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 he had come to see whether it held.
Mintzberg had been spending single days with managers of every kind. Business leaders are so often compared to orchestra conductors that a day with a real one struck him as “irresistible.” He spent it with Bramwell Tovey, artistic director and conductor of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra: about 70 musicians and a single leader.
In rehearsal, Tovey explained, comments had to be aimed at sections, not at individuals. He singled out a player maybe “two or three times a year.”
Mintzberg watched for hours. He 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. Then the rehearsal went on.
What the baton doesn’t show
Mintzberg read Tovey a passage by the management writer Leonard Sayles, who had pictured a manager as a conductor keeping 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 key players were feuding, 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 couldn’t socialize with the musicians outside work. “There are too many agendas.”
By day he ran the rehearsal like a foreman on a factory floor. At the end of the day he turned to the Maestro’s Circle, the orchestra’s most generous supporters. “The whole hierarchy,” Mintzberg wrote, “gets compressed into the job of just one person.”
A manager changes hats all day, and the hats only work as a set.
Ten hats, one head
Mintzberg’s own list of roles came long before that day. In 1975, from logs of five chief executives he had shadowed for a week each, he published a list of ten roles in Harvard Business Review. Formal authority came first and gave rise to three interpersonal roles: figurehead, leader, liaison. Those gave the manager access to information, and with it three informational roles: monitor, disseminator, spokesperson. Together they made possible four decisional roles: entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator, negotiator.
Some roles look trivial. His five executives spent 12 percent of their contact time on ceremonial duties, such as meeting visiting dignitaries and giving out gold watches. But the roles feed each other. A manager without liaison contacts, he noted, lacks external information, and the decisions are made without it.
That was the article’s real claim. The ten roles, Mintzberg wrote, “form a gestalt, an integrated whole.” A team can share a manager’s job only if it shares what each member hears, most of which arrives by talk. “A single managerial job cannot be arbitrarily split, for example, into internal and external roles, for information from both sources must be brought to bear on the same decisions.”
He later turned on his own list. Reprinting the article in 1990, he wrote that the ten roles “decompose the job more than capture the integration.” By 1998 he was using a different model, with managing unfolding on three levels (information, people and action), and he argued that every manager must play all the roles in it. The list grew mainly from five executives’ weeks; the conductor was one day out of 29. They are vivid samples, not measurements of managers in general.
The agent that hands out the work
In June 2025 Anthropic described a research system in which one AI agent acts as the lead. It breaks a question into subtasks, sends other agents off to search, and pulls their findings together. Those are three of Mintzberg’s roles: resource allocator, disseminator, monitor.
Early versions played them badly. Some spawned 50 subagents for simple questions. Given short instructions like “research the semiconductor shortage,” subagents misread the task or ran the same searches; in one run, a subagent explored the 2021 automotive chip crisis while two others duplicated work on 2025 supply chains. The engineers wrote rules for scaling effort to the question into the prompts, and had the lead give each subagent an objective, an output format and clear task boundaries.
In this research system, the lead agent doesn’t take on the conductor’s face-to-face roles: no donors, no feud between two players, no one who needs reassuring. Those roles stay with the people who run it, and what they learn there still has to reach the briefs.
You can check this part. Open the task descriptions your lead agent wrote for each subagent and put them side by side. If two of them could be answered by the same search, the roles aren’t working as a set.
The deputy who took the outside meetings
Imagine you lead a team of eight and decide to give your deputy every meeting with other teams, so you can focus on your own people. For a month it feels cleaner.
Then the planning meeting arrives. You commit the team’s next three weeks to the feature you’ve been building toward. Your deputy frowns. Two weeks ago, the payments team said it was changing the interface that feature depends on. It was in her notes, in a meeting you no longer attend.
The hat came off fine. The news under it stayed in another room.