Top 40 Henry Mintzberg Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Management is, above all, a practice where art, science, and craft meet.”

— Henry Mintzberg

2. “Strategy is not the consequence of planning, but the opposite: its starting point.”

— Henry Mintzberg

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3. “Strategy is a pattern in a stream of decisions.”

— Henry Mintzberg

Featured in: Strategy Quotes

4. “Learning is not doing; it is reflecting on doing.”

— Henry Mintzberg

5. “Leadership, like swimming, cannot be learned by reading about it.”

— Henry Mintzberg

6. “An enterprise is a community of human beings, not a collection of “human resources”.”

— Henry Mintzberg

7. “Strategic planning is not strategic thinking. Indeed, strategic planning often spoils strategic thinking, causing managers to confuse real vision with the manipulation of numbers.”

— Henry Mintzberg

8. “The real challenge in crafting strategy lies in detecting subtle discontinuities that may undermine a business in the future. And for that there is no technique, no program, just a sharp mind in touch with the situation.”

— Henry Mintzberg

9. “While hard data may inform the intellect, it is largely soft data that generates wisdom.”

— Henry Mintzberg

10. “Five coordinating mechanisms seem to explain the fundamental ways in which organizations coordinate their work: mutual adjustment, direct supervision, standardization of work processes, standardization of work outputs, and standardization of worker skills.”

— Henry Mintzberg

11. “Never set out to be the best. It’s too low a standard. Set out to be good. Do Your best.”

— Henry Mintzberg

12. “Managers who don’t lead are quite discouraging, but leaders who don’t manage don’t know what’s going on. It’s a phony separation that people are making between the two.”

— Henry Mintzberg

13. “Everyone is against micro managing but macro managing means you’re working at the big picture but don’t know the details.”

— Henry Mintzberg

14. “Data don’t generate theory – only researchers do that.”

— Henry Mintzberg

15. “A leader has to be one of two things: he either has to be a brilliant visionary himself, a truly creative strategist, in which case he can do what he likes and get away with it; or else he has to be a true empowerer who can bring out the best in others.”

— Henry Mintzberg

16. “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.”

— Henry Mintzberg

17. “Empowerment is what managers do to people. Engagement is what managers do with people.”

— Henry Mintzberg

18. “Effective managing therefore happens where art, craft, and science meet. But in a classroom of students without managerial experience, these have no place to meet there is nothing to do.”

— Henry Mintzberg

19. “Basically, managing is about influencing action. Managing is about helping organizations and units to get things done, which means action. Sometimes, managers manage actions directly. They fight fires. They manage projects. They negotiate contracts.”

— Henry Mintzberg

20. “I describe management as arts, crafts and science. It is a practice that draws on arts, craft and science and there is a lot of craft – meaning experience – there is a certain amount of craft meaning insight, creativity and vision, and there is the use of science, technique or analysis.”

— Henry Mintzberg

21. “If you ask managers what they do, they will most likely tell you that they plan, organise, co-ordinate and control. Then watch what they do. Don’t be surprised if you can’t relate what you see to those four words.”

— Henry Mintzberg

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22. “Organizational effectiveness does not lie in that narrow minded concept called rationality. It lies in the blend of clearheaded logic and powerful intuition.”

— Henry Mintzberg

23. “Corporations are social institutions. If they don’t serve society, they have no business existing.”

— Henry Mintzberg

24. “Strategy-making is an immensely complex process involving the most sophisticated, subtle, and at times subconscious of human cognitive and social processes.”

— Henry Mintzberg

25. “We have great managers who havent spent a day in management school. Do we have great surgeons that havent spent a day in surgical school?”

— Henry Mintzberg

26. “Strategies grow initially like weeds in a garden, they are not cultivated like tomatoes in a hothouse.”

— Henry Mintzberg

27. “Management is a curious phenomenon. It is generously paid, enormously influential, and significantly devoid of common sense.”

— Henry Mintzberg

28. “Companies are communities. Theres a spirit of working together. Communities are not a place where a few people allow themselves to be singled out as solely responsible for success.”

— Henry Mintzberg

29. “You can teach all sorts of things that improve the practice of management with people who are managers. What you cannot do is teach management to somebody who is not a manager, the way you cannot teach surgery to somebody whose not a surgeon.”

— Henry Mintzberg

30. “Technologies tend to undermine community and encourage individualism.”

— Henry Mintzberg

31. “Most of the time, strategies should not be formulating strategy at all; they should be getting on with implementing strategies they already have.”

— Henry Mintzberg

32. “The idea that you can take smart but inexperienced 25-year-olds who never managed anything and turn them into effective managers via two years of classroom training is ludicrous.”

— Henry Mintzberg

33. “Anecdotal data is not incidental to theory development at all, but an essential part of it.”

— Henry Mintzberg

34. “Why does every generation have to think that he lives in the period with the greatest turbulence?”

— Henry Mintzberg

35. “Managing is about nuance as much as it is about decisiveness.”

— Henry Mintzberg

36. “We’re all flawed, but basically, effective managers are people whose flaws are not fatal under the circumstances. Maybe the best managers are simply ordinary, healthy people who aren’t too screwed up.”

— Henry Mintzberg

37. “An obsession with control generally seems to reflect a fear of uncertainty.”

— Henry Mintzberg

38. “No generalizing beyond the data, no theory. No theory, no insight. And if no insight, why do research.”

— Henry Mintzberg

39. “It is time to recognize conventional MBA programs for what they are – or else to close them down. They are specialized training in the functions of business, not general educating in the practice of management.”

— Henry Mintzberg

40. “Corporations are economic entities, to be sure, but they are also social institutions that must justify their existence by their overall contribution to society.”

— Henry Mintzberg

41. “Theory is a dirty word in some managerial quarters. That is rather curious, because all of us, managers especially, can no more get along without theories than libraries can get along without catalogs and for the same reason: theories help us make sense of incoming information.”

— Henry Mintzberg

42. “My feeling about executive bonuses is that any candidate for a chief executive job who even raises the issue of bonuses should be dismissed out of hand.”

— Henry Mintzberg

43. “The prime occupational hazard of a manager is superficiality.”

— Henry Mintzberg

44. “If the private sectors are about markets and the public sectors are about governments, then the plural sector is about communities.”

— Henry Mintzberg

45. “So technologies, whether it is a telephone or an iPhone, computers in general or automobiles, television even, all individualize us. We all sit in front of our iPhones and communicating but are we really communicating?”

— Henry Mintzberg

46. “To ‘turn around’ is to end up facing the same way. Maybe that is the problem, all the turning organizations around.”

— Henry Mintzberg

47. “That is the trouble with flying: We always have to return to airports. Thank of how much fun flying would be if we didn’t have to return to airports.”

— Henry Mintzberg