Word: zaleznik
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Business Consultant Abraham Zaleznik was presented with the following problem: the client was the head of a successful hosiery company that he had inherited from his father. As president, the man aggressively expanded the business, building additional plants and buying new machinery. Yet the market was moving away from his product. Hoping to improve things by a dramatic change he appointed a successor as president and made himself chairman. Then he went into a panic and consulted Zaleznik about whether to fire his successor...
...this a case of poor executive selection? Faulty market research? Zaleznik's diagnosis went beyond both: the client, he concluded, had a father fixation. He had expanded the company in order to prove that he was a bigger and better executive than Dad, and then, when business faltered, he appointed a successor in an unconscious desire to find a scapegoat...
...this sounds like a highly unorthodox analysis, it is, because Zaleznik, 57, is a highly unorthodox consultant. He is not only Cahners-Rabb Professor of Social Psychology of Management at Harvard Business School and a private consultant of 30 years' experience, but also a certified psychoanalyst, one of a very few in the U.S. who have made a specialty of using Freud's teachings and techniques to put corporate employees-and sometimes entire corporations-on the couch. "To me," he says, "an organization is a working coalition among executives that can be disturbed by hidden emotional factors, like...
...Zaleznik was already an experienced teacher, consultant and author of three books when he decided in 1958 to become a psychoanalyst. "I was very taken with the notion of unconscious motivation," he says. "This was the only field addressing itself to the problem." Licensed to practice in 1968, he was certified in 1975 by the American Psychoanalytic Association, a rare distinction...