Jochen Zeitz on Being in Business
If the ordinary senses cannot establish our connection between the material self and the universal self, then in what other ways can we do so? One way is to consider our hidden correspondence with other beings directly.
Take a conversation that I had with Jochen Zeitz, the German-born former CEO and chairman of Puma, a sporting goods and lifestyle company.
Me: What is the role of Being in business?
Zeitz: Everything is interconnected. The moment you take philosophy, psychology, religion, and business and look at the underlying commonality, that’s when you start looking at business in a different way. It’s important that you ultimately find your life through being, and not through having, once you cover your essential needs. But if you don’t think you’re covering your needs, ‘having’ becomes part of your being because you need to have in order to live.
Me: But how can this sense of Being be introduced in corporations, given that it is so unfamiliar a term in the language of business?
Zeitz: If you look at how much of our life we spend in business, do you want to wait until you’re retired to say, ‘Now I’m going to enjoy life?’ I mean, shouldn’t we ideally be in business as well as be working on what we think is very important in our life? It is about business helping give employees an identity, a culture something they can utilize to be during their work. And it doesn’t even have to say, ‘It’s about spirituality.’ It’s about being at work and being respected and being valued, having an ethical platform to work from in business, and having integrity in what you do and that ultimately makes the work environment more fun too.
Me: Where does nature fit in all this?
Zeitz: So not having nature healthy will ultimately have a very negative effect on everybody’s sense of Being. It is critical that we recognise this fact. It is critical to the poor fishermen that no longer can fish to make a living because 50 percent of their fisheries are now depleted or to the poor in many areas of the world who are most affected by climate change. Nature has a significant impact on society, and there’s just no choice but to value nature appropriately in order to find solutions.
Me: So, how do we go about creating this mindset where Being and nature actually are valued?
Zeitz: It’s not that there’s one ultimate solution or answer. Just as we are all unique, we will need to find our own epiphany, our own reason, our own connections.
Me: But where do we go looking to realize these connections?
Zeitz: To me, psychology is something that helps us understand ourselves, something that helps me broaden my horizons into the areas that ultimately are affected by how I am doing things. But that’s just my personal belief that psychology and a better understanding of our conscious selves are helping us better understand the world around us and inside us. It’s kind of an unspoken language that is happening among us that has not been discovered yet. But it’s subconsciously spoken in a way that connects us all. It’s more the connections that we have and that help us communicate without us being consciously aware of them.
Me: But what role does nature play in this subconscious connection?
Zeitz: Well, isn’t that part of nature? We’ve sort of distanced ourselves from nature. Ultimately, we are part of nature. We just think we are above it, but it’s quite the opposite. We will never master nature. I think that’s just a schizophrenic thought. We need to work with rather than against nature because otherwise, nature will not take care of us.
From the perspective of Beingful leadership, every one of us is connected and has the potential to be a business leader because of the simple nature of our existence. Whether we are senior business executives such as Jeffrey Swartz and Jochen Zeitz or workers to whom no one reports, how we choose to be in our business lives affects the lives of the people with whom we interact. In turn, it influences the impact of the corporation itself on the broader world. In seeking an inner transformation to realize Being, there is the possibility of transforming the world itself because many good values, visions, and actions can flow from a centered, understanding, and open self.