Beyond optimization: building beautiful businesses

Interview Summary

From Silicon Valley to “The House of Beautiful Business”

Timestamp: 00:57 A German creative turned Silicon Valley strategist recounts founding The House of Beautiful Business to “build for beauty,” challenging datafication and growth-at-all-costs with a humanities-informed, values-driven community.

Romanticism as an Operating Principle

Timestamp: 05:07Tim reclaims romantic qualities—mystery, intimacy, vulnerability—as a Trojan horse for meaning and innovation, urging language, incentives, and cultures that embrace ambiguity and imagination over pure optimization.

Losing as Practice and Humility

Timestamp: 08:00Against winner-worship, Tim champions losing as necessary humility amid volatility and AI’s encroaching agency, enabling fluid identities, letting go of status, and continual reinvention through inevitable fluctuations.

Humane Growth and AI Choices

Timestamp: 11:42Tim says founders should resist unconditional growth, choose sincere tech practices, set modest targets, and reward responsibility. Society must confer prestige on humanist founders—not just admire financial success or celebrity.

Community, Rituals, and Joy

Timestamp: 14:56–21:56Time describes his global community, which fosters holistic intelligence and transformation. Rituals like silent closings nurture tenderness; personal writing clarifies belief. Joy arises in creation, curation, and awe—work as an unfolding story.

Transcript

Barrak Alzaid (00:21)

Tim, welcome to the Joy of Business. Thank you so much for making the time to speak with us. I am so excited to talk to you because you have done so much to reframe how we think about business and how we do business, how we relate to each other, how we relate to ourselves.

Tim Oliver Leberecht (00:25)

Thanks for having me.

Barrak Alzaid (00:39)

I'd love to hear about your journey from founder Silicon Valley to the books that kind of changed many people's lives and this house of beautiful business that is, I think, marking its 10 year anniversary this year. Congratulations. year.

Tim Oliver Leberecht (00:57)

Next year. Next year. Looking forward to the celebratory gathering in Athens next year. But yeah, but thank you for the kind words. It's always, I mean, 10 years is of course an opportunity also for me and for us to take stock. And it's nice to hear that the books have changed people lives and that we were able to reframe some of the paradigms of business. My own journey, it's always been between two worlds. So I grew up in Germany.

I actually wanted to become an artist. I've always been very creative. I played in a band. I went down that route, only then to end up in marketing and in Silicon Valley eventually. But I really like this intersection of vivid imagination and then, also the formal arena of business and the power of this operating system of business. And my journey is really that I started working in Germany, but my professional coming of age was in Silicon Valley where I was for 14 years, I worked at Frog Design, at the time one of the world's leading design innovation consultancies, so they were among, with others, I do, the pioneers of design thinking. But as a European in Silicon Valley at some point, I became quite homesick and realized also that I don't fully subscribe to the values of Silicon Valley, even at the time it was so relentlessly about optimization and datafication control really and surveillance at some point as well. So I wrote this book, The Business Romantic, which was really in a way a rallying cry against this disenchantment. I think if anything, it wanted to give business people new language. So I gave a lot of talks and host a lot of workshops and consulting projects. And that was also the spark that led to the launch of the House of Beautiful Business. And the idea was really to create a community based on these ideas that we need to think and do business beyond business. We need to draw from the humanities and the arts. And we need to not only build for growth and efficiency, but for beauty. And that sounds like such a lofty idea. a lot of people say, yeah, that's really nice. We can do that once we have great revenue or scaled or sold our business, then we can go and give back. But I think that's just such a fundamental mistake. Because by the time we...we'll be unicorns if at all, and we wake up, you know, we might be rich or very successful, but we might end up in Gotham City, you know, in a world that we no longer want to live in. And I think we're seeing the writing on the wall right now so much. So just to kind of conclude, we started in a way from a very humanist point of view on business, in the language, in the practices that we promoted. And 10 years later, it's so much more urgent.

You know, so this is also why I'm still doing what I'm doing. And I feel really strongly about it, that it almost feels a bit nostalgic to rattle the iron cage of datafication. Now it's like, my God, like there's this unholy alliance between AI and tech and, you know, autocracy, fascism, and they're building a regime that is just designed to basically extract and control. And so I think for founders the ask is just be critical, if anything, and hold up different values and don't jump on the bandwagon and don't glorify the Peter Teals of this world. And so we are trying to create a space and build community for everybody who wants more and who does not fully buy into that vision.

Barrak Alzaid (04:23)

It's really inspiring. And as you mentioned and alluded to, a big part of your work is about reclaiming terms that are typically associated with the domain of the personal. Things like love in the workplace, exploring the heart of a business, emotions in the age of machines. And your acclaimed book, Business Romantic, adds romantic motives to business life. Intimacy instead of transaction. Mystery instead of unambiguity. Vulnerability instead of control.

Surprise instead of predictability. Character instead of efficiency. Dedication instead of facts, orientation, and meaning instead of instant need satisfaction. How did you arrive at this idea and the practices associated with it? And more importantly, how can entrepreneurs, especially those at the early stage, implement it?

Tim Oliver Leberecht (05:07)

Yeah, I picked the term romanticism because I had this epiphany at some point as I was writing my book, which was about meaning and emotions. And then I realized when I looked at all of the principles of meaning making, that they were actually all romantic qualities that the romantic movement, the arts and literature philosophy movement of the 18th, 19th century had established, right? The ones you just listed, which that's quite a comprehensive list. And I thought it's such a great provocation because romance makes people uneasy. Like everybody wants to have a romantic life, but it's still like a business. It's not, it's anathema, right? It's not. So it's for us, was for me, it's been a really great, powerful Trojan horse. And so how can people or how can organizations apply it? For once, as I said earlier, it's the language. It's just talking about these things. And we've seen this over the past, not because of my work, but many other people who've sort of espoused this vulnerability, intimacy.

of psychological safety, Diverse identities at the workplace, fluidity, all of these things have been established. They're also now attacked again, but I think we've come a long way. And so this language, and the other thing of course is to build cultures that are rewarding and incentivizing behaviors that are not only optimized for the bottom line or growth, but that are actually intrinsically motivated and that uphold spaces for ambiguity.

And I think what I always told clients that I work with is the romantic impetus. So to dream, to not see everything for what it is, to assume there's a deeper meaning underneath things. That's such a great engine also for imagination and innovation. So if you only optimize and you only rehash, you sort of die the innovator style dilemma, but you want to have romantics in your organization who see the world as it is not. And if we lose that quality, I just don't think we will be very attractive employers. I don't think we will be very attractive brands. And we will just be sort of eventually be a fully automated organization. But that's not one then that humans want to work for, work at, or buy from, I would imagine.

Barrak Alzaid (07:09)

Yeah, that totally resonates. I feel like it's, know, businesses, entrepreneurs, especially when they're not coming necessarily from that creative or that arts mindset and background as you have may not be thinking about creativity and the connection to innovation. On a global level, they might think, okay, we need this initiative. We need this, you know, it becomes very siloed. And so much of the work you do is going between that, you know, the broad spectrum, let's redefine something and then let's put it into practice in a very practical way. And this goes to also about redefining success and failure and losing. And you've written that it's fair to assume losing will become our new modus operandi or way of, you know, way of operating. Can you share why that might be ⁓ actually a useful approach in entrepreneurship?

Tim Oliver Leberecht (08:00)

Hmm. So I wrote a book in German, actually, it's not been translated, called Against the Attorney of the Winners or Against the Dictatorship of the Winners, I think it was called. And I was trying to reestablish losing. And I think our business culture, the books we read, the way we are conditioned to think in business schools, the whole, even here at Tech Barbecue, right, the, the onus is of course on growing and winning. And it sort of assumes this management idea that we are in control and we are not right. COVID showed it to us. think now the volatility right now in the world also is like, yeah, of course, management is sort of this attempt to control things and to enhance them. But at the end of the day, it's not possible. And I think what we really need right now is sort of a new humility, right? It's sort of putting things into perspective, seeing us as part of a broader society ecosystem.

planetary citizenship, whatnot. And that means that we have to surrender agency a bit. That partly it's voluntary, partly it's also now imposed on us by AI, right? AI is there, it's this new intelligence, this new being, this new workforce that's really also diminishing our agency in a way, right? It's really encroaching on our ability to make autonomous decisions. it's, you know, I talk to philosophers who say, is this a great reminder that we're not at the center of the universe for what it's worth, right? So it's humbling. And I believe that going forward for organizations and for leaders and for workers, we must have this humility to really show up and embrace these opportunities. And I think the other thing that will change is there will be so much fluctuation. So this idea of having an eight to five job, a linear progressive career is just obsolete, right? So more and more we need to be

networked workers with fluid identities plug in to a certain culture and tribe, work with AI, work without AI, work in so many changing contexts and the problems, the pace of challenges is also increasing. So which means we need to learn also to let go. Like what are we saying goodbye to? What are we surrendering to? We're losing maybe status and power only then to reinvent ourselves again.

So disability to lose, it's kind of like a rite of passage is something that we, I think, need to establish. And I know this is a father too, of course, and I've experienced it myself. Like life is just basically characterized as a series of losses, maybe more than anything else. It might be my very own little age. And I think it's just interesting to be prepared for it. And I feel like the age that we're in, the dark age, whatever you want to call it, it will present a lot of these challenges for our identity.

Barrak Alzaid (10:41)

And I think also there's this point that's sort of underlining all of it with connection, right? And the sense of belonging. We all aspire to success, but it's much more common to lose and to fail and to remove the stigma and shame from that and to actually make it a way of doing, a way of learning, a way of creating a positive feedback loop to move you to the next thing, or at least to help you just pause, reflect slow down, I think are so key. Related to that point you're bringing up about AI, that is a huge part of every conversation that's happening these days, particularly for entrepreneurs. It's all about how can AI improve business, optimize operations, help entrepreneurs make more money. So from your perspective and from your experience, having worked in the tech industry, working with

business folks and entrepreneurs across industries, including tech, how can entrepreneurs remain humane and life centered even as they take advantage of these opportunities that are available to them?

Tim Oliver Leberecht (11:42)

Yeah, it's going to be really tough because the pressures on revenue growth and automation are immense, right? So you have publicly listed companies that of course have fiduciary duties to produce shareholder value. For startups, think the playing field is bigger and they have more flexibility. I would just urge founders to build a culture that is humanistic and is not fully opted into one certain regime from the beginning. And it means that you cannot pursue unconditional growth, right? When you do that, you must understand that it happens at the expense of others, other beings, people and planets. So I think it's really important to build in from the beginning a reward system and a culture that allows employees, customers to

Yeah, to not only design for revenue and optimization. An example, like I know a fast moving consumer goods company, TAKK, it's a Turkish entrepreneur, it's based in London and they're essentially creating an alternative consumer goods cosmetics company. And they really made it their mission to not upsell, for example. So if someone buys that, they're not immediately chasing the customer with like, hey, buy this for another 5 % or they're not using persuasive manipulative technologies to then basically sell another bundle or retain them or manipulate them into another buy. They're trying to be very honest and sincere about how they're using technology. And I think this is just one example, but those are some of the values decisions that founders need to make. What is the technology I use? How will I use it? Who do I partner with? What are my growth goals? Is it 20 % or is it 10 % and then what do I do with the money that I earn and the profit? How do I reinvest it? What kind of behavior do I want to incentivize? And what do I say? Like in every single interaction and in my public appearances, I think those are all things that founders can do. But it's going to be really tough. I think founders will not succeed if the business world overall in our societies are not creating rewards for that, right? I think we must live in a society where it's, where those who are responsible founders, humanist founders, have prestige, you know, and are not just financially rewarded, but also socially rewarded with status. And I think right now, I think we're not necessarily doing it. I think we're looking at like, if someone is very successful, no matter what, there is this implicit adoration. It's like, wow, even Elon Musk, right? It's a great example. I mean, he might be a visionary.

But he's also a complete jerk in his behavior. And I think too many people still say, yeah, but he's such a great entrepreneur. I don't care. I think the things that he did, the harm that he's inflicted on people by far outweighs the innovations that he has incubated in history.

Barrak Alzaid (14:27)

And I think part of the value system that you subscribe by is about bringing people together and bringing folks with that common creative, humanistic, humane approach is a really beautiful part of the House of Beautiful Business. And it's described as a global network for the life-centered economy who want to get more out of business and out of life. Can you say a little bit more about what that means and how can entrepreneurs take advantage of this approach?

Tim Oliver Leberecht (14:56)

Yeah, it's community for people who we say dream bigger, aim higher, long for more. And you would be surprised how many people there are. mean, partly we're also thinking, OK, all of these people who are at inflection points and frustrated with the system, they're all coming to us. We tend to believe it's a small sample of actually the population out there. So there's so much disenchantment. There's so much resignation and depression at the workplace. People are not happy and playing along.

And they basically come to us or to other places as well, but we offer them a home where they can have honest conversations. So we talk, we bring to them ideas that they may be not here at a more traditional business conference. And we do it in a way that's very emotional, theatrical, artistic. So it's also playing to all intelligences. So it's the body, it's of course the intellect, it's also spiritual.

It's a more holistic form of engaging with entrepreneurship. You know, it's funny, like there's always a good traditional business reason to do it. So if you look at a lot of research, we'll always say you make better decisions and you are a happier, more productive and more respected leader if you are more holistic, right? If you're more wholesome, if you make decisions not just with your mind, but with your body and you really know who you are. That's one benefit. But I think the other benefit is just that we hope that we give people a sentimental education, an education of the heart, so that they go through business and work where the majority of us still spend 75 % or so of our waking hours. And we feel like it's not just this narrow slice of humanity. You can be anything. You can have all kinds of emotions. Also, by the way, sorrow and melancholy and not just joy and optimism or forced optimism.

So we give people ideas. We talk about big system changes like, you know, future of capitalism, anarchy as a leadership model. I mean, always kind of out there, but always close enough to business mainstream so that people from Siemens and Volkswagen and Novo Nordisk, you know, can still come and feel like, okay, this is not too woowoo, right? This is interesting and it's a bit edgy and it's new.

but it's still sort of digestible. And very often we have people who come and are really moved and then find themselves transformed. So either they change something in the way they lead. We had one person who changed the entire business model of that design company to a circuit of design B-Corp models that we're only going to do circular design anymore in the future. And we had other sort of transformative stories. And of course, there's also now a community of more than 30,000 people who run their own events, who work with each other, who help each other out generously, particularly when they're founding something. So there's so much social and cultural capital that's in there. And for us, what is exciting is just going forward as we sort of enter the next decade is how can we unlock that even more? How can we bring more people into it? Because not enough people still know about it. It's still very niche.

Barrak Alzaid (17:45)

And that's thing about being inclusive with your programming too. It's like you can still cast a very wide net to attract everyone from the creatives to the corporates many of your initiatives are deeply invested in care, creativity, and redefining what doing business looks like. Are there any rituals or practices you have in your day-to-day and business life that help you stay grounded in your values and principles?

Tim Oliver Leberecht (18:08)

As a business we do and our community does, as a person I wish I had more of them. I think I live more of the cliché digital nomad, entrepreneur life than I wish I did. For the community one thing that we always do at every gathering we have a silent closing. Like we have a silent hour. So essentially the premise or the idea is that everything's set it needs to sink in and then we ask people just to sit in silence and maybe even write letters to themselves or other people but just have everything that was created in the space just kind of stay there and it's the most beautiful thing and then the silence is broken in the end by a singer or music and it's so moving so I think it's always I think anything we also do silent dinners by the way anything that can remind us of tenderness in business because it's such a scarce quality but of course it's there and we're human it is kind of is welcome and it always resets the system. So that's a ritual we have. I personally I think for me writing is just cathartic. Like I feel like writing is really becoming a person. So I sometimes wake up and I don't know who I am and then I write and then I have an idea. And it's so hard these days to put yourself in relationships to anything that's happening in the world, you also constantly ask for opinions, not just because maybe you're more public, but like everybody in your friends group, and especially as a founder too, right? Like, what's your opinion on this? And I always find like there's so many fast opinions, and I so often don't know what I really believe. So it's quite helpful to write about that, and then have that at least, maybe not as the sole truth, but as a starting point, and as a way of learning. So that's something I keep, like to keep my system clean in a way I write.

Barrak Alzaid (19:46)

Yeah, writing is a really great tool for self-discovery. And I think it's really underestimated. don't have, there's no.

There's no need to write quote unquote well, if you're writing for yourself, if you're writing to yourself and those quiet moments that you described to conclude gatherings, that's also reflected in practices like yoga or somatic healing, where the nervous system needs that stillness to integrate and that quiet, that rest is really crucial. I've got one last question for you. A digital entrepreneur,

We really care about bringing joy back to entrepreneurs and infusing the entrepreneurial journey with joy. When things are tough or challenging, what helps you tap back into joy, whether in life or in business?

Tim Oliver Leberecht (20:30)

I think creating is amazing. Creating is amazing. I mean, for myself, I love curation that's sort of at the heart of what we do. I love discovering things and then creating scenes and experiences whose outcome I don't know. So I want to maybe encourage founders also to look at it almost as something that they, it's kind of like a story that they begin to write, but the outcome is unclear. But every day it's just, it's almost like watching a show, right? It's another season or it's another episode and you get to write it. It's so cool. So I think that brings you joy. And then there's moments of awe. Like what brings me joy is there's so much research lately on awe and the power of awe in mobilizing social change and driving business and it's underutilized in a way. And awe is amazing. So it's essentially this idea, right? That you are exposed to a vastness that

makes you feel humble but then at the same time belong to some transcendent quality. And I think for founders there's sometimes awe and there's, you know, whether it's flow or it's like, wow, I'm actually building something and it has an impact on people. Or if it's completely outside of work, it's just for me personally, I just love football so much. Like I walk into a football stadium and I'm just like, wow, it's like my cathedral, you know, and everything is just fine. That's really all I need.

So I think it's just being open to the poetry of that and the play of that and not get bucked down by operational pressures.

Barrak Alzaid (21:56)

Well, Tim, think staying grounded in the things that are your personal cathedrals are a great way to bring you joy and to experience that sense of awe that makes us very human. And I really thank you, Tim, for the work that you're doing, the people that you're inspiring, and for spending some time chatting with me today. Thank you. All right.

Tim Oliver Leberecht (22:15)

A pleasure. Thank you, Barrak.