Leading with Wisdom

I have just returned from the sixth annual European SPES Forum (www.eurospes.be) conference at Hilvarenbeek, the Netherlands co-organised with Alba University. This year our theme was “Leading with Wisdom” and we enjoyed a rich dialogue on the growing interest in wisdom in leadership with business leaders and academics. I enjoyed meeting up with Prof em. Peter Pruzan again and his wife Kirsten. Peter was a prime mover in the social accounting movement in the 1990s and then the European Academy of Business in Society (EABIS). Both movements have contributed hugely to the development of the stakeholder approach to business and the engagement of larger firms with society in Europe. Peter is a pioneer and following some profound spiritual experiences re-orientated his life and work around a spirituality, seeking to encourage others to find the “divine spark” within. Peter exudes encouragement, love and warmth combined with a sharp mind and a rich academic history in economics, accounting and management.

Peter and Kirsten gave the keynote speech on "Leading with Wisdom" based on their book of interviews with 31 CEOs on how their spirituality has been a source of wisdom and inspiration in their lives. Peter said that more and more leaders are asking themselves questions both individually and organisationally:
"Who are we?"
"Why are we here?".
As one example Peter and Kirsten quoted Lars Kolind, former CEO of Oticon, Denmark:

"If you are serving a purpose and you are doing it based on care and love, you can have great potential and be successful at almost anything"

And at an organisational level they shared a comment by Helene Ploxi, chairman and MD of Pechel Industries, France:

"The purpose of my own organisation and of business in general is creating wealth for the largest number of people without hurting others."

At first sight these may seem idealistic claims but as we discovered through further dialogue the claims can be rooted in pragmatic business models. Prof em. Gerrit Broekstra gave us both a model ("Deep Leadership") and cases of two companies that had demonstrated a wise leadership approach: IBM and Wipro. Prof Gilbert Lenssen shared news of an exciting Practical Wisdom project sponsored by EABIS and Yale University to explore the links between religious and spiritual traditions in providing practical wisdom for management. Business leaders from Philips, BNP Paribas and Wellco shared their experiences of wise leadership in a pragmatic way. Much of what was shared is intrinsic to our foundation and aims at GoodBrand of becoming a community of wise practitioners in supporting clients in finding wise solutions to the challenges of sustainability that meet economic, social, ethical and environmental goals.

At the conference, I spoke about wisdom-based leadership and defined wisdom as the practice of insight by an individual based on knowledge and perception which results in disinterested and just judgments that are respected by others. The emerging sustainable society of the 21st century places additional demands on multinational firms to take responsibility for their social and environmental impacts and their role in society. This goes beyond the latter twentieth century paradigm of the ‘knowledge economy’. In 1968 Drucker questioned whether knowledge-based leadership alone is sufficient for the moral challenges that he envisaged would emerge from the knowledge economy produced by late twentieth century capitalism. He said that new knowledge leads to new power and new wealth which requires a capacity of decision-making that has the competency to weigh potential impacts on society and the environment beyond the immediate demands of the market or scientific advancement.

Organisations utilise a range of rational and socio-cultural processes to resolve competing claims and interests. However, critical management studies have highlighted the nature of managerial power in which powerful actors lead with a dominant ideology akin to their own self-interest leading to difficulties in resolving organisational dilemmas in objective ways.

In organisational leadership and management, wisdom is a state of heightened awareness and the recognition of one’s own inner drives and needs and the inner drives and needs of others. For this capacity to be wise rather than simply perceptive, the insight needs to be energised by the ability to be disinterested. The quality of being disinterested is perhaps better understood by the notion of unself-interested, springing from a commitment to serve for the benefit of all, or to serve the cause of justice, rather than for the cause of self-interest alone. There may well be a personal cost to being unself-interested although wisdom is not a virtue of ascetic self-denial. Rather is is the capacity to wisely balance self-interest with the interests of others and, in weighing that balance, accepting that there may be some ‘cost’ or sacrifice to oneself. The potential clash of inner drives might be described as the clash between homo economicus and homo spiritualis. But that's another story...