Deborah G. Ancona

INTERVIEWER: This is an interview with professor Deborah Ancona for the 150 Infinite History project. Professor Ancona is currently the CLE Distinguished Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Faculty Director of the MIT Leadership Center. Her pioneering research into how successful teams operate has led directly to the concept of X-Teams and distributed leadership as vehicles for driving innovation within large organizations.

She received her BA and MS in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and her PhD in management from Columbia University. Thank you, for speaking with us Professor Ancona.

ANCONA: My pleasure.

INTERVIEWER: So let's start a little bit by talking about your background in terms of your upbringing, your family background and where you're from.

ANCONA: Well, I'm originally from New York. And my family background, I come from a medical family, actually. My father was a doctor. My mom was a medical social worker. My brother is a doctor. So very much a medical family, a family where education was highly stressed. So our job was to go to school and learn and do well.

We also traveled all over. Several families, my own included, we would go together, actually. We had a great deal of fun all over the world. We went through the Yucatan, to Panama and Costa Rica and Guatemala and all through Europe. And we would trek around.

These were not fancy vacations, but trekking around learning was really a dominant value as well as family and extended family. We would frequently get together with grandparents and aunts and uncles. And so the notion of family and learning and education was dominant.

INTERVIEWER: And that travel experience is invaluable as a child and growing up. How much did that influence your curiosity about the world, about understanding how people think and interact with each other?

ANCONA: I think it probably had quite an impact because it was just eye-opening. In fact, I've never thought about it, but my future work is all about going out. It's seeing from the outside because it opens up new ways of thinking, it exposes you to different ways of living, different value sets, and so I think just opening up the mind.

It was incredibly important and fun, a sense of adventure, that one could go out and just have a good time in terms of understanding what the world is like. We're part of a global economy right now. So if you're ever going to understand that, I think you need to get out and see it.

INTERVIEWER: And how much pressure did you have in this family full of doctors to follow in their footsteps? And how hard was it to forge your own path?

ANCONA: I'd say very hard. So I still, to this day, I think, consider myself the black sheep of the family, which is odd, being a professor at MIT. But yeah, my father very much wanted me to be a doctor.

And when I went off to college, I went off as a physics major. I'm not sure why, but I was pre-med and following in the family pattern. And I made it through physics, even though I'm embarrassed to say, I wrote a note on my final exam saying, please give me a seat or something to that effect.

But I kept it up. Sophomore year, I went to chemistry. It was vivid for me, sitting in chemistry class.

And the bunsen burners are there. There's the smell. There's the periodic table on the wall, and all of these people coming in in pre-med mode.

And I sat there for while. And I said, I hate this. I don't want to do this. And I remember quite distinctly getting up and walking out of that class and never going back again to the hard sciences.

I loved the social sciences. I always have. I just, I'm going to get back into psychology and other arenas. So that was very hard, deciding at that moment that I had to do something that was right for me.

I never liked blood. I'm a big fan of the medical field and have a great deal of respect, but it wasn't right for me. So it was tough. It was tough to make that decision.

INTERVIEWER: And how did you explain that to your family, particularly your parents? And did they understand it? Or did this take some time to convince them you had chosen the right path?

ANCONA: Well, I think that they were a little askance about it for a while, particularly since I changed majors six times after that before I finally settled in. So I don't think they were happy. But I think, at the end of the day, they really wanted me to be happy more than they wanted a specific outcome. So I think that they were pretty content with how things turned out.

INTERVIEWER: And then walk me through these six majors that you experimented with and which one you ultimately chose and why.

ANCONA: So I had taken a great deal of French throughout high school and had also gone to Switzerland. And so, for a while, I was a French major, first French language, and then French literature. But then I realized that, although an interest of mine continues to be-- I'm a Francophile from way back, and I love all things French. Not all things, but many things French.

I moved and experimented quite a bit. So I was an urban planning major at one time, an urban studies major. And then I moved into sociology and ultimately ended up being a psychology major. So that was kind of a road until I found the thing that I found really most intriguing and interesting.

INTERVIEWER: And what was it about psychology that really drew you in because, obviously, you were a Renaissance student, having seen the world and really had the ability to try these different subjects that all seemed interesting. But what honed you in on psychology?

ANCONA: I think I just had this incredibly intrinsic interest in human behavior and seeing what happens to people, whether it's the Milgram experiments and how people, because of authority figures, do all kinds of horrible things. Or I was particularly intrigued with teams, what impact teams have on people, so how students would be in a group. And there would be these pictures of lines. And because two people in the team would say, oh, those lines are unequal, even if they were equal or the opposite, they would say they're equal when they clearly were not, then people would conform to that idea. And I just found it very fascinating to see how humans interacted with each other and what kinds of behaviors they illustrated under different kinds of conditions.

INTERVIEWER: And were there early teachers or mentors who influenced some of your academic choices?

ANCONA: Absolutely. I think probably the biggest influence on me at that point in time was a professor at Penn by the name of Marty Seligman. He's actually quite well-known at the moment.

And so I can remember taking a course with him and just delving into why do we dream. Why do we dream as human beings? And what does it mean? And what are the different interpretations?

And I think the notion that there were different theoretical lenses that could show you different elements of why do you dream, you could take an evolutionary approach to that or a more psychological approach to it. And why do we fear? Why are fear responses so quick to occur? It could be a learning model versus-- so there were multiple interpretations that one could bring to these very interesting questions.

And so having taken that course, I got quite interested in Marty's work on learned helplessness and then became, actually, a research assistant for him, which was great fun. I got into running experiments. So just the intellectual challenge of how do you really create an experiment that tests just what you want to test, and isn't testing anything else or is a very clear test of the question that you're looking at, was quite entertaining and fun for me.

And Marty also used to have these seminars where he'd bring us. I was an undergrad, so I'm the lowly person in this group. But there would be PhD students and other grad students and other faculty, in fact. So we'd hear what was going on with the rats and what was going on in the lab and what was going on in field work all around, looking at this question of learned helplessness and how to overcome it and so on. So I think the whole idea of becoming an academic and majoring in psychology stemmed from that experience.

INTERVIEWER: Was there anything from your earlier childhood or adolescence that you, looking back, realize maybe triggered or laid the seeds for this later interest? Were you fascinated on the playground with how students came together in teams or how certain kids became leaders versus the others? Was this an early interest?

ANCONA: I don't know that I remember that, that well. I do think-- well, I guess it doesn't happen to everybody-- but adolescence is a tough time. And so I think, by its very nature, what we tend to do is try to understand what's happening here. What is my place here? And can I get a good map? So I think sense-making, which is a core leadership capability, now that we look at this whole notion of sense-making, of mapping, of trying to understand the human dynamics of a situation, I think sort of stems from that period where it's an important part of what you have to do in life to survive that moment.

INTERVIEWER: You have a BA and an MS in psychology, which you were just discussing, from the University of Pennsylvania. And then you went on to get a PhD in management from Columbia. A powerful combination. Describe what about these two areas of study made them the perfect match for you.

ANCONA: Well, I think Penn, I went into pre-med. So I was just lucky that, in addition to having great science courses, there was this whole array of things to look at. And so being a very broad kind of institution that enabled me to look around and experiment and try different things, I think, was great. The other thing about the University of Pennsylvania was that it has Wharton. It has an undergraduate business school.

And so there were a number of friends of mine at Penn who were in Wharton. And they would always give me a hard time. Oh, psychology, that's such a gut major, which it's not, by the way. It was not at the time. And I don't know where it is now, but it was quite difficult, actually.

And they were in Wharton. And so I said, oh, well, come on, what are you taking? And so we ended up having this bet of who would do better. And they all took Psych 1. And I ended up taking Management 101.

And so just luckily for me, that seemed like a really interesting domain in which to apply psychology because I was in my Master's degree working on mental health work and really found that very difficult and depressing, and so working in this other domain. So I think Penn just had great professors and a wide- range of opportunities to experiment, both in looking at research opportunities and going through a wide range of subjects. And Columbia was great because it was a new department.

And so there were all these young junior faculty who were engaged in all kinds of research. So again, I like to think out-of-the-box. I kind of don't like to just follow the steady stream where others have gone. So I think both places were both intellectually stimulating and offered a philosophy where you go out and learn and try new things. And so I think that was a good combination.

INTERVIEWER: And among your fellow students in management, did it give you a unique perspective to have the psychology background, whereas, maybe more of them were coming at it from a business-minded model?

ANCONA: Yeah, I think, absolutely. So I was armed with the psychology from the beginning. And I think, throughout that period, I would come at it now from an economic standpoint. So the major dominant voice, if you will, in business is actually more economics than it is psychology. And yet, I think that psychology plays such a big role in understanding what goes on in business or even predicting what goes on in the economy, that I think it was good to have that different way of seeing the world.

INTERVIEWER: Great. And the same year you received your BA from the University of Pennsylvania was the year that UPenn became fully coeducational, which was 1976. How meaningful was that for you? And what was it like being there at that time?

ANCONA: Well, it wasn't really that meaningful. In some ways, it was a step down because I came into the College for Women, and the College for Women, I believe, had harder standards to get in than the general college. So it wasn't clear that we thought this was such a great move, to be honest.

I grew up in the midst of revolution, right? So there was just incredible revolution going on, a lot of unrest around racial issues, gender issues. So way back in high school, I would be protesting. We'd protest. We had to wear dresses to school, so we protested the ability wear pant-- I know that seems ludicrous at this moment in time, but that's what we were doing.

It was the age of protest and the age where people were demanding opportunities. And so that was the culture that I grew up in. And so, in some sense, I think that those of us who grew up in that time period grew up with a sense of mission, a mission of equality, a mission that we could do it, a mission that we can go in and change and move up in all different echelons. So I think, as we saw those progressions, as the male-dominated schools became coed, those were seen as positive moves forward, even though, from a personal standpoint, we thought that the College for Women was actually quite good.

INTERVIEWER: And even though you have that personal take on it about the standards of the colleges at Penn, did you feel like you all were pioneers of sorts? I mean, you were fighting for these kinds of efforts in high school, you said, and then in college to see it actually come to fruition on a larger scale.

ANCONA: Absolutely. As I said, I think that, when you grow up in that kind of time, you do take on some of those values. And so I think a number of the women who were in these schools considered it this mission for women to be able to move forward to do the things that men could do. And that was in college as well as grad school.

INTERVIEWER: And how would you describe the climate you were facing as a woman at that time pursuing advanced degrees and choosing to pursue business management concepts even? Were there are any particular hurdles?

ANCONA: Well I'd say it was an odd combination because, on the one hand, there were opportunities because of the consciousness that these schools had to do something. When I went to college, there was a, I think, 5:2 ratio of men to women. So I think that institutions were trying to bring women in and had a consciousness that they had to do something. So on the one hand, there were many opportunities for women to go ahead in advanced education and even in professorships.

On the other hand, I think that there was a lot of prejudice and bias against women coming in. I can remember, when I went to Columbia, going to speak to a professor and saying, well, I'm coming here. And I'm going to get a PhD.

And he looked at me as if I was out of my mind. And he said, what? Are you kidding? You can't. You're not going to be able to do that.

I don't know from whence that came. I mean, I've gotten in and, obviously, had the credentials to do it. I had a pretty good education and background.

And he just said, well, I just don't think that you can do it. So there was an incredible bias around whether or not-- for some people, not obviously for everybody-- whether or not we can do it. And for me, that was actually useful.

I mean, there was this buildup of, well, what you mean? I'll prove you wrong. So it engendered, actually, more motivation in some ways. But there was clear bias around who would get chosen for TA-ships or what the belief system was about your ability to succeed.

INTERVIEWER: And how far do you think we've come? That wasn't really all that long ago. And then it's quite a difference from today. But just from your own personal experience, looking back, how far do you think women have come?

ANCONA: Oh, that's a tough question. I think we've certainly come a long way. I still think that there is bias. I still think that there are "old boy" networks, maybe new boy networks.

There certainly is progress. And women are moving ahead. But at some level, it's actually kind of still depressing, not just in the educational arena, but everywhere you look at top echelons, whether it's business or government or religion or wherever.

Women still are low in numbers. And so I think it's frustrating. So we've come a long way, but we are not anywhere near equivalency.

INTERVIEWER: And what are some of the lessons learned in that area that you would maybe share with young women today coming up either through academia or trying to get into management in the business world. Do you think they lose sight sometimes of the hard fight that it took others to get them where they are?

ANCONA: Well, again, so they're not armed with the kind of history that we had. And so I think it's harder in some sense. And I'm not sure that I would impose my caring about that issue on other people. We also have worked incredibly hard. And some people don't want to do that.

But I frequently will go and speak to young faculty or young doctoral students about moving ahead. And I think the most important thing-- in fact, it comes from our research on distributed leadership-- is you need to believe that you can do it. So I think part one is, believe that you can do it. Certainly, it's possible.

And it certainly is possible to be successful in your professional life and also have an outside life. I think that there are very practical things that you can do. And I think people need to step up and negotiate for themselves and chart a path and follow it. And so I think believing in it and then getting the networks of support together for people who will get opportunities or offer opportunities to you and being very efficient in your life so that you can be sure to make room for different things, I think it is possible.

INTERVIEWER: I was just curious if you ever ended up running into the faculty member at Columbia who told you this was out of the question to pursue your line of study. Or did you ever have any moment where you reconnected with the doubters?

ANCONA: The doubters, I did. I did reconnect with the doubters and said, see? Actually we became friends. He ended up being part of the group, in fact, when I graduated, my adviser.

And a group of advisers and some other faculty and some other students, we all went out for lunch after that. And he was one of them. So I think he got converted a little bit as well.

INTERVIEWER: And within the field of management, obviously, you could have gone a lot of different ways. What directed you towards focusing your efforts on how people organize themselves and leadership concepts?

ANCONA: Well, the leadership actually came later. For most of my academic career, I was a teams researcher. So as I mentioned earlier, I had always, always just found these team concepts fascinating. Why do some people just follow what's going on in a team? And so I was always intrigued by teams.

At the same time, when I was studying teams early on, the dominant mode of studying them was in the laboratory. And I had done a fair amount of laboratory research. And what I discovered was, well, that the big question for me was, does the work that we're doing in the lab work in the real world? Because we were studying depression in the laboratory, but depression, because you give students unsolvable anagrams, seemed very different than the depression you'd see in a hospital where people were really deeply depressed. And so it doesn't go with what you're doing in the lab. Some of it does.

And I'm a contrarian to begin with. So I would look for something new and different to pay attention to. And so my dissertation actually said, let's look at all the things we know from social psychology about what makes a team effective.

So we know clear goals and clear roles and positive ways of working together, whether it be problem solving or goal setting, let's test that in the real world. Does it work? And for good or for ill, I was a little nervous at the time. But when I did my dissertation research, it didn't.

So I studied 100 sales teams in the communications industry. And internal dynamics, so how well people liked each other, how well they did problem solving together, how they built up trust, their goal clarity, et cetera, all of that was associated with high team satisfaction and how well the team members thought they were performing. But when you looked at the relationship of those variables to team effectiveness measures for sales teams, bringing in revenue, for example, there was a zero relationship.

And luckily for me, that got published anyway, because it was such a surprising, jarring result that there was no result in an area where people had been studying this for a very long time. And so that became my calling card, as it were, the question. I wanted answers. What does matter? How do we begin to understand team dynamics and team effectiveness within an organizational context?

So that just was happenstance. I wanted to go outside. I did go outside. And there was this incredible, oh, my goodness.

All these models that were burnt into our brains, that we still to this day spend billions of dollars training people to do and that are written up in the best-selling text on teams, wasn't working. So I just became very, very curious. How can we solve this dilemma? How can we answer this question?

INTERVIEWER: And how exciting was that? It sounds like it was very exciting that you're finding this new area that other people in the same line of work or study had missed along the way somehow.

ANCONA: Yeah, it was great. That's not to say that all that work is not important. It's just that it's half the story.

And we were missing another half of the story because, when you put a team in context, understanding team context interaction is important. Whereas, if you're in the laboratory, it's not. You can do fine-grained analysis of group process in the lab.

So as I said, my first feelings were one of dread, because you never want to find a no finding in your analysis. But because it was so intriguing, we had measured it well, it was very exciting. It was, oh, well, what's going on? This is pretty neat.

INTERVIEWER: And how did you end up incorporating leadership as an area of focus, in addition to team building and team interaction?

ANCONA: Well, for most of my career, so after that dissertation result, I spent the next 15 to 20 years trying to answer the question. And the answer to the question actually ended up being this X-Team concept. So X-Teams are externally- oriented teams.

And so it turns out that, if you only focus inward on internal team dynamics, as a team, you can end up putting very strong boundaries around your team. The result of which you can very often fail because, if you're not understanding your external context, aligning with different interests within the organization and coordinating the complex work we have to do in organizations across different groups, that's problematic. So we developed this concept with lots and lots of different studies of what teams need to do across their boundaries and showing that it was, in fact, related to performance.

And then we started creating X-Teams. And they became a vehicle for leading change in organizations. So I think leadership was creeping into an interest.

And then some of it was simply the dean at Sloan. We had someone who had been teaching leadership for a long time. He was great.

Unfortunately, he did not get tenure. And so there was this big gap here where we had all these leadership programs. And no one was teaching leadership. So they asked me to do a course and then build a program.

And through that activity, we said, okay, well, this is MIT. So if you're at MIT, you can't teach leadership until there's a leadership model. And there was no model out there that really conformed to what we thought was a good way to study leadership.

And so I teamed up with three other people to begin to create a leadership model, pulling on a lot of other research that was done and our own research that resulted in what we call, The 4-CAP model, the 4 Capability model. And that was just the beginning to this question. Whereas, before, it was what makes teams effective, now we started asking the question of what makes leaders effective. And what are the contexts in which leaders, in fact, can thrive and build teams?

And again, somewhat the contrarian, so in the teams domain everyone was looking at internal dynamics, and my whole work was about external networking and boundary spanning and the importance of that. And in the leadership domain, the focus really was on the traits and characteristics of the individual person in a formal role.

I love to go into organizations. I love to really understand phenomena from the inside out. And when you really go into organizations, it's never just the one leader who's making change happen. It's a complex interaction of multiple leaders and other people who can move new products ahead, who can create new processes, who can, in fact, invent a good strategy for the organization. And so my contrariness, if you will, brings me into new domains and pushes me to look at things with a slightly different lens.

INTERVIEWER: Great. Stepping back a little bit to when you first came to MIT, how did you first end up here when you came in 1985? And what attracted you to it?

ANCONA: Well, I don't know. Maybe we should talk a little. The reality of it was that I was teaching at another school and had thought that it was probably time to leave. But my husband was also-- he was not my husband at the time, but we had decided that we were going to be together. So in fact, my choice of location was pretty geographically limited.

So I was looking at a school in Boston. And there was no job offer, actually, at MIT. So just because there were a lot of interesting people. And they were very phenomenologically oriented, which again, had always been my way of working, what is the phenomenon you're looking at. Go and learn from what actually is going on and then put the theory and the practice together.

And that's all of what MIT is about. I mean, this "mens et manus", theory and practice, it's really how can the practice inform the theory? And how can the theory inform the practice? And that interplay was always quite attractive to me.

But why MIT? Partially because I want to be in Boston. And so I came as a visitor because they needed some classes taught. And then I stayed for another 27 years.

INTERVIEWER: And how much did that mean to you when you landed here and found a great fit in areas that you were interested in, the approach that a place like MIT took to issues?

ANCONA: I'm sorry, what?

INTERVIEWER: How much did it mean to you to find that fit? I mean, you came here. You said you didn't have a job, per se. But it sounded like it was quite a fortuitous marriage between the way you were approaching your fields and the way MIT did.

ANCONA: Well, it was great. It was really great. I always tell this story in my classes about culture and the fit with culture. I tell this story. It's my purple shoes story.

So when I was at this other institution, it's a young junior faculty-- in the book it said that, in order to succeed, you had to do great research, teach well and do service. Those are the three major things.

And so I was moving along in those three domains and thought, oh, things are going really well. And then, one day, the head of my department came in to chat. Always a bad sign when they come to chat.

And so there we were chatting. And I'm trying to figure out what's the messaging here because I knew there was a message. And finally, it came out that I was wearing non-tenure track shoes. And it actually took me some-- like, shoes? What does shoes have to do with anything?

They were purple. They weren't high heels. They weren't open-toe. They weren't open-heel-- I'm pretty conservative-- but they were purple. And in that institution, purple shoes were non-tenure track shoes.

And so coming to MIT was great because no one cares what you wear. In fact, if you look too good, I think that it's somewhat problematic. It's not about what you wear. It's not about what group you're with.

MIT is really about big ideas. It's about big ideas and taking the time to really understand things and study them in ways that other people can't. And so it was great to be in a place where there weren't those kinds of rigidities and things that seemed to me to be really unimportant in some respects. It was all about the work here. And so I consider myself quite lucky to have landed here, where no one's going to come into your office and tell you about your purple shoes.

INTERVIEWER: MIT would welcome the purple shoes.

ANCONA: Maybe.

INTERVIEWER: That's a great story. What was it like here being a female faculty member when you arrived? Were there any obstacles or pros and cons? Any particular challenges?

ANCONA: You know, I think that this duality that I spoke about earlier is really always present. On the one hand, there are many opportunities for men and women, I think, particularly women. Sometimes they want women in administrative positions, in power positions, et cetera.

So I think all of that was good and probably helpful. And I think, like other places, there are battles to be fought and resources to be negotiated. And sometimes I think you are pushed away from certain things because you're female.

I mean, that's in keeping with a lot of the research that's done. So women are more collaborative. Women are more relational, in general. Not everybody, these are clearly generalizations.

Women are more apt to speak for the team they're with than they are for themselves individually. Women don't negotiate as hard as men do. They stop earlier in a negotiation process. So all those things make it more difficult to move in any kind of organization. So I think some of those things are true here as well.

INTERVIEWER: And just since we're talking about that point, do you think any of your models about distributed leadership and changing the way we've normally done things in the business world will help women break through some of those barriers, when you don't have that all-powerful, maybe, male CEO in a top-down way of thinking?

ANCONA: I don't know. I think it will remain to be seen. So that was my belief, that, when we have more distributed kinds of leadership, when we have X-Teams where multiple people are moving outside the boundaries of the organization and bringing things in, which in some sense, is a way of empowering people, at the same time, in a distributed system, people are very dependent upon networking, external networking, and being able to access information and resources and modes of alignment. And I think sometimes, for some women, those skills are still hard.

I'm not a feminist researcher. And I'm in a very male-dominated world. So most of my work is with men, not with women. But the people who teach from a more feminist perspective would say that some of these looser kinds of organizations actually are harder. I don't know that we know the answer yet to that.

In any case, that's the direction we're moving in. Information technology means that information is more distributed to many more people. And so if we are to have organizations that build on the collective intelligence of many more members than just people at the top, then we need to have distributed leadership. So I believe that that is the direction we are going in. And so we have to learn what it is and how to harness it effectively.

INTERVIEWER: How were your ideas about management and organization first received by companies and groups with male-dominated leadership? As you said, you're often dealing with a very male-dominated industry in business.

ANCONA: Quite well, actually. And I think that's part of where MIT has its strength. That is, we go in and we say, okay, we think X-Teams are a great way to go or sense-making is a key leadership capability.

And if you just came out and said that, well, you're just saying it. But because of the work we do here-- I have 20 academic articles that very clearly, from qualitative work to quantitative work, show that there is data to support the fact that these teams are more effective than more traditional teams and that, increasingly now with the leadership work, that the leadership capabilities that we have identified are identified with leadership effectiveness.

We're still not there yet, because we're just collecting data on distributed leadership and how having not just great leaders at the top-- so we're not getting rid of the leaders at the top. We need great leadership the top. It's just that it's enacted in different ways. And there are multiple leaders up and down the firm.

And leaders in organizations know that these things are happening, that there are new modes of operating, that there are more collaborative mechanisms, that people do need to reach across boundaries. I mean, this is the most interconnected world we've ever seen. In some sense, a lot of that work was before its time.

This is a world of bridging boundaries and moving across. So I have not had much of any resistance to these ideas. I think people are hungry for them. And we've had great, great fun.

We have X-Teams all around the world who are doing fun, creative, innovative things. And there are organizations you can walk into, and they're talking about sense-making, envisioning and relating and inventing and have you done your sense-making lately? So it's quite fun to go out and take the theoretical ideas into the world and watch them take off.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, a lot of people think academic models don't really have real world applications. But you've obviously been highly successful in making that link and having the performance to prove it, that these aren't just things in a classroom or that your thinking up in the academic halls of MIT.

ANCONA: Well, so I have an advantage in that sense because I'm an empirical researcher. So the theoretical development starts, actually, with the phenomena in the real world. So you've got that kind of external validation to begin with.

And yes, I think the other thing that's quite amazing about MIT is we have a big executive education program. We do a lot of work with other organizations around the world. And so there is an opportunity.

I have to say that there's also a transition. So for the early part of my career, as in most places, it's all about getting tenure. And getting tenure is all about academic research and getting your publications in the best possible places. But for the latter part of my career, and certainly as the director of the MIT Leadership Center, it has been more about can we use these theoretical ideas in the real world and make a difference? And so MIT is great, again, in bringing together this idea that theory and practice can come together and can make a difference.

INTERVIEWER: MIT is known, of course, for its intense, high-pressure environment among the students. It's a very tough, competitive place. Are there any similarities on those scores when it comes to life for the faculty here?

ANCONA: Absolutely. Absolutely. This is a crazy place. So the students say that coming to MIT is like drinking from a fire hose. That's the word on the street, as it were.

And I'd say that's probably double for the faculty. So you're doing your research, and there are all these PhD students who are interested. And you could spend 24 hours a day-- well, maybe not 24 hours, but-- all day, every day going to seminars.

Around chemistry, you couldn't even go to all the seminars, even if you spent your full day doing them. There are just so many people who are coming here, academics and practitioners coming. And because you're at MIT, so many people want to connect with you in some way, shape or form. So I just sit in my office.

And just take this fall. And I was invited to come and help on a big project in Egypt to improve their research by bringing in team and leadership skills. I was invited to go to Istanbul to work with another university that is partnering with us. I was invited to India, both to teach and to do some work with another leadership center.

So the number of opportunities, it's hard just to even respond to them, much less continue to do your research work, your application in the real world, your work with students and the larger challenges and opportunities that are just thrown at you daily. So it's all amazing. And it's a lot.

INTERVIEWER: And what is it about MIT, do you think, that leads experts like yourself to choose it over many other institutions that do great work in all kinds of different fields? What is so special about this place? It's certainly unique.

ANCONA: I think part of it is freedom, freedom to search out the problems that you're interested in and go and pursue them in any way that you want. So no one says you have to study in this way or you have to study this topic. Not that a lot of other schools do that, but I think there's even more freedom here.

I think that there's a spirit of innovation. Go and do it some other way. And pick up different lenses. And study whatever the phenomena is. So I think there is a real spirit of innovation here.

Very smart people, they're really smart people here. We are very lucky to be in a place where people pull you in all kinds of new and different directions. No one's shy, right? So if you're thinking about going in direction A, then someone will say, well, have you thought about? And have you thought about that?

So it's a culture where people bring in other perspectives and ideas. And it pushes your thinking. And so I think that's unusual.

And add to that this real interaction with the real world. MIT is engineering at heart. I mean, the beginnings are an engineering school. And so being able to show not that something is solely theoretically important, but that it does really work, for me anyway, is a very refreshing way of looking at the world. And I think it pushes both theory and practice in better ways.

INTERVIEWER: And how has the institution changed since you've been here?

ANCONA: Well, I think the fire hose, in some sense, has gotten even bigger. It's a global world. And so there are even more pulls and more opportunities and more things to keep up with. So there are many more journals and more people doing things around the world.

So I think that the fire hose is bigger than it's ever been before. I don't think this is just MIT, but certainly information technology is different. So although it's supposed to make our lives easier, every day I know I'm going to open that email and there are going to be hundreds of people who are wanting things. So I think that the demands are actually greater.

I think that the academic world has gotten even more competitive. And so the push on our students to publish earlier and to get things out and to get more things out and to hit those home runs is even stronger than it was before. And I think that's a hard world to navigate or a harder world, in some sense, to navigate, more opportunities, but a harder time navigating.

INTERVIEWER: And particularly for the students, that sounds like it could have a negative consequence as well. Because you're in college, the more pressure on you, the less time you have to do those other things in your college years to find yourself or develop who you are as an adult. Do you feel for these kids? Or do you feel like--

ANCONA: Oh, I do. I really do feel for these kids. So I have less to do, actually, with undergraduates. I don't teach that many undergraduates. I do more Masters teaching and executive teaching than I do undergraduate teaching.

But I do feel for these kids because I think that there's a pressure. Particularly now, with the economy being what it is, there's so much pressure to decide early, to say what you're passionate about early. And given my own experience where I had the chance to really experiment and look at different things, I had the real opportunity to take an area that I was interested in, teams, and spend a long time.

There was not so much pressure to publish, publish, publish. And so I could go and live with my teams and really understand them from the inside out. And I think that's probably harder to do now.

INTERVIEWER: You mentioned some early mentors who were influential on you. Do you still have mentors today? And also, are you finding yourself in the position of being a mentor?

ANCONA: I still do have some mentors today. When I have a big question, I tend to go back-- actually, not so much to my undergraduate, I've lost touch with them, but-- to my PhD mentors, some of the mentors within the MIT community. So I do go back.

Certainly not as much as I used to. It is more the reverse, me as mentor to my graduate students or, as I said, to women. Women will often come and say, well, how did you do that? And so yes, I find myself more in the mentor role, both as an academic mentor to people who are studying teams and leadership, but also to women who are trying to figure out how to forge a career.

INTERVIEWER: And how rewarding is that? It sounds like you have a lot of things pulling you in different directions and schedules and pressure. And the fire hose is getting just larger, as you said. But how important is that to help these other women who need some guidance in this hectic environment?

ANCONA: I think it's very important. I probably don't do as much of it as I was like, just because there are so many other pressures. But I do see it as my job because I am tenured and, therefore, can go out on a limb and can fight some battles.

And so I will frequently sit a doctoral student down and say, you know what? You offered to do all these things for me. And that's very nice of you, but it's not good for you.

That's a mistake. You're never going to be able to-- and I think women are more prone to do that than men. I'll say, don't do that. You need to focus on what is it that you want to accomplish and how are you going to get there.

INTERVIEWER: What kind of leader would you say you are in your role, either as the director of the Leadership Center here or in other aspects of your life?

ANCONA: Well, I would say I at least try. I don't always succeed, but I try to be a distributed leader. That's the new domain that we're really researching at the MIT Leadership Center.

So I do try to work collaboratively with people. I do try to understand who has expertise in an area and let those people lead with the area that they have interest and skill and passion around. So I do try to get a lot of people involved and engaged.

INTERVIEWER: And are there any lessons from these leadership models that you all have developed that work outside of the workplace or the business worlds, the relationships people have?