The offi ce of Professor Manfred Kets de Vries lies in a remote corner of one of the buildings on the sprawling INSEAD business school campus, carved into a nook of the Fontainebleau forest, 60 kilometres south of Paris. From the 12th century on, this is where French kings used to hunt, and where Francois 1, a warrior king not notably emotionally intelligent, erected his famous château. Kets de Vries has taught at INSEAD for some thirty years and, among other things, has put more than 5,000 executives through group sessions heavy on the psychoanalytical approach to management.

Considering the offi ce's fraught setting, it comes only as a mild surprise to fi nd that Kets de Vries has on his desk a large prehistoric skull, with dauntingly sharp teeth. The other tell-tale object in the offi ce is the couch (de Vries is a schooled psychoanalyst)-the couch being notable for being covered with reports, books, papers and other emotional intelligence.

Knowing what the professor is about, one interprets the scene thus: the skull is that of raw capitalism; the cluttered couch an attempt to provide it a cure. You see, the professor's clinical studies in matters of human behaviour - and his upbringing in conservative Holland - have taught him that greed is sick and needs to be cured.