'You Can't Create a Leader in a Classroom.'

Henry Mintzberg, 61
Professor of management
McGill University
Montreal, Canada

Attending the annual meeting of the Academy of Management with Henry Mintzberg is the business-world equivalent of attending the MTV Video Music Awards with Mick Jagger. The Academy is the world's largest association devoted to the study of management, and its annual meeting is a marketplace for aspiring professors looking to land their first job. At the presidential luncheon, where Mintzberg is to receive an award, he can scarcely manage a forkful of pasta with cream sauce without being tapped on the shoulder again and again by starry-eyed fans. "I just had to meet you," gushes one such follower. "I can't wait to tell my colleagues!" When Mintzberg bounds to the stage to claim his award, applause courses through the cavernous ballroom of the Toronto Sheraton Centre. As the luncheon ends, he is mobbed by well-wishers and colleagues. Posing awkwardly for a photograph with a professor from the Netherlands, Mintzberg looks both gratified yet a bit irritated by the fuss.

His fans are enthusiastic for a reason. With 10 books and more than 100 published articles to his credit -- and with a faculty position at McGill University, in Montreal, as well as at INSEAD, the high-profile business school outside Paris -- Mintzberg, 61, is a dominant figure in the field of management and strategy. For some 30 years, he's been contributing pathbreaking ideas and trailblazing analyses, all rooted in the real work of companies and their executives, to a discipline that often feels stuck in the abstract and the theoretical. And although many of his ideas were considered radical (some would say downright heretical) when he introduced them, Mintzberg is "hot" again: More and more companies are realizing that there's an enormous difference between a CEO with keen financial instincts and a great leader. Mintzberg has shown that management itself is as much a Jackson Pollock painting as it is a quantifiable science. "There's a reason I'm getting this award in 2000 instead of in 1990," Mintzberg says, flashing an ironic smile.

It would be easy for Mintzberg to bask in the overdue glory, to become yet another past-his-prime academic celebrity who recycles old ideas into new books and gets paid ridiculous sums of money to regale corporate bigwigs at off-sites. But that's never been Mintzberg's style. Indeed, these days, Mintzberg is in hot pursuit of a personal goal that he wrote down on a scrap of paper almost two years ago and then locked away in a vault at a bank in Montreal. He plans to open the vault someday to see if he will have delivered on the goal. One of the things that he wrote: "Change management education."

It sounds like a strange ambition, given that management education in general, and the MBA in particular, has never been more popular. Top business schools are overflowing with applications; companies famous for their mutual love affair with MBAs (Goldman Sachs and McKinsey & Co. immediately come to mind) now scramble to compete for the affections of the top graduates from the best schools. If it ain't broke, one can't help but wonder, why fix it?

Pose that question to Mintzberg, and you'll get an earful as he explains, calmly but firmly, that management education is terribly broke. "The MBA is a fabulous design for learning about business," he says. "But if you're trying to train managers, it's dead wrong. The MBA trains the wrong people in the wrong ways for the wrong reasons."

Mintzberg concedes that the U.S. style of management education is in demand around the world -- but mainly, he says, for the big bucks that such a degree confers upon its holder. "Right now, we are creating a kind of neo-aristocracy," he complains, "a 'business class' that believes it has the right to lead because it spent a couple of years in a classroom." But if you really want to learn how to be a manager, he says, you need to be in an environment with, well, other managers. "This is supposed to be about leadership," he says. "You can't create a leader in a classroom."

Mintzberg has other questions. How can aspiring managers expect to learn from business-school case studies -- which are obsolete on the day they are printed and which give the professor too much control over classroom discussion? What does it mean to learn to think globally? It's not enough, Mintzberg insists, to teach American-style ideas to a class with a smattering of students from outside the United States. To become a global-minded manager, you have to learn how people from other countries and other cultures think and act in various situations. And how many companies really value the idea of management education itself -- as opposed to the credential? "I ask a lot of managerial groups, 'What happened on the day you became a manager?' " says Mintzberg. "And the answer, almost inevitably, is 'Nothing.' It's like sex. You're supposed to figure it out."