Henry Mintzberg

In 1968, a doctoral student at the MIT Sloan School of Management did something management researchers almost never did. Henry Mintzberg watched five chief executives through their actual working days—not interviews, not surveys, not retrospective diaries—and timed what they did in intervals of minutes. What he found destroyed the rational model of management that had been accumulating since Henri Fayol's 1916 formulation of the manager as planner, organizer, commander, coordinator, and controller. The average duration of a managerial activity was nine minutes. Half of all activities lasted less than nine minutes. The manager was not a reflective strategist. She was a conductor of an improvised ensemble in which the musicians kept changing and the score kept shifting—characterized by brevity, variety, fragmentation, and a strong preference for action over reflection. This finding was replicated across decades and continents. It remains the empirical baseline against which every promise of AI-augmented management must be assessed.