this is the Bronfman building home to the des Eaux tell faculty of management here at McGill University it's also home base to well-known management expert Henry Mintzberg mitzva joined the faculty in 1968 and is today the cleghorne professor of management studies over the years he's played a major role shaping both the faculty and our understanding of what managing really is he's been named one of the top management thinkers in the world and he's made it his personal mission to reform the way managers are educated he's a member of both the Order of Canada and the
old one SEO knowledge Quebec meet Henry Mintzberg [Music] Mintzberg and management the two words have been linked together successfully for four decades mcgill professor henry mintzberg has developed an international reputation as perhaps the world's premier management thinker his career was born out of a need he identified as a graduate student I did my doctorate at a time when when people in business schools were not remotely interested in management there was just no attention to management at all it wasn't even a course in management where I studied at MIT so he decided to study managers his
doctoral thesis became the basis of his first book the nature of managerial work published in 1973 I studied managers and what did I say in my first book that got the most attention that managers are interrupted a lot that it's a very action-oriented thing that was patently obvious to anybody who had ever managed or spend a day observing a manager it was patently obvious so what makes me so special nothing I just wrote it down that's all nobody happened to write it down I was there I said gee hmm it's not what everybody says this
isn't planning organizing coordinating and controlling to take the most popular words to describe management this is about getting interrupted and trying to keep your head above water and and everybody said oh geez so fantastic and I said I refuse to take credit I just happened to be there without 13 books later Mintzberg has written what he calls his last book on management aptly titled managing management either science nor profession it's a practice and and the practice fundamentally doesn't change what changes is the content of what you're dealing with he says if anything about management has
changed in recent years its technology and in particular the onslaught of email I think it's driving a lot of the practice of management over the edge the people are just too harassed and too short-term and too pressured and you might see the effect of this current financial crisis as partly caused by them over the course of his career he has gone back and forth between studying managers and analyzing strategies well I've always argued that strategic planning is an oxymoron in the sense that strategies don't come out of a formally planned process most strategies and the
interesting strategies tend to emerge as people solve little problems and learn things and and they don't come out sort of Moses coming down the mountain with the tablets they come out as some little thought that grows into a major shift in how a company sees the world so at IKEA they tried this stuff a a table into a I don't come as a car or a truck the the mountains manager just a he were taking a table somewhere and they couldn't get it in so they took off the legs and they put it in and
then as somebody said well wait wait a minute if we can get it in how our customers supposed to get it in and that led to them selling their furniture in in knockdown packages and that's the central part and soul of their strategy or one big piece of it that's how strategies develop in the mid-1990s Mintzberg turned his attention to management education and the classic MBA the Masters of Business Administration program the assumption is that you can create a manager in a classroom or create a leader in a classroom which is even worse and it's
completely fallacious it's an absolute sham you cannot create a manager or a leader in a classroom and I was kind of highly critical of MBA programs and people started asking the embarrassing question that you should never ask an academic which is what are you doing about it and it's kind of like I'm not supposed to do anything about anything I'm just supposed to criticize anyway we got embarrassed into acting and we created the InP and the International masters in practice management and a whole series of programs that followed culminating in what's called coaching ourselves which
is a kind of self-study thing and the idea is that we wanted to change the whole philosophy of how managers were developed in classrooms the IM p.m. revolutionised management education participants are practicing managers who come from around the world together they explore management concepts as they relate to their real life experiences seated at roundtables they engage in what Mintzberg calls friendly consulting the key is to tap into the natural experience of practicing managers most managers are thoughtful given half a chance and they're in touch all the time where they should be if if the senior
management could get off their backs with all these individual performance targets and Emilee other innovative programs include the international master's in health leadership IM hl4 managers from all aspects of health care coming from all regions of the world and the e roundtables which bring together a mba students from different programs around the world this is a lovely story this guy who runs a factory in Mexico City attended one of our programs and emailed us back this photograph when he got back and he says I put a round table in my factory and now every time
we have a problem we get our team around the table to reflect on what the problem is from these programs sprang an independent study initiative called coaching ourselves conceptual materials and discussion topics are available via the internet now managers virtually anywhere can benefit from this kind of reflection and friendly consulting with colleagues these innovative programs have allowed Mintzberg to see firsthand how managers function in a myriad of roles and organizations he chose 29 managers to study for his latest book managing from an orchestra conductor and bank CEO to a refugee camp director and a head
nurse of a surgical ward the amazing thing is a variety of experiences and at one point in the book I say that it's like life itself because managing is about almost everything in life itself he was struck by both the differences and similarities facing these 29 managers his challenge was to synthesize their experiences into a concept of what is managing we know what managers do we just don't have a decent conceptual description of it Mintzberg wanted to come up with a graphic representation a visual aid depicting the essence of managing 20 years in the making
here is the Mintzberg model of managing the manager sits between the unit that's being managed you know if it's a sales manager and then it's the sales department if it's a chief executive then it's the whole company and the world outside that unit and I argue that people manage on three planes if you like okay the the purpose of managing is action the purpose of managing is to ensure and encourage the kinds of actions in the unit that's the purpose of the unit itself so sometimes people manage the action directly but usually they're one step
one or two steps back from that so the second plane one step back is managing people imagine all the people playing to encourage them to take action dealing with people's problems encouraging them pat him on the back holding meetings all that kind of stuff and two steps back is managing on an information plane so it would be sharing information collecting information managing through information a lot of management in large corporations today at senior levels is about managing the numbers it's about giving people targets and making sure they meet them and so on it's become so
bad it's so excessive on that plane that I call this management by deeming you sit in an office and you deem that somebody will cut costs by 10% and you're firing them if they don't I mean my granddaughter is four could do that that's doesn't take genius but that's managing on the information plane but there's lots of functional parts and my argument is that every managers to manage on all three planes although they made tilt towards one or the other depending on the job they're in Mintzberg argues that the recent financial crisis is in fact
a crisis of man the result of companies focusing on heroic leadership and the bottom line organizations are collect our communities of human beings they're not collections of human resources where you kind of fire and hire and he calls for community ship companies must be rebuilt as communities and I think a lot of companies have totally lost the sense of community largely because of all these downsizing and mismanagement and too much leadership hype which takes the wood puts the emphasis on single individual as the be-all and end-all of the future for the company as opposed to
recognizing the role of middle managers in the critical role of middle managers so we need to rebuild that sense of community in our organizations known as a straight talker Mintzberg argues the days of obscene compensation packages should be over the claim which is a phony claim it's at a kind of old boys network claim is that if you don't pay these bonuses you won't get the best people I reverse that and say quite the opposite anybody who demands these bonuses demonstrates that he or she is not a team player that they're not concerned with the
long-term interests of the company and the very fact that they're demanding these bonuses should exclude them from the job an avid outdoorsman Henry Mintzberg prefers spending his free time away from organizations he appreciates the industriousness of the beaver and collects what he calls their discarded beaver sculptures see they eat most of the bark but not all of it it's this idea of serendipity in a way it's this idea that you've kind of learned from things that just happen an art is something it's not just what we make as art consciously it's also what just happens
from artists you know some inadvertent artists namely a beaver I guess we can call them inadvertent artists just come up with something that's absolutely beautiful and that's the way I view strategy and it's like else it's like the legs on the table they just come up with things inadvertently that change the world kind of like Mintzberg himself an observer of nature and human nature whose inadvertent research path has led him on a journey to change the world of managing [Music] you [Music]
