LEADERS FOR HUMANITY: GOOD ECONOMY

THE URGENT CASE FOR REBALANCING SOCIETY

Henry is an outspoken critic of today’s "Corporate Society", advocating instead a Rebalanced Society which — in his own words — is made up of “a public sector of political forces rooted in respected governments, a private sector of economic forces based on responsible businesses, and a plural sector of social forces manifested in robust communities”.

HENRY MINTZBERG

Keywords: a) Theory: Pragmatism, Business Ethics, Realism, Constructionism b) Application: Organisational design, Strategy, Professional education

Unique concepts: Communityship, Rebalanced Society, Corporate Social Irresponsibility

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DESIGNING THE INTERVIEW EXPLORING THE TERRITORY
EMBARKING ON THE DIALOGUE GETTING INSPIRED
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Design the Interview

Developing the topic map and framing the big questions

About OUR INTERVIEW WITH Henry Mintzberg

(1) We wanted to interview Henry Mintzberg because he has been studying "organisations behaving badly" for a long time. He has examined this topic from a variety of angles, including organizational configurations, strategizing, managerial work, business ethics, and political economy. With his critical and transdisciplinary approach and his intimate knowledge of some of the drivers of "bad business behaviors," he has developed a reform plan on how to rebalance society to enable organizations to become good again. Through this, he has contributed to an embedded view of business in society.

(2) In our interview, we discussed the issue of corporate irresponsibility and the various ways in which companies can fail us. We examined the hegemonic US management approaches that have caused misery in the business world, and we talked about what a better society would look like in order for good companies to thrive while green- and whitewashing companies would be identified and pressured. Henry introduced us to his Declaration of Interdependence, which promotes the concept of communityship and provides a strong foundation for a third, plural sector to emerge. This sector would consist of associations such as cooperatives, NGOs, foundations, and clubs that would help rebalance the collective power between businesses and governments.

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Exploring the Critical concepts for this session

Communityship

Rebuilding companies as communities.

Corporate Social Irresponsibility

Henry Mintzberg on CSR as irresponsible management.

Rebalanced Society

We recommend strongly to download his book “Rebalancing Society” which can be found on this page in addition to further comments, insightful articles, and suggestions for action

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discovering the territory

Henry Mintzberg


biography
Henry Mintzberg is Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University and a famously outspoken reformer in numerous areas of management.
MAIN INTERESTS
He questions the dichotomy of management and leadership (and adds “communityship” to the equation), critiques that MBAs are not better managers (and created his own practice-oriented executive programme) and demonstrates that strategy is much less about top-down planning than we were taught at University. And — most pertinent to our inquiry — he is an outspoken critique of today’s Corporate Society, advocating instead a Rebalanced Society which is — in his own words — made up of “a public sector of political forces rooted in respected governments, a private sector of economic forces based on responsible businesses, and a plural sector of social forces manifested in robust communities”.

Personal Links & Relevant Essays

Henry's Website

Henry's own excellent homepage where you can find all his blogs, books (also those which are freely available) and many articles

https://ourinterdependence.org

Our absolute favourite: make sure you sign the "Declaration of Interdependence"!

https://coachingourselves.com

If you are interested in coaching and development with Henry and with Phil please visit this page for further details on the global  "Coaching Ourselves" initiatives

Google Scholar

Finally, you can get an overview and links to his scientific work here

Corporate Control

Who should control the corporation (hint: the government will not be able to do this job alone)

Beaver sculptures

And of course we must give a call out for Henry's unique beaver sculpture collection!

Further essays and materials from other authors
Collective Impact

Henry Mintzberg refers to this excellent article of John Kania and Mark Kramer on how to bring movements together for collective impact.

Selected published works

TOP 100 BEST LEADERSHIP BOOKS
Interested in Leadership? Here is our Top 100 selection of the most important books for professional leaders of all times.
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embarking on the socratic dialogue

Live video recording and podcasts

Our exclusive "best bits" selection

pills of wisdom from the interview

Here you can find the most memorableinsights from our interview. Simply select from the drop down menu on the right.

Introduction
On the unbalancing
  • The imbalance in society has crept up on us. Essentially, there are three sectors in society not two — public, private and what I call plural. Well, we’ll come back to that, I guess. But plural means community. Public means government, private means markets, and so on. Healthy societies balance those. The communist regimes in Eastern Europe didn’t collapse. The communist countries were out of balance on the side of government. And because we believe that capitalism trounced communism, we’ve been going out of balance ever since, on the side of private markets and independence.
  • It didn’t start in 1989, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, but it’s certainly accelerated since 1989. But it’s been with us for a long time. And I always have this point of view that business is just too powerful.
On “adjectival Capitalism”
  • I also collect adjectives of capitalism. I’ve gotten to over 10, I think I’ve just found the 11th different phrase for fixing capitalism: caring capitalism, progressive capitalism, it just goes on and on. My favorite is “democratic capitalism”. Notice that capitalism is the noun, and democracy is the adjective, the order is quite clear. We need to fix capitalism. But we’re never going to fix capitalism if we don’t fix society, capitalism is run rampant in society. And nowhere is this better exhibited than in phrases like democratic capitalism. People don’t even think about what they’re saying, which is that capitalism is more important than democracy.
On the “corporate person“2”

  • I also collect adjectives of capitalism. I’ve gotten to over 10, I think I’ve just found the 11th different phrase for fixing capitalism: caring capitalism, progressive capitalism, it just goes on and on. My favorite is “democratic capitalism”. Notice that capitalism is the noun, and democracy is the adjective, the order is quite clear. We need to fix capitalism. But we’re never going to fix capitalism if we don’t fix society, capitalism is run rampant in society. And nowhere is this better exhibited than in phrases like democratic capitalism. People don’t even think about what they’re saying, which is that capitalism is more important than democracy.

What is Good?
The good society
  • This gets back to the good society, and you know, a good society cares, good people care. Good parents care, fathers of a good country care. And, and we’re driving caring out in a way […] We devote much more effort to cure than to cause. […] You know, they came up with a vaccine for the pandemic, fantastic, but who’s looking at the cause of the pandemic. I don’t mean the origin with some bats in a Chinese market. But for what’s causing the pandemic, I go back to pollution, because I think it’s a factor and who’s looking at that? So, we, again, we lose sight of what matters. Causes matters more than cure […] causes are more important because if you can deal with a cause you don’t need a cure, you don’t need to cure disease, if you can get to the cause.
  • The root cause is individualism that runs rampant in society. it’s mind blowing, the kind of things we tolerate.
On the stock market
  • Okay. I mean, I’m not one for simplistic solutions, but I think there is one, the stock market is utterly dysfunctional.
  • And we’re not so much talking about entrepreneurial companies, at least until they go public. Entrepreneurial companies tend to be more responsible. Some of them view their employees as almost family. They’re deeply devoted to their products. They’re personally humiliated if something goes wrong, and so on, and so forth. It’s the big corporations, the publicly traded corporations. And you’re constantly being driven to up shareholder value, not for 10 years, or 20 years, but for the next quarterly report, which is crazy that massive corporations have to report on a quarterly basis.
Tax Evasion
  • You know, it’s a race to the bottom on corporate taxation. It’s a race to the bottom. Every country has to keep dropping its corporate taxes, because every other country is dropping its corporate taxes, so corporations don’t pay their share anymore. And if Canada decided to up it, Canada was one of the countries that went quite low around 15%, if they decided to go back to 30%, the corporations would all claim to leave. […]. And so, globalization […] has no countervailing power, nobody can stand up. Even the big countries have trouble standing up to international globalization.

Good Organisations
On Corporate Irresponsibility
  • Well, societies are made up of organizations. You cannot separate the two. In fact, one of the main problems with corporate social responsibility is this idea that organizations are isolated. […] Well, if they’re behaving irresponsibly, nobody should tolerate them. They exist under national charters. They’re given the permission to exist, and it used to be that governments could take away that permission. In certain cases, but that’s long gone. Nobody can close down organization because they act irresponsibly. But we certainly need stronger public activities to do that.
On Good Health Care
  • The job of a hospital and medicine in general, is to get me into their categories. You know, so I got a problem in my lower right abdomen. It is diagnosed as appendicitis. We take out the appendix, everybody’s happy. That’s the great strength of medicine. […] But it’s also the debilitating weakness of medicine for three reasons. First, if you don’t fit the categories, for instance you have an irritable bowel syndrome, which they don’t know anything about, from what I understand, you are in trouble. […] Second, if you cross illnesses, like geriatric patients, who will present you with various problems. They are also not very good at solving this, as this requires cooperation, and they are not good at cooperating with each other. So, if it needs different medical specialties, to deal with it, that’s not easy. The third one is more interesting [beneath the categories]. So, the first is outside the categories, the second across the categories. But there’s beneath the categories that the treatment you need is better than what the protocol is called for. And there’s a wonderful article discussed in the book called the bell curve in which somebody was phenomenal in his own field. Because he went deeper. He treated the person, and not just the patient, he went beyond the symptoms, he went into the person’s life, to find out, why she wasn’t doing the exercises, what could help her do the exercises, and so on. And that’s why he was so successful.
On excessive CEO pay

  • An abomination. An absolute abomination. […] effective companies are communities of people, they work together, they cooperate, they function together. The idea that a CEO should accept to be paid 300 times as much as the workers in the same company makes that person not a leader. If you want a definition of someone who’s not a leader, it’s somebody, who by his pay, is prepared to send the message that I’m 300 times more important than any of my workers. That’s an abomination.
There is no “we” in classical economics
  • When Keynes said “in the long run, we’re all dead”, at which everybody laughed, he didn’t mean, WE, as a society, he never would have supported that, he meant each of us, he didn’t mean all of us. And that’s typical of economics, with its overemphasis on the individual and with its complete ignoring of the community for the most part. […] We need individualism, we need collectivism, we need communalism. And we need to find some kind of balance across those things.

On Corporate Governance

  • Yeah, well, for starters, I’m not a big fan of boards. It’s a status position. They don’t necessarily understand the company in much depth, or the NGO for that matter, although they’ll interfere in an NGO a lot quicker than they’ll interfere in the company. 

How can we become good, individually and collectively?
On leadership
  • I think leadership is important. But the trouble with the word leadership is it implies an individual. When you say leader, you don’t mean a group, you don’t mean a community. You don’t mean several people, you mean someone. And it’s hyper individualistic. And what we need is communityship. More than leadership. Also, leadership to me is an intrinsic part of management. They’re not separate. In order to manage you have to lead, in order to lead you have to manage. Managers who don’t lead are boring, and leaders that don’t manage don’t know what’s going on. So, those two things are tied together.
  • Communityship means that people are members, people are respected, the organization respects them, and so they respect the organization. It’s collaborative.
Why Business Schools are Not Getting Better

  • Okay, so until now, what proportion of your teachers in management are teaching analysis? […] So, if three quarters of the faculty is teaching analysis, how you’re going to get to synthesis? Okay. That’s one thing. And the other thing is success. They’re minting money by mistreating education. They’re minting money by sending people out, who don’t have a clue what real management is about and are distorted from finding out. So, the few studies we have of MBAs as CEOs, including Harvard MBAs as CEOs, show that they do worse and get paid more.
On the Effect of SDGs
  • I think it’s important. I think it’s necessary. But wishes aren’t going to get us anywhere. You know, isn’t it a joke: the main reaction to climate change on the part of governments are, that they make decade long plans, they make 20, 30, 40 year plans. But these are 4 year governments! They won’t even be in power in 4 years, most of them, you know, so Obama made a plan. Isn’t that wonderful? Along comes Trump and the plan lands in the garbage. We don’t need wishes, we need action!

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inspiration for diving deeper

Recommended readings for personal reflection and research

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