Leadership

The other week my business school, CEIBS Shanghai, hosted a two day conference on Practical Wisdom for Management from the Chinese Classical Traditions in conjunction with the European Academy of Business in Society (EABIS). We were trying to get to grips with the potential for Confucianist and Daoist wisdom to inform management practice. I presented a paper which explored the tensions between consumerist hedonic values and traditional values still passed through Chinese families and networks today.

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These are the 63 MBA students from Shanghai Jiaotong University who I have been teaching for the past two weeks. They have taken two years out of their managerial careers to achieve an MBA and the title of my course was "Management Ethics and CSR" which enabled us to have lively discussion on doing good and doing well through business. Jiaotong University are making a strong statement by making the course 'core' and not elective.

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President Hu Jintao comforts an injured girl at a makeshift hospital in Yushu. Photo:Liao Pan/China News Both President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao cut short their BRIC / LatAm meetings to get back to "direct" the rescue work of the quake affected people in Yushu. The tragedy of the Quake is hard to imagine as children lie under the rubble, some dead and some, as we saw yesterday, still alive. So far the death toll is 2,064 with 175 missing and 12,135 wounded. Wen was the first back and the press have been keen to show him with the suffering victims.

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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).

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Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? T. S. Eliot, ‘Choruses from the Rock’. The GoodBrand Community are meeting in Windsor this Friday to discuss wisdom and how we can nurture it in our personal and work lives. We shall be asking ourselves questions like: How would I define wisdom? Why is wisdom important for me in the work I do and aspire to do?

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I have been looking into wisdom as a leadership virtue and finding that it is closely allied to humility. It is difficult to imagine a respected wise leader as being haughty and arrogant. S/he is more likely to be concerned about the quality of the organisation, its effectiveness and the quality of its relationships internally and with its stakeholders rather than with 'ego-branding'.

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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.

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A cave at the Napoleonic Citadel in Villefrance, 11-12 September 2009:

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