70: Rebalancing Society with Henry Mintzberg

In this episode, the iconic and world-renowned management expert
Henry Mintzberg shares his wisdom on issues of management,
organisations and how society needs rebalancing. More than this,
Henry generously reflects on his own working methods and
approaches, which gives a fascinating insight into his
success. 
 
When asked by Simon how he sees things that others don’t see,
Henry points to his hero, the boy in the Hans Christian Anderson
story who told the truth to the crowd that the emperor was naked.
This is Henry’s perceptive gift, to see what others don’t see, or
what they don’t want to see.
 
His first success was the book, 'The Nature of Managerial Work'.
Henry observed what 5 CEOs actually did at work. This research
found that the widely accepted idea that the manager's role was
to plan, organise, coordinate & control, was false. By
setting out what they actually did, Henry’s observations had a
major impact on how we think about
management. Henry doesn't think he is particularly creative, nor
is he a contrarian as some claim, he believes he is perceptive
and reports what he sees. Much of Henry’s management education
approach places observation at the heart of the work; Henry
quotes the baseball coach Yogi Berra, who said, ‘You can observe
a lot just by watching’.

Alongside his strength of perception, his other self-identified
strength is to be able to reframe. He reframed strategy from
being an exercise of future planning to learning and emergence,
and he reframed management education as social learning.
 
Henry strongly challenges the MBA as “training the wrong people,
in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences”. Henry believes
management is a mixture of art, science and craft, and yet the
MBA focuses only on the science. Challenged to address this
deficit in
management education, Henry alongside colleague Jonathan Gosling
and others, created the International Masters Program for
Managers, which aimed to rethink management training, placing
learning from practice, and learning from each other at the heart
of this work.

Rebalancing society is Henry’s continuing passion, where he
realises that we are stuck on thinking about two sectors, how the
private and public work, but a vital third sector sits outside
the other two, which he calls the plural sector. This is made up
of those organisations, not private, or public i.e. NGOs,
foundations, universities, charities, community groups,
non-profits, etc. The plural sector is a vital part of society,
and we are presently way out of balance. Henry’s latest book is
titled Understanding Organisations…Finally!

This is a deeply insightful podcast that we are sure you will
both learn from and enjoy!

Short Bio
Henry Mintzberg is a writer and educator, mostly about managing
originations, developing managers, and rebalancing societies (his
current focus). After receiving his doctorate from the MIT Sloan
School of Management, he has made his professional home in the
Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University in Montreal,
where he sits in the Cleghorn Chair of Management Studies, with
extensive stints along the way in England and France. He has
authored 21 books which have earned him 21 honorary degrees and
an officership in the Order of Canada. He publishes a regular
blog, a collection of which was published as Bedtime Stories for
Managers. He co-founded the International Masters Program for
Managers (impm.org) and the International Masters for Health
Leadership (mcgill.ca/imhl) as well as CoachingOurselves.com, all
novel initiatives for managers to learn together from their own
experience. More of his work can be found on mintzberg.org.

Photo credit: Lisa Mintzberg (2019)