A henry mintzberg biography

Canadian academic and author on business and management

Henry MintzbergOC OQ FRSC is a Canadian academic and author on business and management. He is currently the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at the Desautels Faculty of Management of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he has been teaching since 1968.

Early life

Mintzberg was born on September 2, 1939, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He is the son of Jewish parents Myer and Irene (Wexler) Mintzberg. His father, Myer Mintzberg, was a manufacturer.

Education

Henry Mintzberg completed his first undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering at McGill University in 1961. During his time at McGill University he was in two honor societies, was a student council representative, a McGill Daily sports editor, a student athletic council chairman, and more.

Mintzberg then went on to complete his second undergraduate degree in 1962. This degree was a Bachelor of General Arts and he received it from Sir George Williams University, which is now known as Concordia University.

He then completes his Master's degree in Management at MIT Sloan School of Management in 1965. During his studies he was a part of the student government and won the Quebec Fellowship award as well as the M.I.T. Fellowship award.

To finish up his education, Mintzberg returned to Sloan School of Management at M.I.T. and completed his Ph.D. in 1968. He successfully defended his thesis of "The Manager at Work—Determining his Activities, Roles and Programs by Structured Observation" and studied the fields of Policy (major), Organizational Studies, Information and Control Systems, and minor in Political Science. During his time he also received the Ford Fellowship as well as the M.I.T. Fellowship awards.

Personal life

Henry is married to Dulcie Mintzberg and has two children, Susie and Lisa. He als

Description of the video:

SCARPINO: There are literally probably hundreds of books that claim one way or another to teach somebody to be a leader. There are dozens of programs. And you are arguing, I think, that it’s really not possible to train a leader. You cannot learn to be a leader out of a book or in school.

MINTZBERG: I’m arguing that you don’t create a leader in a classroom. You can take people with leadership and management capabilities and enhance those by giving them some tips and some advice and so on, largely by enabling them to reflect on their own experience. I think people like Morgan McCall have written very eloquently about how leadership really comes from the challenge of difficult jobs and being moved around and having challenges at critical points in your career. That is how you train leadership. But I think a lot of leadership is kind of born or probably established by the age of five, anyway.

SCARPINO: That was the next question I was going to ask you, and I was going to set it up by saying that as a young man I may have had an unreasonable fantasy that I could have been a major league pitcher or something, but I didn’t have the physical skills to do that. So, would you argue that good leaders are born or made or some combination thereof? Can anybody be a leader?

MINTZBERG: No, but it’s surprising how many people can emerge out of the blue with surprising leadership capabilities, constantly surprising ourselves with people who actually nobody expected it of them. Sometimes in a crisis, you will find that somebody will emerge who nobody expected to be and will grab leadership needs and do something with them. So you never quite know. So you could be born with all kinds of capabilities that could come out in all kinds of strange ways . . . .

Henry is one of the leading management thinkers in the world and has been for many years. The Economist magazine referrers to him as the “Guru” Henry Mintzberg (although he prefers the term ‘swami’ himself). One of two sons of Myer and Irene Mintzberg, Henry was born in Montreal in 1939 and grew up there so speaks French as well as English. His father owned and ran a dress manufacturing company with an Irish partner.

Henry wanted to be an Industrial Engineer but as the discipline was not taught in McGill University, he went there to study mechanical engineering instead since it was the most similar course they offered. He graduated in 1961 with a Bachelor’s degree and the following year, having attended evening courses, also earned a bachelor’s degree in general arts from Sir George Williams (now Concordia University).

Henry started his career working in the Canadian National Railways, where he spent two years in Operational Research, which involved creative thinking using numbers and analytical thinking. Then, wanting to further his studies, he applied to a number of universities in the States and was accepted into NYU and Columbia to study industrial engineering. However, on the advice of the head of industrial engineering at Columbia, he went to MIT instead and ended up doing a Master of Science.

He earned his Master’s from MIT’s Sloan School of Management in 1965 and stayed on to do a PhD. While working on his doctorate, he was approached about an opportunity to study the management practices of NASA chief James Webb which eventually led to his undertaking a structured observational study of 5 managers. He graduated with his Ph.D. in 1968.

After earning his doctorate, Henry returned to Montreal and became an Assistant Professor at McGill University and has remained at McGill ever since. In 1970, he was made an Associate Professor and in 1975 he was appointed Professor of Management. He is currently the Cleghorn Professor of Manag