"I'm a human being, not a human resource". Is something I have heard my colleague Henry Mintzberg say a number of times. It really seems to resonate with people. Recently Henry published on his website an e-pamphlet called Rebalancing Society. In it he argues that society rests on three key pillars: government, business and what he calls plural society. Henry believes that business today in the West has too much power and we need more of the plural society.
He presented his ideas at a recent event here at McGill University. Not everyone loved the ideas, but the considerable majority did. So today I talk to Henry about his new e-pamphlet (which you can download for free from his website, mintzberg.org). You decide for yourself if what Henry is thinking about today makes sense to you. To watch the video please click on the picture below:
Karl Moore: Henry, you run two great programs, the IMPM and the IMHL, one more for business and NGO’s and one more for health - how does this tie into your e-pamphlet?
Henry Mintzberg: Well, you know, one of the key theme’s - I mean it is a whole different pedagogy the way we work in small groups with experienced people in the classroom; they spend half the time discussing with themselves and working out their own issues.
One of the key theme’s of both, they are both Masters programs, is this sense of community - both the sense of community in the class and encouraging them to see organizations as, the way I put it, a healthy company or a healthy healthcare organization is not a collection of human resources [rather] it’s a community of human beings.
That whole sense of community, both within the classroom and in their organizations that they go back to, is very strong in that program. To me, that is how you really create healthy organizations. In addition, the IMHL, the International Masters for Health Leadership, we describe it as a forum for the enhancement of healthcare worldwide and so people really come to that program with a sense of, “how can I make healthcare better?” Not just, “how can I make me better,” or “how can I make my hospital better,” but also “how can we contribute, as a class, to making healthcare stronger around the world.”
Moore: It seems like appealing to our better nature is a central thing that you are doing. Having a sense of purpose and meaning beyond just ourselves.
Mintzberg: Well, you know, the way I describe the economic dogma is ‘greed is good,’ and you have heard that often enough, ‘markets are sufficient, property is sacrosanct and governments are suspect’. The way I put it in the pamphlet is as one view of human nature that may make some sense but as THE view of nature it’s nonsense! It is absolute nonsense and it caters to our basis worst side. Who can be intrinsically happy with that kind of a thing?
I quote Eric Hoffer, the famous longshoreman philosopher, who said, “You can never get enough of what you don’t really need.” Too many of us are striving to get more of what we don’t really need as opposed to really trying to build a better world. And it is not just building a better world - the world is in dire straights.
There is a whole debate about how long we have got for Global Warming. I think that’s the wrong question for two reasons - number one, if we don’t know how long we have got then why bother doing anything, but number two is how long did the Philippino’s have with their recent storm? Zero years. It is not a question of how long we have got, some people have already got zero. It’s too late for them. Other people are going to get it next year, or the year after. There is not going to be a big bang in 2050, there is just going to be increasing storms and other things and increasing exploitation and we have to stop that or we are doomed, I think, as a human civilization.
