Reflections on Character and Leadership (ePub)

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.