Five Minds of a Manager

Managers are told: Be global and be local. Collaborate and compete. Change perpetually, and maintain order. Make the numbers while nurturing your people. To be effective, managers need to consider the juxtapositions to arrive at a deep integration of these seemingly contradictory concerns. That means they must focus not only on what they have to accomplish but also on how they have to think. When the authors, respectively the director of the Centre for Leadership Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom and the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal, set out to develop a master's program for practicing managers, they saw that they could not rely on the usual MBA educational structure, which divides the management world into discrete business functions such as marketing and accounting. They needed an educational structure that encouraged synthesis rather than separation. Managing, they determined, involves five tasks, each with its own mindset: managing the self (the reflective mindset); managing organizations (the analytic mindset); managing context (the worldly mindset); managing relationships (the collaborative mindset); and managing change (the action mindset). The program is built on the exploration and integration of those five aspects of the managerial mind.

• Decision making
• Managerial behavior
• Leadership
• Management skills
• Fostering collaboration
• Management development
• Business education