Thinkers 50 Management: Cutting Edge Thinking to Engage and Motivate Your Employees for Success

CHAPTER2

What Managers Do

Amid the intellectual jousting of academic research, it is interesting and perhaps worrying that what managers actually do is often overlooked. It is notable, if somewhat bizarre, that the actual tasks undertaken by people in the course of their work have been examined so little. This is particularly true for managerial work. Examinations of what managers really do are few and far between even now. The most significant is Henry Mintzberg’s study in the early 1970s that led to his groundbreaking book The Nature of Managerial Work. Mintzberg, of Canada’s McGill University, has consistently lamented the lack of substantial scholarship about “managers and the essential work they do in organizations.”

The conclusions of Mintzberg’s ...