Tim Leberecht: None of us has a perfect identity

The following short description in Handelsblatt magazine about Tim Leberecht was very appealing to me:

“Leberecht is a keen observer, but not a cynic, his book is a boon for all those who want to get away from the often so naive technology hype of Silicon Valley. When the author speaks, his eyes light up enthusiastically. Leberecht’s theses have inspired filmmakers, and the “Society of Business Romantics” which was founded by him is enjoying more and more fans”.

I continue my research and come across statements like “None of us has a perfect identity. If we knew what always happens, our lives would be insanely lame. I believe that a brand like Tesla, for example, which sometimes gets bogged down, admits mistakes, looks real and thus remains attractive” (interview with w&v)

or “Passion is about suffering. You have to resist the misconception that you have to reach everything comfortably and in the fastest way possible. The best ideas often come from boredom, extra spending or pain” (interview with Börsenblatt).

The German-American Tim Leberecht has more than 20 years of experience in leading positions in the design and technology industry in the USA, Asia and Europe.

As a globally active consultant, author of the international bestseller “Business Romantic” and founder of the Business Romantic Society, he supports companies and executives in vision development, strategic transformations and the creation of more humane cultures. He is also the initiator and curator of the House of Beautiful Business, an annual conference that brings together CEOs, founders and software developers with scientists, poets and philosophers to create an optimistic vision for a philanthropic future of work. After several years in the USA Tim Leberecht moved to Berlin in 2017.

He published the international bestseller “Business-Romantiker: Von der Sehnsucht nach einem anderen Wirtschaftsleben” in 2015 and has been regularly asked about the romanticism in the business world ever since. In an interview with w&v, he gave the following example: “Storytelling is a romantic quality. Because it’s always about projecting something, designing another world. And in the case of advertisers, storytelling touches on the basic longing that drove them to take up their profession. This has a lot to do with the search for meaning.

Anyone who has lived and worked in Silicon Valley for a long time simply cannot be against technology. And he emphasized this in an interview with Wirtschaftswoche:

“I am not against technology. I am just warning against an all too naïve belief in technology. If our actions are based only on algorithms and Big Data, we will start to outsource ourselves.”

One should not underestimate the power and inspiration of human beings, he continued:

“Radical innovations like the iPhone or Airbnb’s business model do not come from machines and do not result from the analysis of customer data. They are so far ahead of their time that they can only be based on human imagination. They come from visionaries who had a romantic belief in another world and set out to build it – often even against better empirical knowledge.”

Tim Leberecht is a globally active consultant and author as well as one of the most passionate and astute thinkers for a new humanism in business and society against the background of digitalization, automation and artificial intelligence. Tim Leberecht can be booked as speaker: tim-leberecht@premium-speakers.com