Keep the Helicopter View: Bernold Schroeder on Leading Through Crisis

At the EHL HumanX Summit in Lausanne, Simone Puorto sat down with Bernold Schroeder, CEO and Managing Partner of MINPER Hotels. Schroeder has run some of the biggest names in the business, Kempinski, Pan Pacific, Jin Jiang and Banyan Tree, across more than thirty years split between Europe and Asia. He recently stepped away from the top of Kempinski, one of Europe's oldest luxury groups, to build his own company in partnership with the Singapore group Perennial. He came to the summit with the long view of someone who has seen more than one crisis up close, and a clear set of ideas about people and change. The full conversation is available to watch below.

Leaving the top job

Schroeder framed the move as a long-held plan rather than a sudden break. He had always wanted his own business, and the partnership with Perennial, a company strong in healthcare and related fields, lets him run hotel projects, sit on hotel boards and stay close to education, including a seat on EHL's International Advisory Board. He is, by his own description, a global citizen who has spent most of his life moving between Europe and Asia, and most of it in Asia.

There was a simpler reason too. Having skin in the game, he said, is what lets you decide for yourself when to stop. He has no plans to stop soon.

What the pandemic taught him

Schroeder led Kempinski through Covid and out the other side, and the company came through with record results, the best in its history. The first lesson he draws is about experience. The leaders who cope best in a crisis, he believes, are the ones who have lived through one before, and his years in Asia gave him plenty: the 1997 financial crisis, SARS, the bird and swine flus, and the 2004 tsunami, which he watched hit the Thai coast and wipe out tourism overnight.

From all of it he takes a few rules. Decide what the handful of truly important things are, and focus there. Make clear, honest plans and be straight about how serious the situation is, because in Europe, for instance, leases are paid whether or not guests arrive, and that is an enormous cash burn. Above all, overcommunicate. Communication is the glue that holds an operation together, he said, and a crisis is when people need that extra motivation most.

He also learned to watch the squad. In a crisis, established names sometimes freeze, while people you barely noticed before start to outperform everyone, coming up with savings and ideas at every level, from rank and file to supervisor. The leadership lesson is to give people in a hard moment the room to speak up. On the numbers, Kempinski laid off no one, cut salaries for a time and paid them back later, and pushed into new areas such as branded residences, which bring in royalties and help cash flow. His advice to younger colleagues is almost counterintuitive: be glad you lived through Covid, because it has made you more resilient for the crisis that will inevitably come next.

Underneath the rules is one habit he keeps returning to. A long-time mentor told him to keep the helicopter view, and he passes it on to students now. If you only ever work on one component, or fight one fire, you lose. You have to hold the big picture while still attending to the parts. He pairs it with a discipline he calls less is more: do fewer things, do them properly, and step back often enough to see the whole.

Invest in human capital

Asked whether any leadership trait is truly universal, Schroeder said communication comes first. Strong communicators make strong leaders, and people who hoard information do not. The style has to flex by region, more direct in some places and more indirect in others, but the need to inspire is constant, and you cannot simply dictate downward any more. He puts empathy alongside it. People will forgive a leader who gets angry or makes mistakes, but a brilliant technical mind without empathy and emotional intelligence is a serious problem. He adds a third trait he thinks matters more now than it used to, the habit of constantly looking forward, planning two and three years out rather than only reporting last month's numbers.

That forward look shapes how he hires. Résumés, he argued, are overrated. Education matters, and he is warm about EHL, but what he looks for is hunger, passion and the right attitude, because those he can train, and they account for most of what makes someone succeed. He dislikes the phrase human resources and prefers human capital, something you invest in. In practice that means spending five to seven percent of payroll on training and giving each employee 150 to 200 hours of it a year, which lowers cost over time through people who stay, perform and do not need replacing. His shorthand for the whole philosophy is that people drive product, and product drives profit.

What makes hospitality different

Schroeder is unusually positive about the industry's future, for two reasons. The first is that hospitality cannot be largely digitalised. You can hand some tasks to a robot, but the business still needs good people, so the jobs will be there. The second is growth. Travel and tourism, he noted, tend to grow about twice as fast as GDP in most of the world, and the sector is always among the first into a downturn and the first out.

There is a third thing he clearly cares about. Hospitality gives everyone a chance. When he started in the late 1980s, leadership was largely European, male and older. Today someone from the smallest village in India or Bangladesh can rise to run the best luxury hotels in Dubai or Saudi Arabia. Without the right university, he pointed out, that same person would never get into Goldman Sachs or a top law firm. In his industry, the entry ticket is passion, hunger and a dream.

Change is no longer optional

The interview ended on the HumanX theme, technology and humanity as partners rather than rivals. Schroeder thinks the balance is reachable, but it depends on an open mindset, and that, he said, varies sharply by region. Parts of Europe show strong resistance to doing things fundamentally differently, which he reads as cultural. Germany, he noted, can still run on fax machines, caught between catching up on basic digitalisation and an AI wave that has already arrived. The Gulf, much of Asia and the Americas tend to adopt change far more quickly.

For leaders, he said, the message has to be blunt: a mindset shift is mandatory, not optional, because the world is moving too fast for anything else. He would like it taught early, in families and schools, so that children grow up understanding that life is about change, and that the only thing that never changes is change itself. He reached, as he often does, for sport and medicine to make the point, the way football and Formula One have been reinvented since the 1970s, the way a bypass operation has become a stent and a trip home the same day. The regions that embrace this will pull ahead. The ones that stay too conservative, he warned, will be left behind.