Leadership is one of those subjects about which much is written and rather less is understood. Consultants package it, business schools teach it, politicians advertise it, and organizations lament its absence whenever things go wrong. Yet for all this noise, leadership remains curiously elusive.

Rather than promising yet another toolkit, Manfred Kets de Vries, Distinguished Clinical Professor of Leadership Development and Organizational Change at INSEAD, invites you into a reflective conversation—a clinically informed, story-rich exploration of how leaders think, feel, decide, and relate when the path ahead is anything but straight.

In exploring what he calls ‘the leadership fog', Kets de Vries invites you to discover the complexities of leadership. Written from a psychodynamic-systemic perspective, he investigates why charisma can intoxicate, why trust collapses, and why some leaders seduce while others contain.

Designed to be read as a series of interconnected essays, this is Kets de Vries at his best. The book examines shame, fantasy, mortality, sexuality, and aging and all the fears and dramas that leaders bring with them into the boardroom. It also confronts the psychological textures of leadership itself: regression, courage, entrepreneurship, trust, and the strange blend of command and care that organizations demand. Moving on to where the fog becomes thickest, he explores the forces shaping our society and argues that leaders never operate in a vacuum, but are shaped by broader social fantasies, politics, and institutional failures.

The twenty chapters and the epilogue do not offer a single doctrine of leadership. They are better understood as a series of reflective excursions into the terrain where psychology, psychoanalysis, organizational life, and society meet. Together they are united by a common concern: how human beings navigate uncertainty when they cannot fully know themselves, one another, or the systems they inhabit.

Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries is the Distinguished Professor of Leadership Development and Organizational Change at INSEAD. He founded INSEAD’s Global Leadership Centre, its top management program, The Challenge of Leadership: Developing Your Emotional Intelligence, and the Executive Master in Change program. He is also the Founder and Chairman of the Kets de Vries Institute (KDVI), a boutique leadership development consultancy.

The Financial Times, Le Capital, Wirtschaftswoche, Harvard Business Review, El Pais and The Economist have rated him among the world’s leading management thinkers. As a global consultant in executive leadership development, his clients have included many of the most important global organizations. He is the author of almost sixty books and hundreds of articles, the recipient of numerous awards, including four honorary doctorates. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Management.