Reflections on Character and Leadership

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.