What’s the Logic?

Abstract

Managers are always being called upon to justify their decisions. Just claiming that something ‘seemed like a good idea at the time’ will rarely suffice unless it works. Hence, for decades, there has been a preoccupation with various forms of modelling on a ‘rational’ basis. Yet Henry Mintzberg (1975) found 40 years ago that few top managers use sophisticated models or information systems of any kind. Most relied on what they heard from others rather than what was set out in databases or information sheets or explicitly modelled. Further, very few wrote down what they heard, so that ‘the strategic data bank of the organisation is not in the memory of its computers, but locked deep in the minds of its managers’ (ibid., p. 10).