Michael Kasbar and the art of becoming irrelevant

Michael J. Kasbar once described a management ambition that would look peculiar on an executive recruitment form: “I try to make myself totally irrelevant.” He had already spent years building a business, buying businesses and running businesses. Irrelevance, in this setting, required quite a lot of work.

By the end of 2026, that ambition will have a practical appointment in the diary. Kasbar is scheduled to step down as executive chairman of World Kinect Corporation on December 31. He will remain a director. Ken Bakshi will take the chair. Ira Birns, who became chief executive in January, will continue running the company.

For a founder, a succession announcement can make a career look suddenly tidy. This one covers decades of changing responsibilities, an acquisition that became a beginning, and a company whose commercial name has recently returned to World Fuel. The dates are orderly. The work behind them involved persuading people across markets to coordinate something unusually unforgiving: the energy that keeps transport moving.

A business built between departures

Kasbar grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, the youngest of six children. His extended family included 55 first cousins. A crowded table was familiar territory long before an international management meeting. Later, he would describe the company’s mixture of people and backgrounds in terms that recalled that family world.

He studied environmental science at SUNY Plattsburgh, graduating in 1977. His professional route led into marine fuel brokerage, then to Trans-Tec, the business he co-founded with Paul Stebbins in the mid-1980s. It was a trade built around connecting vessel operators with fuel suppliers. The vessel might be large; the original enterprise arranging its fuel was small.

In 1995, Trans-Tec was acquired by International Recovery Corporation, the company that became World Fuel Services. Kasbar joined as chief executive of the marine subsidiary, World Fuel Services Americas. Selling the business therefore left him with a substantial operating job. The transaction joined a marine business to a company already working in aviation, widening the field in which the partners could operate.

His progression through the company took time. He became president and chief operating officer in July 2002, then chief executive in January 2012. The chairmanship followed in May 2014. These were different jobs across different stages of the same enterprise: running a subsidiary, coordinating operations and acquisitions, then carrying responsibility for the whole public company.

There is a useful distinction in that sequence. Starting a brokerage and integrating operating businesses demand different kinds of attention. The founder can know the original operation intimately. A larger organization needs other people to know their operations equally well, and enough shared discipline for their decisions to fit together. Kasbar’s responsibilities increasingly concerned that second problem.

The complicated business of getting there

The customer’s request sounds simple: fuel, in the right place, when it is needed. In Kasbar’s account of the business, that request contains questions about availability, quality, price, logistics and payment. A shipping company or airline has its own job to do. Procuring energy introduces another set of moving parts before its people can get on with it.

By 2023, the company’s services extended across aviation, marine and land transportation, along with natural gas and power supply in the United States and Europe. It served more than 150,000 customers. That number measures the breadth of the coordination task. Each customer arrives with a particular operation, location and set of requirements.

In his 2023 discussion of the business, Kasbar identified Neste, BP and Phillips 66 as supply partners. The relationships show another side of the intermediary’s job. Buyers need access to products; producers need a route to customers. The company works between those two sets of needs. Keeping that position useful requires attention to both ends of the transaction, even as the available products change.

Large networks make for impressive maps. The transaction still has to work locally. Weather, supply interruptions and price movements can interfere with an arrangement that looked perfectly sensible when it was made. Kasbar’s explanation of the company emphasized the processes joining buyers and suppliers. Much of the value sits in the unglamorous details. A delayed delivery has little interest in the elegance of the strategy presentation.

In June 2023, World Fuel Services changed its corporate name to World Kinect, and its stock ticker became WKC. The name expressed a broader ambition around energy management and customers’ changing energy needs. Company executives marked the occasion by ringing the New York Stock Exchange closing bell. Kasbar also discussed the change in an NYSE Floor Talk interview.

Names are easier to change than customer habits. In April 2026, under Birns, the company returned to World Fuel as its unified commercial identity, retaining World Kinect as its legal name. The stated emphasis was a simpler business, transportation fuels and related services, and higher-return opportunities. A profile of Kasbar now crosses both identities: the expansion he led and the sharper commercial focus his successor is pursuing.

Back to Plattsburgh, with a harder assignment

Another part of the story takes place far from the exchange floor. At his alma mater, Kasbar proposed an energy and environment business-plan competition that put ten business students together with ten environmental science students. Five teams of four worked on practical energy questions. The arrangement gave each discipline something useful to explain to the other.

The project joined financial analysis, environmental questions and the demands of a proposal an executive might actually use. Students consulted faculty across subjects and presented to Kasbar and company executives by Skype. Kasbar and World Fuel Services provided $15,000 in renewed support for the competition.

The winning team proposed using telematics to track, measure and improve fleet performance. One participant, Kylie Sapone, went on to an internship and then a job at the company’s Parish, New York, office. The classroom exercise had acquired a route into employment.

The choice of students matters. Energy decisions involve physical systems and commercial systems at the same time. A proposal can be persuasive in one language and incomplete in the other. Bringing the two groups together made translation part of the assignment. For an environmental science graduate who had built a career in business, it was a particularly apt piece of homework to set.

Six words, repeated at scale

Kasbar’s leadership vocabulary is compact. In a discussion with leadership writer Jacob Morgan, his mantra was “Say it, Do it, Live it.” Three instructions, six words, and very little room to hide in the grammar. A company spread across markets needs people to understand a message, see it acted upon and recognize it in daily behavior.

“Say it, Do it, Live it.”

Michael J. Kasbar

Those instructions also impose a test on the person giving them. Announcing a priority is quick. Applying it to staffing, investment, customer problems and disagreements takes repeated decisions. The distance between a speech and a working routine is where employees discover what the speech meant.

Kasbar has used the phrase “cooperative antagonism” for colleagues challenging one another while collaborating. It suggests a meeting where agreement earns its place. Alongside that preference sits his interest in routines and culture that allow people to work well without routing every answer through the chief executive.

His thinking about the future has a similar resistance to a single comfortable answer. In conversations for Morgan’s work on future leadership, Kasbar advocated examining several possible paths. That approach has a clear application in energy: customers must make decisions while technologies, supplies and commercial conditions keep changing. A plan needs room for another outcome.

These ideas describe a demanding relationship between freedom and coordination. People need enough authority to act, enough information to understand the consequences, and colleagues willing to question an assumption before it becomes an expensive habit. Making the chief executive less necessary means making those relationships more dependable.

His account of time away from work is less concerned with organization charts. In 2017, he described motorcycle tours through the American West with a few friends, sometimes riding 500 miles in a day. He also talked about family gatherings, food, music and dancing. The enjoyment of other people runs through both accounts: the company’s mix of backgrounds and the people he chooses to spend time with after work.

December 31 is part of the job

The handover has unfolded in stages. Birns succeeded Kasbar as CEO on January 1, 2026. John Rau became president. The September announcement then set the year-end change in the chairmanship. Bakshi, a director since 2002, will become independent chairman. Kasbar’s continuing board membership preserves a connection while changing his executive responsibility.

In discussing the transition, Kasbar emphasized the global platform, culture and leadership team built over the company’s history. He expressed confidence in Birns and the executive team. That is the institutional version of the ambition he described years earlier: other people carrying the work forward.

A founder’s departure from an executive role cannot prove a management theory in advance. What follows will belong to the people making the next decisions. But this particular handover gives Kasbar’s career a coherent question to leave on the table. After decades of connecting customers to suppliers and businesses to one another, has he helped connect the organization well enough to keep moving under different leadership?

On December 31, the chair changes hands. The next day, customers will still need their fuel.