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0:01
KAREN MAY: It is a terrific honor and pleasure for me to be able to be here with all of you and with you, Ed, today. I'm Karen May. I lead our People Development Team. AUDIENCE: Wo-hoo! KAREN MAY: Wo-hoo! But way more importantly than that, I am a lifetime student of organizational behavior, organizational development, how in the world we can function better in this world as people, and a lifelong student of yours, Ed. So I'm thrilled to be able to be here.
0:32
And I know I'm joined here today by a group of people who are also deeply interested in your work and in the work of organizational development and fundamentally how people and organizations can be more effective, more effective together, and can reach both individual and collective real potential. And we are joined not only by these folks physically, but by any number of people virtually who are joining us live stream and/or who will be watching us later. So we'll keep them in mind as we go.
1:18
If you are joining on live stream, there is a Dory-- go/EdSchein-Dory.
1:27
And if you didn't know how to spell Ed Schein, you wouldn't be on this live stream, so I'm not even going to bother with that. So feel free to pop in a Dory question if you're live stream. At about a half an hour in, Kathy Chen will be managing the Dory with me and will be reading out some of your questions. If you're here in the room, we have a mic. And we'll ask that, when you do have a live question, that you use the mic so that those who are joining us virtually can hear the response.
1:56
And, as I say, it's an honor to be here with you today, Ed, and to be joined by people who know share such common interests with us. And in the spirit of your work, I'd like to start with a very open-ended question-- ED SCHEIN: Sure. KAREN MAY: --and ask you who you are here today with us. ED SCHEIN: Well, I'm, first of all, very pleased to be here. This is my third visit to Google. And they are always fascinating visits. It's almost like age meets youth. [LAUGHTER]
2:41
And I think one of the things that is me is curiosity, and so curiosity about what's going on in Silicon Valley, in Google, in all these startups. The world is changing before our very eyes very rapidly. What could be better for me than to engage in that and share some of what I'm learning as I encounter what will be one of the themes of the next book, "Humble Consulting," which is how to give real help faster. I've begun to adapt to speed.
3:26
KAREN MAY: We can all learn with you, then. Wonderful. And I know we'll look forward to "Humble Consulting" coming out, so we can read it and continue to learn from you and with you. I actually came to our conversation with a set of questions more tailored to your more recent "The Humble Inquiry" book. But I actually would like to have us start a bit broader and then move into some of the questions-- and broader in terms of culture. And we spoke a little bit over our lunch
4:01
today about culture as a multidimensional-- we have many cultures. We don't just have a culture. And it's within those cultures that we choose our behavior and kind of assess our context. So if I could ask you to share some of your thoughts about those many cultures. ED SCHEIN: I think that-- as I was thinking about this conversation, Kathy, two words kept popping up in my head. One is culture as something that's inside us, not something that's out there. It's inside us.
4:40
And that leads to the other word. If I have a message today that I want to get out to the world, it's that we've got to combine our notions of mindfulness with our understanding of culture, that mindfulness is not some kind of meditation process. Mindfulness is situational awareness of how culture inside us and around us is really dominating our thinking. And if we don't become aware of how much our thinking is culturally determined culturally at the level of nation-- you all come
5:24
from different countries and different ethnicities; that's a big layer-- culture at the level of an organization, and then inside the organization, the occupation you come from. The engineering culture is different from the finance culture. And then right down to the work group, where we now get to my quick definition of "culture." "Culture" is the accumulated learning you've had in your group experience. So you learned the culture of your family.
6:00
You learned the culture of your schools and your education. And when you entered Google, you had to learn the culture not only of the corporation called Google, but of your own particular work group. So don't think of culture as anything other than accumulated learning that sits inside you as one of your layers of consciousness. And becoming more aware of that I think is crucial. Now the other dimension of culture-- and then I'll shut up. I don't want to use up all the air time here--
6:39
culture can be-- KAREN MAY: It's why you're here, though. It's your air time. [LAUGHTER] ED SCHEIN: To analyze culture-- when people say, OK, Ed, you've described it. But how do we analyze it? You have to think of it at three different levels. When we arrived here, we saw what the anthropologists would call the artifacts or the artifices or the creations of culture-- the buildings, the way people dress, the structures, how you get into the place.
7:12
All that stuff is the visible, feelable, smellable, hearable part of culture, which is real but is just the surface manifestation. It's not below-- it's above what is down below, which I think of as the DNA of the culture. In between that is the layer that we like to talk about, which is what I call the "espoused values." If someone says, why do you people at Google do it this way? Then you'll come up with, because we're creative. We're fast. We're team-based. Those words are espoused values.
7:58
They are not necessarily what is even the deeper level that would explain in detail your day-to-day behavior. I think of that as your "taken for granted" assumptions. It's sort of the automatic way you learn to behave around here. That may mean something as subtle as, well, if we meet one of our founders, how do I relate to that person? You know, you're not necessarily going to learn that from the espoused value level. You're going to learn that from observing,
8:35
by talking to older employees, and say, how do you really handle it when you get nervous in your group meeting? Or when you think it's too competitive and it's not supposed to be? That's the DNA of the culture. And that will reflect the US culture, the management culture-- broadly speaking-- and then the corporate culture of Google and your own department. So what we need to get conscious of is that deeper level. It's not about "is it a nice place to work?"
9:14
It's about what's the deeper reality of what it means to work here and how you get along. So culture and mindfulness are, in that sense, my key messages.
9:28
KAREN MAY: As you're saying that, I'm imagining all of us going through our day, trying to take into account all of those layers. And it's a lot to take in-- and thinking how do you guide people to develop the capacity to be aware and mindful in a complex environment where not only are there many layers, but the volume of work is high and the pace of work is fast? So you're sort of torn between a process consciousness, if you will, and getting pulled into the task at hand.
10:13
And how do you advise people to cultivate the capacity to stay self-aware, even in that complexity? ED SCHEIN: That's a great question because it forces us into some countercultural thinking. If you look at how rampant individualistic competitive US society trains you, it's all about you the person. What are your talents? What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? All the measures of people are around their individual capacities and talents, and so on.
10:56
And what's missed in that is that-- particularly in an organization like this one that espouses teamwork and the belief that really great ideas come about from a lot of interaction-- the first principle is to become less self-conscious and more what one of my heroes, Erving Goffman, would call "interaction conscious." Think a bit more like the social psychologist who says, "What's going on here between these people?" rather than "How am I doing?" We are so over-trained on "How am I doing?"
11:41
and "Am I doing well?" and getting feedback. And the reward system is all about my accomplishments. But the reality of work, I suspect, is all about your relationships to people. So one of the big points that comes out of "Humble Inquiry" and helping is it's about the relationship, stupid. If you don't understand how relationships form, if you don't learn a bit of sociology, and what is it that people do when they date. Or how is-- why is there all this talk about "is this a date or not?"
12:22
What are those words about? What's a date? A date is a relational concept. Or what's a superior-subordinate relationship? You can't talk about this individually. You have to talk about it situationally. And so learning more about relationships is what humble inquiry and helping and humble consulting is really all about. KAREN MAY: Interesting.
12:53
One of the things you talk about in the book in terms of relationships that struck me was the-- my words, not yours-- but the increased responsibility that one has for inquiry, for humble inquiry, as status increases. And it struck me in thinking about how do we help leaders see and take on that responsibility. So when status is at play, what are some of the things that leaders can do to create the psychological safety or the safe space within which creativity and problems can be solved?
13:37
ED SCHEIN: OK, that's a difficult one because if the leader were sitting here today, I would say, you have to become situationally aware to whether the problem you're trying to solve, or what's worrying you is a simple problem to which you have the answer-- in which case, fine. Tell your subordinate what to do because you know. You've been there. You know all about it. But if we discover that what's really worrying you is that you don't know how to get a bunch of subgroups to work together,
14:18
you're discovering that there's a loss of alignment between various of your subordinates or the groups or the subcultures, now telling him what to do isn't going to work. The complexity, the systemic interconnections are too complicated. So you have to get past thinking that you know what to do. Accept your ignorance. And that's where the word "humility" comes in. Humility is acknowledging that there are some things I don't know how to do. Or there is some bit of knowledge that I don't have.
15:01
We've projected this on to the senior leaders, but it applies to everyone in this room. There are situations where you know what to do and are experienced. But a lot of situations that you encounter daily, if you're honest with yourself, you don't really know what's going on. You don't really know what to do. And in those situations, you have to let your curiosity and your humility surface and become dominant. "Humble inquiry" is the acknowledgment that sometimes the other person--
15:38
whether it's a subordinate or a boss or a peer-- knows something that you need to know in order to accomplish your next task. So it's probably the most practical suggestion we can have in a complex world is to get curious and ask questions. Don't think you already know because chances are, if it's complex, you probably got the wrong answer.
16:09
KAREN MAY: It's interesting as you're saying that. And I'm thinking-- as I imagine some of you are-- about contexts in which, on our best days, we could be curious and ask questions. And on some days, either we feel we have to prove ourselves or we feel it there isn't time for asking questions. And so let me push this a step farther and say, if I know intellectually the best thing to do is to be curious and ask questions and acknowledge externally what I know internally, which is I actually
16:46
don't have all the answers, how do I train myself to do that in circumstances when the cost of admitting ignorance feels high? Or the cost of taking the time feels high? So if I kind of know it's the right answer, are there things I can do with the group or to train myself? How do we help people push through with that behavior change, even when the conditions feel difficult for that?
17:25
ED SCHEIN: I don't know this is-- whether this is easy to do or not, but two thoughts occur. One is to become more personal, which is paradoxical. I think society trains us to be mostly transactional, particularly in business. You're supposed to have professional relationships. And professional distance is good. The therapist is not supposed to sleep with the patient. That's bad. But we then also apply it to fraternization in the military-- the officers are not
18:05
supposed to fraternize with the troops. So we have this huge managerial overlay that stayed transactional. And again, in a simple world, that's probably OK. But the minute things get complex and interpersonally diffuse, transactions no longer work. You have to somehow acknowledge that this is now personal. Two or three of us are competing. And this doesn't feel good. And I don't know what to do about it. The first thing is to acknowledge to yourself that this is personal.
18:46
And maybe the best thing to do-- and that's the other point-- is to go to process rather than content. Rather than say, OK, it's personal. I'm going to show this other person that I'm brighter and smarter. So I'm just going to argue even more. Or I might say, God forbid, why are we arguing about this? Is there some common element here? And that means, am I putting my career in jeopardy by not winning? I think we have to ask-- that's a tough question in your environment-- is it better to win?
19:31
Or is it better to personalize and build relationships where, collectively, we end up with a better solution, but God forbid, I might not get all the credit? I don't know the answer to that question. That's embedded in your culture. But I'm suggesting you have the choice of not content-competing and saying, you know, let me prove to you why my idea is better. Instead, say, wait a minute, why are we competing here? And maybe we should look at the two answers and how they combine.
20:08
Or, are you as uncomfortable as I am about how we're arguing here? Personalization means exposing the process of what's going on between us. And I would think, in this kind of organization that espouses teamwork, that's a very natural direction for you to go-- is to get more personal rather than more argumentative, and to let competition go in need interests of better solutions and better answers and hope that the people above you recognize the value of that. But it's a personal decision.
20:55
If you end up with a boss who only likes winners, then you're stuck. And if you really believe this alternative way might be better, then find another group because I think the US managerial culture is hooked on winning and competition. And it's all about the individual. So I'm very aware-- as the book "Humble Inquiry" must leak out-- I'm very critical of competition and rampant individualism brought inside an organization. That may be great for capitalism writ in large.
21:38
But I think it's a disaster when you bring it inside an organization and have what this one executive once said to his subordinates-- this was the CEO who said to his VPs-- Now, I want you all to be team. This is a team process. But don't forget for a minute that you're all competing for my job. And how are you supposed to-- KAREN MAY: Right, which message is louder? ED SCHEIN: --make sense of that? KAREN MAY: Yeah, very interesting. Well, I want to go two directions with what you said.
22:10
So I'll go one and then the other. And one is triggered by some of the questions that some of my colleagues-- I know we're interested in, which is, for those of us who are women, some of what you're suggesting can feel even harder. And do you have any particular advice for women to be able to follow that kind of inquiry path without falling into a process stereotype or a less competitive stereotype? ED SCHEIN: OK, I'm going to pick you up on one word, Kathy. I don't-- what? AUDIENCE: Karen.
22:57
KAREN MAY: It's all right, Kathy, Karen. I'll answer to anything. ED SCHEIN: He's my coach. [LAUGHTER] KAREN MAY: Kathy, I'll take it as a compliment. [LAUGHTER] ED SCHEIN: I don't give advice. KAREN MAY: Ah, man. OK. ED SCHEIN: But you've triggered some thoughts. I think it is alleged-- and you'll have to tell me whether this is changing with millennials and so on-- that women really do learn to be more relational from the outset, particularly if they become mothers and find that you
23:34
cannot deal with children in a transactional way. It gets acutely personal. And so the skills that women bring that are relational should, in principle, make a woman-run organization different. But I'm not sure whether that happens. I think the managerial culture is a male-originated dominant culture. And I think a lot of women feel that, unless they give up their feminine skills and adapt to the masculine competitive environment, they're not going to make it. So I see it more as a dilemma.
24:24
I do think women bring something different. But whether they can actually exercise it effectively in a traditional organization is a real question in my mind. And I've seen good examples and bad examples. And that's why there's no relevant advice except be yourself. And figure out what's better for you if you're a woman-- to play the male competitive game or just say, I'm going to do this thing differently. I'm going to relate differently to people, to be more personal,
25:02
and see whether that works better.
25:07
KAREN MAY: So the other direction your earlier comments about culture and what's happening here triggered for me was, again, something that we spoke about quite briefly, which was the observations you have on what happened to Digital Equipment Corporation. And I wonder if you could share with us a couple of the lessons that you would hope that we, as an organization, might learn from DEC, rather than having to learn it ourselves. ED SCHEIN: That's a very important part of my life.
25:45
I somehow managed, because I was an MIT professor, to be accepted by Ken Olsen, the founder and president of DEC, as a consultant because he was a true engineer. But because of that, he said, we probably aren't so great at communication in groups. So why don't you come and sit in? That led to 25 years of consulting, watching DEC grow and become the number two computer company in the world behind IBM, and in the late '80s, level off and decline, until it got taken over by Compaq.
26:30
So I ended up actually writing a book, which I recommend to you, called "DEC is Dead, Long Live DEC." Because during its heyday, during its successes, DEC believed itself to be the most creative, the most fun, the most exciting company in the world. And if you talk to ex-DEC people, they will say, those were the best years of my life. It was fabulous. So how is it possible that that could all go wrong? And the metaphor that really struck me most was that, when DEC was young, it was
27:12
a bunch of creative engineers creating a whole new industry. What could be more exciting than that? That sounds a little bit familiar with early Google, doesn't it? That's a wonderful time to be. And, at that point, everyone is creative. Everyone is valued. Ideas are what it's all about. But you then produce some products. And lo and behold, they're successful-- wow. So now you get promoted. Now you have a bigger organization and, at the same time, you yourself age.
27:53
So 10 years in now, we're very successful. And what I observe is, in the initial conversations in the top group of DEC, people were rampantly arguing with each other because they were after the truth. What should our next product be? They were betting the company. They were using their intellectual tools to the full. It was a nasty environment because people were really fighting for their ideas. But it was a totally exciting creative environment. Fast forward 10 years-- these same
28:35
people are now in their 30s and they've all been promoted into being engineering managers or product line managers. And they've got organizations. Now I'm in the same group of seven or eight people. And they're deciding the next round of products. And the argument sounds equally vehement and exciting. But I had this horrible feeling that they're now all arguing as representatives of their organizations. They suddenly are not the individual creative engineer, but they're the head of a group.
29:21
And they're very conscious that, if their product isn't the one picked, maybe a hundred or a thousand people will be out of work. Now that transition from being the individual creator to being responsible for a lot of other people destroys a certain level of creativity and innovation. And it's inevitable. You can't say, well, I'm just as creative as I was in my 20s when I was the lone creator. It's different. Now these groups get bigger, and they become empires.
30:03
And the shortest explanation I have of how DEC failed is the empires begin to fight with each other. It was no longer just individuals making a point. But there were, in fact, three different products. There was the Alta Vista search engine, there was a big water-cooled computer that was being produced, and there was the Alpha chip. And the heads of those organizations each sincerely believed that they were the DEC of the future. But complexity intervened.
30:44
Each of those three were no longer simple products. They were now very complicated technologies, required more resources. And the environment was saying, you've got to focus. You can't do it all anymore because each project is too complex. And at that point, those three [INAUDIBLE] could not relate to each other. They fought. And they fought to the death. And that meant they started to steal resources from each other. They began to exaggerate the market potential of each of their products.
31:24
And, as a result, all three hit the market late. And all three of those products failed. And that made DEC no longer economically viable. So the notion that DEC never saw the future or they never understood the strategy, nonsense. They saw it perfectly. But they could not adapt by saying, well, we better bet on Alta Vista or we better get on the-- and kill two big projects and fire thousands of people. So the danger in size and age is these other interpersonal forces become very powerful.
32:10
And I don't know how companies get out of this. That's the problem of the people at the top of your organization. How do they keep this from happening to you? Does that make sense? KAREN MAY: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] ED SCHEIN: And the reason I'm touting the book is the book not only describes DEC's history, but has a whole big chapter on what happens with age and with growth. And you're right at that cusp. KAREN MAY: Well, and this is a terrific group for you
32:51
to be sharing with because, to the extent-- tying back to your earlier comments-- to the extent that we're conscious and aware, we increase the likelihood that we can ask questions that will help raise some of those issues. So I think we all need to read that book. I'm going to now share the pleasure of asking you questions with my colleagues both in the room and outside of the room. And Kathy, why don't we start with one on the Dory and then we'll go to one in the room?
33:19
And we'll just alternate.
33:23
KATHY: I don't know if Stephanie is here. Do you want to ask your question? AUDIENCE: I forgot what it was. KATHY: Oh, OK. I will read your question. "Google, like many other organizations"-- and this is kind of similar to what you were just talking about-- "Google, like many other organizations, is experiencing the challenges of being in an environment characterized by--" in all capital letters, "V-U-C-A." KAREN MAY: Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. KATHY: Got it.
33:49
"What types of interventions, aside from trying to hone our senior leaders, have you seen has a significant impact on the organization's ability to adapt?" ED SCHEIN: Well, I think probably the most important example of dealing with-- do you use "VUCA" or do you always spell it out? KAREN MAY: Having defined it, let's stay with "VUCA." ED SCHEIN: I think, to deal with complexity, one of the great systematic-- systems theory notions is the system has to be
34:33
as complex as the environment within which it works. So as the product environment and the political and economic and other environments get more and more interconnected and complex themselves, the organization has to develop that same level of complexity. What that probably means is a lot more differentiation into a lot more different units. It becomes harder and harder. As in the DEC case, Ken Olsen could no longer centrally grasp these three units.
35:14
It might have been better, with hindsight, for DEC to break into three divisions and let them each forge for themselves. So if one had to think in terms of organization design in the systemic way, you've got to differentiate the system and give more units more of the opportunity to create their own fate, to decentralize more. I don't think it's possible to deal centrally with this complex a world as is developing out there. That makes integration more difficult.
35:59
So the leaders now probably themselves become a group, rather than an individual, because they have to be able to represent the varieties of problems that your different product lines, your different technologies, your different subunits are generating. So I don't know if that answers that question. But I think it means systemic complexity cannot be captured by central single ideas by definition. KAREN MAY: Very interesting. Thanks, Stephanie, for a good question.
36:38
Is there a live question in the room?
36:44
Yes. AUDIENCE: Just to follow up on your last thought-- KAREN MAY: Do me a favor and wait for the mic just so that those who are joining us virtually can hear your question. AUDIENCE: To follow up on your last comment, if you have to have-- ED SCHEIN: Move it closer to your mouth. AUDIENCE: If you have to have divisions, and divisions have division leaders, and the division leaders have to sit in a room and make group decisions, but all the division leaders
37:07
believe if they're going to be fired if their division fails, how do you have the relational conversation in that room?
37:20
ED SCHEIN: Complexity covers problem solving as well as reality. I think the other company that I was consulting with at the same time as DEC was Ciba-Geigy, which was a big chemical giant that had to face the loss of the chemical sector, basically. Chemistry had been overproduced-- and gradually turned themselves into a pharmaceutical company. And that became part of what is today Novartis. So I saw them struggling with how does one destroy a whole sector of a business.
38:07
And what they did was they did it in as human a way as possible. They knew that they had to let thousands of people go. But they created a process that made them still feel we are a humane, responsible company, by first of all, slowing it down through not replacing retirements, by having generous buyouts, by giving people consulting jobs, by bringing in very good counseling services. So that you don't avoid the tough economic decision. But you handle what you have to do in a way that still makes
38:52
you feel that you're not being just a cruel, unthinking kind of organization, but that you're still the organization that you always tried to be. One of the principles of that, by the way, was that you never let somebody go through HR or personnel. The boss has to face the individual and say, John, or Mary, your job has gone away. And so we're going to have to figure out what you will have to do next. And here are some options. But we have to have that face-to-face conversation.
39:37
And they ended up having to train some of their supervisors how to do that. But the notion that personal things work-- people treat each other as adults when they get personal, rather than as commodities. The movie "Up in the Air" is the worst example of what organizations are finding themselves doing-- is to be fired by a hired consultant, in effect, or even worse, by a screen, as I recall. So personalization becomes a very critical concept in all my thinking.
40:24
That even those seven or eight people-- actually, Ciba-Geigy was run by a group of 11. And they had all these different departments and functions. They got to be very close personally. And one way they dealt with the difficulty is they had, over the years, rotated divisional responsibility among themselves so that there would be real empathy. If I'm Product A and saying Product B has got to go, I've managed Product B and I know what it is I'm saying. So you can get a more personal process
41:03
at that level, hopefully, rather than a bureaucratic process that's just driven by financials. That's the one way I've seen it happen. They did a good job of downsizing the agricultural sector, the chemical sector, and beginning to lean almost exclusively toward pharmaceuticals.
41:27
It's useful to always find cases rather than look for generalizations. If you have a question, "how do you do something?" find someone who has done it and see how they did it rather than looking for a formula off the shelf. KAREN MAY: Interesting. Kathy, is there another question on the Dory? KATHY: --questions on the Dory. So Trista, who's in our Seattle office, asks, "Many people in PeopleDev consult with our business clients. And we also want to evaluate our own work.
42:01
How do we evaluate or measure-- or how do you evaluate or measure your consulting work? And do you have any guidance on how we might evaluate our consulting engagements?
42:12
ED SCHEIN: One of the traps of the US culture is that somewhere along the line, we bought into the science model that everything has to be numerical. So I believe in measurement. But I don't believe it has to be quantitative, numerical measurement. So what do I measure? If I'm in a long project with the client, the first thing I would do is to have a conversation about how should we-- two-- collectively measure whether we're getting anywhere or not? You have a piece of that.
42:51
I have a piece of that. Either one of us can say, this isn't working, and bow out. Now, that may not be economically the best for the consultant. But that's one way to measure-- is to collectively build a unit. In my more rapid kind of consulting, which I've found myself doing much more out here, which often is just one hour or a long lunch, and I feel that something has been accomplished, I very much go by whether, at the end of that lunch,
43:28
or the end of that hour, we're both feeling good and both think this has been helpful. And if the client is just saying, well, yes, "that's been very helpful," I can tell by the tone of voice that this has not worked. But if the person goes away from that hour saying, "Gee, that was fun. That was good." That's enough of a measurement for me that this is working. So it goes back to situational awareness. I think we evaluate moment to moment. And in this next book, "Humble Consulting,"
44:07
I'll talk a lot about how these things have to be measured from the moment of initial contact. We don't scout and analyze and diagnose and then figure out what to do. The moment I'm with a client, I'm doing. I'm in it. And I evaluate, moment by moment, whether this is a good conversation. I have to work that way all the time. When we sat down for lunch, I have to ask myself, you know, is this lunch working? Are we getting connected? So I put the measurement evaluation process
44:54
in the here and now because it's quite possible that we will work for a couple of years on a project and the numbers won't reflect anything. Does that mean it's been a failure? People ask me, well, you consulted for Digital for 25 years and they went under. So you must not have done your job, right? [LAUGHTER] So my fellow consultants and I-- and there were many other consultants at DEC-- figured out what the correct answer is to that challenge. The answer is, if we hadn't been there,
45:31
they would have gone under much sooner. [LAUGHTER]
45:37
KAREN MAY: That's great. Well, I actually, in all truth, imagine that the people you taught while you were there-- whatever they went on to do afterwards-- were richer and more aware people than they would have been had you not been there. That's my assumption. Is there another live question in the room? Yes. Great-- mic is on the way. AUDIENCE: So you've given great advice for larger organizations. Does your advice change at all for the budding entrepreneur?
46:08
Because the valley is full of, as well, folks that are thinking of going out there and starting their own thing. ED SCHEIN: OK, back to I don't give advice. [LAUGHTER] But I think I would take that on a personal basis. I would want to know what is that person trying to do, and what's worrying them, and not to assume, again, that there is a formula for what young entrepreneurs should do. One of the biggest aspects of that is the changing technological scene.
46:48
I gave talks to young entrepreneurs in the '60s. And they were all building stuff. They were making other kinds of computers, and so on, and so on. And I noticed that when the software world began to infiltrate and take over, those questions changed. It's no longer a matter of a little shop where you build something. It's now suddenly a different kind of intellectual enterprise. And you're now selling ideas or something entirely different.
47:31
So what does it even mean to be an entrepreneur in today's range of technologies? What does it mean to develop a new app for the iPhone? This is a completely different question from how do I build a new computer or a new car? I guess you're now in both kinds of businesses, right? You're building products as well as these very abstract things that I don't even know how to conceptualize and talk about. So I have to ask my son, what is an app anyway? What does it mean to sit down and do
48:15
a better job of programming? Those are not questions that entrepreneurs used to ask before we invented all this stuff. So it's very situational. But the thing I noticed in my career studies-- I studied a lot of MIT alums and other people. And there was always a subset who wanted to build their own companies who were entrepreneurial. And what I noticed about them was that they were driven people. They had often sold magazines as high schoolers. They were not as academic.
49:01
They were not A-plus students. They were the A-minus students. Why? Because they were too busy doing stuff to really worry about getting the best grade. And they noticed that the world didn't value pure grades as much as the ability to get things done, to be creative. So I guess if that's a general characteristic of people like this, you have to honor your own drives, and say, well, what is it I'm prepared to suffer for because these ideas have grabbed me?
49:41
And by God-- I recently watched an interview that I recommend to all of you that I got on Netflix called "Steve Jobs-- The Lost Interview." Apparently he was collared for an hour and 10 minutes by a very good interviewer and really asked a lot of very personal questions about how he thought about things. It's a gripping interview to see how he kept coming back to some ideas he couldn't let go. No matter what else was going on, something was always there.
50:22
And that, to me, is the mark of an entrepreneur. Because if you don't have that, the early failures are going to kill you. You're gonna get discouraged. That something has to reemerge. And it's not necessarily very articulate. But it's something that drives you. That's one of the things I learned from studying entrepreneurs. KAREN MAY: Very interesting. Kathy-- KATHY: Do you have a follow-up question, or do you-- KAREN MAY: Go ahead. KATHY: Do you want to ask it?
50:59
AUDIENCE: Hi, my question was in relationship to some internal research that we've done lately around the characteristics of the highest performing and most effective teams here at Google. And so I was just curious, in your career, some of the things that you've come up with, you've seen exhibited by the most effective teams that you've worked with. ED SCHEIN: There's a lot of research on that. And I think a lot, again, depends on what they're doing. One of the earliest studies of leadership
51:36
was done way in the '50s on basketball teams, where you had a very clear criterion of whether you win or not. And, at that point, one of the interesting findings was that the winning teams had leaders who were clearer about the difference between "my best people" and "my worst people" than less effective teams who had leaders that said, "my people are more or less alike." That's an interesting bit of research that may not apply to research teams. But it does connect with Steve Jobs,
52:18
who kept saying it's all about the A players. And if you're not an A player, I don't want you on the team. So this notion of knowing who has really the talents for the particular tasks may be one characteristic. But from my point of view, an even more important characteristic is the ability to become a team. And there's a concept that some of you may have become familiar with that Amy Edmondson calls "teaming." She's written a book called "Teaming."
52:56
The notion there is that you don't become a team by just getting to know each other. You become a team by joint learning in a difficult situation. When a group of people who may think of themselves as a team suddenly have to face a new challenge that none of them have separately faced, and they have to learn together, that forces a level of personalization that may not have been there before. And that will be crucial to better performance at a later time.
53:34
So if I were managing teams, I would probably invent problems for them to force them into joint learning. Because I couldn't assume that just because they've been together and they say they like each other, that's not enough. It has to be joint learning that really creates a team. Those are the things that surface for me. KAREN MAY: You would be interested, I think, to know the study that Adam is referring to found that the variable that most indicates
54:08
the team will be effective is psychological safety. And that felt-- as I was reading "Humble Inquiry"-- certainly felt like a precondition for inquiry to exist. ED SCHEIN: Were you are familiar with Amy Edmonson's work on this? Yeah, because she's made a huge issue of psychological safety. And that goes back to my earlier stuff on psychological contract.
54:42
The surface is that any time we're in a work relationship-- and this could be applied to team members-- what's the contract you have with your team members? And does it include that I can be totally me? Or do I have to play a certain kind of a role? And certainly psychological safety would suggest that you want to lean toward making this personally possible to be yourself. And if you're the leader of the group, to go heavily into creating an environment where people will feel safe.
55:25
To me, that's one of the biggest pathologies in the US system-- is that managers have the notion that, if you're a responsible subordinate, you will tell me what's going on, instead of realizing that, unless I deliberately create psychological safety for you, there is no particular incentive for you to tell me what's really going on. So as a boss, you have to really create that environment. You can't assume it. KAREN MAY: Very interesting. So many lessons here for us as an organization.
56:06
And I can't help but finding my mind going also to what's happening in the world. And these lessons feel so relevant across the globe. But we don't have time for world peace or politics today, I'm afraid-- time to talk about it. Hopefully we have time to help make that happen. I know I've seen a few folks needing to gather their things together and go. You say we have two minutes left? So we can-- let me give you the last two minutes and ask you, not in the spirit of advice, but teaching,
56:43
perhaps, what would you leave us with-- as we try to do our best work as folks who attend to process in a fast and intelligent and competitive organization-- what would you leave us with as we go out into our days and weeks and years? ED SCHEIN: I'd come back to mindfulness, Ellen Langer style. If you haven't read Ellen Langer's stuff, you really should do that because she sort of was the creator of the concept along these psychological lines.
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And the question that she asks that I would leave you with is, whenever you're in an experience, stop and say to yourself, what else is going on?
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There's the thing that captures you. But what else is going on? What else is going on in this room right now? What else is going on between the two of us? There's so much of experience that's available that we gloss over or ignore. And the real learning is often in the "what else is going on?" Thank you. KAREN MAY: Wonderful. ED SCHEIN: This is great. KAREN MAY: Thank you so much. [APPLAUSE]
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