Part 3 - Interview with / Entrevue avec Professor Henry Mintzberg - Partie 3

Overview

Professor Henry Mintzberg argues that leadership and management education should be designed to create real change in organizations. He emphasizes listening to experienced managers, empowering teams, and building trust. He contrasts traditional “command-and-vision” leadership with a more distributed approach grounded in learning from lived practice.

Leadership: “just as much” as needed—and listening broadly

• Formal leaders should provide leadership to the degree necessary, not more, and this should be grounded in listening throughout the organization.
• He highlights the IKEA example: valuable improvements can come from ordinary workers whose input solves real product problems.
• A key case is IBM under Lou Gerstner, where Mintzberg suggests Gerstner delayed public “vision” statements because he was still learning and adapting—not projecting strategy prematurely.

Warning about “outsiders” and premature strategy announcements

• Mintzberg is skeptical of executives “airlifted/dropped” into an industry from outside.
• He compares:
  • Gerstner’s learning period, versus
  • Carly Fiorina’s immediate public strategy announcement after joining Hewlett-Packard, which Mintzberg treats as unrealistic and premature.
• He frames Fiorina as an exception—arguing she was smarter than most in that situation—while suggesting the more common error is widespread (and he notes it is often more common among men).

Critique and redesign of business schools: education should stay close to work

Mintzberg proposes shifting business schools away from the traditional MBA model toward management development that better matches how managers actually learn.

Key design principles

• Recruit working managers (not novices).
• Keep participants in their workplaces, rather than removing them from real work for training.
• Build in “cycle time” between classroom concepts and on-the-job experimentation.
• Use formats that foster peer learning, such as round-table discussions where participants share experiences rather than being graded or stratified by level.

What’s wrong with “the same” content for everyone

• He criticizes programs that give experienced managers material that is effectively identical to entry-level MBA content, arguing it fails to respect their prior background.
• He cites examples such as Wharton’s EMBA claims as reflecting a repeated misstep.
• In his own EMBA-style teaching, he argues it’s hard to stop experienced managers from generating meaningful discussion when prompts connect directly to their current work.

Coaching Ourselves: shifting learning into the organization

Mintzberg describes “coachingourselves.com”, extending the classroom-to-work approach into companies themselves.

How it works (per his description)

• No traditional lectures or staged audiences.
• Companies create discussion groups around uploaded “topics,” and teams implement changes based on what they learn.

He frames this primarily as a culture change effort that must be supported by leadership—or, when leaders don’t drive it, by HR and community-building actors.

Role of HR and “impact teams” (example: Lufthansa)

Mintzberg points to a specific kind of HR professional who focuses on cultural change and community—not just conventional leadership training.

• Lufthansa has participated in his International Master of Management program for 15 years.
• The challenge: managers may return from training as individuals and fail to spread learning effectively.

Proposed solution: “impact teams”

• Program participants define impact teams (subordinates/colleagues who help enact changes).
• After each program module, participants report back and coordinate action.
• Learning spreads through a feedback-and-implementation loop, not merely personal insight.

Scaling internationally with Kenya/healthcare (IMHL) and low-cost replication

Mintzberg describes a team traveling to Kenya to help scale management infrastructure, using a similar model in healthcare leadership via an International Master in Healthcare Leadership (IMHL) approach.

He argues the model can be:

• Inexpensive
• Scalable to many participants
• Replicable across Africa to produce large-scale effects in management development

Trust and risk-taking as prerequisites for empowerment

In discussing empowerment, Mintzberg stresses that trust is essential: people won’t take risks if they expect punishment.

• He recounts an example associated with Jack Welch (GE), who rewarded intelligent risk-taking.
• The cultural signal was that effort and learning are respected even when attempts fail, reinforcing that success isn’t the only thing rewarded.

Ethical leadership: legal corruption and CEO bonuses

When addressing ethical leadership, Mintzberg focuses on incentives.

Executive bonuses as “legal corruption”

• He argues that executive bonuses can operate like a form of legal corruption.
• He points to cases where executives received large payments before firms approached bankruptcy, notably in some major US banks and insurance companies.

Critique of lobbying

• He also describes aggressive corporate lobbying as “legal corruption,” undermining democratic processes.

How corporations and individuals are treated differently

• He argues corporations behave like political actors (“persons” under US law), while real people are treated as “human resources,” distorting accountability.
• He contrasts “individualistic democracy” in the US with a healthier balance of individual, public, and collective rights, suggesting community has weakened over time.

Presenters / contributors (as mentioned)

• Professor Henry Mintzberg
• Monica Redden (Australia—mentioned as attending/leading efforts)
• Daniel Loudon (Rio Tinto—mentioned contributor)
• Dora Koop (McGill—mentioned contributor)
• Jack Welch (cited example)
• Carly Fiorina (mentioned)
• George W. Bush (mentioned)
• Gerstner (mentioned; IBM CEO example)
• Ashley St. McGill (mentioned in the context of Mintzberg’s EMBA session)
• Wharton (institution referenced)
• Harvard Business Review (mentioned)