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

In the IMPM, all students must be practicing managers and all must be sponsored by their companies, which include Alcan Aluminum Ltd., AstraZeneca PLC, Deutche Lufthansa, the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Matsushita Communication Industrial Co. Ltd., Motorola, and the Royal Bank of Canada. Students stay in their jobs, so that classroom activity can be connected to ongoing work experiences. The IMPM also encourages people who already work in groups, whether those groups are in-person or virtual, to attend the program together. This is both a support network and a better way of ensuring that new ideas will become reality when the participants return to the work world.

Another critical distinction is the concept of reflection -- quite a switch from traditional executive education, which uses a lot of "action" learning or case studies. "The last thing managers need from us is boot camp -- intense, high-pressure classroom activity," says Mintzberg. "They live boot camp every day! What they need is to step back from the pressures and to reflect on their experiences." Because Mintzberg rejects the notion of silos, most of the business functions are covered either in the analytic module or in "close learning" (otherwise known as "distance learning") between modules. This doesn't mean that you have to hug a tree or dance at a powwow at every session of the IMPM -- though you will sometimes find yourself in drama workshops or yoga classes. What it does mean is that you must learn to ask the right questions, to reflect, and to avoid the traditional manager's trap of reacting to one crisis after another. "Management is, above all, a practice, where art, science, and craft meet," says Mintzberg.

It is that type of interaction that seems to have the most impact. When McCroary was in Japan for the collaborative module, she was walking with another student, an engineer from Matsushita, amid cherry blossoms falling from trees onto a driveway. "He explained to me that a lot of Japanese haiku is written about exactly this event, and I admitted that I had been thinking 'What a messy tree.' The combined effect was so powerful that when I got home, I made it a point to select people who were different from me in a project."

A recent innovation at the IMPM is the 50-50 rule. Unlike the traditional lecture or case format, where a professor is the only expert in the room, IMPM sessions allow students to spend half of the time in conversation with other students. The discussions often veer off on tangents -- but that's the point, says Mintzberg: The executives must decide for themselves what's relevant. "Our program doesn't take more work," he says. "It almost takes less work. But you have to have a lot of depth and understanding and then react to the class." The Royal Bank of Canada's McAuley sat in on a session in Bangalore the day after the IMPM participants had visited several Indian companies. The next morning, like every morning, began with a session called "reflections." "That was the most fascinating conversation in an academic setting that I had ever seen," McAuley says. "We zoomed around the room discussing everything from political to economic issues, and then got into ethics and business."

The IMPM's managerial exchange takes the 50-50 rule to its logical extreme. Between two modules, participants spend a week at a partner's office and then present a paper detailing their observations. That was the highlight of the program for Jeff Guthrie, 42, a 24-year veteran of the Royal Bank of Canada. He accompanied his partner, Helga, an Icelandic native and a team leader for West Africa for the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, to a refugee camp in Sierra Leone -- her "office." Apart from the shock that he felt from seeing firsthand the extent of the human suffering there, Guthrie learned a real management lesson. "It was typical, if we had a problem, for our solution to be 'give me, give me, give me the resources that I need to solve this,' " he says. "What the Red Cross taught me was that people said, 'How can I solve the problem with what I have?' "

"Move Society -- Have Some Impact"

The IMPM's spirit of informality and on-the-fly innovation come straight out of Mintzberg's worldview. He seems to find inspiration in any kind of conversation or event, such as the Montreal jubilation gospel choir that he saw last Christmas. "It was the best thing I'd ever seen on a stage in my entire life," he says. "Not that it was the most polished performance; it was just unbelievable energy. I watched that and said the role of a manager is to bring out the energy that's inherent in people."

Mintzberg takes that same open-mindedness to his research on strategy. "I often think that if we got rid of the word 'strategy,' we'd be better off. Not because strategy is bad, but because we formalize it. Strategic planning is an oxymoron. The idea that it is immaculately conceived, like Moses walking down from the mountain, is silly."