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We all admire leaders. In trying to understand how leadership works, however, we often lose sight of the fact that followers are a crucial part of the equation. Regrettably, they get short shrift in the management literature, where they are described as merely responding to their leaders' charisma or caring attitudes. What most analyses seem to ignore is that followers have their own motivations and are as powerfully driven to follow as leaders are to lead. In this article, psychoanalyst, anthropologist, and management consultant Michael Maccoby delves into the unconscious recesses of followers' minds. He looks closely at the often irrational tendency to relate to a leader as some important person from the past--a parent, a sibling, a close friend, or even a nanny--what Sigmund Freud calls "transference." A solid understanding of transference can yield great insight into organizational behavior and endow you with the wisdom and compassion to be a tremendous leader. The author explains the most common types of transference--paternal, maternal, and sibling--and shows how they play out in the workplace. He notes that they have evolved as our family structures have changed. Whether followers perceive a leader as an all-knowing father figure, an authoritative yet unconditionally loving mother figure, or a brother or sister who isn't necessarily a model of good behavior, the leader can manage transferential ties by bringing unconscious projections to light. Then debilitating resentment and animosity can give way to mutual understanding and productivity--and a limping organization can start to thrive.

In the winter of 2000, at the height of the dot-com boom, business leaders posed for the covers of Time, BusinessWeek, and the Economist with the aplomb and confidence of rock stars. These were a different breed from their counterparts of just 10 or 20 years before, who shunned the press and whose comments were carefully crafted by corporate PR departments. Such love of the limelight often stems from what Freud called a narcissistic personality, says psychoanalyst and anthropologist Michael Maccoby in this HBR classic, first published in the January-February 2000 issue. Narcissists are good for companies in extraordinary times--those that need people with the passion and daring to take them in new directions. But narcissists can also lead companies into disaster by refusing to listen to the advice and warnings of their managers. It's not always true, as Andy Grove famously put it, that only the paranoid survive. Most business advice is focused on the more analytic personality that Freud labeled obsessive. But recommendations about creating teamwork and being more receptive to subordinates will not resonate with narcissists. Narcissists who want to overcome the limits of their personalities must work as hard at that as they do at business success. One solution is to find a trusted sidekick who can point out the operational requirements of the narcissistic leader's often overly grandiose vision and keep him or her rooted in reality. Another is to take a leap of faith and go into psychoanalysis, which can give these leaders the tools to overcome their sometimes fatal character flaws.

Lean production, which has succeeded in both improving quality and lowering costs, has become the competitive standard for automakers worldwide. But a debate continues over how that system treats workers--a debate that concerns not only economics and engineering but also values and ideology. In this article, Michael Maccoby, a consultant based in Washington D.C. who specializes in organizational culture and leadership, reviews two books on General Motors' factories: Farewell to the Factory: Autoworkers in the Late Twentieth Century, by Ruth Milkman; and Just Another Car Factory? Lean Production and Its Discontents, By James Rinehart, Christopher Huxley, and David Robertson. Maccoby argues that companies can raise worker morale and productivity by showing workers true respect and by educating them in business perspective. General Motors may have failed to accomplish this at its Linden, New Jersey and Ingersoll, Ontario plants, but lean production has succeeded at Saturn and NUMMI. As more industries switch to lean production, workers will come under more pressure but companies will also have new opportunities to win their commitment to business goals. Car factories perform much better when workers understand the business and join in the effort to improve it.