The Pope & the CEO

by Andreas Widmer

  So John Paul II invited the circus to the Vatican. When an answer was slow in coming, he sent an emissary to the Soviet Embassy to stress that it was his personal desire for the circus to perform. When Vatican officials protested about the possible dangers of live animals performing in front of the pope, he waived aside all the protocols that would have prevented the performance. The pope also agreed that there would be no talk of politics or war at the audience (this was not long after Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan). This was, he promised the Soviets, an event intended to celebrate life and friendship among peoples, nothing more.

  Over fifty thousand people attended the circus in St. Peter’s Square that day in March. It was the first audience since the assassination attempt, but not a word was breathed of politics. The pope also spared circus performers the dilemma of how to greet him (the bowing and kissing of the pope’s ring was something Soviet atheists could not do) by greeting each performer with two outstretched hands. He wasn’t trying to make any political points that day. He was, like everyone else, a spectator enjoying himself, laughing at Mashka the dancing bear, marveling at the acrobatics, applauding the trained horses.

  It was a good day at the Vatican, a great day even, and that wasn’t in spite of the fact that pope took the time to laugh and relax. It was because of it.

  The New “To-Do” List

  Determine who the five to ten most important people in your life are. (If you have children, you might expand the number by however many kids you have.) Ask yourself what small thing you can do to bring them joy every day or week. Then, in the next thirty days, do it.

  Start keeping a personal log of God’s small wonders, small messages that he gives you every day. Think of it as a gratitude log. Review it daily and rejoice as you give thanks.

  Think of the activities you enjoy most. Pick four, then make room in your calendar to do each one sometime during the next thirty days.

  Diligently use up your vacation time every year. No excuses.

  Make Sundays truly a day of rest. That means no “for profit” work. Instead go to Church, and then spend the rest of the day with family or friends. Try the concept of finding ways to purposefully “waste time” with them (“Wasting” that is, from a purely productivity-driven point of view). Sit and watch the sunset, play with sand at the beach, just sit and be together, try to create a new game with each other.

  Questions for Reflection

  How good are you at “taking care of yourself,” e.g., eating, sleeping, and exercising regularly? Which of the daily essentials is the first to go when things get stressful? In the long run, does that help or hurt your end objectives?

  What is the last vacation you took? Did you work during the vacation? Check email or answer the cell phone? If no, what were the benefits of that? If yes, how did that affect your vacation? In the end, was it worth it?

  Look into the future—thirty, forty, fifty years down the road, long past retirement. What do you want your life to look like then? What do you want to be known for? Who do you want to be with? How is the way you’re living your life now getting you there? Are the decisions you make with your time moving you closer to or farther away from that goal?

  Epigraph. Letter to Artists (April 4, 1999), 2.

  Chapter Nine

  Live Detachment:

  Intentional Humility and Poverty

  “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

  Matthew 5:3

  In old age, how should one face the inevitable decline of life? How should one act in the face of death? The believer knows that his life is in the hands of God…and he accepts from God the need to die…Man is not the master of life, nor is he the master of death. In life and in death, he has to entrust himself completely to the “good pleasure of the Most High,” to his loving plan.

  —Blessed John Paul II

  When I left John Paul II in 1988, he seemed at the height of his strength—fit, active, and full of life. He looked every inch the leader, and his energy was seemingly boundless. But appearances can be deceiving. Even then, complications from the assassin’s bullet were slowly stealing his vigor and strength. It was as if the bullet was still ricocheting inside his body, wounding him again and again. None of us knew that. John Paul II bore all his pain quietly, and his sufferings remained, for a time, invisible.

  That, however, could only go on for so long. Throughout the 1990s, old age came quickly for the pope who once seemed so young. By 2000, his infirmities were painfully apparent. With each passing day, he grew a little bit weaker. First, it was just the trembling of his hand. Then he had trouble controlling his neck muscles. He slowly became more hunched over, and breathing became more difficult. Eventually the simplest of tasks—speaking and swallowing—required considerable effort.

  In some ways, there was nothing remarkable about that. The pope had Parkinson’s Disease. He suffered what all who have the disease suffer. He also suffered much of what the very old and the very ill suffer.

  But those millions were not the pope. They were not great and powerful leaders of worldwide institutions. Their suffering was not broadcast on a daily basis for all the world to see.

  That’s not to say that great leaders haven’t suffered before. They have. But none have done it so publicly. FDR spent the entirety of his presidency paralyzed from the waist down. He kept that fact from the public, however, refusing to be photographed or filmed in his wheelchair. Similarly, Josef Stalin was a tiny man with a shrunken right hand, but he insisted on being photographed and painted in such a way that he appeared massive and whole. At least four artists who got it wrong were shot.

  What set John Paul II apart from those men and others like them was that he never tried to hide his suffering. He wasn’t ashamed of it. He didn’t think it made him less of a man or less of a leader. He saw meaning in his pain. He believed it had value. He wanted to share that with the world. He wanted to remind us that aging and illness are part of what it means to be human, and that suffering, when accepted, becomes an almost limitless source of grace.

  Like the rest of the world, I watched that slow decline on television and in the newspapers. I also heard about it from my friends at the Vatican. By the time he played his closing scene for the world, sitting silently at the window of his study overlooking St. Peter’s Square, while the crowds cheered below, everyone who watched, myself included, understood what he was trying to tell us. We understood then, if we didn’t before, that a person’s dignity doesn’t come from what they’ve accomplished or what they have. It’s not about abilities, gifts, talents, possessions, power, health, or beauty. It’s simply about being human. By the mere fact of our existence, we matter.

  It took great courage to teach the world that lesson as John Paul II taught it. It also took a spirit of detachment. In order to not just preach about human dignity in the midst of suffering, but to openly embody it, John Paul II had to let go of every shred of human pride. He had to embrace his littleness, his dependence on God. His ability to do that wasn’t the work of a moment. It was the work of a lifetime—a lifetime of letting go of pride and letting go of possessions.

  Day in and day out, John Paul II practiced humility and intentional poverty. He was able to be the kind of leader God called him to be in those final years, a leader who embodied the very things he worked so hard to accomplish.

  Detaching from Pride

  St. Augustine once wrote, “Should you ask me, ‘What is the first thing in a virtuous life?’ I should reply, the first, second, and the third thing therein—nay, all is humility.”25

  The opposite of what Augustine said is also true. At the root of vice is humility’s opposite: pride.

  Pride, after all, was man’s original sin. Adam and Eve wanted to be like gods. They wanted to be their own god. They neither trusted nor obeyed, to our great cost.

  We do a good job of imitating Adam and Eve. In my own life, pride has been at the source of so many of the struggles I’ve f
aced, including the downfall of several companies. We thought we were the reason for our success. We took all the credit when things went right. We started to believe our own press. We ignored the advice of others, became self-righteous and self-centered. We let our pride blind us to the truth of the situation, to our own weaknesses, and to our dependence in all things on God’s grace. So, like Adam and Eve, we fell.

  Pride is so insidious because it eats away at the truth of who we are—creatures dependent upon a Creator. This sin goes to the heart of our human identity and therefore can be found in every human endeavor. Pride can destroy marriages, friendships, companies, and careers. Empires have fallen because of pride. We insist that we’re right, no matter how wrong we are. We ignore wise counsel, refuse to ask for help, and lie about our weaknesses. Pride is what blinds us to the gifts that other people have and are.

  Humility is pride’s opposite. It doesn’t necessarily mean you think badly of yourself. It means you think rightly of yourself. Or, as “One Minute Manager” Kenneth Blanchard once wrote, “People with humility don’t think less of themselves. They think of themselves less.”26

  To reject pride and embrace humility is to understand who you are and who made you. It is to cultivate both dependence on God and a spirit of obedience to his will. It’s also to see your desires as secondary and the needs of others as primary.

  To John Paul II, the virtue of humility seemed to come as naturally as breathing. Maybe that wasn’t always the case. There must have been times where he had to do great battle with his will. As a young man serving under him, I never saw that. He was always more interested in others than he was in himself. Hence our conversation on that lonely Christmas Eve in 1986, where he noticed my tears.

  Humility is also what gave John Paul II the courage to live his illness in front of the television cameras. He was weak. He was suffering. What was the point of hiding that? God knew it. God permitted it. Hiding what God permitted, what God willed, would have been an act of disobedience, done in the spirit of pride, to make himself seem stronger, better, than he actually was.

  Importantly, humility is what led John Paul II to do things such as forgive his would-be assassin, Ali Agca, and greet Poland’s communist dictator, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, with as much kindness as he greeted its first democratically elected president, Lech Walesa.

  The pope didn’t have to visit Agca in prison, let alone advocate publicly for the man’s eventual release. He also didn’t have to treat Jaruzelski, the man responsible for so much poverty, suffering, and death in his beloved homeland, with respect. John Paul II could have said one word and Agca would never have seen the light of day again. He could have lifted one finger, and all of Poland would have launched into armed rebellion. He did neither. The reason for that was his humility. John Paul didn’t nurse anger. He didn’t hold on to resentment. He didn’t let his pride rule his better judgment, judgment that told him forgiveness, respect, and peace would ultimately bear more fruit that any acts of vengeance or rebellion.

  Because John Paul II didn’t consider himself to be great, he became great. He made decisions based on wise counsel. He had a proper view of his own strengths and weaknesses. He always had the help he needed, both from others and from God.

  Learning to Let Things Go

  To become a great leader in your businesses or market, you need to learn to let things go. Your decisions have a profound impact on others, and you have to make sure that your ego isn’t calling the shots. You can’t simply follow your own whims and desires, and you can’t be afraid to face your weaknesses, let them be known, and ask for help. No man is Superman. Not even John Paul II. We all need help. We all need grace. We all need to be willing to go to men and God to get it.

  We also need to be willing to give people second chances. People make mistakes. Big mistakes. I found that firing someone out of anger because they messed up is usually a mistake. It’s a decision based on pride, and such decisions usually backfire. After all, the person with whom you replace the employee could make the same mistake. There’s no guarantee that the replacement will never make errors. On the other hand, chances are good that the person whose mistake you forgive will learn from what happened and never make that mistake again. They’ll also likely remain fiercely loyal to you and the company.

  This doesn’t mean that you never dismiss employees. If someone honestly can’t do their job, dismissing them is actually the most loving thing you can do. You’re freeing them to go and do what God made them to do. It also doesn’t mean you can’t put people on performance plans or ask them to meet difficult goals. Being a humble leader is not about holding hands with your employees and singing “Kumbaya.” It does require that you have the courage to forgive and that you treat your employees as equals. It does require you to admit when you’re wrong and get the best help you can.

  I know that letting go of pride and embracing humility can be terrifying at first. It involves making oneself vulnerable and letting go of the control we think we have. In the corporate world, where most people have constructed thick shells of emotional and professional armor to hide all signs of weakness, practicing humility can feel decidedly counterintuitive. But it is the only way to become a truly great leader.

  If you have any doubts, consider this: Who, besides maybe Kim Jong-Il, thinks Josef Stalin was a greater man than John Paul II?

  Which man was afraid to show his weaknesses and which man put them on display for all the world to see?

  Detaching From Possessions

  Humility and poverty go hand in hand. Not because being poor makes you humble, but rather because being intentionally detached from commercial success or failure brings the same freedom and serenity that having an accurate understanding of your place in the universe brings. John Paul II was a prime example of this.

  Karol Wojtyla did not belong to a religious order such as the Augustinians, Dominicans, or Franciscans. He was a diocesan priest, which means he never formally took a vow of poverty. He lived poverty nonetheless. He never had a bank account or a credit card. He never even owned anything for very long. His friends used to lament that as soon as they gave him a gift, he would give it away. He did that as a priest and as a bishop, and he still did that when he became pope.

  At the end of every day in the Vatican, one of the Swiss Guards would go to the papal apartments to deliver the list of attendees for the next morning’s Mass. The guard would usually go straight to the kitchen, where the sisters who attended the pope were, and often the pope would be there sitting and talking with them. If the pope was there, the guard never left empty handed. The pope would say something like, “Didn’t someone just give us a case of wine?” The sisters would reply yes, and tell the pope where it was. Then the pope would tell the guard, “Go get that and give it to the guards downstairs. Give them my greetings.”

  Many of the gifts the pope didn’t manage to give away during the course of the year were saved and distributed to the Swiss Guards and all other Vatican employees at Christmas. He kept almost nothing for himself. Even living in the midst of a palace as sumptuous as the Vatican, he found a way to live poverty. For example, his personal apartments went untouched during all the years he lived there. No improvements or renovations were ever made. He didn’t want them, and he didn’t need them.

  The point of this poverty, however, wasn’t to possess nothing. It was, in part, to practice a detachment from the cares of the world, cares that can get in the way of seeing and valuing spiritual realities. In this life, it’s easy to become focused on the visible trappings of success or feel as if money and things are the goals of work. If you do that, however, you run the risk of letting your desire for things get in the way of your desire for God. You can make compromises, big compromises, in order to attain them. You can make the pursuit of them your greatest good. Cultivating a detachment from those things—not buying what you don’t need, giving readily and quickly to those who do—acts as a check on that tendency. It frees you to ma
ke the right decisions and follow God’s will, regardless of the cost.

  It also builds trust in God.

  Jesus chided those who fretted too much about clothes and things, noting that if God could provide so well for the lilies of the field, he could provide for men too. He wanted his disciples to trust that God, their loving Father, would provide for all they truly needed. He wants the same for you. Intentional poverty is an act of humility. It’s recognizing that there is someone else in charge who is looking out for you, and that your welfare depends far more upon his grace, than on your ability to store up riches.

  How, then, shall you live? This does not mean that you must work for free; it doesn’t mean you should not pursue a promotion or salary increase. You are made for excellence and pursuing these goals through virtue can be one way to pursue excellence at work. The question that addresses intentional poverty is rather how you regard the money you make and what you use it for. Do you believe that you are better than someone who earns less? Do you spend your money on self-indulgences? Do you drive the latest new car every three years? Do you belong to the top-of-the-line golf club? Do you give freely to worthy causes? Do you see money as a means to an end or as the end goal? It is okay to have nice possessions and to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor. The key question about intentional poverty is not about how much you have; it’s about how your soul sees it. It is worth contemplating this answer for some time, and letting your behavior speak rather than your arguments. I spent many years lying to myself about the true role money played in my life.