Tag Archives: Edgar Schein

“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”

In their 1997 book The Power of Alignment George Labovitz and Victor Rosansky attribute this quote to Jim Barksdale, former CEO of Netscape, (although it may come originally from Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, 1989).  For my three decades of medicine in the uniformed services, the main thing was pretty straight forward: caring for Service Members and their families.  I remember considering a transition to civilian-life at about twenty years into my career.  While paging through the directory of a local hospital I found myself looking at the physicians’ pictures and musing, “I wonder what their ‘main thing’ is?”  I stayed in the military until they told me it was time to go home.  I think that the clear sense of the main thing was a big part of the reason.

Now I have worked in academia for nearly a year.  Part of the adjustment has been trying to answer the same question: “What is academia’s main thing?”  To a newcomer, the university seemed at times to be a random collection of instructors, researchers and research assistants, statisticians, administrators, teachers, clinicians (in medical academia) all circling in parallel orbits.  I could argue that the medical or graduate students were the central focus, but some staff members rarely interacted with the students.  The search for a unifying “main thing” proved elusive.

A possible answer to the question occurred to me recently while I was listening to a post-doc researcher present her work.  She described how each experiment had led to the need for further experiments.  One question answered led to fresh questions unanswered.  It struck me while she was speaking that when academia functions as it should, its “main thing” is inquiry. Continue reading →