Face to Face
Unconventional Wisdom:
A Conversation
with Henry Mintzberg
Henry Mintzberg, a leading figure in
the field of management and strategy,
is the Cleghorn Professor of
Management Studies at McGill
University in Montreal, Canada.
Beginning with his seminal 1973
book The Nature of Managerial
Work, Mintzberg has established a
reputation as an iconoclast who
challenges the corporate orthodoxy
of strategic planning as abstract,
prescriptive analysis. Mintzberg
instead views strategy as a creative,
fluid, and emergent process that
should be rooted in the real work of
companies and their leaders. He has
been described as a professional
contrarian, the great debunker of
corporate life, and the guru of
bottom-up management.
A prolific author, Mintzberg has
written more than 120 published
articles and a number of best-selling
books. The latter include The Rise
and Fall of Strategic Planning:
Reconceiving Roles for Planning,
Plans, Planners, in which he exam-
ines the sterility of the traditional
strategic planning process, and
Mintzberg on Management: Inside
Our Strange World of Organizations,
which explores not only the function
of management but also that of the
organization and its meaning for
society.
Although Mintzberg is associated
with business schools, he is no fan of
traditional MBA programs and the
educations they provide. In a 2001
paper, Mintzberg and coauthor
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Joseph Lampel, currently a professor
of strategy at the Sir John Cass
Business School, City of London,
wrote that MBA programs give stu-
dents the confidence to make deci-
sions but not the competence to deal
with the messy reality in which these
get executed. To address what
Mintzberg perceives to be the short-
comings of management education,
he, his colleague Jonathan Gosling
(who is currently director of the
Centre for Leadership Studies at the
University of Exeter in England),
and others in 1996 created a pro-
gram that Fast Company described
as the anti-MBA. The
International Masters Program in
Practicing Management (IMPM)
focuses directly on the development
of managers in their own contexts
their jobs and their organizations.
Designed to be deeper than conven-
tional management development pro-
grams and more practical and
applied than traditional degree pro-
grams, the IMPM encourages man-
agers to learn from their own experi-
ences. The program is spread over a
year and a half, with ten weeks in
the classroom and two weeks in a
managerial exchange with a fellow
participant. There is no home cam-
pus; the five two-week classroom
modules are conducted at business
schools in five countriesCanada,
England, France, India, and Japan.
Each module is structured around an
individual managerial mind-set:
reflective, analytic, worldly, collabo-
rative, and action.
In a brief self-profile on
Mintzbergs Web site, at www.
henrymintzberg.com, he writes that
I may spend my public life dealing
with organizations, but I spend my
private life escaping from them. This
I do on a bicycle (preferably on
quiet roads in Europe), up moun-
tains, or in the Laurentian wilder-
ness of Canada atop cross-country
skis and in a canoe . . . with my wife
Sasha and my daughters Susie . . .
and Lisa.
Leadership in Action managing
editor Stephen Rush recently con-
ducted a phone interview with
Mintzberg, who was working in
Prague, Czech Republic.
SR: You have been a longtime critic
of management education in gener-
al and MBA programs in particu-
lar. What are some of the specific
faults that you find in management
education today?
HM: Im not critical of management
educationthere is no management
education. Im critical of business
education because its not manage-
ment education. MBA programs give
the impression of developing man-
agers, but they dont. Theres very lit-
tle management in them and most of
what is in there about management
tends to be distorted, because you
cant create a manager in a class-
room. So theyre trying to do the
impossible, which is to turn people
who are not managers into managers,
and it just doesnt work.
People come out of MBA pro-
grams thinking that managers are
people who sit at the top, people
who pronounce strategies and so on
and so forth. All the nuance is really
lost.
I maintain that MBA programs
train the wrong people in the wrong
ways for the wrong reasons. Theyre
the wrong people because theyre
not managers; theyre the wrong
ways because they tend to focus on
the functions of business rather than
the practice of managing; and
theyre the wrong reasons because
theyre based on this distorted view
of management as decision making
by analysiswriting reports and
plans and doing information pro-
cessing, things that are only a small
part of management.
SR: Do you think that MBA pro-
grams put all or most of their
emphasis on the MBA credential
rather than on teaching people how
to deal with real problems?
HM: No, I think the programs them-
selves are serious about educating. I
think the students put too much
emphasis on the credential, but I
dont think the faculties do. I think
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the faculties are serious about what
they do, but what they do is about the
business functionsabout marketing,
finance, accounting, and so onand
they do that very well. But the stu-
dents are often there not so much to
learn as to get the credential.
SR: You studied mechanical engi-
neering as an undergraduate. Did
that have an influence on your
approach to management?
HM: It probably did, but Im not
sure how. I tend to believe in a
hands-on, dirt-under-the-fingernails
approach. In those days, at least,
Management education
doesnt mean a lot to
those who have no expe-
rience in the practice of
management.
mechanical engineering entailed an
applied, pragmatic view of engi-
neering, so it probably had some
effect on my approach to manage-
ment. I find myself always drawing
diagrams that look like engineers
diagrams.
SR: To help prepare managers to
deal with real problems in the real
world, you, Jonathan Gosling, and
others created the International
Masters Program in Practicing
Management. What makes the
IMPM different from other man-
agement education programs?
HM: Its a program for practicing
managers sent by their companies
those are the only participants we
will accept. Management is a prac-
tice that comprises a great deal of
art and craft as well as some sci-
ence. Thats why managers cant be
created in a classroom the way
accountants or physicians are.
Management education doesnt
mean a lot to those who have no
experience in the practice of man-
agement. But for those who do have
such experience, management edu-
cation can be profound.
The IMPM takes place in five
locations around the world and the
people come from those locations,
so theres a natural international
focus to the program. The five
places are very different from one
another, and none takes the lead
its a true partnership. Each school is
responsible for one module and for
bringing in companies from its
region and tutoring the managers
sent from there. So when the class
meetsand everywhere it meets
the context is clearly international
yet decidedly local. In each location
the participants, their companies,
and the faculty from that region host
their colleagues from abroad. So we
train managers to understand differ-
ent cultures. Were not training them
to all be the same; were training
them to come from their differences
and to understand one anothers dif-
ferences. We want them to be world-
ly, not global.
Its a unique program that is
unlike any other in its combination of
depth and application. I think it espe-
cially appeals to organizations that
are seeking a serious developmental
experience for their best and most
dedicated people.
SR: What kind of feedback have
you gotten from graduates? Do
you think the program has been
successful?
HM: Judging from the graduate
response, I think its been fabulously
successful. They absolutely love it. I
cant think of anyone who didnt
walk away enthralled with the pro-
grambecause it really focuses on
them and their experiences and their
needs. Its not just us lecturing them;
its very much built around their
experiences. The international com-
ponent, I think, is unmatched by any
other program, not just because they
go to different places but because its
a natural partnership of people from
those places, both the schools and the
companies. So its a naturally bal-
anced program.
SR: You once said that strategic
planning is an oxymoron. Why is
that?
HM: Strategy depends on interac-
tions, learning, discussion, creativity,
insight, and so on. Its a very soft
process, and planning tries to for-
malize that process. But as soon as
you try to do that, you lose it.
Strategic planning really means
strategic programming. It means tak-
ing the strategies youve got and
programming them. And if you dont
have strategies, the process doesnt
give you strategies so much as
encourage you to extrapolate what
youve got or to copy your competi-
tors. Its rare that a formalized
process like that will come up with
interesting strategies.
SR: Do you think that the deficien-
cies of management education
played a role in the recent wave of
corporate scandals?
HM: It certainly didnt help. The
fact that many of these people went
to MBA programs and probably had
a course in ethics alongside twelve
courses in shareholder value obvi-
ously didnt make them very sensi-
tive to those issues. Studies by the
Aspen Institute [an international
organization whose mission is to
foster enlightened leadership] show
that as people go through MBA pro-
grams they tend to become more
focused on things such as share-
holder value and less focused on
things such as social responsibility.
So the programs certainly dont
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help, and they probably do promote
a kind of mercenary view of man-
agement. I think the whole premise
of MBA programs encourages that
kind of behavior. Because the prem-
ise is that you are not there because
you are a proven manager who
somebody thinks can become a bet-
ter manager; youre there because
youre self-selected. You decided
that being a boss is better than
being a worker. Youre there
because, usually, you want a better
job in another company. Youre a
Programs designed to
create leaders may be
dysfunctional because
they promote hubris.
kind of hired gun. And so you tend
to be more prone to getting involved
in those kinds of scandals.
SR: In reading some of your work,
its clear to me that you have an
active sense of humor. Do you think
that maintaining a sense of humor
is a valuable attribute for leaders?
And is a sense of humor something
that is perhaps stifled by some cor-
porate cultures?
HM: I think a sense of humor is
absolutely an important attribute for
leaders, and I think its fair to say
that a sense of humor is stifled by
some corporate cultures. A sense of
humor is just a reflection of an open
view to life, and good managers are
open to things. If theyre tight and
stiffand people who dont have a
sense of humor also tend to be arro-
gantthose are not good characteris-
tics for managers to have.
SR: What is the single biggest chal-
lenge facing leaders today?
HM: Getting past leadership and
especially the current views of it
what I call the heroic view of lead-
ership. I think, for example, that
programs designed to create leaders
may be dysfunctional because they
promote hubris. I dont think you
can create a leader in a classroom,
but I believe that practicing man-
agers can profoundly improve their
capabilities in a classroom. I think
you can encourage managerial
skills, you can get people to share
information, but the idea of going to
a leadership course to become a
leader encourages hubris. People
walk out thinking that because they
have been to a leadership course,
they are leaders. And thats not
where leadership comes from. First
of all, I believe that leadership
develops before the age of about
ten. And second, I think leadership
is in the eyes of the beholder, not in
the eyes of the doer. I dont like
people who run around saying, Im
a leader. I prefer people who run
around saying, The person who
supervises me is a leader.
SR: Theres been quite a bit of
interest recently in the notion of
connected leadership, or shared
leadership. Whats your opinion of
that?
HM: It depends on what it means
and on whos saying it and what
they have in mind. Generally, team-
work in management is nothing
new, and sometimes you have to
balance different skills in a manage-
rial team.
SR: Do you think that leadership
will be significantly different ten
years from now?
HM: I hope so. I hope it will be quieter
and I hope it will be more modest. I
hope it will be less heroic and that
well talk a lot less about it. Then, I
believe, well get more of it.