Henry Mintzberg
Henry Mintzberg (born September 2, 1939) 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 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada; the son of the Jewish parents: Myer (a manufacturer) and Irene (Wexler) Mintzberg. He completed his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering at the Faculty of Engineering of McGill University. He completed his Master's degree in Management and PhD from the MIT Sloan School  of Management in 1965 and 1968 respectively. Career. In 1997, Professor 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. In 2004, he published a book entitled "Managers Not MBAs" which outlines what he believes to be wrong with management education today. Mintzberg claims that prestigious graduate management schools like Harvard Business School and the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania are obsessed with numbers and that their overzealous attempts to make management a  science are damaging the discipline of management. Mintzberg advocates more emphasis on post graduate programs that educate practicing managers (rather than students with little real world experience) by relying upon action learning and insights from their own problems and experiences. Mintzberg has twice won the McKinsey Award for publishing the best article in the "Harvard Business Review" (despite his critical stance about the strategy consulting business). He is also credited with co-creating the organigraph, which is taught in business schools. From 1991 to 1999, he was a visiting professor at INSEAD. 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 . Contribution to organization theory. The organizational configurations framework of Mintzberg is a model that describes six valid organizational configurations (originally only five; the sixth one was added later): Regarding the coordination between different tasks, Mintzberg defines the following mechanisms: According to the organizational configurations model of Mintzberg, each organization can consist of a maximum of six basic parts: Contribution to business strategy theory. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Mintzberg's research findings and writing on business strategy, is that they have often emphasized the importance of emergent strategy, which arises informally at any level in an organisation, as an  alternative or a complement to deliberate strategy, which is determined consciously either by top management or with the acquiescence of top management. He has been strongly critical of the stream of strategy literature which focuses predominantly on deliberate strategy.