Henry Mintzberg Quotes

I used to have to pick up the phone and talk to people who placed orders for the car. When you reach a certain size, you need to have processes in place.

An index is a great leveller.

Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs - these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration.

I think he’s incredibly dangerous. He’s a very smart guy whose electrons aren’t connected, so he arc lights all the time. He can’t organize anything.

At the moment we need training for leadership.

My desktop is really chaotic, and I'm always trying to work out where I am going to put all these ideas.

I've learnt that what you need to do is have standards that are agreed nationally and then allow people locally to work out what they need.

Uniformity is the friend of scalability.

This organization has been nothing but first class to me, believing in my talent and my skills since I got here. And I'm just here to pay them back with my work ethic.

I'm very artistic and creative, disorganised - ambitious, I would say, if that even makes sense. I'm definitely not the most mathematical person in the world; not scientific. I can't even work out a tip; it's really sad. But I've always thought, play up your strengths and let someone else handle your weaknesses. It's OK. Work together.

Management and leadership are not separate spheres. The two skills work together in the larger realm of “communityship.

The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine those things with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy.

As a general rule, moderate levels of arousal facilitate deployment of skills, whereas high arousal disrupts it. This is especially true of complex activities requiring intricate organization of behavior

Competitiveness is defined as the ability of companies to compete while maintaining or improving the average standard of living. If you are cutting wages to become more competitive, that's not really more competitive. It's raising the skill and the efficiency of those workers so that they can support and sustain that higher wage.

The idea of a rational bureaucracy, of skill, merit, and consistency, is essential to all modern states.

Making your bed every morning is correlated with better productivity, a greater sense of well-being, and stronger skills at sticking with a budget.

There are so many ways to help, by either sharing your skills or expertise, joining our board of directors or advisory boards, and donating. Regardless of what or how you share with ISF, we recognize that we don't have all the answers, and that solutions lie not in commonality but in diversity. Welcoming a broad range of thinkers, creators, and doers is what makes this organization thrive.

We need to organize and figure out our own voice as a bloc and stop doubting ourselves.

Conception of a film starts with the music. Always. I hear the movie before I can ever write it. I would say that 80% of the time, that's the successful stuff. It's the other stuff I have to work for to get right, and sometimes it doesn't work out, but the music is always the beginning. So I'm still a music journalist.

People can be really smart or have skills that are directly applicable, but if they don't really believe in it, then they are not going to really work hard.

I like that combination between creativity and the creative process and the organization needed to make a business like this successful worldwide.

We call it infectious impatience. That's his hallmark and we are trying to inculcate it in the entire organization. Infectious impatience. So that things not only get done but get done in double quick time.

For so work the honey bees, creatures that by a rule in nature teach the act of order to a peopled kingdom.

We cannot have islands of excellence in a sea of slovenly indifference to standards.

There may be such a thing as habitual luck. People who are said to be lucky at cards probably have certain hidden talents for those games in which skill plays a role. It is like hidden parameters in physics, this ability that does not surface and that I like to call "habitual luck".