A number of executives, after retiring from the business stage, have turned to writing or teaching. Few have done so as successfully as Bill George.

George was one of the most successful business leaders in the United States. He joined Medtronic as president and COO in 1989, becoming CEO in 1991 and chairman in 1996. Under his leadership, Medtronic’s market capitalization grew from US$1.1 billion to US$60 billion, averaging 35 percent growth per year, a fact of which he is rather proud—even though he has been bashing the idea that the purpose of a corporation is to maximize shareholder value. He was named one of the “Top 25 Business Leaders of the Past 25 Years” by PBS, “Executive of the Year 2001” by the Academy of Management, and “Director of the Year 2001-02” by the National Association of Corporate Directors.

When he retired from Medtronic, companies such as Enron and Arthur Andersen had scandalized and enraged American society and the world, and people like Jeff Skilling and Bernie Ebbers were seen as the epitome of corporate leadership. Intel’s Andy Grove (one of the few others to have made successful double careers in practicing business and preaching it) said he was ashamed to be a businessman. No doubt, so was Bill George.

Yet he was inspired too. He wrote the book Authentic Leadership, in which he thanked Enron and Arthur Andersen because “we needed this kind of shock therapy to realize that something is sorely missing in many of our corporations.” Then what is missing? In one word, leadership; and in two words, authentic leadership, which George advocates as a combination of being who you are and character-based, values-driven leadership.

Neither the title of the book nor its contents were novel or fancy. However, the book caught on, not only because it was—and still is—timely, but also thanks to its author’s almost unparalleled credibility. His experience in Medtronic had attested to the fact that a company could do well by doing good; his personal experience of becoming an authentic leader was vividly convincing.

In January 2008, George spoke to me about authentic leadership by phone from his home in Minnesota.

So I went to Switzerland for a working sabbatical at the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Lausanne, and at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, where I had a joint appointment. I found that I really liked teaching. Then the dean of Harvard Business School, my alma mater—I graduated in 1966—asked me to join the faculty as a professor of management practice and teach the creative new course, “Leadership and Corporate Accountability.”

If you have a large global organization, and your organization is in Europe, China, Australia, and Africa, you have to have strong leaders in each of those areas. They have to be able to lead without supervision. But the only way they can do that is if they know the mission and values of the organization; you have to ensure that the values are the same in China, or in Japan, or in the United States. You cannot have different values today.

For a company that does not have a clear or relevant mission, I think the leader can bring key people together to define a new mission for the company.

From that, IBM settled on key values and has been taking these around the world to create what Palmisano calls an Integrated Global Network organization. People in all parts of the world are integrated around a common set of values. That was a very creative way of getting all the employees involved in identifying the company’s values and making them feel that they had some ownership of these values.

We talked to 125 outstanding leaders around the world ranging in age from 23 to 93. We found that what defined all these leaders, regardless of age, was the impact of their individual lives on what was ahead of them. This has then defined what kind of leader they want to become, and where they found their passion to lead and make a difference around the world. It does sound a little abstract, but the important fact is that it defines people, and this becomes much more important than any set of traits or characteristics.

I remember my first trip to China in 1984, meeting with a group of Chinese physicians in Shanghai. These were very brilliant men, who were defined very much by the Cultural Revolution, because they had had to work in the rice fields and give up medicine for a long time. It gave them great passion for their work. They wanted to see a different China in the future. That is just one small example of what I mean.

I know people from countries like Chile or Colombia where they had a great deal of difficulty. They want to go back and use their leadership to improve their home country. In the same way, African-Americans want to improve the lives of African-Americans. Some people are fascinated with technology because early in their lives, like the founder of Medtronic, they got involved in technology and this has defined very much what they want to do in their lives.

From that point on, she changed the message of her show from being about celebrities to empowering people to take responsibility for their lives. From this epiphany about her own life and her own life story, her career has gone straight up. She has been extraordinarily successful in part because she had the epiphany and realized the purpose of her work.

Say, for example, you start a new company in China with a view to making a lot of money for yourself. Later, though, you come to realize that there’s more to it than this: you want to build a company that helps China by creating jobs for others. This is a very different approach. One is all about you: the other is about trying to help others. That is where the epiphany comes in.

There is no quick fix. It is hard work. You have to spend a lifetime developing yourself as a leader. It never stops. I am still trying to develop myself as a leader.

General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt is a very authentic leader who will be very successful at GE in the long run.

Andrea Jung has the largest organization in the world: six million people work with Avon Products. She was originally passed over for CEO and almost quit. One of the company’s board members told her that she should follow her compass, not her clock. When she became CEO, she changed the mission of Avon Products from cosmetics to the empowerment of women.

She did this because she realized that what makes Avon is helping women who are poor achieve economic self-sufficiency. The women borrow the money to buy inventory, and then build the business to be successful. So it is kind of like microenterprise, or microfinance.

She is one of the most successful leaders in the world, and was named one of the American Best Leaders in 2007. Andrea is a very authentic and humble person who has never forgotten her Chinese roots. She was raised in a family where discipline and commitment were very important. If she makes a commitment, she will always be true to it.

I am on the board of a Swiss company called Novartis, one of the greatest pharmaceutical companies in the world. Dan Vasella, the CEO, whom I have written about in True North, has a very long-term orientation. It takes 12 years to develop new drugs. If you try to do it in less time, you will fail. Unless you have a long-term orientation, you cannot create a great drug company, period. It is not possible.

The biggest concern I have about China is that even though your country has Confucian principles, there are no clear business ethics today.

We had a great debate on business ethics among the Chinese I taught at the class at Harvard. One businessman said he had decided to be totally ethical. He had thought he would lose 30 percent of business, but it had actually increased 10 percent. Other people in the class said it was not possible and you had to pay bribes. There was a huge debate, which I just listened to. Since the modern capitalist system is new in China, it is still developing its ethical standards.

One of the things we talked about with the Chinese executives was Siemens, a German company that had admitted to paying US$2 billion in bribes. Several Chinese executives in the room said that they had to compete with Siemens. Siemens and General Electric used to be equivalent companies. But GE has always been very ethical. It has made mistakes, but it has been very ethical. Now Siemens has been hurt by the ethics scandal, but under new leadership, it is going forward.

China is developing a strong capitalistic system that can give people economic self-sufficiency and give people freedom. Eventually it will develop into a more democratic country. In Iraq, we have imposed democracy, but there is no economy there. There is no capitalism, no free-enterprise system. I think the Chinese system is a very good model for developing countries.