In a recent Wall Street Journal interview, Robert Bruner (dean of Univ. of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and co-author of the Panic of 1907: Lessons Learned from the Market’s Perfect Storm) said that a lesson emerging from current market conditions comments that “Ethics are always No.1…Leadership is second…” He does not address how a person’s ethics are developed. That is the more powerful issue.
Conceit in one’s own ability to “be” has resulted in an abundance of oxymoronic followers of relative truth. Leaders, like all of us, must first answer these questions:
- Where did you come from?
- Why are you here?
- Where are you going?
- Are you aligned with a larger purpose outside of self?”
Max Dupree (former chairman of Herman Miller, Inc.), in Leadership Jazz, observes, ”…Leadership is a position of servant-hood. Leadership is also a posture of debt; it is a forfeiture of rights.”
Serving customers, employees and suppliers demands in us a very different attitude from being “wise in [our] own eyes.” Running a business takes a mix of confidence and humility – humility to accept that “we” don’t have all the answers, and some of answers may even have a spiritual component acknowledging a need for God’s perspective.
Conceit has captivated humans from the very beginning and may be expressed by an assumption that God has nothing to say about business and its relationships – could that be a conceit that makes one a “practical atheist?”
I believe there is one wiser than we and His Word is our guidebook – even for business.
Two questions: Whom do you serve? What are you reading?
Copyright ©2009 by P. Griffith Lindell
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