A business provides mutual support when it effectively fulfills legitimate customer needs at a competitive price. By “legitimate” I mean moral, a need that doesn’t contribute in any way to harming a person physically or spiritually.
A business benefits its employees and owners, psychologically and physically, when it generates enough profit to sustain a reasonable system of financial rewards (wages and shareholder return). This is important both for attracting good employees who uphold the quality of the business and for maintaining its investors.
Violate any one of those objectives and your business will fail to thrive. Ignore the person at the center of the activity, ignore the team or stifle creativity, and the business suffers. Ignore legitimate customer needs and manufacture products that are destructive or useless, and the business dies. Ignore giving reasonable financial rewards and incentives to the participants in the business and ignore giving share values or profits to the shareholders, and the business becomes unsustainable.
What’s true in human relationships is true in business relationships. The good of the person always has to come first. It has to be the guide, shaping your decisions, policies, and practices. It has to form the foundation of your professional and personal ethic. Only when it does can your business and everything else in your life flourish.
***
In 1988, shortly after the pope returned from a visit to Berlin, I was standing guard outside his private apartment when the future Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, stopped by for a visit. The cardinal had been with the pope in Berlin, where less than friendly crowds greeted them. Activists staged huge protests and launched eggs and tomatoes at the “popemobile” as it drove by.
While Cardinal Ratzinger waited for admittance to the rooms, I began to chat with him. He’s a gentle man, shy but friendly and sincere. That particular day I was curious about the reception Berlin had given the two and asked what it was like to be attacked as they had been.
“Doesn’t it bother you to have eggs and tomatoes thrown at you? Doesn’t it hurt your feelings?” I asked.
He smiled in his gentle way and explained, “No, because what they’re throwing they’re not throwing at Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger. If the two of us had never been involved in Christ’s message, they wouldn’t be throwing anything at us. The tomatoes and insults are intended for what we stand for and what we proclaim. It is the Christian faith which has been handed down to us through the centuries. We can’t change that because it is difficult to live up to or doesn’t fit the current cultural trends. We should proclaim it in love, but it’s not ours to change.”
How the cardinal saw the situation was how John Paul II saw it. Christ had given them a message—the Good News. Reason had given them an ethical framework for incarnating that message in their day-to-day decisions—the person-centered ethic. They could only be truly successful if they were faithful to that, if they held true to what they had been given and upheld the ultimate dignity of the human person regardless of the cost. In their fidelity to what is right, what is true, they found their strength.
Meeting the Right Objectives
Wonder if your business is meeting its primary objectives for all parties involved? Answer the questions below and find out.
Objectives
Creativity: How is my company’s work life-giving and creative? How is it helping everyone involved not just make more but also become more?
What are ways to improve?
Support: How does our work support the needs of everyone involved? Are these needs legitimate?
What are ways to improve?
Benefit: How is our work physically and/or psychologically beneficial to all participants? Is it financially sustainable for all involved?
What are ways to improve?
Questions for Reflection
Have you seen utilitarianism at work in your business or profession? How has that impacted the individuals involved, both customers and employees?
Draw or describe your ethical framework. How do you evaluate right from wrong? To what or whom do you turn when you find yourself in “gray areas”? How did you come by this framework?
Think of a situation at work where you, your manager, or an employee let utilitarianism be the guiding principle? How would the situation have turned out differently if a person-centered ethic had been used?
What are five principles of person-centered ethics that you can apply to your work every day?
Epigraph. Message for the Celebration of the World Day of Peace (January 1, 2005).
Chapter Four
Know How to Choose What’s Right:
Exercising Your Free Will
Sometimes a way seems right to a man, but the end of it leads to death!
Proverbs 14:12
In [the act of entrusting oneself to God], the intellect and the will display their spiritual nature, enabling the subject to act in a way which realizes personal freedom to the full. It is not just that freedom is part of the act of faith: it is absolutely required. Indeed, it is faith that allows individuals to give consummate expression to their own freedom. Put differently, freedom is not realized in decisions made against God. For how could it be an exercise of true freedom to refuse to be open to the very reality that enables our self-realization?
—Blessed John Paul II
In April 1987, the Swiss Guards at the Vatican were anxiously awaiting John Paul II’s return to Rome. He had just spent several weeks visiting Latin America, where he was only grudgingly welcomed. The people were thrilled to see him. It was their governments who were being difficult. With them, his firm opposition to their repeated human rights violations made him less than popular.
In Chile things got particularly bad, with the government staging a riot at one of the pope’s large, outdoor Masses. The other guards and I had seen some coverage of the events on the news, but we wanted the full story from our friends who witnessed it on the ground.
When we got that story it was far worse and far more inspiring than the news coverage had led us to believe. Apparently, the riots in Chile were sparked by government officials who were present at the outdoor Mass. When the pope began praying the Sacred Liturgy, they launched into a nationalistic anthem. Singing at the tops of their lungs, they attempted to drown out his voice. When the Catholic faithful in attendance tried to silence them, the military responded by aiming tear gas into the crowds.
Amidst the pandemonium, the altar remained peaceful. Most men in John Paul’s position would have grown angry or retired to safety, but he took a different course. When the officials shouted out their songs, he prayed a little louder. He continued to pray when the rioting broke out. With tear gas in the air, he prayed more still. He didn’t shout, and he didn’t run. He made the decision that celebrating that Mass, despite all the forces arrayed against him, was the most important thing he could do for God and the Chilean people. He knew he needed to show them that the government could not silence the Church. It could not silence God.
John Paul focused on the task at hand and chose to respond in the way he believed God wanted him to respond. He was able to do that not simply because he knew it was the right thing to do, but also, more importantly, because over a period of many years, he had made a habit of choosing the right course of action. He had learned to discipline his will to choose the good, even when that choice was difficult. He had, in fact, learned to use his free will rightly.
The Challenge of Free Will
In life, ethics can only get you so far. There is, after all, a difference between knowing what’s right and doing what’s right. A solid ethical framework can help you with the former, but with the latter, something more is needed. That something is the ability to exercise your free will in service of the good, to consciously choose the correct course of action regardless of the obstacles and temptations standing in your way.
That ability is something all of us can cultivate. Simply by virtue of being human, we all possess the powe
r to make good choices. That’s what free will gives you—the ability to exercise control over how you conduct yourself in public and in private, as well as over what you choose to believe. Whether you run your business honestly or dishonestly, whether you remain faithful to your spouse or commit adultery, whether you give your life to God or reject his loving mercy—all those things are choices that hinge upon the right exercise of your free will.
In many ways, free will is what gives your life meaning. Without it, your good actions and bad actions would have no value because they would not really be your actions, freely chosen. There could be no such thing as sin without free will, because sin involves both the recognition that a certain action is wrong and the choice to engage in that action regardless. Likewise, there could be no such thing as virtue, because virtue requires the conscious choice to act rightly. Free will is what makes it possible for you to become a sinner or a saint.
It’s important to note, however, that the power to choose for yourself what is good, doesn’t mean all choices are, in fact, good. There are good choices and bad choices. The good choices are choices made in conformity with God’s will. The bad choices violate God’s will. Free will is only exercised rightly when it brings your actions and your will into accord with God’s perfect will. That’s the goal. That’s the end for which you should strive to use your free will.
Free Will as the Key to Successful Leadership
John Paul II was able to choose the correct action in the midst of a Chilean riot because he had already spent a lifetime training his will, exercising it in small matters and in great matters in the service of the good. His right responses were, at that point, second nature, a virtuous habit formed over the course of decades.
That habit is one reason why he served God and led the Catholic Church so successfully. He knew how to choose the right course of action and follow that choice through. He didn’t get distracted by matters of secondary importance and could focus on what mattered most at any given point in time. Moreover, by his example of right action, he taught those serving under him to respond rightly too.
That same habit is just as crucial for an executive or CEO. You can’t be successful without having a will disciplined enough to help you achieve your goals. You can’t lead your company to success without having the ability to pursue the right course of action. You can’t create a corporate culture of responsibility and innovation unless you’ve modeled those behaviors for your employees.
You can’t allow yourself to become distracted, unfocused, or lazy as the person ultimately responsible for your business’ future. You have to be willing to do the hard work and make the hard choices, and you actually have to do both. If you don’t, nobody else will.
Over the years, I’ve worked with plenty of CEOs and managers who don’t think those rules apply to them. They think they hit a certain point in their careers where the hard work stops, and they can just coast on the record of their past successes. These are the managers who stop coming to meetings and answering their employees’ questions, who secure perks for themselves that nobody else has, who take salaries dramatically out of proportion to their actual contributions to the company. These are also the CEOs who appoint their buddies to the board so they don’t have to face strict scrutiny over their decisions and the company’s numbers. They pad and fiddle with the bottom line, acting increasingly disingenuous as the years pass.
It may not happen overnight, but in the long run, the company always suffers for that kind of behavior. When the person at the helm doesn’t have the strength of will to work hard and work honestly, he and everyone whose livelihoods depend upon him get blown off course. They don’t accomplish what they set out to accomplish. The vision, once shared, dies.
That’s why free will matters, in business and in life. That’s why nobody who wants to lead well can put off until tomorrow the work of training their will. By tomorrow, it may already be too late.
God’s Authority and Will
In the years before and after he became pope, John Paul II was sought out by innumerable friends and students for advice and spiritual direction. They would come to him with a problem, expecting he would tell them what to do. But it rarely worked that way. Sometimes he would ask them questions. Other times, he would ask them to take some time to think things over. Through all that talking and thinking, he wanted them to come to see for themselves the various sides of a question or what was at stake. Once they did, he still didn’t tell them what to do. “You must make the decision,” was what he would always say.
What John Paul wanted for those advice seekers was that they exercise their free will. In that, he purposefully imitated God, although many people today don’t recognize that.
John Paul often lamented that people didn’t understand the gift of their free will or the nature of God’s authority. The fact that the right exercise of free will means choosing God’s way, not our own, both confuses and frustrates many. They see that as a denial of their freedom, a restriction on their liberty. They also see God not as a loving Father, but as a repressive and authoritarian dictator, asking them to do what they don’t want to do.
In that, many seem to confuse their heavenly Father with their earthly fathers or other authority figures they’ve known. That’s easy enough to understand. All of us, at some point or other, have suffered under the arbitrary rule of someone misusing their authority—a parent, a teacher, a boss, a commanding officer. We’ve been repressed, judged, limited, shamed, and abandoned at their direction. The more times that happens, the less willing we are to trust anyone with authority. We see an adversarial system at work in the world—oppressor and oppressed—and we assume that same system is at work in the Church, with God being the oppressor and us being the oppressed.
A True Father
If that were how God operated, we would be more than justified in not trusting him. But that’s not how things work. God doesn’t wield authority like a power-hungry dictator. He doesn’t want to oppress you or force you to do his will. He doesn’t want to force you to do anything. That’s where free will comes in. God wants you to choose for yourself what you will believe and not believe, what you will do and not do. He wants you to choose willingly and joyfully what he asks of you.
What he asks of you is never arbitrary and never wrong. It may be difficult. It may go against what you instinctively desire for yourself or what the culture at large says that you should want, but it nevertheless is good for you. It’s what will lead you to true happiness and eternal life.
That’s how God’s law always works. It’s a roadmap for happiness based upon how God made you. You were made to want certain things and do certain things and only when you pursue them can you find joy. Only when you live according to God’s will, do you discover who you truly are and find the grace to be truly free. In God, you don’t lose yourself, you find yourself.15
That’s why, although God wants you to choose for yourself what you will believe and do, there are still right choices and wrong choices, good ones and bad ones. That’s also why there are consequences for choosing wrongly.
When you choose not to live in accord with truth, and how you were made, things will go wrong. It’s like using the wrong tool for a construction job. You’re not going to get the outcome you want. There will be problems. Those problems, however, are your doing, not God’s. You’re suffering at your own hands, not his. Sin brings its own punishment, and eventually, whether it takes us a day, a month, or a lifetime, we all come to see the truth of that.
If you want to be happy and successful, if you want to live and act rightly, making the correct choices and taking the correct actions, you have to let go of any fears and hang-ups about God’s authority and will, and do everything you can to bring your will into conformity with his. You have to practice, like a great athlete would, seeking out every occasion to strengthen your will. I learned as a Swiss Guard that such practice must happen both in thought and in deed.
Training the Wi
ll: Learning to Stand Still
Swiss Guards are probably most famous for the statue-like stance they take outside the pope’s palace. Tourists almost make a game of trying to get the sentinel on duty to look at them or smile. Women wink, blow kisses, and make all sorts of proposals. Men do gymnastics, crack jokes, or even throw an insult or two at the guard, hoping to get a rise of out him.
It never happens. The sentinel doesn’t really notice their antics. It’s not his job to notice them, or, for that matter, anything else going on around him. Sentinel duty is just an honor guard duty. It’s a sign of respect the Vatican pays to visitors. The real work is done by a more senior guard who stands nearby. While he controls crowds and helps out tourists, the sentinel just has to stand still. He has to do that for a very, very long time. Trust me, that is work. There are two tricks that help.
The Pope & the CEO Page 7
