Biography of Henry Mintzberg

Currently he is Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal, where he has been since graduating with a doctorate from MIT in 1968. (His undergraduate degree was from McGill in Mechanical Engineering.) Henry also holds the title of Visiting Scholar at INSEAD in Fontainbleau, France.

Henry has devoted himself largely to his writing and research over the years especially about managerial work, strategy formation, and forms of organizing. He has completed a book called Developing Managers, not MBAs, and is preparing a series of essays to be published under the title Managing Quietly, also a short political pamphlet called Getting Past Smith and Marx: Toward a Balanced Society.

Henry has worked for much of the past seven years or so, in collaboration with colleagues from Canada, England, France, India, and Japan, to develop new approaches to management education. The International Masters Program in Practicing Management has been running for five years now, and are launching the Advanced Leadership Program, both rather novel ways to help managers learn from their own experience. He teaches in these programs and supervises doctoral students.

In recent years, Henry has shifted a bit toward more general writing. He has done some newspaper articles, and likes to write short stories of which he hopes to publish a collection of them soon, entitled Reflection from the Window. He has also just completed a book called Why I Hate Flying, a spoof of all the foibles of flying, and of managing (published by Texere).

In all, Henry has written about 120 articles and about 10 books. Honors have included election as an Officer of the Order of Canada and l'Ordre national du Quebec, and selection as Distinguished Scholar for the year 2000 by the Academy of Management.

Henry may spend his public life dealing with organizations, but he spends his private life escaping from them. This he does on a bicycle (preferably on quiet roads in Europe), up mountains, or in the Laurentian wilderness of Canada atop cross-country skis and in a canoe.