Most of leadership is applied psychology. A LinkedIn forward (author not known to me) — fifteen thinkers, one line each — covers a surprising amount of the territory in a single screen.
Came across this on LinkedIn from an unknown author — or rather, an author not known to me. Worth keeping around.
Most of leadership is applied psychology, and these fifteen lines cover a surprising amount of the territory in one screen. If you recognise the original author, please write in — full attribution belongs to them.
Some land harder than others depending on where you are standing this week. Frankl, for me, sits closest to what leadership actually is — suffering becomes bearable the moment it has meaning — that is most of the job, in nine words. Jung and Horney are the two I keep returning to when I notice myself reacting to something out of proportion. Fromm is the quiet one. Read slowly.
And — worth saying out loud — this is a list of fifteen Western voices. India has been studying the inner mind much longer. The Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, and the Ramayana and Mahabharata read not as stories but as maps of the self. Each character on the Kurukshetra field is a part of us. Patanjali's five kleshas — ignorance, ego, attraction, aversion, fear of death — sit underneath most of what the fifteen lines above are trying to name. Sanskrit has words for inner states that English is still reaching for.
We've sat with one of these threads over at the lotus. The sister musing — Indian voices on the inner mind, one line each — now lives next door.
The dates and countries hide a quieter story. Of the fifteen, Freud, Adler, Erikson, Horney, and Fromm all left Vienna or Berlin in the 1930s as the Nazis rose — some fled directly, others moved in 1932 reading the signs. Kahneman, the youngest on the list, survived Nazi-occupied France as a Jewish child in hiding.
Mid-century American psychology was, in large part, a Central European refugee project. Vienna and Berlin emptied of their psychologists, and the field we now think of as "American" grew up in New York.
A sequel musing is sitting right inside this list — the psychologists Hitler made American. For another day.
One starting book per author — the place to begin if any of the lines landed harder than the rest.
Search links to Amazon.in — pick the edition that suits you. Not affiliate links.