The head of a school system held a review session with one of his executives. It lasted 18 minutes. By the count of the doctoral student taking notes, they got through “fully 15 distinct issues.”
The student was Henry Mintzberg, at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. The superintendent was one of five chief executives who, as Mintzberg wrote, “allowed me to watch their every move for one week.” The others ran a consulting firm, a technology company, a hospital and a consumer goods company, all middle to large American organizations.
In April 1966 Mintzberg had sat through an MIT conference on computers and management and, by his own account, “hours of, what I believed to be, fruitless debate about the nature of the work of the manager.” Since the French industrialist Henri Fayol introduced the words in 1916, managers planned, organized, coordinated and controlled. The manager of that folklore was a reflective, systematic planner who ran on aggregated reports.
So he wrote everything down: each letter, call and meeting, who started it, how long it ran. Five weeks came to 890 pieces of mail and 368 verbal contacts.
What he saw was a stream of interruptions. Half of the executives’ activities lasted less than nine minutes, and only 10% went past an hour. Exactly one of the 368 had no specific issue behind it and could be called general planning. They spent 78% of their time talking, on the phone or in meetings. Of 40 routine reports, they responded immediately to 2. One of them picked up a standard cost report, the first piece of “hard” mail he had received all week, and put it aside: “I never look at this.”
An earlier Swedish researcher, Sune Carlson, had concluded that managers could easily escape interruption with better use of secretaries and more delegation. Mintzberg’s five were well guarded by their secretaries, and he saw no reason to think they were poor delegators. They broke off their own desk work to call people in. They left meetings before the end. One put his desk where he could look down a long hallway and kept his door open. The thesis concluded that “it would appear to be worthwhile for any manager to learn to become superficial in a proficient way.”
From the logs he built a list of roles: thirteen in the 1968 thesis, ten by the time “The Manager’s Job: Folklore and Fact” ran in Harvard Business Review in July 1975. The executives spent 40% of their contact time purely passing information along. “Managers don’t leave meetings or hang up the telephone to get back to work,” he wrote. “In large part, communication is their work.”
Five men, one week each, in weeks picked for having little travel: it is a small sample, and the thesis says so, warning that its generalizations “are based primarily on five weeks of observation.” The HBR article set his numbers beside other studies. A study of 56 American foremen counted 583 activities in an eight-hour shift, one every 48 seconds. A diary study of 160 British managers found they worked half an hour without interruption only about once every two days.
When HBR reprinted the article in 1990, Mintzberg wrote that one reaction had dominated what managers told him: “You make me feel so good. I thought all those other managers were planning, organizing, coordinating, and controlling, while I was busy being interrupted, jumping from one issue to another, and trying to keep the lid on the chaos.”