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.

The worldly view is a view which wants the potential manager to get into someone else’s world to produce a mirror of our own. I believe taking us into different worlds is good but due to the variance of each person’s mind-set we keep our own unique perspectives and inevitably land up contradicting other views. I don’t believe that the worldly view will help in any sense to produce an effective manager.

Gosling and Mintzberg stated that some of the managers they observed over concentrated more on, for example, the action mind-set. I believe this over concentration strongly has to do with the psyche of the person. His inner self has been developed to an extent that he will unknowingly proceeds with more action than reflection. An example of this would be to consider a person who lacked the attention required in the development stages by a parent and later, in an unconscious reaction to this, seeks too much attention from his fellow subordinates (i.e. over concentrates on the collaborative mind-set).

What I don’t understand is whether each person’s reflection will help lead to a sturdy cloth per se. The reflection is based on our perception of the situation and our perception is linked to our unconscious. If an individuals psyche was affected negatively during one of Freud’s development stages the inner self will unconsciously affect their perception inevitably leaving a ‘hole in the cloth’. Due to the fact that all these mind-sets influence each other, the reflection mind-set may cause the proc

Some topics in this essay:
Gosling Mintzberg, University Montreal, Minds Managers”, Overall Freud, , Stages Development, Voice Culture, Gosling Mintzberg’s, I’m Freud’s, mind-set managing, Jonathon Goslin, sturdy cloth, inner self, gosling mintzberg, action mind-set, validity effectiveness, individuals psyche, educational structure, freud’s view, stages development,