Henry Mintzberg Storch

Henry Mintzberg is a Canadian academic and author on business and management. He is currently the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at the Desautels Faculty of Management of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he has been teaching since 1968.

Early life Mintzberg was born on September 2, 1939, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He is the son of Jewish parents Myer and Irene (Wexler) Mintzberg. His father, Myer Mintzberg, was a manufacturer.

Education Henry Mintzberg completed his first undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering at McGill University in 1961. During his time at McGill University he was in two honor societies, was a student council representative, a McGill Daily sports editor, a student athletic council chairman, and more. During his studies he was a part of the student government and won the Quebec Fellowship award as well as the M.I.T. Fellowship award.

Henry Mintzberg likes to write short stories about his personal life experiences and wants to publish them one day. Mintzberg also likes to collect beaver sculptures, and he shares pictures of his collection on his personal website.

Mintzberg writes on the topics of management and business strategy, with more than 150 articles and fifteen books to his name. His seminal book, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, criticizes some of the practices of strategic planning today.

Mintzberg runs two programs at the Desautels Faculty of Management which have been designed to teach his alternative approach to management and strategic planning: the International Masters in Practicing Management (IMPM) in association with the McGill Executive Institute and the International Masters for Health Leadership (IMHL). With Phil LeNir, he owns Coaching Ourselves International, a private company using his alternative approach for management development directly in the workplace.

In 1997, Dr. Mintzberg was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 1998 he was made an Officer of the National Order of Quebec. He is now a member of the Strategic Management Society. During his time as a professor, Dr. Mintzberg has supervised 22 doctoral programs, has been on committee for 14 doctoral programs, and has received a large number of awards both for his work as a professor as well as his work on organizational theory. Simple structure, characteristic of entrepreneurial organization Machine bureaucracy Professional bureaucracy Diversified form Adhocracy, or innovative organization Missionary organization, or idealistic organization

Regarding the coordination between different tasks, Mintzberg defines the following mechanisms:

Mutual adjustment, which achieves coordination by the simple process of informal communication (as between two operating employees) Direct supervision is achieved by having one person issue orders or instructions to several others whose work interrelates (as when a boss tells others what is to be done, one step at a time) Standardization of work processes, which achieves coordination by specifying the work processes of people carrying out interrelated tasks (those standards usually being developed in the technostructure to be carried out in the operating core, as in the case of the work instructions that come out of time-and-motion studies) Standardization of outputs, which achieves coordination by specifying the results of different work (again usually developed in the technostructure, as in a financial plan that specifies subunit performance targets or specifications that outline the dimensions of a product to be produced) Standardization of skills (as well as knowledge), in which different work is coordinated by virtue of the related training the workers have received (as in medical specialists—say a surgeon and an anesthetist in an operating room—responding almost automatically to each other's standardized procedures) Standardization of norms, in which it is the norms infusing the work that are controlled, usually for the entire organization, so that everyone functions according to the same set of beliefs (as in a religious order)

According to the organizational configurations model of Mintzberg, each organization can consist of a maximum of six basic parts: and refers to "strategic planning" as an oxymoron.