Managers are told: be global and be local. Make the numbers while nurturing your people. To be effective, managers need to consider the juxtapositions in order to arrive at a deep integration of these contradictory concerns. This means they must focus not only on what they have to accomplish but also on how they have to think. .
When the authors, Jonathon Goslin (director of the Centre for Leadership Studies at the University of Exeter in the U.K.) and Henry Mintzberg (Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal), set out to develop a masters program for practicing managers, they saw that they could not rely on the MBA educational structure, which divides management into business functions such as marketing, accounting and finance. They needed an educational structure that would create synthesis rather than separation. Managing, they determined, involves five tasks, each with its own mind-set: managing the self (the reflective mind-set); managing organizations (the analytic mind-set); managing context (the worldly mind-set); managing relationships (the collaborative mind-set); and managing change (the action mind-set). The program is built on the exploration and integration of those five aspects of the managerial mind. Imagine the mind-sets as threads and the manager as the weaver and effective performance means weaving each mind-set over and under each other to create a sturdy cloth.
By looking at the above arguments on how a manager needs to have his mind set in order to be effective in the workplace, we can consider these aspects as popular culture in thought. Does this popular culture thought contradict with the many expert systems that hold their roots in the ever changing view of man? An expert systems which I"m very interested in, is Freud's view of man. We"ll take a look at his theory and compare it with that of Gosling and Mintzberg's "The Five Minds of Managers".
