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

In this sweeping critique of how managers are educated and how, as a consequence, management is practiced, Henry Mintzberg offers thoughtful and controversial ideas for reforming both.

“The MBA trains the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences,” Mintzberg writes. “Using the classroom to help develop people already practicing management is a fine idea, but pretending to create managers out of people who have never managed is a sham.”

Leaders cannot be created in a classroom. They arise in context. But people who already practice management can significantly improve their effectiveness given the opportunity to learn thoughtfully from their own experience. Mintzberg calls for a more engaging approach to managing and a more reflective approach to management education. He also outlines how business schools can become true schools of management.

Henry Mintzberg is Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He was named Distinguished Scholar for the Year 2000 by the Academy of Management, served as President of the Strategic Management Society from 1988-1991, is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (the first from a manage-ment faculty), and has been named an Officer of the Order of Canada and of l’Ordre Nationale du Quebec. He is the author of 12 books, including The Nature of Managerial Work, The Structuring of Organiza¬tions, Mintzberg on Management, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, and Strategy Safari.