Katzenbach Partners, a management consultant group based in New York, is working with the American Psychoanalytic Association on its strategic planning and reorganization efforts. Kerry Sulkowicz, an APsaA member and management consultant, whose firm, the Boswell Group, once was a part of Katzenbach, recommended the firm.
Niko Canner, one of the founders of the six-year-old consulting group, initially worked pro bono on an analysis of the organizational needs of APsaA, making widely praised presentations at the APsaA meetings in New York in January 2004. His associate, Gretchen Anderson, has been working with APsaA president, Jon Meyer, on a strategic planning process for APsaA that Meyer says is “desperately needed.” She and Canner are also working as consultants to the Reorganization Task Force in a relationship that is still being defined.
Anderson says both she and Canner have been drawn to APsaA work because of the “passion” members have for the organization. She said that it has been important for her to work with an “organization with such a long history that is attentive to its history. That is different from corporations.” She said that over the long term, she and Canner hope that their “work will help people.” They are invested, she said, in psychoanalysis.
Although neither has been in analysis, both have a long interest in the field. As TAP reported in early 2004, Canner stated to APsaA that on a personal level, the idea that there was a way of listening that produced meaning and was helpful to people in such abundance, was immensely appealing to him in adolescence, and he finds it satisfying to help a group of people who make that their work. Anderson pointed to her work with psychoanalytic thought, beginning with that of Julia Kristeva, during her Ph.D. work in English at Stanford.
Anderson commented that the kind of governance issues APsaA is involved with, “although unique, are a kind of crystallization of what we see in other kinds of organizations.” She asked, “How do we think about change? What happens to people internally, what happens in the outside world; how permeable do we want our boundaries to be to that outside world?”
Psychoanalysis, she said, “is science, art, faith, by its nature an extraordinary cross-disciplinary” endeavor. It is a way of talking about “intangibles,” as are “organizational design issues: You can't put your finger on it.” Her doctoral work on a generation of American women poets who converged on Greenwich Village in the 1920s similarly worked with issues of intangibles, she said. She looked at issues of why Greenwich Village and why this group of women poets in this particular publishing market.
Katzenbach Partners is a rapidly expanding firm of about 100 employees. It is a firm that seeks to combine the sometimes disparate management consultant concerns of strategic planning with people and organizations. They pay especial attention to the culture and the history of their clients, and have a reputation for developing longer-term relationships using fewer consultants than is common in the field, according to a profile of the firm in the May/June 2004 issue of Consulting Magazine.
Canner told that magazine, “We engage with clients over longer periods of time with smaller teams that help drive change at a more natural pace.” At the same time, he and Anderson have made clear that part of their job is to help keep the work focused and on track.
John Rowe, CEO of Aetna and former CEO of Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City, has used Katzenbach Partners in both of his positions. In an interview, he told Consulting Magazine, “This is a very highly intellectual group, and I would describe it as a very-high-protein content… They produce ideas and simple, straightforward approaches.” They “dedicate themselves in such a way,” he said, “that if you were witnessing them working you wouldn't know that they were not Aetna employees.”
As Sulkowicz commented, Anderson “truly is neutral.” Katzenbach Partners will help facilitate the direction APsaA chooses to go.
Michael Slevin, M.A., is editor of TAP.