Edgar Schein Quotes

Most of my important lessons about life have come from recognizing how others from a different culture view things.

we do not think and talk about what we see; we see what we are able to think and talk about.

Questions are taken for granted rather than given a starring role in the human drama. Yet all my teaching and consulting experience has taught me that what builds a relationship, what solves problems, what moves things forward is asking the right questions.

we must become better at asking and do less telling in a culture that overvalues telling. It

Help in the broadest sense is, in fact, one of the most important currencies that flow between members of society because help is one of the main ways of expressing love and other caring emotions that humans express.

When you are giving feedback, try to be descriptive and minimize judgment.

If a client insists on getting a recommendation from you, always give him at least two alternatives so that he still has to make choice.

Organizational analyses that show separate boxes for “culture” and “strategy” are making a fundamental conceptual error. Strategy is an integral part of the culture.

Our wants and needs distort to an unknown degree what we perceive. We block out a great deal of information that is potentially available if it does not fit our needs, expectations, preconceptions, and prejudgments.

we value task accomplishment over relationship building and either are not aware of this cultural bias or, worse, don’t care and don’t want to be bothered with it.

Telling puts the other person down. It implies that the other person does not already know what I am telling and that the other person ought to know it.

Check out your own emotions and intentions before offering, giving, or receiving help.

Remember that the person requesting your help may feel uncomfortable, so make sure to ask what the client really wants and how you can best help.

Everything You Say or Do Is an Intervention that Determines the Future of the Relationship

Minimize inappropriate encouragement.

Leadership” is wanting to do something new and better, and getting others to go along.

When our true intentions are something other than providing help, such as getting a job done or beating someone in a game, we are most prone to falling into the traps described throughout this book.

In building the helping relationship, encouragement—via positive reinforcement—certainly seems appropriate. But if it is not sensitively handled, such encouragement can quickly become patronizing and insulting. My

Telling is only an investment if you know for sure that what you are telling is of value to the other person. That is why it is safest to tell only if you have been asked, rather than arrogantly deciding on your own to tell somebody something.

Gratuitous telling betrays three kinds of arrogance: (1) that you think you know more than the person you’re telling, (2) that your knowledge is the correct knowledge, and (3) that you have the right to structure other people’s experience for them.

Share your helping problem. More often than I care to admit I have found that when I was supposed to be helping someone, I suddenly did not know what to do next. When this happens, the best thing to do is to say to the client, “At this point I am stuck—I don’t know what to do next to be helpful.

The point is that no matter what you do or don’t do, you are sending signals; you are intervening in the situation and therefore need to be mindful of that reality. Unless you are invisible you cannot help but communicate, so your choice of communication should be based on what kind of intervention you intend.

The dilemma in U.S. culture is that we don’t really distinguish what I am defining as Humble Inquiry carefully enough from leading questions, rhetorical questions, embarrassing questions, or statements in the form of questions—such as journalists seem to love— which are deliberately provocative and intended to put you down.

We know that negative reinforcement or punishment works well for behavior that should be eliminated. And we know from feedback theory that the best kind of feedback is descriptive because the client can then make the evaluation. These are valid guidelines but they don’t solve some of the subtle issues that can arise in the relationship.

Toyota wasn’t really worried that it would give away its “secret sauce.” Toyota’s competitive advantage rested firmly in its proprietary, complex, and often unspoken processes. In hindsight, Ernie Schaefer, a longtime GM manager who toured the Toyota plant, told NPR’s This American Life that he realized that there were no special secrets to see on the manufacturing floors. “You know, they never prohibited us from walking through the plant, understanding, even asking questions of some of their key people,” Schaefer said. “I’ve often puzzled over that, why they did that. And I think they recognized we were asking the wrong questions. We didn’t understand this bigger picture.” It’s no surprise, really. Processes are often hard to see—they’re a combination of both formal, defined, and documented steps and expectations and informal, habitual routines or ways of working that have evolved over time. But they matter profoundly. As MIT’s Edgar Schein has explored and discussed, processes are a critical part of the unspoken culture of an organization. 1 They enforce “this is what matters most to us.” Processes are intangible; they belong to the company. They emerge from hundreds and hundreds of small decisions about how to solve a problem. They’re critical to strategy, but they also can’t easily be copied. Pixar Animation Studios, too, has openly shared its creative process with the world. Pixar’s longtime president Ed Catmull has literally written the book on how the digital film company fosters collective creativity2—there are fixed processes about how a movie idea is generated, critiqued, improved, and perfected. Yet Pixar’s competitors have yet to equal Pixar’s successes. Like Toyota, Southern New Hampshire University has been open with would-be competitors, regularly offering tours and visits to other educational institutions. As President Paul LeBlanc sees it, competition is always possible from well-financed organizations with more powerful brand recognition. But those assets alone aren’t enough to give them a leg up. SNHU has taken years to craft and integrate the right experiences and processes for its students and they would be exceedingly difficult for a would-be competitor to copy. SNHU did not invent all its tactics for recruiting and serving its online students. It borrowed from some of the best practices of the for-profit educational sector. But what it’s done with laser focus is to ensure that all its processes—hundreds and hundreds of individual “this is how we do it” processes—focus specifically on how to best respond to the job students are hiring it for. “We think we have advantages by ‘owning’ these processes internally,” LeBlanc says, “and some of that is tied to our culture and passion for students.

All groups and organizations need to know how they are doing against their goals and periodically need to check to determine whether they are performing in line with their mission. This process involves three areas in which the group needs to achieve consensus leading to cultural dimensions that later drop out of awareness and become basic assumptions. Consensus must be achieved on what to measure, how to measure it, and what to do when corrections are needed. The cultural elements that form around each of these issues often become the primary focus for what newcomers to the organization will be concerned about because such measurements inevitably become linked to how each employee is doing his or her job.

Self-Management If you can read just one book on motivation—yours and others: Dan Pink, Drive If you can read just one book on building new habits: Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit If you can read just one book on harnessing neuroscience for personal change: Dan Siegel, Mindsight If you can read just one book on deep personal change: Lisa Lahey and Bob Kegan, Immunity to Change If you can read just one book on resilience: Seth Godin, The Dip Organizational Change If you can read just one book on how organizational change really works: Chip and Dan Heath, Switch If you can read just two books on understanding that change is a complex system: Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations Dan Pontefract, Flat Army Hear interviews with FREDERIC LALOUX, DAN PONTEFRACT, and JERRY STERNIN at the Great Work Podcast. If you can read just one book on using structure to change behaviours: Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto If you can read just one book on how to amplify the good: Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin and Monique Sternin, The Power of Positive Deviance If you can read just one book on increasing your impact within organizations: Peter Block, Flawless Consulting Other Cool Stuff If you can read just one book on being strategic: Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley, Playing to Win If you can read just one book on scaling up your impact: Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao, Scaling Up Excellence If you can read just one book on being more helpful: Edgar Schein, Helping Hear interviews with ROGER MARTIN, BOB SUTTON, and WARREN BERGER at the Great Work Podcast. If you can read just two books on the great questions: Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question Dorothy Strachan, Making Questions Work If you can read just one book on creating learning that sticks: Peter Brown, Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel, Make It Stick If you can read just one book on why you should appreciate and marvel at every day, every moment: Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything If you can read just one book that saves lives while increasing impact: Michael Bungay Stanier, ed., End Malaria (All money goes to Malaria No More; about $400,000 has been raised so far.) IF THERE ARE NO STUPID QUESTIONS, THEN WHAT KIND OF QUESTIONS DO STUPID PEOPLE ASK?

Don’t we all know how to ask questions? Of course we think we know how to ask, but we fail to notice how often even our questions are just another form of telling—rhetorical or just testing whether what we think is right. We are biased toward telling instead of asking because we live in a pragmatic, problem-solving culture in which knowing things and telling others what we know is valued.

Though helping is a common social process, it is not the only social process. Our relationships with others have many other functions. In order to offer, give, and receive help effectively, we also need the ability to shift from whatever else we were doing and adopt a readiness to help or be helped. It is part of our social training to be prepared to help and to offer help when the ongoing situation suddenly makes helping an imperative or at least an option. But this impulse to help or seek help can run counter to what else is going on.

In airplane crashes and chemical industry accidents, in the infrequent but serious nuclear plant accidents, in the NASA Challenger and Columbia disasters, and in the British Petroleum gulf spill, a common finding is that lower-ranking employees had information that would have prevented or lessened the consequences of the accident, but either it was not passed up to higher levels, or it was ignored, or it was overridden. When I talk to senior managers, they always assure me that they are open, that they want to hear from their subordinates, and that they take the information seriously. However, when I talk to the subordinates in those same organizations, they tell me either they do not feel safe bringing bad news to their bosses or they’ve tried but never got any response or even acknowledgment, so they concluded that their input wasn’t welcome and gave up. Shockingly often, they settled for risky alternatives rather than upset their bosses with potentially bad news. When I look at what goes on in hospitals, in operating rooms, and in the health care system generally, I find the same problems of communication exist and that patients frequently pay the price. Nurses and technicians do not feel safe bringing negative information to doctors or correcting a doctor who is about to make a mistake. Doctors will argue that if the others were “professionals” they would speak up, but in many a hospital the nurses will tell you that doctors feel free to yell at nurses in a punishing way, which creates a climate where nurses will certainly not speak up. Doctors engage patients in one-way conversations in which they ask only enough questions to make a diagnosis and sometimes make misdiagnoses because they don’t ask enough questions before they begin to tell patients what they should do.

we know intuitively and from experience that we work better in a complex interdependent task with someone we know and trust, but we are not prepared to spend the effort, time, and money to ensure that such relationships are built. We value such relationships when they are built as part of the work itself, as in military operations where soldiers form intense personal relationships with their buddies. We admire the loyalty to each other and the heroism that is displayed on behalf of someone with whom one has a relationship, but when we see such deep relationships in a business organization, we consider it unusual. And programs for team building are often the first things cut in the budget when cost issues arise. The

Saying to oneself that one should ask more and tell less does not solve the problem of building a relationship of mutual trust. The underlying attitude of competitive one-upmanship will leak out if it is there. Humble Inquiry starts with the attitude and is then supported by our choice of questions. The more we remain curious about the other person rather than letting our own expectations and preconceptions creep in, the better our chances are of staying in the right questioning mode. We have to learn that diagnostic and confrontational questions come very naturally and easily, just as telling comes naturally and easily. It takes some discipline and practice to access one’s ignorance, to stay focused on the other person.

A key characteristic of the engineering culture is that the individual engineer’s commitment is to technical challenge rather than to a given company. There is no intrinsic loyalty to an employer as such. An employer is good only for providing the sandbox in which to play. If there is no challenge or if resources fail to be provided, the engineer will seek employment elsewhere. In the engineering culture, people, organization, and bureaucracy are constraints to be overcome. In the ideal organization everything is automated so that people cannot screw it up. There is a joke that says it all. A plant is being managed by one man and one dog. It is the job of the man to feed the dog, and it is the job of the dog to keep the man from touching the equipment. Or, as two Boeing engineers were overheard to say during a landing at Seattle, “What a waste it is to have those people in the cockpit when the plane could land itself perfectly well.” Just as there is no loyalty to an employer, there is no loyalty to the customer. As we will see later, if trade-offs had to be made between building the next generation of “fun” computers and meeting the needs of “dumb” customers who wanted turnkey products, the engineers at DEC always opted for technological advancement and paid attention only to those customers who provided a technical challenge.

Humble Inquiry is the skill and the art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not already know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person.

We tend to think we can separate strategy from culture, but we fail to notice that in most organizations strategic thinking is deeply colored by tacit assumptions about who they are and what their mission is. ~ Edgar Schein, professor MIT Sloan School of Management

Doctors engage patients in one-way conversations in which they ask only enough questions to make a diagnosis and sometimes make misdiagnoses because they don’t ask enough questions before they begin to tell patients what they should do.

The answer runs counter to some important aspects of U.S. culture— we must become better at asking and do less telling in a culture that overvalues telling. It has always bothered me how even ordinary conversations tend to be defined by what we tell rather than by what we ask.

How does one produce a climate in which people will speak up, bring up information that is safety related, and even correct superiors or those of higher status when they are about to make a mistake?

The leader of the future will be a person who can lead and follow, be central and marginal, be hierarchically above and below, be individualistic and a team player, and above all, be a perpetual learner. – Edgar H. Schein

What are you working on?” Because Ken was genuinely interested, the pair would end up in a long conversation that would be satisfying both technically and personally. Even when the company had over 100,000

Edgar Schein has said, learning only occurs when “survival anxiety” becomes greater than “learning anxiety.

Trust in the context of a conversation is believing that the other person will acknowledge me, not take advantage of me, not embarrass or humiliate me, tell me the truth, and, in the broader context, not cheat me, work on my behalf, and support the goals we have agreed to.

When we don’t get acknowledgment or feel that we are giving more than we are getting out of conversations or feel talked down to, we become anxious, disrespected, and humiliated. Humble

What we choose to ask, when we ask, what our underlying attitude is as we ask—all are key to relationship building, to communication, and to task performance.

The world is becoming more technologically complex, interdependent, and culturally diverse, which makes the building of relationships more and more necessary to get things accomplished and, at the same time, more difficult. Relationships are the key to good communication; good communication is the key to successful task accomplishment; and Humble Inquiry, based on Here-and-now Humility, is the key to good relationships.

Ultimately the purpose of Humble Inquiry is to build relationships that lead to trust which, in turn, leads to better communication and collaboration.

The world is becoming more technologically complex, interdependent, and culturally diverse, which makes the building of relationships more and more necessary to get things accomplished and, at the same time, more difficult. Relationships are the key to good communication; good communication is the key to successful task accomplishment; and Humble Inquiry, based on Here-and-now Humility, is the key to good relationships. Increasingly,

Humble Inquiry is the fine art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not already know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person.

About this book In this book I will first define and explain what I mean by Humble Inquiry in Chapter 1. To fully understand humility, it is helpful to differentiate three kinds of humility: 1) the humility that we feel around elders and dignitaries; 2) the humility that we feel in the presence of those who awe us with their achievements; and 3) Here-and-now Humility, which results from our being dependent from time to time on someone else in order to accomplish a task that we are committed to. This will strike some readers as academic hairsplitting, but it is the recognition of this third type of humility that is the key to Humble Inquiry and to the building of positive relationships.

Finally, in Chapter 7, I provide some suggestions for how we can increase our ability and desire to engage in more Humble Inquiry.

How Does Asking Build Relationships?

We also know how important telling is from our desire in most conversations to get to the point. When we are listening to someone and don’t see where it is going, we ask, “So what is your point?” We expect conversations to get to a conclusion, which is reached by telling something, not by asking more open-ended questions.

By asking a diagnostic question instead of continuing to encourage the unfolding of the client’s story, you are taking charge of the direction of the conversation and should, therefore, consider whether or not this is desirable. The main issue is whether this steering is in the interest of actual problem-solving and helping, or simply indulging your curiosity in a way that may not be helpful.

What you just said, that you didn’t do anything, made me realize that we don’t need an outside assessment. We just need to begin to act on those behaviors that we observe that no longer make any sense. We have allowed and maybe even encouraged some of the old rituals that we are now calling stodgy. We now need to change our own behavior to signal that many of the old ways of doing things will no longer work. So, with Ed’s help, let’s figure out when we personally have condoned what we don’t like, and in what way we could behave differently in the future.

If you are trying to develop a good relationship and feel the conversation starting to go in the wrong direction, you can humbly ask some version of “Are we OK?” “Is this working?” or “What is happening here?” to explore what might be going wrong and how it might be improved.

The power of this kind of inquiry is that it focuses on the relationship and enables both parties to assess whether their relationship goals are being met.

The more we remain curious about the other person in the current context—before letting our own expectations and preconceptions creep in—the better our chances are of staying in the right questioning mode. The more we take a collaborative helping purpose into our conversations, the more likely we are to improve the relationship.

To be humble, to ask instead of telling, or to personize the relationship to some degree requires a higher level of trust. 6 Yet trust is one of those words that we all think we know the meaning of only to discover that it is also highly situational. In the context of a personal conversation, trust is believing that the other person will acknowledge us and tell us the truth; we trust that other person will not take advantage of us, not embarrass or humiliate us, and, in the broader context, not cheat us. We expect the other person to work on our behalf, support the goals we have agreed to, and be willing to make and keep commitments.

The goal of relationship building should be to reduce each other’s blind spots by each revealing more of our concealed selves.

In the culture of do and tell, the biggest problem is that we cannot really know how valid or appropriate what we tell or are told is to the situation, unless we ask.

The time when Humble Inquiry is often most needed is when we observe something that makes us angry or anxious. It is at those times that we need to slow down, to ask ourselves and others “What’s really going on?” in order to check out the facts. Then we ask ourselves how valid our reactions are before we make a judgment and leap into action.

One might argue then that in order to learn, one must increase survival anxiety, yet this only increases our overall tension because the sources of learning anxiety do not go away. To facilitate new learning, we need to decrease learning anxiety. We need to feel that a new behavior or practice is worthwhile, not threatening, and possible to learn.

and authority but also leads directly to the central issue of being clear about purpose. Do we know why we are having a conversation or what our purpose is in calling a meeting? When you are meeting with a financial advisor or lawyer, visiting your doctor, or being introduced to your new head of marketing, do you ask yourself, What is the purpose of this meeting? Your purpose defines the task and the kind of relationships you want to create. When you come together with another person, you jointly and automatically define the situation: What is it we are here to do? What is each of our roles in the situation? What do we expect of each other? What kind of relationship can this

Consider the question “What’s going on?” contrasted with the question “Everything going okay?” One of these questions is open and one is closed. Why does it matter? Because the second question can be answered with a simple yes or no, so it may not be helpful in building trust and openness.

Humble Inquiry is an attitude that can and should show up in different kinds of situations. The most important aspect of the attitude is situational awareness, assessing in every conversation what your purpose is and how it aligns to the situation at hand. You may just be exploring, having fun, or trying to convince someone of something; you may be trying to build a relationship or decipher what may really be going on if the situation is ambiguous or full of conflict. Everything you do next will be an intervention, even if you just stay in a silent observer mode, and will convey some aspect of your purpose to the other person in the conversation. It will help to learn to become mindful of the different consequences of what you say.

In our pragmatic task-oriented culture we also learn that feelings are a source of distortion and should not influence judgments, and we are often cautioned not to act impulsively on our feelings. But, paradoxically, we may end up acting most on our feelings when we are least aware of them, all the while deluding ourselves that we are carefully acting only on rational assessments. We are often surprisingly oblivious to the influences that our feelings have on our judgments.

When we anticipate all of these potential difficulties, we are experiencing learning anxiety, which often accompanies any unlearning and is the primary source of resistance to change. As long as learning anxiety remains stronger than survival anxiety, we will resist change and avoid learning.

Learning new things can be easy when there is no unlearning involved. But if the new learning has to displace some old habits of telling, two anxieties come into play that have to be managed. First, survival anxiety is the realization that unless we learn the new behavior, we will be at a disadvantage (metaphorically threatened by extinction). Survival anxiety provides the motivation to learn, even if it is mostly nervous energy.

Slowing down is countercultural for many, and varying the pace to coordinate with others may seem a bit inefficient. This is a time to think about survival anxiety and experiment by testing learning anxiety. Is it possible to find a shared work pace that allows for the group to accomplish more? Is it worth it to take a time-out on a project to reflect on what worked and what did not? What may seem to be less efficient may turn out to be more effective.

Keeping up with the content of accelerating change is really hard. Naturally we all share the inclination to focus on what we know, on our industry, or on our area of expertise, where we can be comfortable keeping up with what is changing. Yet trying to keep up with the content of accelerating change may actually be less important than keeping up with the context of accelerating change. There is a real difference between the content question “What changed?” and the context question “What is going on?” or “Why is this happening?

Certainty is the belief and adherence to a point of view, often accompanied by vehement argument. Clarity is being able to see and learn more of what is really going on, the full spectrum of dimensions that emerge as critically important as events unfold.1 We add that seeing with more clarity and abandoning certainty are benefits of a Humble Inquiry attitude.

people in leadership roles particularly need to hone these skills because this art of inquiry becomes more challenging as power and status increase. Our culture emphasizes that leaders set direction and articulate values, all of which predisposes them to tell rather than ask. Yet it is such leaders who may need Humble Inquiry most because intricate interdependent tasks require building positive, open, and trusting relationships above, below, and around them, in order to facilitate safer and more effective task performance and innovation in the face of a perpetually changing context.

Humble Inquiry is the fine art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not already know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in another person.

When a team is trying to solve a tricky problem of what to do next and is stuck among several alternatives, Humble Inquiry means asking, “What else do we need to know?” or “How did we/you arrive at this point?” This is particularly true when others propose something that we oppose or don’t understand.

The Humble Inquiry attitude does not require that humility be a major personality trait of a good inquirer. But even the most confident or arrogant among us will find ourselves humbled by the reality of being dependent on others, and by the sheer complexity of trying to figure out what is important and what is not. We can think of this as Here-and-now Humility, accepting our dependence on each for information sharing and task completion.

The paradox is that the main inhibitor of useful telling is often our own failure to inquire in a way that makes it safe for others to tell us the truth, or at least to share all of what they know.

building relationships between humans is an intricate adaptive process because it requires us to deal simultaneously with our biologically encoded impulses to both compete and cooperate in a cultural context that tends to favor one over the other. In our U.S. culture, it can be especially difficult to build enough trust to feel comfortable asking for help.

Humble Inquiry goes beyond mere questioning and displays an attitude of interest and curiosity that hopefully engenders a similar reciprocal demeanor of curiosity in the other person in the conversation. You can open the door to a relationship through your own Humble Inquiry, yet a relationship only flourishes if that attitude is reciprocated.

another person in that moment. My Here-and-now Humility can by itself trigger a very positive and genuine curiosity and interest in you. You will feel acknowledged, and it is precisely my temporary “subordination” that can create psychological safety for you, which can increase the chances that you will reveal what I need to know to get a task completed and begin to build our relationship constructively.

of something, seduce, or give advice. Your sense of purpose defines your attitude, and knowing why you are in a conversation helps you to clear your head of distractions and irrelevant feelings.

Humble Inquiry is therefore most relevant when you find yourself in a conversation that is initially just transactional but develops into something more personal because one or both of you want it.

Humble Inquiry has the potential to humanize relationships across hierarchical and geographical boundaries, especially when people reveal aspects of themselves that are relatable. Of course each person’s experiences are unique. Yet the events of any story we tell reveal how we perceive things, feel about them, and act on them, which sooner or later provides opportunities for empathizing. Ideally, inquirers remember something similar from their own experiences and can identify with the storyteller. When we share our stories, we provide each other opportunities to discover important similarities in our experiences and our reactions, even as we know that experiences still differ in many ways. We have to listen and understand—this allows us to identify with the storyteller, which in turn prompts us to inquire further.

We see Humble Inquiry as primarily about reducing one’s ignorance, making sense of complicated situations, and in that process, deepening relationships. In contrast, the primary role of helping inquiry is to influence—to teach, coach, counsel, and heal.

Humble Inquiry works only if the attitude behind it includes the desire to really hear what the other person says, to develop an appropriate level of empathy, and to choose a response that shows interest and curiosity.

The key to Humble Inquiry is to recognize when you need to know why something is happening instead of giving in to a knee-jerk impulse that not only keeps you ignorant but also creates an avoidable disconnect.

Learn to see, feel, and curb the impulses to lash out; (2) Learn to make a habit of listening and figuring out what is going on before taking action; and (3) Try harder to hear, to understand, and acknowledge what others are trying to express to you.

Successful conversations that lead to productive Level 2 relationships typically start with the assumptions of sociological equity and balance.

(1) Learn to see, feel, and curb the impulses to lash out; (2) Learn to make a habit of listening and figuring out what is going on before taking action; and (3) Try harder to hear, to understand, and acknowledge what others are trying to express to you.

To understand your connection—and your disconnection—to work on a deeper level, consider the concept of career anchors, introduced by Edgar Schein in the late ’70s. These anchors consist of values, motives, and needs that constitute a way we experience the world of work. Schein asserts that certain motivational, talent, and value self-images, formed through work experience, function to guide and constrain our entire careers. These self-images act, in effect, as career anchors that not only influence career choices but also affect decisions to move from one employer to another, shape what individuals are looking for in life, and color their views of the future.1

working identity involves revisiting the basic assumptions we use to evaluate possibilities. To illustrate what basic assumptions are, it is useful to think of our career choices as a pyramid with three levels (see figure 4-1).4 At the top of the pyramid lies what is most visible, to us and to the outside world: what job we hold in what setting. Dan, for example, was an executive in a high-tech company. One level below are the values and motivating factors that hold constant from job to job and company to company. These are what MIT career specialist Edgar Schein calls our “career anchors,” the competencies, preferences, and work-related values that we would be unwilling to give up if forced to make a choice.5 Dan’s experience has led him to value himself professionally as someone who excels at turnarounds—at making troubled companies healthy. He could perform this role on a smaller or larger scale (for example, big company or small start-up), in an advisory or a hands-on role, and as a manager or an owner, but the constant is that managerial challenge is what excites him. Dan’s turmoil over the offer of a “perfect job” that would have again robbed him of his family time, however, belies a conflict between his professional and personal values that is rooted at a deeper level. In his search, therefore, he has to plumb deeper: He must explore the final, bottom level of the pyramid to understand the basic assumptions—our mental maps about how the world works—that truly drive his behavior.

The top forty or so DEC executives were flown up to Heald Pond, Ken Olsen’s hideaway in Maine,

Edgar Schein, a specialist in organizational culture and former professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, says, “If one wishes to distinguish leadership from management or administration, one can argue that leaders creates and changes culture, while management and administration act within culture.

Barry James Folsom worked at DEC in the early 1980s as manager of the Rainbow (PC) Development Group. Of his time at Digital he says, “Professionally, this was the best time in my life. . . . It was the foundation for me and my career.

Gene Amdahl’s

Waldrop, M. M. 2002. The origins of personal computing. Scientific American, 85–91.

Thus the greatest and fatal flaw was the failure to draw on its intellectual capital

Thus the greatest and fatal flaw was the failure to draw on its intellectual capital. - Gordon Bell

and Tell” and argue that not only do we value telling more than

When we get to know someone personally and can work with him or her on a more personal level, this is Level Two, which is essential for real help to occur. Level Two trust implies that we are willing to make promises and will keep them. Level Two openness implies that with respect to our joint task we will share all relevant information and will not lie to one another.

Building a relationship begins with attitudinal preparation, a conscious process of building the right kind of mind-set.