When the maestro raises his baton, the musicians respond in unison. Another motion, and they stop. “It’s the image of absolute control,” Henry Mintzberg wrote, and it “is all a great myth.”
Mintzberg, who had studied managers’ work on and off for three decades, had been spending single days with managers of all kinds: by the time he wrote this up in Harvard Business Review in 1998, 29 of them, from the head of England’s National Health Service to the manager of a Red Cross delegation for refugee camps in Tanzania. Because business leaders are so often compared to orchestra conductors, he found a day with one “irresistible.” He spent it with Bramwell Tovey, artistic director and conductor of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, about 70 musicians and a single leader.
Tovey described his job as choosing the program, deciding how the pieces are played, choosing guest artists, staffing the orchestra and managing some external relations. Administration and finance belonged to an executive director, Max Tapper, who comanaged the orchestra with him.
In rehearsal, the directing was thinner than the myth. Tovey explained that comments had to be aimed at sections, not at individuals; some union contracts elsewhere forbade singling players out. He made individual comments, he said, maybe “two or three times a year.” In many hours of rehearsal Mintzberg saw “only one overt act of leadership”: late in the afternoon, dissatisfied, Tovey told the players they were asleep and that it wasn’t good enough. Doing that all the time, he said later, would be intrusive.
Mintzberg read him a passage by the management writer Leonard Sayles, who had compared a manager to a conductor trying to keep the performance melodious while players have personal troubles, stagehands move the music stands, the hall swings between too hot and too cold, and the sponsor demands irrational changes to the program. Tovey laughed. All of it had happened to him. Two of the orchestra’s key players were feuding at the time, so if one wanted a note played long and the other short, a simple suggestion to play it one way could be seen as “awarding points.” He could not socialize with the musicians outside work. “There are too many agendas.”
“I think of myself as a soccer coach who plays,” Tovey said.
Mintzberg saw a lot more doing than leading: Tovey ran the rehearsal like a hands-on project manager, closer to a factory foreman than to a distant executive. Then, at the end of the day, he turned to the orchestra’s most generous supporters, a group called the Maestro’s Circle. “The whole hierarchy,” Mintzberg wrote, “gets compressed into the job of just one person.”
Mintzberg also visited a hospital. Its head nurse ran her ward from the floor and disliked what she called “the whole PR thing.” The hospital’s director cherished his “advocacy” role outside, and when he turned around he faced physicians demanding more resources. Mintzberg’s conclusion was that external linking and dealing “cannot be dissociated from internal leading and doing.”
Tovey himself resisted the label. “I don’t see myself as a manager,” he told Mintzberg. “I consider myself more of a lion tamer.”