Biography

Henry MINTZBERG

2003 ranking: 7

There is more to Henry Mintzberg than strategy. Witness his latest book: Why I Hate Flying, a brilliantly sardonic look at management in the airline industry. Next in line is a book exploring management education, one of Mintzberg’s longest held bugbears. Indeed, as befits an iconoclast, a common theme throughout Mintzberg’s career has been a willingness to bite the hand that feeds him. For a man employed by two business schools – Montreal’s McGill and France’s INSEAD – he has proved a relentless thorn in the side of conventional b-school education. The fruit of his dissatisfaction was the International Masters Program in Management, a thoroughly global program which encourages managers to break free of the limitations of functional, and other, perspectives.

His career began with his PhD research which saw him examining what managers actually did. Hardly rocket science, but a strangely unusual strategy. The result was The Nature of Managerial Work (1973) was the result – one of the few (very few) books which actually examines what managers do rather than discussing what they should do.

Since then, Mintzberg has set the agenda in the sphere of strategic management with a combination of academic rigour and a devotion to seeking out new perspectives which has generally set him apart from his contemporaries. This reached a climax with the publication of The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, a coherent tour-de-force which sounded the death knell for the strategic orthodoxy which had long dominated management thinking and education. His most recent strategy book is Strategy Safari.

Mintzberg is working on his next book Developing Managers, Not MBAs. No doubt the book will include more of Mintzberg’s forthright opinions on the subject as expressed in a recent interview: “I think every MBA should have a skull and crossbones stamped on their forehead and underneath should be written: "Warning: not prepared to manage."

All Biographies