Biography of Michael Maccoby

Michael Maccoby is a psychoanalyst and anthropologist globally recognized as an expert on leadership for his research, writing and projects to improve organizations and work. He has authored or co-authored twelve books and consulted to companies, governments, the World Bank, unions, research and development centers and laboratories, universities and orphanages in 26 countries.

Early life, education, and family:He was born in Mt. Vernon, NY March 5, 1933 where his father was a reform rabbi and his mother was a teacher. Except for two years at the Brandes School in Tucson, Arizona, Maccoby attended public school in Mt. Vernon. At age 15, he organized and led an interfaith organization, and in later years has worked closely with Catholic, Protestant, Muslim and Jewish organizations. He received a BA (magna cum laude) at Harvard in 1954 where he was president of the Crimson. He then studied philosophy with Stuart Hampshire and Bernard Williams at New College, Oxford on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. As a graduate student at Harvard he was a teaching fellow and secretary to the Committee on Educational Policy at the faculty of Arts and Sciences. He received a PhD from Harvard in Social Relations (combining social psychology and personality with anthropology) in 1960. At Harvard he worked with David Riesman, Jerome Bruner, B.F. Skinner, and McGeorge Bundy, and also studied with the anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn. At the University of Chicago he studied with the anthropologist Robert Redfield and the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim. Also at Chicago he studied Machiavelli with the political philosopher Leo Strauss. He married Sandylee Weille in 1959. Between 1960 and 1968 they lived in Mexico. They have four children, Annie Berglof, Izette Folger, Nora Hathaway and Max Maccoby.

WorkHe was awarded a Research and Training Fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health to train as a psychoanalyst with Erich Fromm at the Mexican Institute of Psychoanalysis and study psychological factors in development. He completed this training with the Degree in Psychoanalysis in 1964. With Fromm he co-authored Social Character in a Mexican Village (1970, 1996), which reported their ten-year, multidisciplinary social science study which showed how family history, social character, and one’s work strongly determines the degree of social adaptation, psychopathology or well-being.

Between 1962 and 1988 Dr. Maccoby practiced clinical psychoanalysis, largely with high-functioning adult patients, and he trained and supervised psychiatrists and psychologists from the United States, Mexico, and Spain. In 1968 he worked in the Eugene McCarthy presidential campaign, traveling around the country organizing delegate hearings to persuade delegates to support McCarthy. He also organized intellectuals, including some like Daniel Patrick Moynihan who had supported Robert Kennedy.

In 1969, as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, he was awarded a grant from Harvard’s Program on Technology and Society to study the companies and their managers who were creating the new information and communication technology. This research in HP, Texas Instruments, IBM and other high tech companies was reported in his book The Gamesman (1977) which was a best-seller, reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Sunday book review. It was a pioneering application of socio-psychoanalytic understanding to personality and leadership in business.

He was a Fellow of the Institute of Policy Studies from 1969 to 1977. In 1972, he directed the Bolivar Project, the first modern joint management-union partnership (Harman Industries and the United Auto Workers) to improve the quality of working life in the auto industry.It was supported by the Ford Foundation, the Sloan Foundation and the National Productivity Commission. As a result of this project, he was invited to lead quality of worklife programs in the U.K. and with AT&T and the Communication Workers of America. (see The Leader (1981), Why Work? (1988, 1995) and Agents of Change (2003), with Charles Heckscher, Rafael Ramirez and Pierre-Eric Tixier).

During the Carter administration at the Department of Commerce he led a project to improve the quality of working life and at the Department of State he created a participative project that determined the kind of leadership needed. During the Reagan administration he helped the US ambassador in New Delhi to develop a collaborative embassy team and under the auspices of State he provided lectures to Chile's business community on Democracy and Free Enterprise before the plebiscite of 1988. From 1969-1990 he directed the Program on Technology, Public Policy and Human Development at the Kennedy School at Harvard. Since 1980 he has been the President of the Maccoby Group, a consultancy, and Director of the Project on Technology, Work and Character, a not-for-profit research center.

In The Productive Narcissist (2003) and The Leaders We Need, And What Makes Us Follow (2007), Dr. Maccoby has applied psychoanalytic concepts, including the theory of social character, to the study of leadership and followership. Building on Fromm, he proposes that social character is the internalized culture which is formed in childhood to enable people to adapt to the demands of work and social patterns in that culture. In his books and writings he contrasts social character formed by peasant, industrial-bureaucratic, and knowledge-service dominated cultures. He has also developed interpretative interview and survey instruments and methodology for revealing a person’s social character and personality.

In 1973, Volvo management asked Dr. Maccoby to help develop innovative factories. He was then invited by the Swedish Council on Leadership (FA rådet) to direct a study of Swedish leaders and to propose the kind of leaders Sweden needed for the future. He published the results in Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s largest newspaper and in two books, one in Swedish (Ledare fur Sverige, 1987), and the other in English (Sweden at the Edge, 1990). Dr. Maccoby has consulted on leadership to numerous Swedish organizations. In 2008, King Carl XVI Gustav made him Commander of the Royal Order of the Polar Star for his services to Sweden. In 2004, Dr. Maccoby facilitated the National Coalition on Health Care in developing specifications for a comprehensive health care policy in America. With a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, he studied some of the most effective health care organizations in America, resulting in the report Leadership for Health Care (2001). He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Anthropological Association, the Society for Applied Anthropology, and the National Academy of Public Administration. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the Global Business Network, and the Cosmos Club.

From 1986 to 2009 he wrote a column, The Human Side for Research Technology Management and was recognized by The International Association of Management of Technology (IAMOT) as one of the top 50 authors of writings on technology and innovation management over the last 5 years. He has taught at [[Cornell University[[, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Chicago, the National University of Mexico, Sciences Po (Paris Institute of Political Studies), the Mexican Institute of Psychoanalysis, the Brookings Institution, the Washington School of Psychiatry, and Templeton College and Said Business School of Oxford University. He has served on the boards of the Washington School of Psychiatry, the Albert Shanker Institute, the Tällberg Foundation, and Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos (NPH), an orphanage in nine Latin American and Caribbean countries based on humanistic principles that stimulate development. He was a close associate of Father William Wasson, the founder of NPH.