Do You Have the Will to Lead?

Who hasn't stared out an airplane window on yet another red-eye and thought, What exactly is the point of this exercise? Or sat through a particularly senseless meeting and wondered, How in the world did I get here? Or wrestled with a set of strategic choices -- all of which seem hard and unpleasant -- and said, What happened to the fun part of being in business? According to Peter Koestenbaum, those uncomfortable questions -- those existential quandaries -- are at the root of issues that great leaders deal with all the time, and they influence every decision that must be made.

A classically trained philosopher with degrees in philosophy, physics, and theology from Stanford, Harvard, and Boston University, Koestenbaum has spent half a century pondering the questions that give most of us headaches: Why is there being instead of nothing? What is the ultimate explanation of the universe? What does it mean to be a successful human being? After fleeing pre-World War II Germany with his parents, Koestenbaum was raised in Venezuela; later, he emigrated to the United States to pursue his studies. He taught at San Jose State University for 34 years, and during that period he focused on creating a "practical philosophy" -- a philosophy that is linked to education, psychology, and psychiatry. His many books include "The Vitality of Death" (Greenwood, 1971), "The New Image of the Person" (Greenwood, 1978), and "Managing Anxiety" (Prentice Hall, 1974). One of his books, "Leadership: The Inner Side of Greatness" (Jossey-Bass, 1991), has been translated into several languages, and Koestenbaum is now at work on a new book, tentatively titled "Diamond Reverse Engineering."

More than 25 years ago, Koestenbaum traded the cloistered halls of academia for the front lines of the global economy. It's not unheard-of for this philosopher, now a tireless 71-year-old with thick glasses and a flowing beard, to visit clients across three continents in a single week. His agenda: to apply the power of philosophy to the big question of the day -- how to reconcile the often-brutal realities of business with basic human values -- and to create a new language of effective leadership. "Unless the distant goals of meaning, greatness, and destiny are addressed," Koestenbaum insists, "we can't make an intelligent decision about what to do tomorrow morning -- much less set strategy for a company or for a human life. Nothing is more practical than for people to deepen themselves. The more you understand the human condition, the more effective you are as a businessperson. Human depth makes business sense."

Koestenbaum's wisdom makes sense to leaders at such giant organizations as Ford, EDS, Citibank, Xerox, Ericsson, and even one of Korea's chaebols. All of these companies have welcomed him into their offices to roam free as a resident sage, company therapist, and secular priest. His involvement with them ranges from one-on-one coaching sessions to decade-long engagements featuring intensive leadership seminars. At Ford, Koestenbaum contributed to the company's 2,000-person Senior Executive Program throughout the 1980s. In more than a decade at EDS, he led seminars and coached hundreds of top executives, including then-chairman Les Alberthal. He also coached Alexander Krauer, a prominent Swedish industrialist, when Krauer was chairman of Ciba-Geigy. Picking up on that momentum, another leading Swedish industrialist, Rolf Falkenberg, founded the Koestenbaum Institute to disseminate the philosopher's teachings across Scandinavia.

"Everything I do," says Koestenbaum, "is about using themes from the history of thought to rescue people who are stuck." His logic: Change -- true, lasting, deep-seated change -- is the business world's biggest and most persistent challenge. But too many people and too many companies approach change by treating it as a technical challenge rather than by developing authentic answers to basic questions about business life. "We've reached such explosive levels of freedom that, for the first time in history, we have to manage our own mutation," declares Koestenbaum. "It's up to us to decide what it means to be a successful human being. That's the philosophical task of the age. Nothing happens unless you make it happen. As a leader, everything is your responsibility, because you always could have chosen otherwise."

In an interview with Fast Company, Koestenbaum explains how age-old questions apply to the new world of work.