The former CEO of Siemens and Alcoa, Klaus Kleinfeld, rejects the idea of separation of professional life: “You are a person”
Good morning. Geoff Colvin here, sitting for Diane. In these decreasing days of summer, in which CEOs and other hard executives observe an unwritten pact to relax, or at least easier, they are faced with a rare opportunity to think of great thoughts. A beach book appropriate for them, offering heavy thoughts resolutely relevant to businessmen, would be Leading to prosper by Klaus Kleinfeld. The former CEO of Alcoa and Siemens are now spending his days investing in companies not yet public while supervising CEOs and helping his daughters to direct their business of probiotics (he started his career in the pharmaceutical industry). But he also burned to write a book “by a practitioner for practitioners” and to “separate theories that sound well from those that work well in the real world”.
The result, unlike most CEO books, does not start with leadership, team consolidation, management of the board of directors or other CEO subjects. These are the second half of the book. The first half is a question of “inner game”, demanding “energy, concentration and resilience”. Speaking with me recently, he recognized his sins: “Put the teams because I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do that day.” He would insist that his team continues to work after midnight, to find that in the morning that the idea was terrible, and people were too exhausted to think directly. This is how he learned that energy management is much more important than time management. “This is why I focus on how you win and keep the energy,” he says. Its formula implies the former Roman philosopher Seneca, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Friedrich Nietzsche, Dalai Lama and many others.
Kleinfeld disdains the concept of work-life separation. Yes, he says: “You play several roles”, but in the end, “you are one person”. The idea that “I have a private life and I have a professional life – that’s not how the world works. It is in fact a very old industrial idea which was not there before the industrial era, and it will not survive the post-industrial world. ”
After all, he says: “It’s a life.” He would advise anyone who to really think about what excites them, which obtains them in the morning. Think about it and spend time on it. ” When he thinks of his own choices, he says he still remembers the work of Bronnie Ware, an Australian palliative nurse who cataloged the regrets of the dying. “One of the best regrets is:” I would have liked to be happier, “he says. “It is as simple as it may seem, but it also has deep wisdom that happiness is a decision you take.” –Geoff Colvin
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