Henry Mintzberg

How I met Henry

I first encountered Henry Mintzberg’s ideas in 2003. I was running an engineering team at Nuance Communications — we made speech recognition software — and I wanted to get better at managing people. I looked into Henry’s International Masters Program for Managers (IMPM) at McGill, but I couldn’t afford it. So I did the next best thing: I read his book.

“Managers, Not MBAs” changed how I thought about everything. Henry’s argument was simple and devastating: you don’t learn to manage in a classroom. You learn to manage by managing — and then reflecting on that experience with other people who manage.

I remember thinking: if that’s true, why am I sending my people to training programs at all?

The experiment

So I tried something. Instead of sending my managers to external programs, I brought Henry’s ideas directly into our office. I gathered a small group — five or six of us — and we met regularly to discuss ideas from his work. Not a lecture. Not a workshop. Just a conversation among peers, guided by good ideas.

It worked. People started thinking differently about their roles. They started being more honest with each other about what was hard. And I realized that this format — small groups, expert ideas, peer discussion — was something any organization could use.

I reached out to Henry. He liked the idea. And in 2007, CoachingOurselves was born.

Henry Mintzberg on management, communityship, and what managers actually do

What Henry figured out

Henry has spent sixty years studying managers — actually watching them work, not theorizing from an office. He started by following five CEOs around, then twenty-nine more managers across all kinds of organizations. What he found surprised everyone.

Managers don’t plan, organize, coordinate, and control the way textbooks say they should. They are interrupted constantly. They make decisions on the fly. They deal with ambiguity every single day. Management, Henry concluded, is a practice — like medicine or engineering. You get better at it through experience and reflection, not through studying frameworks in a classroom.

He also figured out that management sits at the intersection of three things: art (the vision and creative insight), craft (the experience and hands-on learning), and science (the analysis and systematic thinking). Too much of any one, and things go wrong. Too much science, and you get analysis paralysis. Too much art, and you get narcissism. Too much craft, and you get “we’ve always done it this way.”

The ideas that matter now

If you work in L&D, you’ve probably heard Henry’s name in the context of strategy or organizational design. But the ideas of his that matter most right now are about something much more fundamental.

Communityship. Henry has been saying for years that we’ve gotten obsessed with “leadership” — finding the heroic individual at the top who will save the organization. But that’s not how healthy organizations actually work. They work because people feel connected to each other. Because they function as a community, not a machine.

“I’m a human being, not a human resource. The most effective organizations are communities of engaged human beings, not collections of detached human resources.”

In a world where hybrid work has scattered teams across cities and time zones, where managers are burned out and employees feel isolated — communityship isn’t just a nice idea. It’s urgent.

Henry on a frozen lake, explaining why society needs balance

Managing, not just leading. Henry pushes back hard on the idea that “leadership” is somehow superior to “management.” Leadership without management is disconnected. It creates people at the top who have big visions but no understanding of what actually happens on Tuesday morning. Good managers lead. Good leaders manage. The two are inseparable.

The Five Mindsets. With Jonathan Gosling, Henry developed a framework for what managers actually need: the reflective mindset (managing self), the analytical mindset (managing organizations), the worldly mindset (managing context), the collaborative mindset (managing relationships), and the action mindset (managing change). Not a model to memorize — a set of lenses to think through.

How these ideas live inside CoachingOurselves

Henry’s own website — mintzberg.org — is where he writes about politics, society, and management theory. He publishes blog posts, academic articles, and provocative ideas. If you want his philosophy, go there.

What CoachingOurselves does is different. We take his ideas — and those of 75 other expert authors — and turn them into structured peer conversations that managers can have in their own workplace. Ninety minutes. Four to six people. A guidebook that gives you something worth thinking about, and a conversation that helps you figure out what it means for your specific situation.

Henry has authored more than fifteen of these guidebooks himself. Topics like Simply Managing: From Reflection to Action, Developing Our Organization as a Community, Management Styles: Art, Craft, Science, and Understanding Organizations. Each one is designed to start a conversation, not deliver a lecture.

That’s the bridge between theory and practice that Henry always wanted to build. And honestly, it’s the reason I reached out to him in the first place.

Going deeper

If you want to explore Henry’s thinking:

• His blog and latest writing: mintzberg.org
• The book that started CoachingOurselves: Managers, Not MBAs
• His most recent book: Understanding Organizations… Finally!
• His most influential article: “The Five Minds of a Manager” (HBR, with Jonathan Gosling)
• Our Five Mindsets program, built on his framework
• A longer conversation: Henry Mintzberg on Management (41 minutes, YouTube)