The business doctor: family therapist John Pagan is diagnosing and treating business ills.

• Author: Hill, Robin Mackey
• Position: Includes related article on do-it-yourself diagnosis of your business

Anchorage family therapist business consultant Pagan began making the connection about 10 years ago. Practicing then as a marriage and family therapist in California, Pagan began noticing a common ailment among his clients. Although most came to him for what they thought were family-related problems, Pagan realized that many of their symptoms pointed instead to work-related problems.

The connection between the two became so obvious, in fact, that after Pagan moved to Anchorage in 1980, he decided to expand his practice and to become a consultant to businesses eager to improve the general health of their organizations. Today he has crafted a private practice that is 30 percent family therapy and 70 percent organization development, sometimes referred to as organizational transformation or organizational effectiveness.

In the last few years he has helped oil companies, Native corporations, hospitals and non-profit organizations negotiate the passages of mergers, shifts in personnel and restructurings. His goal is to teach businesses how to handle change in a way that is both productive and healthy for management and staff.

Sometimes I call myself the organizational doctor,' says Pagan.

An intensely driven man who at age 42 is as focused on becoming a top master's tennis player as he is on succeeding professionally, Pagan and his wife, Kathleen Holmes, own Human Concerns Inc., in Anchorage. He recalls events that prompted him to expand his practice from family to corporate counseling: As I was listening to people come in to talk about their personal dilemmas, I began to see that there were some patterns that were emerging with people leaving their jobs.

It was difficult for them to keep jobs. I would hear war stories about how awful their work settings would be, the tremendous overtime and the work demands placed on the employees.'

Many of his clients expressed frustration over climbing - or the inability to climb - the career ladder. Employees didn't trust management. Managers didn't trust the people they supervised. As a result, no one was as happy - or as productive - as they could have been. 'I began to notice there was a lot of dysfunction going on in the work settings,' adds Pagan.

Soon he also recognized similarities between family life and life at the office. People who went home to chaotic families or to those affected by alcohol tended to get themselves into chaotic work situations. Many worked with peers who also had problems with...