The managers found out that the CEO was not quite as buttoned-down as he appeared, and he realized that the Americans were not quite as wild as he had assumed. The company has since tripled in size and its revenue continue to grow, and the management has bought back most of the ownership from the foreign firm. No, it's quite different. The field of organizational behavior has done a lot of good, working in HR functions, addressing issues of workplace safety, career development and the like. While their approach focuses rather exclusively on behavior, ours pays a great deal of attention to addressing underlying causes.
Companies have minds of their own that are greater than the sum of their parts.
There are forces at play that are largely outside of the awareness of the people working there. Traditional consultants no doubt run up against these psychological underpinnings but may not have the training to tease them out from the observable information. But my training and experience allow me to understand some of the covert processes at work in an organization. And a better understanding of such forces can enable a company to become more adaptive and competitive in a rapidly changing economy. There's a tradition of applying psychoanalytic ideas to organizations in general that actually dates back to Freud.