Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You

by Frances Frei

As a starting place for discovering how possible it is to change culture, we like former MIT professor Edgar H. Schein’s iconic framework, which loosely divides organizational culture into artifacts, behaviors, and shared basic assumptions.2 As Schein argues persuasively, to get people to reliably behave the way you want—even in your absence—you have to get them to reliably think the way you want. David Neeleman famously flew as a crew member once a month when he started JetBlue.3 He would put on an apron, serve coffee, and introduce himself up and down the aisle with a friendly, “Hi, I’m Dave.” Neeleman electrified the organization every time he did this and reinforced the company’s shared basic assumptions, including the belief that everyone, at every level, was in service to JetBlue passengers. The most important assumption he surfaced—a somewhat radical idea at the time—was that customers are people. JetBlue’s mission was to “bring humanity back to air travel.” Seeing the CEO treat a passenger like a human being was a warning shot to everyone that no one flies steerage on this airline. That’s how things are really done around JetBlue.