Leadership-Interview-Transkript - Sozialpsychologie - Goethe ...

Patrick D. Cowden
Short biography
Patrick Cowden was born the 21 st December 1964 in Frankfurt am Main as the son of a US-
Army sergeant major and a German mother and grew up in both countries. He was trained to
be a meteorologist and an oceanographer at the US-Navy from 1983 to 1984 and went to
Germany then, where he got qualified as a software engineer at Mainframe Systems
Programming. His career includes jobs as Systems Programmer at Deutsche Bank, System
Engineer at EMC, Management Consultant at Capgemini Consulting and General Manager at
WestLB, SAP and Bertelsmann. From 2003 to 2007, he worked as Director and General
Manager at DELL Germany and after that, he became Vice President and General Manager at
Hitachi Data Systems and holds that position until today. He founded the project ‘Beyond
Leadership’, which aims at developing a new leadership culture in Germany. For him, being a
leader is an affair of the heart, of inspiration and shared values.
Interview conducted in Frankfurt am Main, the 27 th October 2011
Rolf van Dick: Patrick, thank you very much for supporting our center and our activities.
You know that we are people from economics, sociology, psychology. We want to study
leadership and inform practice about how to build better organizations. You have had many
experiences with leadership, both as a follower and as a leader yourself. You have been
trained in the U.S. Army, you are half German, half American. You have got your education
from the U.S. Army, you worked in the IT-Business for the last 25 years, you have been a
director at Dell, and for the last few years you have been working for a Japanese company,
Hitachi Data Systems, as a general manager. So you both had experiences as a follower,
during your time as a student, in the Army, at Dell before you became a manager there, but
now you are in a leadership position yourself and you are studying leadership. You founded
the ‘Beyond Leadership’ – movement. We are interested in your personal experiences. The
first question always is: How important is leadership? Do we need leaders? Do you need a
leader to get up in the morning, to write your books?
Patrick Cowden: Well, I think what we need is inspiration and motivation, for just about
anything that we do in life. Usually, the things we do best, we do for love – not for money. So
it is never really a commercial question. I think, in a lot of environments, especially big
organizations, the leadership helps people find that inspiration to go do great things.
Sometimes we find it ourselves, sometimes we find it at home, but sometimes it is really
important to find it at the job and at the work environment. And that is why we need leaders –
they can help shape the future in a good way.
Rolf van Dick: And that is how you would define good leadership, providing inspiration and
motivating people, is that good leadership?
Patrick Cowden: Well, it is an element of good leadership. I think it is an important
foundation. You know, one of the things I have always said is, the foundation for change is
sometimes inspiration. To do things differently is part of what makes humanity what it is – we
do things differently. And some point we invented fire, and we did things differently after
that, right? So I think one element is inspiration, another element are of course shaping
organizations and shaping the purpose of what we do – that is something leaders can have a