East and West Approaches to the Common Good

It would not be true to say that our publishers, Garant (Antwerp), have rushed to get our book out for Christmas sales. It's not really that kind of book. Leadership, Spirituality and the Common Good: East and West Approaches was published last week for the people who are interested in the topic of spirituality and its application to society and business. Spirituality has become one of those "in" topics even though we all struggle to really define what we mean by it. This book is an approach to leadership and the rich idea of the Common Good, of which CSR is a post-modern corporatist expression of a social 'good'. Eight authors mainly drawn from academia have edited by Professor Henri-Claude de Bettignies, Distinguished Professor of Globally Responsible Leadership at the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS and me).

Spirituality is not religion and "profane spirituality", to use Prof. Luk Bouckaert’s expression from his chapter, is accessible to any human being. Luk's description of "profane spirituality" is anchored in everyday life and aims “to inspire our day-to-day profane life, or to put it slightly more poetically: ‘to open our eyes to what is happening just beneath the skin of our ordinary lives’”. As organisations are learning how to harness the “whole person” and the universal spiritual energy that is at the core of each of us, we see emerging a growing interest in spiritual leadership, spiritual capital and even in the “spiritual enterprise”. The particular focus of this book is on the need for responsible leaders who understand and accept their responsibility to steward the resources in their care for the good of their organisation and for the Common Good. Such leaders will have developed the capacity to integrate the economic, the social and the environmental realms and inspire trust in their organisational communities through the quality of their character and spirit. The Common Good calls us towards benevolence and cooperation with the other as a counterweight to the Self and to the ego of the material realm. As Rosmini wrote: “self-interest, when it is found alone, is always negative and ignoble.” *

*Rosmini, Antonio, "Storia comparativa e critica dei sistemi intorno al principio della morale", en Principi della scienza morale e Storia comparativa e critica dei sistemi intorno al principio della morale. 1941.