Leadership can be lonely, but only if you make it so. Offering fresh insights of the price to pay for being a leader, Dr. Tracey Jones interviews Dr. Ed Schein, the professor of Organization Studies Emeritus at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and his son, Peter Schein. Together they talk about their book, Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling, which they are re-releasing after seven years. Sometimes, many leaders feel like it’s only them against everything. However, now more than ever, leadership has evolved into a team sport. Ed and Peter dive deep into that by discussing how leaders need not have all the answers come from them alone—they can simply and humbly ask for it. Join in on this discussion to get a peek into Ed and Peter’s updated book, what to do with loneliness and wariness as a leader, and more.
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Humble Inquiry: Why Leadership Is A Team Sport With Dr. Ed Schein And Peter Schein
Our guest is Ed Schein. Ed is Professor Emeritus at the MIT Sloan School of Management and is one of the most well-known theorists working with organizational culture. We are also joined with his son, Peter Schein. Peter and Ed are working on re-releasing a book that came out in 2013. The title is Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling. You are going to love what these gentlemen have to share on what it takes to pay the price of leadership.
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I am extremely honored to have Dr. Ed Schein and his son Peter Schein. Ed is the Professor of Organizational Studies Emeritus at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is the author of books on corporate culture, leadership, career development, and the management of culture change. Books with his son, Peter, are Humble Leadership in 2018 and The Corporate Culture Survival Guide, the third edition, also in 2018. He's got a ton of that before, you need to check them all out. They're both working on the revision of the best seller, Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling. We're going to talk about that at the end. There's so much I want to unpack in this. Ed and Peter, thank you for tuning in from California to be on the show.
Thank you for having us.
Thanks, Ed. My father wrote a book titled The Price of Leadership. He was passionate about leadership and in it he talked about the price leaders have to pay to truly be engaged in leadership. I want to get your input as leadership experts on the different prices and what this means to you. The first price he talks about is loneliness. We've all heard people say, “Leadership, nobody wants to do it because it's lonely at the top.” Ed, could you unpack that for us? What loneliness might look like for a leader and when there's not to be loneliness? What would you have for our leaders out there reading on this topic?
The best way to open this is with a provocative line. Leadership may, at one time, have been a lonely sport but now, it's a group sport, a team sport. Historically, we have had jobs for people to be the head of something, a company, a family, and so on that could be discretely identified. What's happened historically, is the things that we ascribe as jobs to leaders are no longer doable by one person. It's as simple as that. You can be told, “You're the leader and it's your job.”
You then sit in that chair and look at it and say, “I can't do this alone. There is no way. I don't know enough. I'm dependent on a whole bunch of people. If they screw up, the fact that I am the leader, the buck stops with me. The fact that I recognize that the buck stops with me is what should tell me, ‘That's the wrong construction.’ The buck shouldn't stop with me. It should stop with all of us who are accountable to do things because we are truly interdependent.” It's now a team sport whether we love it or not.
A lot of the stuff coming out is talking about the dyadic nature of leadership. It's not a one-person show. It's the whole team. It's the co-leaders. It's the followers and how they're all integrated. What advice would you give to leaders if they feel like they are in a position of loneliness? How can they unpack that and look at, “Is it me? Is it them? Is it both of us?” Everybody in leadership has this aspiration utopia that we all are in this together, but if you look at what's going on out there. You see that a lot of times, it's not. Sometimes, it is the leader that is not being collaborative in nature but that old school, “My way or the highway.” What would you recommend for all the different people coming into the workforce, we got a lot of different generations? Do you have any insights for that, as to how to build that robust cohesion?
I have a simple, theoretically profound point about that and it links to the other issue of how does change happens? After all, leadership is wanting to do something new and better. Once we think of it that way, the simple answer to the question of how do I overcome loneliness as a leader is, I have to get to know my subordinates, my direct reports, and my colleagues. I have to collapse psychological distance. Most of all, I have to not do this famous comment that I heard a CEO make. He said to his team, “Remember, we're all a team in this together but don't forget that you're all competing for my job.” That is a prescription for loneliness.
It is. That is so back to the last Millennial thing. You do have people that still get that set up like that. That breeds that competitiveness.
Our whole huge industry is built on that. When people say, “How do I start change?” I come to the same point, “It starts with, how you handle your subordinates? How you deal with your peers and with your direct reports on a day to day basis.” If you get to know them, you're going to be less lonely, they will start telling you what's going on, and leadership will begin to happen.
I watched a couple of your other speeches where you've got that communication. We're at 30,000 feet and we don't know what we don't know. You got to rely on your team to up channel information. You used the surgeon example. If somebody holds back from sharing something with the leader, but the whole thing is critical thinking skills and then being all-in enough to get a hold of the leader and say, “I have to tell you something.”
Tracey, I'd like to add something to that. A lot of this comes from the history of the machine model of an organization where the leadership was ultimately charged with command and control. A term that, at the time, was appropriately borrowed from the military. If you think of the well-oiled machine corporation and the CEO in charge of command and control, the buck stops with the CEO when it comes to efficiency, capital efficiency, financial efficiency, and all of those things.
Our argument would be, “Yes, that's important but we've developed a lot of tools, mechanisms, and ways of increasing efficiency that happens throughout the organization without that critical command and control from the single, alone person at the top.” The challenge, though, is that if you don't innovate, you die. It's a lot harder to innovate as an I, alone leader, than as a leader as a team sport leader. You may be fine running that command and control organization, and if you're hitting your numbers, if the metrics all line-up, you're in good shape. Two weeks later, some competitor out-innovates you and you're in trouble next quarter.
You may be able to command and control by yourself and that may feel a little bit lonely, particularly if you're not hitting the numbers but when it comes to innovation, you can't do that alone. That's unusual. Out here in Silicon Valley, we've got some iconic innovators who created namely the largest corporation in the history of the planet in Apple. That was a single, iconic innovator but he did not do it alone. If he were alive today, he would be the first to admit that. innovation is absolutely a team sport. Leaders have to always be thinking about innovation.
I love that you talked about the role is efficiency but then you have to execute it. I'm sure, we'll tease that out as we get down the vision. Gentlemen, thank you for that input and that clarity on true leadership and how they relate to loneliness. The next thing that my dad talked about was weariness. When you're out there and you're innovating and thinking, I'm sure Steve Jobs and all those guys got tired every now and then. What do you recommend? Can you talk to me about weariness and how leaders stay replenished at the top of their game so they can be there for their teams? What are your recommendations or insights on that?
I'll start this one off with the idea that in some respects, your biggest job as a leader is to get the most from the energy in the room? If you, individually, are feeling flummoxed, tired, and you don't know the answer, step away from the mirror. Go into work thinking about, how are they doing? What can I do to get the most out of the people around me, to let them bring more energy into the room so that I can tap that energy, not feeling the burden on my shoulders but saying we're all in this together? We're going to do more to figure this out together than any single one of us could do anyway. One way we like to describe that is the leader can always ask a question and get an answer to the question that he or she asks. The bigger challenge is what you should be shooting for, it’s finding answers to the questions that you don't even know to ask. That's where the energy in the room turns you on. It gets you thinking, “I hadn't thought of that.” Those moments are when you get re-energized.
Sometimes, when I felt the weariness or in a slump is when I'm not taking in other people's input, or I'm not getting those questions I don't know how to ask. Somebody then will say something and all of a sudden, that innovation energy, your open mind, and those previously unrecognized assumptions kicks in. Anything else on the weariness, getting replenished, and re-energized?
Would you like a real-life example?
I would love one, please.
I was a department chairman and had twelve faculty members. One day, a notice arrived from the dean's office that our group, which was one of many groups in the Sloan School, had extraordinarily high telephone charges, way out of line. A lot of these were expensive overseas calls. The note from the dean said, “Find out what's going on because this is unacceptable.” The provost is on my neck because phone expenses are a big deal. What I was confronted with was finding out from those twelve people who were over because I had all the individual data, and then seeing each of them to see what was going on.
Something I had learned from my mentors, Douglas McGregor and others, the people who have to deal with control overruns or mistakes are the people who made them, not the boss. It occurred to me that what I should do with this list of fifteen people is to pretend I didn't see it, tell my secretary to send a note from me saying, “Our department has phone overruns. My secretary is giving each of you your own data. I would like you to look at it. Let's meet next week and see what you've come up with on your own phone charges. I have not seen them. I don't want to talk to you about your overruns. I want you to look at them and see what you come up with.”
It's a good example of what Peter is talking about, though I've never thought of that before. I started getting memos back during the week from faculty members. Some of whom said, “My things are completely within the norm, etc.” A couple of people said, “Sorry, I was making some personal calls. That won't happen again. I should have put this on a research project.” One memo said, “Ed, I'm glad you brought this to my attention because I didn't realize that one of my graduate students, who is an Indian, was coming into the office every night calling his family in India.” There’s no way I would have covered that. He might have denied it if I had confronted him with, “What's wrong with your phone calls?”
He didn't know the student was doing that. That's a brilliant example. Ed, you hit the nail on the head. A lot of times with leadership, people are like, “It's like adult babysitting.” No, not if you let the team members come in on the problem resolution and fix it. I love that example.
It did require some innovation because I was tempted to say, “I got the data. I'll talk to each of them.” That's the normal process. I had to invent my way out of how do I get them involved without my being on the hook.
Humble Inquiry: Innovation is absolutely a team sport. Leaders have to always be thinking about innovation.
Without you being the blackhat.
It’s in relation to what Peter is talking about. Things surface from them that you never knew about.
That's the sage wisdom for leaders out there. Get them involved in the problem resolution, let them figure it out. You even got some apologies that it won't happen again. You don't get those when it's coming down looking for who did what? That's a great real-world illustration. Anything else on weariness you'd like to recap with? I know we teased this one apart pretty good.
I want to make one general point about control systems because all control systems make this mistake. They gather the data about what are the overruns or inventory problems down in the organization, give them to the head of accounting who gives it to the head of the line organization. The head of the line organization then is stuck with having to find out what's going on. My mentor, Douglas McGregor, always said, “No. Once the person, the accountant, discovers anything that's out of line in a well-functioning system, he or she would immediately give that data to the people who had the overrun.” Let’s say you've got a problem. Your boss doesn't yet know about it, what's going on here. A good control system is to give instant feedback rather than sending stuff up the line.
We learned that in the military. Keep that stuff done at the lowest level. Leaders can't be looking forward if they're checking off papers to see what kind of mistake. The third point my dad talks about is abandonment. Abandonment has that negative connotation, fear of abandonment. What my dad was talking about an abandonment was that we need to control our minds and thoughts and stay focused on what we ought and need to focus on, rather than what we want and like. I read this book when I was growing up, it said, “Sacred cows make the best burgers.” I always think about that because I always think, “I have my pet projects and I have the things that I like but is that what I need to be thinking about as a leader?” Can you speak into that, what abandonment would mean for leadership and the importance of it?
I'll take one quick angle on it, Ed and I suspect you’ll want to build on that. Ed shared that the definition of leadership is wanting to do something new and better. We also like to think of leadership as that process of doing something new and better, not the role, the attribute, or the action of a leader. It's a process that multiple people are engaged with and we make a distinction in the Humble Leadership in a model of four levels of relationship. The critical levels of a relationship are the two middle ones where what we call level one relationship is transactional. You're maintaining your role, performing your function, staying in your lane, and you are transacting decisions and business with other people adjacent to you. That's a typical model of work relationships, particularly in a transactional industry.
Level two relationship, which we consider as the critical one for leaders to be thinking about. It’s one that's based on personal connections, built on openness and trust. If you define your work, and your work success around those critical level two relationships, key connections with people built on openness and trust, you're not alone. You're not abandoned. You are providing a vital side of a relationship with somebody else and they're providing that vital energy back to you. Most successful leadership situations, we believe, are where there are those interwoven level two relationships highly characterized by openness and trust. Nobody is alone and abandoned because you're in a relationship. You have to maintain your side and they have to maintain their side.
I’m thinking of examples. We’re adding the point that Peter brought to the party in our joint writing is a discussion of why we feel in organizations that there has to be a professional distance between the boss and the direct report. There is a tradition in the transactional model of leadership that there shouldn't be nepotism or favoritism. They should be apart. What level two says is, “No, that's exactly wrong.” That produces all of those symptoms that your father talked about. How do you collapse professional distance? That’s another way of asking the question.
My best example there comes from a different kind of loneliness, the loneliness of the surgeon in the OR, who is totally accountable for life, and death, who is totally dependent on 3 or 4 other people. If they make mistakes or incompetent, the patient dies, but the surgeon gets blamed. I have a son-in-law who does difficult back operations that sometimes take 5 to 6 hours. When I asked him how he builds a team he said, “I need competent people in each of the major areas. When I've got the names, I take them out to lunch.”
That's a simplistic and profound insight. He collapses what Peter is talking about in the simplest possible way. We break bread together and bosses should always do that. The Japanese are good at it. They go out drinking together and that's not a casual thing. It's necessary. They’re functioning. The way you deal with that sense of abandonment is not to let it happen in the first place. Get with your direct reports, get to know them, and have lunch with them.
The other alchemy is that it has to be genuine. We're sensitive to artificiality. We were joking that there are many comics, movies, and TV shows that have played on this issue of insincerity and a lack of genuineness at work. It's hilarious because it's common and we all see it immediately. We can make great humor out of that but if you're deciding as a leader and you're going to try to build those relationships, it's got to be in your heart. It can't be a checklist. It can’t just be part of the agenda. It has to be something that's truly in your heart.
We call that in the military, Mandatory Fun. You guys get together and that'll improve camaraderie. It won't. We're completely divided. If it's real and genuine, it's also a great data point and to your point about the surgeon to check in and make sure everybody's all in about it. You can look across the street or table eyeball to eyeball and go, “These are the values and these are important.” You can look at that person and go, “They’re right there with me,” and we're all collectively pushing towards the same thing.
That raises one of the programmatic things that we sometimes talk about. Let’s say you've got a six meeting day in front of you. You've got back to back one-hour meetings, tons on the agenda, and you’ve got to get this stuff done. It's a highly content-rich day in front of you. Is there a way that you can take five minutes to do an open no agenda content free check-in with people like a temperature check? People are doing this. This is a 21st century almost obligatory style of management that people are getting. This is not new. I do think it's penetrating. People are getting the picture that you need to do those check-ins. It's tough because the content is always fighting against context at work and you’ve got to spend more time on context and a little less time on content.
Anything else that you guys wanted to pull up? You're right that it is there. I was always told in the motivational, the more emotive type things. We'd have this little gas tank and it was your emotional fuel tank. Before you start anything, are you empty? Are you full or are you somewhere in between? No matter what, I say until I know where your head and heart are at you may not hear a word that's being said in the rich context if I'm not aware of something that's distracting you, pulling away on you, or concerning you.
There is an important qualification for what you said. That is the tank is the individual. The temptation to say, “It's up to me,” is tremendous and that's a mistake. It's not up to you. Don't think in terms of the tank being you, but the energy source being the whole team. Ask the question, “How full is our team tank?” The earlier point that Peter made when I'm tired, maybe the best thing is for me to go find someone who's energized to say, “What are you up to?”
My dad would always do that. He was like, “If you're down, meet great people and read great books,” and you come back up. That's excellent insight. Lastly, my dad talked about vision. You're out in California where you've got a lot of visionaries out there and you talked about some of them. He said with vision, you have to have this extra part of your brain or something like that gift, even giftedness, but he talked about seeing what needs to be done and being able to build a team to execute it. How do you see the role of vision coming into building the teams and getting the most out of people?
The whole business of leadership is vision is unnecessarily linked to that something that happens at the top. Rather than vision is something that can happen anywhere and anytime around any of the business processes. If you want some hook vision from what the top people do, the strategy, the big picture, and the long-range, then say, “Vision is about improvement in the long haul.” For improvement, I'm sitting as a group member in a team and I see people interrupting each other. I point out that maybe we could do better if we wrote things down so we could get a whole thought down and go to the flip chart and write it down. Lo and behold, the group starts working better.
My vision was, “This present process is working. I can think of a better way of doing it. I found a way to make an intervention.” It works. I have done an incredible job of leadership and no one may even notice it. I will be aware of it. I suspect that a lot of what Gerstner did was at that level. It was not sitting down and saying, “What does IBM need to do?” I suspect he hung around and prodded here and there and implemented stuff that was part of something he saw but this whole idea of vision being a thing, it's out there, and you see it is nonsense. We see it historically.
Steve Jobs had a great vision. I know Steve Jobs’ vision because it was quoted to me when I was a consultant there. Wozniak and Jobs had two simple visions. Wozniak said, “I want a computer that kids can use. It's too complicated.” Steve Jobs was alleged to have said, “I want a computer that is going to be fun for yuppies.” You can’t call that a grand vision but for him, it was immediate. Why don't we make the Macintosh fun and easy not only for kids but for all of us? They resisted government contracts and everything that wasn't immediate business fun for a long time. We'll be careful not to escalate this word vision and unrealistic strategic things. Strategy is going to be a group sport too where it has to change frequently.
Peter, anything on vision?
I wanted to add that I do think we find some of these self-managed teams holacracy and those kinds of things to be interesting experiments in how you distribute the responsibility of vision throughout the organization. The leadership's role is to be the great assimilator but the great insights and vision are likely to come out of these groups that roll up their sleeves and focus on something. The idea that's interesting with holacracy is that it's so organic. It's allowed to happen anywhere in the organization based on passion or a predilection to focus on something. I'm more interested in the great assimilator than the great visionary because the assimilator is likely to end up with a bigger bucket to work with than the one that the great visionary makes.
Vision should mean here and now. What I see now that needs to be fixed that launches where we're going in a few years.
I love that you pulled vision down to almost the beauty of the tactical, the here and now, and there are things we can do. Sometimes we get the BHAG, the Big Hairy Audacious Goal. We’ve got a lot of stuff here and now. You gave that example with IBM. We may not need to reinvent everything. If we can start looking at different things and getting innovative along the way, we can get there. I love how you guys broke down vision.
I gave you a short critique of how our control systems mess up. The same thing happens with accountability. If we want leadership, innovation, and doing better things to be distributed, because reality distributes it that way, we have to find a different way of assigning rewards in accountability. We can’t take all the innovation of the group, and say that the leader did it all. Find a way not to give all the rewards to the heads of groups. That's a deeply embedded problem in our reward systems. We don't know how to distribute rewards and accountability, according to where it exists and comes up.
Humble Inquiry: A good control system is to give instant feedback rather than sending stuff up the line.
Thank you for that.
Tracey, don't get us started on some of the cultural underpinnings discussions.
We’ll come back for part two. I love that.
We spend a lot of time talking about that but we're at a unique place as the US now struggling with that issue of that abject rugged individualism versus a more collective and holistic way to manage organizations. We're struggling with that.
Can we talk about the book, Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling? I know it came out in 2013 but you are doing a rewrite. Is this an updated edition of it?
It’s improved.
Can you tell me a little bit about what you're putting into that or what you've seen over the few years that you're adding to it?
The short answer to that is refresh stories where we've refined it because a lot of it's a sequence of stories and examples. There's a lot of refinement to that. I alluded to the relationship model, the four-layer model that was not in the original book that is in this. It's been implicit for Ed for a long time. It's more forcefully argued in the new Humble Inquiry book
We heard the first two so you go into the other two in that book.
Let me elaborate on one point. Peter didn't bring it up, though, it's his point. In the first edition of Humble Inquiry, my goal was to illustrate how to inquire in order to build a better relationship and that's still there. However, when we start to talk about what's happening years later, this is the thing that Peter brought to the story. We need a humble inquiry to figure out what's even going on because the context has become credibly muddy with fake facts and fake truth. We don't know what reality is. For me, the biggest new part of this book is to say we need a humble inquiry to find out where we're at and what's going on. We can't second guess it. It’s too complex and too muddy.
Do you drill more into that? I didn't read the first edition.
It's counterposed against our obsession with data and analytics. All of that stuff is important and most business decisions are going to be based on that. If we don't step back every once in a while and ask ourselves, “What's going on?” That's what the Humble Inquiry is about, getting to that level of genuine curiosity so that we don't get focused on the data, focused on the content that we missed the context.
Do you go into a series of sense-making strategies or tools or diagnostics about how to unpack different issues?
Yes, and not solely. That's what we add to what was already there. There’s another example of the earlier point of where we, as a team, ended up with a brand-new point that never occurred to me that resulted from beginning to work together. It has become a more important part of the book. I was all about helping how to build relationships. At that time, that was the bigger issue. The bigger issue is, “What the hell is going on?” I wasn't aware of that as to where Humble Inquiry can help until we started to work on it together.
That's exciting for you both. As somebody who's close to her father and unpacking leadership stuff, none of us is as smart as all of us. I'm excited at the pairing you teach. You've researched innovation. I love that, Ed, you got to this awakening, “Here's Peter. Together, we can create that.” That's exciting for the stage of what's going on.
I'm grateful that Peter arrived at this on his own, too. I asked if Peter would come along and he said, “Let's work on this together.”
Do you address this, when people are trying to get to the root cause and look at the data but unpack and get to, “What are we trying to solve here? What is it?” Do you also talk about the timing? A lot of it is incendiary out there, “What do you think? You got to make a decision right now.” I remember reading Stephen Samples’ book, The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership, and he's like, “Ninety-nine percent of what you get asked, you don't have to make this decision now. There is a time when you're going to have to make a decision.” You've heard that analysis paralysis, do you unpack that at all?
By implications, I don’t think we tackle time. Culturally, we point out over and over again that the US is a short time culture where we measure things by the minute, by the hour, by the quarter. That’s often a mistake because we don't know enough to know what to do immediately. We might need to acquire some more before we make a decision. The cultural analysis fits that very much.
That's the most important thing. I don't think we realized that because we are in such that, “Multiple-choice, pick the right answer. It is your time. I need a response now. The cameras are coming.” You’re making people aware of that. Get the data. Take your time unless you have to respond to it. By having that, it will be a huge awakening for people out there that are in the process of decision making.
It leads to a central point that we haven't brought up. People do keep pushing us to say, “Leadership is all distributed.” Nevertheless, what should the guy who's at the top be doing? Big question. What should be that person's central, most powerful trait or skill? I have an answer to that. That person has to be situationally aware. The most important thing for the guy or gal at the top is not to have the formula to say, “What's going on right now in this time, in this situation with this group?” When I figured that out, what do I do? Situational awareness is a concept that came out of the safety stuff. The safety people now preach that as essential. It's even more essential for leadership.
Ed, you'd like this. When I was in the Air Force, I was in safety and QA. I was on a fighter jet. You had to have a big safety. That was one of the things we call it SA, Situational Awareness. In other words, if you're up in a dogfight, you may see the bogey in front of you, but you have to be aware of where everybody else is around you to include where the earth is. If somebody did something where they were focused on one thing, they missed all the other contexts around and we're like, “That was some poor SA.” That's cool that you're bringing that because it is highly contextualized. There are many different pieces that you have to get and look at. I love that you're pulling SA in.
If I'm picking a leader, if I'm the board, that's the most important thing I would be looking for.
That's a great insight.
In relation to that, back to the subtitle tagline for the Humble Inquiry book, because a lot of it is about this distinction between telling and asking. You were describing that situation where you're being asked something, but you're being told something.
Humble Inquiry: Vision should mean here and now—what I see now that needs to be fixed that launches where we're going in a few years.
It’s like a parenting thing, “I'd like you, kids, to make your bed.” They finally look at you and go, “You're telling us, right?”
That’s part of that management tradition, that command and control mentality. We shouldn't be asking questions that we don't know the answer to, because then we're revealing our ignorance. Our work is trying to turn that upside down and say, “No.” You're going to become much better informed, much more situationally aware if you do reveal your ignorance. You don't want to show weakness necessarily. People don't always seize on weaknesses in a negative way. That's what Brené Brown has made her whole vulnerability argument about. Oftentimes, that invites more collaboration than aggression. Because you show vulnerability, it doesn't mean it's going to be met with aggression and negative energy. It’s much to the opposite.
I completely agree. There's core expertise. They expect you to be knowledgeable. As you brought out, in the modern-day world, stuff changes quickly. From regulatory, from the world, we're all interconnected. What seems so cut and dry years ago, you can get up and look and turn on the TV the next day and, as we saw in the pandemic, everything's completely changed. Core expert, you want to be competent, but nobody can possibly know it all. I know what I know right now and I'm trying to learn, trying to surround myself with people, but we got to ask questions as leaders and keep digging.
There are no answers. There are only adaptive moves.
I wrote that down from one of your videos. I love that because that was when my PhD was in resiliency, self-efficacy, and adaptive capacity. I'm like, “There is no fight or flight. You have to learn to adapt.” That's beautiful. I love that. They have two great, incredible, well-learned men on the subject. Is there anything else you would like to leave with our group of people reading?
Get to know the people around you. We say it and we don’t do it. We keep the distance.
You’ll enjoy your work more. We are humans. We are social animals. We don't like loneliness, weariness, and isolation. We felt like that.
We’re not coming for that. We heard that point loud and clear. I truly appreciate that. Gentlemen, where can people that are reading find out more about you, get your books? How can they find out about the new book coming out? I know you guys are all over YouTube, published papers, all that stuff. What's the best way to connect with you both?
Our website, OCLI.org, which is the Organizational Culture and Leadership Institute. That has a forum where you can contact us. It has information. It would take me too much time to be continually updating that site. We all have that problem. There's not enough time in any day to keep your website fully current.
You, too. That’s good to know. I feel better. Thank you.
That's an easy way to do it. My email is Peter@OCLI.org if people want to reach out directly.
I learned early on a principle from my PhD mentor who said, “If you can't write it, you don't know it.” I have always been dedicated to the written word. People may say, “Where are the workshops? Where the how-tos?” I say, “We're not ready to tell you. We can write about it and explain it and hope you get it.” That's where I still feel we are. Many of the other leadership people have the formula for the programs and stuff. That doesn't get you anywhere in today's world.
That's an interesting insight, Ed. Thank you for sharing.
Don’t be afraid to read what we write.
This is an art of the Corporate Culture Survival Guide. We wanted to create this image of the circle of culture, change, and leadership. To Ed's point, it's not a program. It's not a linear progression. It's a continuous wave-like cycle of things that are intricately interwoven. Culture change and leadership all happen together iteratively or adaptively. Think about the circle and the wave, not about the line or the formula.
Thank you for sharing that. Gentlemen, I appreciate your insights. You're taking the time from your decades of knowledge and your real-world experiences. I love it when we combine the theory with the application. It doesn't get any better than that. Thank you both for your transparency and for your time spent with us. I hope everything goes good in California. I hope you're safe from the fires. We're all out of this soon. Say hello to your puppies, Peter. I’ll say hello to mine.
Before you cut out, I have a question for you.
Go right ahead.
Have you read Friendly Fire?
I have not read Friendly Fire.
It’s by a man by the name Snook. It's the story of what happened when two fighters shot down the UN helicopter with the twenty UN diplomats. It is the most exciting analysis of efforts to be situationally aware. Despite that, it was a major tragedy.
It was. Ed, I did not know that book was out. I was deployed to Turkey. Those were our jets that that happened. Those are two of our pilots.
You must read that book.
That was when I was in the Air Force. I knew that. I remember when they landed. I remember their faces when they found out what happened. They had missed ID the two choppers.
Humble Inquiry: Humble Inquiry is about getting to that level of genuine curiosity so that we don't get focused on the data and on the content that we miss the context.
Which is one of a dozen factors that all work together, and that’s what that book, Friendly Fire, talks about.
Thank you for that book recommendation. I will check into that. Gentlemen, thank you.
I admire you for having been a fighter pilot.
I worked on it. I was an aircraft maintenance officer. They didn't let ladies fly back then, but they do now.
It still counts.
I did because they couldn't have flown if I weren't out there with my maintenance guys. They were wonderful.
It’s a team sport.
Yes. It was awesome.
How many pilots worry about, “How good is my maintenance crew?”
They were good to us because they knew we build on those jets and make sure they had as many landings as they did take off. That's what they wanted. They wanted that to be equal.
Are you working on aircraft carriers as well?
No. I was in the Air Force. I worked on the F-15s and F-16s. At that point, Operation Northern Watch deployed out to Turkey after the first Gulf War for that. We were out there when that happened.
What an exciting time it must have been.
The military was a beautiful place to learn leadership. I've had a lot of great real-world opportunities out of that. I get to keep writing and researching and talking to people like you. It doesn't get any more tremendous than that.
I hope you do write from the point of view of what it's like to be a maintenance person.
I hadn't thought of that.
It's a big mystery. We all depend on it. We all fly. We know practically nothing about that occupation.
Thank you for that. I'm sitting there on airplanes. If I hear what's going on, people are talking around, I'm like, “This is what's going on. It's okay. Stop complaining. We need to stay on the ground until this gets sorted out.” Thanks, Ed. I hadn't thought about that.
It would be an important contribution to this age of flying.
Gentlemen, thank you again. To our fans out there, if you like what you learned, please click on the share. Share this with people. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Do us the honor of a rating or give us a comment, we'd love to answer. If you got any questions for Peter or Ed, we’ll forward it to you. Thank you for being part of our show and keep on paying the price of leadership.
I enjoyed the conversation, Tracey.
Thank you.
Important Links:
YouTube - Ed Schein
About Ed Schein
Ed Schein is Professor Emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan School of Management. He was educated at the University of Chicago, Stanford University, and Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology. He worked at the Walter Reed Institute of Research for four years and then joined MIT, where he taught until 2005. He has published extensively-- Organizational Psychology, 3d Ed. (1980), Process Consultation Revisited (1999), career dynamics (Career Anchors, 4th ed. With John Van Maanen, 2013), Organizational Culture and Leadership, 4th Ed. (2010), The Corporate Culture Survival Guide, 2d Ed., (2009), a cultural analysis of Singapore's economic miracle (Strategic Pragmatism, 1996), and Digital Equipment Corp.'s rise and fall (DEC is Dead; Long Live DEC, 2003).
In 2009 he published Helping, a book on the general theory and practice of giving and receiving help followed in 2013 by Humble Inquiry which explores why helping is so difficult in western culture, and which won the 2013 business book of the year award from the Dept. of Leadership of the University of San Diego. He has just released Humble Consulting which revises the whole model of how to consult and coach and is currently working with his son Peter on Humble Leadership (2018) which challenges our current theories of leadership and management.
He continues to consult with various local and international organizations on a variety of organizational culture and career development issues, with special emphasis on safety and quality in health care, the nuclear energy industry, and the US Forest Service. An important focus of this new consulting is to focus on the interaction of occupational/organizational subcultures and how they interact with career anchors to determine the effectiveness and safety of organizations.
He is the 2009 recipient of the Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner Award of the Academy of Management, the 2012 recipient of the Life Time Achievement Award from the International Leadership Association, the 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award in Organization Development from the International OD Network, and has an Honorary Doctorate from the IEDC Bled School of Management in Slovenia.
About Peter Schein
Peter Schein is a strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. He provides help to start-ups and expansion-phase technology companies.
Peter’s expertise draws on over twenty years of industry experience in marketing and corporate development at technology pioneers. In his early career he developed new products and services at Pacific Bell and Apple Computer, Inc. (including eWorld and Newton). He led product marketing efforts at Silicon Graphics Inc., Concentric Network Corporation (XO Communications), and Packeteer (BlueCoat). He developed a deep experience base and passion for internet infrastructure as the Web era dawned in the mid-1990s.
Thereafter, Peter spent eleven years in corporate development and product strategy at Sun Microsystems. At Sun, Peter led numerous minority equity investments in mission-critical technology ecosystems. He drove acquisitions of technology innovators that developed into multi-million dollar product lines at Sun. Through these experiences developing new strategies organically and merging smaller entities into a large company, Peter developed a keen focus on the underlying organizational culture challenges that growth engenders in innovation-driven enterprises.
Peter was educated at Stanford University (BA Social Anthropology, Honors and Distinction) and Northwestern University (Kellogg MBA, Marketing and Information Management, Top Student in Information Management), and the USC Marshall School of Business Center For Effective Organizations (HCEO Certificate, 2017).