Harry Levinson, Leadership Pioneer, Has Passed Away at Age 90

The Levinson Institute Endures

Dr. Harry Levinson was a man with a gutsy vision. He knew that leadership theory and practice during the early 1950s was too mechanistic, too impersonal, and too inadequate. He additionally understood that it was devoid of any real understanding of human nature and motivation. With the support of Roy Menninger at the Menninger Clinic, Harry set out to do field analysis, watching how professionals led, but through the eyes and mind of a medical professional. He was driven to discover how modern psychoanalytic theory could improve leadership effectiveness.

Thus began an exceptional sixty-year journey of leadership discovery, writing, teaching, and consulting. Along the way, Harry became a professor of management at the Harvard Business School and authored more than 15 books and numerous Harvard Business Review articles. In 1968, he launched The Levinson Institute. His internationally regarded On Leadership workshop set a new model for leadership development and, today, continues to be at the forefront of training future top global professionals.

Harry exhibited an exceptional blend of intelligence, erudition, perspective, ambition, and pragmatism. He spoke to captains of industry with great authority, but also with wonderful empathy. His tremendous fascination with human nature and motivation never wavered. Even after his vacations, he would come back and write articles sharing his perspectives about different cultures and habits he experienced all over the world.

Harry had great breadth of thinking, as well. In the process, Harry co-founded the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations, which continues to prosper. He also exhibited the type of open-minded thinking that allowed him to bring another icon in the field, Elliott Jaques, into The Levinson Institute's community. Elliott also spent a long time investigating leadership and, particularly, leadership systems, so Harry set out to supply professionals with a community (called Modern Organization) to be aware of businesses from both mental and "engineering" points of views. Out of these origins, The Levinson Institute's Strategic Organization model, education, consultancy, and software emerged, keeping the Institute at the leading edge of being capable of leverage the full promise of organizations and other human work systems.

The arena of work is a new and better place due to Harry Levinson. In the years to come, we at The Levinson Institute will continue to honor Harry's legacy by performing groundbreaking analysis and providing innovative leadership-and-leadership-system training and assessment.