Interview Henry Mintzberg: still the zealous skeptic and scold

Robert J. Allio

new compilation of essays titled Management? Its Not What You Think! features thirteen broadsides by the veteran observer and outspoken critic of corporate follies, Henry Mintzberg, Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal. Edited by Professors Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand, and Joseph Lampel, the collection published by AMACOM also includes brief contributions from sages Peter Drucker, Richard Pascale, David Hurst, Edward Tufte and many others. Strategy & Leadership took the occasion of its publication to chat with Professor Mintzberg about the state of management and management education. His previous books include Managers Not MBAs (2004), Tracking Strategies (2007) and Managing (2009). S&Ls interviewer was Robert J. Allio, a contributing editor and a founder of this publication. He is the author of The Seven Faces of Leadership (2002).

Strategy & Leadership: In your classic 1973 study on the nature of managerial work, you took contrarian views about what managers really do. How have your perspectives changed since then? Henry Mintzberg: My perceptions have evolved, but Im not sure that managerial practices have changed. Trends have changed, as witness the current emphasis on leadership. Organizations lean one way or another, but the fundamentals are no different. Managers time is lled with interruption, but basically managing is about inuencing actions, working through people and information. Managing cant be programmed or simulated. Effective managers are connected. They know what is going on in and around their organizations. S&L: Do you espouse the idea that leadership and managing are different modalities? Mintzberg: The notion that one can be a leader and not a manager, originally postulated by Harvard Business School professor Abraham Zaleznik, is wrong. An executive cannot lead without managing. If theyre not coupled, the organization becomes dysfunctional. S&L: So how do we teach more effective management? Indeed, can managing be taught? Mintzberg: The short answer is no and the long answer is also no. Managing is a natural practice that cannot be reproduced in the classroom you

Prof. Henry Mintzberg. Photo by Owen Egan

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VOL. 39 NO. 2 2011, pp. 4-8, Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 1087-8572

DOI 10.1108/10878571111114419

need experience to appreciate it. No simulation, no HBS case study can replicate the experience, can communicate the complexity or rather the intricacy of managing. As an alternative to conventional management education, at McGill University we developed an approach to teaching called the International Masters in Practicing Management (www.impm.org). In this program practicing managers sit around tables, sharing experiences with their peers, reecting on what theyve learned. In this way we give practitioners the opportunity to enhance their understanding and insight. S&L: Then does management education, as taught in most business schools at the undergraduate and graduate level, have no utility? Mintzberg: We can teach undergraduates business that is, economics, industrial history and other courses but we cant teach them management. Undergraduate education should teach students how to think, and provide courses in economics, psychology and anthropology, for example. All are appropriate so long as they dont delude students into expecting to leave to go into management positions. And the MBA is great training for some management functions like marketing or nance or accounting. But mastering those functions does not equate to mastering the practice of managing. S&L: In the past few years weve witnessed a deluge of programs that purport to teach leadership. The concept of management appears to have become an unfashionable anachronism its the drama of leadership these days that resonates more strongly with the expectations of society. Has McGill followed this trend? Mintzberg: Yes, we do offer programs highlighted with the word leadership . . . But we dont pretend to teach leadership. Americans these days revere leadership, probably because they get so little of it. So we label programs to get students into the classroom. But our programs do not profess to create leaders, and we dont aspire to create leaders in the classroom. In our IMPM (International Masters Program in Practicing Management) we take people who are leaders and get them to be more introspective about their leading. We also have a program that carries all this into the workplace. It is being used around the world in seven languages. Cathay Pacic, ING Bank, many other international rms have adopted it. S&L: Whats the metric for the effectiveness of your approach? Mintzberg: One cant measure learning, so the bottom line is impossible to quantify. As a result, we use surrogate measures, such as repeat business. Customer loyalty is very high: a number of companies, such as Lufthansa and Fujitsu, have participated in IMPM since its outset 15 years ago. S&L: Isnt the entire idea of a leader rather an articial construct? Leadership events occur from time to time as the organization coheres around a particular challenge or opportunity. In these situations doesnt the role of leader inevitably fall to those who temporarily exhibit some unique traits or characteristics? Mintzberg: I compiled a comprehensive list of the 50 qualities various experts claimed to be manifested in leaders. Many of these traits can be helpful, but no individual can possibly possess them all. But successful individuals acting as leaders are effective in the context in which they perform. Many successful managers and leaders are rather healthy people likable, considerate, decent. S&L: How about some examples of this rare species! Mintzberg: Ko Annan, perhaps. Barack Obama ts nothing apparently neurotic or unlikeable about him. Bill Clinton is another candidate in his managing and leading, he seems like a normal healthy guy. S&L: What about in the corporate domain?

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 The MBA is great training for some management functions like marketing or nance or accounting. But mastering those functions does not equate to mastering the practice of managing.

Mintzberg: Im reluctant to name individuals that I dont have personal experience with, but two executives that come to mind are John Cleghorn, formerly Chairman and CEO of the Royal Bank of Canada, and Jacques Bentz now the Chief Executive Ofcer of Tecnet Participations. But leaders like these dont get written up in magazines theyre not exciting, they dont exude re and brimstone, theyre not doing mergers left and right. S&L: So organizations can be successful without a charismatic, egotistical individual? Would Apple have realized its recent renaissance if Steve Jobs hadnt returned? Mintzberg: Conditions sometimes need a dynamic individual to turn the rm around, or demand an entrepreneurial spirit to start new rm. Steve Jobs may be narcissistic, but entrepreneurs are different case. Im talking about running established rms. S&L: Although formal planning has been around for long time, its discredited in many rms today. What do you see as the utility of formal strategic planning, as compared with an opportunistic approach, the emergent strategy model? Mintzberg: I prefer a learning approach, as compared to a planning approach, to strategy. You cannot formalize the process of creating strategy you can only formalize the implementation of strategy through budgets, programs, and so forth. Take the case of IKEA the enormously successful Swedish furniture company. Their business model comprised two critical elements: offer furniture unassembled, and give customers access to the warehouse. S&L: IKEA has certainly excelled. They now run over 300 furniture and housewares stores around the world, with revenues in excess of 22 billion Euros. And as a private rm they can allow some stores to operate for years before making a prot. Do we know the genesis of their strategy? Mintzberg: Yes. One of the workers, frustrated in trying to get a table in his car decided to take the legs off. Insight number one all customers have the same challenge. And IKEA began selling unassembled merchandize. Insight number two: when a large new store in Stockholm became inundated with customers, staff began to allow customers to retrieve product from the warehouse the go get-the-stuff-yourself model. Opportunism? I call it learning. S&L: So businesses need a culture that enables that kind of behavior, one based on collaboration and communication. In the well-managed corporation, whos responsible for this learning process? Doesnt the CEO have a role in all of this? Mintzberg: Everyone is responsible. Everyone is learning at all levels, and management is listening. Middle managers are important, although they do need the support of senior management. The problem with the concept of leadership is that it implies everyone else is a follower. But we dont need more followers. We need a world of community-ship in which employees have a sense of belonging, and a willingness to work hard for it. S&L: What overall advice can you offer executives managing in todays turbulent environment, particularly those in places like Kenya or the BRIC community? Mintzberg: Dont use the American model. Much of US practice is off the rails, and much of corporate America is sick. Not all of it by any stretch there are some notable exceptions.

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Apple, for example, has been an explorer par excellence, not an exploiter. But it is hardly mainstream corporate America, which is precisely what make it so notable. The current crisis is not simply a banking or nancial sector crisis, it is a management crisis. Americas legendary sense of enterprise embodied in the energy and resourcefulness of its people, has been the key to its economic miracle. The dismal state to which the American economy has now fallen can be attributed signicantly to the steady deterioration of many of its large enterprises, which has undermined the countrys very sense of enterprise. Publicly-traded corporations are dreadfully badly managed. Paul Krugman, the economic columnist for the New York Times and other editorializers keep calling for economic solutions but its not an economic problem, its a management problem that cannot be xed with modications to scal and monetary policy. But no one wants to hear that message. S&L: Thats a pretty severe indictment. Share with us some of the evidence to support your conclusions. Mintzberg: Lets start with the disproportionate bonus system. Anyone who accepts excessive rewards is not a leader. Almost every CEO of a Fortune 500 company is therefore corrupt. Although theyre not breaking any law, they are allowing the bonus system to disconnect them from their organization. Downsizing has wreaked havoc and most of downsizing has not been because rms had their backs against the wall, until the recent severe economic slowdown. Pzer, for example, red thousands of its employees, not because it was threatened with failure, but because its prots failed to be as hugely high as they had been. Actions like this destroy sense of community. S&L: Yes, I note that Pzer, which earned over $8 billion last year, has pursued an aggressive expense-reduction strategy, regardless of its consequences. Pzer plans to close a day care center that has taken care of employees children for nearly 30 years. So should we conclude that maximizing shareholder value is not an appropriate target? And those who manage their nancials to increase bottom line and bonus are doing a number on their companies? Mintzberg: Shareholder value is an absolute crock all it means is raising the stock price. Youll be more successful in the long run if you dont manage to the bottom line in the short run. Take a look at banks, Insurance, and auto rms, all troubled industries. Their executives have been running home with massive bonuses. Thats what I mean when I say that US corporations are seriously sick. S&L: I agree entirely with your position on bonuses but thats not the whole story. Fixing the incentive system may be necessary but surely not sufcient? Mintzberg: Agree. But there are many other symptoms. Such as management education that attempts to prepare people to manage everything when they cant manage anything. Such as downsizing a clear indication of managing for the short term. Another symptom is the mortgage investment imbroglio betting your entire company on risky instruments. What kind of management is that? There are only two possibilities: management doesnt know, or doesnt care. How could you put your entire fortune into Bernie Madoffs Ponzi scheme

The problem with the concept of leadership is that it implies everyone else is a follower. But we dont need more followers. We need a world of community-ship in which employees have a sense of belonging, and a willingness to work hard for it.

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without asking, Can I meet with your accountant? And the nancial advisors who steered people to invest with him should be totally liable. S&L: Are you condemning the entire capitalist model we practice in this country? Mintzberg: No capitalism is simply a way to raise money, and Im a big fan of free markets and open competition. Contrast this model with the sordid behavior of a number of large pharmaceuticals. Unable to manage their research programs effectively, they have turned to aggressive lobbying and the promotion of me-too products, protected by patents that allow them to price carte blanche. A viable economy needs explorers, not exploiters dependent on patents. S&L: What then is the prescription for xing todays management crisis? Mintzberg: The slow x can begin with the heads of large corporations. The narcissists will have to be driven out of their executive suites, along with their shameful bonuses. In their place will have to come some real leadership people truly engaged in their enterprise, personally and deeply, in order to rebuild its sense of community. Not birds of passage, not MBAs who macro-lead rather than micromanage, who believe they can run anything by demanding performance, but people with a profound appreciation for their industry, their enterprise, its products and services and especially its people. Lets bring decent regular people into CEO roles. And then get them reecting on their experiences in programs like the IMDM and coachingourselves.com S&L: Is there a new paradigm for managing and leading that we should be considering? Mintzberg: No the fundamentals havent changed. Embedded, involved management is the key. Manage quietly, craft the strategy.

Corresponding author
Robert J. Allio can be contacted at: rallio@mac.com

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