Henry Mintzberg is stirring the pot again. For those of you who don’t know who Mintzberg is, he’s a professor at the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He co-founded the International Masters Program in Practicing Management as an alternative to an MBA program. He likes to challenge conventional wisdom about management, and he does a great job at getting people to react to his views, though not the way you might want people to react.
Mintzberg earned quite a few critics with his 2004 book, Managers Not MBAs, in which he slammed MBA programs. He said “MBA programs train the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences. No one can create a manager in a classroom.” He even implied that the MBA program at McGill (his employer) was ineffective.
His latest book, called Managing, is sure to garner lots of attention from his critics. In this book he argues that good middle management is the key to good leadership. Accordingly, rather than distinguishing between leadership and management, he says “we should be seeing managers as leaders, and leadership as management practiced well.” Mintzberg studied the work of twenty-nine different managers and suggests that managers are hindered from being effective planners due to the realities of today’s workplace such as heavy workloads and constant interruptions. To overcome these obstacles, he offers a new management paradigm in which managers can become effective leaders by working through information, people, and direct action.
