The Manager’ s Job • HBR CLASSIC
Over the years, one reaction has dominated the comments I have received from managers who read“ The Manager’ s Job: Folklore and Fact”:“ You make me feel so good. I thought all those other managers were planning, organizing, coordinating, and controlling, while I was busy being interrupted, jumping from one issue to another, and trying to keep the lid on the chaos.” Yet everything in this article must have been patently obvious to these people. Why such a reaction to reading what they already knew?
Conversely, how to explain the very different reaction of two media people who called to line up interviews after an article based on this one appeared in the New York Times.“ Are we glad someone finally let managers have it,” both said in passing, a comment that still takes me aback. True, they had read only the account in the Times, but that no more let managers have it than did this article. Why that reaction?
One explanation grows out of the way I now see this article— as proposing not so much another view of management as another face of it. I like to call it the insightful face, in contrast to the long-dominant professional or cerebral face. One stresses commitment, the other calculation; one sees the world with integrated perspective, the other figures it as the components of a portfolio. The cerebral face operates with the words and numbers of rationality; the insightful face is rooted in the images and feel of a manager’ s integrity.
Each of these faces implies a different kind of“ knowing,” and that, I believe, explains many managers’ reaction to this article. Rationally, they“ knew” what managers did— planned, organized, coordinated, and controlled. But deep down that did not
Retrospective Commentary Henry Mintzberg
feel quite right. The description in this article may have come closer to what they really“ knew.” As for those media people, they weren’ t railing against management as such but against the cerebral form of management, so pervasive, that they saw impersonalizing the world around them.
In practice, management has to be two-faced— there has to be a balance between the cerebral and the insightful. So, for example, I realized originally that managerial communication was largely oral and that the advent of the computer had not changed anything fundamental in the executive suite— a conclusion I continue to hold.( The greatest threat the personal computer poses is that managers will take it seriously and come to believe that they can manage by remaining in their offices and looking at displays of digital characters.) But I also thought that the dilemma of delegating could be dealt with by periodic debriefings— disseminating words. Now, however, I believe that managers need more ways to convey the images and impressions they carry inside of them. This explains the renewed interest in strategic vision, in culture, and in the roles of intuition and insight in management.
The ten roles I used to describe the manager’ s job also reflect management’ s cerebral face, in that they decompose the job more than capture the integration. Indeed, my effort to show a sequence among these roles now seems more consistent with the traditional face of management work than an insightful one. Might we not just as well say that people throughout the organization take actions that inform managers who, by making sense of those actions, develop images and visions that inspire people to subsequent efforts? Perhaps my greatest disappointment about the research reported here is that it did not stimulate new efforts. In a world so concerned with management, much of the popular literature is superficial and the academic research pedestrian. Certainly, many studies have been carried out over the last 15 years, but the vast majority sought to replicate earlier research. In particular, we remain grossly ignorant about the fundamental content of the manager’ s job and have barely addressed the major issues and dilemmas in its practice.
But superficiality is not only a problem of the literature. It is also an occupational hazard of the manager’ s job. Originally, I believed this problem could be dealt with; now I see it as inherent in the job. This is because managing insightfully depends on the direct experience and personal knowledge that come from intimate contact. But in organizations grown larger and more diversified, that becomes difficult to achieve. And so managers turn increasingly to the cerebral face, and the delicate balance between the two faces is lost.
Certainly, some organizations manage to sustain their humanity despite their large size— as Tom Peters and Robert Waterman show in their book In Search of Excellence. But that book attained its outstanding success precisely because it is about the exceptions, about the organizations so many of us long to be a part of— not the organizations in which we actually work.
Fifteen years ago, I stated that“ No job is more vital to our society than that of the manager. It is the manager who determines whether our social institutions serve us well or whether they squander our talents and resources.”
harvard business review • march – april 1990 page 8