Episode Transcript
In the fall of 2025, I was just getting settled into my office at Penn State Smeal, papers everywhere. Had a freshly whisked matcha on my desk, kind of trying to figure out what my rhythms would be now as a full-time professor after 15 years or so, of full-time corporate work and there was a knock on my door.
I opened it and a man said simply and softly, hi, I’m Don. I recognized him immediately. Don Hambrick is one of the most cited management scholars in the world. The papers that were scattered across my desk, they weren’t yet from students. Some of them were his. I was researching his work and how to integrate it into my own, and so here he was just popping by to congratulate me on joining the team.
Wish me luck in my first semester. No ego, no performance, just genuine warmth from someone who had absolutely nothing to prove. Anyways, I’ve thought about that moment a lot since then because, Don Hambrick has spent much of his career studying something I think that moment kind of illustrated.
It’s this idea that the, that who a leader is as a person shapes what an organization becomes. And the organization I had just joined the Smeal College of Business was wowing me at every turn. After a long tenure at Columbia Business School, Don has been with us now for over 20 years, so his fingerprints on our culture are everywhere.
1984, Hambrick and Mason introduced what became known as Upper Echelons Theory, and in a 2007 update, Hambrick sharpened its core premise. Basically, executive actions are based on their own personalized interpretations of the situations they face, and those interpretations are, put through a filter, basically a filter of their experiences, values, and personalities.
The theory is built on the idea of what’s called bounded rationality, which I could probably do a whole nother 3MR about, but basically it’s the recognition that complex situations aren’t objectively knowable. They’re, they’re, they’re interpretable, and the lens doing the interpreting belongs to a human, a human being with a history and gaps and biases that they may not even know they have.
What the research consist consistently shows is that all of that matters a lot. A leader shaped by financial scarcity will likely manage resources different differently than one who hasn’t. CEO, who came up through engineering will tend to see problems differently than one who came up through sales.
These aren’t just, small stylistic differences. They show up in strategy and culture and what gets funded and what gets cut, and whether people feel psychologically safe enough to bring their real thinking to the table, which means this theory isn’t just about CEOs. I think it can apply to just about every person who leads anything, a team, a classroom, a household, a meeting.
Our histories are in the room with us, whether we know it or not. Whether we know how they are expressing themselves or not. Your experiences shape parts of you and those parts shape what you notice, what you reward, what makes you uncomfortable, how you give and receive feedback and on and on. And here’s the part of Hambrick’s work, that I also find interesting, upper Echelons theory
is not just a celebration of leaders, it’s actually a kind of humbling of them. The whole premise is that executives are humanly finite, susceptible to cognitive biases, gaps in their perspective, and the accumulated weight of their own histories, just like the rest of us. So whatever you lead and there is surely something, ask yourself which three experiences throughout your history most inform how you show up in the present.
When might those experiences be leading you and when are you your, your larger and best self led not so much by them, but with their help. See you next week.
Show Notes
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