Professor Mintzberg continues to foster the education of management and managers and leaders. I once commented on an article regarding the question of Leadership and to my surprise in 2006, he was kind enough to write me back.

Dear Mr Laos

I like this very much. Your definition of leadership is great. I am not sure, however, that more books will help.

Best

Henry Mintzberg
Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies
McGill University
Desautels Faculty of Management

Below was my original email to which he responded:

This may be one of the most important questions ever discussed. Why as Professor Marsh asserts should we take the subject of leadership "seriously". I am not surprised because I have often commented to myself, "how can it be that with so many books on leadership, there appears to be a dearth of it everywhere." Yet, I know that the problem is not the ubiquity of books addressing the subject. Leadership is not about a classroom experience, a series of books, styles or personality. Leaders are not born nor are they made. It is not nurture vs nature. The act of leadership is not about titles nor roles nor positions. Leadership is merely the incidental moments where courage meets opportunity. The courage to act, speak, not act, not speak. It is often said, luck is where preparedness meets opportunity. Leadership is where courage meets opportunity. A life spent preparing ie) reading, studying, reflecting, acting can affect the degree of courage a person is able to muster as the opportunity arises. The courage to admit you have made a mistake, the courage to say no when everyone else says yes, the courage to make your best decision unsure of the consequences but sure of the gravity, the courage to forgive when others hate, the courage to be silent when everyone else wants to talk, the courage to face reality and yes the courage to have faith. Yes, courage. So I say to Dr. Marsh, we do not have enough books, enough teachers or enough colleges to begin to address the subject of leadership. We have only begun to scratch the surface on a subject whose boundaries are all world history, all religious acts and studies, all acts by humanity, all creations of art and literature and science ad infinitum and growing. All acts of courage and all merely degrees of leadership. And where you find fear, you will find all of leadership's failures.

I appreciate this article a great deal. I think you identified exactly the way things SHOULD be, but unfortunately, it doesn't always work this way in many companies. I worked at a leading aerospace company for many years and in that company senior management seemed to always wanted the undiluted truth. They wanted the jesters point of view. The lives of thousands of people could depend on it today and in the future. But I left that company and that industry and very much to my disappointment I have found out the hard way that often times senior management don't want the truth, they want "Yes" men or ego strokers around them. People are trained (beat in submission) not to challenge the thoughts or ideas of management. That is the way it is in this company and apparently in many of the companies my friends work in. With the economic conditions being the way they are today management should want to KNOW that the decisions being made are the correct ones. But, what I see are people wanting to be "liked" or people wanting to be perceived as "on the team" so as to avoid being ostracized and/or eventually laid off. The jester, as you call it, is not a contrarian but one that looks at the bottom line and asked if it is real. It is undeniable that that person is valuable to the long term success or survival of the company but they are not always valued. We used to say that our ethics would not allow us to "go along to get along". You can draw your own conclusion from there.

We need to know our data, we need to know the truth as brought out by the jester and management should embrace it. I reported to Allan Mulally (former VP of the New Airplane division of Boeing and now the President of the Ford Motor Company) and he had a saying that drove most of us crazy; "Know your data and the data will set you free". It annoyed me then but oh how I long for senior management to have such a commitment to the facts and to the truth once again.

Long live the jester because as long as they live and are valued the company will live and possibly even thrive.