About Dr. Henry Mintzberg
Henry Mintzberg is Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal, the winner of awards from the most prestigious practitioners and academic institutions in management (from the Harvard Business Review to the Academy of Management), and the recipient of 21 honorary degrees from around the world. He is the author or coauthor of 21 books. His latest book is Understanding Organizations…Finally! – Structuring in Sevens (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Feb. 7, 2023), and before that, Bedtime Stories for Managers.
In this episode Steve and Dr. Henry discuss:
- Understanding organizations
- How strategic planning doesn't work in a program organization
- The art of managing a company
- Why so many organizations are a mess
Key Takeaways:
- Strategic planning is a waste of time.
- The four basic forms of organization are personal, program, professional and project.
- Strategy does not emerge from a planning process; rather, it emerges from a much more creative and learning process and then you implement or bring the strategy to life through a planning process.
- When starting a new business, or frankly, any new organization, government, department, NGO, or whatever, you must begin with the arts. You must devise innovative new ways to position that new organization.
- There is so much going on in modern life and interruption causing people not to stop and think. And with the reduction in community, some people feel that they are isolated.
“Insight is lovely, because insight is art, insights are not craft, and certainly not science. It's art. It's finding something new, something in ways that people haven't seen before. It is important in new organizations, important in all organizations for certain things. ” - Dr. Henry Mintzberg
Connect with Craig Davis:
- Website: https://streetlevelleadership.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craig-davis-0b99b426
Connect with Steve and Jason:
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Website: Rewire, Inc.: Transformed Thinking
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Email: grow@rewireinc.com
Show notes by: Denice Salem
Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You're the expert. Your podcast will prove it.
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Dr. Henry Mintzberg - Strategic Planning Is A Waste Of Time
In this episode, I have a very special guest with me. I was considering reading over this guest's curriculum vita, but it would take the entire interview, so we might not get to do all of that, but we do get to talk to Dr. Henry Mintzberg. Before we get going, Dr. Mintzberg, say hello to the Insight Interview world.
Hello, Steve, and hello to the Insight Interview world. This sounds like fun.
A lot of times, I get to start how we've done this. I get to say, “This is my good friend.” I don't get to claim that this time. This is someone that I've met, and I did get to do a lot of research on you, whether you know that or not. I did quite a bit of research on where you've come from and you've got this amazing background.
Dr. Mintzberg is the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal. He's won countless awards from academic institutions. He is from Harvard Business Review to the Academy of Management. He's got 21 honorary degrees around the world and has co-written 21 books. His latest book is called Understanding Organizations...Finally! I love that part, finally, as if we finally need to understand these things.
I can't wait to hear some of your thinking about organizations. Before we even dive into it, we've got this little thing that we do on the show and it's this. Before we even dive in, I would love to hear from you about all your background and all that you've done. A simple question is this. What are you grateful for?
I'm grateful for living in a world that has been wonderful. I hope we'll stop going to hell.
That's going to be your 22nd book, This Wonderful World That’s Going to Hell.
It's the eighteenth, I think. It was called Rebalancing Society. I'm living on a lake. This world is beautiful and wonderful. We've got to be so careful about what we're doing.
Again, I love that. I love the gratitude that you have for the world itself. You seem like you're pretty in tune with that. You've published 21 books. You first started back in the 1970s. Why the word finally in this title of your new book, Understanding Organizations...Finally!? What's that all about in your new book? Would you tell us about that?
There are two things. One is I wrote a book called The Structuring of Organizations published in 1979. I published the earlier version of this book. It's been my most successful book but not successful enough in the sense, and that's why I revised it now. We, meaning everybody, unless you're a hermit, have a desperate need to understand our organizations. We live in them all the time.
The book opens by describing a typical day where in the space of one day, we're probably in touch one way or another with fifteen or so different organizations every day. What do we understand about them? If you want to understand yourself, go into a bookstore and find a dozen books on your psyche. If you want to understand the economy, read any newspaper, blog, whatever and you'll find that all about the economy. In between this macro economy and our micro selves are organizations.
They're key to everything we do and yet we don't understand them. We confuse them. We mix them all up. A famous professor at Harvard once referred to hospitals as focused factories. Do you want to have a hard bypass operation and a focused factory? We mix them up in all kinds of ways. I wrote this book in the hope that I could reach a much broader audience. The academic audience was rather huge. I sold maybe 1/3 of a million copies of the earlier versions, but we need to reach beyond academia or students studying business to people in the world in general. That's what it's about.
I can't wait to put my hands on it. In the confines of our little show, I'm sitting here going, “We get the author.” What are some of the things that jump out at you? I hate to do this to you because it sounds like your work is fairly comprehensive. Let's say you had an elevator ride. It's a tall building. Maybe you have 2 or 3 minutes. Someone says, “I'm interested in that.” What jumps out at you as some of the crucial things that you'd want to tell someone about organizations that you think they otherwise might not know?
The core of the book is what I call four basic forms of organizations. I call them the personal program, professional, and project. They're very different and we all know all of them. In fact, we could use restaurants as an example of all of them. Personal organization is controlled like an entrepreneurial company by a founder or a chief executive or whatever. It's like the greasy spoon restaurant down at the corner where the boss is involved with everything.
This is what we always think of as organizations with hierarchies and structures and rules and all that stuff, banks and assembly lines and all those things. Everything is programmed. McDonald's or any fast food restaurant epitomizes it. It is very different from the corner greasy spoon. A professional organization is one where everybody is highly skilled.
In a gourmet restaurant, everybody is very skilled. Even the person who takes your code or parks your car thinks of him or herself as a professional. The chefs are the key ones but not the only ones. Project organizations are catering where you create a project for special customized purposes, as I say, like a catered event. Take sports, which are even more interesting, like American football. You have to know that it's Canadian football because it was invented at McGill that went to Harvard to play the first game ever.
We have to pause. We didn't tell the audience that you're a Canadian. As Americans, we love to hear Canadians tell us that story. That's great.
We, Canadians have to get into it very quickly. It's the most programmed sport you can possibly imagine. You got a hierarchy on the field. You've got rules galore. Everybody lines up. Even the cheerleaders line up. Everything is so structured. The quarterback calls the play by number and everybody knows what they can do and you're not allowed to catch the ball if you're on the line and all kinds of rules. It is loaded with rules or programs.
A professional sport is a baseball in the sense that when a surgeon operates in an operating room or if there are two surgeons or nurses, whatever, they don't talk to each other because they have been highly trained to know what to expect of each other. They don't coordinate by talking to each other or by getting orders from a boss. They coordinate by virtue of their training. That's accountants or lawyers in a law firm, but baseball is the perfect example.
A double play is beautiful but not creative. You don't want a creative operation when you're having your gallbladder taken in. It's not creative but it's very skilled and it double-plays that. We had trouble with what's a personal organization in sports. Finally, we found one, which is World Cup Yacht Racing, where the owner typically will work on the design, work with the people who are building it, hire the crew, and even skipper in the races.
It's a team sport that's revolving around an individual more than any other. These are all different and yet we mix them all up. Consultants come in and think it's all about programming, structures, information system, controls, and all that. It doesn't work in a hospital. It doesn't work for a project. You don't need it in a personal organization where the boss is doing it all anyway. By the way, are we on the 100th floor yet in this elevator?
You did great. I don't know what floor we're on because I'm on the elevator and I'm taking notes. I want to ask this. Part of what this book and your work is illuminating, is first and foremost, educating people that there are these four different macro kinds of organizations. First of all, knowing what they are and understanding which one you're in because I presume that the book goes on to say as you did. If you're a project one, as opposed to a personal one, the kinds of problems that you have and the opportunities that you have are germane and specific to that one. If you confound that, you might be messing things up. Do I have that right?
If you come into a hospital and think it's a focused factory, you're going to create a hell of a mess in the place because it all revolves around the professionals. If it's a project organization, it's changing constantly. You better rethink strategy from beginning to end. I wrote a book called The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning. Strategic planning doesn't work in a program organization except as strategic programming. In other words, you don't get a strategy from a planning process. You get a strategy from another process, much more creative and learning, then you implement the strategy or bring the strategy to life through a planning process.
You've mentioned banking, I can assume because a lot of our readers come from either a banking or a mortgage banking or financial services type of thing. That's program organization, correct?
Retail banking but not investment banking or many of those other kinds of banking would be closer to project organizations. Often within the same bank, you've got people who are doing projects one by one for financing and so on and other people who are doing retailing, which is very programmed. You got to be careful. It's a hybrid.
If you mix those up or have a person from one trying to impose rules on the other, you're going to have trouble. It's a good example. A pharmaceutical company is more project in research. It's more professional in development where it's testing the products. It's more programmed in manufacturing and so on. If it's a new young pharmaceutical company, it probably has a very strong boss who's more personal.
I want to go back. You said you made an interesting passing comment about strategic planning and you wrote a book about that, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning. I suppose there are people that attend a course or read a book that we all need a strategic plan and we've heard about tactics and strategy and all this. You cut through that and basically said, “No. If you're in some organizations, strategic planning doesn't make sense.” Talk to me a little bit more about that.
First of all, if you're an all-organization, it doesn't make sense. Strategic planning is an oxymoron. You don't plan strategy, you learn strategy. Even in a program organization, you learn strategy then you program the consequences of what you learned, how many people to hire and how many machines to build and what buildings to create and so on and so forth.
Even more so, in a professional organization where strategy is created as ventures on the ground. A group of pulmonologists comes out with a new way of doing things and they create a center in a hospital. These things are usually championed on the ground and they add up to the strategy of the hospital. In a project organization, it's the project and particularly how they turn out that determine the strategy of the organization.
In a personal organization, the boss is coming up with a vision. He or she doesn't need or want or like strategic planning. Strategic planning is a monumental waste of time. Strategic learning is very important. Strategic programming in a programmed organization is also important if you need to think through the consequences of what you're doing.
Strategic planning is a monumental waste of time. Strategic learning is very important.
I got so many other questions for you. We could spend an entire episode just on that concept because there is this contradictory statement that you're not sorry to say, which I love, “Strategic planning is a waste of time.” That should have been the title of your book. I think more people would've bought Strategic Planning is a Waste of Time.
It's true. Tom Peters called it the best management book in the last 25 years.
I love it. Tell us a little bit. My brain is so stuck on this strategic planning thing. Again, I will get off that, I promise. I want to go back. For people specifically in a program thing where there is a hierarchy and there is a structure like that, and I'm going to refer not to an investment bank but a bank, what is your recommendation with regard to then? What planning is effective in that organization?
Let's separate strategy from operations. Planning in the operations is critically important. In a bank, you've got to plan the operations. You can't bring staff into a facility that's not ready. You've got to think through all that, but the strategy in a programmed organization is largely fixed. It's largely given. Look at your phone companies, your McDonald's, fast food franchises, and so on.
What changes are their products. They'll bring in new products and new forms of salads and God knows what, but the overall strategy doesn't change very much. When it does change, often they have to revert to a personal organization. In other words, they have to bring in a new leader who's very forceful, takes charge, and says, “Let's work out a new vision for this place.”
That means we have to learn new for the place. We don't plan it. We don't do it in executive committees. We learn it. At IKEA, before it sold unassembled furniture, a worker tried to put a table in his car and it didn't fit. He took the legs off. It then came the critical moment, the strategic moment. If we have to take the legs off, so do our customers.
That was the origin of the amazing strategy that IKEA has been pursuing for years. It just came from an idea on the ground. Not in an executive committee meeting but on the ground. IKEA has been pursuing that strategy for years. It doesn't change its strategy. It changes its product. It adds new things here and there, but the strategy is fixed the way McDonald's strategy is fixed, which is fast food offerings. That's what it does.
There are so many thoughts there and I'm so grateful. I feel like we have the blessing of being in your presence. You may know as much if not more about organizations than anyone that I've ever talked to and written about. I have some other thoughts. If you're going to begin an organization or if you're already in one, is an organization or in creating an organization, is it more you think science, is it art or craft? Talk to us a little bit about that.
First of all, I've written several books, particularly one called simply managing on The Nature of Managerial Work. Management is a practice. It's not a science. It uses some science but not nearly as much as engineers or people like that do. It's not a science. It's not a profession. It's a practice. That practice uses some science, but not much.
Management is a practice. It's not a science.
It's mostly craft, which means, as I talked about a moment ago, it's based on experience. You learn it by experience. The good ones use a lot of art. They're creative. They come up with visions and so on. When you're starting a new enterprise or frankly any new organization, new government department, new NGO, or whatever it is, you have to start largely significantly with the art.
In other words, you've got to come up with creative new ways of positioning that new organization, vis-a-vis its competitors or other organizations. It's got to find its place. That's art, creativity, vision, and insight. Insight is lovely because insight is art. Insight's not craft and certainly not science. It's art. It's finding something new, seeing something in ways that people haven't seen before.
It is especially important in new organizations. It is important in all organizations for certain things but especially in one. In project organizations, every project is something new and special because those projects are customized. If a consulting firm is doing major projects for its customers, it can't repeat what it does for everybody. It's got to come up with new insights for each project.
How many of these project organizations or these new entities in your view over the years still look to the science? Maybe it's not a science like from a university but it might be a science like, “Can you give me the five ways to do that?” What I'm hearing you say is that's a waste of time too. You're saying, “No, there's an art to this. There's insight,” but I don't know. Maybe it's been my view that people still try to find the five ways to create this and follow some prescription. What do you think about it?
It's in the book. I've got all kinds of boxes in the new book. Those are things or insights, the boxes about things. One of them is called Five Easy Steps to Destroy Your Organization.
Is one of them creating five steps?
Yes, the fifth one is to do everything in five easy steps. That's right. You got it. One of them is to measure everything so on and so forth. Measure like mad is another step. Change everything all the time except your own behavior.
These are steps you don't want to do.
These are steps you do want to do to kill your organization.
I'm trying to get the twisted form of your humor. I love it. A couple of years ago, I wrote an article called Five Easy Ways to Create Three Simple Steps. We say that and the reason that even made your book, that wouldn't be germane or even mildly humorous at all if there weren't some truth to it. You wouldn't have to write that if you did see people doing that or organizations still attempting to do this.
We've got it all the time. We get nonsense, “If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.” That's sheer nonsense. I don't know about them, but many of the most interesting things like management itself, we can't measure it. Who's ever measured the effectiveness of measurement? If you can't measure measurement, then you have to get rid of measurement too.
This is a ridiculous culture. Who measures culture? Who measures leadership? Who measures a new product? Which company measures the potential for a new product? Procter & Gamble introduced Pampers and never dreamed it would be used in homes. It was introduced as a travel product. They made this wonderful mistake of hugely underestimating the potential because they couldn't measure what didn't exist.
This is an off-the-beat question. With everything you're saying, I would hope our readers are reading this. People come up with these pithy ideas. They must have read a book somewhere, which cracks me up that says, “If you can't measure it, you can't manage,” which you're completely obliterating as a concept. Why do you think we think that? Why did we ever buy off on that? It's self-evident that it doesn't work, then why do you suspect people still continue to have those thoughts that lead to those actions and a huge amount of poor management and leadership? Why do you think they still do it?
I have a blog, Mintzberg.org/blog. One of them is called What is Dumbing Us Down? There are so many examples of things. I was at a party in rural Virginia some years ago, and these guys were going on and on about government and taxes. You've heard this a million times about how terrible taxes and government is. They were all retired military guys. They never earned a penny that didn't come from taxes in government.
What is dumb? Smart people are dumb. That's not just those people. It's all kinds of people who are doing all kinds of dumb things all the time. Look what's going on now with China and Russia. Are they stupid enough to even tempt the start of a nuclear exchange? What is making these people so monumentally stupid?
We want the answer. If you wrote a book, give us the quick five-step answer. I'm teasing you about that. What is making us dumber? Come on.
I have five.
Do you know them off the top of your head?
No, I got them. You must be a psychic, Steve. You're figuring out all the things I've done. I have two answers that relate to society. One is we're alienated and isolated. With a reduction in community, we feel apart. We feel like we're out of it, too many of us. We feel isolated, that's one. The other is the sheer pressure of modern life.
With a reduction in community, we feel apart and isolated.
There's so much going on in modern life and so much interruption and so on that we can't stop and think. There are two social reasons. There are two more toxins. One is chemical toxins. Who knows what all these chemicals that we ingest, absorb, and inhale are doing to our brains? We're inundated with these things. This may be a factor, but the electronic toxins might be worse.
I'm sitting here in the country and I can probably get a million sources from the internet. Not through my phone lines but if I'm sitting out in the garden, outside, we're exposed. If you're in Times Square, think of what you're exposed to. To believe that it isn't affecting us is hard to believe, in fact, unless we're so dumbed down by it that we can't think about it.
That's a whole other irony. We can't even get to that one.
The fifth one comes from an Israeli historian. Do you know the guy who wrote Sapiens? The fifth one comes from Harari, the famous Israeli historian who implies in one of his books that the farther we get from nature, the more we lose it. All four of the other ones are all being separated from nature. We lose community. Our cities are too busy, too hectic, and too hyper. Electronic toxins take us away from nature. That's the fifth thing that is dumbing us down.
Any one of those is the means of talking to you further. Believe it or not, the one that's jumping at me is number two also. There's so much pressure and stuff. We're in the post-information age, which is whatever that is but we've got so much stuff that do we pause to think?
Have a look at the blog. It was published somewhere. I can't remember offhand, but the blog refers to the original publication too. If you go on Mintzberg.org/blog and put in dumbing or dumb, it will come up right away.
We're getting close here. Believe it or not, time flies when you're having fun. There are a lot of things I could ask you. This is an odd question. Of all the things that you've done, and it could be in this new book, the Understanding Organizations, what's one thing you hoped I would ask you that I didn't? What's one thing that's hot on your mind that like, “I hope Steve asks me about that.” Maybe on this day, this season, it's important for you. Maybe we already talked about it, but is there anything that you hoped I'd asked you?
I hadn't thought about that question. I would like to ask you how I can reach people and this is a start. Everybody needs to know about organizations unless you're a hermit. That is an interesting question. One question is why I redid the book but that I've already discussed. I don't have an answer offhand, but what you could have asked me that could have been interesting is, “Why in the world don't we recognize the importance of organizations in our lives?”
The only answer I could give is we skip very important things sometimes. We don't notice the obvious. We notice the economy because economists write so much about it. We know about our own personalities because we're obsessed with our own position in society, but why don't we recognize this huge impact that organizations are having on ourselves? The only answer I can give, which is not a direct answer, is please read the book because it may surprise you. You mentioned the sense of humor. People love the sense of humor in the book. I've been getting lots of feedback. They love the little jokes and things I do along the way.
We skip very important things sometimes. We don't notice the obvious.
That’s consistent with the creativity that you put forth. Even writing a book as far as I can tell, is an artistic endeavor. There's an art and there's a craft to that as well, but I was laughing at the fifth step being, “Go ahead and keep creating five steps,” because you're pointing out the fact that people keep looking for these. By the way, this is all coming around.
This is going to sound horribly judgmental, so forgive me. Maybe the dumber we get, the more we look for five simple steps because it's all we've got. It's the only mental capacity I can attend to, which is just five simple steps. I've literally had our clients ask me for steps and systems and processes because we need that part of our brain to go and see beyond that, but if we don't have it, then we're going to capitulate and go back to, “Just give me five steps.”
We're flying in ever-diminishing circles until we end up in the sun and earth, our own rear end in a way. Here's a new thought I had. Let me see if I can get this right. What do you call this new technology everybody's making this big fuss about the writing chat? I forget what it's called.
It's using AI and all the chat.
What are the letters again?
I know what you're talking about. We're both blanking. We've done a bunch. We need to take some time and think for ourselves. Anyway, I know what you're talking about.
This new technology can write for us and people are concerned that this is going to dumb us down, but maybe we're so dumbed down already that the new technology is simply imitating ourselves. That's the way we are writing now. We are writing by an effect combining and recombining all the things we've already said so there's nothing new. There's no new creativity, so we're writing the way this new technology writes. Therefore, it's perfectly natural to have it. It can replace advertising text because so much of it is so banal that we can do it instead. It's aping us.
That's so great. I want to end, as crazy as this sounds, on a positive note. You wouldn't, I suspect, write this stuff, have these thoughts, and desire to get it out to the world. I want to let you know that I'm going to do my best through our show. I'm going to get the word out about your book but not just about the book, about the topic. It sounds to me like your desire would be to not leave a world a little worse but leave it better. I know we can be cynical and go, “It's going to hell in a handbasket,” but you would only write this if you knew that there was hope. We don't have to follow these strategies. We can see these things, and I would suspect that's why you write your books.
There's a whole other topic we haven't even gotten into but you would be interested in. I called it Rebalancing Society. I've written a summary. I wrote a book by that title in 2015. I put together an article-length thing called Restoring Democracy as Balance. If I reply to your email that was sent to Zoom, does that go to you directly?
You bet it. I would love to see it.
I'll send it to you. I don't want to publish until I get it published. Anyway, have a look. We're starting to do our own show. Now somebody's interviewing me regularly, but I also think it would be interesting to rebroadcast a show that other people have done like this one. Is that possible?
You bet. You have access to it, and this becomes evergreen content. We'll make sure that you have that. That's a wonderful way to go about getting the information out there and getting you out there. Even though you and I can find all kinds of ways some of this electronic toxicity, as you call it, it can be used for good. We can use it to grow our minds. It can certainly be used to dumb us down as well and we got to be on guard for that. It sounds to me like you and I are both for the artistic emergent growing thoughtfulness that can make our world better. I thank you. Thank you for all the work that you've done. I'm grateful to have been able to interview you. I got a million more questions, so we get to do it again. How's that sound?
I'm happy to do it whenever.
Thank you so much. Like we started, we end in a certain way. I hope as a reader, you might be walking away going, “I got a lot of questions for this guy, as do I.” We'll end with this. We never do these to give advice but rather to create insights in you. As you read about Dr. Mintzberg, what insights did you have? I've got so many, and I'm grateful for you. Thank you very much for your time. We look forward to seeing you again.
Thank you, Steve. It was lovely.
Have a great day. Thank you.
