Kerry Sulkowicz, a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, in September began writing a sophisticated biweekly column, “Analyze This,” in Business-Week, a major national publication with over a million readers. Stephen J. Adler, editor-in-chief of the magazine, in introducing the column said, “Of course, a 50-line answer can't make a problem disappear, any more than a 50-minute hour can. The idea is to offer an insight, a start. Kerry has experience with this kind of distillation.”
I interviewed Sulkowicz by e-mail to learn more.
TAP: How did the column come about?
Sulkowicz: After writing the monthly “Corporate Shrink” column in Fast Company magazine for the past three years, I was asked by John Byrne, the executive editor (who had previously been editor-in-chief at Fast Company) to start writing a similar column, called “Analyze This,” in BusinessWeek. The column made its debut in the September 11 issue and runs biweekly. It will involve answering questions from readers on the psychology of business, as well as occasional pieces offering a psychoanalytic perspective on current business news and trends. I will also be doing regular podcasts, downloadable from the Business-Week Web site and iTunes, which will give me a forum for interviewing business leaders and for conversations with business journalists about similar topics.
TAP: Are you identified as a psychoanalyst?
Sulkowicz: Yes, the tagline reads: “Kerry J. Sulkowicz, M.D., a psychoanalyst and founder of the Boswell Group, advises executives on psychological aspects of business.”
TAP: Does that give you credibility—or not?
Sulkowicz: Being identified as a psychoanalyst lends credibility, even if most people don't understand the distinction between psychoanalysis and other mental health disciplines. It connotes understanding and exploration, rather than drugs or testing or mental illness, and the ambiguity and mystery surrounding our profession makes some readers curious about what psychoanalysis is. That curiosity is a very good thing.
My hope is that readers will gradually learn to approach work problems more psychoanalytically, which would be to everyone's benefit.
TAP: What are your plans for the column?
Sulkowicz: I plan to take up questions and issues in business that have broad interest to the more than one million people who read the magazine each week, and offer them what will most likely be a novel way of thinking about the world in which they work. I'll also give a lot of advice from a psychoanalytic perspective, not unlike the advice I give my CEO clients everyday. My hope is that readers will gradually learn to approach work problems more psychoanalytically, which would be to everyone's benefit.
TAP: You have many skills. What are those that most qualify you to write the column?
Sulkowicz: I started consulting to businesses more than 10 years ago, sparked by a cocktail party conversation with a man who needed help leading his senior management team and dealing with the emotional transition from being an entrepreneur to running a growing, successful organization. I always enjoyed teaching and writing, and was always drawn to organizational politics. I was also struck earlier in my career by how psychoanalysts tended to be so awful at running their own organizations, in part because they erroneously assumed that their deep knowledge of individual dynamics translated naturally into an understanding of groups, and in part because most psychoanalysts were not natural leaders. Their personalities made leadership too conflictual an act. My interest in these problems, as well as my experience as a spokesperson for the Association as chair of the Committee on Public Information, made me want to discover ways to apply and spread the word about psychoanalysis on a larger scale. In a sense, I realized that I wanted to become a professional applied psychoanalyst.
It soon became clear that, while there were many consultants who tried to help companies, there were very few who had any psychoanalytic experience, and there was an enormous need for that sort of understanding in the workplace. I'm a driven, restless person and found myself enjoying my work outside the consulting room more than my work inside it. I kept getting more clients in larger and larger organizations, and eventually closed my clinical practice to focus full time on the Boswell Group, a consulting firm I founded in 1998.
Most of my clients now are CEOs, boards of Fortune 500 public companies, hedge funds, and private equity firms, as well as founders of large family businesses in the U.S. and Asia. I advise CEOs on senior team dynamics, psychological negotiation strategy, and corporate culture, and serve as a sounding board on things they can't discuss with anyone else. I also advise boards of directors on CEO succession and leadership transitions.
Michael Slevin, M.A., is editor of TAP.
I love the challenge of breaking new ground and developing novel applications for psychoanalysis. For example, I'm currently working on a partnership with a retained executive search firm, that features psychoanalytic assessments to ensure a better cultural and personality fit for key hires, and also on a consulting service that provides psychological profiling, at a distance, of high-stakes negotiation targets in merger and acquisition situations. The latter is really an adaptation of a psychoanalytic supervision model, with the “supervisee” being the CEO client, and the “patient” being the CEO of the company my client wants to acquire.
So, even though I no longer see patients, psychoanalysis remains at the heart of everything I do. I feel fortunate to be able to introduce a psychoanalytic perspective into corporate life. It's gratifying to see the profound impact it has through these business leaders, who have the capacity to influence the lives of so many people.