Managing

So if you want to be a better boss or understand your boss better, this book is for you. If you're involved in hiring or firing managers, you'll find it hugely valuable. And if you've studied, or are studying, management, it's a must-read. You don't have to agree with the author's ideas, but it's useful to know about them.

This book could also bring solace to any manager who feels like they're drowning in their job, or not applying anything they learned at business school. After reading "Managing," you may well breathe a sigh of relief and realize that it's not all lost after all! You may even decide you're doing a pretty decent job.

Now, if you're not an academic or a management guru and you're thinking a book just about managing will be a dry read, think again. Those familiar with the author's writing will recognize his chatty, colloquial style and his ubiquitous humor. Those new to him will be amazed at his ability to turn such a clinical dissection of management into a really lively read.

"Managing" is also a timely publication, particularly relevant in an era when the world is obsessed with good management and strong leadership.

The author writes with great confidence, the result of decades spent writing and researching managerial work, strategy formation, and forms of organizing. Now aged 70, he published his first book on management in 1973, and has since published around 150 articles and another 14 books.

He is Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal, and has helped set up a number of master's programs on management education and development. These programs are about practicing managers developing themselves. They're the author's answer to traditional MBA programs, which he describes – in this book and others – as futile.

So keep listening to hear the myths of management debunked, to learn how effective managers strike the right balance, and to hear some tips on coping with the inevitable conundrums every manager faces.

Managing is a sort of sequel to the author's 1973 book The Nature of Managerial Work. For his first book, the author studied the working lives of five chief executives. This time around, he studied 29 managers of all kinds. He became a 'fly on the wall' on a typical day in their working lives.

His studies come from the world of business, government, health care and the not-for-profit sector. They include a CEO of a leading Canadian bank, different levels of managers in Britain's National Health Service, and the manager of a Tanzanian refugee camp. He studied the chief executives of a fashion museum and of Doctors Without Borders, the conductor of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, and a number of managers of Canada's national parks.

The author carried out his studies in the 1990s, watching the managers throughout their working day and taking reams of notes. What time did they get to work? When did they sign off? Did they ever sign off? What challenges did they face? How did they resolve them? How did they relate to others? He then dissected all the information and interpreted it, building the theories that make this book.

He adds to the mix countless other studies, books and articles on management, dating back decades. So the book is peppered with the names and theories of some of the deepest thinkers and most prolific writers on management the world has known. The author agrees with some of their theories and rips others apart, with no reservations! He illustrates his arguments with simple diagrams and even throws in some exercises for managers to evaluate themselves.

Managing is very user-friendly. You heard earlier how the author writes in a chatty style, engaging the reader in a discussion. He also helpfully tells us how best to read the book. In a preliminary note to readers, entitled Read Me First, the author guides readers through the content of the book, suggesting which bits to skip or scan if they're busy.

And you can put away the highlighter pen. He does this for you. He puts in bold letters key sentences that summarize the main points of a particular section or passage. Readers can jump to these if they're short on time. This will no doubt be a blessing to busy managers, or students with a reading list as long as their arm.

The rest of the book is divided into six chapters, plus an appendix where the author describes a day in the life of eight of the managers he observed. Readers can follow the full twenty-nine days, one for each of the managers profiled, at www.mintzberg-managing.com.

So let's take a look at the highlights.

In the first chapter, called Managing Ahead, the author gives his view of managing. Right from the start, he challenges conventional wisdom.

He criticizes the world's obsession with leadership, and says we're over-led and undermanaged. Unlike many of today's business experts, he believes we shouldn't try to separate leadership and management. Instead, he thinks they should be embedded together, in what he calls "communityship."

Nor does management change with the times. According to the author, it involves basic aspects of human behavior that simply don't change.

Throughout his career, the author has questioned the value of traditional MBA programs, like the one run by Harvard Business School. Here, he echoes that criticism, asserting that managing is not a science nor a profession, but rather it's a calling. He says it can't be taught effectively in the classroom, but has to be learned in context, on the job.

Chapter two is called The Dynamics of Managing. Here, the author debunks a series of myths about managing.

One myth, or "piece of folklore" as the author calls it, is that managers are systematic planners. Instead, he says managers work at an unrelenting pace and are constantly interrupted. They dash around all the time and they always have something to do. Sure, managers do plan, but they're not systematic planners, as some business literature suggests.

Let's take another piece of the so-called folklore. Do you think that managers receive their information in an organized way, through a formal system? Well apparently they don't. Management is 60-90% oral, he says,

and managers depend a lot on hearsay, gossip and speculation. They prefer to store information in their heads, rather than see it written in lengthy reports.

And how about the idea that management is about hierarchical relationships, between superiors and subordinates? Well, the author says it's more about lateral relationships than up-and-down ones.

You may disagree with some of these statements, but they're based on his research. This is what the author saw when he visited retail bank branches with the CEO of the Royal Bank of Canada, and when he walked around a Tanzanian refugee camp with managers from the International Committee of the Red Cross.

There's an interesting discussion in this chapter about the impact of the Internet. Here, the author asks more questions than he gives answers, noting that, as yet, there aren't enough studies to make concrete assertions.

Does the Internet prompt some managers to act too quickly, because of its immediate nature? Can it give the illusion of control, when in fact it may be robbing managers of control? Is it making management more frenetic, too superficial? It's too soon to tell, he says, but concludes that the Internet isn't changing the practice of management fundamentally.

In the next chapter, A Model of Managing, the author compiles everything he knows and has learned about managing and puts it into a neat diagram. He first drew a model of managing in 1973 and this is his latest version. With humility and a touch of humor, he says he hopes this model will hold together long enough to help others come up with better ones.

In his model, the manager is the nerve center. He or she is communicating and controlling, framing and scheduling, dealing, linking, leading and doing, and all on three planes: information, people and action. The manager operates within his or her own unit, with the rest of the organization and with the world outside the organization.

Now, there's far too much in this model to go into all the details here, but the author walks the reader through it in the book, describing each of its elements.

The goal here is to help managers recognize their own strengths and weaknesses, and to help non-managers see these in their superiors.

The model also helps to identify the pitfalls of favoring one aspect of management over another. Communicate too much and you may never get anything done. But if you're obsessed with doing, you'll end up doing it all alone. Too much thinking is just as bad as too much acting. This leads to lop-sided management.

So if you want to become an effective manager, learn how to blend all of these elements together – and how to strike a dynamic balance between them all. Easier said than done, of course, but at least you've got something to aim for!

This balancing act is why the author says it's futile to teach management in a classroom to people who've had no hands-on experience of it.

Chapter five is a particularly fun one to read. It's called Conundrums of "Managing" and it aims to give managers a better understanding of how to cope with things they can't avoid.

It's the play on words that makes this section such a lively read. Sub-heads include the Quandary of Connecting, the Dilemma of Delegating and the Mysteries of Measuring. Then, there's the Clutch of Confidence and the Syndrome of Superficiality, the Enigma of Order and the Paradox of Control.

In that last section, the author explores how to stay in touch with what's going on, when management necessarily separates you from the things to be managed. You might need a middle manager, and you'll definitely want to break out of the boardroom and get down on the ground as often as possible, to check out what's really going on.

In the Enigma of Order, the author discusses controlled disorder. He echoes a phrase coined by Andy Grove of Intel in 1995 about letting the chaos reign while reigning in the chaos. It's about striking the right balance between order and disorder.

The section called the Clutch of Confidence looks at how to stay confident while avoiding crossing over to arrogance. He suggests the best way to deal with this conundrum is to look for managers with inner confidence, not outer confidence, and to make sure they don't take themselves too seriously!

The final chapter is called Managing Effectively and could help you do just that. It includes a list of 52 of the basic qualities for assured managerial success, compiled from years of research. It's quite a tall order to tick all the boxes, but the great thing is you don't have to. Just like Superman and his Kryptonite weakness, all managers are flawed. But their flaws aren't fatal, the author says.

He goes on to talk about why some managers fail, but then offers a framework to put managerial effectiveness in context. He calls managing "a tapestry woven of the threads of reflection, analysis, worldliness, collaboration, and proactiveness, all of it infused with personal energy and bonded by collective integration." Knit all those elements together and you stand a pretty good chance of being effective.

He gives some tips on selecting, assessing and developing effective managers. For example, choose someone whose flaws you already know, and allow those who know the candidates best, or who've been managed by them, to make the choice.

And when assessing managers, don't be mesmerized by measurement! This may seem odd in today's times of performance indicators, but nothing outweighs judgment, the author says. He wraps up by saying that to understand management you need to start out at ground level, which is exactly what he did with this book.

As you heard earlier, you may not agree with all of the author's views. Experienced managers and supporters of traditional MBA programs particularly may balk at some of them. But other managers may welcome the fact that the difficulties of the job are being so frankly discussed.

Some readers may prefer a more nuanced approach and may be put off by the author's forthright views. Are traditional MBA programs completely futile, you may ask?

And some may question whether his sample of managers is broad enough. They are almost all drawn from Canada, Britain and France. The only exceptions are the Tanzanian managers and an executive director of Greenpeace International, based in Amsterdam.

If you've read a lot of Mintzberg before, you may also find some of his arguments repetitive, particularly his promotion of the management programs with which he's associated.

Most of all, though, some readers may feel overwhelmed with the wealth of information, data, studies and diagrams the author throws at them. But if that starts to happen, you can just jump to the bits in bold and scan the rest!

All that said, the book is definitely worth plowing through. Despite its controversial qualities, Managing is fascinating, insightful and an engaging read, and you can't help but be impressed by the research behind it.

It'll certainly give managers, or prospective ones, plenty to ponder, while those being managed will gain a new set of tools with which to evaluate their superiors. And it supplies everyone with plenty of ammunition for the next debate on what makes a great manager, or leader even.

"Managing" by Henry Mintzberg is published by Berrett-Koehler.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Click here to buy the book from Amazon.