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

Lots of professors are good at raising provocative questions. What distinguishes Mintzberg is that he is devising answers. Along with a colleague, Jonathan Gosling of Lancaster University Management School, in the United Kingdom, Mintzberg has created an educational experience that is in many ways the anti-MBA. The program, an International Masters in Practicing Management (IMPM) , is now in its fifth cycle. Nearly 180 participants have gone through the program, and, according to those participants and their sponsoring executives, it has had an indelible impact on their personal and professional lives. "It changes people more than any other program I've seen -- ever," says Frank McAuley, 44, a Kellogg MBA and vice president for leadership effectiveness at the Royal Bank of Canada, which has sent 16 people through the program. "It brings them to a different place."

Learning to Learn

Henry Mintzberg's entire career has focused on understanding how managers make decisions and how they develop strategy. After studying mechanical engineering at McGill, he went to work in operations research at Canadian National Railways. Then he went to MIT to study management and decided to switch tracks, so to speak, because he was more interested in how people worked than in how things operated.

In his first book, The Nature of Managerial Work (Harper and Row, 1973) , Mintzberg explored his topic by watching what managers actually did in their offices, rather than, as most academics do, by inventing theories and then trying to back them up. What he found demolished the assumption that managers were organized and confident planners. His research demonstrated that real bosses spent more time responding quickly to crises than they spent doing anything else -- a lesson that many new-economy chieftains think they're discovering only today. Although the book was rejected by 15 publishers before it reached bookstore shelves, it became a huge success -- and Mintzberg's career as an influential author was on its way.

Although Mintzberg had been railing against management education for years, what had been theory became practice in 1993, as he was considering a new MBA program at McGill. He heard about a more practical model that Gosling had been using at Lancaster with British Airways executives. He first tried, and failed, to create a joint program along the Lancaster lines with INSEAD. Then he approached Gosling himself. Working together, the two decided to create something completely different: a program that focused on teaching real executives how to deal with real problems, the kind that don't fit neatly into case studies. The duo toyed with calling the program the "Alternative MBA," and then with calling it the "Real MBA."

"That wouldn't distinguish it," says Gosling, "so we had the notion of 'Real-Alternative MBA,' which would have the acronym RAMBA, a sort of feminine Rambo. We liked that, but there was no way that the management school at Lancaster was going to allow us to launch something called 'RAMBA' while it was still trying to sell the MBA." Once it was dubbed the 'IMPM,' Mintzberg and Gosling decided to make the program more global by adding INSEAD, the Indian Institute of Management and Japanese faculty from several schools, including Hitotsubashi University. The first cycle began in spring 1996.

So what makes the IMPM different -- and more worthwhile -- for managers? Start with this: There is no home campus for the program, which consists of two-week modules spread over 16 months and five countries: Canada, France, India, Japan, and the UK. After each module, when students have returned to work, they must write a reflection paper describing how what they learned relates to their job. They meet regularly with a tutor in their area and work on "ventures," which are program-long projects to create real change in their own work environment. There are five modules: Managing Self, the reflective mind-set; Managing Relationships, the collaborative mind-set; Managing Organizations, the analytic mind-set; Managing Context, the worldly mind-set; and Managing Change, the action mind-set. Each module is presented by one of the five partner universities. Students travel to each campus for one module and spend the time immersed in the home culture of the country, making company visits (called "field studies") and learning from colleagues, some of whom are now in their home country. "It has been absolutely a life-changing experience," says Jane K. McCroary, 45, project manager for the online travel portal at Deutche Lufthansa AG and a member of the first graduating class. "Somehow IMPM learning was implicit in the stomach, in the gut. You learned not explicit things but things that improved judgment and performance."