An academic and author on business and management discusses his writing, his definition of leadership, and balance in society.
Henry Mintzberg
Featured Leadership Topics
Lead Confidently
“I never set out to be the best. It’s too low a standard. I set out to be good.” And that’s what belongs on my tombstone, I think, in a way which is – I wasn’t saying that everybody else is doing junk. I was basically saying you compete with yourself. You try and do as best as you can do in terms of your own skills and you’re not going to get anywhere by trying to be better than somebody else.You’re going to get somewhere by doing as well as you can possibly do.”
Description of the video:
You earned leadership, one of my things that I don't like at all is this idea of young leaders because they're almost always designated by old leaders who don't have a clue whether they're able to lead or not. So there are literally probably hundreds of books that claim one way or another to teach somebody to be a leader. There are dozens of programs. And you're arguing, I think that it's really not possible to train a leader. Yes, again, I learn to be a leader out of Booker in school. Yeah. I'm arguing that you don't create a leader in a classroom. You can take people with leadership and management capabilities and enhance those by giving them some tips and some advice and so on, largely by enabling them to reflect on their own experience. I think people like Morgan McCall have written very eloquently about how leadership really comes from the challenge of difficult jobs and being moved around and having challenges at critical points in your career. That's how you trained leadership. But I think a lot of leadership is born and probably established by the age of five anyway.
Resolve Conflicts and Crisis
“Sometimes in a crisis, you’ll find that somebody will emerge who nobody expected to be and will grab leadership needs and do something with them. So you never quite know. So you could be born with all kinds of capabilities that could come out in all kinds of strange ways, but in my experience a lot of the people who think they were God's gift to leadership and everybody around them thought they were God's gift to leadership have not turned out to be very pretty.”
Description of the video:
You earned leadership, one of my things that I don't like at all is this idea of young leaders because they're almost always designated by old leaders who don't have a clue whether they're able to lead or not. So there are literally probably hundreds of books that claim one way or another to teach somebody to be a leader. There are dozens of programs. And you're arguing, I think that it's really not possible to train a leader. Yes, again, I learn to be a leader out of Booker in school. Yeah. I'm arguing that you don't create a leader in a classroom. You can take people with leadership and management capabilities and enhance those by giving them some tips and some advice and so on, largely by enabling them to reflect on their own experience. I think people like Morgan McCall have written very eloquently about how leadership really comes from the challenge of difficult jobs and being moved around and having challenges at critical points in your career. That's how you trained leadership. But I think a lot of leadership is born and probably established by the age of five anyway.
Embrace Creativity
“You also learn about the fact that you can be creative and you can come up with outrageous ideas... I didn’t get raised in a bureaucrat environment that said protect your rear end. When I went to vocational testing in high school, mechanical things came up top, so they said I should be an accountant. Why? Because a good Jewish boy should be an accountant. After a couple of weeks, I thought, "I can’t think of anything less suited to me than accounting", so I went into mechanical engineering. So I had to have the courage to not go with the flow. ”
Description of the video:
You earned leadership, one of my things that I don't like at all is this idea of young leaders because they're almost always designated by old leaders who don't have a clue whether they're able to lead or not. So there are literally probably hundreds of books that claim one way or another to teach somebody to be a leader. There are dozens of programs. And you're arguing, I think that it's really not possible to train a leader. Yes, again, I learn to be a leader out of Booker in school. Yeah. I'm arguing that you don't create a leader in a classroom. You can take people with leadership and management capabilities and enhance those by giving them some tips and some advice and so on, largely by enabling them to reflect on their own experience. I think people like Morgan McCall have written very eloquently about how leadership really comes from the challenge of difficult jobs and being moved around and having challenges at critical points in your career. That's how you trained leadership. But I think a lot of leadership is born and probably established by the age of five anyway.
Understand Leadership
“I’m arguing that you don’t create a leader in a classroom. You can take people with leadership and management capabilities and enhance those by giving them some tips and some advice and so on, largely by enabling them to reflect on their own experience...leadership really comes from the challenge of difficult jobs and being moved around and having challenges at critical points in your career. That’s how you train leadership. But I think a lot of leadership is kind of born or probably established by the age of five, anyway. ”
Description of the video:
You earned leadership, one of my things that I don't like at all is this idea of young leaders because they're almost always designated by old leaders who don't have a clue whether they're able to lead or not. So there are literally probably hundreds of books that claim one way or another to teach somebody to be a leader. There are dozens of programs. And you're arguing, I think that it's really not possible to train a leader. Yes, again, I learn to be a leader out of Booker in school. Yeah. I'm arguing that you don't create a leader in a classroom. You can take people with leadership and management capabilities and enhance those by giving them some tips and some advice and so on, largely by enabling them to reflect on their own experience. I think people like Morgan McCall have written very eloquently about how leadership really comes from the challenge of difficult jobs and being moved around and having challenges at critical points in your career. That's how you trained leadership. But I think a lot of leadership is born and probably established by the age of five anyway.
About Henry Mintzberg
Henry Mintzberg earned his master’s degree in 1965 and his Ph.D. in management from the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1968. Since that time, he has worked for McGill University with time out for a number of visiting positions, including part time at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France (1991–99).
Mintzberg has published about 160 scholarly articles and 16 books with a focus on organization, strategy, management, and leadership. One window into the significance of the body of his research is his Google Scholar citation index, which in October 2013 showed 91,886 citations for 469 entries (37,756 since 2008). An indication of the staying power and ongoing impact of his work is the fact that his first two books, The Nature of Managerial Work (1973) and The Structuring of Organizations: Synthesis of Research (1979) record a combined total of 17,558 citations. The Rise and Fall of Planning (1994), which is among his most influential and seminal books, records an additional 5,517 citations.
Mintzberg is a recipient of the International Leadership Association Lifetime Achievement Award. He has earned a number of other awards and distinctions, including the following highlights:
- Seventeen honorary degrees between 1983 and 2012
- Officer of the Order of Canada (1998)
- Elected Fellow, Royal Society of Canada
- McKinsey Prize from the Harvard Business Review (best, 1975; second best, 1987)
- The Academy of Management’s George R. Terry Award for the best book of the year for The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning (1995)
Born or Made?
“[L]eadership really comes from the challenge of difficult jobs and being moved around and having challenges at critical points in your career. That’s how you train leadership. But I think a lot of leadership is kind of born.”
Description of the video:
SCARPINO: There are literally probably hundreds of books that claim one way or another to teach somebody to be a leader. There are dozens of programs. And you are arguing, I think, that it’s really not possible to train a leader. You cannot learn to be a leader out of a book or in school.
MINTZBERG: I’m arguing that you don’t create a leader in a classroom. You can take people with leadership and management capabilities and enhance those by giving them some tips and some advice and so on, largely by enabling them to reflect on their own experience. I think people like Morgan McCall have written very eloquently about how leadership really comes from the challenge of difficult jobs and being moved around and having challenges at critical points in your career. That is how you train leadership. But I think a lot of leadership is kind of born or probably established by the age of five, anyway.
SCARPINO: That was the next question I was going to ask you, and I was going to set it up by saying that as a young man I may have had an unreasonable fantasy that I could have been a major league pitcher or something, but I didn’t have the physical skills to do that. So, would you argue that good leaders are born or made or some combination thereof? Can anybody be a leader?
MINTZBERG: No, but it’s surprising how many people can emerge out of the blue with surprising leadership capabilities, constantly surprising ourselves with people who actually nobody expected it of them. Sometimes in a crisis, you will find that somebody will emerge who nobody expected to be and will grab leadership needs and do something with them. So you never quite know. So you could be born with all kinds of capabilities that could come out in all kinds of strange ways . . . .
Leaders Are Readers
Books I Recommend
- The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
—by Julian Jaynes - Common Sense
—by Thomas Paine
