Somewhere west of Burgos, on a stretch of the Camino de Santiago where the wheat fields run flat to the horizon, I fell into step with Anders Kjellberg, who runs a Swedish logistics company with twelve thousand employees. He was wearing a sun hat, a borrowed fleece and an expression of mild bewilderment. It was his nineteenth day of walking. He had not checked his email since leaving the Pyrenees, and he confessed that he had begun, for the first time in years, to dream.
He is one of a growing number of senior executives who are walking the ancient pilgrimage route, often for its full eight hundred kilometres, and often quietly. Leadership coaches in London, Frankfurt and New York told me that requests for help planning such walks have multiplied in recent years. Some executives go alone. Others go with a single trusted colleague. Almost all of them, I was told, leave their phones with a friend or switch them off entirely.
The appeal is not difficult to understand. Senior leaders live in a state of constant partial attention, their days fragmented into meetings and messages. The Camino offers the opposite: a single, simple task repeated for weeks, in the company of strangers who have no idea who you are. Elena Marchetti-Ruiz, a former bank executive who now guides small groups along the route, says most of her clients spend the first week decompressing and the second week grieving.
What the walking reveals
Grieving what, I asked. The version of themselves they had been performing, she said. By the third week many of her walkers are asking questions they have avoided for years, about their marriages, their health and whether the work they do still means anything to them. A surprising number make significant decisions on their return. She estimates that a third of the executives she has guided have changed jobs within eighteen months, and several have left corporate life altogether.
For thirty years my calendar told me who I was. On the Camino I had nothing but my feet and my thoughts, and it turned out I had been avoiding both.
Not everyone is persuaded. Critics argue that the executive pilgrimage has become a luxury product in its own right, complete with private guides, boutique guesthouses and luggage transported between stops. Some residents along the route grumble that the new walkers bring money but little humility. Marchetti-Ruiz acknowledges the tension. The Camino, she says, cannot be bought, but the comfort around it can, and executives must decide which of those they have really come for.
There is also the question of what happens afterwards. Returning to a full inbox after a month of silence is, several walkers told me, a peculiarly brutal experience, and the clarity found on the trail can evaporate within days. The most successful returners seem to be those who bring back a single, concrete change, such as a protected morning, a weekly walk without a phone or a decision to finally hand over part of the job.
When I saw Kjellberg again, outside the cathedral in Santiago, he had lost six kilos and gained a beard he was clearly proud of. He had decided, he told me, to step down within the year and hand the company to his deputy. He did not seem sad about it. He was already planning to walk the Portuguese route next spring, and he intended, once again, to leave his phone at home.
