Whether you subscribe to the philosophy that management is an art and not a science or that it’s a science composed of best practices and systemic steps, one thing is for sure: there is no one easy way to describe what managers do. In this inspiring book, Henry Mintzberg, one of today’s most respected and controversial thinkers on management, joins forces with other leading business figures to provide a provocative mix of writing on management that inspires laughter as much as it brings forth tears (for poor old management itself!). Management? It’s Not What You Think! gets readers thinking as they never have before on topics including management terminology and buzzwords, myths and maxims, MBAs, management fads, leadership, strategy, and much more. With wit, intrigue, and plenty of food for thought, Mintzberg presents articles, book and journal excerpts, letters, web selections, and musings that will spark debate in managers of all types and experiences and renew their interest in doing what they do best--managing.

In this sure-to-be-controversial book, leading management thinker Henry Mintzberg turns his attention to reframing the management and organization of health care. The problem is not management per se but a form of remote-control management detached from the operations yet determined to control them. It reorganizes relentlessly, measures like mad, promotes a heroic form of leadership, favors competition where the need for cooperation, and pretends that the calling of health care should be managed like a business. This professional form of organizing is the source of health care's great strength as well as its debilitating weakness. In its administration, as in its operations, it categorizes whatever it can to apply standardized practices whose results can be measured. When the categories fit, this works wonderfully well. The physician diagnoses appendicitis and operates; some administrator ticks the appropriate box and pays. But when happens when the fit fails - when patients fall outside the categories or across several categories or need to be treated as people beneath the categories? To cope with all this, Mintzberg says that we need to reorganize our heads instead of our institutions. He discusses how we can think differently about systems and strategies, sectors and scale, measurement and management, leadership and organization, competition and collaboration. The overall message of Mintzberg's masterful analysis is that care, cure, control, and community have to work together, within health-care institutions and across them, to deliver quantity, quality, and equality simultaneously. -- from back cover.