Henry Mintzberg

So, you know, I think, you know, why do you think the human side of management matters just as much as the tools and process or output?

Well, I think like for most companies like like you have a product which is normally not the human but like it's made by humans so like even if like you have like all the tech in the world and which is was actually one of like the topic of one of the management class that i've done which i think it management and at the beginning of the class they're saying like usually it's not a problem with technology it's a problem of like processes human and stuff and bringing people all together Then if I go back a little bit to one of my favorite class that I've done in management with Henry Mintzberg.

So I've been, as we said, working in creative industry for all my life, which based on his like studies and stuff.

I'm not sure I will say it correctly, but I've done the class in French.

In that vein, is there anyone or anything in your career that you'd like to shout out to the audience that might give them a little additional value? Maybe a mentor, a valuable resource, favorite client, anything like that?

I guess there will be a lot of people that could be a very long list, but like if we go like maybe in like let's see, everyday knowledge that I use, I never met him in person.

But Henry Mintzberg, who wrote the book of one of my favorite, like management class, I think in English, it's the structure of organizing or organization.

In French, structure is dynamic disorganization.

Okay, so it was before my time, anyway.

I guess Henry Mintzberg was around, who's coming to class in a couple weeks.

He was around there,

absolutely.

So I also hope that they learn from me and my experiences and any advice that I'm able to give them.

There's two big schools of strategy.

One is Henry Mintzberg here at McGill, my colleague who's coming to our class in a couple weeks, and then Michael Porter at Harvard.

Where Porter's more top-down, Mintzberg more bottom-up.

Um, this could just be visitors.

So I love this definition from Henry Mintzberg.

As a manager, as somebody who sees visitors so that other people can get their work done.

I can tell you my office is down the hall from Jim Plummers.

Yeah.

Then there's Mintzberg at McGill, kind of emergent strategy, bottom-up.

That's all, that's all university strategy.

Okay.

Now, my guest today needs very little introduction if you've ever been at management school, if you've ever been a manager or been managed by others and wanted good ideas on how to deal with a bad manager.

Um, the guest is Henry Mintzberg.

Henry is regarded by many as one of the world's, if not the world's, leading management thinker, and after a career of just about 60 years, he's written a new book called Bust Those Management Myths, where he challenges our thinking and has decided that he wants to change his name to Henry Myth Bust.

So Henry, welcome back to the podcast.

Oh, it's true.

So a, a few weeks ago, I actually had on this podcast, I had Henry Mintzberg.

He talked about the importance of communityship and also followership as well, but very much to the same thing.

He actually thinks we should ex- excise the word leadership from vocabulary and actually change it to, to communityship as well.

Right

... uh, to steal from Henry Mintzberg.

And I think, you know, at that point you just can't help but learn from others because-

Yeah

We did have strategy sessions that we've been There's a lot of research that's looked at management theory and how to create a strategy.

And it was Mintzberg, I think, who talked about strategic incrementalism and that a lot of organizations will have a strategy session at a board level and they'll put it on a piece of paper and then they'll look at it again next year.

yep and that it doesn't really influence necessarily what's happening on a day-to-day basis and what actually dictates where you end up is the culture and it's the habits values and behaviors of the people on a day-to-day basis that incrementally leads you where you where you end up um and uh And so one challenge that we spend a bit of time thinking about is how do you bring that to life? So we collect all these ideas from people of what they thought would be where we could be in five years across the organisation.

We've grouped them.