Henry Mintzberg "The Manager's Job: Folklore And Fact"

Henry Mintzberg "The Manager's Job: Folklore and Fact"
In this reading, the author answers the basic question, What do managers do? Contrasting the myths with the facts, he examines the variousinterpersonal, informational, and decisional roles of managers. He also provides prescriptions for more effective management, along with a list of questions for self-study. He then discusses theimportance of training managers to manage. 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 youcan't relate what you see to these words.
These four words, which have dominated management vocabulary since the French industrialist Henri Fayol first introduced them in 1916, tell us little aboutwhat 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 a half a century notseriously 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 improvethe practice of management at all?
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 behavioralscientist to the problem of worker motivation, the manager - the person in charge of the organization or one of its subunits - has been forgotten.
I intend to break the reader away from Fayol's wordsand introduce a more supportable and useful description of managerial work. This description derives from my review and synthesis of research on how various managers have spent their time.
A synthesisof these findings paints an interesting picture, one as different from Fayol's classical view as a cubist abstract is from a Renaissance painting. In a sense, this picture will be obvious to anyone...