Henry Mintzberg, the biggest thought leaders on organizational theory, was born on 2nd September, 1939 in Montreal. He was a son of Jewish parents named Myer Mintzberg, a manufacturer and Irene (Wexler) Mintzberg. He is married to Dulcie Mintzberg and has two children named Susie and Lisa and has three grandchildren. Henry Mintzberg likes to write short stories about his personal life experiences and publish them. He also likes to collect sculpture. A Canadian academic and a superlative author on business management. Mintzberg’s foundational work, “The Nature of Managerial Work” (1973), revolutionized management theory. In this book, he challenged the popular belief of the era by assessing that managers perform a multitude of roles rather than just planning, coordinating, and controlling. He is currently the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at the Management School of McGrill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he has been teaching since 1968.
Henry Mintzberg completed his undergraduate studies in mechanical engineering at McGill University in 1961. During his time, he was a student council representative, sports editor of a daily and was in athletic council and many more leadership position. He completed his second undergraduate degree in 1962 in Bachelor of General Arts from Sir George Williams University, now Concordia University. Mintzberg completed his Masters in Management at MIT Sloan School of Management in 1965. During his studies at MIT he was a part of the student government and won the Quebec Fellowship award as well as the M.I.T. Fellowship award and again completed his Ph.D. from MIT in 1968. The title of his thesis was “The Manager at Work: Determining his Activities, Roles and Programs by Structured Observation. None the less he studied Policy as major, Organizational Studies, Information and Control Systems, and Political Science and was winner of Ford and MIT Fellowship.
Dr. Mintzberg is now a member of the strategic Management Society and from 1991 to 1999, he was a visiting professor at INSEAD. In 2004, he published a book named Manager’s not MBAs, which reveals about what he believes to be wrong with management education. Mintzberg claims that prestigious graduate management schools like Harvard Business School and the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania are obsessed with numbers and that their zealot attempts to make management a science are damaging the discipline of management. Mintzberg supports and emphasis on PG programs that educate practicing managers not students with little real world experience. He strongly believes in action learning. Despite his critical stance on strategy consulting, Mintzberg twice won the McKinsey Award for publishing the best article in the Harvard Business Review. He has authored more than 150 articles and fifteen books to his name and supervised 22 doctoral programs . Awarded 20 honorary degrees from universities globally
His seminal book ‘The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning’ criticizes some of the practices of strategic planning today. With Phil LeNir, he owns Coaching Ourselves International, a private company using his alternative approach for management development directly in the workplace.
Henry Mintzberg’s contribution to organizational theory, framework and model are timeless. Mintzberg is best known for his 5Ps of strategy and the ten managerial roles. His contribution to business strategy theory is most distinctive, often emphasized the importance of emergent strategy, which happens in any level in an organisation, as an alternative or a complement to deliberate strategy, which is determined consciously either by top management or with the acquiescence of top management. Mintzberg believes in quotes “Managers who don’t lead are quite discouraging, but leaders who don’t manage are quite deadly. You cannot create a leader in the class room”.