Managers not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Managing and Management Development

In his new book, Henry Mintzberg offers a sweeping critique of how managers are educated and how management, as a result, is practiced, and makes thoughtful-and controversial-recommendations for reforming both. Management, Mintzberg writes, is a practice that blends a great deal of craft (experience) with a certain amount of art (insight) and some science (analysis). Because conventional MBA programs are designed almost exclusively for young people with little if any managerial experience, and hence little art and no craft to draw upon, the programs overemphasize science, in the form of analysis and technique. Graduates leave with a distorted impression that management consists entirely of applying formulas to situations, which has had a corrupting, dehumanizing effect not just on the practice of management, but also on our organizations and our social institutions. Turning to how managers should be developed, Mintzberg describes in detail a set of innovative programs designed to address these shortcomings that he and a group of colleagues have put into practice: the International Masters in Practicing Management (IMPM). Finally, he outlines how business schools can transform themselves to become true schools of management. Managers Not MBAs presents the kind of bold, iconoclastic thinking readers have come to expect from the man Fast Company magazine called "one of the most original minds in management."

About the Author

Henry Mintzberg joined the Faculty of Management at McGill University in 1968, where he taught the MBA course in management policy until the mid-1980s, after which he has concentrated on education for practicing managers and doctoral students. He holds an M.S. (basically an MBA) as well as a Ph.D. from the MIT Sloan School of Management and has been a visiting professor at Insead, London Business School, Université d’Aix-Marseille, Carnegie-Mellon University, and École des Hautes Études Commercial de Montréal. He is currently the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill.

This is his twelfth book, and it links most closely to his first, The Nature of Managerial Work. It builds on the conclusions of that book while advancing his views of the management process and the implication of these for the development of managers. Aspects of his other books, particularly on organization design and strategy formation, are drawn upon here as well.

Starting in 1980, Mintzberg taught a two-day program for practicing managers for many years, particularly with the Management Centre Europe. After creating the International Masters Program in Practicing Management with colleagues from Canada, England, France, India, and Japan in 1996, he directed the program for its first four years and has remained close to it ever since.

Mintzberg was named an Officer of the Order of Canada and l’Ordre National du Québec in 1998, has been fellow of the Royal Society of Canada since 1980 (the first from a management faculty), and received the Distinguished Scholar Award for Contributions to Management from the Academy of Management in 2000 as well as its George R. Terry Award for the best book of 1995 (The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning).

This book marks a transition in his writing, from describing management and organization to addressing broader social issues. An “electronic pamphlet” under the title Getting Past Smith and Marx: Toward a Balanced Society, which he has been preparing for several years, will be his next major effort.