CONCEPT
The Craft of Managing
Mintzberg's insistence that management is not a science or a profession but a craft — tacit knowledge built through practice, irreducible to rules, and therefore unreplicable by any machine that operates through explicit formalization.
Three words compete for the soul of the management profession: science, profession, and craft. Mintzberg argued for decades that the right word is the third, and that the confusion between the three has produced a managerial class that is analytically sophisticated and practically impoverished. Science is systematic; its knowledge is explicit, transferable, and independent of the person who holds it. A profession operates through codified bodies of knowledge and standardized training. Craft is neither. Craft is learned through practice. Its knowledge is tacit — it lives in the hands, in the judgment, in the feel for the material that comes only from having worked with it repeatedly under conditions no textbook can specify. Mintzberg said managing is pottery, not engineering. The manager works with material — people, processes, politics, culture — whose properties resist any plan and whose patterns emerge only through the accumulated adjustments of experienced practice.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The craft