PETER KOESTENBAUM, Ph.D., founder and Chairman of PiB and the Koestenbaum Institute, brings leadership philosophy to business people globally. He has been close to business executives and their deepest concerns, sharing with them insights and feelings, new perspectives and more serviceable adaptations.  

Peter Koestenbaum is presently active in establishing the globally through the Koestenbaum Institute, headquartered in Stockholm and Los Angeles. Koestenbaum’s Leadership Diamond® is a complete program of leadership awareness.

The Leadership Diamond® focuses on the power of depth, which leads to emphasizing the power of free will, the ubiquitous presence of polarity and paradox, analyzing the structure of courage, and the critical importance of understanding systems and strategy. This leadership philosophy leverages the power of negative experiences for clues to breakthroughs. Koestenbaum talks about the development of the leadership mind as the key for achieving business results. And he spends much time on the tough issues of implementation.

Peter Koestenbaum’s education was in physics, music, and above all philosophy, having earned degrees from Stanford (physics and philosophy), Harvard (philosophy), and Boston University (philosophy) — (B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. respectively), but also attending the University of California (Berkeley, in music and philosophy).

He taught for 34 years in the Philosophy Department of San Jose State University, in California, having received the Statewide Outstanding Professor Award. While a professor of philosophy, Peter Koestenbaum spent 25 years working with psychologists and psychiatrists, in seminars, lectures, and books, exploring the relationship between psychiatry and the healing potential of philosophy.

Peter Koestenbaum founded in California an accredited institute for teachers, nurses, physicians, psychologists, and psychiatrists. It taught the uses of philosophy in education, psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy.

Over twenty five years ago (some overlapping with teaching) Peter Koestenbaum decided to apply the insights he gained in philosophy and psychiatry to business: management, strategic thinking, marketing, but above all to leadership. This journey has taken Peter Koestenbaum to over thirty-six countries in five continents. Among the firms where he worked with intensity are IBM, Electronic Data Systems, Ford, Ciba-Geigy (now Novartis), Citibank, Volvo, Amoco, Xerox, American Medical International (now Tenet HealthSystem), Warner Cosmetics, Statoil (Norway), Sparbanken Gruppen (Sweden), etc. He is an active faculty member in the School for Managing and Leading Change.

His business books, available for sale in are Leadership: The Inner Side of Greatness (also, in Spanish, Swedish, French), The Heart of Business (also in French) and Freedom and Accountability at Work: Applying Philosophic Insight to the Real World. Some of his philosophic books are The Vitality of Death, The New Image of the Person, Managing Anxiety, Choosing to Love and Is There an Answer to Death?