Academy ol Management Executive. 2004, Vol. 18, No. 2

Changing organizationalstructures: An interview with

Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Interview by Sheila M. Puffer

Executive OverviewRosabeth Moss Kanter is the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor of Business Administration at

Harvard Business School, specializing in strategy, innovation, and leadership for change.She advises major corporations and governments worldwide and is the author or co-author of 16 books, including her 2001 book. Evolve!: Succeeding in the Digital Culture ofTomorrow, and a /orfhcoming boot. Confidence: How Winning Streaks and LosingStreaks Begin and End. on organizafiona7 dynamics and the leadership of turnarounds.Other award-winning bestsellers since Men and Women of the Corporation and TheChange Masters include When Giants Learn to Dance, as well as World Class: ThrivingLocally in the Global Economy and Rosabeth Moss Kanter on the Frontiers ofManagement. In 2001 she received the Academy of Management's Distinguished CareerAward, its highest award for scholarly contributions, for her impact on managementthought, and in 2002 she received the World Teleport Association's Intelligent CommunityVisionary of the Year Award.

She serves as a senior adviser to IBM's award-winning Reinventing Educationinitiative, currently active at 21 sites in the U.S. and in eight other countries. In 1997-1998she conceived and led the Business Leadership in the Social Sector project, under theauspices of the Harvard Business School, which involved over 100 national leaders indialogue and a call to action about public-private partnerships for change. From 1989-1992 she also served as editor of the Harvard Business Review. She joined the HarvardBusiness School faculty in 1986 from Yale University, where she held a tenuredprofessorship from 1977 to 1986.

Professor Kanter has received 21 honorary doctoral degrees from distinguisheduniversities nationwide and over a dozen leadership awards, and has been named to listsof the "50 most influential business thinkers in the world," the "18 business gurus towatch," the "100 most important women in America," and the "50 most powerful womenin the world." Her public service activities span local and global interests. She has beena corporate and pension fund director and sits on many civic and non-profit boards,including City Year, the national urban youth service corps. She co-foundedGoodmeasure Inc., a consulting group, and serves as chairman of its board and also is adirector or adviser for other companies.

98

2004 banter 97

Rosabeth Moss Kanter

I am meeting with you more than a quarter centuryafter my first reading of Men and Women of theCorporation. To mark the occasion, I am wearingthe same suede suit that I wore in the 1970s when Iwas an administrator in the Canadian governmentas well as a part-time MBA student and instructor.And I am holding the paperback copy of your book,complete with highlighting throughout, that hasbeen on my shelf all those years.

Men and Women of the Corporation was an award-winning book right after it was published,receiving the 1977 C. Wright Mills Award. Did youexpect the book to be such a success from thestart? Why do you think it made such an impact?

I was very early in my career, but I had spoken aboutthe themes before the book came out and understoodthat they resonated with people for several reasons.One was that we were on the cusp of change in theUnited States and then increasingly around theworld. When you're on the cusp of change, an anal-ysis that comes along and begins to explain theexperiences people are having is welcomed. So therewas an audience for this book, in fact, several audi-

ences. One was academics who needed to incorpo-rate a different perspective into their work given thatthe assumptions about organizations and how theyfunctioned were based on the model of a largemachine-age industrial bureaucracy with a sex-segregated workforce.

By the cusp of change, I don't mean only changewith respect to the flood of women into profes-sional and managerial careers but also manyother changes. Because many existing theorieswere based on an old economic and organizationalmodel, there was interest in hearing about emerg-ing models and enlarging analyses to take morethings into account that had been neglected. I'mnot sure that one could have written about thecomposition of the workforce before it began tochange, because as long as things are stable youtake for granted the conditions around you.

Another audience was the people who were expe-riencing difficulties in their own careers enteringworlds that had been closed to them, whether theywere women or racial minorities or simply peoplecrossing barriers. I was an advocate. I was one ofthose people and was very interested in ensuringthat social science didn't continue to blame the vic-tim—that is, hold that success or lack of it was solelyup to the individual rather than reflecting systemicpatterns. I had a mission to explain people's experi-ence in such a way that they could both understandwhy it was happening to them, see the barriers, andthen break through them.

/ had a mission to explain people'sexperience in such a way that they couldboth understand why it was happeningto them, see the barriers, and then breakthrough them.

The audience of practitioners, executives, and pol-icy makers had to deal with the influx of a new kindof person. This was after the early days of the CivilRights Movement when women by accident got writ-ten into the law. This was now the point of change atwhich companies had to figure out how to ensurethat people would have access to more opportunity.It was also at the cusp of the emergence of a neweconomy. Apple Computer was founded a year be-fore Men and Women of the Corporation was pub-lished. America's productivity crisis had been notedfive years before, and I remember being at manyconferences dealing with the topic at which few peo-ple—yet—questioned whether the structure of theold industrial bureaucracy might just be a cause of

98 Academy of Management Executive May

failure to reach full potential in terms of productivityand effectiveness.

So I was dealing with many currents in the air. Iworked hard to meet every academic standard Icould, but my goal was impact and change, not justacademic research for its own sake. I was veryconscious of the potential value of my work bothfor individuals and for changing policy. Weneeded to change policy because every time peo-ple were stifled or prevented from reaching theirpotential to make a contribution, we were losingproductivity. One of the reasons I knew the bookwould be well received, and I don't mean this in anarrogant way, was because it was talking aboutthings that didn't blame either the victim of dis-crimination nor the people who had benefited frompast inequities. It was talking about the system, sopeople could listen to it.

I show^ed that powerlessness corrupts, lack ofopportunity demotivates, being too different andnot being accepted distracts the attention of thegroup, and having a homogeneous group of exec-utives at the top perpetuates tradition rather thanopening the company to innovation. Structural ar-guments are very powerful, particularly the num-bers issue. Everyone understands the experienceof being different from the people around them.People can more easily have a dialogue about thiscommon experience than they can about what itmeans to be female or African-American, so thatcommunication begins to open. I could talk to ex-ecutives about how these ideas could not only cre-ate more equity in the workforce, but also how theycould create a more productive organization thatwould be more effective for everyone. So I hadmany ways of talking about these issues, and Ithink that's important in the impact that academicwork can have. If it is thought of in terms of signif-icant economic and social issues, then it can makea contribution to improving the world. I don't wantto do anything that doesn't make a contribution toimproving the world.

7 don't want to do anything that doesn'tmake a contribution to improving theworld.

Of course, the book was also an ethnography of acorporation, one of the first to tackle the topic ofcorporate culture. I was trying to explain the focalcompany [a large multinational conglomerate whichKanter called Industrial Supply Corporation, or Ind-sco] as an iconic company, representing the fullrange of industrial giants. Even if I could have

named it, I wouldn't have, because it was more pow-erful disguised. Through the years, countless peoplehave asked me: "When did you study us?" It wasarchetypal. I wanted to explain "Industrial SupplyCorporation" and what it did to people. I also wantedto understand why some people, more women thanmen, got a bad rap. Many people really cared aboutthese issues, particularly women. Many women toldme how the book explained their experience. It cer-tainly explained mine. I wrote it partly because I wasannoyed at the academic work coming out claimingthat women feared success and had no ambition. Iknew many people for whom that was not true. Iwanted to debunk a range of stereotypes by testingthem in the real world. Why was it that people didn'twant women as bosses? In other spheres, women aresupposed to be kind and nurturing. This was a newfrontier at the time that looked at the sociology of theworkplace, that added to the classic studies throughthe years. I felt that it spoke to many different audi-ences. That's another criterion I have for my work,that it's multidimensional.

Men and Women of the Corporation, The ChangeMasters, and numerous other works of yoursemploy intensive field research and ethnographicmethodology, richly supported by social scienceresearch literature. How feasible and valuable isthis methodology today?

With Men and Women of the Corporation, I didn'thave all that much access to top management. AndI wasn't at Harvard Business School at the time.Now business schools write cases, and there is anestablished mode. I was unusual too. But I wasstudying corporations because of my interest inpractice. As a young professor, I did not want tospend my life in an ivory tower. I wanted to be outin the real world. I had access to the companybecause I was brought in to do some consultingprojects, using survey research skills I had gainedin graduate school. One project led to another, andmy training in field research proved handy. I be-friended people in a personnel developmentgroup, and that was a source of entree. So I wasworking with the middle level of the company, andthat's where the action is, where people werethinking about who's going to get promoted.

I interviewed the first women brought in to a cer-tain function, as well as the first woman promotedfrom secretary to manager. I got to see the differencebetween the requirements of a support role andthose of a managerial role as she struggled with thetransition. In some ways, I learned the companymuch better because I was living it through the eyesof people in the middle, than had I spent all my time

2004 Kanter 99

in the executive suite. I hadn't intended to write anethnography, but all the pieces fell together when Iconsidered current theories in light of my actual ex-perience in the field. Then I began to see the connec-tion between the observations I was making and thenew or enlarged concepts that were required to makesense out of them. As I explained in the methodolog-ical appendix to Men and Women of the Corporation,I moved back and forth between the field observa-tions and the theory, and they started to come to-gether very nicely.

When the book came out, the social sciences werebecoming so overwhelmingly quantitative and wereconcerned so much with mathematical modeling. Iwas doing a study using field methods. The firstresponses I got from senior people in the field werevery positive. The only controversy about the bookwas from people who did not like change andwanted to pretend that discrimination didn't exist,like a member of the Fortune editorial board about toretire who said I was wrong because companiesdon't discriminate (and maybe women belonged athome anyway). Other people of his generation re-sisted those ideas, and I worked hard to convincethem. I wrote an article on the values and composi-tion of the changing workforce and included 102 foot-notes to convince a very old economist that I knewwhat I was talking about, because he wanted to saynothing had changed, that there was no "new workforce" or "changing organization." Of course, thefounding of Apple in 1976 and the growth of theinformation technology industry soon proved thatthey were wrong, and I was right, and as awarenessof all these changes grew, my next book. The ChangeMasters, was very well received.

In the introduction to Men and Women, youadvanced as your main premise thatorganizational structure was the primarydeterminant of behavior in organizations andthat "the women's issue also appears as animportant sub-theme in this book" (p. 8). With"women" prominently in the title, was this morethan a sub-theme? You could have called it ThePeople of the Corporation. Did "the women'sissue" ultimately overshadow your main theme?

I deliberately called it Men and Women of theCorporation. Men and women. That's a phrase thattrips off the tongue. I called it "of" and not "in" thecorporation. "Of" means you are "a creation of." Iwas writing about two kinds of people who werecreated by, whose behavior was created by, thetracking system in the company. That was what Imeant by structure, which today would includestructure, culture, and processes. It's the system

underlying behavior. It could have been called ThePeople of the Corporation, but that would havemissed the point that both men and women wereshaped by their positions, though in different waysbecause they were concentrated in different roles.If the roles were similar, so was the behavior as-sociated with them.

In some ways the women's issue did get much ofthe attention, because there was a strong femaleconstituency who cared about the issues, and as Isaid earlier, we were on the cusp of major socialchange. But the book got read, used, and quoted bymany people of both genders. Jeffrey Pfeffer [ofStanford University] talked about this as being oneof the first studies of organizational demographicsand how it affected performance. Many peoplecited the chapter about managers where I ad-vanced the idea that is now called cloning. I calledit homosocial reproduction and was being a littleprovocative.

In some ways the women's issue did getmuch of the attention, because there wasa strong female constituency who caredabout the issues, and we were on thecusp of major social change.

The three guiding concepts of opportunity,power, and numbers got a great deal of discussion,but there were many concepts in the book besidesthose three key variables. I published some sepa-rate journal articles, including one on the numbersissue in the American Journal of Sociology, thatbecame very popular. I also developed a trainingvideo on the structural phenomenon of being dif-ferent, A Tale of "O," that is still widely usedaround the world 20 years later. So there weremany themes, but women were certainly a constit-uency and an audience. But the book wouldn'thave resonated if it were just about women andwomen's experience, nor would any of those othermaterials, including that training video. I wascareful not to talk about the usual things that aresaid in gender studies or about women, becausemy goal was to understand organizations and pro-vide an agenda for changing them. In essence, allI'm saying is that if a company is tracking peopleby a certain set of physical characteristics, andyours are different, then your entry job is likely tobe different depending on your own characteris-tics. And that sets your behavior in motion. In Si-mone de Beauvoir's book The Second Sex, the sec-ond sex refers to the Other. The Other has toalways be super conscious, whereas the dominant

100 Academy of Management Executive May

player can take everything for granted because theworld just makes room for him. I think that domi-nant players are often less interested in knowinghow the world works, because it is working forthem, whereas those who feel like the Other areautomatically more interested. The ideas from Menand Women of the Corporation show how, for in-stance, in situations of risk, people still want to bewith those like themselves, and exclude others.

In the same year that Men and Women of theCorporation appeared, you published aninfluential monograph for the Russell SageFoundation titled Wort and Family in the UnitedStates. That volume laid some groundwork forwhy these domains should not be consideredseparate worlds. What were the major messagesyou tried to get across in that book?

The two books came out at the same time becauseanother piece of the societal-change equation wasthat people went home and had lives outside thecorporation. One chapter in Men and Women of theCorporation dealt with corporate wives. I had donesome analysis a few years earlier and published achapter in a book I co-edited about the roleswomen played in and around the white collar ormanagerial ranks of corporations. They were notsimply playing roles as secretaries, which was theprincipal role for women, or in occupations thatwere female-dominated, like teaching and nurs-ing. They were making major contributions, partic-ularly at higher ranks of companies, colleges anduniversities, and in government as wives, as asecond unpaid staff person or contributor to thework of the organization. In fact, as part of theresearch for Men and Women, I convened a meet-ing of the wives at Industrial Supply Corporationbecause it had become clear to me how importanttheir contributions were, not just in getting theirhusbands off to work in the morning and takingcare of everything at home, but that they wereactually providing services just as the First Ladyprovides services to the United States. So you votefor one and get two.

What impact did Work and Family have ongovernment and corporate policy making?

The role of women in organizations was one ofthe big issues at that time, and some of theissues of work and family are still unresolvedtoday. Back then, when men entered the work-force, they brought two people. When womenentered the workforce, they either had to staysingle, in which case they were one person, or if

they had a family, they were less than one per-son because they had obligations at home. Thiswas a policy issue, a matter of debate very muchon people's minds. I took a look at these inter-sections, and again we were on the cusp ofchange as women started trying to get into otheroccupations. All of a sudden, it became an issueof what would happen to the family at home. Andif men weren't going to bring two people withthem to the workplace, then expectations wouldhave to change.

When women entered the workforce, theyeither had to stay single, in which casethey were one person, or if they had afamily, they were less than one personbecause they had obligations at home.

I was very interested in whether we needednew policy and had been involved in many pol-icy discussions of some of these issues. So Iwrote Work and Family for the Russell SageFoundation. One of my regrets is that I let thempublish it rather than a commercial publisher,and it went out of print. But the Center for Workand Family at Purdue University in collaborationwith Boston College now gives a Rosabeth MossKanter Award, named after me as a result of thatbook, for research on work and family. At thattime there were a handful of people who wereinterested in the intersections. It seemed to methat if we were dealing with change, change tookplace not just inside companies but also at theintersection of those companies and the lives ofthe people they were hoping would be productive.

Work and Family begins by talking about themyth of separate worlds, as though life at homehas nothing to do with life in the company. I dis-covered at Industrial Supply Corporation, and wesee it all around us, that people pretended that allthe richness and variety of people's differenceswere irrelevant to the work of the corporation.There was a tacit agreement that these worldsdidn't intersect, when clearly they did. When peo-ple called in sick, they might really have beentaking care of a sick child. When men got pro-moted, it was often weighed what kind of a hostesstheir wife was, how good she would be at enter-taining, and she was often part of the politicswhether he got ahead. I acknowledged these otherobligations and said there was a call for child care,the absence of which still astonishes me in a coun-try like the United States. Also, it was clear thatpeople took their experiences home with them.