PRLawrence.com

An Informal Breakfast Talk on My Career

Paul Lawrence - Originally presented 4/14/07

Today I will sketch out my career adventures along my lifetime track in search of a unified understanding of human behavior---actually a pretty strange story. This is the first time I have been challenged to list all the steps. Frankly they were more diverse than I had realized. And my conclusion is that I have been very fortunate in my career.

I will start with my memory of the very first time I acted as a student of human behavior. At around 6 I had a serious heart-to-heart with my Dad about my observation that I truly loved him, but I loved my Mom even more. I told him that I had figured out why. “I am only related to you by marriage.” My father loved to tell this story about me.
Next a key event as a fifth grader. Upon reviewing why my teacher had marked a single one of my answers wrong on an arithmetic test, I approached her and quietly questioned her grading. She responded in a voice that carried to the entire class. “Why Paul, I must have been mistaken to grade any of your answers as wrong.” The class roared. I must have been insufferable. I think this was the first time I intensely experienced the feeling we refer to as shame. I can still feel it. I think it made me more cautious and somewhat shy. [But maybe after hearing my talk you will wonder about that.]
After my seventh grade my family moved from a small town to the big city of Grand Rapids. I moved from the top to the bottom of the social heap. Defined as a country hick, I was teased and even bullied by my peers. My response was to decide to beat them all —in my strong suit---academics. I became the ultimate nerd.
As a high school senior on the debating team, I was challenged by our coach to come up with a winning argument to the proposition that the US should enter into a military alliance with Great Britain. This was 1938, in isolationist Michigan. It seemed hopeless. But I spent day after day in the library and came up with the ‘outside-the-box” idea that the US should focus on entering into a defensive naval alliance with the Brits to check Japan’s ambitions in the Pacific. It was a weird idea at the time, but unlike other teams, we started winning all our affirmative debates. From this experience I gained confidence that I could tackle complex issues and, with hard work, I could make some sense of them. I think I actually became addicted to this exciting learning process.
That same year I had a big idea that shaped much of my subsequent career. I was appalled at all the violence I saw around me – the labor--management conflict in Michigan’s auto industry, and, at that particular time, the outbreak of WWII in Europe. Why was such violence a big part of the human record throughout history? None of the people I knew were violent. I decided I wanted to understand human behavior, especially the violent part. I had my lifetime mission. Luckily for me, I had no idea how ridiculously ambitious it was.
I began searching for the college training that I guessed my mission would require. During my three undergraduate years I majored in sociology and economics and minored in psychology. At 19, in the spring of 1942, the wartime conditions gave me the opportunity to simultaneously enter both the MBA program at the Harvard Business School and the Navy. One year later I went on fulltime duty in the Navy—nothing glamorous — I ran a batch of tran shipment warehouses in New Guinea.
After the war I decided I needed to complete my education by getting a PhD in sociology so I went for interviews at the University of Chicago. Luckily my interviewer, when he learned of the training I wanted, advised me to go back to HBS and enter their brand new multidisciplinary (drawing on all the social sciences) doctoral program on human behavior in organizations. What fabulous advice! What wonderful luck!!
For my doctorate research at HBS I was more of less assigned to study the local Sylvania Electric plant. I was told to go into that plant on a daily basis and interview and observe from bottom to top, from side to side for months, until I really understood what was going on in the entire organization. I was told to behave like an anthropologist studying a strange tribe. To put a story line on my observations I tracked their efforts at the time to design and produce an early form of the transistor. During the same time I was expected to read and discuss the classics in all the social sciences. This entire training process was essential to all my subsequent work. [2 books based on my dissertation work]
Later, as a new faculty member at HBS, I decided to study the Stop and Shop grocery chain as my first major project: again a close-up look from bottom to top as the company tried to execute a major decentralization change. I learned how hard such change is when it involves changing established behavior patterns of key managers, especially when the required changes contradicted their self-concept. [1 book]
Next came a chance to study the Pentagon (with Jack Glover): a confusing story mostly of inter-group, that is, inter-service, rivalry and conflict. It was a very heady experience interviewing all that brass. [1 book]
Next came a multi-industry study of the inherent nature of industrial jobs and the response of workers to these various jobs (with Arthur Turner). We studied all kinds of jobs from highly repetitive assembly lines to the high-skilled operation of huge paper mills. We had to identify the dimensions along which these jobs could be rated and compared and the several dimensions of response in order to see the uniformities. The movement toward job enrichment came out of this kind of work. [1 book]
Next came my best-known study (with Jay Lorsch; it has been cited more than 2000 times in our professional journals). The principal resulting book was entitled Organization and Environment: Managing Differentiation and Integration. It was based on an insight from the prior study that it takes different kinds of organizations to be successful in different kinds of industrial environments. This was like Darwin’s observations about the adaptation of species to diverse environments. But what kinds of organizations match successfully with which kinds of environments? We found that the differentiation of internal units needed to reflect the complexity and change-rate of their environments, but increased differentiation made it harder to attain the needed integration. We identified integrative mechanisms that could address the issue. [3 books]
In the late sixties, I was part of a team that studied the social organization of inner city black ghettos. We actually contributed to a social invention, Community Development Corporations; and some of them still persist relatively successfully. [1 book]
During the crisis at Harvard in 1969-1970, as part of the larger Committee on Governance, I served as chairman of the inter-school committee on The Nature and Purposes of the University. This gave us the challenge of analyzing universities as institutions in relation to the broader society, both in general and in particular as regards Harvard. I recently reread our brief report and found it still to be relevant to the issues Harvard faces. [1 booklet]
As a bit of a by-pass, I must mention a 1970 family safari in Africa that gave me insights that paid off much latter. Our safari leaders had friends along the way. We had the good fortunate to camp out with Jane Goodall and go with her on field observations of the wild dogs she was studying at the time. We also were personally guided by Mary Leaky to the very spot in the Oldavi Gorge where, with her husband, she discovered the first fossil remains of Homo habilis. What adventures!
As the early seventies started I undertook a study of mid-sized city governments (with John Kotter). We focused on each city’s leading mayoral administration of the sixties. We found that their relative success hinged primarily on each mayor’s ability to develop constructive relations with key community leaders, a network outside as well as inside the government, who together developed a consensus agenda of do-able projects and worked together to enact them. [1 book]
In the seventies I developed some key contacts in the medical field that parlayed into three studies. First a key administrator in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) got us going on studying medical schools and also their associated teaching hospitals. In summary, we found that teaching hospitals, in organizational terms, were highly differentiated but barely integrated at all. The insurance system gave them no cost constraints, hence no pressure for integration. We found the power in medical schools was concentrated in departmental chiefs. Each of these gentlemen was striving gallantly to simultaneously be excellent as researchers, teachers, practitioners and administrators. Not surprisingly, not all of them were successful in doing it all. [several articles with Marvin Weisbord and Marty Charns]
These studies, luckily, opened the way later to the study of two fascinating organizations dedicated to performing large-scale research: NIH itself and also the famous Bell Labs. We were given the chance to take an inside look at a selection of major research projects in both organizations and did a comparative analysis of what contributed to their success or failure. [1 book with Ron Beddows and Harry Lane]
In the eighties I undertook to study a prominent issue at the time, the relative decline of many American industries [with David Dyer]. We studied the entire life history of seven major industries: the steel, auto, coal, agriculture, telecommunication, hospital, and housing industries as they soared and declined over time. The major finding was that the ups and downs varied primarily with the amount of competitive pressure they were under. While the economists were arguing that the more competitive pressure the better, we found that decline was associated with very high competitive pressure as well as with low pressure. Like for Goldilocks, the middle sweet spot was ‘just right’. And governmental industrial policies had the most leverage on the amount of competitive pressure in each industry. [1 book]
Also during the eighties I studied two organizational developments that were notable for their record of conspicuous successes, but almost equally for some conspicuous failures; matrix organizations and supply-chain alliances. [1 book]
My next big adventure of doing close-up research in factories was in the Soviet Union during the turbulent Gorbachev days. With the essential help of my partner, Charalambos Vlachoutsicos, we obtained permission to be the first Western scholars to have such a close-up look. We learned about the consequences of managing large enterprises entirely by means of hierarchal, command-and-control, methods.
When I reached my mandatory retirement date in 1991, I stopped teaching but, fortunately, my Dean asked me to continue at half-pay on research. In case you wondered what happened to my sense of mission about understanding human behavior, including violence, it now kicked in as my central focus. I had just needed a string of diverse organizational studies as part of my rather long preparation time, just soaking up observations of human behavior. I figured I had finally done my homework. And now there were new ways to research the brain (scanning, genomics, etc.) that made it possible to search for stronger answers to my big questions. I profited greatly from directly studying Darwin’s own writing and discovered his key insights about human behavior that have been essentially neglected since his time. I also profited by being coached in biology by E. O Wilson and Ernst Mayr. The result was my book with Nitin Nohria, Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices. This book focused on the ultimate unconscious motives, the four drives underlying human behavior.
Finally, I am up-to-date. I am now finishing up my latest book that rounds out a unified theory on human behavior and then directly focuses on the violence question. It is called: Being Human: A Darwinian Theory of Human Behavior
In closing I want to stress the essential fact that all my wildly diverse research work for 60 years was consistently supported, intellectually and financially, by my employer, Harvard University. And recently Harvard even honored my work by naming an endowed chair for me. Not many universities would do that. How fortunate I have been.