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'You Can't Create a Leader in a Classroom.'

Professor Henry Mintzberg is one of the world's most influential
teachers of business strategy. Now he's developing a new lesson plan:
to change the very essence of business education itself.

by Jennifer Reingold
photographs by Chris Chapman
from FC issue 40, page 286
Read more stories from this November 2000 issue

Henry Mintzberg,
61
Professor of
management
McGill University
Montreal, Canada

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Attending the annual
Search for Software
Business Directory meeting of the
Academy of
Management with
Henry Mintzberg is
the business-world
McGill University equivalent of
attending the MTV
Video Music Awards
with Mick Jagger. The
Personal Growth and Academy is the
Development world's largest
> Lead Your Team association devoted to
Education the study of management, and its annual meeting is a marketplace for
Leadership aspiring professors looking to land their first job. At the presidential luncheon,
> Leadership Lessons where Mintzberg is to receive an award, he can scarcely manage a forkful of
pasta with cream sauce without being tapped on the shoulder again and again
by starry-eyed fans. "I just had to meet you," gushes one such follower. "I
FAST TAKE can't wait to tell my colleagues!" When Mintzberg bounds to the stage to claim
A weekly roundup his award, applause courses through the cavernous ballroom of the Toronto
from the Web and Sheraton Centre. As the luncheon ends, he is mobbed by well-wishers and
magazine
colleagues. Posing awkwardly for a photograph with a professor from the

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'You Can't Create a Leader in a Classroom.' Page 2 of 8

FAST TALK Netherlands, Mintzberg looks both gratified yet a bit irritated by the fuss.
A bimonthly report
from business
leaders tackling His fans are enthusiastic for a reason. With 10 books and more than 100
tough topics published articles to his credit -- and with a faculty position at McGill
FIRST University, in Montreal, as well as at INSEAD, the high-profile business school
IMPRESSION outside Paris -- Mintzberg, 61, is a dominant figure in the field of
A daily jolt of management and strategy. For some 30 years, he's been contributing
inspiration pathbreaking ideas and trailblazing analyses, all rooted in the real work of
enter email
companies and their executives, to a discipline that often feels stuck in the
abstract and the theoretical. And although many of his ideas were considered
Sign up! radical ( some would say downright heretical ) when he introduced them,
Mintzberg is "hot" again: More and more companies are realizing that there's
an enormous difference between a CEO with keen financial instincts and a
great leader. Mintzberg has shown that management itself is as much a
Jackson Pollock painting as it is a quantifiable science. "There's a reason I'm
getting this award in 2000 instead of in 1990," Mintzberg says, flashing an
ironic smile.

It would be easy for Mintzberg to bask in the overdue glory, to become yet
another past-his-prime academic celebrity who recycles old ideas into new
books and gets paid ridiculous sums of money to regale corporate bigwigs at
off-sites. But that's never been Mintzberg's style. Indeed, these days,
Mintzberg is in hot pursuit of a personal goal that he wrote down on a scrap of
paper almost two years ago and then locked away in a vault at a bank in
Montreal. He plans to open the vault someday to see if he will have delivered
on the goal. One of the things that he wrote: "Change management
education."

It sounds like a strange ambition, given that management education in

general, and the MBA in particular, has never been more popular. Top
business schools are overflowing with applications; companies famous for
their mutual love affair with MBAs ( Goldman Sachs and McKinsey & Co.
immediately come to mind ) now scramble to compete for the affections of the
top graduates from the best schools. If it ain't broke, one can't help but
wonder, why fix it?

Pose that question to Mintzberg, and you'll get an earful as he explains,

calmly but firmly, that management education is terribly broke. "The MBA is a
fabulous design for learning about business," he says. "But if you're trying to
train managers, it's dead wrong. The MBA trains the wrong people in the
wrong ways for the wrong reasons."

Mintzberg concedes that the U.S. style of management education is in

demand around the world -- but mainly, he says, for the big bucks that such a
degree confers upon its holder. "Right now, we are creating a kind of neo-
aristocracy," he complains, "a 'business class' that believes it has the right to
lead because it spent a couple of years in a classroom." But if you really want
to learn how to be a manager, he says, you need to be in an environment
with, well, other managers. "This is supposed to be about leadership," he
says. "You can't create a leader in a classroom."

Mintzberg has other questions. How can aspiring managers expect to learn
from business-school case studies -- which are obsolete on the day they are
printed and which give the professor too much control over classroom
discussion? What does it mean to learn to think globally? It's not enough,
Mintzberg insists, to teach American-style ideas to a class with a smattering of
students from outside the United States. To become a global-minded
manager, you have to learn how people from other countries and other
cultures think and act in various situations. And how many companies really
value the idea of management education itself -- as opposed to the

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credential? "I ask a lot of managerial groups, 'What happened on the day you
became a manager?' " says Mintzberg. "And the answer, almost inevitably, is
'Nothing.' It's like sex. You're supposed to figure it out."

Lots of professors are good at raising provocative questions. What

distinguishes Mintzberg is that he is devising answers. Along with a colleague,
Jonathan Gosling of Lancaster University Management School, in the United
Kingdom, Mintzberg has created an educational experience that is in many
ways the anti-MBA. The program, an International Masters in Practicing
Management ( IMPM ) , is now in its fifth cycle. Nearly 180 participants have
gone through the program, and, according to those participants and their
sponsoring executives, it has had an indelible impact on their personal and
professional lives. "It changes people more than any other program I've seen
-- ever," says Frank McAuley, 44, a Kellogg MBA and vice president for
leadership effectiveness at the Royal Bank of Canada, which has sent 16
people through the program. "It brings them to a different place."

Learning to Learn
Henry Mintzberg's entire career has focused on understanding how managers
make decisions and how they develop strategy. After studying mechanical
engineering at McGill, he went to work in operations research at Canadian
National Railways. Then he went to MIT to study management and decided to
switch tracks, so to speak, because he was more interested in how people
worked than in how things operated.

In his first book, The Nature of Managerial Work ( Harper and Row, 1973 ) ,
Mintzberg explored his topic by watching what managers actually did in their
offices, rather than, as most academics do, by inventing theories and then
trying to back them up. What he found demolished the assumption that
managers were organized and confident planners. His research demonstrated
that real bosses spent more time responding quickly to crises than they spent
doing anything else -- a lesson that many new-economy chieftains think
they're discovering only today. Although the book was rejected by 15
publishers before it reached bookstore shelves, it became a huge success --
and Mintzberg's career as an influential author was on its way.

Although Mintzberg had been railing against management education for years,
what had been theory became practice in 1993, as he was considering a new
MBA program at McGill. He heard about a more practical model that Gosling
had been using at Lancaster with British Airways executives. He first tried,
and failed, to create a joint program along the Lancaster lines with INSEAD.
Then he approached Gosling himself. Working together, the two decided to
create something completely different: a program that focused on teaching
real executives how to deal with real problems, the kind that don't fit neatly
into case studies. The duo toyed with calling the program the "Alternative
MBA," and then with calling it the "Real MBA."

"That wouldn't distinguish it," says Gosling, "so we had the notion of 'Real-
Alternative MBA,' which would have the acronym RAMBA, a sort of feminine
Rambo. We liked that, but there was no way that the management school at
Lancaster was going to allow us to launch something called 'RAMBA' while it
was still trying to sell the MBA." Once it was dubbed the 'IMPM,' Mintzberg
and Gosling decided to make the program more global by adding INSEAD, the
Indian Institute of Management and Japanese faculty from several schools,
including Hitotsubashi University. The first cycle began in spring 1996.

So what makes the IMPM different -- and more worthwhile -- for managers?

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Start with this: There is no home campus for the program, which consists of
two-week modules spread over 16 months and five countries: Canada,
France, India, Japan, and the UK. After each module, when students have
returned to work, they must write a reflection paper describing how what they
learned relates to their job. They meet regularly with a tutor in their area and
work on "ventures," which are program-long projects to create real change in
their own work environment. There are five modules: Managing Self, the
reflective mind-set; Managing Relationships, the collaborative mind-set;
Managing Organizations, the analytic mind-set; Managing Context, the worldly
mind-set; and Managing Change, the action mind-set. Each module is
presented by one of the five partner universities. Students travel to each
campus for one module and spend the time immersed in the home culture of
the country, making company visits ( called "field studies" ) and learning from
colleagues, some of whom are now in their home country. "It has been
absolutely a life-changing experience," says Jane K. McCroary, 45, project
manager for the online travel portal at Deutche Lufthansa AG and a member
of the first graduating class. "Somehow IMPM learning was implicit in the
stomach, in the gut. You learned not explicit things but things that improved
judgment and performance."

In the IMPM, all students must be practicing managers and all must be
sponsored by their companies, which include Alcan Aluminum Ltd.,
AstraZeneca PLC, Deutche Lufthansa, the International Federation of the Red
Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Matsushita Communication Industrial Co.
Ltd., Motorola, and the Royal Bank of Canada. Students stay in their jobs, so
that classroom activity can be connected to ongoing work experiences. The
IMPM also encourages people who already work in groups, whether those
groups are in-person or virtual, to attend the program together. This is both a
support network and a better way of ensuring that new ideas will become
reality when the participants return to the work world.

Another critical distinction is the concept of reflection -- quite a switch from

traditional executive education, which uses a lot of "action" learning or case
studies. "The last thing managers need from us is boot camp -- intense, high-
pressure classroom activity," says Mintzberg. "They live boot camp every day!
What they need is to step back from the pressures and to reflect on their
experiences." Because Mintzberg rejects the notion of silos, most of the
business functions are covered either in the analytic module or in "close
learning" ( otherwise known as "distance learning" ) between modules. This
doesn't mean that you have to hug a tree or dance at a powwow at every
session of the IMPM -- though you will sometimes find yourself in drama
workshops or yoga classes. What it does mean is that you must learn to ask
the right questions, to reflect, and to avoid the traditional manager's trap of
reacting to one crisis after another. "Management is, above all, a practice,
where art, science, and craft meet," says Mintzberg.

It is that type of interaction that seems to have the most impact. When
McCroary was in Japan for the collaborative module, she was walking with
another student, an engineer from Matsushita, amid cherry blossoms falling
from trees onto a driveway. "He explained to me that a lot of Japanese haiku
is written about exactly this event, and I admitted that I had been thinking
'What a messy tree.' The combined effect was so powerful that when I got
home, I made it a point to select people who were different from me in a
project."

A recent innovation at the IMPM is the 50-50 rule. Unlike the traditional
lecture or case format, where a professor is the only expert in the room, IMPM
sessions allow students to spend half of the time in conversation with other
students. The discussions often veer off on tangents -- but that's the point,
says Mintzberg: The executives must decide for themselves what's relevant.
"Our program doesn't take more work," he says. "It almost takes less work.

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But you have to have a lot of depth and understanding and then react to the
class." The Royal Bank of Canada's McAuley sat in on a session in Bangalore
the day after the IMPM participants had visited several Indian companies. The
next morning, like every morning, began with a session called "reflections."
"That was the most fascinating conversation in an academic setting that I had
ever seen," McAuley says. "We zoomed around the room discussing
everything from political to economic issues, and then got into ethics and
business."

The IMPM's managerial exchange takes the 50-50 rule to its logical extreme.
Between two modules, participants spend a week at a partner's office and
then present a paper detailing their observations. That was the highlight of
the program for Jeff Guthrie, 42, a 24-year veteran of the Royal Bank of
Canada. He accompanied his partner, Helga, an Icelandic native and a team
leader for West Africa for the International Federation of the Red Cross and
Red Crescent Societies, to a refugee camp in Sierra Leone -- her "office."
Apart from the shock that he felt from seeing firsthand the extent of the
human suffering there, Guthrie learned a real management lesson. "It was
typical, if we had a problem, for our solution to be 'give me, give me, give me
the resources that I need to solve this,' " he says. "What the Red Cross taught
me was that people said, 'How can I solve the problem with what I have?' "

"Move Society -- Have Some Impact"

The IMPM's spirit of informality and on-the-fly innovation come straight out of
Mintzberg's worldview. He seems to find inspiration in any kind of
conversation or event, such as the Montreal jubilation gospel choir that he
saw last Christmas. "It was the best thing I'd ever seen on a stage in my
entire life," he says. "Not that it was the most polished performance; it was
just unbelievable energy. I watched that and said the role of a manager is to
bring out the energy that's inherent in people."

Mintzberg takes that same open-mindedness to his research on strategy. "I

often think that if we got rid of the word 'strategy,' we'd be better off. Not
because strategy is bad, but because we formalize it. Strategic planning is an
oxymoron. The idea that it is immaculately conceived, like Moses walking
down from the mountain, is silly."

Now that the IMPM is established, Mintzberg is moving on. He has stepped
down as the program's chairman ( Gosling will take over his role ) , but he's
hardly abandoning the cause. Instead, he's trying to "diffuse" the concept to
other sectors. He's writing a book called Developing Managers, Not MBAs,
about management and about the theory and practice of the IMPM. Already
there is an IMPM for Canadians in the volunteer sector, and plans for a health-
care IMPM are under way. And the day after the awards luncheon in Toronto,
Mintzberg and his team met with executive-development heads from nine
companies to sell them on Mintzberg's latest concept -- ALP, the Advanced
Leadership Program. It's an IMPM for very senior managers. If all that isn't
enough, there's the rest of civilization to think about. Also written on
Mintzberg's locked-up sheet of paper are the words "Move society -- have
some impact." So Mintzberg is stretching beyond management with a new
book, tentatively titled Getting Past Smith and Marx: Toward a Balanced
Society. He thinks the structure of current political and social dialogue has
been corrupted by the twin tyrannies of shareholder value and rampant
consumerism.

The success of the IMPM suggests that after years of MBA bashing from the
Canadian wilderness, the world may finally be moving toward Mintzberg's
point of view. Traditional MBA programs are now trying to bring out the more
emotional, thoughtful side of management. Companies everywhere, desperate

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'You Can't Create a Leader in a Classroom.' Page 6 of 8

for more effective leadership, are working with their executives to develop
more robust approaches to managing, rather than simply sending them off to
cookie-cutter executive-education programs. "It was extraordinary at the
Academy of Management this year to hear so many people saying the same
thing as Henry's been saying for years," notes Gosling.

And yet, while that's happy news for Mintzberg, it's obvious that part of him
relishes the role of the renegade, the naysayer, the lonely voice on the fringe.
"I've always been a cynic about things that are too popular and too widely
believed," he frets, peering intently over round, metal-framed glasses.
Indeed, Mintzberg says that he does his most creative thinking when he's
involved in some type of solitary physical activity, whether it be canoeing,
cross-country skiing, or bicycling. Back in 1987, when he was finishing an
eight-day bike trip from Paris to the Charles de Gaulle Airport, he was loaded
down with gear and luggage. As he approached the Champs-Elysees,
Mintzberg saw a phalanx of police officers guarding a bizarrely empty avenue.
He asked what was going on, but no one responded, so Mintzberg slipped past
a barrier for a bit of experiential learning. He rode alone down the long, wide
avenue until he was spotted by a slack-jawed policeman at the end of the
street.

It turned out that the Canadian professor had nearly managed to become the
first cyclist to ride along the Champs-Elysees as the Tour de France came to a
close. It's not a bad metaphor for his career: one of the most original minds in
management, charting his own course, being chased by others, who are
pedaling furiously and who get to the same spot as Mintzberg -- only much
later.

Jennifer Reingold ( jreingold@fastcompany.com ) is a Fast Company senior

writer. Contact Henry Mintzberg by email
( mintzber@management.mcgill.ca ) , or visit the IMPM on the Web
( http://www.impm.org ) .

Sidebar: What's Fast

How do you get stressed-out executives to turn off their cell-phones, close
their day planners, and open their minds to learning? It's a question that both
fascinates and torments Henry Mintzberg, Cleghorn Professor of Management
Studies at McGill University, visiting scholar at INSEAD, and cocreator of the
International Masters in Practicing Management. Here are some of his basic
beliefs.

Real executives only, please. The concept of teaching management to

twentysomethings who are just a few years out of college makes no sense to
Mintzberg. Only by having been in the trenches can you relate personally to
what's being taught. You must be sponsored by your company and should
continue to work while you're in the program. Only if you have experiences of
your own to share can you contribute to class discussions.

Your colleagues are also your teachers. The IMPM uses what's called the
"50-50 rule," which means that for every hour the professor speaks, students
get an hour to discuss issues that are relevant to them. That allows the
lessons of the classroom to flow immediately into the real-life experiences of
the students. And because IMPM students sit in groups around tables, rather
than in the standard U-shaped classroom ( which Mintzberg believes deifies
the professor ) , it's easier for lessons to flow.

Smash the silos. Most MBA programs still teach through the prism of specific

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'You Can't Create a Leader in a Classroom.' Page 7 of 8

subjects such as finance or marketing. But that's no way to learn, according

to Mintzberg. "The MBA is fine for training," he says. "But the concept of
teaching specific skills in finance or in marketing does not help with the real-
life decisions that people make in the business world each and every day."
The IMPM, in contrast, uses holistic mind-sets such as "reflective" and
"analytic" to connect the dots. And since many of the IMPM students are now
in general-management roles, that's where they should stay. Says Mintzberg:
"Why would you want to push them back into the silos?"

Be ready to abandon the script. In the IMPM, each module is redesigned at

the end of the preceding one to bring in some of the most current problems
and issues faced by the students. If everyone is struggling with e-commerce,
for example, the program is flexible enough to spend extra time in that area
and to eliminate a workshop that is less than enthralling to the students.
While there is always a blueprint, it is up to the students to make their
education relate to their jobs, and the IMPM professors adjust where
necessary.

Back to top | Read more stories from this November 2000 issue

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z I would agree that many current MBA stud... Darren Gruendel
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z CLASSROOMS ARE NO PLACE FOR LEARNING.... Ben Ganje
z As I was nevigating, I found it and like... Dr M E Haque
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z In a word, experience is the name of the... Brian Herne
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