Short Form vs Long From Reach and Impact | Henry Mintzberg | 509

Welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you are joining us on the podcast, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is kind of a legend, I think, is Henry Mintzberg. Henry has written over 20 books, including Management, Not MBAs, Simply Managing, Rebalancing Society, and Managing the Myths of Healthcare. Hundreds of articles, including several that have been prominently placed in Harvard Business Review, and the list goes on. I was fortunate enough to meet Henry in person many years ago at the Thinkers50 in London, and I've always, I was fanboying a little bit because I've always been a big fan. And it's a pleasure to have you on today, Henry. Thank you for spending time with us today.

It's nice to be here. Great to be here.

So before we get into sort of the current work that you're doing, which is a little bit different, I just want to get a high-level sort of perspective from you, given that you've written more books than most people read these days, uh, good, bad, or ugly. Tell us how it's changed, you know, what an author can expect from a publisher, what a publisher can expect from an author. Is it harder or easier to get the message out? Just give us your sort of macro view on those things.

Yeah, it's, it's hard to know how much is my own experience and how much is going on in general. But some recent books of mine that I thought might have been more popular, you know, and the publisher put quite a bit of effort into them, have not gone nearly as well as I thought. I wrote a book called Bedtime Stories for Managers, which is a collection of my, of certain twogs or blog. I call them tweet for blog, but they're blogs. You would think that would be a kind of an appealing sort of thing. And we put effort into promoting it, but it's okay, doing okay. But so I'm not sure, you know, the publisher who we both know, Steve Persante, people aren't reading books as much as they did, or they may be buying them, but they're not reading them.

So if they're not buying or reading them, stay there for a sec. If they're not buying them or reading them, you know, on one end of the spectrum, you can come to a conclusion that says, well, I shouldn't write them. Which is kind of not the conclusion, right? On the other end, you say, well, what are the other benefits and value in writing a book? And I think about it from an intrinsic to an extrinsic standpoint. So intrinsically, clearly a forcing mechanism to get your thoughts tight, right? And get it clear and get it polished. And then extrinsically, it could be the lead to other things. So how have you changed your expectation from, you know, what you expect from a book?

Well, yeah, I haven't because I just keep going. And it's partly the answer to your question, which is I think many of us are compelled to write books. You know, we write articles and we write other things, but certain people just feel compelled to write books and they write one book after another. I've written 21 of them. I had lunch the other day with somebody who's written, I don't know how many, maybe 15. So I think it's kind of built in and therefore there's no change in expectations. It's kind of like, I'm going to get this down whether it sells or not. Now, Peter, there's another angle to this which I've always maintained and I think is important, which is it's books that change things, not articles. Because no matter how compelling or important an article is, you read it and you go on to the next one, and 10 minutes or 10 days later, you've forgotten about it. You know, you just kind of move from one article to another. Oh, that's interesting. Or that could change the world. Yeah. And then go on.

So stay with that though, because I agree with you that, but I think it's a chicken and an egg piece. There are many articles that then become a book, right?

Oh, yes.

And then there are many books that you look at and say, that should have stayed an article. So how do you deal with that?

Yes. Yes. Many books that should have stayed articles and many articles— books become articles. I just had a piece turned down because they said, well, the book's been out for a few months, but usually in the same— I could say it's the Harvard Business Review. I don't think it's any secret, but my most successful article in the Harvard Business Review was published in 1975, and it was one of their most successful Articles of all time, but the book came out in '73 and they didn't mind then. But now my book on structuring came out in February and a couple of months later they say we can't publish it because the book's already out.

So, but, but stay there a minute because I think that there's, that's such a rub that I hear from so many authors is that the whole publishing industrial complex, if you will, focuses on this stupid date called a pub date. Right? Your birthday is an important date, right? Lots of things are triggered on your birthday. A pub date is so silly. So to say, oh, that was published 4 months ago or whatever the case is, therefore the ideas are invalid or it's not as fresh is so ridiculous. Because some, like, I'm sitting in a room surrounded by books. I love my books, but some of the greatest books here, it might be 20, 30, 40, 50 years old. Who cares? Some of them might be current. I never really think about a pub date.

Yeah. And maybe they should call it a pub period. But you're right, it doesn't really matter. Great books are great books no matter when they were written, whether it's Plato or whoever. So, but the other point I wanted to make is that the importance of books is that articles come and go in your head, but books remain because you've devoted hours and hours and maybe days or even weeks to a book. So you get it. Otherwise you, otherwise you leave it at the beginning. You know, you read a few pages and put it aside. But if you stick with it, you get it. So if you want to change the world, I think reaching 10,000 people on a book could be a lot more influential than reaching 100,000 or half a million in an article.

Well, okay, but, but stay there and I'll give you the data that's depressing. So you can't extrapolate generalities based on your own preferences, right? So I know I read at least 2 books a week. If I were to extrapolate that, the book industry would be probably 30x of what it is. The average business book sells 1,500, 2,000 units. And more depressingly than that, the average person only gets through 18 pages of it. So I actually agree, right? How depressing is that, right? But I agree with you. The experience of sitting with an idea in a book for whatever it takes you to read it, 6 hours, 8 hours, over a couple days, couple weeks, whatever, is a very different experience than sitting down and plowing through 8 well-written pages in Harvard Business Review. It's just a different level of internalization, of processing, of your brain firing in the shower when you're not controlling it. You know, it's just a whole different way.

Yeah, exactly. And you, we're not gonna change the world with those 8 pages. I don't think we're gonna change the world with books. Uh, so it's a frustration we have to deal with now. You know, I did a blog called What's Dumbing Us Down. And one of the things that may be dumbing us down is we're not reading books. And so, because I go through several reasons that are dumbing us down, one of which is interruption.

Yeah.

Okay. That, that so interrupted all the time. Well, in articles we're interrupted, maybe we can read through it, but then we're interrupted by the next article and the next thing and so on and so forth. And so maybe books, all these problems we're chatting about with books are dumbing us down. Not that every book is wonderful, but wonderful books maybe aren't getting through.

Well, I think the interruption thing is real, and I think that you could either shrug your shoulders and go, oh, this generation, or the technology, or, you know, everybody's— the alerts on the phone. There's a thousand reasons, including biochemistry and dopamine and all that, where the technology sort of hijacks your physiology and you kind of have no control over it. But the reality is, I think that a thought leader today needs to embrace as many modalities as is rational and logical to reach their audience. There are some thought leaders that say, "Oh, poo-poo, I'm never going to do a tweet or a short-form article or whatever." And it's like, "Okay, great. That's fine. That's your right to do that. But if you're really passionate about the work, how do you get it out there? Multiple modalities, formats, video, audio, whatever, so that you can evangelize the messaging?" Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So that's why I've been talked into doing a series of podcasts now, which is sort of an in-between thing, right? The podcast will last an hour or something, 30 to 60 minutes, whatever it is. So, so you got people's attention for a certain period of time, even though they're trying to avoid pedestrians and, uh, and they're driving or they're panting heavily on the treadmill or whatever. Yeah, yeah, dealing with the person who's tailgating you on the highway or whatever. But, uh, yeah, yeah.

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So look, maybe that's part of the problem, because what I'm writing about mostly is that the world's going to hell and why aren't we recognizing it or understanding what's causing it or even just facing the fact, you know, one of the statements I make these days is we will get nowhere with climate change until we rebalance our societies. As long as the private sector is so influential and what I call the plural or people sector and the public sector are less influential, we are in deep trouble and we'll get nowhere with climate change. You know, we are—

So is part of the potential Challenges that you're facing with this current topic, a little bit different than some of the other things, is that if I'm standing in the airport, right? And I'm looking at the titles on the bookstore, which I'll probably just buy on my Kindle on the plane. I'm probably not even gonna buy it there. Some of the titles are really, really positive. The 5 Things You Need to Do to Succeed as a CEO, or The 3 Easy Steps to Balance Your Life, or whatever. And then you're, you're, here comes, here comes Henry going, the end of the world, the end of the world. Kind of depressing, right? Like it's hard to compete with Do people want the reality? Do they want the— I mean, we see what, you know, John Doerr is doing. You're not the only one sort of banging this drum, which is a real drum. Why, why don't people want to— why don't people want to invest the time in these things or the energy or the brainwaves in it?

Well, I think I'm starting to be convinced that my market are people without mortgages. So my market is, is under 30 or over 70. Because people with mortgages are too distracted worrying about their mortgages and their jobs and everything else. If you're rich, then you don't have a mortgage, and that's fine, except you're probably just self-centered. And if you're really poor and don't have a mortgage, then you're even worse off. But, you know, I— in, in my book on bedtime stories, one of the stories is 5 Easy Steps to Destroy an Organization, you know, uh, but that doesn't get as much attention as 5 Easy Steps to Make Your organization the greatest thing since sliced bread, you know.

Yeah, I think, well, and then the other piece is even that 5 easy steps, you know, as a holding place, these hacks and, you know, listicles and all these sort of things. It's really hard to boil thought leadership down to a listicle, you know, it's just kind of silly. But that's what people want. People, you know, would rather read something pithy than do something difficult often, right?

So yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I should just say that I've spent years trying to get across my rebound The Blessing Society book, and now I'm doing a pamphlet called Wake Up World, which is intended to be written straightforward and also in a kind of a hopeful tone. Not everything's going to hell, but we can do something about it.

Yep. So I want to pivot a little bit to— we spent a lot of time talking about books and the ideas, etc. Think about or share with us some of the business components of this that you're seeing, right? So you're in the business of thought leadership, you're an academic, you're in the business of thought leadership. How have you seen that market change in the last several years? Are people bringing you in for different types of problems? How are, how are your clients working with you?

Well, you know, I don't do that much consulting, and when I do it, it's usually about getting our managers to understand management better. And, and that kind of thing. So I don't have my finger on the pulse of what's bothering companies today, but I nevertheless have explanation for it. The main one being market. I think the stock market is utterly destructive, and I think the sooner we get rid of the stock market, or at least change it dramatically, the better, because what you know, you build a nice company, you're an entrepreneur, you build a company, you're very proud of it. Your employees are your family, everybody's tight and happy and connected. And next thing you know, you've done an IPO. And the question, a bunch of kid analysts who have MBAs are descending on you and saying, what are you doing for us, your stockholders, tomorrow morning? And if you're Apple and you passed a trillion dollars for the first time in history, That's the starting point. Don't tell us about your trillion dollars of share value. Tell us what you're doing now. But Steve Jobs is gone and they're not capable of doing now what they did with Steve Jobs. And it's almost inevitable. Amazon, I think, is losing it in their sourcing. It has become weird in the sense that the same thing is advertised 8 different, you know, is listed 8 different times at different prices. You know, you go on and look at something that you like. The other day, a shirt for about $20 and or some linen or something. I forget what it was, but something for $20. And we said, oh, we'd like the gray rather than the blue. And that was $50. They're losing it completely. I think the only thing they've got going.

Yeah, but so, so nobody's challenging them. If you're not a fan. Of the stock market and I get the things that you're saying, what do you put in there to replace it? Because I think there's a lot of positive things that come outta the stock market as well in terms of the embracing innovation. I mean, North America is, I mean, you mentioned Amazon and Apple. I mean, where else could those places have come to be other than through the resources of the stock market?

Well, they both came to be through entrepreneurship. They came to be through a couple of people who had some very clever ideas and learned how to do things right and so on and so forth. They grew through the stock market, but there are people like Buffett who invest long-term in different ways and don't squeeze every last penny short-term out of them. There's social enterprises that do, some of them do brilliantly. Co-ops and all kinds of other social enterprises that are not, that don't have stockholders. They have stakeholders, but they don't have stockholders. So there are other ways to do it. I'm not against the stock market if it wasn't doing so much short-term harm to companies and destroying cultures and destroying ethics by encouraging people to just more, more, more. And if Every time I see a company doing something questionable, I think, you know, they're responding to the stockholders because they don't have the people to come up, you know, the entrepreneurs are gone. They're not coming up with the creative ideas, but the market wants more and more and more.

Got it. So if there's someone out there, and I'm sure there probably is, that's on a similar path or journey that you were, say, 30, 40 years ago, right? What would you— what advice might you give them today?

Hmm. I— if it's in your soul to write books, write books, you know? I mean, books do succeed. Maybe they don't succeed quite as glamorously, and the ones that succeed are, you know, Hillary Clinton or whoever, right?

Right.

You know, their own story. But if, if you're compelled to do it— I've always said the same thing when I did sort of things with doctoral students who are just completing their degrees and how to go forward. I say, do what's in your heart. Don't let anybody talk you into doing what's not in your heart because you'll do it badly.

Yeah, I love that. I mean, I think the, the, some people are called to write a book and, and some people write a book more strategically or as a tactic or with an objective in mind. But I, I agree with you that some of the greatest thought leaders I know and have come to admire and, and love over the years there's just some, you know, it's like an artist needs to paint and a sculptor needs to sculpt and it's no different. And I like the idea of not letting the, you know, the rational mind overcome the need to put those things out there and give birth to those ideas and polish them over the years.

Yeah. You can't be your best if you're holding the finger to the wind and going in the direction that's not you. Yeah.

No, totally agree.

Keep holding the finger to the wind and find a way for you to do that in your own with your own self-respect, you can do that. But just be careful, that's all. And let's face it, books are precious. I think that's changed. Books— this idea of book burning is so abhorrent to people. And books are precious. And, you know, and the proportion of people who read print books, paper books, as compared to ebooks is still what? About 8 to 1 or something?

Depends on whose data you look at. I mean, I think it's 60/40 now, but who knows? It depends on the data that you get or how you're defining print books. I'm thinking specifically more nonfiction business than literature and all that. So anyway, this has been fantastic. I appreciate your coming on. I appreciate you sharing your insights and your thoughts and your thought leadership with us, Henry. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

It's great to chat with you, Peter. I really enjoy it.

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