Henry Mintzberg’s Definition of Success: Change the World

Photo by Owen Egan

Haegwan Kim: What is your definition of success?

Henry Mintzberg: To change the world.

HK: How do you want to change the world?

HM: I want management to come to its senses. I want a balance between social issues and economic issues. The economic issues dominate and are destroying us and we need much better balance between the social and economic, and we need management that is much more sensible, common sense, and not all this narcissistic leadership nonsense.

HK: Talking about the economic and social balance, can you tell me how we can balance well?

HM: We need to recognize that there are three sectors in society, not just two, and we need to recognize that capitalism isn’t good because communism was bad; that an excess of government is no worse than an excess of markets; that we need to balance governments and markets. And the way we do that is to realize that there’s a third sector in society, which is the social sector, which consists of non-business, non-government organizations, like NGOs and cooperatives and so on. We need to understand what’s the role of each of those sectors.

HK: I realize like your success is not for you, I mean, for yourself, but for our society and for the world. Is there any reason to focus on outside of yourself rather than inside to seek your success?

HM: Yes, because that’s the problem with the world. Too many prominent people are focused on themselves as if nothing else matters. So long as BP is pumping oil that’s the only thing that matters for BP, and so on and so forth, and there’s just too much attention to private matters. We’re competitive souls, as the economists tell us, but we are cooperative souls too so we need to balance cooperation with competition; we need to balance the social with the economic; we need to balance communities with individuality and we’re losing it.

HK: As you’re really familiar with the field of business and management, I want to ask you about what is successful management. But before that, could you tell me why management is so important for business?

HM: Management is important for every organization, because when you get a few people together, you don’t need management. Often we have dinner up in a country house and lots of people are here sometimes and when everybody does something– one person sets the table, one person cooks the potatoes, and one person makes the meat, you don’t need management. But when you get lots of people trying to do things like manufacture automobiles, or fight a war, or treat people in a hospital, you need some central guidance.

HK: Then can you tell me what kind of management is successful management?

HM: Engaging management: engaged, and engaging management. Management that is personally engaged, that knows what’s going on, is intimately involved with what’s going on, and is able to engage other people in what’s going on, not people who think that they themselves are the be all and end all of the organization. That’s why I have so much trouble with leadership, because it’s very self-centered, very individually focused, and too often narcissistic.

HK: I realize that your emphasis is on profits of business, rather than knowledge of business.

HM: No, no, no. The knowledge of business in general and the knowledge of the industry and company in particular.

HK: For example, an MBA.

HM: MBA is the wrong kind of knowledge. Not the wrong kind of knowledge; but it’s knowledge about business functions, which is fine. If you’re going to manage in a business, you’ve got to know marketing and finance and accounting, but it de-emphasizes knowledge of the industry and knowledge of the company and knowledge of the people. Read a 20-page case and you think you know the company and the industry, which is a joke. George Bush did a case study in Iraq; he didn’t know anything. The idea is that people in business schools are trained in general. You can’t manage in general; you have to have a very deep understanding of what you’re managing.

HK: That’s impressive. I just want to ask you about leadership. Do you think in today’s society we all can be a good leader?

HM: No, probably not; not everybody is born to be a leader. But not everybody who thinks he or she is a leader is a leader either. Leadership is granted by followers. You’re a leader because people choose to believe in you, not because you want to be a leader. When people present themselves in a program and say, I’m a leader I want to be a leader; I think they’re the wrong people.

HK: So leadership totally relies on others, rather than what you think about yourself?

HM: Yes, but not totally – You have to have a certain confidence.

HK: That’s quite an interesting point. As we are living with globalization, I was wondering whether there’s sort of globalization of management?

HM: There is a globalization of management, but I don’t think it’s very healthy, because it’s part of the same problem — that everybody is supposed to be the same. We don’t try and train our managers in our programs towards globalization, cookie-cutter globalization: we train them for worldliness. We want them to understand other worlds so they can understand their own world better.

HK: Final question. What is your advice to be successful in life?

HM: Be true to yourself, and never set out to be the best; it’s too low a standard: set out to be good.