Who was your most important mentor and why?

 Tony Athos was on the cover of Time magazine as one of the country’s best teachers. I arrived at Harvard business School as a naive Idaho transplant completely unused to being in the midst of world leading researchers, former Secretaries of Commerce, and other famous people. For some reason he took me under his wing. I remember asking him to watch me teach a class one time, in a course he’d co-designed. I prepared as best I could. He came, sat in the back, and afterward, I rushed to his office to get his verdict. His opening was, “Jim, you’re boring.” Thunk! An arrow to the heart.

He went on like this. “I notice you play basketball with the doctoral students at noon.” I do. I love basketball. “Well, that’s obvious. When you come back you are glowing, you are floating three inches off the ground, and you are emanating energy. You need to figure out how to play basketball in the classroom.”

I went back to my office utterly deflated —- because in my mind, basketball was play and teaching was work and my mom had taught me work before play. I sat there and ruminated. Hmm, there is a start, a tipoff. And since we use case method, you “pass the ball” from one student to another. And then they dribble, sometimes uselessly, at other times making a huge point, a three-point basket. Hmmm, you COULD play basketball in the classroom.

That experience changed my life. It was a major VABE abrasion—and instead of rejecting it, I adjusted my VABEs. Whew.

There were others—I have a “Heroes Page.” I’m grateful and learned from many of my HBS instructors and later colleagues: Paul Lawrence, Jay Lorsch, Jack Gabarro and Sherwood Frey. And at MIT, Ed Schein who introduced me to the notion that there were three layers of human behavior—visible behavior, conscious thought, and semi- or pre-conscious VABEs. He used Central American pyramids as an example. We can see and touch the visible artifacts, the pyramids themselves. We can learn and infer though we cannot see them, the rituals they performed on those pyramids—human sacrifices. The real issue though is, WHY did they do that? VABEs. To make real change, one must work at Level Three. see my website at Level Three Leadership 

I later focused my doctoral thesis on the nature of developmental relationships including mentor/protege relationships.