and moral support. Terry's (2013) team‐teaching venture with President Devorah Lieberman and Professor Jack Meek of the University of La Verne showed what's possible when conventional boundaries are trespassed in a class of aspiring undergraduate leaders.
This experience led to the founding of the Terrence E. Deal Leadership Institute. The Institute focuses on the role of fiction, music, art, metaphor, theater and drama, and other nonrational aspects of leadership and organizations. The board for the Institute includes Dr. Shannon Capaldi, Executive Director Lee Bolman, Lee Brockman, Carl Cohn, Sharon Conley, Myra Garcia, Stu Gothold, Bill Hawkins, Wendy Lau, Doan Thi Nam‐Hau, Alma Martinez, Jack Meek, and the late Warren Bennis.
Others to whom our debt is particularly clear are John Aasted, Homa Aminmadani, the late Chris Argyris, Sam Bacharach, Cliff Baden, Margaret Benefiel, Estella Bensimon, Bud Bilanich, Bob Birnbaum, Barbara Bunker, Tom Burks, Ellen Castro, Carlos Cortés, Linton Deck, Dave Fuller, Ellen Harris, Jim Honan, Jim Hynes, Tom Johnson, Bob Kegan, James March, Grady McGonagill, Judy McLaughlin, John Meyer, Kevin Nichols, Harrison Owen, Donna Redman, Peggy Redman, Michael Sales, Karl Weick, Julie Wheeler, Roy Williams, and Joe Zolner. Thanks as always to Dave Brown, Tim Hall, Todd Jick, Bill Kahn, Phil Mirvis, and Barry Oshry of the Group previously known as the Brookline Circle, now in its fifth decade of searching for joy and meaning in lives devoted to the study of organizations, even with its members mostly retired and spread across five different states.
Outside the United States, we are grateful to Poul Erik Mouritzen in Denmark; Rolf Kaelin, Cüno Pumpin, and Peter Weisman in Switzerland; Ilpo Linko in Finland; Tom Case in Brazil; Einar Plyhn and Haakon Gran in Norway; Peter Normark and Dag Bjorkegren in Sweden; Ching‐Shiun Chung in Taiwan; Helen Gluzdakova and Anastasia Vitkovskaya in Russia; and H.R.H. Prince Philipp von und zu Lichtenstein.
Four professional winemakers, the late Romeo “Meo” Zuech of Piedra Creek Winery, Brett Escalera of Consilience, and Tre Anelli and Bob Shiebelhut of Tolosa, offer advice that applies to leadership as well as wine making. Meo reminds us, “Never over‐manage your grapes,” and Brett prefaces answers to all questions with “It all depends.” On the East Coast, members of two neighborhood groups, Feet First and the Salisbury Road Book Club, have helped to maintain sanity and spirit even when the pandemic blocked our traditional sharing of food and drink
We're delighted to be well into the fourth decade of our partnership with Jossey‐Bass and Wiley. We're grateful to the many friends who have helped us over the years, including Bill Henry, Steve Piersanti, Lynn Luckow, Bill Hicks, Debra Hunter, Cedric Crocker, Byron Schneider, Kathe Sweeney, and many others. In recent years, Jeanenne Ray has been a wonderful editor and friend.
Lee's six children—Edward, Shelley, Lori, Scott, Christopher, and Bradley—and three grandchildren (James, Jazmyne, and Foster)—all continue to enrich his life and contribute to his growth. Terry's daughter Janie, a chef, has a rare talent of almost magically transforming simple ingredients into fine cuisine. Special mention also goes to Terry's deceased parents, Bob and Dorothy Deal. Both lived long enough to be pleasantly surprised that their oft‐wayward son could write a book. Equal mention is due to Lee's parents, Eldred and Florence Bolman.
We again dedicate this book to our wives, who have more than earned all the credit and appreciation that we can give them. Joan Gallos, Lee's spouse and closest colleague, combines intellectual challenge and critique with support and love. She has been an active collaborator in developing our ideas, and her teaching manual for previous editions has been a frame‐breaking model for the genre. Her contributions have become so integrated into our own thinking that we are no longer able to thank her for all the ways that the book has gained from her wisdom and insights.
Sandy Deal's psychological training enables her to approach the field of organizations with a distinctive and illuminating slant. Her successful practice produces examples that have helped us make some even stronger connections to the concepts of clinical psychology. She is one of the most gifted diagnosticians in the field, as well as a delightful partner whose love and support over the long run have made all the difference. She is a rare combination of courage and caring, intimacy and independence, responsibility, and playfulness.
To Joan and Sandy, thanks again. As the years accumulate (rapidly), we love you even more.
Lee G. Bolman
Brookline, Massachusetts
Terrence E. Deal
San Luis Obispo, California
January, 2021
Chapter 1 Introduction: The Power of Reframing
Donald Trump's presidency was distinctive for his outsized personality, raucous rallies, fearsome Twitterstorms, and stunning iconoclasm. It was also unorthodox from a management perspective, a feature that generated less media attention but affected everything the Trump administration tried to do. From his experience of running a family business, Trump brought a deeply ingrained preference for patriarchy rather than bureaucracy, for entrepreneurial flexibility rather than structural constraint, and for lieutenants whose loyalty mattered more than their experience or expertise (Blair, 2018). He created a structure much like that of a boisterous family, with Trump as a dominant father figure whose attention and favor everyone else fought to get.
Traditionally, presidents have relied on their chiefs of staff to bring a modicum of order and discipline to operations that are chronically hectic and complex. Trump's first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, lasted only six months, during which he struggled to control both his boss and his staff. He was “widely viewed as weak and ineffective,” but “hardly got the chance to operate as an effective chief of staff” (Prokop, 2017), because he was hobbled by more powerful informal players like Trump consigliere Steve Bannon and Trump's son‐in‐law Jared Kushner.
Trump tried to rein in the chaos and infighting of the Priebus era by appointing a retired marine general, John Kelly, as his next chief of staff, but the buttoned‐down general and the mercurial president were not a match made in heaven. Kelly set out to bring coherence and a semblance of military discipline to the cacophony of voices that vied for the president's attention. He announced a hierarchical system requiring all staff to go through him before seeing the president, but that was alien to the president's free‐wheeling style. As a former official in the Bush administration noted, “The notion of a chain of command is gone” (Baker, 2017).
Kelly lasted 18 months in the job, longer than many skeptics expected, before leaving in the wake of media reports that he and the president were no longer on speaking terms. After his departure, Trump's subsequent chiefs (Mick Mulvaney and Mark Meadows) were loyalists with limited inclination or ability to contain the president's impulses.
White House turmoil reached a new high after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election. Some of Trump's most committed supporters found that he was eager to listen to any conspiracy theory that reinforced his preferred narrative that he had “won by a landslide” (Barry and Frenkel, 2021). Trump ignored advisors who encouraged him to acknowledge Biden's victory. Instead, he devoted almost all his attention to a quixotic battle to overturn the election results. A tragic climax came on January 6, 2021, when Trump's “Rally for America” triggered a mob to march down Pennsylvania Avenue and to invade the halls of Congress, producing terror, vandalism, and five deaths.
A few weeks before the rally, Trump had tweeted to his supporters, “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” At the event, he gave an hour‐long, barn‐burner of a speech that extolled his achievements, insisted that the election had been stolen, and told his audience they needed to be strong to “stop the steal.”
