“Energy and passion are the difference between the successful and the more successful. Charisma. Focusing energy resources in the right directions, on the right priorities, in the right places. In business, every word counts. And every action can be critical… It’s about the ability to be authentic. About being able to resolve crises that no one else can resolve. Because it’s only in serious crises that a person’s true face is revealed,” says the CEO of NLB. A lot of people say that he’s too political, too noisy, even too popular. For me, though, the CEO of one of the currently fastest growing and most successful Slovenian banks is, above all, three things: straightforward, grounded and stubborn about things he believes are worth fighting for. He’s one of the few members of Slovenia’s business community who is not afraid of publicity. Or of standing up for what he believes in and promoting it publicly. Plenty of people say they’re not afraid of anything, but Blaž Brodnjak is one of the few people who give the impression that they actually live this way too. I am very grateful to the CEO of NLB for his time and for his optimistic encouragement to keep following my dream and keep on fighting to establish myself as someone who talks to members of Slovenia’s business and political community about the psychology of success. And who does so in a competent and professional manner.

“For the path to the top, you have to be emotionally and physically resilient. Emotional resilience is often linked to physical fitness. In my view, top management is no different from elite sport. Top-level business is no different from elite sport. Being a top manager means knowing how to accept defeats, learn from them and keep on fighting. How to set out, come back, fall down, pick yourself up and return even better. It means never giving up. It also means being able to accept defeat with good grace and congratulate the person who has beaten you.” My interview with the CEO of NLB, one of my first, actually came about more or less by chance, as a result of a combination of circumstances. Blaž Brodnjak says he likes to help young people… What was meant to be a brief online chat while he was on his way to the airport in Skopje turned into a two-hour conversation about life. About business. About victories. And about defeats. About the wheel of fortune that is constantly turning, and how important it is for each individual to discover their own “power to live”.

The importance of allocating energy and knowing your own power to live

M: Leadership psychology is a relatively poorly researched field in Slovenia. I believe that leadership style is very important when it comes to establishing employee well-being and protecting both their mental health and that of the leader. How, in your opinion, do a shared vision and awareness of this in employees affect mental health in you and your subordinates? To what extent does having your own personal set of values help you withstand pressures?

BB: One thing is health, the other is the ability to work normally and effectively. The fact that something doesn’t negatively impact your health still doesn’t mean that you are working effectively. The dimensions of managing pressure are extremely important. Everything has to be balanced. The most important thing is managing the energy levels of the individual and the team. You can also get to a stage where there is a kind of burnout, where the energy level falls as a result of overwork or excessive pressure. In the context of leadership, it is extremely important to know how to maintain this energy and transfer it and retain it at the team level. This is the biggest challenge – how to ensure that we remain in the area of motivation without overstepping the boundary and potentially placing excessive burdens on people. And of course some people have higher thresholds while others have lower thresholds. You have to understand these thresholds within the team as a whole and, sometimes, do things differently for a given period. It is essential to understand where they are, these energy levels that are still acceptable. The most important thing is the so-called power to live. Understanding what constitutes, in individuals and the team, the power to live that enables them to overcome saturation and overwork – that is really the key thing for me. You have to know how to solve this – by presenting the bigger picture, a higher reason for your actions, and what it is that you are supporting and trying to achieve through them. Then it is possible to achieve a qualitative leap, where even in very demanding situations people find motivation and achieve what they thought was impossible.

M: Would you say that as a good leader you have more of this power to live, that you are able to focus this energy better and are better at choosing priorities?

BB: That depends who you ask. People react to the energy of leaders in very different ways. Some people might see my leadership style as burdensome, or aggressive, while others are very motivated by it. In sport, too, some coaches manage to extract the maximum from a team through a more aggressive approach, but at the same time other, totally different approaches are also possible. Depending on an individual’s emotional disposition and sensitivity in a given moment, certain approaches can work or not. It is important not to try to be too one-sided. There is always going to be someone who is put off by your approach and finds it too aggressive. Someone else might be attracted and motivated by the same approach and you can continue to push them.

M: Every leader makes mistakes sometimes, and you are probably no exception. How does leadership fit in with acknowledging one’s own mistakes? To what extent does the feeling that they – or you – can do this reduce the pressure on you and your employees? Do people apologise too little or too much, or do they just persist with their own view? What importance do you ascribe to the ability to correct and acknowledge mistakes when it comes to well-being and growth in an organisation? How is your capacity for self-correction?

BB: This is a key issue not just in business but in the social environment, since as a society we are incapable of achieving a certain level of forgiveness and admitting that all of us sometimes make mistakes, shaking hands, forgiving and moving on. The same is true in institutions of various kinds. There are mistakes and there are fatal errors. Naturally we cannot tolerate fatal errors that would mean the collapse of a business, but it makes sense to tolerate micro-mistakes. It’s through mistakes that we learn to be entrepreneurial. Mistakes are part of a creative attempt to push the limits. Very often things won’t work out, and the extent to which we can allow this kind of experimentation depends on the environment. Allowing too many mistakes in interpersonal relations is another matter. Things change when you occupy a role in a given environment that affects someone else and their emotional state. I distinguish between management and leadership at the emotional level. If you make too many mistakes at this level, you lose the support of the team. If you are incapable of accepting constructive feedback, the team will reject you. Highly energetic people do not necessarily get enough feedback, because people tend to withdraw. Everything functions at the level of energies. The psychology of crowds is based on a collective psychosis. Highly energetic people can quickly abuse their power. The trick is not to lead people in the wrong direction, where they will make decisions that are harmful for the company’s operations and their own emotional state. I try to analyse every situation. At the Bled School of Management I was very fond of the subject that involved analysing specific management situations on the basis of clips from films. Since then, this is something I do in my everyday life. When I watch a film, say, I analyse how the commander acts in a critical situation, when things break down. I try to draw inspiration from it and project it into my own environment. No one is ideal and I often find that there are things that haven’t been done optimally as far as a particular individual is concerned. This is something I try to resolve at the team level.

M: I understand. So you are saying that, as a top manager, you use the situations you encounter in life, in films, everything you come into contact with, as analogies in relation to business operations? That you learn something from every situation and draw parallels with running a bank?

BB: Of course. As far as I’m concerned, you can learn from everything. Watching a football match and observing the manager and the moves he makes. How he raises the energy level when the team is in a difficult situation. Back when practically every mention of us in the media had a strongly negative connotation, I continued to seek answers to the question of how we were going to lift ourselves out of this situation and maintain our self-belief and trust that the company would turn things around. And convince people that before long NLB would once again be seen as one of Slovenia’s most prestigious companies. These are life situations that affect the individual at the emotional level in a different way from mere business issues.

M: Do you believe, then, that all victories are achieved at the level of energy? That it is necessary to focus on the right things, and in the right directions?

BB: I believe that 90% of this happens at the level of energy. Through motivation, which is an emotional level. At the level of the ability to engage and animate energy. At the technical level, instrumental motivation through rewards only functions for a transitional period. But to function in the long term in routine, possibly tedious situations, motivation has to be internal. You have to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Vision and passion

M: To have vision. So that you are able to overcome current difficulties. It is often said that top management is a kind of obsession – either you want to be good or you cannot be good… Some people believe that without strong emotional investment in one’s goals, one cannot be steadfast in the pursuit of these goals. What role do emotions play in successful management? How, in your opinion do they affect the quality of decisions? What do you consider to be the characteristics of a good leader and what balance does such a leader have to maintain between emotional and rational work in order to lead successfully? Does emotional involvement impede or promote effectiveness in business or a clear view of the situation?

BB: There are two different things here. One is emotional sensitivity and the other is passion. I see business as being analogous to sport. You start off with ambition, you want to compete, you have to do more, create more, repeat routine operations multiple times and more extensively, so that you can be part of this international competitive story. The same applies to business. If you don’t have ambition, you will never achieve your goals. For that, you have to be emotionally and physically resilient. Emotional resilience is often linked to physical fitness. Your energy levels are higher if you are physically fit, muscle tone reduces the load on the skeleton, electrolytes flow better. In my view, top management is no different from elite sport. Top-level business is no different from elite sport. If you want to be successful, you have to apply very analogous principles. Alertness. Knowing your team. Predicting what’s going to happen. Being responsive when it does. We have to steer a course through unforeseen situations, absorb strong blows and be sufficiently physically fit to be able to pick ourselves up after challenges. That’s why NLB is so involved in sponsoring youth sport. Sport builds a value system that helps you understand, helps you comprehend that life is not only made up of victories but also of defeats, after which you have to pick yourself up with dignity. Look your opponent in the eyes and congratulate him for being better than you. And then work even harder and even better so that next time you’ll achieve a better result.

M: You’ve drawn analogies between business and sport and between business and a battle and you’ve mentioned the importance of recovering after defeats, admitting one’s mistakes and physical fitness. What resources do you draw on? Where do you and your employees recharge your batteries? Where do you build your emotional strength? Is this something innate or is it something you have built during your career? What is your view of these things?

BB: To a large extent, it’s innate. Like the instinct of an alpha male or alpha female, you bring something into the world in the sense of your energetic attributes. Some innate characteristics exist. You might be more extroverted, more belligerent, more aggressive. This is connected to hormonal imbalances in the body, hormone levels in the body, which affect the way you respond in concrete situations. That is why different people react in completely different ways. The other thing is the kind of family environment you grew up in, what behavioural patterns you automatically, implicitly bring from this environment. This is where you come from. From something that is innate. From something that your family gives you. And something that I call experience and life outside the comfort zone in various critical situations. You develop a sense for separating the wheat from the chaff. Making optimal decisions, responding constructively, standing behind difficult and demanding decisions. You build credibility and people follow and trust your way of responding. You must never avoid taking responsibility. The key attribute of a leader is that when things are really critical, he picks up the flag and keeps on going. People have to be able to count on the leader taking responsibility and taking matters into his own hands. He will also be the first one to lose his job if anything goes wrong…

M: Like Prince Bolkonsky in War and Peace, except that no one noticed him, no one celebrated when he was the only one to pick up the flag in battle and was wounded. People love winners, not those who try and fail. To pick oneself up and carry on, to persist stubbornly until you reach your goal, this seems to be the key thing. Perhaps part of the art of leadership in today’s world is that people recognise your successes, that they see them and acknowledge them. One is the story that is sold, the other is reality. The ability to sell oneself is becoming ever more sought after, essential and desirable. You mentioned parallels in teamwork and the acceptance of responsibility in both sport and business. Do you think that parallels exist in all spheres of life, laws that one must understand in order to become successful? And as far as behaviour is concerned – do specific situations require specific people and specific responses? To what extent are top leaders similar to each other, to what extent are they specific?

BB: When it comes to crises, there’s a difference between having to constantly manage an ongoing situation in order to survive and a longer-lasting, highly stressful phase during which there is a lot of idealism but few concrete things that could give people a sense of security and confidence. But the basic rules are the same in all fields – in all sporting, cultural and business activities. If you want to develop as a team that achieves top results, certain standard patterns of operation have to be established. Hard work is the first and most essential condition: without it you will achieve nothing. Everything else is luck. In the long term, you can’t count on winning the lottery. Tomaž Pandur succeeded in elevating the Slovene National Theatre in Maribor to the ranks of global cultural champions. He succeeded and achieved his dream. There are many similar examples in Slovenian sport. Likewise in business, in certain niches. The basic principles and patterns of operation that allow you to count on success with a certain degree of reliability and solidity are similar in all spheres. Understanding the power to live of others. For me, 33 years of marriage is another great achievement. For me, it’s a big success if you can move in the same direction at the level of your energies and achieve results in this field too, ticking off milestones such as your first, second and third child finishing school, your first child graduating from university, and so on. These are comparable milestones to those in the business environment. You find them everywhere: similar patterns repeat in all fields.

M: Energy, passion, motivation. Nothing comes on its own, you say. How do you draw the line between professional and private life, so that stressful events from your private life, the kind that inevitably occur from time to time, do not reduce the quality of your work and your productivity here and now? To what extent do you think a feeling of competence in one area compensates for sacrificed or unmet, postponed needs in other areas?

BB: That is by far the most difficult question. If I’m realistic, like every professional, I usually end up sacrificing family life, especially now that I’m involved in my job on a 24-hour basis and this way of life is a constant for me. For 24 hours a day you alternate your private life and your professional life, with online meetings, work-related travel, and so on, so there is no longer a physical dividing line. It is difficult to remain at the top in business situations without there being consequences for the other areas of your life. The filter for releasing negative energy, unfortunately but realistically, is often the family. The family absorbs the outbursts, the occasional over-aggressive responses that are unfairly directed at the family as a form of filter, it suffers the lack of involvement with children, and so on. Unfortunately, in the attempt to find a balance, the family usually ends up paying a higher price than the job. Work commitments have to be ticked off, while at the same time you are constantly having to manage this conflict of interests. This applies to all very ambitious people who achieve top results at the internationally competitive level. You have to give up certain things so that you can invest even more on the other side. The day only has 24 hours and you have to sleep for at least some of them. I admire those who say they have the perfect balance between work and private life. Personally, I don’t think I have it, but I try to manage it in such a way that we are nevertheless connected, that these two ecosystems become increasingly interconnected as a result of advancing technology. In all sincerity, though, it is unfortunately often the family that suffers. As I say, to a certain extent you stop separating private life and work life. In a position like mine, you have to absorb all the information, make connections and draw analogies even from situations outside the business environment. Everything is interconnected in a holistic manner. Everything I read, I apply to business. I do not radically separate these things. It’s all one life. The essential thing for me is that I manage my own energy level. When I reach the threshold, I try to find an hour or two to calm my mind. I might go to a rock concert, for example, which is an important filter for me and the whole family, since we’ve often travelled by coach to rock concerts all over Europe. Forty people with the same goal and the same energy going in the same direction. I try to find motivational micro-approaches that recharge me for the next fortnight. Sports events also work.

M: I imagine you spend part of your weekend preparing for the week ahead. No one is successful without planning, you said. We also talked about balance. I am interested in the extent to which you see being a successful manager or successful leadership as a balance between the intuitive, impulsive seizing of opportunities and rational, careful consideration. Which is more important? What is the ideal ratio between the two?

BB: It depends on the circumstances. It depends on the phase or the current situation of the company. In the very early stages of development, you don’t have time to deal with structure. Instead, you are forced to be entrepreneurial, you have to try. Later on, when the phase is that of an already developed, complex mechanism with a large number of functions, it is essential to manage risks in a structured manner. The same applies in a crisis situation. A crisis requires decisive, concrete and structured measures, without much creative thinking. You need to make snap decisions with concrete consequences and quickly assume calculated risks. It is not necessarily the case that a 50:50 ratio is the right one. In some circumstances you have to be creative and entrepreneurially spontaneous, while in others you have to be very structured. Both are important and the ratio changes from situation to situation.

Mindfulness in the workplace

M: Earlier, you used the term “alertness”. How do you practice mindfulness in your work environment? Mindfulness is an increasingly trendy term. Where could this heightened self-awareness and awareness of situations, the work environment, challenges and fleeting nuances in communication and negotiations be important? In what sense does mindfulness improve the effectiveness of negotiations and dealmaking? How well do you have to know yourself in order to be a good leader?

BB: This is a key aspect of every negotiating process and an essential part of negotiating skills. You have to understand what you can bring to the table, and what is important to people. This is something you learn either through seminars or through countless life situations in which you analyse what works and what doesn’t. It’s something that is present in sales and, in my core mission, at the level of stakeholders and relationships with shareholders and other parties. Every word, every facial expression, every instance of non-verbal communication is incredibly important. Every word can lead to a decision whether or not to invest in your company or to pull out of it. These are extremely subtle situations, so you have to be very sensitive and aware of what is happening at any given moment, both at the emotional level and as regards content.

M: So someone who is selling a company, negotiating successfully with clients and trying to attract investors has to be a very good psychologist and subtly able to perceive all their needs, thoughts and aspirations?

BB: To answer your first question: absolutely they do. These people are very effective in their thinking and their actions and operate at the level of micro-cues, where every gesture, every word is important. As are you yourself, of course, at the emotional level... I’m talking about energy and authenticity in the way you present yourself, which makes you credible in the eyes of the person you are talking to and builds trust, in a way that can actually transcend the level of content. With the right approach, you can persuade someone to believe you and trust you, at which point content is actually less important, sad though it is to say. That is why when I’m invited to give a lecture at the university I do so without using slides.

M: You mentioned that people who are very good in business have an optimised and efficient way of thinking. It is said that successful people work the same number of hours as those who are less successful, only that they work smarter. In what sense do you work smarter, in an optimised and efficient manner, and how do you achieve this? How do you acquire the confidence necessary to be a successful leader, accept responsibility and take decisions?

BB: Through experience. It actually comes with experience. These days it takes me thirty minutes to complete a task that would once have had me losing sleep for two weeks. I have many difficult situations behind me. I’ve taken difficult decisions and faced the consequences. I’ve seen what difficult decisions bring and experienced their consequences. As a result, after 25 years, I am able to judge what consequences a given decision will have. You make decisions more confidently and more autonomously when you know what’s coming. When I was 22 years old I would waver and hesitate, and everything was different.

M: To what extent do successfully resolved crises and awards like manager of the year give you, as an individual, the feeling that you are good enough, that you are worthy, that you are making a valuable contribution to society? Is that something you think about at all? How much do your business successes mean for your own self-image? How fulfilling are they for you?

BB: For me, all this is confirmation that I am doing things that have a sense to them. I believe that it is right to use the brief and finite span allotted to us to leave behind a trace that means something in the context of the society we live in. I am a sincere and convinced patriot. I am interested in how Slovenian companies are run and the ways in which we can improve the well-being of the population. I act beyond the narrow interests of the companies I represent. People can tell if you are doing something sincerely and genuinely, in the interests of society rather than for irrational, particular interests. Then come awards and appointments, when someone decides that you are their voice. In this way, an environment is created that broadens your influence and makes it easier for you to disseminate your ideas in the context of your own company, the sector you work in, the business enterprise sector as a whole, or the region. In the end this makes it easier for you to achieve your own business ambitions. The aim is not personal reward but to achieve the results you are striving for. Awards are the consequence of being loyal to yourself.

M: Do you think that the average successful Slovene is more focused on higher goals or on personal glory? Is the Slovenian environment irritated by successful individuals?

BB: It certainly is irritated by them! We come from a past in which we eliminated the capital substance of wealthy individuals. We’ve only had free enterprise for the last thirty years, and in this time we haven’t established an industrial elite, we have no billionaires or extremely rich people. It is difficult for Slovenes to accept that someone has more, and we fail to ask ourselves why they have more. We don’t have a problem with successful athletes, but we do when it comes to entrepreneurs who strike gold as a result of their own intense efforts. Many people are unaware of the responsibility that comes with all this. These positions involve significant legal and financial liability. Compensation must reflect the risks associated with these roles. People are quick to label a successful entrepreneur as a tycoon who has stolen everything and doesn’t deserve anything. As someone who exploits the system. Taxation on high salaries has been increased again. The highest managerial salaries in Croatia are at the same gross levels as here, but net earnings are up to 50% higher. We have become utterly uncompetitive at the international level. The talent shortage is a challenge for everyone in an ageing and complacent Western European society built on old money. Slovenian society is very, very closed. NLB is the only part publicly owned company in the country to have an international management team. We will soon be faced with major challenges when we no longer have the people to perform many systemically extremely important tasks. The population is falling. It will be extremely challenging to resolve this situation with imported workers from the Philippines and other parts of Asia. But this is how it will be, and we won’t be able to avoid it.

Balance that helps you avoid burnout

M: Perhaps there’s a lack of hunger to go further, to change things. Slovenia is an ideal country to live in. I don’t know how ideal it is for business, but it’s an ideal place to live. The Alps, the sea… It’s cheaper than Switzerland and in some ways just as beautiful. Earlier, we talked about balance, about avoiding burnout and maintaining mental health. You probably have to make a lot of sacrifices to be so successful. But how do you, Blaž, manage your time, apart from the ways we’ve already mentioned? What is your recipe for slightly but not entirely neglecting your wife/friends/business partners? How are you able to manage so many things at once? Aside from rock concerts, what helps you maintain your mental health, what keeps you grounded? All the projects you are involved in, with all their various aspects, all the companies you are in contact with and connected with – how do you manage to keep them all in your head and manage them all in parallel? Would you say that you live in multiple parallel universes or in one highly segmented one? You said earlier that it’s all one life and that everything you do is interwoven with everything else.

BB: I try to involve family members in projects. My family and I have thirteen hectares of vineyard in Haloze. My brother, my father, my mother… we all work there. The whole family is involved, across different generations. My children, my wife, my parents, my mother-in-law… My daughter is studying the wine business near Vienna. We’ve created a new field so that we can all be included in a common course of action, which from the business point of view has development and energy-related ambitions but which has the basic goal of supporting the development of the local environment in Haloze. We share the same idealism. We’ve sold properties to invest in Haloze. It’s crazy, but in essence the entire family is involved in this, so it gives us an incentive to be together. We have a shared project, a shared desire, a shared ambition. This connects us.

M: What is it that most connects people? What connects you to your wife, what connects the teams you lead?

BB: A value system. If you have a value system that goes in the directions of absolute ethicality, of not wanting to harm anyone, of wanting to work creatively, then you are absolutely aware that results are the consequence of hard, responsible work, not of shortcuts and coincidences. And that you are capable of accepting radical compromises in the family environment. At the family level there has to be a family agreement about where we are going to invest, how we are going to live. But there is no compromise without understanding. If we’re cultivating the vineyard, we don’t go skiing and we don’t go to the Maldives: we’re in the vineyard. That’s a big sacrifice. You have to come to an agreement.

M: The Vedas say ahimsā paramo dharmaḥ. Non-violence is the highest principle. To do no harm, in thought, words or action. And I understand: it doesn’t work in all directions, does it? Do you think that this motivation towards a higher goal was present in you, or in individuals like you, right from the start and that it has helped you reach your limits? Is it established when you reach milestones and are no longer so motivated by profit, because you find yourself looking for other motivations? What’s your view on this?

BB: The real difference comes when you gain influence. That’s when you can distinguish between people who prioritise their private interests and remain silent, even when they could speak up, and those who believe in creating a better society, including for their own children.

M: Money changes a person. Power changes a person. When we get both, we show our true face and our upbringing.

BB: That’s true. We make decisions that may not suit particular interests because we are idealists and we accept the risk that this might lead to us getting arrested.

M: In Slovenia we are quick to see a lot of things as white-collar crime, aren’t we? Business is a slippery terrain. The boundary between loopholes in the law and illegal activity is a narrow one, and laws can also change. When I was still at primary school, I read the book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In it, the author explains that it is important not to let the crises of the present overwhelm us to the point that we never take time to focus on our vision. How do you distribute your energy among all your projects, how do you hold all the threads in your hand?

BB: You never succeed 100%, but like a good Virgo I do have my life planned well in advance. Whatever tomorrow brings is, for me, a step on the journey. My vision stretches at least twenty years into the future. I’m always looking to the future, I have always had everything planned. University, military service in the year before graduation so as not to waste time, getting married, job, first child… everything according to a plan. It’s been the same with my career. There is such a thing as chance, but in the background there is always a long-term focus. Short-term crises are, for me, a learning opportunity. A chance to learn how to respond in a crisis situation, so that next time you will be better, more effective and will spend less time on the crisis and more time looking ahead. On the other hand, events have always overtaken me. At the age of 26 I had to lay people off and implement crisis measures. In my early thirties I became a member of the board of a subsidiary bank of an international banking group. Things happened faster than I expected, despite all my planning. I kept on moving upwards. If you start out as a business adviser in the Maribor branch of an international banking group with its head office in Ljubljana, you get to know the sector from the bottom up. And understand better how an entire company functions. You move through all the levels of management, following a logical development path, which makes it easier for you. You understand why something happens in given circumstances. Not necessarily completely, but more easily and more quickly. You know, for example, how to divide people’s complaints into simple grievances and objective, serious problems.

M: Have your career advancements been a current that has carried you along or are they the result of hard work and specific abilities that have brought you to the top?

BB: Financial results count for something, but the key to good leadership is to represent an idea authentically, with a sufficiently high level of energy. In the end it is about charisma and energy, which are the things that separate the very best from those who are not quite at the top level. In a crisis situation, you have to give more of yourself. Technique is one thing, but the real trick is to pull something unexpected out of your sleeve in such a situation. I’m talking about a capacity for abstract thinking, which is not something you can learn. Energy levels are something you can train, but authenticity is not. You can overcome nerves, but superficial fixes and learned strategies cannot take the place of genuine authenticity. This is most apparent in unforeseen situations. The more frequently you react well in such situations, the more credibility you gain.

M: The younger we are, the more our brains are plastic. We need to get used to coordinating multiple activities and handling pressure as early as possible. How would you best summarise the conditions, protective factors and risk factors for mental health in the workplace for management personnel and their employees? What ways of relieving stress, returning to yourself, finding your inner child are you able to pass on to them? How do you encourage them to seek balance?

BB: People’s basic motivation varies. What drives me to do precisely the things I do is sometimes difficult to determine even in my own case. Why did I study economics and not biology, my favourite subject? Once I make a decision, I move forwards in that direction. You operate in specific contexts. What can you achieve in Slovenia? I was the third-ranked table tennis player in the country. You aspire to work in an institution that is one of the best. The sporting ambition to be the best is the basis. The desire for one’s actions to have a multiplier effect on the whole of society. To play an active part in creating a society that grows in a correct, ethical direction. This is what drives you on. When you see that the introduction of measures is based on an agenda of prosperity and creating conditions for international competitiveness. Goals are constantly shifting upwards and achievements set you new limits. What success actually is – that’s another question. The success of an institution, a step forward as a society, the growth of different grape varieties in my vineyard… All these are micro-successes for me.

Criteria of success and the wheel of fortune

M: What is your personal criterion of success?

BB: There’s no one answer to that. To do something that is considered extremely difficult, if not impossible. But that means different things in different situations. A feeling of satisfaction in a given moment that usually lasts an hour or so.

M: None of these successes give us lasting happiness, do they? We always need new ones to fulfil us, to reaffirm us. When you get a pay rise, you feel euphoric for a couple of months, but then your needs increase and you get used to your new lifestyle, isn’t that true? We get used to everything. Do the environments you work in offer new directions, new sources of inner motivation and shape and guide your path? Has any outside influence pushed you strongly in a given direction?

BB: There are many influences, both internal and external. They play a part in shaping our responses in specific situations and present new challenges. Not getting clearance to perform the function I’d been appointed to perform at [insurance company] Zavarovalnica Triglav – that was a kind of reset for me. The reason for it lay in the particular interests of a public company in majority state ownership. That was a major blow for me. I thought that I would never again be appointed to a similar position in Slovenia. An immediate rejection can be a formal disqualification criterion for the authorities responsible for vetting and clearance. That was what made me decide to leave my comfort zone for two years and go to Klagenfurt. To gain experience – and I did gain a great deal of extremely valuable experience. I learnt how to tackle a major restructuring of a large system. After a rapid ascent, I experienced a major setback on the management board of an insurance company. This meant, however, that I was later able to return, armed with the necessary knowledge and experience, to the extremely challenging environment of NLB, which was haemorrhaging money, and be appointed to its management board. Two steps back in order to take four steps forward.

M: If I may be a little poetic: the wheel of fortune is always turning. I learnt this from watching a TV series about Anne Boleyn. From commoner to queen and from throne to scaffold. I also learnt it from the chronicles of my own family. I grew up surrounded by big egos. But, as the saying goes, the higher you fly, the harder you fall. Unfortunately that’s often true, isn’t it? You can be the president of a country, a dictator, and a few years later you’re no one, fleeing for your life. The wheel of fortune. After the highs come the lows. On the other hand, Western society and philosophy teach us that we are all the architects of our own fortune. Perhaps the key thing about successful people is that they know how to react to failure and are able to pick themselves up. You mentioned that you played sports. Did sport teach you to deal with failure?

BB: Sport tempered me. It forces you to ask yourself what’s wrong with you. And you understand that after a defeat the only option is to train harder and become better. Team sports teach you to organise yourself. When I played table tennis, I also played doubles, as part of a team, and a team experiences victories and defeats together. A team doesn’t point the finger at the culprit but instead learns from the failure of a team member how to move forward together and improve.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts

M: Gestalt psychology teaches that every whole creates more than the sum of its individual parts. That it gives us something extra. How do you see that in the context of a team? How do you coordinate people in teams?

BB: A team can achieve a lot more than six elite individuals lumped together. There are circumstances in which there is no place for soloists. You can put Ronaldo and Messi together but there is no guarantee that they will be able to form a good team. We unify the members of a team through a shared value system. In certain situations you want comparable, calibrated responses, but not ones that are completely different. As far as my current sports activities go, we’re all in it together when we take part in the Banking Games. Apart from that, my wife and I do functional training a few times a week.

M: Do the personal foundations of your marriage help you withstand pressure? Was it intuition that guided you in your choice of partner, or were there other criteria?

BB: To answer your first question: absolutely they do. I am blessed to have found my partner. She has her own demands, but she keeps me grounded. Along with farming and the vineyard, she brings me back to earth time and again. She chose me. You ladies choose a man and then you spend your life with him or you don’t. To sum up: the link between management and leadership is the link between technical work and creative work. It’s about combining techniques, emotions and intuition. In some situations organisation and structure prevail, while in others energy is far more important. For deciding what direction to go in and how we are going to do something. This applies to all situations in life. In culture, in sport, in management. What counts most is hard, responsible work. You can draw analogies with all spheres. Sacrifice. Life isn’t only made up of rights, but also of responsibilities. People don’t realise how much weight leadership brings with it. They don’t think about what we are willing to invest in society. People expect something before they’ve given you anything. In my view this is also partly the consequence of inadequate, permissive parenting.