Speakers Bios & Abstracts

Platzhalter Speakers
Henry Mintzberg
CA

Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies
at McGill University

Biography

I have been an academic most of my working life. After receiving my undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from McGill University in Montreal (1961), I worked in Operational Research at the Canadian National Railways for two years. Since graduating with a doctorate from MIT in 1968, I have been at McGill. I am Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies (half-time since the mid 1980s)—with stints at other universities in the U.S., France, and England.


I devote myself largely to writing and research, over the years especially about managerial work, strategy formation, and forms of organizing. I published Managers not MBAs in 2004, Tracking Strategies in 2007, and Simply Managing in 2013. I am completing a monograph entitled Managing the Myths of Health Care, and my attention is now devoted to what has begun as an electronic pamphlet entitled Rebalancing Society…radical renewal beyond left, right, and center.I have worked for much of the past two decades, in collaboration with colleagues from Canada, England, France, India, Japan, and now China and Brazil, on developing new approaches to management education and development. The International Masters in Practicing Management has been running since 1996 and the International Masters for Health Leadership since 2006. Both are rather novel ways for managers to learn from their own experience. I teach in these programs and otherwise supervise doctoral students. In 2007, four of us developed CoachingOurselves.com, which brings all these efforts to natural fruition, by enabling small groups of practicing managers to develop themselves and their organizations in their own workplace. Our MOOC, entitled “Social Learning for Social Impact”, is due out on EdX in September of 2015.


In recent years, I have been doing more general writing, including some newspaper commentaries (listed under commentaries). I also like to write short stories, several of which are on this website: I hope to publish a collection of them under the title Reflections from the Window. Some years ago, I published Why I Hate Flying (later The Flying Circus), a spoof on the foibles of flying. I also like to collect "beaver sculptures".On 2 September 2014, my 75th birsthday, I started a TWOG (from tweet2blog, on twitter @mintzberg141, or directly on this site:mintberg.org/blog ): it appears every weekend, as provocative fun in a page or 2 instead of pithy pronouncements in a

sentence or 2.


In all, I have published about 160 articles (listed on this website with annotations and, where available, web links) and 18 books. Honors have included election as an Officer of the Order of Canada and of l'Ordre national du Quebec, selection as Distinguished Scholar for the year 2000 by the Academy of Management, and two McKinsey prizes for articles in the Harvard Business Review. Honorary degrees and other awards are listed in my full C.V. You can also see a piece I wrote on my career up to the early 1990s (1993 autobiography). If you are interested in how I research, conceive, and write, please see “Developing Theory about the Development of Theory”.


I continue to spend my public life dealing with organizations and my private life escaping from them. This I like to do on a bicycle, up mountain trails, and in the Laurentian wilderness of Canada atop skates and in a canoe, with my partner Dulcie, my daughters Susie and Lisa, and my grandchildren, Laura, Tomas, and Maya.