Simply Managing:
What Managers Do-and Can Do Better

by Henry Mintzberg

In 2009, Henry Mintzberg’s Managing was given these honors:

- One of the best books of the year by strategy+business and Library Journal magazines
- The number two business book of the year by the Toronto Globe and Mail
- One of the top ten academic titles by Choice magazine
- The management book of the year in a competition organized by the Chartered Management Institute in association with the British Library.

One of the issues Mintzberg addresses in Managing is the frenetic pace and pressures of the job-most managers hardly have time to think, let alone read a 320-page book. Mintzberg revised and distilled the essence of his old book into a new, compact version that retains all the -punch’ which made Managing such a hit title. The result? Simply Managing .

The core of the book remains the same: Mintzberg’s observations of twenty-nine different managers from business, government, and nonprofits, working in diverse settings ranging from a refugee camp to a symphony orchestra. What he saw led him to develop a new model of management, one firmly grounded in his conclusion that it is not a profession or a science. “It is a practice,” he writes, “learned primarily through experience and rooted in context.”

Mintzberg offers a compelling discussion of some of the conundrums of managing. How can you get in deep when there is so much pressure to get it done? How can you manage it when you can’t reliably measure it? How do you balance the need for change with the need for continuity?

He concludes with a provocative look at what being an effective manager really means, which he describes as “engaging management.” This is the most authoritative and revealing book yet written about what managers do, how they do it, and how they can have the greatest impact.

Henry Mintzberg is Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He was named Distinguished Scholar for the Year 2000 by the Academy of Management, served as President of the Strategic Management Society from 1988-1991, is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (the first from a manage-ment faculty), and has been named an Officer of the Order of Canada and of l’Ordre Nationale du Quebec. He is the author of 12 books, including The Nature of Managerial Work, The Structuring of Organizations, Mintzberg on Management, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, and Strategy Safari.

Publication date: August 2013, $18.95, paperback, 216 pages, 5 ½" x 8 ½"
ISBN 9781609949235 Business/Managing