Friday, May 31, 10 a.m.
Oration honouring Dr. Henry Mintzberg
Let us begin with the word, paradox – not the safest
word in the English language to use in this august assembly of engineering
and business students because it tells of the existence of ambiguity,
contradiction, and chance. Our graduates, today, have been taught the
importance of precision not ambiguity, consistency not contradiction,
and planning not happenstance.
And, Mr. Chancellor, we are glad of that, because we do not want our bridges
to fall down, our ships to sink, or our businesses to go bankrupt. Yet
we ignore paradoxes at our peril, for they express propositions that are
only seemingly absurd; when you think about them, they express fundamental
truths about reality.
Today, we honour Henry Mintzberg, Officer of the Order of Canada, recipient
of nine honorary degrees – and the best is yet to come – Fellow
of the Royal Society of Canada, one of the world’s most provocative
and influential management gurus, media darling of Wall Street Journal
and The Financial Post, author, at last count, of 10 books
and of countless articles, interviews and several short stories. Henry
Mintzberg recognizes the existence of ambiguity and he, himself, is a
series of paradoxes: His ideas were once so radical that he was considered
the enfant terrible of the academic world of management studies,
but now he has star-billing at international conferences. He has even
been dubbed the Mick Jagger of the management world. For both Mick and
Mintzberg are pursued by adoring fans, but the similarities end there.
Mick's passion, among other things, is soccer; Mintzberg's is the solitude
of the Canadian wilderness. This man who spends half his life in the public
arena spends the other half escaping from people.
Mr. Chancellor, these “pretty paradoxes” continue: Mintzberg
is the high-priest of management studies, but advocates demolishing the
cult of management, claiming that “society becomes more unmanageable
as a result of professional management.” The inspiration for business
academics and company CEOs, this man is photographed under the Latin tag
illigitimus non carborundum, a loose translation of which, in polite
society, means “Don’t let the buzzards get you down.” This
leading academic states that business leaders cannot be made in the classroom,
yet his books are studied in business schools all over the world. This
is the man who in the middle of a slick, high-tech, multimedia, powerpoint
presentation will, like a Miro manqué or Dali gone mad, scribble
surreal, hand-drawings of a company’s structure. This archetypal
advocate of planning cannot stick to a grocery list, going into Costco
to buy coffee and coming out with a bag of crab legs and a set of roller-blades.
This is the man who understands how we strive for profit but also knows
that we need the philosopher Pascal’s wisdom. For, Le coeur a
ses raisons que la raison ne connaît poins. (The heart has its
reasons that reason never knows.)
Mr. Chancellor, you will be glad to know that Henry Mintzberg is the new
order of Canadian academic, defining the boundaries of his discipline,
and also crossing the boundaries. He is the new “compleat” man,
holding degrees in Mechanical Engineering and in General Arts, writing
a ground-breaking doctoral thesis in management studies at MIT and simultaneously
studying political science.
So it should come as no surprise that this advocate of creative, open-ended
management loves to play with alliteration, puns, and paradox; uses metaphors
from music, sculpture and the cosmos that take us to levels of knowledge
within and beyond reality, demolishes the buzz words and clichés
favoured by conventional thinkers, stating that the phrase “strategic
planning” is an oxymoron, that only children need “empowerment”
and that “rationalization” is similar to medieval blood-letting.
Fully aware of the treacherous terrain in the corporate world, he offers
himself as a tour guide through the wilds of the corporate jungle in his
book, Strategic Safari, and prefaces it with a quotation from that
other classic on how to prepare for the unexpected, A.A. Milne’s
Winnie-the Pooh. In his weighty tome, The Structuring of Organizations,
a standard text in The Theory of Management Policy Series, Mintzberg
states apologetically that the book is only one view of reality, it may
contain 175,000 words laid end to end in a single, linear sequence, but
the “world is not linear, especially the world of organizational
structure, that the world intermingles all kinds of complex flows –
parallel, circular, reciprocal,” In this he echoes the words of the
poet Gerard Manley Hopkins who also saw the grandeur in “All things
counter, original, spare, strange.”
Mr. Chancellor, Henry Mintzberg’s original perceptions go beyond
the cleverness of his titles and the allusiveness of his writing. And
that is why we honour him. On the one hand, he is the consummate academic,
a leader in his chosen field of study and on the other he has not lost
sight of his humanity, of the reality and the value of the random and
the inconsistent in human institutions. This writer of texts about strategic
planning, has also told us that fancy strategies don’t come up with
solutions, people do, if given the opportunity, encouragement and credit.
He tells us all to think about the work we do, not mindlessly follow techniques
and procedures; That the most “dangerous” person in a company
is the person who is parachuted in to come up with a great strategy. That
there should be more dialogue, less computer-generated data, more networking
less number-crunching. That managers should know how to write haikus about
falling cherry blossom in the city, as well as reports on civic maintenance.
He agrees with that master of paradox, Oscar Wilde, who warns us about
creating societies that know the price of everything and the value of
nothing.
Mr. Chancellor, Henry Mintzberg is a passionate Canadian, one of our most
original thinkers since Frye and McLuhan. He has put the ethical back
into the material and mathematical equations in management. Unequivocally
he tells us, “As members of the world community, Canadians are committed
to the continued use of our influence and resources in support of the
very values that we specify here for ourselves: the freedom and dignity
of the individual, respect for cultural plurality, responsiveness of institutions,
balanced prosperity, and peace and stable order.”
Like today’s graduates he wants to make a difference. He has always
taken “the road less traveled by”; he has always been wary of
“what was too popular or widely believed,” always more a maverick
than a company man. He has even been described as a gadfly, stinging large
organizations out of their complacency.
Mr. Chancellor, the great philosopher, Socrates, was also called a gadfly
and was famous for his radical thinking, but he suffered a terrible fate
at the hands of his society; he was made to drink a chalice filled with
poison. We know better. We have given this gadfly, who managed to provoke
change without acrimony, a robe of silk, and will give him a free lunch,
once he is admitted to our privileged community. Therefore, I ask you
Mr. Chancellor, to award the degree of doctor of letters, (honoris
causa) to Henry Mintzberg who prefers “open fields to closed
cages,” the planner who says “you can’t predict the future,
so the best thing is to create it.”
Annette Staveley
Deputy Public Orator
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