Biography

Mintzberg was born in Montreal, and as a teenager had no life plan except to avoid working with his father, who was a successful manufacturer. On leaving school he read engineering at McGill University, and studied simultaneously in the evenings for another degree at Sir George Williams University.

In 1961 he received a BS from McGill and began work with the Canadian National Railways. After two years he returned to his studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he obtained a Masters degree.

He then received his PhD at McGill, where he became a professor and subsequently Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies. He is now recognised as one of the top management thinkers in the world.

Mintzberg is constantly rethinking the strategic needs of the manager, and in particular what he regards as the failure of MBAs to equip the manager to perform his or her job.

In 2009, as one of the few writers on generalist management, he published Managing, which is an update on Drucker's seminal work The Practice of Management.

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