- In today’s CEO Daily: Leadership and life lessons from the former CEO of Alcoa and Siemens.
- The big story: The world waits for Powell’s swan song Jackson Hole address.
- The markets: China is up amid mixed performance in global markets.
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. Geoff Colvin here, sitting in for Diane. In these waning days of summer, in which CEOs and other hard-charging executives observe an unwritten pact to take it easy, or at least easier, they face a rare opportunity to think large thoughts. An appropriate beach book for them, offering hefty thoughts decidedly relevant to businesspeople, would be Leading to Thrive by Klaus Kleinfeld. The former CEO of Alcoa and Siemens now spends his days investing in not-yet-public companies while also mentoring CEOs and helping his daughters run their probiotics company (he started his career in the pharmaceutical industry). But he also burned to write a book “by a practitioner for practitioners” and to “separate the theories that sound good from those that work well in the real world.”
The result, unlike most CEO books, doesn’t begin with leadership, team building, managing the board, or other CEO topics. Those are for the book’s second half. The first half is all about “the inner game,” demanding personal “energy, focus, and resilience.” Speaking with me recently, he acknowledges his sins, “pushing teams because I had a clear idea of what I wanted to get done that day.” He’d insist his team keep working past midnight, only to find in the morning that the idea was terrible, and the people were too exhausted to think straight. That’s how he learned that energy management is way more important than time management. “It’s why I have this strong focus on how you gain and retain energy,” he says. His formula involves the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Friedrich Nietzsche, the Dalai Lama, and many others.
Kleinfeld disdains the concept of work-life separation. Yes, he says, “you play multiple roles,” but ultimately, “you are one person.” The idea that “I have a private life and I have a business life—that’s not the way the world works. It’s actually a very old industrial idea that wasn’t around before the Industrial Age, and it will not survive the post-industrial world.”
After all, he says, “It’s one life.” He would advise anyone “to really think about what excites them, what gets them up in the morning. Think about it and spend some time on it.” When he reflects on his own choices, he says he is always reminded of the work of Bronnie Ware, an Australian palliative nurse who catalogued the regrets of the dying. “One of the top regrets is, ‘I wish I had let myself be happier,’” he says. “This is as simple as it sounds, but it also has the profound wisdom that happiness is a decision you take.”—Geoff Colvin
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Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
