Simply Managing by Henry Mintzberg

Author:Henry Mintzberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2013-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

Minimal Managing

The last feasible point on our scale is labeled minimal managing. Here there is hardly anything left to manage, sometimes hardly even an organization as such. But there does remain some coherent activity in need of coordination, from managers.

This may sound curious, until we realize that most of us live with it every day. Think of open source systems such as Wikipedia and the Linux Operating System. These are the ultimate adhocracies, which engage the full creative potential of broad communities. People come and go—they enter, make changes, and exit—but the system carries on—in fact, with remarkable coherence. These are self-managed organizations, almost. Someone had to get them started; someone has to set and enforce the rules of entry, change, and exit; and there is the need to keep the whole thing coherent. That can be done from the background too. On a poster with one duck following a bunch of others is the inscription “There they go. I have to follow them because I am their leader.”

This completes our discussion of managing every which way. We have seen immense variation in the practice. The next two chapters build on the first four, considering the inescapable conundrums faced by anyone who takes on the job of managing, and then what it might mean to manage effectively.

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