10/04/2011

Henry Mintzberg on Sunday Morning

Listening to CBC Radio's Sunday Morning this morning I was taken in by Michael Enright's interview with Henry Mintzberg, who is Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University.

I have reproduced a part of his website below and encourage you to visit it.

If you missed the program on Sunday you can go to the Sunday Morning webpage and download it as a podcasts.


Henry Mintzberg
  • This election is theatre: ignore the campaigns and the promises (which are just attempts to bribe us with our own money.) What matters is what the people who are elected can and will do. And that is best judged by what they have done.
  • What the Conservatives have done suggests that, with a majority, our most cherished institutions―Medicare [PDF], the CBC [PDF], others―will be threatened. As a prominent minister was overheard just after the 2006 election: “If we get a majority, they won’t recognize this country.”
  • Do not necessarily vote Liberal. Or NDP. Or Bloc. Or Green. Or Independent. If the majority of voters split their votes again, the Conservatives will go forward again. So please drop your party preference: this election is about the future of Canada. If you cherish what this country is, vote for whichever candidate in your riding has the greatest chance of beating the Conservative―in other words, the one who is ahead of these others.1 Consult the latest poll in your riding, or else see the results last time [PDF]. (See also www.Catch22campaign.ca. for information on this.)

  • If enough people do this, we will likely end up with a coalition government, which could well be the best solution. (Recall that cooperation of the NDP with the Liberals gave us Medicare fifty years ago.) This election has to be about the country, not about its personalities. In fact, such a coalition may well prefer as prime minister someone who is not now the leader of any of the parties.

2 comments:

  1. I can't stand the Harper government, & firmly believe they'll ruin this country, however I can't stand when someone is apparently quoted as saying something but we're not told who actually said it. So if a prominent CONservative MP said “If we get a majority, they won’t recognize this country.” it would be of the utmost importance to know who actually said it. Anonymous quotes do nothing to help the cause of getting the CONservatives out of office. So...who said it?

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  2. I think you should take up your concerns with Henry Mintzberg, not me. As I indicated in the heading, the text is from his website. The link is above.
    Honestly, I would like to know who said it too. A web search takes me back to Mintzberg's site and to other sites that have done what I did and replicated his posting.

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Agree or disagree, I would love to hear from anyone who visits the site