Post by Samuel A.

Matthias Altendorf led Endress+Hauser Group for a decade as CEO, and is now serving as the chairman of the COLTENE Group board after starting as a tool making apprentice 40 years ago. At The Lisbon MBA Católica | Nova he put one line on the board. “Circumstances create behavior, and behavior creates circumstances”. His point was that you cannot change a person, or a company's core, by asking it to change. The core is set early, somewhere between age 0 and 14, and it is stubborn. What you can change are the circumstances around it. Move someone from one country to another and over years the behavior shifts, then the character follows. Change how you lead eighteen thousand people and, slowly, the culture's core moves with them. This reframed something I keep wrestling with in the program. It is easy to collect frameworks in an MBA and mistake the collecting for change. He was describing the gap between knowing about yourself and actually shifting, and how rare the second one is. Of every hundred executives he has developed, he can honestly say he made fifteen better. The rest did not get worse. They simply would not do the work, because the work means admitting you are not as good as you want to be. So the learning, for me, is not the next framework. It is whether I am willing to change the circumstances around my own core, on purpose, while I am in a place built to do exactly that. He gave it a sharp edge too. Everything is visible but not seen. We can see what needs to change and still wait until the economics force it, because comfort is its own circumstance. Thank you Matthias Altendorf.