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.
Why does being a leader feel so hard
today?
Because reckoning with freedom is always hard -- and the powerful
paradoxes of the new economy make it even harder. We're living in a
peculiar time: It's marked by a soaring stock market, the creation
of tremendous wealth, an explosion in innovation, and the acute
alienation that occurs when the global economy hits the average
individual. What I call the "new-economy pathology" is driven by
impossible demands -- better quality, lower prices, faster
innovation -- that generate an unprecedented form of stress. People
feel pressure to meet ever-higher objectives in all realms of work,
wealth, and lifestyle -- and to thrive on that pressure in the
process.
This condition is exacerbated by the pornographic treatment of
business in media and culture. The message is, You're living in the
best country in the world at the best time in history; you have an
amazing degree of freedom to do what you want, along with an
unprecedented opportunity to build immense wealth and success -- and
to do it more quickly than ever before. Of course, the average
individual has as much of a chance of launching a skyrocketing IPO
as he or she has of becoming a movie star.
What's even more disturbing is that the ascendancy of shareholder
value as the dominant driving force in business has resulted in a
terrible insensitivity to basic human values. That's the real "stuck
point" for leaders: How do we cope with a brutal business reality
and still preserve human values? How do we handle competition
without becoming either the kind of fool who allows it to crush us
or the kind of fool who forgets people?
Resolving that paradox requires something like an evolutionary
transformation of who we are, how we behave, how we think, and what
we value. We've reached such an incredible level of freedom that,
for the first time in history, we have to manage our own mutation.
It's up to us to decide what it means to be a successful human
being. That's the philosophical task of the age.
In some sense, of course, that has been the task of every age.
There's nothing in today's economic disruptions that equals the
horror of World War II. According to some estimates, nearly 100,000
people were killed during every week of that war. In 1935, when I
was a seven-year-old boy, I once stood in the Alexanderplatz, a
square in Berlin, and watched Hitler parade by in his Mercedes, just
a few feet away. I'll never forget the mothers with babies in their
arms, the children holding up swastikas. That leaves a mark on you
that can't be erased -- and it leaves you with questions that you
have to confront: Who am I to have witnessed such acts? How am I to
live meaningfully in a world such as this?
The new economy just happens to be the form that our existential
challenge takes today. As always, the real obstacle is existence
itself.
That's a heavy burden to place on leaders. They must not
only guide organizations but also wrestle with basic philosophical
questions.
There's a terrible defect at the core of how we think about
people and organizations today. There is little or no tolerance for
the kinds of character-building conversations that pave the way for
meaningful change. The average person is stuck, lost, riveted by the
objective domain. That's where our metrics are; that's where we look
for solutions. It's the come-on of the consulting industry and the
domain of all the books, magazines, and training programs out there.
And that's why books and magazines that have numbers in their titles
sell so well. We'll do anything to avoid facing the basic,
underlying questions: How do we make truly difficult choices? How do
we act when the risks seem overwhelming? How can we muster the guts
to burn our bridges and to create a condition of no return?
There's nothing wrong with all of those technical solutions.
They're excellent; they're creative; they're even necessary. But
they shield us from the real issues: What kind of life do I want to
lead? What is my destiny? How much evil am I willing to tolerate?
Reflection doesn't take anything away from decisiveness, from
being a person of action. In fact, it generates the inner toughness
that you need to be an effective person of action -- to be a leader.
Think of leadership as the sum of two vectors: competence ( your
specialty, your skills, your know-how ) and authenticity ( your
identity, your character, your attitude ). When companies and people
get stuck, they tend to apply more steam -- more competence -- to
what got them into trouble in the first place: "If I try harder,
I'll be successful," or "If we exert more control, we'll get the
results we need."
The problem is, when you're stuck, you're not likely to make
progress by using competence as your tool. Instead, progress
requires commitment to two things. First, you need to dedicate
yourself to understanding yourself better -- in the philosophical
sense of understanding what it means to exist as a human being in
the world. Second, you need to change your habits of thought: how
you think, what you value, how you work, how you connect with
people, how you learn, what you expect from life, and how you manage
frustration. Changing those habits means changing your way of being
intelligent. It means moving from a nonleadership mind to a
leadership mind.
What are the attributes of a "leadership mind"?
Authentic leaders have absorbed the fundamental fact of existence
-- that you can't get around life's inherent contradictions. The
leadership mind is spacious. It has ample room for the ambiguities
of the world, for conflicting feelings, and for contradictory ideas.
I believe that the central leadership attribute is the ability to
manage polarity. In every aspect of life, polarities are inevitable:
We want to live, yet we must die. How can I devote myself fully to
both family and career? Am I a boss or a friend? A lover or a judge?
How do I reconcile my own needs with those of my team? Those
paradoxes are simply part of life. Every business interaction is a
form of confrontation -- a clash of priorities, a struggle of
dignities, a battle of beliefs. That's not an invitation to wage an
epic battle of good versus evil or right versus wrong. ( Chances
are, your boss is less of an SOB than he is an agent of the cosmos.
) My point is, you have to be careful not to bang your head against
the wrong door. Polarities are in the nature of things. How we act,
how we respond to those polarities -- that is where we separate
greatness from mediocrity.
That doesn't mean that we don't have to make decisions. Tough
choices are a daily requirement of leadership. Leaders have to hire
and fire, to sign off on new strategies, and to risk investments --
all of which can lead to stress and guilt. The presence of guilt is
not a result of making the wrong choice but of choosing itself. And
that is the human condition: You are a being that chooses.
A young, ambitious guy whom I worked with at Amoco got a double
promotion that required a transfer to Cairo. He went home to his new
wife and young baby and said, "Great news, we're moving to Cairo."
Appalled, his wife said, "You're moving alone. I'm going home to my
mother." That was the first test of leadership in that family. There
was no viable compromise: If he relinquished his promotion, he would
resent his wife for ruining his career; if she just went along with
the move, she would hate him for squashing her ideals for her baby
and herself. What to do?
After some discussion, they might have been tempted to believe
that maturity required them to deny their feelings and to sacrifice
on behalf of each other. But that actually leads to illness,
depression, and the end of affection. Instead, they went back to the
fundamentals: Is it my career, or is it our career? Is it your baby,
or is it our baby? Are we individuals, or do we operate as a team?
What are our values? That marriage had to grow up by the equivalent
of five years in about two weeks. They ended up going to Cairo, but
their relationship had been transformed: She understood that his
career was important to her; he recommitted to his values as a
participant in the family. What matters is not what they ended up
choosing, but how. They took the courageous step to redefine, from
the inside out, who they truly were. The how is what gives you
character. The what, which at first appears paramount, is ultimately
of no emotional significance.
Managing polarity teaches us that there are no solutions -- there
are only changes of attitude. When you grapple with polarities in
your life, you lose your arrogant, self-indulgent illusions, and you
realize that the joke is on you. To get that message makes you a
more credible human being -- instantly.
It's one thing for a leader to embrace the contradictions
of the new economy. But how does he or she persuade colleagues to go
along with this kind of thinking?
The best leaders operate in four dimensions: vision, reality,
ethics, and courage. These are the four intelligences, the four
forms of perceiving, the languages for communicating that are
required to achieve meaningful, sustained results. The visionary
leader thinks big, thinks new, thinks ahead -- and, most important,
is in touch with the deep structure of human consciousness and
creative potential. Reality is the polar opposite of vision. The
leader as realist follows this motto: Face reality as it is, not as
you wish it to be. The realist grapples with hard, factual, daily,
and numeric parameters. A master in the art of the possible, the
realist has no illusions, sees limits, and has no patience for
speculation.
Ethics refers to the basic human values of integrity, love, and
meaning. This dimension represents a higher level of development,
one ruled not by fear or pleasure but by principle. Courage is the
realm of the will; it involves the capacity to make things happen.
The philosophic roots of this dimension lie in fully understanding
the centrality of free will in human affairs. Courage involves both
advocacy -- the ability to take a stand -- and the internalization
of personal responsibility and accountability.
The real challenge of leadership is to develop all four of these
often-contradictory modes of thinking and behaving at once. Leaders
tend to operate on two dimensions at most -- which has more to do
with a lack of insight into human nature than with corrupt intent.
Reality dominates, and the second-most-common attribute is ethics:
Consider the statement "People are our most important asset."
Unfortunately, those are often empty words -- not just because too
few people make the connection between profits and human values, but
also because there is no adequate understanding of what it means to
be a human being in a brutally competitive environment. "Vision"
might be one of the most overused words in business, but in fact
vision -- in the sense of honing great thinking and fostering the
capacity for ongoing inventiveness -- is rarely practiced. And
courage is demonstrated even more rarely.
When we talk about courage, we usually mean having guts or
taking risks. But you talk about courage as if it were an almost
mythic quality -- one that lies at the heart of leadership
success.
It goes back to the beginning of our discussion. Aristotle
believed, correctly, that courage is the first of the human virtues,
because it makes the others possible. Courage begins with the
decision to face the ultimate truth about existence: the dirty
little secret that we are free. It requires an understanding of free
will at the archetypal level -- an understanding that we are free to
define who we are at every moment. We are not what society and
randomness have made us; we are what we have chosen to be from the
depth of our being. We are a product of our will. We are self-made
in the deepest sense.
One of the gravest problems in life is self-limitation: We create
defense mechanisms to protect us from the anxiety that comes with
freedom. We refuse to fulfill our potential. We live only
marginally. This was Freud's definition of psychoneurosis: We limit
how we live so that we can limit the amount of anxiety that we
experience. We end up tranquilizing many of life's functions. We
shut down the centers of entrepreneurial and creative thinking; in
effect, we halt progress and growth. But no significant decision --
personal or organizational -- has ever been undertaken without being
attended by an existential crisis, or without a commitment to wade
through anxiety, uncertainty, and guilt.
That's what we mean by transformation. You can't just change how
you think or the way that you act -- you must change the way that
you will. You must gain control over the patterns that govern your
mind: your worldview, your beliefs about what you deserve and about
what's possible. That's the zone of fundamental change, strength,
and energy -- and the true meaning of courage.
Does developing the will to transform mean that you can
actually will others to change?
Taking personal responsibility for getting others to implement
strategy is the leader's key polarity. It's the existential paradox
of holding yourself 100% responsible for the fate of your
organization, on the one hand, and assuming absolutely no
responsibility for the choices made by other people, on the other
hand. That applies to your children too. You are 100% responsible
for how your children turn out. And you accomplish that by teaching
them that they are 100% responsible for how they turn out.
So how do you motivate people? Not with techniques, but by
risking yourself with a personal, lifelong commitment to greatness
-- by demonstrating courage. You don't teach it so much as challenge
it into existence. You cannot choose for others. All you can do is
inform them that you cannot choose for them. In most cases, that in
itself will be a strong motivator for the people whom you want to
cultivate. The leader's role is less to heal or to help than to
enlarge the capacity for responsible freedom.
Some people are more talented than others. Some are more
educationally privileged than others. But we all have the capacity
to be great. Greatness comes with recognizing that your potential is
limited only by how you choose, how you use your freedom, how
resolute you are, how persistent you are -- in short, by your
attitude. And we are all free to choose our attitude.
Polly LaBarre, a Fast Company senior editor, is based in New York
City. Contact Peter Koestenbaum by email ( pkipeter@ix.netcom.com ) or
on the Web ( http://www.pib.net/
).
Sidebar: Fear and Trembling in the New
Economy
You don't need a philosopher to tell you that anxiety is one
by-product of what Peter Koestenbaum calls "the brutality and
promise" of the new economy. But you do need a philosopher to
explain how anxiety rules the human condition -- and how it can
serve as a powerful, productive force in your life. The best thinker
for the job, says Koestenbaum, is Soren Kierkegaard, a Danish
philosopher who did as much for the analysis of anxiety as Freud did
for the analysis of the subconscious. Here's a short course from
Koestenbaum on the value of anxiety.
Anxiety generates knowledge. "As Kierkegaard explains it,
anxiety is the natural condition. It's a cognitive emotion that
reveals truths that we would prefer to hide but that we need for our
greater health. In an essay called 'The Concept of Dread,'
Kierkegaard draws a connection between anxiety and free will. We
cannot prove that free will is true -- because we freely choose the
meaning of truth in the first place. But our anxiety tips us off to
the existence of our freedom: It reminds us of our huge
responsibility to choose who we are and to define our world."
Anxiety leads to action. "Kierkegaard wrote that the most
common form of despair occurs when one does not choose or 'will' to
be oneself -- when a person is 'another than himself.' The opposite
of despair is 'to will to be that self which one truly is.' That's
the experience of anxiety. It is choosing life in the face of death;
it is the experience of thought becoming action, reflection becoming
behavior, and theory becoming practice. Anxiety is pure energy."
Anxiety makes you a grown-up. "Anxiety is the experience
of growth itself. In any endeavor, how do you feel when you go from
one stage to the next? The answer: You feel anxious. Anxiety that is
denied makes us ill; anxiety that is fully confronted and fully
lived through converts itself into joy, security, strength,
centeredness, and character. The practical formula: Go where the
pain is."
