Rebalancing Society with Henry Mintzberg
World-renowned management expert Henry Mintzberg shares his wisdom on issues of management, organisations and how society needs rebalancing.
Our latest Edgy Ideas podcast is up now and features a conversation with management expert Henry Mintzberg. In this episode, Henry reflects on his own working methods and approaches, which gives a fascinating insight into his success. He also shares his views on management, organisations, and the need to rebalance society. You can listen to the podcast here.
When asked by Simon how he sees things that others don’t see, Henry points to his hero, the boy in the Hans Christian Anderson story who told the truth to the crowd that the emperor was naked. This is Henry’s perceptive gift, to see what others don’t see, or what they don’t want to see.
His first success was the book, 'The Nature of Managerial Work'. Henry observed what 5 CEOs actually did at work. This research found that the widely accepted idea that the manager's role was to plan, organise, coordinate & control, was false. By setting out what they actually did, Henry’s observations had a major impact on how we think about management. Henry doesn't think he is particularly creative, nor is he a contrarian as some claim, he believes he is perceptive and reports what he sees. Much of Henry’s management education approach places observation at the heart of the work; Henry quotes the baseball coach Yogi Berra, who said, ‘You can observe a lot just by watching’.
Alongside his strength of perception, his other self-identified strength is to be able to reframe. He reframed strategy from being an exercise of future planning to learning and emergence, and he reframed management education as social learning.
Henry strongly challenges the MBA as “training the wrong people, in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences”. Henry believes management is a mixture of art, science and craft, and yet the MBA focuses only on the science. Challenged to address this deficit in management education, Henry alongside colleague Jonathan Gosling and others, created the International Masters in Practicing Management (IMPM), which aimed to rethink management training, placing learning from practice, and learning from each other at the heart of this work.
Rebalancing society is Henry’s latest passion, where he realises that we are stuck on thinking about two sectors, how the private and public work, but a vital third sector sits outside the other two, which he calls the plural sector. This is made up of those organisations, not private, or public i.e. NGOs, foundations, universities, charities, community groups, non-profits, etc. The plural sector is a vital part of society, and we are presently way out of balance. Henry’s latest book is titled Understanding Organisations…Finally!
Click here to listen to the episode.
This is a deeply insightful podcast that we are sure you will both learn from and enjoy!
Simon