Henry Mintzberg

My Story

I am a writer and educator, mostly about managing originations, developing managers, and rebalancing societies (where my attention is currently focused), also an outdoorsman and collector of beaver sculptures.

After receiving my bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from McGill University in Montreal (1961), working in Operational Research for the Canadian National Railways (1961-1963), and doing my masters and PhD at the MIT Sloan School of Management (1965 and 1968), I have made my professional home in the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill. I sit in the Cleghorn Chair of Management Studies (half-time since the mid-1980s), and have had extensive visiting professorships at INSEAD in France and the London Business School in England.

I have authored 20 books, including Managers not MBAs, Simply Managing, Rebalancing Societyand Managing the Myths of Health Care, also 180 articles plus numerous commentaries and videos. I now publish a regular TWOG (TWeet 2 blOG), as “provocative fun in a page or 2 beyond pithy pronouncements in a line or 2” (@mintzberg141 to mintzberg.org/blog). A collection has recently been published under the title Bedtime Stories for Managers, and following that will be Understanding Organizations...finally (a revision of my book Structure in Fives).

I co-founded and remain active in the International Masters Program for Managers (impm.org) and the International Masters for Health Leadership (mcgill.ca/imhl) as well as a venture CoachingOurselves.com, all novel initiatives for managers to learn together from their own experience, the last in their own workplace.

Some consequences of all this have been election to the Order of Canada and l’Ordre national du Quebec as well as to the Royal Society of Canada (the first from a management faculty), two prize- winning Harvard Business Review articles, and twenty-one honorary degrees from universities around the world.

I may spend my professional life dealing with organizations, but I continue to spend my private life escaping from them, especially in the Laurentian wilderness of Canada, usually with my partner and sometimes with my two daughters and three grandchildren. (See full CV and further details on mintzberg.org.)