About the Author

After studying mechanical engineering at McGill University, Henry Mintzberg worked in Operational Research at the Canadian National Railways before receiving his Master of Science and Ph.D. degrees from the Sloan School of Management at MIT. He has been at the McGill University Faculty of Management ever since—in recent years as Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies—aside from visiting professorships at Carnegie Mellon University, Université d’Aix-Marseille, École des hautes études commerciales of Montreal, London Business School, and Insead. He has also received fifteen honorary degrees from universities around the world.

This is his fifteenth book, which revisits the subject of his first, The Nature of Managerial Work (1973). Others include Structure in Fives (1983), Mintzberg on Management (1989), The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning (1994), Managers Not MBAs (2004), and Strategy Safari (with Joe Lampel and Bruce Alhstrand; second edition, 2009). He has also published about 150 articles, including two Harvard Business Review McKinsey prize-winners.

Henry Mintzberg has received awards from prominent academic and practitioner associations, including the Academy of Management, the Strategic Management Society, and the Association of Management Consulting Firms. He was the first person from a management faculty named to the Royal Society of Canada, and is an Officer of the Order of Canada and l’Ordre national du Québec.

He has been devoting much of his time in recent years to the development of a family of programs in which managers learn by reflecting in small groups on their own experience. These include the International Masters in Practicing Management (www.impm.org), the International Masters for Health Leadership (www.imhl.info), and the Advanced Leadership Program (www.impm-alp.com). This led to the establishment of www.CoachingOurselves.com, which enables groups of managers to learn in this way and drive change in their own workplace.

Henry Mintzberg is completing a monograph entitled “Managing the Myths of Health Care,” and is about to devote his time to an electronic pamphlet entitled “Getting Past Smith and Marx … toward a Balanced Society,” for which he has been collecting materials and doing workshops around the world the past ten years.