A Theorist in Management: Henry Mintzberg Essay

Henry Mintzberg can be described as a guru of management and business studies including four-in-handial and content culture, organization and structure, strategy and planning. He was born in 1939 and since 1968 has been teaching in McGill University in Montral. Henry Mintzberg is the source of thirteen books including The Nature of Managerial Work (1973), twist in 5s Designing Effective Organization (1983), The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning (1994), Strategy Bites Back (2005), etc. Also, Henry Mintzberg is the author of more than 140 articles and twice winner of the McKinsey Award (Witzel, 2003).Most of his theories, Henry Mintzberg has based on human approach to management. During 1970s, Henry Mintzberg made extensive surveys of existent research and integrated those findings with his own studies of five chief executive officers in his attempts to find how managers spend their time and perform their work. The results were interesting and help the understanding of the geniu s of the managerial task. In The Nature of Managerial Work Mintzberg singles out three managerial roles interpersonal, Informational and decisional. A managers interpersonal roles include that of a figurehead, performing ceremonial duties.Mintzberg thought that this was possibly the most important and classified this aspect into three roles role of disseminator, company representative or spokesman role, and monitor role. A managers decisional roles can be of four types as an entrepreneur to launch a new idea as a care handler as a resource allocator choosing from among competing demands for money, equipment, personnel and management time as a negotiator (Witzel, 2003).Also, Mintzberg highlights the changing, uncertain environment in which the manager operates and the importance of organizational structure. According to Henry Mintzberg, the organizations can be based on simple structure machine bureaucracy professional bureaucracy divisional zed form adhocracy.In The Rise and Fa ll of Strategic Planning Mintzberg has proposed new vision of strategy underlining the importance of processes, data and detachment in planning. Also, Mintzberg criticizes formalization as the main mistake and drawback of modern management.ReferencesWitzel, M. (2003) Fifty Key Figures in Management. New York Routledge.