Book description
Reflections on Character and Leadership
is the first of the three books in the Manfred kets de Vries on the Couch
series.
Here, Kets de Vries looks at entrepreneurship, the pathology
of leadership, and the personality of the leader. The reader will
visit the disturbed inner worlds of leaders like Alexander the Great,
Shaka Zulu and Robert Maxwell, discover how to distinguish between a
cold fish and a live volcano, and identify impostors, despots,
organizational fools and global leaders.
The book highlights the basic principles of the clinical paradigm-the
process of putting organizations and the individuals who lead them on
the psychoanalyst's couch. It includes studies of personality
archetypes and the effects they have on organizational life and
culture-and the effects that organizations have on them. Referring
frequently to key management concepts, Kets de Vries looks not only at
what happens when things go wrong, but also at how to create the
psychological and organizational space to make sure that things go right.
About the series:
The series offers an overview of Kets de Vries's work spanning four
decades, a period in which he has established himself as the leading
figure in the clinical study of organizational leadership.
The books in this series contain a representative selection of Kets
de Vries' writings about leadership from a wide variety of published
sources and cover character and leadership in a global context, career
development and leadership in organizations. The original essays were
all written or published between 1976 and 2008. Updated where
appropriate and revised by the author, they present a digest of the
work of one of the most influential management thinkers of the present
day.
Manfred Kets de Vries brings a much-needed fresh
perspective to the subjects of leadership and change, drawing on his
knowledge of economics, management, psychology and
psychoanalysis.
He is Clinical Professor of Leadership at INSEAD
where he holds the Raoul de Vitry d'Avaucourt Chair of Leadership
Development. He has also held professorships at McGill University, the
Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales in Montreal and Harvard Business
School, and has lectured at management institutions all over the
world. He is the author, co-author, or editor of m ore than 30 books
including The Leader on the Couch and Family Business on the Couch,
and over 300 articles and papers.
In November 2008, Manfred Kets
de Vries was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the
International Leadership Association in Los Angeles. He and six others
were inducted into the leadership legacy project as "founding
professionals of the development of leadership as a field and as a
discipline." Previously, in 2005, he was the first non-American
recipient of the ILA Leadership Award for his 'Contributions to the
Classroom and to the boardroom." The Financial Times, Le Capital,
Wirtschaftwoche and The Economist have also judged him one of the
world's leading thinkers on leadership.
