Henry Mintzberg - Career

Career

Henry Mintzberg writes prolifically on the topics of management and business strategy, with more than 150 articles and fifteen books to his name. His seminal book, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning (Mintzberg 1994), criticizes some of the practices of strategic planning today.

In 2004 he published a book entitled Managers Not MBAs (Mintzberg 2004) which outlines what he believes to be wrong with management education today. Rather controversially, Mintzberg claims that prestigious graduate management schools like Harvard Business School and the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania are obsessed with numbers and that their overzealous attempts to make management a science are damaging the discipline of management. Mintzberg advocates more emphasis on post graduate programs that educate practicing managers (rather than students with little real world experience) by relying upon action learning and insights from their own problems and experiences.

Ironically, although Professor Mintzberg is quite critical about the strategy consulting business, he has twice won the McKinsey Award for publishing the best article in the Harvard Business Review. Also, he is credited with co-creating the organigraph, which is taught in business schools.

From 1991 to 1999, he was a visiting professor at INSEAD.

In 1997 he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 1998 he was made an Officer of the National Order of Quebec. He is now a member of the Strategic Management Society.

Mintzberg runs two programs which have been designed to teach his alternative approach to management and strategic planning at McGill University: the International Masters in Practicing Management (I.M.P.M.) in association with the McGill Executive Institute and the International Masters for Health Leadership (I.M.H.L.). With Phil LeNir, he owns Coaching Ourselves International, a private company using his alternative approach for management development directly in the workplace.