Henry Mintzberg: Rebalancing Society Before It's Too Late

Henry Mintzberg, guest · [03:55]I've been called a contrarian, but I'm not a contrarian. A contrarian is someone who challenges established thoughts for its own sake, just to be on the other side. I don't think I'm like that at all. I think I just see the world a little differently and can't help challenges. For example, in my doctoral thesis, I simply went over chief executives and watched what they did, and what they did had almost nothing to do with what the literature said they were supposed to do, namely planning, organizing, coordinating, and controlling, which are all... I would watch them, you know, present a gold watch to a retiring employee in those days, or, or, or meet with a union head, or, or whatever else they did, but almost none of it matched these, this controlling. Sure, there was controlling of a sort, but not nearly to the extent that it described what they were doing. Mostly they were getting interrupted a lot. Mostly they were, they were struggling to control their own jobs, in fact. And so I wrote it all down on my committee, so this is terrific, put it, put everything down, write everything down. They liked what I was doing, and it succeeded.

Henry Mintzberg, guest · [05:58]In the case of structure organizations, the orthodoxy I was challenging was the academic orthodoxy of decomposition without synthesis, decomposition without reconstruction, if you like. All kinds of researchers had taken apart organization design every which way, but nobody put it together. Nobody put this Humpty Dumpty back together. And so I wrote a book trying to synthesize this around different basic forms of organizations. And that was 1979, as you said. In 1983, I did a short version of that called Structure and Same book, essentially. And then a couple of years ago, I did Understanding Organizations, finally, which basically was a similar framework, I think better labeling for forms of organization that I call program, project, personal, and professional. So personal are entrepreneurial companies, and professional are hospitals and, and universities, and programmed are McDonald's and everything else, and project are project organizations. And in fact, I use sports. I don't know if you want to get into this, but I use sports as wonderful illustrations of these, because the programmed organization is North American football. As two Canadians, we should make it quite clear that football was invented at McGill. And it's the most programmed sport imaginable, not the way we invented it, but as it turned out, everything is programmed. It's got leadership right on the field. It's got everybody lined up, complete division of labor, as to who can catch the ball and who can't catch the ball and who comes on to kick the ball. Amazing when you step back from football. Baseball is like professional. Everybody for himself, like professors in the university or doctors in a hospital. We all work independently of each other. And baseball is the perfect sport to play during COVID because other than the pitcher, other than the batter and the catcher, everybody is apart. Everybody's separate. And everything is so, so structured the way an operation in a, in a hospital is structured. Everything is so structured that people can sit down and make fill out these little forms with everything that's going on. So hockey, basketball, soccer, And rugby are all project sports. Every time the pucker ball is at one end, it's a new project and nobody knows how it's going to unfold. In, in, in football, the other kind of football, the, the offensive team knows how it's supposed to unfold because they call a play. Nobody knows what's going to happen with the puck once they pick up the puck at one end, and the idea is to outwit your opponent. And then personal sport is yacht racing, where an individual does almost everything, you know, designs the boat, skippers it, you know, World Cup yacht racing. So those are the four basic forms, and, it's a way of getting people to understand organizations, finally.

Henry Mintzberg, guest · [10:09]So in 1991, I visited Prague. This was two years after the Velvet Revolution, or two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Being a good Canadian, I don't accept American interpretations of things lightly. And the understanding at the time was that capitalism had triumphed. And again, I wasn't being contrarian. I just looked around and said, capitalism didn't triumph. Communism collapsed. It collapsed under its own dead weight because it was so out of balance in society. And because of the belief that capitalism had triumphed, it's been triumphing ever since, and now it's destroying us. Not capitalism as such, but a particularly form of mercenary or predatory capitalism that's dominating today, and totally tilting society. So historically, we, we lived with two, we have lived with two-sector politics. We, we have left and right and favoring business or favoring, favoring government or favoring business, swinging back and forth, and every country in the world except Canada is paralyzed in the center, or most countries. Canada, in fact, is now really dead center in a way with, especially the new government. And so we should be challenging that in favor of what I call three-sector society by adding to business and government community. And community is key. The key to American development was as much community as it was business. America developed, had very strong sense of community right from the revolution. And if you read de Tocqueville about America in the nine, in the 1830s, it emphasizes the important role of community, what he called associations. In favor of, well, we've got three superpowers. So you've got China, which favors public sector communism, and America, which favors private sector capitalism, and Russia, which favors plural sector, community sector populism,

Henry Mintzberg, guest · [14:19]Well, look at an, the article we just published on Co-op Sapporo, because when you use the term hollowed out and plural sector kind of has to do something, this is a, a very constructive example of that. Japan. Considers itself suffering from depopulation, and more so in Hokkaido. In fact, it doesn't have to be considered suffering, because there are, there are things you can do with depopulation. Somebody who studies it, a person I met in Japan, a lawyer who, professor who studies it, argues that, it brings out the, it creates opportunities for women who aren't working, it creates opportunity for the handicapped, it creates opportunity for the elderly, all of whom can suddenly join back in the economy. But anyway, Co-op Sapporo was a traditional co-op, but started to fill in where business was leaving Hokkaido, and coming into, and they were, they were running supermarkets and so on, and now they're cradled to grave. They have benefits for their members for babies, they supply lunches for kids in school, they provide funeral services, they provide insurance services, they do all kinds of things. The bank Banking was leaving some places. They have vans that go out and, and sort of carry supermarkets, small grocery stores, into villages that don't have those services. So they put ATM machines in those vans so that they could serve as banking for the people who couldn't get out. So we followed them around for a week. We followed their vans and whatever else they were doing around for a week and wrote an article and called it a kind of a, the, sort of a collaborative, social economy.

Daniel Atlin, host · [16:09]I spent, about ten years actually in the Co-op sector here and credit unions actually in, in Canada, of course, which, provides sort of an interesting alternative to, to banks as well. And, and, and you're right, we need, we need to cultivate that social society, the, the, the, social economy. Just, just a quick

Henry Mintzberg, guest · [16:27]comment. Co-ops usually are in one business, like banking or insurance, mutual insurance companies or co-op banks, whatever it is, and, serve their members that way. But Co-op Sapporo is, is a comprehensive social economy model that could do all kinds of wonderful things or is doing all kinds of wonderful things. So we need to develop more models like that. I'm working on, on the third stage. The first stage of my book was my book, Rebalancing Society, and the second stage was my website. And now I'm doing a pamphlet called, called Balance Now for the Sake of Survival. and it will talk about Co-op Sapporo and alternate models for, social economy and so on.

Henry Mintzberg, guest · [18:54]Well, that's the whole pamphlet. I mean, in four stages, I, I, I kind of describe it as four stages. The first stage is commitment or engagement or involvement or changing your mindset or realizing what's going on, all those things, reframing. And we've developed something called the, our Declaration of Interdependence, which can be found on the web on that name, where people can sign up. Key sentences, paraphrasing the American Declaration, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created dependent on each other, our earth and its climate. And so on, it goes on like that. That's stage one. Stage two is mobilization or action, doing something, engaging in all kinds of activities. And I don't mean marching, and I don't mean sitting in. I mean tangible activities to challenge things we don't like, like the women of Paraguay, when a senator, when a corrupt senator weaseled out of a challenge, court challenge, they went to his house and kept pelting it with eggs, and the smell got to him, and he resigned. That's action. That's mobilization. the third stage is to carry that into institutions. So we, we make our governments more respected, we make our businesses more responsible, we make our communities more robust, and we consolidate how they work together. And that's stage three. And then stage, well, stage four is what I call consolidation, is how all this comes together like the, that model of Co-op Sapporo, where a, where a whole social economy module, model comes together.

Henry Mintzberg, guest · [25:42]You can't create a manager in a classroom any more than you can create a swimmer in a classroom. Management is experience-based. It's not evidence-based, it's experience-based. and you can't create a manager in a classroom, but MBA programs traditionally don't accept that or recognize that, so they pretend that by teaching analysis or shooting your mouth off about a bunch of cases that you barely, of companies you barely know, that you manage. And so we develop programs where we take people who are managers, bring them into a classroom, sit them at a round table, and give them half the opportunity, half the time of the classroom to discuss and reflect on their own experience and share their insights. So I might drop in some, you know, I might give a short lecture on revalu-revaluing society or more likely on, on, on the four forms of organizations or something, but then it's over to them at their tables to discuss how they could use this. And so it becomes a very powerful learning community.

Daniel Atlin, host · [26:46]Absolutely. And, and, and I think part of the challenge is, you know, we have this mass market education sort of system as well, which, which is hard to sort of translate some of these, you know, ways of, of teaching at, at sort of a more localized and, and, and sort of a, a smaller scale, I guess, too.

Henry Mintzberg, guest · [27:03]Although, you know, we've done some of this, we once did this kind of thing at a conference, a session at a conference with 200 people. We managed to get them all seated at round tables, five people per table, and, get them discussing. And then for the debrief, how do you debrief 50 tables or whatever it is? So, so for the debrief, we simply said, raise your hand if you heard someone at your table had a great idea. And the first hand that went up, we called on them and we debriefed that way. So we could actually reduce a big group to a very small, integral, you know, intimate

Henry Mintzberg, guest · [29:06]The young people, a lot of young people are very concerned. Here and there, people pop up out of the blue who somehow found my rebalancing society work or whatever, and have become very supportive, very deterministically supportive. There's a French translation of the book that was going nowhere, and there's a few people in France who say, this can't be, people have to read this book. And so we've been working through the publisher to get the Quebec publisher, believe it or not, but you'll believe it, that when it comes to the French language, the French don't want, don't want, to have just a Quebec version or vice versa. So, so, so there's out, was actually a French translation and a, and a, and a France, a Quebec translation and a France translation, even though the two Which is written are not that different at all, and recovering by getting the Quebec version available in France. So, so there are people who are determined and who keep saying, you know, we got to find out how to make this be. I'm looking for what I call a first follower. I, I don't know if you've seen this, Daniel, this wonderful video. You know the video, the guy dancing in a park? You ever seen that? Yeah, many people have seen that. And the message of that is it's not about the leader, it's about the first follower. The first follower makes the leader a leader. And so we're trying to find a first follower, somebody who can take this and do what I'm not able to do very well, which is help it to go viral, help the message to go viral. And trying to reach prominent people or reach someone who can do a good video or reach people like yourself who are doing podcasts and so on to get the word out. And, but, you know, at some point it'll work. The Reformation, the Reformation is my model. Martin, Martin Luther was an obscure monk who tried to, convey a message, and the story is, is astounding. I mean, it was circulating in massive numbers. His one-page rant that he nailed on the door of a church, an obscure monk nailing a rant on an obscure piece of paper in an, on an obscure church that changed Christianity.