Fall from Grace (Page 2)

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Home > McGill News > 2005 > Summer 2005 > Fall from Grace > Fall from Grace (Page 2)

Fall from Grace (Page 2)

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Dean of Medicine Abe Fuks, Mintzberg and adjunct professor Sholom Glouberman have created the International Master's Program for Health Leadership.
Owen Egan

In a recent interview in the British magazine Red Business, Peters adds, "Henry's mistake was that he chose to be born north of the American border. Americans don't take Canadians seriously, alas. Henry would be the guru of gurus if he had only had the good sense to be born in Buffalo instead of Montreal."

As a youngster, Mintzberg says he wasn't exactly a sure bet for stardom of any sort. "I was under no risk in high school of ever being labelled ‘most likely to succeed as an academic.' I wasn't a bad student, but I wasn't anything special."

In university, he began to distinguish himself, getting involved in a wide range of extracurricular activities while doing a mechanical engineering degree at McGill. He took particular pleasure in his work as a reporter and sports editor for the McGill Daily. "I had more fun doing that than anything else. I used to cover hockey games, then race down to Le Devoir (where the Daily was printed) and type it all up right away to make deadline. The first time I would actually read my story would be when it was published the next morning."

Writing is more laborious these days. He admits to going through up to ten drafts when preparing something new. But the effort is worth it. Mintzberg's books are widely acknowledged, not only for their penetrating analyses, but for sheer enjoyment.

"People talk about how engaging Henry's writing is," says Frances Westley, MA'75, PhD'78, a longtime colleague at McGill, who recently headed south to become the director of the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

"He works very hard at communicating, because he really does want to reach people. He has a genius for taking knowledge that's drawn from his research and making it accessible to managers."

After graduating, Mintzberg took a job in operations research at Canadian National Railways, but soon returned to academic life to examine the world of management, an interest since boyhood, when he first began wondering what his dad, the president of a small manufacturing company, did all day at the office. He started work on a doctoral degree at MIT.

For his thesis, he tailed a handful of managers on the job, watching them wrestle with the challenges of a typical day, observing them as they coped with the unexpected calamities that derailed their best-laid plans.

The thesis eventually blossomed into his first book, The Nature of Managerial Work. Fifteen publishers passed on the title till it finally found a home. Once released in 1973, it caused a stir. While business theorists at the time painted managing as a sort of chess game - a largely bloodless and cerebral pursuit - Mintzberg indicated that managers actually had to cope with a fair bit of chaos in their jobs. Good managers learned to think fast and roll with the punches.

While acknowledging that MBAs "don't ruin everyone who gets one," Mintzberg worries that the degrees - and the way they are promoted by the universities who offer them - create poisonous expectations.

MBA holders, he writes, are too often "mercenary managers [who] flit from one battle to another, chasing the money. Job-hopping has become a sign of accelerated career progress." Rarely armed with any in-depth understanding of the companies they work for, or how they developed over time, MBA-formed executives cheerfully reshuffle the decks "without sticking around to deal with the repercussions of decisions they've made."

And once they succeed in their ascent to the CEO's office, they expect to be treated as conquering heroes with all the answers.

"Leaders are supposed to engage others, to foster teamwork, to take the long view, not to grab the lion's share of the rewards for themselves," Mintzberg writes.

Universities themselves, in the competition to attract MBA students, resort to the sort of slick advertising campaigns one would expect of Coca-Cola or Nike. When Mintzberg sees a respected institution like the London Business School attach itself to an inane slogan like "The fast track to success just got faster," it troubles him.

"It's dreadful. Everything becomes a brand. It cheapens the role of a university, which is to be thoughtful and to be critical and to question this kind of silliness."

Not surprisingly, given his strong views on how managers shouldn't be trained, Mintzberg also has a clear sense of how universities can better prepare managers to do their work. He is one of the chief architects of a program that has been putting those beliefs into action - McGill's pioneering International Master's Program in Practising Management, launched in 1996.

Only managers with several years of experience can apply - no neophytes allowed. Students come from very different backgrounds, so they can learn from one another. Their ties to their jobs aren't severed (IMPM students do two-week study stints, then return to work for a period) and instead of dealing with theoretical case studies, they bring issues from their own workplaces to class.

Where other programs boast of being international by dint of having a few professors or students from overseas, IMPM students take the program in five different countries (McGill's IMPM partners include Britain's Lancaster University, France's INSEAD, the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore and some institutions in Japan), discovering for themselves that the world offers more than one model for managing.

Students shadow classmates from other organizations when they go back to do their jobs, again learning different ways of doing things. Jeff Guthrie, MMgmt'00, a Royal Bank of Canada manager, told Fast Company magazine about watching a Red Cross worker do her job at a refugee camp in Sierra Leone.

"It was typical, if we had a problem, for our solution to be ‘Give me the resources that I need to solve this.' What the Red Cross taught me was ‘How can I solve the problem with what I have?'"

IMPM graduates regularly describe the experience as life-changing. Alumna Shari Austin, MMgmt'01, also from the Royal Bank, says, "The program has made a huge difference to both my career enjoyment and my contribution to the organization."

According to colleagues, Mintzberg's focus on the lives of managers isn't strictly an academic affair. Jonathan Gosling, a key collaborator with Mintzberg on the design of the IMPM, says the McGill professor is motivated by "a sincere admiration for the efforts and idealism of managers."

Frances Westley says her friend isn't one to be awestruck by status.

"If Henry met a five-year-old who had a wonderful idea, he would pay as close attention to that as he would to a great idea that came from, say, the CEO of IBM."

This November, McGill's Faculties of Management and Medicine will work together on a new program based very much on Mintzberg's IMPM. The brainchild of Mintzberg and McGill adjunct professor Sholom Glouberman, BA'61, philosopher in residence at the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care, the International Master's Program for Health Leadership quickly earned the enthusiastic support of Dean of Medicine Abraham Fuks, BSc'68, MDCM'70, who has helped develop it further.

"This is a very innovative, creative and timely program," says Fuks. "More and more people are being asked to take on larger administrative roles in health care with very little [managerial] training. It's one thing to be an excellent nurse. It's another to be suddenly asked to head up a nursing program in a teaching hospital with a $100-million budget."

The IMHL will borrow heavily from the IMPM's model. Students will be seasoned experts from a variety of health care settings. Mintzberg is particularly keen on encouraging participants to learn from one another and to critically explore the way health care is administered.

"What we want to do with this program," says Mintzberg, "is not to just fundamentally change the way health care managers are trained, but to change the health care sector itself. We want this to be a forum for addressing the state of health care systems worldwide.

"We want the most eclectic group of students possible, from all regions of the world, from all types of health-related organizations."

Things look promising on that front. "We're receiving inquiries from all over the place," says Mintzberg, noting that groups from the U.S., Britain, Ireland and Italy have all expressed strong interest.

Does Mintzberg ever feel uncomfortable teaching in a faculty that offers its own MBA program?

"Why should McGill cancel a program just because I wrote a book? McGill has nothing to apologize for. Some very interesting ideas have been born here and launched from here."

Some of the most unique among them bear Mintzberg's own imprimatur.

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