Of managers and onagers

Burkhard Schwenker takes the Financial Times Germany to a favorite place of his - the Hamburg zoo

When Roland Berger CEO Burkhard Schwenker feels like relaxing, he doesn't play a round of golf – he heads for the zoo. This is why the Financial Times Germany (FTD), in their ongoing series "Die Spleens der Alphatiere" ("Spleens of the alpha dogs") about the unusual hobbies of German managers, recently accompanied Burkhard to one of his favorite locations: Hamburg's famous zoo "Hagenbeck's Tierpark". In the video attached to the story, we can see Burkhard feeding giraffes and elephants and hear him talk about how not to draw parallels between managers and animals.

While denying that his affection for animals can in any way be subjected to psychological interpretation, Burkhard does show some preference for an animal that displays just the character traits many consultants are endowed with – the onager or Asian wild donkey. "They're stubborn, they're tough, they have character and I just like them", he says in the video.

But animals should not be turned into objects of psychological scrutiny, either: When the FTD reporter asks Burkhard how he feels about recent management theories claiming that managers can learn something about successful strategies by observing animal behavior, he says: "To be honest, I find the idea pretty absurd that overzealous young people crowd the zoos trying to learn something for their careers."