An organizational development scholar talks about social and organizational therapy, his military service, and his research.
Edgar Schein
Featured Leadership Topics
Influences and Impacts
“It was wonderful. I have nothing but good memories of those two years at Stanford.”
Description of the video:
SCARPINO: I want to ask you about organizational culture. I looked up a list of your clients, which is long and impressive, but, you know, Digital Equipment Corporation, Ciba-Geigy, Apple, Citibank, General Foods, Proctor and Gamble, and the list goes on and on. I also read in the course of my research that many of your colleagues credit you with coining the term corporate culture or organizational culture. Do you accept credit for that? I mean, they can say whatever they want, but, I mean, it’s …
SCHEIN: It’s yes and no. I think that Elliott Jaques had used the changing culture of the faculty—factory. There were a couple of other people who had talked about union culture or work culture, but I think that the first book with that title, organizational culture, was Organizational Culture and Leadership. Then the book, The Corporate Culture Survival Guide, was several years later. Again, I think the terms were being used, but I don’t know whether you could find many articles or books that had them in print. So in that sense, I formalized it by putting it in print. Certainly, there was no invention there. We all knew the word culture and applying it to organizations was no big deal. But maybe actually I think what—what clicked was my three state—three level model. I hear over and over again that what people took out of the early culture literature was this idea that culture is a three-level phenomenon of, you know, artifacts, spouse values and basic assumptions, and that was again my categorizing genius at work. I think we all knew that culture was that way, but I somehow found a set of labels that made it more understandable.
SCARPINO: Did your work with anthropologists in any way influence your willingness to look at organizations through a cultural lens?
SCHEIN: From the beginning. Two or three of my friends at Harvard were anthropologists and sociologists, and one of the important books we read was Men Who Manage, which was really an ethnographic study, and William White had written the Street Corner Society. There was nothing new about applying culture to groups and organizations. I think what was new in my book was elaborating it as a textbook, in putting a lot of material and combining it with the word leadership, and saying, look, leaders create cultures and are victims of cultures and the best way to understand culture is—organizational culture—is through entrepreneurial behavior. I think being able to contrast Digital and Ciba-Geigy was important. One was an old company that defined leadership. The other was a young company where the leader defined culture. So I had a lot more raw material to put into a book, and I think that also, combined with by then having accepted clinical research as a paradigm and saying, look, building a whole theory on cases is okay. Let the world decide. I felt like writing it that way and that was that. I didn’t want to do a quantitative study like some others had done.
SCARPINO: Well, you mentioned the word leadership and I’ve read in a number of places a quote attributed to you that the only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture.
SCHEIN: That was my position and I owned it and was willing to foist it on the world, yes. It’s a little bit vague and a little general, but I think it’s accurate. If you really want to know ultimately what makes leaders different from anybody else, what is it they do that’s different from anybody else, it’s they create and manage culture.
SCARPINO: Do you think that effective leaders understand that?
SCHEIN: No. No. But some do. I think one of the best books in the field and you ought to interview him because I think he deserves it, is Gerstner. He, in his book, Elephants Can Learn to Dance, where he describes how he got IBM back into a good company. He talks at length about how he had to evolve certain cultural themes, bring back some of the culture of IBM that had been lost. He understood perfectly well that it was all about culture. So I think the good ones do.
SCARPINO: What do you think that you learned—what do you think people could learn about leadership from reading your work on organizational culture?
SCHEIN: What they could learn about leadership is a great deal because I not only describe in the book how leaders create organizations and then infuse through their own values, those values into the organization, which, if they work, become the culture. People forget that originally it was just the leader’s values. I’ve had a lot of thesis students look at their own organizations historically by saying, well go back and find out what your founders were all about. My best example being Apple, where I had learned early in my consulting with Apple that Gerstner, I mean, Wozniak, wanted something that kids could use. He was a school-oriented person. A simple computer. Steve Jobs was a creative genius who thought he wanted a toy for yuppies. Those—that was tossed around. Now, what, how many, 50 years later, what have we got? We’ve got a whole bunch of toys for yuppies that are very simple to use. I don’t think that’s accidental. I think that somehow the mentality of Wozniak to kind of keep it simple, easy to use, and Jobs says, it’s got to be fun, that that just drove the process into these toys. Why did Apple succeed so much quicker? Because I think that vision got infused into all the engineers, all through the years, and so you could figure out the Apple culture by going back and seeing what… You could figure out the HP culture by going to Packard and Hewlett and seeing what did those people want. You won’t figure out all of it because some of it evolved, but you’ll see the essence. I had a woman from the post office department who was totally able to explain the post office by going back to the early postmaster generals. The woman yesterday from the Marine Corps used my model to analyze the culture of the Marine Corps and found it very easy to figure out if she looked historically at how… So history is, in fact, the best way to get a culture, not just any old history, but going back to the founders and see what they wanted.
SCARPINO: You published Organizational Culture and Leadership in 1985 and in your draft autobiography you called it your opus. Now, for a man who has published such a tremendous body of work you singled out this one piece and called it your opus. Why?
SCHEIN: It’s the only one that I took seriously enough to try to read almost everything and to try to really make it into a complete text, and go to the labor of… The other books were more creative impulses. This was—I felt it as a serious piece of work that had to be able to stand on its own, that had to be able to function as a textbook, that could not be easily dismissed as just a view. Maybe that’s the other thing. This was trying to take in all the views that I was aware of, of organizational culture. There were a few out there, but not many actually.
Influences and Impacts
“I think I was constantly praised and rewarded and made to feel special and all that stuff that goes with loving parents.”
Description of the video:
SCARPINO: I want to ask you about organizational culture. I looked up a list of your clients, which is long and impressive, but, you know, Digital Equipment Corporation, Ciba-Geigy, Apple, Citibank, General Foods, Proctor and Gamble, and the list goes on and on. I also read in the course of my research that many of your colleagues credit you with coining the term corporate culture or organizational culture. Do you accept credit for that? I mean, they can say whatever they want, but, I mean, it’s …
SCHEIN: It’s yes and no. I think that Elliott Jaques had used the changing culture of the faculty—factory. There were a couple of other people who had talked about union culture or work culture, but I think that the first book with that title, organizational culture, was Organizational Culture and Leadership. Then the book, The Corporate Culture Survival Guide, was several years later. Again, I think the terms were being used, but I don’t know whether you could find many articles or books that had them in print. So in that sense, I formalized it by putting it in print. Certainly, there was no invention there. We all knew the word culture and applying it to organizations was no big deal. But maybe actually I think what—what clicked was my three state—three level model. I hear over and over again that what people took out of the early culture literature was this idea that culture is a three-level phenomenon of, you know, artifacts, spouse values and basic assumptions, and that was again my categorizing genius at work. I think we all knew that culture was that way, but I somehow found a set of labels that made it more understandable.
SCARPINO: Did your work with anthropologists in any way influence your willingness to look at organizations through a cultural lens?
SCHEIN: From the beginning. Two or three of my friends at Harvard were anthropologists and sociologists, and one of the important books we read was Men Who Manage, which was really an ethnographic study, and William White had written the Street Corner Society. There was nothing new about applying culture to groups and organizations. I think what was new in my book was elaborating it as a textbook, in putting a lot of material and combining it with the word leadership, and saying, look, leaders create cultures and are victims of cultures and the best way to understand culture is—organizational culture—is through entrepreneurial behavior. I think being able to contrast Digital and Ciba-Geigy was important. One was an old company that defined leadership. The other was a young company where the leader defined culture. So I had a lot more raw material to put into a book, and I think that also, combined with by then having accepted clinical research as a paradigm and saying, look, building a whole theory on cases is okay. Let the world decide. I felt like writing it that way and that was that. I didn’t want to do a quantitative study like some others had done.
SCARPINO: Well, you mentioned the word leadership and I’ve read in a number of places a quote attributed to you that the only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture.
SCHEIN: That was my position and I owned it and was willing to foist it on the world, yes. It’s a little bit vague and a little general, but I think it’s accurate. If you really want to know ultimately what makes leaders different from anybody else, what is it they do that’s different from anybody else, it’s they create and manage culture.
SCARPINO: Do you think that effective leaders understand that?
SCHEIN: No. No. But some do. I think one of the best books in the field and you ought to interview him because I think he deserves it, is Gerstner. He, in his book, Elephants Can Learn to Dance, where he describes how he got IBM back into a good company. He talks at length about how he had to evolve certain cultural themes, bring back some of the culture of IBM that had been lost. He understood perfectly well that it was all about culture. So I think the good ones do.
SCARPINO: What do you think that you learned—what do you think people could learn about leadership from reading your work on organizational culture?
SCHEIN: What they could learn about leadership is a great deal because I not only describe in the book how leaders create organizations and then infuse through their own values, those values into the organization, which, if they work, become the culture. People forget that originally it was just the leader’s values. I’ve had a lot of thesis students look at their own organizations historically by saying, well go back and find out what your founders were all about. My best example being Apple, where I had learned early in my consulting with Apple that Gerstner, I mean, Wozniak, wanted something that kids could use. He was a school-oriented person. A simple computer. Steve Jobs was a creative genius who thought he wanted a toy for yuppies. Those—that was tossed around. Now, what, how many, 50 years later, what have we got? We’ve got a whole bunch of toys for yuppies that are very simple to use. I don’t think that’s accidental. I think that somehow the mentality of Wozniak to kind of keep it simple, easy to use, and Jobs says, it’s got to be fun, that that just drove the process into these toys. Why did Apple succeed so much quicker? Because I think that vision got infused into all the engineers, all through the years, and so you could figure out the Apple culture by going back and seeing what… You could figure out the HP culture by going to Packard and Hewlett and seeing what did those people want. You won’t figure out all of it because some of it evolved, but you’ll see the essence. I had a woman from the post office department who was totally able to explain the post office by going back to the early postmaster generals. The woman yesterday from the Marine Corps used my model to analyze the culture of the Marine Corps and found it very easy to figure out if she looked historically at how… So history is, in fact, the best way to get a culture, not just any old history, but going back to the founders and see what they wanted.
SCARPINO: You published Organizational Culture and Leadership in 1985 and in your draft autobiography you called it your opus. Now, for a man who has published such a tremendous body of work you singled out this one piece and called it your opus. Why?
SCHEIN: It’s the only one that I took seriously enough to try to read almost everything and to try to really make it into a complete text, and go to the labor of… The other books were more creative impulses. This was—I felt it as a serious piece of work that had to be able to stand on its own, that had to be able to function as a textbook, that could not be easily dismissed as just a view. Maybe that’s the other thing. This was trying to take in all the views that I was aware of, of organizational culture. There were a few out there, but not many actually.
Storytelling
“[T]hat’s coercive persuasion. The coercion is the physical restraint; persuasion is what then happens afterwards.”
Description of the video:
SCARPINO: I want to ask you about organizational culture. I looked up a list of your clients, which is long and impressive, but, you know, Digital Equipment Corporation, Ciba-Geigy, Apple, Citibank, General Foods, Proctor and Gamble, and the list goes on and on. I also read in the course of my research that many of your colleagues credit you with coining the term corporate culture or organizational culture. Do you accept credit for that? I mean, they can say whatever they want, but, I mean, it’s …
SCHEIN: It’s yes and no. I think that Elliott Jaques had used the changing culture of the faculty—factory. There were a couple of other people who had talked about union culture or work culture, but I think that the first book with that title, organizational culture, was Organizational Culture and Leadership. Then the book, The Corporate Culture Survival Guide, was several years later. Again, I think the terms were being used, but I don’t know whether you could find many articles or books that had them in print. So in that sense, I formalized it by putting it in print. Certainly, there was no invention there. We all knew the word culture and applying it to organizations was no big deal. But maybe actually I think what—what clicked was my three state—three level model. I hear over and over again that what people took out of the early culture literature was this idea that culture is a three-level phenomenon of, you know, artifacts, spouse values and basic assumptions, and that was again my categorizing genius at work. I think we all knew that culture was that way, but I somehow found a set of labels that made it more understandable.
SCARPINO: Did your work with anthropologists in any way influence your willingness to look at organizations through a cultural lens?
SCHEIN: From the beginning. Two or three of my friends at Harvard were anthropologists and sociologists, and one of the important books we read was Men Who Manage, which was really an ethnographic study, and William White had written the Street Corner Society. There was nothing new about applying culture to groups and organizations. I think what was new in my book was elaborating it as a textbook, in putting a lot of material and combining it with the word leadership, and saying, look, leaders create cultures and are victims of cultures and the best way to understand culture is—organizational culture—is through entrepreneurial behavior. I think being able to contrast Digital and Ciba-Geigy was important. One was an old company that defined leadership. The other was a young company where the leader defined culture. So I had a lot more raw material to put into a book, and I think that also, combined with by then having accepted clinical research as a paradigm and saying, look, building a whole theory on cases is okay. Let the world decide. I felt like writing it that way and that was that. I didn’t want to do a quantitative study like some others had done.
SCARPINO: Well, you mentioned the word leadership and I’ve read in a number of places a quote attributed to you that the only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture.
SCHEIN: That was my position and I owned it and was willing to foist it on the world, yes. It’s a little bit vague and a little general, but I think it’s accurate. If you really want to know ultimately what makes leaders different from anybody else, what is it they do that’s different from anybody else, it’s they create and manage culture.
SCARPINO: Do you think that effective leaders understand that?
SCHEIN: No. No. But some do. I think one of the best books in the field and you ought to interview him because I think he deserves it, is Gerstner. He, in his book, Elephants Can Learn to Dance, where he describes how he got IBM back into a good company. He talks at length about how he had to evolve certain cultural themes, bring back some of the culture of IBM that had been lost. He understood perfectly well that it was all about culture. So I think the good ones do.
SCARPINO: What do you think that you learned—what do you think people could learn about leadership from reading your work on organizational culture?
SCHEIN: What they could learn about leadership is a great deal because I not only describe in the book how leaders create organizations and then infuse through their own values, those values into the organization, which, if they work, become the culture. People forget that originally it was just the leader’s values. I’ve had a lot of thesis students look at their own organizations historically by saying, well go back and find out what your founders were all about. My best example being Apple, where I had learned early in my consulting with Apple that Gerstner, I mean, Wozniak, wanted something that kids could use. He was a school-oriented person. A simple computer. Steve Jobs was a creative genius who thought he wanted a toy for yuppies. Those—that was tossed around. Now, what, how many, 50 years later, what have we got? We’ve got a whole bunch of toys for yuppies that are very simple to use. I don’t think that’s accidental. I think that somehow the mentality of Wozniak to kind of keep it simple, easy to use, and Jobs says, it’s got to be fun, that that just drove the process into these toys. Why did Apple succeed so much quicker? Because I think that vision got infused into all the engineers, all through the years, and so you could figure out the Apple culture by going back and seeing what… You could figure out the HP culture by going to Packard and Hewlett and seeing what did those people want. You won’t figure out all of it because some of it evolved, but you’ll see the essence. I had a woman from the post office department who was totally able to explain the post office by going back to the early postmaster generals. The woman yesterday from the Marine Corps used my model to analyze the culture of the Marine Corps and found it very easy to figure out if she looked historically at how… So history is, in fact, the best way to get a culture, not just any old history, but going back to the founders and see what they wanted.
SCARPINO: You published Organizational Culture and Leadership in 1985 and in your draft autobiography you called it your opus. Now, for a man who has published such a tremendous body of work you singled out this one piece and called it your opus. Why?
SCHEIN: It’s the only one that I took seriously enough to try to read almost everything and to try to really make it into a complete text, and go to the labor of… The other books were more creative impulses. This was—I felt it as a serious piece of work that had to be able to stand on its own, that had to be able to function as a textbook, that could not be easily dismissed as just a view. Maybe that’s the other thing. This was trying to take in all the views that I was aware of, of organizational culture. There were a few out there, but not many actually.
Storytelling
“[L]eaders create cultures and are victims of cultures…”
Description of the video:
SCARPINO: I want to ask you about organizational culture. I looked up a list of your clients, which is long and impressive, but, you know, Digital Equipment Corporation, Ciba-Geigy, Apple, Citibank, General Foods, Proctor and Gamble, and the list goes on and on. I also read in the course of my research that many of your colleagues credit you with coining the term corporate culture or organizational culture. Do you accept credit for that? I mean, they can say whatever they want, but, I mean, it’s …
SCHEIN: It’s yes and no. I think that Elliott Jaques had used the changing culture of the faculty—factory. There were a couple of other people who had talked about union culture or work culture, but I think that the first book with that title, organizational culture, was Organizational Culture and Leadership. Then the book, The Corporate Culture Survival Guide, was several years later. Again, I think the terms were being used, but I don’t know whether you could find many articles or books that had them in print. So in that sense, I formalized it by putting it in print. Certainly, there was no invention there. We all knew the word culture and applying it to organizations was no big deal. But maybe actually I think what—what clicked was my three state—three level model. I hear over and over again that what people took out of the early culture literature was this idea that culture is a three-level phenomenon of, you know, artifacts, spouse values and basic assumptions, and that was again my categorizing genius at work. I think we all knew that culture was that way, but I somehow found a set of labels that made it more understandable.
SCARPINO: Did your work with anthropologists in any way influence your willingness to look at organizations through a cultural lens?
SCHEIN: From the beginning. Two or three of my friends at Harvard were anthropologists and sociologists, and one of the important books we read was Men Who Manage, which was really an ethnographic study, and William White had written the Street Corner Society. There was nothing new about applying culture to groups and organizations. I think what was new in my book was elaborating it as a textbook, in putting a lot of material and combining it with the word leadership, and saying, look, leaders create cultures and are victims of cultures and the best way to understand culture is—organizational culture—is through entrepreneurial behavior. I think being able to contrast Digital and Ciba-Geigy was important. One was an old company that defined leadership. The other was a young company where the leader defined culture. So I had a lot more raw material to put into a book, and I think that also, combined with by then having accepted clinical research as a paradigm and saying, look, building a whole theory on cases is okay. Let the world decide. I felt like writing it that way and that was that. I didn’t want to do a quantitative study like some others had done.
SCARPINO: Well, you mentioned the word leadership and I’ve read in a number of places a quote attributed to you that the only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture.
SCHEIN: That was my position and I owned it and was willing to foist it on the world, yes. It’s a little bit vague and a little general, but I think it’s accurate. If you really want to know ultimately what makes leaders different from anybody else, what is it they do that’s different from anybody else, it’s they create and manage culture.
SCARPINO: Do you think that effective leaders understand that?
SCHEIN: No. No. But some do. I think one of the best books in the field and you ought to interview him because I think he deserves it, is Gerstner. He, in his book, Elephants Can Learn to Dance, where he describes how he got IBM back into a good company. He talks at length about how he had to evolve certain cultural themes, bring back some of the culture of IBM that had been lost. He understood perfectly well that it was all about culture. So I think the good ones do.
SCARPINO: What do you think that you learned—what do you think people could learn about leadership from reading your work on organizational culture?
SCHEIN: What they could learn about leadership is a great deal because I not only describe in the book how leaders create organizations and then infuse through their own values, those values into the organization, which, if they work, become the culture. People forget that originally it was just the leader’s values. I’ve had a lot of thesis students look at their own organizations historically by saying, well go back and find out what your founders were all about. My best example being Apple, where I had learned early in my consulting with Apple that Gerstner, I mean, Wozniak, wanted something that kids could use. He was a school-oriented person. A simple computer. Steve Jobs was a creative genius who thought he wanted a toy for yuppies. Those—that was tossed around. Now, what, how many, 50 years later, what have we got? We’ve got a whole bunch of toys for yuppies that are very simple to use. I don’t think that’s accidental. I think that somehow the mentality of Wozniak to kind of keep it simple, easy to use, and Jobs says, it’s got to be fun, that that just drove the process into these toys. Why did Apple succeed so much quicker? Because I think that vision got infused into all the engineers, all through the years, and so you could figure out the Apple culture by going back and seeing what… You could figure out the HP culture by going to Packard and Hewlett and seeing what did those people want. You won’t figure out all of it because some of it evolved, but you’ll see the essence. I had a woman from the post office department who was totally able to explain the post office by going back to the early postmaster generals. The woman yesterday from the Marine Corps used my model to analyze the culture of the Marine Corps and found it very easy to figure out if she looked historically at how… So history is, in fact, the best way to get a culture, not just any old history, but going back to the founders and see what they wanted.
SCARPINO: You published Organizational Culture and Leadership in 1985 and in your draft autobiography you called it your opus. Now, for a man who has published such a tremendous body of work you singled out this one piece and called it your opus. Why?
SCHEIN: It’s the only one that I took seriously enough to try to read almost everything and to try to really make it into a complete text, and go to the labor of… The other books were more creative impulses. This was—I felt it as a serious piece of work that had to be able to stand on its own, that had to be able to function as a textbook, that could not be easily dismissed as just a view. Maybe that’s the other thing. This was trying to take in all the views that I was aware of, of organizational culture. There were a few out there, but not many actually.
About Edgar Schein
Edgar Schein received his Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard in 1952 and served as a captain in the U.S. Army from 1952 to 1956. While in the Army, he served as chief of the social psychology section of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, where he worked with repatriated U.S. service personnel who had been captured and subjected to brainwashing by the Chinese during the Korean War. This work had a significant impact on his scholarship on leadership and management.
Schein joined MIT’s Sloan School of Management in 1956. He was named Sloan Fellows Professor of Management in 1978, a chair he held until 1990. He retired from MIT in 2006 and is professor emeritus.
Dr. Schein’s work has had a tremendous effect on the field of organizational development in areas such as career development, group process consultation, and organizational culture. He is the founding editor of Reflections: The Society for Organizational Learning Journal (1999–2004). His curriculum vita lists 179 publications spanning a period from 1954 through 2010, including 14 books. Schein is a recipient of the International Leadership Association Lifetime Achievement Award.
Explore the complete oral history of Edgar ScheinLeaders Are Readers
“[L]eaders create cultures and are victims of cultures…”
