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8 October 2015
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Why being good is best

By Henry Mintzberg

This article is part of the Contemporary leadership series

In 1997, Stuart Crainer met me at Heathrow Airport as I arrived overnight from Montreal. It was the only time we could connect, to interview me for a book he was writing with Des Dearlove about management ideas and gurus.

This guru business must be very competitive, Stuart suggested. Not at all, I said: I never felt any competition. And then I blurted this out in my jet-lagged stupor (words I remember clearly): “I never set out to be the best. It’s too low a standard. I set out to be good.”

Henry Mintzberg graduated in Mechanical Engineering from McGill University in Montreal in 1961. He worked in Operational Research at the Canadian National Railways, and then received a masters and doctorate from the MIT Sloan School of Management in Boston. In 1968, he returned to McGill, where he joined what is now the Desautels Faculty of Management where he is the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies.

On 1 October 2015, it was announced that Mintzberg is to receive the Thinkers50 Lifetime Achievement Award for exceptional services to management. “The Lifetime Achievement Award is given to someone who has had a long-term impact on the way people think about and practice management,” explains Thinkers50 co-founder Des Dearlove. “Henry Mintzberg has done that and much more. He has been an intellectual trailblazer from his very first book – The Nature of Managerial Work – to his work on strategy and his pioneering executive education programs.”

- This article appeared originally on thinkers50.com -

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