Innovation begins with a spark, but sparks need people and serendipity to build the better enterprises we urgently need today. This session brings together two powerful lenses on that challenge: Henry Mintzberg's lifelong inquiry into how organisations are structured, how strategy actually forms, and what communityship really means — alongside the Enterprise Design methodology, which gives practitioners concrete tools to shape enterprises as coherent wholes with intent.
Mintzberg has argued that healthy societies require a balance between government, business, and the plural sector of communities. Enterprises bear responsibility for more than shareholder returns. His recent work on rebalancing society and on the role of serendipity in organisational life raises urgent questions for anyone designing enterprises today: What does it mean to create better enterprises in an imbalanced world? How do you create the conditions for ideas to survive, scale, and deliver genuine impact without reducing everything to a plan?
In this interactive Q&A, we put these topics and your questions directly to Henry Mintzberg, connecting his thinking to Enterprise Design practice and to the central challenge of Intersection 26: going beyond the spark to turn ideas into enterprises that matter.
Article: Is Serendipity Serendipitous?
Books:
I am a writer and educator, mostly about managing originations, developing managers, and rebalancing societies (where my attention is currently focused), also an outdoorsman and collector of beaver sculptures.
After receiving my bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from McGill University in Montreal (1961), working in Operational Research for the Canadian National Railways (1961-1963), and doing my masters and PhD at the MIT Sloan School of Management (1965 and 1968), I have made my professional home in the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill. I sit in the Cleghorn Chair of Management Studies (half-time since the mid-1980s), and have had extensive visiting professorships at INSEAD in France and the London Business School in England.
I have authored 22 books, including Managers not MBAs, Simply Managing, Rebalancing Society, and Managing the Myths of Health Care, also 180 articles plus numerous commentaries and videos. I publish a periodic TWOG (TWeet 2 blOG), as “provocative fun in a page or 2 beyond pithy pronouncements in a line or 2” (@mintzberg141 to mintzberg.org/blog). A collection has been published under the title Bedtime Stories for Managers, and Bust those Management Myths will be coming out in September.
Some consequences of all this have been election to the Order of Canada and l’Ordre national du Quebec as well as to the Royal Society of Canada (the first from a management faculty), two prize- winning Harvard Business Review articles, and twenty-one honorary degrees from universities around the world.
Wolfgang Goebl is the founder and President of the Intersection Group and an Enterprise Design Coach and IT Enterprise Architect at Austrian Power Grid. He is one of the authors of the book “Enterprise Design Patterns” and the EDGY language for collaborative Enterprise Design (www.enterprise.design).
Intersection 26 is the leading global event on Enterprise Design.
New Thoughts on Organisational Design with Henry Mintzberg
