A Leader's Journey

The questions that Admiral James Stockdale infamously posed seven years ago -- "Who am I? Why am I here?" -- are no joke at AEI. They form the core of the program. And many of AEI's clients -- including CEOs and top executives at major companies, as well as accomplished entrepreneurs -- say that answering those questions has changed their lives. John Matczak is a case in point: The 57-year-old founder and CEO of Pennfield Group, a $50 million aerospace conglomerate headquartered in Sellersville, Pennsylvania, sold off his most prized possessions after realizing that they owned him. Another executive, a top official at a major pharmaceutical firm, shared his deepest insecurity with his colleagues after reaching the gut-wrenching conclusion that his secret had been poisoning his relationships at work. "Going through this program makes you look in the mirror," says Matczak. "At times, that's really tough."

All these revelations take place in a 250-year-old stone barn, on Wieand's estate, which he bought from a psychiatrist during his banker days. ("Back then, I thought all shrinks were wackos," he laughs.) Wieand tries not to appear like "some namby-pamby intellectual" to his clients. Although he can rattle off quotations from existentialist philosophers and psychologists, he is quick to make his business credentials known. And mementos of his corporate life are prominently displayed in his office, along with old photos of him in his Brooks Brothers suit, surrounded by middle-aged bankers.

Moreover, unlike most psychologists, who present themselves to their patients as blank slates, Wieand makes a point of sharing his "war stories" with clients -- "the more painful the better," he says. "I want people to know that I've been hurt in the business world -- badly. Yet I obviously went through a transformation, going from president of a multibillion-dollar business, sitting in a big corner office, to sitting here, at my little desk."

Real Leaders Are Authentic

Wieand's program is based on lessons that he learned the hard way. He was raised in an apartment over his father's auto-body shop in Souderton, Pennsylvania. He had an undiagnosed learning disability, and, as a result, he grew up thinking he was dumb. When his seventh-grade math teacher berated him in front of the class, saying, "You're so stupid, Paul. You don't belong here," Wieand's worst fears were confirmed. He spent the rest of his high-school years racing cars and dreaming of someday getting rich. He ended up graduating in the bottom 5% of his high-school class.

To avoid the draft during the Vietnam War, he entered the Bethlehem Business School, a two-year college; then he enrolled at Dyke College, in Cleveland. During his junior year, he started dating a student at Case Western Reserve University. Her father was a Harvard PhD -- which spurred Wieand to get serious about his studies. "I knew that he thought I was an embarrassment," says Wieand. "I was determined to prove him, and anyone else who ever thought I was stupid, wrong." Wieand graduated on the dean's list, with nearly a 4.0 average in economics, and married his girlfriend.

Like most of the clients he sees today, he buried his childhood shame, only to have it haunt him as an adult. "When you reveal your secret, it begins to lose its power and eventually goes away," says Wieand. "But if you hide it, you develop defenses, and you overcompensate." In Wieand's case, he became "obsessed" with achievement -- and intolerant of those he considered to be beneath him.

Discovering that he had an aptitude for finance, Wieand pushed that strength to the limit: Within 10 years, he worked his way up from commercial-credit analyst to president of Bucks County Bank, a small but prestigious institution in Perkasie, Pennsylvania, while earning his MBA at night and becoming an adjunct professor in Drexel's Executive MBA program.

After becoming president of the bank, he masterminded mergers with two other banks, tripling its size and turning it into a major regional institution. "I had been watching the deregulation of the banking industry," Wieand remembers. "The industry was going through a massive consolidation. Either we would get gobbled up, or we would do the gobbling."

Wieand named the holding company Independence Bancorp and modeled the organization after the U.S. federal banking system. The model worked. A year after the merger, in a study of similar-size banks, Independence ranked third in the nation in performance on assets. But, like so many of the executives he would later counsel, Wieand pushed his strengths too far. Eventually, his financial savvy became his liability. Instead of cultivating the older, established bankers who were stewards of the institutions that Wieand had acquired, he tried to force them out. He froze their salaries, took away their responsibilities, and installed a layer of young MBAs above them. He refused to defer to the board of directors, most of whom he saw as "country-clubbers who golfed while I ran the place." Even today, Wieand replays many incidents in his mind, wishing that he could turn back the clock.