November 10, 2022
“The crises we face are not a science problem, they are a human problem.” – Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart, announcing Walmart’s commitment to become a “Regenerative Company”
Doug McMillon is right. As we confront the triple, mutually reinforcing challenges of an ongoing pandemic, wrenching social inequity, and the mounting threat of irreversible environmental breakdown, we must acknowledge that these issues are driven by human beings and are, therefore, “a human problem.”1 A human problem because these crises can be informatively understood as arising out of an “industrial age paradigm” of public and private leadership and public policy that is premised on what science is increasingly revealing to be a misunderstanding of human nature, the same misunderstanding that has distorted micro and macroeconomic theory and policy for generations. It turns out that human nature is the part of nature that citizens in developed economies have most painfully misunderstood.
Fortunately, a new dignity-first leadership paradigm is emerging across executive, enterprise and economic leadership. It may be too little acknowledged now, but there is reason to expect it can effect remarkably penetrating, broad, and needed change. It is grounded in more than a generation of experimental and theoretical science across disciplines, which has prompted a revaluation of human nature. Contemporary social psychology, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience and cognitive science have revealed our irreducibly social nature as homo sapiens. We are profoundly social mammals with an evolved, differentiating hunger and aptitude for creating positive social meaning. As related scientific understandings become more popular, top thought leaders in executive, enterprise, and economic leadership – who seem largely unaware of each other’s related work – are increasingly recognizing the need and opportunity to re-imagine the nature and purpose of leadership and to center dignity.2
What top thought leaders across executive, enterprise, and economic leadership propose constitutes a discernible change in the assumed fundamental frameworks of perception and practice in leadership. This approach holds great promise for individual leaders and for-profit and civil enterprises willing to acknowledge they are rightly understood to be dependent on (and rightly recognizing and serving all the individuals) the communities and natural systems that sustain them.
Many business leaders, in particular, will assert that what Walmart’s CEO describes as an “astonishing moment of truth,” wherein “the entire world is coming together whether we realize it or not” that the “human problem” is what is driving this challenge, is beyond what most any business leader can smartly address, save for perhaps the CEO of the world’s largest employer. But the argument that business leaders should focus tightly on the practical productivity of those they are charged with managing is better understood as part of the “human problem,” suggested by Walmart’s CEO as, in fact, at the heart of the health, social, and ecological crises we face.
I first proposed this paradigm shift in a January 2021 blog post on the website of a small company I founded and built, Sustainability Roundtable Inc. Now, after a summer of unprecedented global heat, continuing health crises, and an appalling war of aggression in the Ukraine waged by Putin’s extractive regime, I want to be more direct. My proposal is immodest, specific, and with the help of legions of other similarly inclined – including possibly you – it could potentially effect cascading and desperately needed change. It is that executive, enterprise, and economic leaders should recognize the need and opportunity to evolve beyond seeking greater efficiency in some imprecisely imagined machine in their minds and instead center, serve, and magnify the dignity (for the purposes of this writing: “the positive social meaning”) of each individual and natural system that sustains the leader, enterprise and/or economy.3
Leaders who embrace a “dignity first” paradigm, putting employees and (ergo) the natural world before short term benefit, and center organizational strategy and execution that magnifies the dignity of human beings and the nature that sustains them, can build remarkably creative and resilient organizations with growing positive societal and environmental impact.
Embracing this approach that moves beyond short-term cash metrics (even while regularly improving them) can position executive, enterprise, and economic leadership to support the non-linear, breakthrough change required to help reverse human-caused climate and ecological breakdown.
I hope those interested in this immodest proposal will review the full 2021 version of this essay and recognize there is an opportunity to move from a need-based seeking of efficiency to a care-based offering of dignity to ourselves, others, and the natural world that sustains us all. Top leaders – some of the most successful leaders in the world today – are already doing it. I also hope that many who consider this proposal will recognize that they could play a needed and impactful role in successfully defining, reifying, and promoting this fundamental paradigm change – to help catalyze its full flowering – even on the scale of global systems change. How could this happen? Well, it is highly improbable and dauntingly difficult, but leading experts in systems change have long acknowledged that it is possible to deliberately change fundamental frameworks of perception – and when these frameworks change, the cascading effect causes systems-level change.
Beyond paradigm change being possible, there are several reasons making the proposed change in fundamental framing more likely, despite the almost absurd audacity of seeking to name, promote, and help effect a paradigm change in the nature and purpose of global leadership. The reasons that make the specific proposed reframing to center dignity more likely to succeed include: first, the proposed change is tied to, and meaningfully grows out of, a recognized change in globally respected science regarding our nature as human beings. Second, the proposed change is aided by the fact it leverages centuries established and cross- culturally resonant terminology aligned with respected ancient art and wisdom – when it invokes our shared demand for “dignity” and seeks to have leaders center and serve it. Third, the change proposed is simple, specific and memorable. Fourth, it is a change addressed both very widely and specifically to those who want to lead at every level at a time when many agree the failure in leadership has been epic. Fifth, the likelihood of accomplishing this immodest change is aided by the fact it seems to resonate in a manner that transcends race, religion, and region in an awesomely diverse global context—without denying their importance.
Finally, it is now only clearer that the possibility of this simple change proving effective, broad and deep is supported by the need for some sort of timely, repeatable and scalable change. As the UN Secretary General António Guterres has observed, we are collectively walking on a path that is “immoral and suicidal.” Consequently, the conditions are right for the exponential growth and impact of a new theory and practice of leadership.
The Needed & Emerging Paradigm Change
Fortunately, the scholarship supporting – and in some instances reflecting – the proposed change to dignity-centered leadership is already impressive and growing. What has yet to be acknowledged is that this is happening not only within executive leadership, enterprise leadership, and economic leadership but, also, across these spheres. A great place to begin examining this scholarship is in the prescient work of Donella Meadows, a Dartmouth College environmental scientist. Meadows, who died too young in 2001 but whose work has grown increasingly more important, focused on systems change to avert environmental collapse. Meadows published a seminal essay in 1999 entitled: “Leverage Points; Twelve Places to Intervene in a System.” Therein, she detailed twelve leverage points through which one could work to change large and complex systems such as a large corporation, an economy, or even our relationship to the natural world. Meadows identified “transcendence” and “paradigm change” as the first and second most highly leveraged ways to effect change in complex systems. By the first, she meant the ability to intellectually and emotionally internalize that every system is premised on certain paradigms or fundamental “mental models,” such that someone could transcend their own most ingrained or assumed frameworks of perception. Regarding the second, “paradigm change”, Meadows was borrowing a concept from Thomas Kuhn’s well-noted 1962 book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” which held that once a “paradigm” or fundamental framework is changed (e.g., the idea in early medicine that sickness was in the blood and that, therefore, bloodletting would help), the entire related field would change.
Diagram depiction of Donella Meadows’ Twelve Leverage Points. Source: Cities Journal article.
Meadows asserted that leaders could transcend their received traditions and that largely unconscious paradigmatic frameworks of perception can be identified and deliberately changed through concerted efforts to effect great practical change system-wide. To the extent that a market-based model of behavior focused on controlling, extracting, and exchanging “things” is a degrading instrumentalization of the natural world, then this is exactly the type of paradigm Meadows would hope leaders could change. To advance that, Meadows counseled both a systematic and dramatic highlighting of the faults of the incumbent paradigm and a relentless assertion of the supplanting paradigm’s advantages. To follow Meadows’ lead, it is necessary to move beyond a critique of the current faltering market-based paradigm and to examine the advantages of a proposed, superior paradigm.
This approach recalls business consultant Stephen Covey (author of “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”) who, after encouraging legions of readers to optimize their existence (“interdependence is a higher value than independence”) within an industrial age paradigm—in which controlling, extracting, and exchanging “things” is de rigueur—revealed his “Eighth Habit:” Find your voice and inspire others to find theirs. In the new “leading with dignity” paradigm, Covey’s interdependence is both prescriptive and profound.
In “The 8th Habit; From Effectiveness to Greatness” (2004), Covey recognized the fundamental “problem” of the “post-industrial knowledge economy” is that most managers continue to embrace an “industrial age paradigm” that seeks to control, extract and exchange “things,” including people, as opposed to respecting people as creative, choice-making ends in themselves, who seek their own voice and purpose. Covey quoted Henry David Thoreau in saying “there are thousands hacking at the branches of evil to one that is striking at the root.” And in identifying what Covey conceptualized as the “industrial age paradigm,” Covey seems to have been striking at the root of what Walmart’s CEO recognized as our current “human problem.” This may explain why Doug McMillon felt it was all together appropriate for the world’s largest employer to make a deliberate, public, values-defining commitment to its practical opposite in: “reverence, respect and compassion for ourselves, all other people and the natural world that sustains us all.”
A Paradigm Change Grounded in Science
Science is revealing the daunting breadth, depth, and urgency of the existential challenge we face in human-caused environmental breakdown, which is undermining the order of life on earth in our time, for all time. But it is also, through digitalization and the internet, increasingly connecting us as never before. Moreover, across disciplines including social psychology, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science, a new understanding of human nature has emerged over the last twenty to thirty years that validates ancient art and wisdom that long held that human beings have a passionate need – and talent – for creating shared meaning. So, we have reason to have faith in the success we increasingly understand that we must together create. The emerging (though in actuality, immemorial) appreciation for our irreducibly social nature as human beings helps us understand how and why it is reasonable to hope we can evolve in our basic frameworks of perception, from always looking to “utilize” to what we can be, both for others and for our natural world, with a deeper sense of gratitude for what we already are.
In Kate Raworth’s 2017 book “Doughnut Economics: 7 Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist,” the former long-time economist for Oxfam who helped develop the UN Sustainable Development Goals is especially cogent when arguing against a macro-economics that assumes perfect information, rationalism, and the absence of politics. More persuasively than dozens of prominent thinkers before her, Raworth lampoons the development of a reductionist economics that assumes those participating in an economy are not committed parents, children, citizens, and faith and community participants before they are perfectly informed, individual, utility-maximizing consumers. And which assumes economies should be optimized to increase Gross Domestic Product, even if “GDP” does, as Robert Kennedy once observed, “measure everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”4 And fails to measure all sorts of value – like that of parenting – as well as all sorts of costs, like the world-threatening cost of carbon pollution. So, Raworth proposes a well-being – or what might fairly be described as a human dignity-first – centered “Doughnut Economics,” which asserts that in order to enable personal and societal development and avoid citizens falling into a proverbial hole of only growing need, while also setting limits on consumption required by environmental limits, it is necessary to meet real human needs.
Kate Raworth builds her persuasive argument on the basis of the changed scientific understanding of the nature of human beings. The cross-discipline change in the scientific understanding of human motivations and behavior is what inspired Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and sociologist, to create Yale University’s “The Human Nature Lab.” In 2019 Doctor Christakis wrote “Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society” which offers an excellent survey of relevant experimental and theoretical science supporting the revaluation of human nature that has found humans to be definingly “pro-social.”
From Seeking Efficiency to Offering Dignity
A change in the scientific understanding of human nature obviously has shaping impact on what used to be called moral philosophy as well as on political theory. A scholar who has taken those impacts seriously is Francis Fukuyama, who serves as the Director of the Rule of Law & Democracy Center at Stanford. Specifically, Fukuyama has offered a deeply historical argument that the newly recognized “pro-social” orientation of human beings was actually long recognized by, and indeed foundational to, significant traditions in western political thought. In his flawed but luminous and timely 2018 book “Identity: The Demands for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment,” Fukuyama (whose grandparents suffered in the Japanese Internment during WWII and was not taught Japanese growing up), examines the intellectual and political enthusiasm for racial, ethnic, and sexual identity in the U.S. and the resulting violent, authoritarian, white nationalist reaction.
The best part of the book is the first half of the second chapter entitled “The Third Part of the Soul.” Therein, Fukuyama recognizes economic theories are built on theories of human behavior which are, in turn, built on theories of human nature. Fukuyama summarizes the case against modern economics based on the more social understanding of human nature as revealed by contemporary science. He then reaches back to one of the first recorded discussions of the human soul in a fascinating attempt to help develop a vocabulary of story and words to discuss the more social nature of human motivations science now supports.
In just a few sentences, Fukuyama cites psychologist, economist, and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, author of the 2015 best seller “Thinking Fast and Slow” and Kehneman’s collaborator, mathematical psychologist and cognitive scientist Amos Tversky, in their critique of modern economics and their work helping to establish behavioral economics. Fukuyama then explains that contemporary economics is premised on the theory that humans are “rational utility maximizers.” This theory rests on multiple assumptions, including that the correct unit of account is the individual (not a company, family, or community) and that individuals cooperate to advance their individual self-interest, wherein an individual’s preferences – “for a car, for sexual gratification, for a pleasant vacation” – make up what economists call a person’s “utility function.” Thus, a hedge fund manager betting for another billion and a Marine jumping on a grenade to save his team are both said to be “maximizing their preferences.”
What is needed, Fukuyama asserts, is a theory to explain why some pursue money and security, while others sacrifice money and time or even die for causes greater than themselves. Which, although Fukuyama does not mention it, is a question that organizational science has explored going back at least to Douglas McGregor’s classic work of organizational theory “The Human Side of Enterprise” (1960), known for its contrasting assertion of a “Theory X” (that employees were largely only concerned with their immediate self-interest) and “Theory Y” (that employees are creative and naturally self-motivated to advance enterprise goals but require leaders who recognize that and facilitate their more independent contributions). In 2022, it is safe to say Theory Y has been validated by both social psychology and generations of successful management strategies driven by prominent leaders, including those who report success with Steven Covey’s earlier-mentioned “The 8th Habit.”
Perhaps because evidence of predictably self-sacrificing, prosocial human proclivities is well established elsewhere, Fukuyama did not in his 2018 book examine emerging social psychology or cognitive science. He instead turns to the cultural authority of Plato and examines one of the foundational texts in Western philosophy. Fukuyama does so to recover how Plato categorized what for centuries was viewed as a central wellspring of human motivation, long ago obscured by the rise of utilitarian and materialistic philosophies and contemporary economics and its reductionist interest in “material utility.”
Fukuyama turns to Book IV of “The Republic” to recount how Plato imagines Socrates leading two aristocratic students through a dialogue to examine different parts of the human soul (in Greek: “psyche”). The dialogue explores hypothetical situations to tease out how a given “psyche” must have different dimensions to it to enable a single person to desire things like water, but know not to pursue it due to any credible concern for poison– or to be committed to the highest standards, but furious with themselves if they submit to baser desires. Then, Socrates and students are imagined to quickly agree the soul has an epithymetikon (from epithymia), or aspect providing bodily appetites located in the stomach, as well as a hopefully governing “logistikon” (from logos), or calculating aspect located in the head. Socrates prompts this student to go further and consider a story of a respected aristocrat who reproached himself angrily for his failure to suppress his interest in looking at an especially morbid scene. Through dialogue, they concluded this was evidence of thumitikon (from thymos), a third dimension of the soul that is often translated as “spiritedness” located in the chest, which may be best described as a passionate hunger for recognized social worth or dignity.
Fukuyama also explored how it can be helpful to distinguish an “isothymia” that seeks a recognition of universal dignity from a “megalothymia” that seeks special, exclusionary honors. He asserts that what was discussed in “The Republic” was, by these definitions, the megalothymia of ancient Greece’s aristocratic order and specifically a description of Plato’s idealized Guardians, who are brought up from childhood to be “courageous, moderate, holy and free” [Book III, Sec. 395]. Fukuyama suggests that much of the rise of democratic societies in history could be understood as the evolution from a “megalothymatic” ordering into an “isothymatic” ordering, as what began as an aristocratic demand for exclusive honors grew into a demand for universal dignity. Unfortunately, Fukuyama does not consider how a society committed to universal dignity might be complemented by an aligned system enabling greater self-chosen commitments for exclusive honors based on prosocial accomplishments.5
Fukuyama does, however, provide an example of how recovering the discussion of the Greek concept of Thymos – a hunger for dignity – can help us. He asserts that, for centuries up to and including Hegel’s influential work, our thymotic hunger for dignity was accepted as the principal driver in human relations and even history itself. Fukuyama explores how recovering this “third dimension of the soul” might help us better address our current challenges, including the daunting challenge of an anti-rational, ethnic nativism that is rising globally and making it difficult to address challenges in social equity and environmental breakdown. Because discussions of our hunger for dignity moves beyond the tired framing of our “baser” interest in the material advantage of one’s perceived group (think of the epithymia of the Greek stomach) versus the enlightened self-interest of the shared and greater good (think of the logos of the Greek head). This is something that was well understood by leaders before economic thinking conquered all. Napoleon appears to have appreciated the vital role of our hunger for dignity when he famously observed: “You call these metals and ribbons baubles; well, it is with such baubles men are led . . . do you think you would be able to make men fight by reasoning? Never, that is only good for the scholar in his study.”6
Dignity First Executive Leadership
Beyond political theory, the changed and emerging understanding of human nature is increasingly supporting and encouraging a “dignity first” paradigm in executive, enterprise, and economic leadership, even if this precise term is not used. The paragon of this in executive leadership is Dr. Donna Hicks of Harvard’s JFK School of Government. She is the most explicit among top thought leaders in urging the embrace of “dignity-centered leadership.” Hicks is a psychologist who gained global notice through her success in advancing the peace process in Northern Ireland, and between Palestine and Israel. In her 2017 “Leading with Dignity: How to Create a Culture that Brings Out the Best in People,” Dr. Hicks proposed a new paradigm for leadership that is premised on a scientific understanding of human nature and centered on a leader’s relationship with oneself, other people, and the world at large. Since she emerged as a leader in international dispute resolution and teaches at a leading school in public administration, Dr. Hicks’ ground-breaking work on the role of “dignity” in organizational leadership has not been as widely discussed as it deserves in the popular and academic discourse on responsible business leadership. Ken Frazier, Chairman & CEO of Merck & Co., Inc. has, however, recognized that: “Donna Hicks articulates for business leaders not only a grand concept but also a practical framework for strengthening corporate culture by recognizing and promoting the inherent value of each employee.”
Since Dr. Hicks’ new paradigm for executive leadership was developed outside of any business school and as a model for societal leadership throughout the world, it is not surprising that it is well aligned with the markedly expanded social and environmental expectations and demands facing today’s business leaders. It is also not surprising that Dr. Hicks’ 2011 book “Dignity: Its Essential Role in Resolving Conflict” and her 2017 “Leading with Dignity” both reflect a sophisticated understanding of the emerging cross-discipline reevaluation of human nature that has occurred over the last generation. This exploration examines the success she has had centering “dignity” in international dispute resolution and in executive leadership teaching and advising. In “Leading with Dignity,” Hicks praises Michael Pirson’s “Humanistic Management: Protecting Dignity and Promoting Well-Being” (2017) and the International Humanistic Management Network which Pirson leads. Pirson’s book provides an academically rigorous explication of the management science supporting Hicks’ approach to leadership.
What Dr. Hicks proposes is relatively simple: a focus on personal excellence and relationships, as opposed to system or model optimization. Dr. Hicks expressly focuses on the quality of relationships, including an important relationship with the broader world. Hicks’ work supports an emerging, human, not market-centered paradigm, premised on a generation of scientific learning across disciplines that validates ancient thought traditions about human nature. It also could prepare enterprises, and ultimately economies, to address the immense challenge a generation of global science has revealed we face in human-caused environmental breakdown. It is a new paradigm of leadership that seems well designed to resonate with the souls (i.e., in Greek: “psyche”) of those women and men inclined to work together in a creative and purposed solidarity to transform our “human problem” into a demanding but brilliant flourishing, wherein complex and even chaotic systems including large enterprises, markets, and economies are organized by a well-reasoned and passionately lived commitment to make them serve the demands of the universal, inviolable, and inalienable dignity of all the individuals involved and the natural environment that sustains us all. Those who embrace this approach should enjoy a flourishing that will be first their own but – as science suggests is necessary – is expressly for the benefit of others.
Dr. Hicks’ leadership paradigm is an excellent approach for those who want to address the “human problem” Walmart’s CEO acknowledged and to improve our relationship with ourselves, others, and with the broader world in the context of irreversible environmental breakdown which we must address. Furthermore, Dr. Hicks’ proposed paradigm for leadership is also aligned with, first, the emerging consensus in enterprise theory and practice from “shareholder first” approaches to purpose-driven multi-stakeholder value creation; and, second, the distinct, aligned evolution of macro-economic theory and analysis that also seeks to take into account current science about human nature as well as complexity theory and the mounting existential environmental threats.
Dignity First Enterprise Leadership
At the enterprise level, the mechanics of leading with dignity have already been established and compellingly demonstrated. A good way to illustrate this is by connecting Meadows and Hicks to Rebecca Henderson, who published “Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire” in 2020. The first two words of that title is the name of the most popular class at Harvard Business School, which Henderson has led in teaching for ten years. Henderson’s book was reviewed on this Sustainable Leadership blog and provides dozens of case studies of impressive twenty-first century enterprise leadership. Henderson even briefly mentions business leaders’ engagement with economic development at large. Specifically, she cites Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, who partnered to write “Why Nations Fail” in 2015 and “The Narrow Corridor; States Societies, and the Fate of Liberty” in 2019, to encourage business leaders to move beyond the blinkered framing of “government versus markets” and, instead, recognize the superiority of the “inclusive versus extractive” framing that is broadly accepted among development economists.
Henderson’s focus, however, is on next generation enterprise strategy; and she makes an important contribution to that through her persuasive arguments and case studies encouraging business leaders to move beyond a prioritization of short-term shareholder interest to a shared purpose-driven, multi-stakeholder, long-term value creation. Henderson recognizes that this now must occur in a changed context that is shaped by a world that is actually and increasingly “on fire.” Consistent with Harvard Business School’s practical focus on case studies, she does this through dozens of compelling, detailed examples of aligned leadership. She does not focus on naming or delineating the new paradigm for leadership itself.
Outside of the academic realm, there is emerging consensus that, at the enterprise level, a new paradigm should be embraced. In August of 2019, 181 CEOs of America’s largest corporations who participate in the Business Roundtable committed to a purpose driven, multi-stakeholder approach to long-term value creation. In the Statement on the Purpose of the Corporation, these CEOs specifically recognized that corporations exist to benefit stakeholders such as customers, employees, suppliers, and host communities as much as shareholders. This represented an unnoted but unmistakable reversal of a Business Roundtable publicly declared definition of the purpose of the corporations from 1997: “The paramount duty of management and of boards of directors is to the corporation’s stockholders. The interests of the other stakeholders are relevant as a derivative of the duty to the stockholders.”
This high-profile reversal has helped catapult the “multi-stakeholder capitalism,” advocated for more than a generation by the World Economic Forum, which meets annually in Davos and is reflected in “Davos Manifesto 2020,” into mainstream business strategy in the U.S. and globally. Most recently, Andrew Winston and former Unilever CEO Paul Polman’s “Net-Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take,” serves as a rallying cry for corporate social responsibility rooted in stakeholder primacy. What’s missing, however, is an explication of the necessary paradigm shift—not only from short-termism to long-termism and from shareholder primacy to stakeholder primacy, but also in the even more fundamental framing that imagines a reductionist, closed-loop, machine-like system that needs greater efficiency to one that recognizes complexity and seeks to offer greater dignity to all the stakeholders involved. This can be found in Mark Carney’s opus, “Value(s),” in which the foundation of values-based leadership is grounded in dignity. In 2021, Carney exposed the schism enterprise leadership must address: “Value in the market is increasingly determining the values of society. We are living Oscar Wilde’s aphorism – knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing – at incalculable costs to our society, to future generations and to our planet.”
Dignity First Economic Leadership
Beyond Kate Raworth, top thought leaders in economic planning have also been embracing a dignity-first paradigm, such as Mariana Mazzacuto, Professor of Economics and Innovation and Public Value at University College London, in her works “The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy” and “Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism.” Although little noted, this new paradigm of leadership has even reached the highest levels of policy development in the United States. Gene Sperling, former Chief Economic Advisor to Presidents Clinton and Obama, published a book in 2020 entitled “Economic Dignity,” which proposed bringing a dignity-first approach to economic policy making. Although he did not mention Dr. Hicks or Kate Raworth, in his book Sperling advances an organizing and multi-faceted commitment to meeting the minimum needs required to enable every person’s flourishing as a recognition of – and investment in – their inalienable human dignity. In doing so, Sperling recognizes the inadequacy of former approaches he helped lead that sought to optimize a massive and complex U.S. economy, but failed the very citizens it was supposed to serve. So, he proposes to now begin with meeting minimum needs first, which is consistent with the hard-won wisdom of Germany’s post World War II 1949 Basic Law (i.e., Constitution) which begins: “Human dignity shall be inviolable. To protect and respect it is the duty of all state authority.” Soon, hopefully, global businesses will begin to see how this foundational principle for public authorities can be applied to the private enterprises that public authorities charter.
For a systems-change roadmap in public expectations and the public sector, we can look to economist Mariana Mazzucato’s “The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy” (2018) and “Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism” (2021). Mazzucato is a Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College, London. In both books she argues that capitalism can be redefined, not by the private sector, but by governments and policymakers willing to commit to the currently “impossible” – to define the value that will make it possible and even get it done. Mazzucato argues that we can do better than Oscar Wilde’s cynic who “knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.” If we return to the center of economics, the examination of the nature of “value” needs to be expressly tied to how an item or process, within complex systems, advances human purposes. This is, in turn, advanced by a theory of micro-economic value creation within a given enterprise that dignifies multiple stakeholders including supplier, labor, manager, consumer, and citizen of an enterprise’s host community, who all help create and evaluate an enterprise’s value.
Conclusion
In what appears to most to be an increasingly complex, even chaotic world that is ever more globalized and science-informed (at least at a leadership level), there is now a brilliant opportunity to embrace a simple but profound new paradigm of executive, enterprise, and economic leadership. Doing so can enable the most courageous, compassionate, and creative to out-perform peers by moving beyond a deadening attempt to extract value through seeking to make incompletely imagined machines more “efficient,” to no less than systematically, regularly, and practically vindicating the dignity of specific human beings and specific parts of the natural world that sustains us all. A self-serving attitude that seeks to “utilize” what Pope Francis described in “Laudato Si: On Care For Our Common Home,” his epic encyclical on integral ecology, as “the rest of the single garment of creation,” is individually and cumulatively bankrupting, whereas a thriving individual organism will regularly provide a generous “net positive” and regenerative contribution to a broader ecology to help it become sustainable. Consistent with this insight, we should remember the ancient Vedic wisdom that recognized “the fruit is not for the tree.” And we can dare to imagine – even those of us who are not religious – the change of consciousness that Pope Francis proposes in “Laudato Si,” when he communicates a radically decentered and complete sense of gratitude through quoting the presumably Shinto-influenced Bishops of Japan and recognizes: “To sense each creature singing the hymn of its existence, is to live joyfully in G-d’s love and hope.”
In executive, enterprise, and economic leadership, there is now an opportunity to center and magnify the dignity of all the unique and irreplaceable stakeholders who sustain us as leaders. It is now intellectually deeply supported in leadership literature, in the emerging understanding of human motivations, and in behavioral economics. Practically, we can practice this through the trinity of commitments Dr. Hicks proposes to our best selves as servant leaders, to enabling our colleagues’ and our customers’ best selves, and through a defining natural, regenerative, net-positive relationship to our environment that sustains us all. In a time of manifesting crisis and attendant confusion brought on by human-caused climate and ecological breakdown, this can be a shared and redemptive purpose. At every level of leadership—family, community, corporations, nations, and the world– a commitment to offer a “net positive” and “regenerative” magnification of every stakeholder’s inviolable and inalienable dignity.
Footnotes
Jim Boyle is the CEO & Founder of Sustainability Roundtable, Inc. For more than a dozen years, Jim has led full-time teams of diverse experts to assist nearly 100 Fortune 500 and growth companies in their move to more sustainable high-performance. Specifically, SR Inc has helped world-leading corporations, real estate owners, and federal agencies to set goals, drive progress, and report results in their move to greater Corporate Sustainability. Mr. Boyle led in the creation of SR Inc’s Renewable Energy Procurement Services (REPS), which advises and represents Fortune 500 and fast growth companies across the U.S. and internationally in the development of renewable energy strategies and the procurement of both on and off-site advanced energy solutions. Before founding SR Inc, Mr. Boyle co-led Trammell Crow Company Corporate Advisory Services in San Francisco and returned to his native Boston and Trammell Crow Company’s market leading team in Greater Boston where he received the Commercial Brokers Association’s Platinum Award for the highest level of commercial real estate transactions. Earlier, he advised companies on real estate and environmental matters as an attorney at a large law firm based in Boston. Jim is a graduate of Middlebury College, where he co-captained the football team, and Boston College Law School. Early in his career, he served as a federal law clerk, an aide to John F. Kerry in the U. S. Senate, and on Vice President Al Gore’s campaign for President. Jim lives in Concord, MA with his wife and kids a half mile across the street from Emerson’s house and museum on the route to Walden Pond.
