Henry Ford? Thierry Henry? Henry Fayol? Nope, it's Henry Mintzberg

So, here come my second post. What's up readers? Today is not a very much productive day, so I guess I'll be sitting in front of this hardware and software thingy just to write a post in hoping to entertain you all. I know most of my friends right now are also keeping themselves busy with this blog posting and templates searching. Doing assignments on the last minute are pretty much to be some sort of culture for students nowadays. lol. I hope our lecturer for MGT417 subject may consider and still give us good mark for this so-not-prepared blog. Btw, here's some random picture I've taken and try guessing where it is taken. ;)

Gigantic lizard looking for exposed entrepreneur

Mintzberg during his successful year

Back to the main topic, Mintzberg is in the house right now. So, I'll be talking about Sir Henry Mintzberg and what are the things he had done that make his name been spread out-wide. Actually, in our MGT420 and MGT417 do provide some information about him pretty much but I guess I'll just write some more about him and perhaps it can be a great help for me and the others to understand more of his philosophy. Begins with his biography, Professor Henry Mintzberg was born in Montreal on 2nd September, 1939. Quite known in academic and author on business and management and currently, he is the Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Canada. From 1991 to 1999, he was a visiting professor at INSEAD and Mintzberg writes prolifically on the topics of management and business strategy, with more than 150 articles and fifteen books to his name. Mintzberg once write about a basic description of managerial work and the one that I would like to touch about is his studies on Managerial Roles.

Now I'll try to put some of the pieces of this puzzle together. A manager can be best defined as a person in charge of an organization. Based on my understanding on Mintzberg's managerial roles, there are 3 roles in which managers do in exercising their duties which are Interpersonal, Informational and Decisional roles. Now let's us discuss on the first very role, Interpersonal. Mintzberg believe that interpersonal roles are roles that involve people and other duties that are ceremonial and symbolic in nature. Three of the manager's roles arise directly from formal authority and involve basic interpersonal relationships.

First is the figurehead role. By virtue of his or her position as head of an organizational unit, every manager must perform some duties of a ceremonial nature. For example, The president greets the touring dignitaries and the sales manager takes an important customer to lunch. Duties that involve interpersonal roles may sometimes be routine, involving little serious communication and no important decision-making. Nevertheless, they are important to the smooth functioning of an organization and cannot be ignored by the manager.

Because he or she is in charge of an organizational unit, the manager is also responsible for the work of the people of that unit. His or her actions in this regard pictures the leader role. Some of those actions involve leadership directly. For example, in most organizations the manager is normally responsible for hiring and training his or her own staff. In addition, every manager must motivate and encourage his or her employees, somehow reconciling their individual needs with the goals of the organization. Every contact the manager has with those employees seeking leadership clues probe his or her actions such as "Does he approve?" or "How would she like the report to turn out?"

The literature of management has always recognized the leader role, particularly those aspects of it related to motivation. In comparison, until recently it has hardly mentioned the liaison role, in which the manager makes contacts outside his or her vertical chain of command. This is remarkable in light of the finding of virtually every study of managerial work that managers spend as much time with peers and other people outside their units as they do with their own subordinates, and, surprisingly, very little time with their own superiors.

Moving on to Informational roles, it can be defined as managerial roles that involve receiving, collecting and disseminating information.

As a monitor, the manager scans his or her environment for information, interrogates liaison contacts, and receives unsolicited information, much of it as a result of the network of personal contacts he or she has developed. Remember that a good part of the information the manager collects in the monitor role arrives in oral form, often as gossip and speculation.

In the mean time, managers must share and distribute much of this information. Information they obtain from outside personal contacts may be needed within their organizations. In their disseminator role, managers pass some of their privileged information directly to their subordinates, who would otherwise have no access to it. Moreover, when their subordinates lack easy contact with one another, managers will sometimes pass information from one to another.

In their spokesman role, managers send some of their information to people outside their units. For example, a president makes a speech to lobby for an organizational need, or a foreman suggests a product modification to a supplier. In addition, as part of the role of spokesman, every manager must inform and satisfy the influential people who control his or her organizational unit. Chief executives especially may spend great amounts of time dealing with hosts of influences. Directors and shareholders must be advised about financial performance, consumer groups must be assured that the organization is fulfilling its social responsibilities, and so on.

Proceed with Decisional roles, it involves around making choices. As we all know, managers and even us make decision almost every day in order to maintain specific goal.

As entrepreneur, the manager seeks to improve his or her unit, to adapt it to changing conditions in the environment. In the monitor role, the president is constantly on the lookout for new ideas; when a good one appears, he or she initiates, in the context of the entrepreneur role, a development project that he or she may supervise or else delegate to an employee.

While the entrepreneur role describes the manager as the voluntary initiator of change, the disturbance handler role shows the manager involuntarily responding to pressures. The manager has the task of creating a true whole that is larger than the sum of its parts, a productive entity that turns out more than the sum of the resources put into it. One best example is the conductor of a symphony orchestra, through whose effort, vision and leadership individual instrumental parts that are so much noise by themselves become the living whole of music. But the conductor has the composer's score that he is only interpreter. The manager is both composer and conductor.

The third decisional role is that of resource allocator. To the manager falls the responsibility of deciding who will get what in the organizational unit. Perhaps the most important resource the manager allocates is his or her own time. Access to the manager constitutes exposure to the unit's nerve center and decision-maker. The manager is also charged with designing the unit's structure, that pattern of formal relationships that determines how work is to be divided and coordinated.

The final decisional role is that of negotiator. Studies of managerial work at all levels indicate that managers spend considerable time in negotiations. For instance, the corporation president leads his or her company's contingent to negotiate a new strike issue and the foreman argues a grievance problem to its conclusion with the shop steward. This situation shows how a manager performed the negotiating part.

So, here comes the end of my second post and I hope that in future, I will certainly write some more post regarding educational purpose which is just so-not-me. lol. Anyway, thanks for reading. God speed amigo.