Dr. Elias Aboujaoude is a psychiatry professor, researcher and author at Stanford University, where he heads the Anxiety Disorders Section and the OCD Clinic. He has also held positions at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, the University of California in Berkeley, the University of California in San Francisco and the University of York in the United Kingdom. Dr. Aboujaoude has conducted pioneering research on the interface between technology and psychology. In Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the e-Personality (New York Times Editors’ Choice), he sounded an early alarm in the heart of Silicon Valley about the psychological and cultural costs of runaway internet technologies. His most recent book, A Leader’s Destiny: Why Psychology, Personality and Character Make All the Difference, has been praised as a "distinctive, thought-provoking view on leadership in the twenty-first century.” In it, he debunks a “leadership industrial complex” of executive coaches, training programs and leadership bootcamps that promises leadership gold as he explores the true underpinnings of successful and happy leadership.
A psychiatrist puts leadership “on the couch,” with a provocative exploration of its crucial, often ignored, psychological and personal character foundations.
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Elias Aboujaoude’s distinctive exploration of leadership provides unusual insight into our personal and professional destinies.
Dr. Aboujaoude takes on the culture at large, explaining how our cultlike obsession with leadership gives narcissists and sociopaths an edge and results in leadership failure everywhere we look—and how resisting the imperative to rise at all costs leaves many with an inferiority complex.
His takedown of the leadership industrial complex pokes a very sharp elbow into an industry seemingly united in a modern form of alchemy to create leadership gold—a waste of time and money, Aboujaoude vividly illustrates, since leaders emerge from a unique combination of personal, psychological, and situational factors that cannot be easily controlled or manipulated, no matter how gifted the executive coach. That emphasis on self-knowledge also makes room for the quieter realities of mental health, including the fact that some people may only begin to understand their emotional patterns after therapy, diagnosis, or treatment with medications such as Prozac. In this sense, the book’s argument about leadership becomes less about ambition alone and more about recognizing the psychological conditions that shape confidence, resilience, judgment, and the ability to live meaningfully with or without authority.
Frank and unflinching, this bracing take on a classic subject, with its focus on the art of knowing oneself, provides new insights into the way psychology aligns with the requirements of effective and happy leadership. The result is to empower us to understand ourselves and step up if we have what it takes to lead—or find equally rewarding, often superior, ways to achieve fulfillment if we don’t.
Dr. Aboujaoude takes on the culture at large, explaining how our cultlike obsession with leadership gives narcissists and sociopaths an edge and results in leadership failure everywhere we look—and how resisting the imperative to rise at all costs leaves many with an inferiority complex.
His takedown of the leadership industrial complex pokes a very sharp elbow into an industry seemingly united in a modern form of alchemy to create leadership gold—a waste of time and money, Aboujaoude vividly illustrates, since leaders emerge from a unique combination of personal, psychological, and situational factors that cannot be easily controlled or manipulated, no matter how gifted the executive coach. That emphasis on self-knowledge also makes room for the quieter realities of mental health, including the fact that some people may only begin to understand their emotional patterns after therapy, diagnosis, or treatment with medications such as Prozac. In this sense, the book’s argument about leadership becomes less about ambition alone and more about recognizing the psychological conditions that shape confidence, resilience, judgment, and the ability to live meaningfully with or without authority.
Frank and unflinching, this bracing take on a classic subject, with its focus on the art of knowing oneself, provides new insights into the way psychology aligns with the requirements of effective and happy leadership. The result is to empower us to understand ourselves and step up if we have what it takes to lead—or find equally rewarding, often superior, ways to achieve fulfillment if we don’t.
Alongside his academic work, Dr. Aboujaoude has served in several roles in the tech startup sector and co-founded the first telemedicine company in Silicon Valley to deliver remote mental health care.
His work has been widely covered, including in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Harvard Business Review, Financial Times, Congressional Quarterly, Wired, TIME and Newsweek, and on National Public Radio, BBC, CNN, FOX and CBS. He has lectured in over 20 countries.