Headline, September12, 2013

''' !!! PROFESSOR HENRY 

MINTZBERG : THE WORLD'S MOST

 INFLUENTIA​L TEACHER OF 

BUSINESS STRATEGY !!! '''

Attending the annual meeting of the Academy of Management with Henry Mintzberg is the business world equivalent of attending the MTV Video Music Awards with Mick Jagger.

The Academy is the world's largest association devoted to the study of management, and its annual meeting is a marketplace for aspiring professors looking to land their first job.

At the Presidential luncheon where Mintzberg is to receive an award, he can barely manage a forklift of pasta with cream sauce without being tapped in the shoulder again and again by the starry-eyed fans. ''I just had to meet you,'' gushes one such follower. ''I can't wait to tell my colleagues!''

When Mintzberg bounds on to the stage to claim his award, applause courses through the cavernous ballroom. As the luncheon ends, he is mobbed by students, well wishers and colleagues. Posing awkwardly for a photograph with a professor of Netherlands, Mintzberg looks both gratified and yet a bit irritated by the fuss.

His fans are enthusiastic for a reason. With over 10 books and more than 100 published articles to his credit  -and with a faculty position at McGill University, in Montreal, as well as at  INSEAD, the  highprofile business school outside Paris, Mintzberg is a dominant figure in the field of management and strategy. For some over 30 years, he's been contributing ''pathbreaking ideas and trailblazing''  analyses,

All rooted in the real work of their companies and their executives, to a discipline that often feels stuck in the abstract and the theoretical. And although many of his ideas were considered radical  -some would say down right heretical- when he introduced them , Mintzberg is ever hot again. 

More and more companies are realizing that there's an enormous difference between a CEO with keen financial instincts and a great leader.

Mintzberg has shown that management itself is as much a Jackson Pollock painting as it is a quantifiable science. It would be easy for Mintzberg to bask in the overdue glory, to become yet another past-his-prime academic celebrity who recycles old ideas into new books and get paid ridicu;ous sums of money to regale corporate bigwigs at off-sites. But that's never been Mintzberg's style.     

Henry Mintzberg's entire career has focused on understanding how managers make decisions and how they develop strategy. After studying mechanical engineering at McGill, he went on to work in operations research at Canadian National Railways. Then he went to MIT to study management and decided to switch tracks, so to speak, because he was more interested in how people worked than in how things operated.

In his first book, The Nature of Managerial Work, Mintzberg explored his topic by watching what managers actually did in their offices, rather than, as most academics do, by inventing theories and then backing them up. What he found demolished the assumption that managers were organized and confident planners. His research demonstrated that real bosses spend more time responding quickly to crises than they spent doing anything else.

This is a lesson that many new-economy chieftains think they're discovering only today. although the book was rejected by 15 publishers before it reached bookstore shelves, it became a huge success  -and Mintzberg's career as an influential author was on its way.

Although Mintzberg had been railing against management education for years, what had been theory became practice in 1993, as he was considering a new MBA program at Mcgill.

He heard about a more practical model that Gosling had been using at Lancaster with British Airways executives. He first tried, and failed, to create a joint program along the Lancaster lines with INSEAD. Then he approached Gosling himself. Working together, the two decided to create something completely different: a program that focused on teaching real executives how to deal with real problems, the kind that don't fit neatly into case studies. The duo toyed with calling the program the ''Alternative MBA,'' and then with calling it the ''Real MBA''.  

''That wouldn't distinguish it,'' says Gosling. ''so we had the notion of 'Real-Alternative MBA,' which would have the acronym RAMBA, a sort of feminine Rambo. We liked that, but there was no way that the management school at Lancaster was going to allow us to launch something called 'RAMBA' while it was still trying to sell the MBA.''

Once it was dubbed the  'IMPM,'   Mintzberg and Gosling decided to make the program more global by adding  INSEAD,  the Indian Institute of Management and  Japanese faculty from several schools, including Hitosubashi University. 

The first cycle began in 1996.

The Post continues:

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of Brazil. See ya all on the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless  ''The Chic Secret''

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless