The Five Minds of a Manager

This post is an article published in the Harvard Business Review, November 2003, in which Jonathan Gosling and Henry Mintzberg explain their proposition that “The world of the manager is complicated and confusing. Making sense of it requires not a knack for simplification but the ability to synthesize insights from different mind-sets into a comprehensible whole.”

Managers are told: Be global and be local. Collaborate and compete. Change perpetually, and maintain order. Make the numbers while nurturing your people. To be effective, managers need to consider the juxtapositions to arrive at a deep integration of these seemingly contradictory concerns. That means they must focus not only on what they have to accomplish but also on how they have to think.

http://www.impm.org/files/misc/132.pdf