When I was 16, my father had sent me to the Harvard Summer School, which was a fantastic experience—the diversity of people was very exciting, much more so than university life turned out to be in Holland. While studying, I told myself that I would go back to the States one day, and I did. I returned to the USA after I’d finished my doctoral examination in economics in Holland, by which time I had realized that I had the potential to be some kind of an academic. I decided to take time out traveling and booked a place on a Norwegian freighter. It was a very cheap way to cross the Atlantic—my father was a good client of the freight company—but also an extremely boring crossing of which the only highlight was a storm. When the boat docked in Boston I couldn’t get off it quickly enough. Out of pure nostalgia I visited Harvard again, this time including the Business School. I was curious about the programs and courses they were offering. I discovered the school was running a sort of ‘ missionary’ program—the International Teachers Program—intended to spread the Harvard case -method all round the world. I was still thinking vaguely about joining the corporate world—banking would be an option—at this stage but I saw this program as a chance to spend a year at Harvard. During the interview process, the program director of the International Teachers Program mentioned an unusual course being given by Abraham Zaleznik, who had a chair in what was then called Social Psychology of Management, something of a misnomer, given the strong psychoanalytic focus of the course. The seminar he suggested I should take was ‘ Psychoanalytic psychology and organizational theory.’ I decided to enroll—and it changed my life.

I still remember that our first assignment was to read Ernest Jones’s biography of Sigmund Freud, which consisted of two pretty impressive tomes. In spite of my relatively poor English, I read all the material over one weekend and I was probably the only person on the seminar who bothered to do so. The course was quite exciting for a budding business economist as it included case studies such as ‘The Wolfman, ’ ‘ The Ratman,’ and ‘The Psychotic Dr Schreber,’ quite different from the material you get in an economics course. With hindsight, I would now question the validity of some of Freud’s case interpretations, but at the time they brought me into a completely different world and stimulated my fantasy life. Suddenly I saw a lot of new connections in literature, film, and art: it was like having an additional lens, moving from a two-dimensional to a three-dimensional world. In addition, I was living in a foreign country, with all the mental turmoil that accompanies that sort of temporary life, which deepened the experience. Certainly, it affected my dream life. Because my life experiences were so different, I paid a lot of attention to my inner world. I did a lot of dream analysis to get a better understanding of myself.

It was during this time that I began to play with the idea of integrating the worlds of clinical psychology (i.e. psychoanalysis) and management. When Zaleznik offered me a position as his assistant, the direction I was heading in was confirmed. In addition, I was accepted into the doctoral program at the Harvard Business School, although I was also advised to do an MBA. The thinking was that if I didn’t make it through the doctorate, I’d at least have the MBA to fall back on. It turned out that the International Teachers Program covered the second year of the MBA so, ironically, I did the first year’s course of the MBA in my second year. Looking back, Harvard was an extremely important learning experience. Being in one class section with a hundred extremely competitive individuals helped me understand and learn to speak the language of executives.

My doctoral dissertation under Zaleznik was on entrepreneurship; I finished it extremely fast and almost immediately my writing career started. Roland Christensen, a delightful man, and one of my thesis advisers, asked me to write a short excerpt on entrepreneurship from my thesis as a student note to use in his classes, and various articles followed. In addition, I was involved with Zaleznik in a very large research project on individual and organizational stress. At the same time, I became interested in starting some form of psychoanalytic training. As I became more familiar with psychoanalysis as a method of investigation, I experienced a need to deepen my clinical expertise. Without such exposure, I felt that the application of theoretical ideas to organizations would be a rather barren exercise. I decided I wanted to become a psychoanalyst. But with my background in economics and business administration I would be a very atypical candidate for a psychoanalytic training institute, particularly as the psychoanalytic world in the USA at the time was very medically oriented. And I had to deal with another problem: to be accepted at an institute was one thing, but I would also have to pay for the training. To do that, I needed a job. It wasn’t so easy to get an interesting job in the Boston area. I knew that for a number of political reasons—Zaleznik not belonging to a specific area—there would be no offer forthcoming from the Harvard Business School. Joining Zaleznik was great as a learning experience but had not been a very smart political move.

I decided to go to France where the Institut européen d’administration des affaires (INSEAD) was getting off the ground. A dean had been hired to build a faculty. I also felt that France would give me the chance to pursue my wish to become a psychoanalyst, as they were more relaxed about accepting people with more unorthodox backgrounds. At the same time, I started psychoanalysis with Joyce McDougall, one of the most famous, and original, psychoanalysts in the world. My stay at INSEAD lasted for two years. To put it bluntly, I was fired. The reasons were never made very clear to me, but the school’s financial problems were one of them. It probably didn’t help that I was not very subtle presenting my ideas about how the functioning of the school could be improved, suggestions that were not wholly appreciated. When I worked out that I was being fired—the dean was quite evasive about it—I protested about the reasons given for my dismissal and the way it was handled, which led to a protest by other faculty members (fearful who would be next in line, as there was no system of due process) and ultimately to the establishment of a faculty evaluation committee that ensured that hiring and firing would no longer be a flavor-of-the-week process. Ironically, INSEAD made me an offer a year after they sacked me, but I turned it down. Looking back, getting fired turned out to be a lucky experience for me, as it contributed to interesting learning opportunities.

I returned to the Harvard Business School as a research fellow for one year, joining the Production and Operations Management area. I worked for a man called Wickham Skinner who wanted my help writing case studies with a human touch. I hoped, now that I was back at HBS, that I would be offered a longer-term appointment. But for a number of reasons it was not to be. Having received the highest teaching rating at the school may have been a black mark against me. Obviously, I could not be a researcher. But the most telling lesson was that the Organizational Behavior area was blocking Zaleznik from making tenure track appointments. In addition, the opinion of one of the power holders in the Organizational Behavior department was that I would never write anything. That particular person must have had a very good understanding of human behavior. One of the small pleasures in life is doing something people say you’ll never do. I believe this is my twenty -ninth book. I have always thought that academics are masters in character assassination.

Luckily, Henry Minzberg was more visionary than Jay Lorsch and had another view on the matter. At the time he was looking for faculty members who didn’t fit the standard OB mold. I was certainly part of that group of misfits. He offered me a position at McGill in Canada. The Faculty of Management was relatively new and offered many growth possibilities. What also attracted me to Montreal was that it had a very open -minded psychoanalytic training institute. I was particularly attracted to Maurice Dongier, at the time the head of psychiatry and the director of the Allen Memorial Institute, a psychiatric think tank. He was adventurous enough to accept me as a candidate for training despite my unorthodox background. He turned out to be the right person for me, at the right time. Not only did he give me many insights but he also became a very good friend.

Anyone who goes through this sort of training faces a real dilemma about what direction to go to afterwards. I thought clinical work was interesting—but there were an awful lot of psychoanalysts about. Very few psychoanalysts, however, really understood organizational life. That’s where I thought I could make a real contribution with my clinical training.