Reflections on Leadership and Career Development E-Book

Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 517

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Views from the interface of psychoanalysis and organizational life In the books in this series Manfred Kets de Vries--failed engineer, entrepreneur manqué, reluctant economist, international management guru, psychoanalyst, wit, and outdoorsman--offers an overview of his work spanning four decades, a period in which he has established himself as the leading figure in the clinical study of organizational leadership. At a key point in his career, working as he puts it, "in the twilight zone of economics, management, and psychoanalysis," he decided to strike out on a little-trodden path and "bring the person back into the organization." Now Kets de Vries occupies a unique position in the academic business world, putting leaders and companies of the couch and working at the often intimate interface where the inner theater of the individual meets the outer world of the organization. The second book in this series, Reflections on Leadership and Career Development, takes different perspectives on the intimate connection between the personality or "inner theater" of individuals and the organizational context in which they work--how different personality types, in positions of leadership or as members of management teams, affect the functioning and success of organizations. Kets de Vries looks at the way basic psychological processes operate on individual and corporate performance and analyzes them in the context of case studies of leaders and organizations. He examines narcissism, dysfunctional collusion between leaders and followers, some new leadership archetypes, and the roles that "organizational therapists" (coaches or consultants) can play in their interventions. The book includes a lengthy study of Vladimir Putin, as "CEO of Russia, Inc.," an assessment of the former Russian president's performance as an organizational leader. The final part of the book examines the career life cycle and how executives cope (or fail to cope) with rites de passage like succession and retirement. "For the first time this book provides a glimpse of Manfred Kets de Vries' own 'inner theater' as the wellspring of his success as psychoanalyst, mentor and inspiration to a generation of leaders. Reflections on Leadership and Career Development offers a rare opportunity to observe Manfred on his own legendary couch, a personal perspective not to be missed." Paul McMorran, HR Director, TNK-BP

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Contents

Editor

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

INTRODUCTION

BULLIES AND NARCISSISTS

BEING AN EXPLORER

CAREER DEVELOPMENT

ABOUT THIS BOOK

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PART 1: THE ORIGINS OF LEADERSHIP

CHAPTER 1 NARCISSISM AND LEADERSHIP

LEADERS AND FOLLOWERS

THE NARCISSISTIC DISPOSITION IN LEADERS

THREE TYPES OF NARCISSIST

DEFENSIVE SYSTEMS IN NARCISSISTS

NARCISSISTS WITHIN ORGANIZATIONS

MANAGING NARCISSISTIC LEADERS

CHAPTER 2 WHY FOLLOW THE LEADER?

LEADER OR PUPPET?

LEADERS AND THEIR FOLLOWERS

WHAT MAKES AN EFFECTIVE LEADER?

CONCLUSIONS

CHAPTER 3 THE DANCE OF LEADERS AND FOLLOWERS

THE MESHING OF FANTASIES

METHODOLOGY

TYPES OF COLLUSION

BREAKING THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

CHAPTER 4 LISTENING WITH THE THIRD EAR

PROJECTIVE IDENTIFICATION

‘GOOD-ENOUGH PARENTING’ AND CONTAINMENT: THE ORIGINS OF SUBLIMINAL COMMUNICATION

SUBLIMINAL COMMUNICATION

THE ACTION TRAP: ‘I ACT; THEREFORE I AM’

ALIGNMENT

PART 2: LEADERSHIP AND PERSONALITY

CHAPTER 5 VLADIMIR PUTIN, CEO OF RUSSIA, INC.: THE LEGACY AND THE FUTURE

EIGHT YEARS AT THE HELM: EXPECTATIONS AND RESULTS

WHAT DO EFFECTIVE CEOS DO?

SUCCESSION AND LEGACY

THE LEADERSHIP STYLE RUSSIA NEEDS

WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT?

CHAPTER 6 ‘COMPLEX’ EXECUTIVES I HAVE ‘MET’ IN COACHING AND CONSULTING

A ‘COMPLEX’ HISTORY

COMMON WORKPLACE COMPLEXES

COPING WITH COMPLEXES

CHAPTER 7 LEADERSHIP ARCHETYPES: A NEW ORGANIZATIONAL CONSTELLATION

LAYING THE GHOST OF THE GREAT MAN TO REST

A QUESTION OF CHARACTER

TESTING, TESTING

THE ASSESSMENT OF LEADERSHIP BEHAVIOR

IDENTIFYING LEADERSHIP ARCHETYPES

THE ARCHETYPES

THE CHANGE-CATALYST: LEADERSHIP AS A TURNAROUND ACTIVITY

THE TRANSACTOR: LEADERSHIP AS DEAL-MAKING

THE BUILDER: LEADERSHIP AS AN ENTREPRENEURIAL ACTIVITY

THE INNOVATOR: LEADERSHIP AS CREATIVE IDEA GENERATION

THE PROCESSOR: LEADERSHIP AS AN EXERCISE IN EFFICIENCY

THE COACH: LEADERSHIP AS PEOPLE DEVELOPMENT

THE COMMUNICATOR: LEADERSHIP AS STAGE MANAGEMENT

MAPPING ARCHETYPES

PART 3: LEADERSHIP AND CAREER DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER 8 MIDLIFE—STOP THE WORLD, I WANT TO GET OFF

WHAT HAS CHANGED?

A SERIES OF LOSSES

THE END IN SIGHT

HOW TO MANAGE THE REST OF YOUR LIFE

WAYS OF COPING WITH THE MIDLIFE CRISIS

THE CONSTRUCTIVE STYLE

THE SATISFICING STYLE

THE DEFENSIVE STYLE

THE DEPRESSIVE STYLE

IMPLICATIONS OF MIDLIFE TRANSITIONS FOR ORGANIZATIONS

CONCLUSIONS

CHAPTER 9 THE CEO LIFE CYCLE

STEPPING DOWN

SELECTING THE SUCCESSOR

THE FINAL ACT

THE CEO LIFECYCLE: HOW LONG IS LONG ENOUGH?

THE VIEW FROM THE TOP

GAINING SELF-AWARENESS

THE MOMENT FOR CHANGE

CHAPTER 10 THE RETIREMENT SYNDROME: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LETTING GO

THE CHALLENGE OF LETTING GO

FAMILIAL AND SOCIETAL ATTITUDES TOWARD RETIREES

ENDING IT ALL

THE PHYSICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF AGING

THE ORGANIZATION’S ROLE IN RETIREMENT

CONCLUSION: THE TWICE-BORN EXPERIENCE

THE ROAD LESS TRAVELLED

CATALYSTS FOR TRANSFORMATION

REFERENCES

INDEX

END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT

List of Illustrations

Chapter 7: Leadership Archetypes: A New Organizational Constellation

Figure 7.1 The leadership cycle

Figure 7.2 The leadership onion

Figure 7.3 A leadership archetype profile

Chapter 8: Midlife—Stop the World, I Want to Get Off

Figure 8.1 The midlife conundrum: coping strategies

Guide

Cover

Contents

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On the Couch with Manfred Kets de Vries

On the Couch with Manfred Kets de Vries offers an overview of the author’s work spanning four decades, a period in which Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries has established himself as the leading figure in the clinical study of organizational leadership.

The three books in this series contain a representative selection of Kets de Vries’s writings about leadership from a wide variety of published sources. They cover three major themes: 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 today’s most influential management thinkers.

Published TitlesReflections on Character and LeadershipReflections on Leadership and Career Development

Forthcoming TitlesReflections on Organizations

REFLECTIONS ON LEADERSHIP AND CAREER DEVELOPMENT

Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries

Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester,

West Sussex PO19 8SQ, England

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All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except under the terms of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP, UK, without the permission in writing of the Publisher. Requests to the Publisher should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex PO19 8SQ, England, or emailed to [email protected], or faxed to ([phone].

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kets de Vries, Manfred F. R.Reflections on leadership and career development : on the couch with Manfred Kets de Vries / Mafred F.R. Kets de Vries.p. cm.ISBN 978-0-470-74246-41. Leadership. 2. Leadership–Psychological aspects I. Title.HD57.7.K484 2010658.4′092–dc222009038962

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-0-470-74246-4

ISBN 978-1-119-96592-3 (epub)

ISBN 978-1-119-96593-0 (mobi)

ISBN 978-1-119-96591-6 (epdf)

To Elisabet—who knows that patience is a major companion of wisdom.

INTRODUCTION

An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

—George Orwell

I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography, I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction, so since I’m so dim and they’re so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn’t.

—Philip Roth

I don’t think anyone should write their autobiography until after they’re dead.

—Samuel Goldwyn

Many of the major themes of this book—the relationship between leaders and followers, leadership archetypes, the enigma of Russia, and the challenges we all face at midlife and beyond—have marked formative experiences in my own life. Reviewing material that I have worked on over the course of 30 years I revisited many memories, some archaic ones, others more recent, which have informed my interest in these themes.

BULLIES AND NARCISSISTS

One of my earliest memories is of being lost. However, because I was very young, I have never been sure whether it is a real memory or an implanted memory that I inadvertently internalized as the story was told to me over and over again by my mother. It is possible that these ‘memories’ were implanted—but in my mind’s eye, I see myself doing these things from a first person perspective.

I was born and spent the first 11 years of my life in the outskirts of a small village called Huizen, on the Zuiderzee (now the Ijsselmeer), a large lake in the center of Holland, a place where people still wore traditional regional dress. The women wore very large white caps, while the men looked like crows, all dressed in black. The village was surrounded by endless meadows where cattle were raised. One day, it seems, I wandered off with my cousin and could not be found. My mother panicked and warned the authorities in the village. When there were important announcements or emergencies (like trying to find out what had happened to two small boys), the people in charge of the town hall sent a person armed with a rattle to bicycle around and make announcements. In this instance, the alarm was sounded and the whole village was alerted that two small boys had gone missing. Eventually, the two of us were found. From the dubious safety of one side of a small ditch, I was busily throwing stones at a big bull that was getting madder and madder. I still wonder whether I was trying to drive the bull away or was I the instigator of its fury—probably the latter. I don’t remember why I was doing what I was doing. Luckily, the cavalry arrived in the shape of a farmer who saved us from what would have been an extremely unfortunate incident. This story was repeated to me many times over the years by my mother, who saw it as a metaphor for my attitude toward authority and ‘bullies’—less sympathetically, my rebelliousness.

BEING AN EXPLORER

Some things never change. All my life, I have obeyed the impulse to court danger. As a child, I always wanted to be an explorer—I wanted to go into the jungles in the heart of Africa or the Amazon, or to the deserts of the Sahara or Outer Mongolia, climb mountains in Asia or Canada, or be at the North Pole. The call of the wild was always with me. Moving from the center of the village where I lived during World War II to the countryside helped to deal with my adventurous bent. It was a great area to play in. Stalking birds, animals, and fish became a popular pastime. Luckily, our neighbor had a whole menagerie of creatures. Turtles, ducks, chickens, turkeys, pigeons, rabbits, dogs, and cats all roamed the garden. The most imposing creatures, however, were the geese, which, when they felt threatened, would raise their necks, make a lot of noise, and run after me, trying to peck me. All these animals made up part of my inner life. My explorations in the heather, the forest, and the meadows became a transitional world where geese would magically transform into buffalos, cats into lions, and pike into piranhas and sharks. These outdoor activities continued when we moved to an apartment by the North Sea. The sea and the dunes were even more exciting playgrounds.

What added to the theme of adventure in my inner world was my fascination for the novels of Karl May, a German writer of adventure stories. In particular, I would dream my way through his novels set in the American West—as he described it, a dangerous territory populated by cowboys and Indians. I was fascinated by May’s characterization of Winnetou, the wise chief of the Apache, and Old Shatterhand, Winnetou’s white blood brother (and May’s alter ego). These armchair ‘thrills and regressions’ were followed by Hergé’s comic strip Tintin, describing the exploits of a young Belgian reporter in all parts of the world, including space. To add to this sense of (sublimated) adventure, there were also cartoon strips of Tom Puss and Oliver B. Bumble (‘Tom Poes’ and ‘Olivier B. Bommel’ in Dutch), an anthropomorphic cat and bear, written by Marten Toonder. Their adventures and misadventures helped to quench my thirst for exploration. In addition, I was fascinated by the historically oriented voyages in a Viking ship of the cartoonist Hans Kresse’s Eric de Noorman (Eric the Norseman). I remember clearly his many expeditions to uphold what was right. His exploits took him to Russia, China, Mongolia, Britain, North America, and even Atlantis. These adventures filled my imagination, and were acted out through various games in the forests, heather, and dunes.

At university I became fascinated by the Russian novelists and playwrights, triggered by discovering Ivan Turgenev’s book Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, a collection of short stories based on his own observations while hunting at his mother’s estate. I loved that book, which fed my passion for the outdoors. In it, Turgenev also described the abuse of the peasants and the injustices of the system that constrained them. At the time, a Dutch publisher was translating all the Russian classics into Dutch, a series to which I subscribed. In this way, I found other Russian writers, like Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Isaac Babel, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It is little wonder that Russia has remained an area of continuing interest to me.

Sadly, on reaching adulthood, I realized that there’s not much left to explore, but in my adult life—like the heroes of my youth—I’ve managed it by going on strange expeditions, usually combined with climbing, fishing, and hunting. After glasnost, I was one of the first to travel to previously forbidden regions of the Russian Federation. I liked to explore the country’s wild places, from Kamchatka, to Siberia, to the High Altai. I also went to the old republics, like Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kirghizistan. I get great pleasure from going to totally out of the way places where nobody else has been.

To pursue my anthropological bent, I like to better understand the indigenous people in those regions. I don’t have any special training—I’ve spent time with the Inuit in the Arctic, the Indians in the Amazon, and the pygmies in the rain forest and I’ve relied on their special skills to find my way back. Being with these people gives me a sense of humility—realizing how knowledgeable they are in their natural environment. It also helps me appreciate the simple things of life—a good antidote of the luxuries to be found in the center of Paris.

During my exploits I’ve been seriously frightened on rare occasions, but those were usually the most exciting. Once on the Alaska Peninsula, early in the morning, a hungry Kodiak bear tried to get into my tent, an incident worth remembering. At another time, in the same area, I climbed a mountain with a guide, to look for two bears that I had seen at the top. Climbing up, we tracked them closer and closer until I suddenly spotted the two of them lying beside each other, not far from us, at which point it dawned on me that it was the mating season. I wanted to take a picture but when I went to take my camera out of my backpack, one of the bears caught the movement, and came straight for me. I dropped my camera, grabbed my gun, and was preparing to shoot when the guide who was with me stood up, waved his arms to make himself look as big as possible and yelled at the bear, which stopped dead in its tracks, and turned less than ten meters from us.

On another occasion, I had crossed the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan, dressed as a Russian soldier—the only way to get in, as the Soviet war with that country was at its peak. There was bombing on the adjacent mountain. I will never forget my guide—as we climbed the mountain, hanging with our nails on the steepest cliffs I had ever seen—saying that we were ‘’, or crazy. Not only was there the danger of breaking our necks, but there were also the mujahideen to watch out for, who had their own ideas of what to do with our necks. On our return to Tajikistan, following the course of a river at night, in a jeep, four sharp, penetrating lights suddenly appeared: Russian tanks. We were very lucky not to be shot to smithereens.

These stories say a great deal about my attitudes to independence and personal safety. I have never shaken off the impulse to explore, test, challenge, and ask questions. In my work, when trying to build better teams and organizations, some describe me as the ‘Lord High Executioner’ of asking questions of all and sundry—whatever their position. I may do so, but I do it—I hope—with very good intentions.

Those attitudes of rebelliousness and adventure have inevitably influenced the way I have dealt with leader–follower relationships throughout my life. We are all leaders and followers, in whatever sphere we operate—social, professional, and personal. Although academic institutions are not the simplest types of organizations, they are the professional context in which I have made my career and have had to make sense of the relationship between leaders and followers, first, as a student in Amsterdam, Harvard, and Montreal, and later in my role as a professor vis-à-vis various deans. As a follower, I have sometimes had to engage in a delicate dance with my leaders. Of course, like everyone else, the way I manage that dance originates in my relationship with my father and mother. As I have suggested, my rebelliousness toward authority and need for independence were established very early in my life. They informed my interest in entrepreneurship and pointed me to the road I took to becoming a psychoanalyst, a professor, a consultant—and a fly fisherman and hunter.

However, my earliest impressions of leadership were also colored—much more darkly—by my vague memories of life in Nazi-occupied Holland, and the stories I heard about the activities of the Nazis party in our country. Here I must have absorbed something of my family’s (and particular my mother’s) rebellious attitude toward bullies. During World War II, my maternal grandfather—who was a good carpenter—sheltered ‘onderduikers’ (Jews and others who were hiding from the Nazis). He had built a double wall in the house to create a remarkable hiding place. The entrance to that place was underneath a carpet. Off and on, up to 20 people hid in his farmhouse, including a 12-year-old boy who had walked all the way from Poland with his sister. Feeding these ‘non-existent’ people, with strict wartime food rationing, was a major endeavor for my father and mother.

Understandably, being not allowed to go outside the house, the onderduikers (including my Jewish paternal grandparents) were all very bored and used to make a huge fuss of me. But the dangers of hiding people and possible discovery were enormous. The most likely punishment was death in a concentration camp. It would have been so easy for a small child to say or do the wrong thing. Although I have no clear memory of it, I must have been told not to talk about the people hidden in the house. But I do remember my mother, who was born in Germany and spoke fluent German, being very assertive—and fearless—with the Grüne Polizei (the Nazi police force) when they interrogated people in the house, looking for onderduikers and her heroic feat of getting my father out of one of the transition camps—a temporary holding place for one of the death camps. The winter of 1944 was very harsh and Holland was empty of supplies; everything was siphoned off to Germany. My mother made many excursions with her sister into the countryside, on bicycles with hard rubber tires, to trade with farmers to obtain food. Now, the names of my mother and her parents are listed among those of other ‘righteous Gentiles’—people who saved lives—at the Holocaust Museum in Washington.

If my early childhood experiences taught me a lot about the darker side of leader–follower relationships, I was also fast becoming aware of the many facets of narcissism. Like many young boys (and adults), I was no stranger to attention-seeking. I discovered a spectacular way of impressing all and sundry. For a while my brother and I, determined to trump the other boys in the neighborhood, specialized in falling out of trees. We had a very tall conifer in our garden, with plenty of well-spaced branches to enable a controlled fall, and we could make the exercise look a great deal more dramatic than it was. The worst aspect was being badly scratched—but it was worth the excitement. What made it even better was that no one else (with the exception of my brother) dared to do it. I can still remember the enormous fright of my grandfather, who caught us in the act. Attention-seeking though this kind of entertainment was, it was essentially innocent and comfortably at the healthy end of the narcissistic spectrum. The opposite extreme of narcissism run mad was being played out around me in the larger world.

CAREER DEVELOPMENT

As I grew older, and saw the people around me aging, I became more and more interested in the adult life cycle. When I started teaching, much had been written about the early stages of human development, starting with Freud’s Three Essays on Sexuality. This famous work had established the foundation—but what about the stages of adult life? At that time, one of the leading figures in human development, Erik Erikson, was teaching the most popular course at Harvard University. I was lucky enough to be able to follow his classes; I met him, and became deeply interested in his work. I once remember sitting in a taxi in New York with Erikson and a very close friend and colleague, Sudhir Kakar—now a leading scholar and psychoanalyst. We were returning from a ceremony held by the International Psychoanalytic Association to honor Erikson for his work on the human life cycle. The taxi driver drove like a maniac, screaming and yelling, and commenting on all the ‘idiots’ on the road. At one point, he asked us if we knew what made people ‘tick.’ We glanced at each other and kept quiet—it was clearly a rhetorical question—while he treated us all, including the giant in the field of human behavior, to a lecture on human psychology. It was an unforgettable and very funny moment.

Ironically, I wrote the articles about retirement, on which the chapters in the final part of this book are based, long before I reached the age when many people tend to retire. When I revisited them for this book, having now come closer to that point in my life, I was struck by how little I wanted to change them. I believe my impulse to write about a life stage that still lay in the distant future was related to my father’s unhappiness about being forced to retire, and the disorientation he experienced.

My father joined a family firm in Amsterdam when he was 16 and remained with the firm throughout his working life. When the owner died after World War II, my father promised him on his deathbed that he would take care of his wife and children. And he did so by dramatically expanding the business, making them all wealthy in the process. But children grow up. Unfortunately, these children didn’t have my father’s entrepreneurial capabilities. Although he received a good salary throughout his career with the company, my father was neither given (nor asked for) shares. At 65, he was pushed out—one of the sons-in-law (the most capable) wanted to become president. This change in position was a catastrophe for my father, as, like many entrepreneurial types, the company was his life. Interestingly enough, after my father’s exit, the family members started to fight among themselves and the company went down the drain. It was hard for my father to see so many people, who had worked with him for a lifetime, lose their job.

My father, to save his own sanity, and I imagine in a spirit of some defiance, after he was pushed out, decided to start his own entrepreneurial company rather than retire. He is not the type to plant roses. This made an enormous impression on me. I had already learned not to be dependent on other people and the value of my own independence: now I saw at first-hand the proof of the value of those ideals—and, through my father’s example, to reject the arbitrariness of society’s expectations of age-appropriate behavior.

An entrepreneur in my own way, and differently than my father, I have been an academic entrepreneur. Not only does my work involve teaching, writing, and playing with ideas, at INSEAD, I have also developed one of the largest leadership coaching centers in the world. And, to hedge my bets, I also have my own consulting firm. I am well aware that there are some people who start their retirement long before they stop working but that way of behaving has never been attractive to me. I don’t want to retire from something before I have something to retire to. I am always interested in doing new things. Furthermore, I also believe that age is only a number—a means of keeping track. As I play many roles in life, as long as my mind is functioning, I certainly will not retire. How can I retire from life? I know that sooner or later, I will die, but ‘retirement’ is not part of the package. There are still too many things and places left to explore. As the comedian George Burns said, ‘You can’t help getting older, but you don’t have to get old.’

ABOUT THIS BOOK

To start off this book, I take an in-depth look at the way basic psychological processes operate on individual and organizational performance and analyze these in the context of case studies of leaders and organizations. In the second part, I look at various leadership styles, including a lengthy study of Vladimir Putin, as ‘CEO of Russia, Inc.’ The third part of the book examines the career life cycle and how leaders and executives cope (or fail to cope) with rites de passage like succession and retirement.

Part 1 The Origins of Leadership examines the qualities that characterize great leaders and the interactions, both positive and dysfunctional, between leaders and followers. Taking a psychological perspective, I describe the processes at work in leader–follower relationships and leadership coaching and counselling interventions.

Part 2 Leadership and Personality builds on the clinical orientation introduced in Part 1. In these chapters I introduce a range of character types and leadership archetypes, examining how they operate within organizations, and how to deal with them as bosses, colleagues, and consultants.

Part 3 Leadership and Career Development is an examination of the issues, anxieties and opportunities that we face at midlife and beyond, a critical time both personally and professionally, as we confront changes in family life and our career trajectory changes direction.

In the Conclusion, I explore the ways in which change can be embraced to alter our perspective on life, giving us the opportunity to become ‘twice-born.’

Manfred Kets de VriesParis 2009