Dr. Brennan Jacoby is a philosopher and the founder of Philosophy at Work, an organisation providing professional support to companies navigating complex issues and bringing about positive change.  He delivers group facilitation, learning and development training and public speaking.   

In this interview, we discussed the role of the philosopher in the boardroom, how to make the right decisions, and why Silicon Valley has taken a sudden interest in the lessons of Plato.

—David Maclean

Where did you grow up, and what was your hometown like?

I grew up in Detroit, MI until I was 8-years old, and then the family moved to Jackson, MI in the countryside. I grew up in a family of musicians and artists, but there was always a lot of reading and thinking going on in the home, and I think that likely sparked some of my later interest in philosophy.

Were you interested in philosophy during high school, or did that come earlier? You mention that it was perhaps always there percolating in the background.

No, it actually came much later. Growing up in a family that was always interested in getting at the truth of things and thinking about what’s real definitely laid the groundwork for asking philosophical questions, but it was when I got to university that I really started to become interested in the ideas that would later evolve into Philosophy at Work. I actually began by studying communications and working in radio broadcasting at Spring Arbor University in Michigan, and because it’s a liberal arts university part of the programme mandates that you undertake an introduction to philosophy class. While I was on that course,  I came across thinkers like Plato, Nietzsche and Sartre that were talking about things that I thought really mattered and made a lot of sense, so I switched from communications to philosophy with the idea that if I learned how to think, I could then return to broadcasting and have more to say. I still haven’t made it back to radio, but that movement from thinking to doing is the core of what I’m doing now with Philosophy at Work; the belief that how we think impacts what we do, i.e. how we execute.

From your first encounters with those thinkers, particularly those you mention such as Plato and Nietzsche, how did your philosophical thinking change over time?