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The classical view says that the manager organizes, coordinates,
plans, and controls; the facts suggest otherwise.

HBR CLASSIC

The Manager’s Job
Folklore and Fact

COPYRIGHT © 1990 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

by Henry Mintzberg

If you ask managers what they do, they will
most likely tell you that they plan, organize,
coordinate, and control. Then watch what
they do. Don’t be surprised if you can’t relate
what you see to these words.
When a manager is told that a factory has
just burned down and then advises the caller
to see whether temporary arrangements can
be made to supply customers through a foreign subsidiary, is that manager planning, organizing, coordinating, or controlling? How
about when he or she presents a gold watch to
a retiring employee? Or attends a conference
to meet people in the trade and returns with
an interesting new product idea for employees
to consider?
These four words, which have dominated
management vocabulary since the French industrialist Henri Fayol first introduced them in
1916, tell us little about what managers actually do. At best, they indicate some vague objectives managers have when they work.
The field of management, so devoted to
progress and change, has for more than half a

harvard business review • march–april 1990

century not seriously addressed the basic question: What do managers do? Without a proper
answer, how can we teach management? How
can we design planning or information systems for managers? How can we improve the
practice of management at all?
Our ignorance of the nature of managerial
work shows up in various ways in the modern
organization—in boasts by successful managers who never spent a single day in a management training program; in the turnover of corporate planners who never quite understood
what it was the manager wanted; in the computer consoles gathering dust in the back room
because the managers never used the fancy online MIS some analyst thought they needed.
Perhaps most important, our ignorance shows
up in the inability of our large public organizations to come to grips with some of their most
serious policy problems.
Somehow, in the rush to automate production, to use management science in the functional areas of marketing and finance, and to
apply the skills of the behavioral scientist to

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