A professor in Â鶹AV's Desautels Faculty of Management, Henry Mintzberg has been called a lot of things over his career - influential, innovative, iconoclast. Business magazine Fast Company even likened him to Mick Jagger.
Of course, Mick Jagger was never named one of the top management thinkers in the world, largely by attacking the foundations of the modern managerial profession - the MBA. Management education, according to Mintzberg, should be given to those actually working as managers, as opposed to the current practice of training young students with no practical experience in management theory.
"Leadership, like swimming, cannot be learned by reading about it," he says.
With books such as Managers Not MBAs and Strategy Bites Back Mintzberg had made the business world sit up and take notice of the flaws in how they think. He's made it his personal mission to reform the way managers are educated.
At Â鶹AV, Mintzberg helped design the International Masters Program for Managers, a program that's been running since 1996, which seeks to expose practicing executives to new ways of thinking in a series of international modules. One executive at a major bank has sent some 16 of his managers through the program: "It changes people more than any other program I've seen - ever."