Leading Women: Angelica Kohlmann
Held each year at the Vienna Hofburg imperial palace, the Peter Drucker Forum brings together thoughtful business leaders to discuss the latest management ideas and models. This isn’t an academic event, but a mix of investigators, consultants, specialist journalists, entrepreneurs and managers who discuss not simply theories, but how ideas can be put into practice to make businesses into models for social change.
The blended aspect of the Forum, of bringing together researchers and practitioners, speculation and experience, would have appealed particularly to Peter Drucker, who is rightly considered the father of modern management, and while no academic, taught management at several universities and wrote many influential books and articles on the subject.
The Chairman of the Drucker Forum Advisory Board and the European Peter Drucker Society that supports it is Angelica Kohlmann, a member of Drucker’s wife family, who co-organizes the event with Richard Straub, its President. As Peter Drucker’s birthplace, Vienna is particularly appropriate for the event - a crossroads of intellectuals, artists, writers and entrepreneurs, also birthplace of psychologists, philosophers and musicians, home to outstanding economists such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, or Joseph Schumpeter.
Although her family is European, Kohlmann was born in Brazil and spent her first years in S?o Paulo, as her parents had emigrated to Latin America. Her personality reflects the enviable synergy between a Germanic sense of duty and discipline with the vibrancy traditionally associated with the culture of Brazil. She holds a German and a Brazilian passport. “We grew up in a very international environment, travelling a lot, with relatives in the United States, in Europe, and elsewhere across the world.
This impacted my life. Certainly, I love Brazil, where I grew up. But I always appreciated the high cultural level I found in Europe, along with other philosophies and mindsets, and the way capitalism is understood in America. I tried to learn the best from each culture and country, and I always felt that I was a world citizen and not Brazilian or German or anything else.”
As with other people who have been exposed to different cultures from a young age or who have lived in diverse countries, such as the children of diplomats or executives posted abroad, rather than identifying with a single country, Kohlmann has a more international outlook, an identity associated with global citizenship. Furthermore, she has developed an interest in a range of cultures, along with a deep-rooted respect and tolerance for human diversity in all its forms.
Research shows that children exposed to different cultures, or who show an interest in other societies, tend to have a greater capacity for leadership than those brought up in the same place and who feel tied to their domestic environment. Our sense of belonging to a group is fundamentally cultural, a habit we acquire through education from infancy onward, and of course can be modified through experience and education.
Kohlmann shows a deep gratitude toward her parents for her upbringing, “which had a strong impact on how later I made my decisions.
They gave us a broad international outlook, stressing the importance of education and, above all, they gave us self-confidence, in the sense that as long as you’re honest, you work hard and you have strict ethical views, there is no limit to what you can achieve or how far you can go. I always felt a strong sense of self-confidence from my first job about what I was doing and I think this helped me a lot to move on and make decisions. Of course, this was based on a good education which I was fortunate to receive, and which is not to be taken for granted, but it was just this feeling that as long as you work hard you can go very far, and I think this was much more important than having studied medicine, for example.”
This self-confidence allowed her to take on roles and make the decisions she wanted. “When I was a teenager and attended college, girls stuck together and talked about fingernails, and the young men were discussing politics. I always preferred to be with the young men, discussing politics; I understood that I wanted to be part of society.” She also understood from an early age that while she wanted a family, she also wanted to develop a fulfilling career, and so set about combining them: “I knew that organizational skills were highly important.
I needed to be able to organize the kids. I also knew that if they were sick or anything happened to them, they would come first, but as long as they were healthy and happy, then I could continue my work, and I think both aspects of my life profited from that.”
Kohlmann says she has always enjoyed her relationship with her children, finding time, particularly around the table, to deepen the family experience, perhaps compensating for her absences:
“During family trips we would make, at least once a year, we spend hours at the dinner table discussing science, politics, economics, and we would have discussions deep into the night sometimes, it was a lot of fun. When they were younger I felt I was more knowledgeable, but today it’s not the case. It’s nice to see that I brought up kids who have so many ideas and so much input: it was a pleasure to combine my professional life with bringing up children. It was a challenge. It was a lot of work, a lot of organization. It was my choice and it was wonderful and completely doable.”
Kohlmann studied medicine in Germany, although she never felt a strong vocation to be a doctor. Her real interest was in how science could impact on society. After graduating, she worked as a doctor and researcher at the Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and the Kettering Cancer Center in New York. But she found laboratory work monotonous, while treating cancer patients exposed her to deep pain and suffering. She realized that she was more oriented toward action and so decided to make the leap into the business world at a time when pharmaceutical companies were looking for professionals with a medical background that could combine their research experience with management.
She was offered a number of positions and opted to work in marketing for Behringwerke AG. Despite having no experience in the field, she was attracted to the global orientation of the post, of leading a team of people and also being able to use her language skills. Over time, she was asked to work in a support capacity for the board of directors at Hoechst, which gave her a more holistic understanding of the business, analyzing investments and evaluating the financial performance of the company’s different business units, a task she enjoyed, given her passion for numbers and mathematics. “I found that combining some medical knowledge with numbers was the perfect place for me in those days.
I was 26 years old and I realized that at the board meeting there were thirty people, comprising board members and supporting staff, and I was the only woman. It took me some time to realize this, I was blind to it. I think it might have been my age or not seeing that I was different in those days that helped me a lot, I just moved on.”
Since then, Kohlmann’s career has advanced, as she explains, with some unexpected turns along the way, and she has continued to apply her Philosophy of generating a positive impact as she takes on greater responsibilities, even setting up her own venture fund with her children that invests in biotech, tech and related sectors. Asked about the milestones in her career, she remembers her years at the head of Behringwerke’s global re-structuring team, a time when she was given a free hand and that allowed her to develop a sense of responsibility and learn many aspects of management, among them taking risks and making mistakes in a relatively safe environment. Over the course of her career, Kohlmann has cultivated and strengthened a series of virtues that are fundamental for the good practice of management: discipline, dedication, determination and commitment to her ethical principles.
She still remembers her conversations with her uncle, Peter Drucker, at his home in the Rockies, when he would advise her to practice the virtue of listening, vital to leadership. She admits to not being a good listener and having largely acted independently. After reading his books, she says she now understands better the centrality of people to the practice of management. In his memoirs, Drucker refers to an episode at Cambridge University when he was attending a seminar given by John Maynard Keynes: “All the students were interested in the behavior of commodities, while for me, the behavior of people was much more interesting.”
Note
This article is extracted from chapter 4 of my book: "In An Ideal Business: How The Ideas of 10 Female Philosophers Bring Value into The Workplace".