Author Talks: How Stoic wisdom can guide modern ambition

In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Eric Quiñones chats with Robert Rosenkranz, chairman of Delphi Capital Management, about The Stoic Capitalist: Advice for the Exceptionally Ambitious (Bloomsbury Business/Bloomsbury Publishing, May 2025). Rosenkranz explains how adopting Stoic principles of a well-lived life can benefit people both professionally and personally. He points to the Stoics’ emphases on being guided by reason rather than emotion, prioritizing time as a precious resource, and acting for the good of society. An edited version of the conversation follows. You can watch the full video at the end of this page.

Why did you write this book, and why now?

The book was really intended to help people realize their childhood dreams. I felt like the Stoic ideas and the cognitive-behavioral-therapy ideas that form the structure of the book would get life by being reflected in anecdotes from my own life. I absolutely did not want to write a memoir. I wanted to write something that would help people, and this was a format that would do that.

How did your interest in stoic thinking develop?

My avenue into Stoic thinking was through cognitive behavioral psychology. I was interested in that mode of thought. That led me to the Stoics, whom I started to read about intensely. From childhood, I was approaching things from this perspective. It gave it more richness, more articulation, and therefore was something that I felt I could build a book around.

What is the key to a well-lived life?

The key is being mindful. It’s using a variety of Stoic principles that I lay out in the book. The primary idea is to use reason to regulate emotion—to value reason as our greatest human attribute. There’s also the sense that time is our most precious and limited resource—to be very, very conscious about how we use time—and the idea of accepting impermanence, expecting change.

The idea is being quite rigorous in separating facts from interpretation. It’s the idea of actually doing less but doing it with greater concentration, trying to eliminate the nonessentials from your life. Finally, it involves acting for the benefit of society. Those are the principles that can lead to success as a capitalist but also lead to a well-lived and fulfilling life that does a lot of good for the society as well.

Which Stoic principles do you think can help guide people to achieve professional success?

All Stoic principles are applicable, but one of the most important principles is the idea of prioritization and time. If something has the potential to be meaningful in your world, focus on it.

But if it’s below that threshold, don’t take the meeting; don’t clutter up your mind or your calendar. Maintain focus on the things that matter, and don’t get bogged down in things that don’t.

One of the things that worked for me is taking what I call a “yellow pad” and going to a rare-book library or someplace where I won’t be disturbed. I’ll consider a whole range of things. I’ll think about people in my life, the relationships that are working or not working, those that need repair, and the things that may have outlived their usefulness. Then I’ll think about opportunities that I might be missing, ignoring, or putting insufficient effort into. I’ll think about the things I might be spending time on that are poor uses of time, the habits that are time wasters, and the things I might want to learn. I’ll consider potential risks that I hadn’t really thought about.

By the end of the day, I’ll have a pretty good idea of how I want to prioritize what’s very important to me. Also I’m a big believer in delegating, not only in my business life, but also in my personal life. I really want to reserve my time for things that are truly meaningful to me and delegate everything else to other people. That means prioritizing good people, giving them the authority that goes with the responsibility, and not micromanaging.

What does it mean to adopt a ‘man from Mars’ mindset? How has that helped you in your career?

It means looking at human behavior without any preconceptions about what is happening, as a person from Mars would. You’re looking at the earthlings and seeing what they’re doing. If you think about value investing—looking at a company and trying to identify the underlying value of the enterprise—you’re making a presumption about human behavior.

You’re making a presumption that the other folks in the marketplace, the earthlings, care about value. Maybe they do; maybe they don’t. Maybe the earthlings are buying indexes, so they’re not looking at the value of individual stocks at all.

Maybe that’s a trend that will result in a pro-momentum bias in the market, a trend that’ll make it very difficult for stock pickers. That would be the kind of logic that you would get to, or the way you would look at the behavior of the people in the marketplace without preconception.

How did Stoic thinking influence your approach to building your businesses and nurturing organizational culture?

Stoics honor rationality above all else. In building my business, I was very conscious of the fact that big companies are not unitary, rational decision-makers. I wanted Delphi, which was the biggest company that I built in my lifetime, although there have been a half a dozen others, to really make the most rational decisions it could.

There are two enemies of rational decision-making for corporations: corporate politics and bureaucracy. We were very conscious about creating a corporate culture for Delphi that minimized those elements.

By and large, Delphi made very rational decisions, which paid off. We made over 150 times our money and compounded the equity in that company at 24 percent a year for more than 20 years. The rationality component was absolutely critical.

How can we ensure that our actions create the outcomes we desire?

I habitually think about my responses in terms of whether the response would result in an outcome that works for me. I might be very angry with someone, and I might be tempted to give them a piece of my mind. Yet it has become habitual for me not to do that without pausing to say, “Is this going to produce the outcome I want?” Maybe the outcome I want is for this person to be scared, to really know that I’m angry, and that will be helpful. But maybe not—usually not. Acting on emotion usually is not useful, so don’t act on emotion on autopilot. Stop and think: “Will acting angry help produce an outcome that works for me?”

The two biggest emotions that the Stoics talk about are fear and anger. There’s a chapter in the book where I talk about risking 100 percent of my liquid net worth at the time in starting a firm where if the firm’s capital was down 20 percent, I would be wiped out.

I did that in order to secure a deal that was basically a 50-50 sharing of profits and losses. In other words, the standard deal at the time would have been a 20 percent profit share.

I said, “I’m willing to align interests completely and put every nickel I have on the table in a leveraged way. I’ll take 50 percent of the losses; I want 50 percent of the profits.” Now obviously, there’s a huge amount of fear that would be associated with that kind of risk taking.

I wrote about how I was able to master that fear. I not only accepted this idea, but I also proposed it. We lost $100,000 on the first deal we completed. For the next deal, we made $100 million, so it balanced out.

What does it mean to be a ‘selfish philanthropist’?

I came from a very disadvantaged family. I remember my parents worrying about whether the electricity or the phone would be cut off or the butcher would be paid. I didn’t have role models in my world, so I became a voracious reader of biographies. I read them for role models. Among the ones I read were the Rockefeller biographies and the Carnegie biographies, and I saw the robber barons.

I was enough of a critical thinker to say, “Wait a second. These guys were heroes.” They built the great American industries, and they established this tradition of philanthropy. Their philanthropies were not merely giving money to poor people or to causes that they liked but really using their talents and abilities to bring into being the institutions that they felt society needed.

In Carnegie’s case, these institutions are the libraries, the Carnegie Hall, what became Carnegie Mellon University, and in Rockefeller’s case, the University of Chicago and the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government. My sense of philanthropy as part of a well-lived life was another opportunity to use the entrepreneurial skills, strategic thinking, convening power, and abilities that secured your means of becoming philanthropic in a different context.

By “selfish,” I mean that you’re getting satisfaction. You’re doing this because it gives you another avenue for growth, for learning, for exercising your talents. In that chapter, push back against the idea of philanthropy as giving back. Building a successful business contributes something meaningful to society. You haven’t taken anything away; you’ve contributed something by building a business. It’s not that you owe anything. Rather, philanthropy is something you do selfishly to create a richer and more meaningful life for yourself and give yourself a broader canvas to paint on, giving more scope for your own creativity and abilities.

Setting a consistent goal is a key Stoic principle. What was your career goal? How would you advise others to develop their own?

Indeed, the biggest goal for me or for anybody trying to live a full and well-lived life is to find something that you can do that emphasizes all your talents and abilities, produces a wide range of opportunities for growth, and is really energizing.

If you find something like that, go with it. Most people who build major businesses will do so with that energy and commitment. The satisfaction is in the process, not so much in the goal.

Was there anything that surprised you in the research and writing of the book?

Reading about Marcus Aurelius was remarkable. This was the most philosophically grounded leader of all time. My introduction to Stoicism was through his Meditations. It’s a self-help book.

Keep in mind the principles of a virtuous life. Consider how they can be applied to someone who has to deal with the things a member of the Roman empire has to deal with, such as the internal dissensions, wars, politics, and upper classes. Aurelius’s use of these philosophical principles in order to cope with the day-to-day stresses or the emperorship was extraordinary. Also, the openness of the upper levels of Roman society to ideas was very interesting.

Two of the Stoics that Marcus Aurelius was probably most influenced by were from completely opposite ends of the social spectrum. There was Seneca, who was reputedly the wealthiest man in Rome, and Epictetus, who was born a slave in a remote Roman outpost. They were both regarded as major figures in philosophy. That seems quite extraordinary to me.

Watch the full interview

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