This article, presented in the form of a fairy tale, describes the rise and decline of a flawed leader—a person showing uncanny similarities to President Donald Trump. Taking into consideration contemporary literature on personality disorders as well as forays into developmental psychology, it...

In this article, I explore subtle, mostly out-of-awareness dialogues between consultants and clients and highlight how consultants use themselves as an “instrument” when dealing with their clients - using their own reactions to help interpret what the client is trying to transmit to them. To...

This article is based on the responses of 160 senior executives to questions of what success means to them. Eight major categories of success emerged: family, wealth, work/career, recognition/fame, power, winning/overcoming challenges, friendships, and meaning. Experiences of success depended on...

How do organizations become and remain great places to work? That is the question that primarily motivates this chapter. The authors claim that is precisely the adaptive capability of self-renewal which characterizes great places to work. But changing mindsets is never easy and the need for...

Chapter 1: Covid and the seven deadly sins -- Chapter 2: Evil: reality and imagination -- Chapter 3: The psychology of white-collar criminals -- Chapter 4: The dance macabre of shame -- Chapter 5: Catching the thief of time: the perils of procrastination -- Chapter 6: The inner theatre of the...

In this article, I suggest that doing nothing and being bored can be invaluable to the creative process. In our present networked society, introspection and reflection have become lost arts. Instead, we are at risk of becoming victims of informational overload. The balance between activity and...

This paper describes the phenomenon of mass psychosis. It explains that human beings, when exposed to too much stress, act as the herd animals we are, and can become victim to strange psychological group reactions. Large numbers of people may lose touch with reality and descend into a...

The similarities that exist between working with koans—the riddles presented by Zen masters to their pupils—and the exchanges of people in the helping professions are examined in an effort to shed light on the transformative potential of ambiguity as a tool in therapeutic practice. This is...

This article offers a fairy tale but also a moral tale. It tells the story of a black widow spider and her ten little spiders—all female. After a number of behavioral observations about the habits of black widow spiders, under the disguise of lessons from life, there is a dialogue between the...

This article deals with a rather taboo subject: the consequences of prolonging life into extreme old age, now possible with advances in medical procedures. It poses the existential question about the quality of life in the final stage of the human life cycle. I suggest that most of us are more...