Abraham Zaleznik

He was a critic of what he called "the managerial orientation" which led managers and executives to focus on process, rather on the substance of their work. He followed up this article with an important book, published in 1989, The Managerial Mystique: Rediscovering Leadership in Business, which explored this theme in depth. He did not subscribe to the idea that there were leadership competencies. Rather, he believed that leaders were animated by distinctive talents, describing them as various forms of "imagination" for example, the financial imagination and the marketing imagination. Theodore Levitt, a major theorist of marketing, was influenced by Zaleznik's idea.

Zaleznik taught at the Harvard Business School for four decades. He authored 16 books and over forty articles. Beginning in the 1960s he studied at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. In 1971 he was certified as a clinical psychoanalyst, a rare achievement at a time when most psychoanalytic institutes trained physicians only. He saw patients in a psychoanalytic private practice for 20 years. In 1981 he met Konosuke Matsushita, the founder of the Matsushita Electric Industrial Company, on a trip to Japan. The latter established a chair in leadership at the Harvard Business School, which Zaleznik occupied until his retirement. Zaleznik served on corporate boards, consulted to many businesses, and was an early contributor to the formation of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations. He died at the age of 87. At the time of his death he had two grown children and five grandchildren. His wife of 66 years, Elizabeth, died two years earlier in 2009.

Abraham Zaleznik (1924–2011) was a leading scholar and teacher in the field of organizational psychodynamics and the psychodynamics of leadership.