Henry Mintzberg is management education's stormy petrel. By his own admission, he is cynical about things that are too popular. In his career spanning over 40 years, the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal, has repeatedly demolished popular notion. Management education, especially the way it is right now, is his favourite whipping boy. He is also a harsh critic of what he calls heroic leaders -- who think they can waltz into an organization, and transform it almost single-handedly. And he blames B-schools for glorifying them. In a freewheeling interview with BW's Neelima Mahajan and Indrajit Gupta, Mintzberg shares his views on a host of issues:

• The MBA continues to be one of the most popular degrees ever. Yet, you have been one of its strongest critics. Why?
  
  By giving young people, who have never managed, the impression that we are turning them into managers is very dysfunctional. I believe that even taking people who are managers and doing what we usually do in B-schools, which is concentrate on the business function, does not teach them management. People learn management by focusing on their own experience and learning from their own experience.
  
  
• Does the problem lie with the way management education is structured currently?
  
  The problem is everywhere. It is in the very assumption that we can take people who have never managed, bring them into a classroom and teach them management. That is utterly wrong. It gives them a dysfunctional view of management. It gives the impression that anybody can manage anything, only if he has been through that education. That is incorrect.
  
  The schools are driven by a strategy that was developed in the 1950s. They are based on business functions, and rooted in the disciplines of economics and psychology and mathematics and so on. They have a heavy emphasis on research. The view of management education developed in the 1950s is business education -- that's not management education at all.
  
  
  
• So what needs to change if one were to make management education more relevant?
  
  Management education should be available only to people who are managers and are sent by their companies. We shouldn't have people in the classroom, who are looking for another job. We should have people in a classroom who are looking to do a better job. People who are going to be better where they are. Not people who are trying to use the education as a way to parachute into some other situation. And once they come in, we should encourage them to learn from their own experience.
  
  As faculty, we bring concepts, ideas, various techniques of doing things, cases and so on. They (students) bring their experience and the key thing is that they are able to use what we give them, and discuss amongst themselves in the classroom the relevance of that learning for themselves. In other words, the learning should be based on people reflecting on their own experience.
  
  
  
• But haven't B-schools been obviously successful in what they have done?
  
  They have been terrible failures in what they have done. They have been successful in attracting students, yes. But I challenge the performance of many, many of those students. Some perform very well. And that's not because of solely what they learned in school; it's because they were smart people who figured it out. There's a chart in my book (Managers Not MBAs, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2004) that lists 19 'superstars' who were chief executives of major corporations in 1990 and studied at Harvard Business School. We tracked them till 2003. Ten of them were total failures and four were questionable in terms of performance. So, five out of 19 had clean records. So, yes, I am challenging what B-schools do. We have created a programme that does the things that I am talking about (See 'The Mintzberg Model').
  
  
• Is innovation becoming a problem at B-schools?
  
  Absolutely. And the more famous the school, the more conservative it is. In England, you have tremendous innovation. Far, far more than in the US. But it is not coming out of the main schools -- Oxford and London Business School. For innovation, look at the programme on critical management at University of Lancaster. Or the one on purchasing at Bath University. Very innovative teaching.
  
  
• Most schools are geared to produce only functional specialists. How can this be corrected?
  
  It's fine. Let them produce only functional specialists. As long as they don't give them the impression that they have been trained to do general management. I wouldn't quite say functional specialists. I would say that the schools are geared to train people in the business functions. So, they can go into specialised jobs. I am not sure how specialist they are -- add a few courses in finance, a few in market research... But they are certainly ready to go into those kinds of functions. They are not ready to study management, to practise management.
  
  To correct themselves, schools could develop programmes that focus on management and the practice of management without mixing that with the business function.
  

• Given that B-schools have had the advantage of a multi-disciplinary faculty, why did they go down this path in the first place?
  
  You are right. One of their (B-schools') great strengths is attracting faculty from different underlying disciplines like economics, mathematics or psychology, sociology or whatever. If you look at the history, US B-schools were very weak until the 1950s. They were accused of being trade schools and doing trivial things. Then came Carnegie Mellon or what was called Carnegie Institute of Technology, where Herbert Simon, (G.L.) Bach and (William W.) Cooper and people like that had a different idea (Simon, Bach and Cooper were the founding faculty of this school, now called Tepper School of Business). Their idea was focused on the underlying disciplines like mathematics, psychology and economics specifically. But gradually the functional specialisations became more and more prominent as people focused on marketing, finance and accounting issues -- not on management and organisational issues. Even strategy has become a specialty called strategic management -- as if strategic management is separate from management. And organisation behaviour has become a specialty called human resource management. So even people have become a function in B- school.
  
  
• In your book, Managers Not MBAs, you say that schools have a very hands-off approach to teaching management…
  
  The hands-off view is that you can't do anything in a classroom. That's why Harvard, in its cases in strategy, focuses on formulation. But they have trouble with implementation. Because anybody can formulate like mad, but no one can implement anything in a classroom. Whereas if you have managers who are talking about their own problems of implementation and formulation, and focusing on their own experience as managers, that becomes very powerful.
  
  
• What is the role of industry in influencing curriculum and encouraging research?
  
  They have a role in supporting programmes that train their managers and really connect. The most important place for industry connect is where it sends its managers, but it tries to manage that process by which they bring that learning back into those companies. We call it impact. How we manage that process by which they spread their learning into those companies. That has to be done in partnership with the schools giving the programmes and the companies sending the participants.
  
  If the industry opens itself up to study and to people who want to study and do research, that is important. In research, the faculty takes the lead, in terms of what subject and so on. But I hope they study things that are tied to practice. That doesn't mean that they become consultants or make recommendations. We have no business giving 'prescriptions'. Our job is to bring better and more insightful 'descriptions', so people in practice can understand what they are dealing with. But research should be connected to real concerns and real issues, and not the abstractions we find in the library. Companies must encourage that kind of research and use it where it is conceived insightfully and written accessibly.
  
  
• How do you rate the kind of research that's happening in B- schools?
  
  I maintain that most of research is useless. If you go into pharmaceutical research or any corporate research, you'll probably find that 80 per cent of it is useless too. The trouble is that you don't know what's going to be useful.
  
  That's because some people don't connect very well, others don't think well. Also, we ourselves tend to judge much of our own research. We referee our own articles in our own journals and we decide we should get money for research ourselves. We are a bit like a closed shop.
  
  
  
• Moving on to another area -- organisational culture. Isn't it a paradox that most organisations start off as entrepreneurial set-ups where the strategy crafting process is adaptive, as you described in the book, Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning? But as these evolve, they accumulate bureaucratic flab. How can that be prevented?
  
  You prevent it from happening by building a culture that keeps the organisation fit, energised and keeps people in communication with each other. You keep it going by having a chief executive who doesn't sit far away, and doesn't pretend to know what's going on by simply reading the balance-sheet and reports. You get people on the ground including the chief executive. We get rid of the idea of top management. On top of what? Nobody should be on top of anything. You need a management that's active, energised, involved. You need distributed management or distributed leadership, so people can grab initiative where they see opportunity.
  
  
• A lot of organisations are searching for the perfect organisational structure, and many CEOs are also beginning to realise that the answer perhaps lies beyond structure. So are structures really all that important as they are made out to be?
  
  Structure is the easiest way to change an organisation. You shift a few people around, and you call it a change. I draw an organisation chart on a board -- just a bunch of boxes. I say this is an organisation. Then I draw exactly the same thing below it. And I say this is re-organisation. You change a few names, you change a few titles. You move people around and you think you've re-organised. But a lot of change in structure happens beyond organisation. Who reports to whom is also important. But we give it much too much importance. For example, I think architectural structure is probably more important than organisational structure. By that I mean who sits next to whom.

Carly Fiorina's heroics In his most recent book, Managers Not MBAs, Henry Mintzberg says that Carly Fiorina's stewardship at Hewlett-Packard is a great example of heroic management. He systematically tracked her tenure at HP starting 2001. When she joined, it was said that her mandate was to 'reinvent' HP from the ground up in three phases of a year each. So much so that it seemed like she was the only person responsible for the turnaround. That's a style that Mintzberg believes is outmoded. So how do you recognise a heroic manager? Mintzberg says they tend to: Ignore the existing business because anything established takes time to fix. Be dramatic, striking deals and merging like mad. Focus on the present, and do the dramatic deal now! Favour outsiders over insiders; rely on consultants as they appreciate heroic leaders. Use numbers to assess insiders. That way you do not have to manage performance so much as deem it. Promote the changing of everything all the time. Re-organise constantly. Be a risk taker. Get the stock price up. Cash in and run -- heroes are in great demand. Sounds familiar?

• Usually managing a strategy and crafting it is given a lot of time and energy. Somehow, execution never gets the kind of share of mind that it should…
  
  What's the use of formulating a strategy that can't get implemented? You know if a strategy fails, people blame implementation mostly because it's the formulators who are doing the blaming. But if something fails in implementation, then it means the formulation was not well worked out because the formulators did not take into account the people who were implementing it. So all failures of implementation are failures of formulation.
  
  But most of them are, in fact, failures of something else. They are failures of the separation between formulation and implementation. Somebody thinks, and everybody runs around implementing it. Whereas often the implementers are the people who know what's going on, and they can contribute to the formulation.
  
  
  
• And you are saying that's often never sought…
  
  A lot of organisations block out the ideas of everybody else -- the people who are on the ground. We are so captured with this heroic view of management, of this great manager who walks in and solves every problem. MBA programmes tend to contribute very strongly to that impression among people as well.
  
  
• In this whole game of managing ideas across the organisation, how critical is cultural diversity?
  
  The idea of cultural diversity is a myth. Is IBM not an American company? Is Matsushita not a Japanese company? There are few companies that have a mix of management culturally. Some of my colleagues undertook a study. They defined a truly global company as having 20 per cent of its sales in three major markets - North America, Europe and Asia. They found rather few companies that met that criterion.
  
  
• We have developed various stereotypical images of leaders. Do you think it is time to change the mould?
  
  Absolutely, we need to get rid of heroic leadership. We need to get much more engaging leadership. And I think Mahatma Gandhi is a wonderful example of someone who was engaged, on the ground… He led by example.
  Such leaders are committed to an organisation, committed to a job. They are not sitting on the edge of their chair waiting to leap to some better situation. That's one of the troubles with MBA programmes. They train people who tend to be mercenary. They just want to push themselves ahead, and get better jobs. They don't care about their organisations or their situations very deeply. Can you imagine the expression 'Mahatma Gandhi on the fast track'?(Laughs)
  
  
• If ideas are the heart of competitive advantage, how should organisations be designed so that ideas can flow seamlessly? What sort of an organisational architecture do we need to think about?
  
  Well, it's the concept of the network: an organisation as a network of interacting people, rather than a hierarchy. Think of it as webs and networks in which people communicate. I put a hierarchy, and ask where do you find management. Everyone says on top. I draw a hub, a circle, and I ask where do you put management; people say in the middle.
  Then, I draw a network of interacting individuals and ask where do you put management now. If they say on top, I say a manager on top of the network is out of the network. A manager in the centre of a network, centralises it and it ceases to be a network. When people realise this, they say a manager has to be everywhere in the network. I say, yeah, he also has to be everyone. You need distributed responsibility. This doesn't mean you don't have people who have final authority, but you have to diffuse the power and the authority to people who have knowledge on the ground.
  
  
• In this whole game of managing ideas across the organisation, how critical is cultural diversity?
  
  The idea of cultural diversity is a myth. Is IBM not an American company? Is Matsushita not a Japanese company? Is Lufthansa not a German company? There are very few companies that have a real mix of management culturally. Some of my colleagues undertook a study. They defined a truly global company as having 20 per cent of its sales in three major markets -- North America, Europe and Asia. They found rather few companies that met that criterion.
  
  
• But lots of B- schools do make a big deal about diversity…
  
  Yeah right. They are teaching American management style, and calling it global. An American school that boasts about diversity boasts that 20-30 per cent of its students come from abroad -- maybe 30-35 percent at the most. Any class that has 60-70 per cent Americans, who don't tend to be shy in a classroom, is hardly diverse. If you go to INSEAD (in France), you see real diversity because probably no more than 20 per cent are from any one country. You get international experience there.