Were management a science or a profession, we could teach it to people without experience. It is neither.

MANAGEMENT IS NOT A SCIENCE. Science is about the development of systematic knowledge through research. That is hardly the purpose of management. Management is not even an applied science, for that is still a science. Management certainly applies science: managers have to use all the knowledge they can get, from the sciences and elsewhere. But management is more art, based on "insight", "vision", "intuition". (Peter Drucker wrote in 1954 that ¿the days of the "intuitive" manager are numbered [1]. Half a century later we are still counting.) And most management is craft, meaning that it relies on experience-learning on the job. This means it is as much about doing in order to think as thinking in order to do. 

Put together a good deal of craft with a certain amount of art and some science, and you end up with a job that is above all a practice. There is no "one best way" to manage; it all depends on the situation. 

Effective managing therefore happens where art, craft and science meet. But in a classroom of students without managerial experience, these have no place to meet, there is nothing to do. Linda Hill (1992) writes in her book about people becoming managers that they "had to act as managers before they understood what the role was" [2]. In other words, where there is no experience, there is no room for craft: Inexperienced students simply cannot understand the practice. As for art, nothing stops that from being discussed, even admired, in the conventional MBA classroom. But the inexperience of the students stops it from being appreciated. They can only look on as non-artists do observing it without understanding how it came to be. 

That leaves science, which is what conventional MBA education is mostly about, at least in the form of analysis. So conventional MBA students graduate with the impression that management is analysis, specifically the making of systematic decisions and the formulation of deliberate strategies. This is a narrow and ultimately distorted view of management that has encouraged two dysfunctional styles in practice: calculating (overly analytical) and heroic (pretend art). These are later contrasted with a more experienced-based style labelled engaging ¿ quiet and connected, involving and inspiring. 

MANAGEMENT IS NOT A PROFESSION. It has been pointed out that engineering, too, is not a science or an applied science so much as a practice in its own right (Lewin 1979) [3]. But engineering does apply a good deal of science, codified and certified as to its effectiveness. And so it can be called a profession, which means it can be taught in advance of practice, out of context. In a sense, a bridge is a bridge, or at least steel is steel, even if its use has to be adapted to the circumstances at hand. The same can be said about medicine: many illnesses are codified as standard syndromes to be treated by specific techniques. But that cannot be said of management (Whitley 1995:92) [4]. Little of its practice has been reliably codified, let alone certified as to its effectiveness. So management cannot be called a profession or taught as such. 

Because engineering and medicine have so much codified knowledge that must be learned formally, the trained expert can almost always outperform the layperson. Not so in management. Few of us would trust the intuitive engineer or physician, with no formal training. Yet we trust all kinds of managers who have never spent a day in a management classroom (and we have suspicions about some others who spent two years there). 

Ever since the 1910s when Frederick Taylor (1911) [5] wrote about that "one best way" and Henri Fayol (1916/1984) [6] claimed that "managerial ability can and should be acquired in the same way as technical ability at school, later in the workshop", we have been in this search for the holy grail of management as a science and a profession. In Britain, a group called the Management Charter Initiative sought to barrel ahead with the certification of managers, not making the case for management as a profession so much as assuming it. As its director told a newspaper, the MBA "is the only truly global qualification, the only license to trade internationally" (Watts 1997:43) [7]. 

The statement is nonsense, and the group has failed in those efforts. It is time to face a fact: After almost a century of trying, by any reasonable assessment management has become neither a science nor a profession. It remains deeply embedded in the practices of everyday living. We should be celebrating that fact, not depreciating it. And we should be developing managers who are deeply embedded in the life of leading, not professionals removed from it. 

Those fields of work discussed earlier can be divided into ones in which the person doing it truly ¿knows better¿ than the recipients and others in which acting as the expert who knows better can get in the way. Upon being wheeled into an operating room, few of us would be inclined to second-guess the surgeon. (Could you cut a little lower, please?) No matter how miserable the bedside manner, we accept that he or she knows better. But a schoolteacher who acts on the basis of knowing better can impede the learning of the student. School teaching is a facilitation activity, more about encouraging learning than doing teaching. 

Managing is largely a facilitating activity, too. Sure, managers have to know a lot, and they often have to make decisions based on that knowledge. But, especially in large organizations and those concerned with "knowledge work", managers have to lead better, so that others can know better and therefore act better. They have to bring out the best in other people. The idea that the chief does it all, coming up with the grand strategy and then driving its implementation by everyone else, is frequently a myth left over from the mass production of simple goods. ¿Our goal is to create an environment where students learn how to tackle difficult, complex problems. Students learn what it feels like to exercise judgment, make decisions, and take responsibility? (in "Message from the Dean", Harvard Business School Web site, 2003). 

Because grade school teachers can easily carry their skills from one classroom to another, they can still be called professionals. But not so managers, who can hardly carry their skills from one function to another within the same organization, let alone across organizations or industries. In other words, knowledge about context is not as portable in management as it is in education or engineering or medicine. That is why so many managers who have succeeded in one place fail in others (which is hardly true of teachers or engineers or physicians, so long as they stick to the skills they have).

A GUEST MANAGER? Imagine a guest manager. The very idea seems absurd. How could anyone just come in and manage something? The manager must have a deep understanding of the context. Yet we accept substitute teachers who take over classrooms for a day, and Doctors without Borders who set up hospitals in hours. But temporary managers? 

The one obvious example is instructive a guest conductor. A few rehearsals, and off go the musicians performing at the most prestigious concert halls of the world. The reason is simple: the whole exercise is so highly programmed. Mozart is pulling the strings; everyone plays to his highly orchestrated score. We shall have professional management as soon as other organizations become as programmed as the symphony orchestra, playing their strategies like scores from Mozart, withal the obedient employees and costumers sitting in neat rows responding on cue. 

The practice of management is characterized by its ambiguity. That is why, despite its popular use, the metaphor of the conductor on the podium is wholly inappropriate (at least during performance, if not necessarily rehearsal; see Mintzberg 1998) [8]. Most work that can be programmed in an organization need to concern its managers directly; specialists can be delegated to do it. That leaves the managers mostly with the messy stuff the intractable problems, the complicated connections. And that is what makes the practice of management so fundamentally soft and why labels such as experience, intuition, judgment, and wisdom are so commonly used for it. Here is how successful manager at a major airline described her MBA husband to me: "He has the technique, thinks he knows best. But he is frustrated because he doesn't understand the complexities and the politics. He thinks he has the answers but is frustrated by being unable to do anything about it". He never learned management in the business school.

Henry Mintzberg is Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University's Faculty of Management 

[1] Drucker, Peter F. The Practice of Management. New York: Harper, 1954.

[2] Hill, Linda A. Becoming a Manager Mastery of a New Identity. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1992.

[3] Lewin, Douglas. On the Place of Design in Engineering. Design Studies 1, no. 2 (1979): 113-17.

[4] Whitely, Richard. Academic Knowledge and Work Jurisdiction in Management. Organization Science 16, no. 1 (1995): 81-105.

[5] Taylor, Frederick Winslow. The Principles of Scientific Management. New York: Harper, 1911.

[6] Fayol, Henri, and Irwin Gray. General and Industrial Management. Rev. ed. New York: institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 1984. (First published in French in 1916.)

[7] Watts, Robert. Sunday Telegraph. July 18, 1997, 43.

[8] Mintzberg, Henry. Covert Leadership: The Art of Managing Professionals.¿ Harvard Business Review (November-December 1998): 140-147.

Managers Not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Managing and Management Development. By Henry Mintzberg, San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc, 2004.