Edgar H. Schein

"We live, says Ed Schein, in a culture of Tell. Rather than trying to genuinely relate to other people we tell them what we think they need to know or should do based on assumptions we've made about them. But telling makes people feel inferior--it shuts them down. This is particularly true of interactions between superiors and subordinates, and that's where it's particularly problematic. In today's complex, interconnected, rapidly changing world hierarchy means nothing--anybody anywhere could have that vital fact or insight that could mean the difference between success or disaster. A free flow of information is crucial. Humble Inquiry builds the kinds of positive, trusting, balanced relationships that encourage honest and open interactions in both our professional and personal lives. Schein defines Humble Inquiry as "the fine art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person." In this seminal work he explores the concept of humility, looks at how Humble Inquiry differs from other kinds of inquiry, offers examples of Humble Inquiry in action in many different settings, and shows how to overcome the cultural, organizational and psychological barriers that keep us from practicing it. This is a major new contribution to how we see human dynamics and relationships, presented in a compact, personal, eminently practical way"--

The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

Humble Inquiry

"With the emphasis on teamwork in contemporary society, Schein's model has the potential to improve the collaborative process. A theoretical book based on Schein's extensive teaching and consulting, this is a useful, important resource. Summing up: essential; four stars." --M. Bonner, University of Maryland University College (Choice)Helping is a fundamental human activity, but it can also be a frustrating one. All too often, to our bewilderment, our sincere offers of help are resented, resisted, or refused -- and we often react the same way when people try to help us. Why is it so difficult to provide or accept help? How can we make the whole process easier? Many different words are used for helping: assisting, aiding, advising, caregiving, coaching, consulting, counseling, guiding, mentoring, supporting, teaching, and many more. In this seminal book on the topic, corporate culture and organizational development guru Ed Schein analyzes the social and psychological dynamics common to all types of helping relationships, explains why help is often not helpful, and shows what any would-be helpers must do to ensure that their assistance is both welcomed and genuinely useful.The moment of asking for and offering help is a delicate and complex one, fraught with inequities and ambiguities. Schein helps us navigate that moment so we avoid potential pitfalls, mitigate power imbalances, and establish a solid foundation of trust. He identifies three roles a helper can play, explaining which one is nearly always the best starting point if we are to provide truly effective help. So that readers can determine exactly what kind of help is needed, he describes an inquiry process that puts the helper and the client on an equal footing, encouraging the client to open up and engage and giving the helper much better information to work with. And he shows how these techniques can be applied to teamwork and to organizational leadership.Illustrated with examples from many types of relationships -- husbands and wives, doctors and patients, consultants and clients -- Helping is a concise, definitive analysis of what it takes to establish successful, mutually satisfying helping relationships.

How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help

Helping

In this third edition of his classic book, Edgar Schein shows how to transform the abstract concept of culture into a practical tool that managers and students can use to understand the dynamics of organizations and change. Organizational pioneer Schein updates his influential understanding of culture--what it is, how it is created, how it evolves, and how it can be changed. Focusing on today's business realities, Schein draws on a wide range of contemporary research to redefine culture, offers new information on the topic of occupational cultures, and demonstrates the crucial role leaders play in successfully applying the principles of culture to achieve organizational goals. He also tackles the complex question of how an existing culture can be changed--one of the toughest challenges of leadership. The result is a vital resource for understanding and practicing organizational effectiveness.

Organizational Culture and Leadership

Peter A. Schein

Bestselling author and father of organizational behavior, Edgar Schein and Peter Schein trail-blaze with a creative perspective on leadership that encourages vulnerability and empathy as a form of strength. The more traditional form of leadership that is based on immobile hierarchies is growing increasingly outdated and ineffective. Without the ability to actually communicate with their peers, leaders become alienated from their followers and productivity and quality are sacrificed. Authors Edgar Schein and Peter Schein recognize this reality and call for a reimagined form a leadership that coincides with emerging trends of relationship building, complex group work, and diverse workforces. Gaining a deeper understanding of the constantly evolving complexities of interpersonal, group and even intergroup relationships requires shifting our focus towards the process of group dynamics and collaboration. The humble leadership paradigm stresses the importance of studying of how things are being done through collaboration and humility. This space of collaboration is often where invention and brand-new ways of getting things done are created, rather than in the tunnel vision of new ideas of products, markets, or production methods. The future of leadership is dependent on working relationships that are trusting and open. Humble leaders don't shy away from human connection in the workplace but rather see it as an opportunity for growth and success.

The Power of Relationships, Openness, and Trust

Humble Leadership

This new book reveals what it takes for consultants of all types, as well as organizational leaders, to be really helpful in dealing with the complex, systemic, constantly changing organizational problems of today. They need to rapidly create a relationship of trust and openness that enables clients, subordinates, and team members to reveal what is really on their minds and to jointly develop a sense of what is the problem and what kind of adaptive response could best deal with it. Schein first introduced some of these concepts in his foundational 1969 book Process Consultation, which is still in use today. But now clients don't have the time or patience for the endless questioning that characterized much of process consultation. And clients still expect consultants to hand them answers. But Schein has come to realize that answers from outsiders are useless, because they're often working the wrong problem, don't understand the client organization's culture, or ignore the fact that constant change makes today's solutions obsolete tomorrow. To achieve a joint sense of what to do requires consultants and other helpers to develop a different kind of relationship with clients--a set of attitudes and behaviors that Schein calls humble consulting. Schein shows how helpers can display from the moment of first contact a level of caring and curiosity to move from relationships of professional distance to relationships of personalized trust and openness. And he gives many illustrations of the profound changes in mindset, behavior, and daily actions that flow from this new helpful consulting model.

How to Provide Real Help Faster

Humble Consulting

Sloan Fellows Professor of Management Edgar H Schein

Consulting in Complex and Changing Times Organizations face challenges today that are too messy and complicated for consultants to simply play doctor: run a few tests, offer a neat diagnosis of the “problem,” and recommend a solution. Edgar Schein argues that consultants have to jettison the old idea of professional distance and work with their clients in a more personal way, emphasizing authentic openness, curiosity, and humility. Schein draws deeply on his own decades of experience, offering over two dozen case studies that illuminate each stage of this humble consulting process. Just as he did with Process Consultation nearly fifty years ago, Schein has once again revolutionized the field, enabling consultants to be more genuinely helpful and vastly more effective.

John Van Maanen

Take back control of your career journey In the newly revised edition of Career Anchors: Finding Stability and Opportunity in the Changing Nature of Work, a team of world-renowned management and culture experts delivers a uniquely insightful exploration of your own career values and work relationships as they relate to your past and future choices. This easy-to-use workbook in combination with an online self-assessment offers critical and accessible self-diagnostic exercises along with information about the changing career scene and new descriptions of the eight career anchor categories. This book will help you: Explore how your work choices now relate to your family and self-development Explore how the rapidly changing world of work and business emphasizes globalization, competition, technology, organizational instability, uncertainty, and shifting values Engage in a powerful relationship mapping process that helps you to consider how your work and career choices now interact with your relationships with family, friends, and community Review the career anchor values and examine how these values have changed, so you can make better choices of what, when, where, and how to work as you look ahead This newest edition of Career Anchors is a can’t-miss resource written to help you analyze, assess, and understand the past, present, and future of your own career. It belongs in the libraries of early-career—as well as established—professionals looking to take back control over their work trajectories.

Finding Direction and Opportunity in the Changing World of Work

Career Anchors Reimagined

The father of the corporate culture field and pioneer in organizational psychology on today's changing corporate culture This is the definitive guide to corporate culture for practitioners. Recognized expert Edgar H. Schein explains what culture is and why it's important, how to evaluate your organization's culture, and how to improve it, using straightforward, practical tools based on decades of research and real-world case studies. This new edition reflects the massive changes in the business world over the past ten years, exploring the influence of globalization, new technology, and mergers on culture and organization change. New case examples help illustrate the principals at work and bring focus to emerging issues in international, nonprofit, and government organizations as well as business. Organized around the questions that change agents most often ask, this new edition of the classic book will help anyone from line managers to CEOs assess their culture and make it more effective. Offers a new edition of a classic work with a focus on practitioners Includes new case examples and information on globalization, the effects of technology, and managerial competencies Covers the basics on changing culture and includes a wealth of practical advice

The Corporate Culture Survival Guide

This worldwide bestseller offers simple guidance for building the kind of open and trusting relatonships vital for tackling global systemic challenges and developing adaptive, innovative organizations—over 200,000 copies sold and translated into seventeen languages! We live, say Edgar and Peter Schein, in a culture of “tell.” All too often we tell others what we think they need to know or should do. But whether we are leading or following, what matters most is we get to the truth. We have to develop a commitment to sharing vital facts and identifying faulty assumptions—it can mean the difference between success and failure. This is why we need Humble Inquiry more than ever. The Scheins define Humble Inquiry as “the gentle art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not know the answer, of building relationships based on curiosity and interest in the other person.” It was inspired by Edgar's twenty years of work in high-hazard industries and the health-care system, where honest communication can literally mean the difference between life and death. In this new edition the authors look at how Humble Inquiry differs from other kinds of inquiry, offer examples of it in action, and show how to overcome the barriers that keep us telling when we should be asking. This edition offers a deepening and broadening of this concept, seeing it as not just a way of posing questions but an entire attitude that includes better listening, better responding to what others are trying to tell us, and better revealing of ourselves. Packed with case examples and a full chapter of exercises and simulations, this is a major contribution to how we see human conversational dynamics and relationships, presented in a compact, personal, and eminently practical way.

Humble Inquiry, Second Edition

Lead your employees, clients, or students on a career path to success with the new third edition of Career Anchors. This edition features: Three user-friendly products that have been thoroughly updated and redesigned. An integration of the Career Anchors Self-Assessment with job/role analysis in one participant package. A more complete Facilitator's Guide that includes job/role analysis. A new, 4-point rating scale (in the previous edition the scale was 6-point). Updated scoring instructions. The Participant Workbook includes information about career development, a more complete description of the eight Career Anchors categories, and an interview section to help participants analyze their career history and determine their Career Anchor more precisely. The Workbook also includes a new section that enables participants to relate the Career Anchors to their current job and possible future jobs by providing an explaining how to create role maps of current job and conduct job/role analysis of possible future jobs. Order the Participant Workbook today and help your employees, clients, or students find workplace happiness and success.

Participant Workbook

Career Anchors

Implications for Education and Management

The Generation Gap

Corporate culture pioneer Edgar H. Schein gets back to basics and delivers a dynamite primer on changing cultures packed with practical advice. Here, Schein separates the sense from the nonsense regarding culture change theory and practice and tells in plain terms how readers can assess their organization to determine if its current culture fits its people and products. He then examines corporate culture on three levels--behaviors, values, and shared assumptions--and shows how each factors into change initiatives. Framed around the questions managers ask most often, the book uses case studies to show what successful change looks like and to demonstrate how you can dismantle a dysfunctional culture. A Warren Bennis Book

Sense and Nonsense About Culture Change

Edgar H. Schein, a major contributor to the field of organizational psychology, often gets asked how he became interested in culture, careers, and consulting-so he wrote this first part of his autobiography to answer that question. From his early years in Switzerland, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia, to immigrating to the United States in 1938 and attending three different universities, he recalls the formative experiences that made him a scholar as well as his post-doctoral work at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, where he interviewed returning prisoners of war from the Korean conflict. He'd go on to work at MIT's Sloan School of Management from 1956 to 2008, and help lay the foundation for five different concepts in the field of organizational psychology: coercive persuasion, career anchors, process consultation, organizational culture, and humble inquiry. But he would not have been able to make so many professional contributions without his wife of more than fifty years, the late Mary Lodmell, who gave him three children and many, many great times. Join Schein as he looks back at his childhood, early professional life, and courting the woman of his dreams in Becoming American.

My First Learning Journey

Becoming American

Michael M

Paul J

Peter S. DeLisi

Paul J. Kampas

Edgar H

Michael M. Sonduck

Peter S

In a study of Digital Equipment Corporation, the author chronicles the four-decade arc of one of the most important companies of the computer age, revealing how the company rose to prominance and then collapsed.

DEC is dead, long live DEC

In this Third Edition of His Classic Book, Edgar Schein shows how to transform the abstract concept of culture into a practical tool that managers and students can use to understand the dynamics of organizations and change. Organizational pioneer Schein updates his influential understanding of culture-what it is, how it is created, how it evolves, and how it can be changed. Focusing on today's business realities, Schein draws on a wide range of contemporary research to redefine culture, offers new information on the topic of occupational cultures, and demonstrates the crucial role leaders play in successfully applying the principles of culture to achieve organizational goals. He also tackles the complex question of how an existing culture can be changed-one of the toughest challenges of leadership. The result is a vital resource for understanding and practicing organizational effectiveness. Book jacket.

A Dynamic View

Edgar G. Schein

Organizational Psychology

Edgar H. Schein, a major contributor to the field of organizational psychology, often gets asked how he became interested in culture, careers, and consultingso he wrote this first part of his autobiography to answer that question. From his early years in Switzerland, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia, to immigrating to the United States in 1938 and attending three different universities, he recalls the formative experiences that made him a scholar as well as his post-doctoral work at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, where he interviewed returning prisoners of war from the Korean conflict. Hed go on to work at MITs Sloan School of Management from 1956 to 2008, and help lay the foundation for five different concepts in the field of organizational psychology: coercive persuasion, career anchors, process consultation, organizational culture, and humble inquiry. But he would not have been able to make so many professional contributions without his wife of more than fifty years, the late Mary Lodmell, who gave him three children and many, many great times. Join Schein as he looks back at his childhood, early professional life, and courting the woman of his dreams in Becoming American.

Edgar H. Schein

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