An academic and author on business and management discusses his writing, his definition of leadership, and balance in society.
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Henry Mintzberg
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 . . . .
