Robert J. Hale

ABOUT

The thinkers he read at university turned out to be more useful in boardrooms than they had ever been in lecture halls.

Robert J. Hale studied natural sciences and philosophy at the University of Oxford, where he developed an obsession with the gap between how ideas are discovered and how they actually reach the people who need them. A postgraduate year at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands deepened that obsession, introducing him to continental philosophical traditions that Oxford had only gestured at.

Then he did what most philosophy students do not: he went into business. Over three decades, Robert built and led companies across Europe and Asia. He hired, fired, negotiated, failed, recovered, and learned. Throughout it all, he kept reading. Marcus Aurelius on a flight to Singapore. Nietzsche in a hotel room in Hamburg. Darwin on a train through the English Midlands.

Now in his early sixties, Robert lives in the English countryside with his wife. They have three grown children and a first grandchild on the way. The next generation is part of why he writes: he wants to pass on the ideas that shaped how he sees the world, in a form that people will actually read.