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Discovering Your Authentic Leadership
Analyzing 3,000 pages of from extreme challenges in his youth to reach
transcripts, our team was the pinnacle of the global pharmaceutical in-
startled to see you do not dustry, a trajectory that illustrates the trials
have to be born with many leaders have to go through on their jour-
specific characteristics or neys to authentic leadership.
traits of a leader.
Leadership emerges from Vasella was born in 1953 to a modest fam-
your life story. ily in Fribourg, Switzerland. His early years
were filled with medical problems that stoked
his passion to become a physician. His first
recollections were of a hospital where he was
admitted at age four when he suffered from
food poisoning. Falling ill with asthma at age
five, he was sent alone to the mountains of
eastern Switzerland for two summers. He
found the four-month separations from his
parents especially difficult because his care-
taker had an alcohol problem and was unre-
sponsive to his needs.
At age eight, Vasella had tuberculosis, fol-
lowed by meningitis, and was sent to a sanato-
rium for a year. Lonely and homesick, he suf-
fered a great deal that year, as his parents
rarely visited him. He still remembers the pain
and fear when the nurses held him down dur-
ing the lumbar punctures so that he would not
move. One day, a new physician arrived and
took time to explain each step of the proce-
dure. Vasella asked the doctor if he could hold
a nurse’s hand rather than being held down.
“The amazing thing is that this time the proce-
dure didn’t hurt,” Vasella recalls. “Afterward,
the doctor asked me, ‘How was that?’ I reached
up and gave him a big hug. These human ges-
tures of forgiveness, caring, and compassion
made a deep impression on me and on the
kind of person I wanted to become.”
Throughout his early years, Vasella’s life con- what empowered them to lead, these leaders
tinued to be unsettled. When he was ten, his
18-year-old sister passed away after suffering
from cancer for two years. Three years later,
his father died in surgery. To support the fam-
ily, his mother went to work in a distant town
and came home only once every three weeks.
Left to himself, he and his friends held beer
parties and got into frequent fights. This lasted
for three years until he met his first girlfriend,
whose affection changed his life.
At 20, Vasella entered medical school, later
graduating with honors. During medical school,
he sought out psychotherapy so he could come
to terms with his early experiences and not feel
like a victim. Through analysis, he reframed
his life story and realized that he wanted to
help a wider range of people than he could as
harvard business review • hbr.org • february 2007
Purchased by Ken Hampian (kchampian@charter.net) on March 15, 2013
an individual practitioner. Upon completion of
his residency, he applied to become chief phy-
sician at the University of Zurich; however, the
search committee considered him too young
for the position.
Disappointed but not surprised, Vasella de-
cided to use his abilities to increase his impact
on medicine. At that time, he had a growing
fascination with finance and business. He
talked with the head of the pharmaceutical di-
vision of Sandoz, who offered him the oppor-
tunity to join the company’s U.S. affiliate. In
his five years in the United States, Vasella flour-
ished in the stimulating environment, first as a
sales representative and later as a product
manager, and advanced rapidly through the
Sandoz marketing organization.
When Sandoz merged with Ciba-Geigy in
1996, Vasella was named CEO of the combined
companies, now called Novartis, despite his
young age and limited experience. Once in the
CEO’s role, Vasella blossomed as a leader. He
envisioned the opportunity to build a great
global health care company that could help
people through lifesaving new drugs, such as
Gleevec, which has proved to be highly effec-
tive for patients with chronic myeloid leuke-
mia. Drawing on the physician role models of
his youth, he built an entirely new Novartis
culture centered on compassion, competence,
and competition. These moves established No-
vartis as a giant in the industry and Vasella as a
compassionate leader.
Vasella’s experience is just one of dozens
provided by authentic leaders who traced their
inspiration directly from their life stories. Asked
consistently replied that they found their
strength through transformative experiences.
Those experiences enabled them to under-
stand the deeper purpose of their leadership.
Knowing Your Authentic Self
When the 75 members of Stanford Graduate
School of Business’s Advisory Council were
asked to recommend the most important ca-
pability for leaders to develop, their answer
was nearly unanimous: self-awareness. Yet many
leaders, especially those early in their careers,
are trying so hard to establish themselves in
the world that they leave little time for self-
exploration. They strive to achieve success in
tangible ways that are recognized in the ex-
ternal world—money, fame, power, status, or
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