Ed Schein is Professor Emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan School of Management.  He was educated at the University of Chicago, Stanford University, and Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology in 1952.  He worked at the Walter Reed Institute of Research from 1952-1956 and then joined MIT’s Sloan School where he taught until 2005. He retired and moved to Palo Alto, CA where he continues to write and consult.

He has published extensively-- Organizational Psychology, 3d Ed. (1980), a cultural analysis of Singapore's economic miracle Strategic Pragmatism (1996) and Digital Equipment Corp.'s rise and fall DEC is Dead; Long Live DEC (2003), Process Consultation Revisited (1999), The Corporate Culture Survival Guide, 2d Ed., (2009), Career Anchors, 4th ed. With John Van Maanen (2013), Organizational Culture and Leadership, 5th ed. With Peter Schein (2017).

In 2009 he published Helping, a book on the general theory and practice of giving and receiving help followed in 2013 by Humble Inquiry which explores why helping is so difficult in western culture, and which won the 2013 business book of the year award from the Dept. of Leadership of the University of San Diego.

He is the 2009 recipient of the Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner Award of the Academy of Management, the 2012 recipient of the Life Time Achievement Award from the International Leadership Association, the 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award in Organization Development from the International OD Network, and has an Honorary Doctorate from the IEDC Bled School of Management in Slovenia.

He continues to write, is working on Memoirs, and consults with various local and international organizations on a variety of organizational culture and career development issues, with special emphasis on safety and quality in health care, the nuclear energy industry, and the US Forest Service.  An important focus of this new consulting is to focus on the interaction of occupational/organizational subcultures and how they interact with career anchors to determine the effectiveness and safety of organizations.