Henry Mintzberg

Business Management and Organizational Structure Expert

Henry Mintzberg is Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies in the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University in Montreal. His research has dealt with issues of general management and organizations, focusing on the nature of managerial work, forms of organizing, and the strategy formation process. He has also been promoting the development of a family of programs for practicing managers in the private and health sectors. His own teaching activities focus on ad hoc seminars for managers and work with doctoral students. He is currently working on an electronic pamphlet entitled “Rebalancing Society: radical renewal beyond left, right, and center.”

Professor Mintzberg earned his doctorate and Master of Science degrees at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management and his mechanical engineering degree at McGill, working in between in operational research for the Canadian National Railways. He has been named an Officer of the Order of Canada and of l’Ordre national du Québec and holds honorary degrees from fifteen universities in ten countries. He also served as President of the Strategic Management Society from 1988-91, and is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (the first from a management faculty), the Academy of Management, and the International Academy of Management. He was named Distinguished Scholar for the year 2000 by the Academy of Management.

He is the author or co-author of fifteen books, including The Nature of Managerial Work, The Structuring of Organizations, Mintzberg on Management, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, The Canadian Condition, Strategy Safari, Managers not MBAs, Strategy Bites Back and Managing. His management articles number over one hundred fifty, including the Strategic Management Journal Best Paper Prize and two Harvard Business Review McKinsey prizewinners: “The Manager’s Job: Folklore and Fact” and “Crafting Strategy”. He is recognized in the Web of Science list of “the world’s most cited and influential researchers” with approximately 4,000 citations.

One of Professor Mintzberg’s books was “written for those of us who spend our public lives dealing with organizations and our private lives escaping from them.” He escapes on a bicycle, preferably on remote roads in Europe, up mountains, atop cross-country skis, and in a canoe, the last two often in the Laurentian wilderness of Canada.