Henry Mintzberg

• PhD MIT 1968, SM MIT 1965, B.Eng McGill 1961
• Professor at McGill University

For the past 15 years, and especially since I published Managers not MBAs in 2004, we have been on a journey: to renew organizations by transforming how their managers are developed. We have come a long way, through our own development of a family of programs that suggest some novel ways by which organizations can be renewed. This has been based on...

The widely accepted view equates strategy making with planning, assuming that strategies are 'formulated' before they are 'implemented'. Based on the detailed tracking over time of the actions of a single project organization, strongly resemblant of an ideal type called 'adhocracy', this paper shows that strategies can 'form' in a variety of differ...

Myths abound in management, for example that senior managers sit on “top” (of what?), that leaders are more important than managers (try leading without managing), and that people are human resources (I am a human being). Myths abound in what is called the system of health care too, not least that it is a system, and is about the care of health (mo...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify critical challenges to public leaders in troubled times, based on the experience and thoughts of an accomplished and world-renowned academic in the field of strategy and leadership. The authors have also included it on the original paper, which is attached. Design/methodology/approach A semi-struc...

This article is adapted from the author’s book, Rebalancing Society…Radical Renewal Beyond Left, Right, and Center (Berret Koehler, 2015).

Although corporations can play important roles in addressing some of society’s problems, it’s naïve to think that corporate social responsibility can turn the corporate landscape into a win-win wonderland. ---------------- Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) isn’t a piece of cake. It is fraught with contradictions, subject to political challenges...

Myths impede the effective management of health care, for example that the system is failing (indeed, that is a system), and can be fixed by detached social engineering and heroic leadership, or treating it more like a business. This field needs to reframe its management, as distributed beyond the " top " ; its strategy as venturing, not planning;...

In this article, we challenge the notion that complex and resilient problems - such as global warming and poverty - will have to be resolved by governments or responsible corporations. Instead, we argue for the potency of social initiatives promoted by communities of engaged people. A variety of experiences from around the world, and especially fro...

Myths impede the effective management of health care, for example that the system is failing (indeed, that is a system), and can be fixed by detached social engineering and heroic leadership, or treating it more like a business. This field needs to reframe its management, as distributed beyond the "top"; its strategy as venturing, not planning; its...

FROM THE OCTOBER 2011 ISSUE F ixing U.S. health care was never going to be easy, but some persistent myths have made it more difficult than it should be. The first myth is that the system is failing. In reality, it is succeeding, but in an expensive way: Thanks to costly treatments, people are living longer. The problem is that, as a society, the U...

It's been a hectic morning, as usual. You're struggling to keep your head above water. And here comes an email from HR: Apparently, it's time you participated in another development program. Just what you need! You think back on the last one: It was pleasant enough, especially the discussions with other managers in the halls. You even picked up som...

HOW A COMPANY understands and organizes design activities can have a profound impact on innovation. To conceptualize this notion, four models are defined, each of which describes how firms address the issues of form, function and fit. One of these – Cooperative Design – holds special promise for innovation because it engages managers as valuable “s...

Top performance is “a question of building strong institutions, not creating heroic leaders. Heroic leaders get in the way of strong institutions,” Henry Mintzberg says in this interview. He focuses on his latest book, Managing, and describes how a leader manages on three planes, from the conceptual to the concrete: with information, through people...

return to index | share | comment as one of annan ' s advisors told a journalist, he " runs the u.n. like an old fashioned african village, with long discussions among the elders, periods of reflection and eventually a decision. " We develop leaders, and We develop countries. Or so we believe. We also believe that we develop countries by developing...

A classic part of the community development process is people facing an acute economic or social problem connecting with others specializing in conceptual solutions. For example, South Asian villagers confronting chronic poverty may work with non-governmental organizations offering micro-credit schemes. These are two sides of the development relati...

Decades of short-term management have inflated the importance of GEOs and reduced employees to fungible commodities. Middle managers, who see the connections between operations and strategy, can be instrumental in rebuilding a sense of community in businesses. Copyright © 2009 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.

A number of the fundamental premises of strategic management are put into question in a study that tracks the realized strategies of a prominent university over a century and an half. Amidst continual change in detail, there was remarkable stability in the aggregate, and nothing resembling quantum or revolutionary change in strategy ever occurred....

The strategies of the Sherbrooke Record, a small English language daily newspaper in Quebec's Eastern Townships, are tracked across three decades to draw some conclusions about strategy formation in general and about the actions of two of Canada's most prominent businessmen in particular. John Bassett Jr. and later Conrad Black managed the organiza...

This paper tracks the strategies of a “quintessentially Canadian company,” Dominion Textile Inc., through most of its history, from 1873 to 1990. Created entrepreneur‐ially, but soon consolidated politically, it became the dominant player in an important industry in Canada, faltering bureaucratically before it renewed itself competitively. As discu...

“Policy” has long meant to the public sector what “strategy” means to the private sector. In both cases, a highly rational model has long been dominant: that policy or strategy is formulated consciously, preferably analytically, made explicit, and then implemented formally. Much research and other evidence has raised all kinds of doubts about the v...

“Aunque no está muerta, la planificación estratégica ha tenido una larga caída de su pedestal. Pero incluso ahora, pocas personas entienden completamente la razón: la planificación estratégica no es pensamiento estratégico” (Harvard Business Review, Jan-Feb, 1994). Hace ya un cuarto de siglo que Henry Mintzberg removía con esta demoledora frase las...

When they cut R&D, underinvest in their brands, and - worse - cut worker and middle management ranks, leaders are merely punishing their employees (and stockholders) for their own inability to create real value, says this McGill University professor, Productivity improvements come from better management or applying new technologies, not from making...

Politics and conflict sometimes capture an organization in whole or significant part, giving rise to a form we call the Political Arena. After discussing briefly the system of politics in organizations, particularly as a set of ‘political games’, we derive through a series of propositions four basic types of Political Arenas: the complete Political...

Management is often taught as if it were immaterial—a set of abstract formulae, case histories and flow diagrams. These may be useful, but only if tested and put to use in the material practice of managing. Education makes matters worse if it becomes the simple consumption of this insubstantial fare. This article proposes seven principles for educa...

Incl. abstract and bib. references A visit to Ghana, with the hosts interested in developing leaders and the guest interested in developing countries, led to a questioning of both. Three approaches to development are discussed. The top-down government planning approach, discredited with the fall of communism, has been replaced by an outside-in 'glo...

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Alfred P. Sloan School of Management. Thesis. 1968. Ph.D. MICROFICHE COPY ALSO AVAILABLE IN DEWEY LIBRARY. Vita. Bibliography: leaves 374-381. Ph.D.

This article presents a reply by the author of the book, Managers Not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Managing & Management Development. Given that the book constitutes a rather harsh critique of business schools in general and their mothership Master of Business Administration (MBA) programs in particular, the author takes it as an encou...

This article comments on a paper by Sumantra Ghoshal published in this issue of Academy of Management Learning & Education which argues that academic research related to the conduct of business and management has had some very significant and negative influences on the practice of management. The author observes that in substance, the article repre...

Résumé Dans son dernier ouvrage, Henry Mintzberg fait une critique radicale des business schools. L’extrait ci-dessous présente sa propre vision de l’enseignement destiné aux managers.

Management professor Henry Mintzberg argues that a little leadership goes a long way.

The authors argue that contemporary management education does a disservice by standardizing content, focusing on business functions (instead of managing practices) and training specialists (rather than general managers). Working with several major international universities, the authors have developed a vision of management education that grounds M...

Managers can't be created in a classroom. Instead they should be engaged actively in their learning, which means it should relate to their personal experience. Unfortunately, most degree programs for such people rely on the first generation of other people's experience and the second generation of artificial experience, while mostly ignoring the ma...

Managers are told: Be global and be local. Collaborate and compete. Change, perpetually, and maintain order. Make the numbers while nurturing your people. To be effective, managers need to consider the juxtapositions in order to arrive at a deep integration of these seemingly contradictory concerns. That means they must focus not only on what they...

To understand social processes in history or today, how far is it useful to think in terms of phases, cycles, or curves of learning or growth? Professional historians have been distinctly cool in answering: “The individual emerges as being more highly conditioned by history than prima facie we had imagined”; there are group forces at work, and the...

Managing may be managing, but it is practiced in a wide range of ways in the so-called 'healthcare' system. All or in some cases part of a day in the life of seven managers is described and then analysed, separately and then together. This presents a consistent picture of the varieties as well as the discontinuities in managing this hopefully integ...

Managing Healthcare and the Treatment of Disease Why is it that healthcare systems are so difficult to manage? It would appear that no country is satisfied with the current state of its health system. In all parts of the world, reforms are either being considered, planned or applied, many of them diametrically opposed. Each reform purports to be ca...

Borders of different kinds get in the way of management education. Six years of experience with the International Masters Program in Practicing Management has suggested how we might break down these borders, to get beyond "students," beyond "globalization," beyond "teaching," and beyond the business functions. The management education classroom sho...

In an article written well before Enron became a euphemism for corporate irresponsibility, the authors make the case that such misdeeds, so prevalent in recent months, are symptoms of a syndrome of selfishness that has taken hold of our business institutions, our societies and our minds. Drawing on history, literature, philosophy and management thi...

This paper is about two managers of Red Cross refugee camps in Tanzania who manage by exception in rather exceptional circumstances. Using a model of managerial work that delineates roles carried out at the information, people, and action levels, inside and outside the unit, these managers' activities concentrate especially on communicating and con...

The clinical methods used in health care and disease cure are easily understood. Yet when combined into institutions and broadened into social systems, the management of them becomes surprisingly convoluted. Part I of this article presents a framework to help understand how this happens.

The development of appropriate levels of integration in the system of health care and disease cure will require stronger collective cultures and enhanced communication among the key actors. Part II of this paper uses this line of argument to reframe four major issues in this system: coordination of acute cure and of community care, and collaboratio...

The organization chart can no longer help us understand what an organization does. What's needed in these dynamic times is a much richer diagram that gives us a more revealing picture of a more dynamic organization. That organization can be a hub, a web, or a chain. It is critical that we understand each of these forms and how they work in a partic...

Sustaining the physical environment requires sustenance of the associated institutional environment. Questions are raised about this, based on the observation of a day in each of the lives of two headquarters managers at Greenpeace, the Executive Director and a Director of certain of the central units. In our analysis, we look beyond the obvious do...

Sustaining the physical environment requires sustenance of the associated institutional environment. Questions are raised about this, based on the observation of a day in each of the lives of two headquarters managers at Greenpeace, the Executive Director and a Director of certain of the central units. In our analysis, we look beyond the obvious do...

Walk into any organization and you will get a snapshot of the company in action--people and products moving every which way. But ask for a picture of the company and you will be given the org chart, with its orderly little boxes showing just the names and titles of managers. Now there's a more revealing way to depict the people and operations withi...

457 p., ref. bib. : 23 p. Dans cet ouvrage incisif, Henry Mintzberg passe au crible le processus qui a fasciné tant d'organisations depuis une trentaine d'années : la planification stratégique. Est-elle un mythe ? Quelle est la véritable relation entre planification et stratégie ? En définitive, qu'est-ce que la planification ? et la stratégie ? L'...

In this article, we review briefly the evolution of the field in terms of ten "schools." We ask whether these perspectives represent fundamentally different processes of strategy making or different parts of the same process. In both cases, our answer is yes. We seek to show how some recent work tends to cut across these historical perspectives - i...

The orchestra conductor is a popular metaphor for managers today--up there on the podium in complete control. But that image may be misleading, says Henry Mintzberg, who recently spent a day with Bramwell Tovey, conductor of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, in order to explore the metaphor. He found that Tovey does not operate like an absolute rule...