Henry Mintzberg is one of the scourges of modern management education, arguing the MBA does not give managers the knowledge and skills to manage effectively.
A professor of strategy and organisation, he holds a joint appointment at the Desautels business school at McGill University in his native Montreal and at Insead, in Fontainebleau and Singapore.
An engineer by training, he received a PhD from MIT before joining McGill’s faculty of management in 1968. He was the first Fellow to be elected to the Royal Society of Canada from the field of Management.
He designed and developed the IMPM, the International Masters Program in Practising Management, a degree-level programme delivered in six countries – Canada, England, France, India, Japan and Korea. It is a degree programme that focuses directly on the development of managers in their jobs and organisations
He is a prolific writer of books and journal articles. His best-known books are: The Nature of Managerial Work (1973); The Structuring of Organizations (1979); Power In and Around Organizations (1983); The Strategy Process (1988); and Mintzberg on Management: Inside Our Strange World of Organizations (1989). His The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning won the best book award of the Academy of Management in 1995. His latest is The Strategy Safari.