Professor Henry Mintzberg awarded 2006 Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize

Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies Henry Mintzberg has been awarded this year's Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize in the Social Sciences and Humanities for his outstanding lifetime and ongoing contribution to the cultural and intellectual life of Canada.

"Council could not have chosen more wisely than Henry Mintzberg for the 2006 Molson Prize," said Heather Munroe-Blum, Principal and Vice-Chancellor of McGill University. "Henry is the epitome of excellence. He challenges conventional wisdom. He gets us to think and he changes the way we think, and has done so for decades."

Known for his eloquent and frequently controversial criticism of conventional management school practices, he is the author or co-author of 14 books, including The Nature of Managerial Work (1973), The Structuring of Organizations (1979), Mintzberg on Management (1989) and The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning (1994). An early and longtime proponent of practical management experience over immersion in theory, Professor Mintzberg's management philosophy is perhaps best captured in his own, oft-quoted quip, "Leadership, like swimming, cannot be learned by reading about it."

Prof. Mintzberg earned his doctorate and MSc degrees at the MIT Sloan School of Management and his mechanical engineering degree at McGill. He was named an Officer of both the Order of Canada and the Ordre National du Québec in 1998. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (the first from a management faculty), the Academy of Management and the International Academy of Management. He was named Distinguished Scholar for the year 2000 by the Academy of Management. He is also the 2006 prize recipient of the Gérard Parizeau award of Quebec's École des Hautes Études Commerciales. He is currently Director of McGill's International Masters Program in Management (IMPM) as well as Cleghorn Chair in Management Studies at the Desautels Faculty of Management.

Two Molson Prizes worth $50,000 each are awarded every year to distinguished Canadians, one in the arts and the other in the social sciences or humanities. This year's arts recipient is Quebec novelist and poet Nicole Brossard.

Please click on "More information" to view the Canada Council press release.