About the Authors

Ed Schein is Professor Emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan School of Management. He was educated at the University of Chicago, Stanford University, and Harvard University, where he received his PhD in Social Psychology in 1952. He worked at the Walter Reed Institute of Research for 4 years and then joined MIT, where he taught until 2005. He has published extensively—Organizational Psychology, 3rd ed. (1980); Process Consultation Revisited (1999); Career Anchors, 4th ed. (with John Van Maanen, 2013; on career dynamics); Organizational Culture and Leadership, 5th ed. (2017); The Corporate Culture Survival Guide, 2nd ed. (2009); on a cultural analysis of Singapore’s economic miracle (Strategic Pragmatism, 1996); and on the rise and fall of Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC Is Dead; Long Live DEC, 2003).

In 2009 he published Helping, a book on the general theory and practice of giving and receiving help, followed in 2013 by Humble Inquiry, which explores why helping is so difficult in Western culture and which won the 2013 business book of the year award from the Dept. of Leadership of the University of San Diego. He published Humble Consulting in 2016, which revises the whole model of how to consult and coach, and is working with his son Peter on various projects in their Organizational Culture and Leadership Institute (OCLI.org).

He is the 2009 recipient of the Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner Award of the Academy of Management, the 2012 recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Leadership Association, and the 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award in Organization Development from the International OD Network and has an Honorary Doctorate from the IEDC Bled School of Management in Slovenia.

Peter Schein is the cofounder and COO of OCLI.org in Menlo Park, CA. He provides counsel to senior management on organizational development challenges facing private and public sector entities worldwide. He is a contributing author to the 5th edition of Organizational Culture and Leadership (Schein, 2017).

Peter’s work draws on 30 years of industry experience in marketing and corporate development at technology pioneers. In his early career he developed new products at Pacific Bell and Apple. He led new product efforts at Silicon Graphics, Inc., Concentric Network Corporation (XO Communications), and Packeteer (Blue Coat). Thereafter, Peter spent 11 years in corporate development and strategy at Sun Microsystems, where he led numerous investments in high-growth ecosystems. He drove acquisitions of technology innovators that developed into highly valued product lines at Sun. Through these experiences developing new strategies organically, and merging smaller entities into a large company, Peter developed a keen focus on the underlying organizational development challenges that growth engenders in innovation-driven enterprises.

Peter was educated at Stanford University (BA Social Anthropology, with Honors and Distinction), Northwestern University (Kellogg MBA, Marketing and Information Management), and the USC Marshall School of Business (HCEO Certificate).