What the Camino Taught Me About Leadership with Peter D. Schwartz

January 12, 2026·34 min·2 clips

Peter Schwartz's coaching formula: 'Performance equals potential minus interference' — his job is to identify and remove what's blocking leaders who already have talent and drive.

Hola opens the conversation, and Joe Partavilla starts by placing Peter D. Schwartz in context as an award-winning CEO coach, author, and longtime Vistage Master Chair. Then the episode gets more personal. Joe brings in his own family roots in Spain and Galicia before asking what pulled Peter toward the Camino. Peter does not dress up the walk. He talks about bad knees, mountain climbs he was not used to, and the decision to live with the pain instead of obsessing over it. The downhill stretches were the worst, but he treats that pain as chosen and workable, not heroic. That is where the leadership thread lands. Joe asks what leaders carry that makes the walk harder. Peter will not give one tidy answer. Sometimes it is a relationship. Sometimes it is a product line. Sometimes ego needs to move out of the way. The heavier load, he says, is often an inner belief sitting quietly in the pack. The conversation stays grounded: grow inside, act outside, keep walking. Near the end, Peter talks about support from his wife and Vistage members. The Leadership Journeyman gives the episode its frame: lifelong growth, purpose, and knowing what to leave behind.

As heard by us

A Camino walk becomes a steady lesson in what leaders have to carry.

Peter D. Schwartz uses a 45-day walk on the Camino de Santiago to make a plain case for leadership as something lived day by day, not performed for show.

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Why you'd press play

A grounded leadership listen that treats the long walk as a test of what you carry.

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