Kets de Vries makes two key arguments. One, organizations, like people, have psychological styles. Two, people are not so straightforward. “There are few universals in life, but transference is one,” he writes. “What transference says is that no relationship we have is a new relationship; all relationships are colored by previous relationships.” And this doesn’t just mean previous work relationships. Psychologists like Kets de Vries believe that the majority of one’s personality is shaped by the age of three. In other words, it’s all Mom’s fault.
Kets de Vries’s position is that everyone has a core drama that leads to their personality style. What makes each of us the person we are is the dominance of some inner wish. The wish to be loved, or to be understood, or noticed. The wish to be free from conflict, or to help, or to be able to hurt others. The wish to achieve or the wish to fail. When we go to work, we take this fundamental wish into a context of relationships. We project it on others, and rightly or wrongly anticipate how others will react to us, and then we react to their reactions. This basic wish, embedded in context, is what psychiatrists call the core conflictual relationship theme, and everybody’s CCRT is unique.
On the larger canvas of the organization, these inner dramas develop into corporate cultures. Corporations, like their leaders, can be dramatic, like Sandy Weil’s Citigroup. They can be suspicious like Hal Geneen’s ITT, or detached like Czar Nikolas’s Russian government; depressive like Robert Allen’s AT&T, or compulsive like Henry Ford’s car company. Kets de Vries explores these five dominant “constellations,” each with its organization style, executive personality, culture, strategic style, and underlying guiding theme. Each of the five organizational patterns brings its strengths and its weaknesses, just as every emotion has its silver lining.
The Leadership Mystique does not represent new research on Kets de Vries’s part. It is a synthesis of material he has been using with executives for the past ten years. It does differ from his earlier books by having an upbeat ending. He took a note from American self-help books, making the second half of the book more upbeat and more how-to. Unfortunately, I found the second half of the book a little too-too. There are forty-six self-evaluation exercises, lists and lists of things, and a little too much general management advice. The first half of the book is more fun, with the schadenfreude and the voyeurism that go with reading about famous leaders’ fatal flaws. There are also any number of fun facts, like Walt Disney’s preferred breakfast being Dunkin Donuts, dunked in whiskey. (from an excellent review by David S. McIntosh at:
Manfred Kets de Vries
Subjects: Leadership, Organizational Behavior
