MIT Sloan Management Review Article on A New Era for Culture, Change, and Leadership

With the world in flux, organizations and the people within them need close relationships to thrive.

When social psychologist Edgar Schein joined MIT’s Sloan School of Management in the 1950s, the school had just launched its great experiment of teaching management through formal disciplines like mathematics, social psychology, economics, and history. That was a radical departure from expounding “the practice of management” through cases taught by professors who had been managers for most of their careers. The new approach sparked close, unlikely collaborations and deep, innovative thinking about leadership, group cultures, and organizational change — all nascent fields of study at the time. It was in this environment that Ed and his colleagues embarked on what he calls “an exciting quarter century of model building,” which helped define how people thought about and engaged with organizations.