Beacons of Business - 33

[Guest guest]

Sairam Sisters and Brothers,

We will continue to listen from Andrè L. Delbecq, Director - Institute for

Spirituality and Organisation Leadership, J. Thomas and Kathleen L. McCarthy

University Professor, Santa Clara University, Alameda, CA, USA.

---

"In a seminar I taught at the Santa Clara University, in the Leavey School of

Business, entitled "The Management of High Technology" for MBA students, I used

to invite prominent business leaders from Silicon Valley's technology complex to

come and talk about their most difficult problems. The difficulty might be a

lawsuit, a product launch problem, the complexities of integration of

businesses following a merger or acquisition, or ramping up for large-scale

manufacturing. The particular challenges varied greatly. The purpose was to

share the generic nature of strategic struggles where both means and ends are

unclear as the leader embraces the problem.

Throughout the years, MBA students offered two major observations or leanings

from their experience. The first lesson was how difficult such challenges were

in a fast moving, contemporary, and complex organisation. No matter how tough

they thought leading an organisation through such difficulties might be, their

prior imaginings didn't begin to capture the reality of the complexity these

leaders were facing. These problems involved long lines of causation, required

linking loosely coupled stakeholders in difficult alliances, and involved

sustaining others through long periods of effort.

The second lesson was the enormous moral integrity of these men and women

leading these corporations. The students came to see that what allowed these

leaders to succeed was the fact that they were operating from a deep inner

compass. These were leaders who were not opportunistic or exploitive. The focus

of these leaders was serving society well through all the difficulties of

evolving an efficient and effective organisation to provide their product or

service in fast moving, competitive settings.

Still, these working professional MBAs would always spend more time in their

reports discussing their impression of the courage, integrity and ethics of the

leader than they would spend on the analysis of the exemplified business

strategy. Note that these leaders were not invited to talk about ethics, or

integrity. The focus was on business strategy. However their ethical and moral

courage just flowed transparently through their discussion of whatever business

problems they described.

In this seminar, on one occasion we had a leader make a presentation who was not

particularly ethical. Rather, he was quite brutal and opportunistic. After he

departed I asked the students for their impression of this particular

presentation. It was summarised best by the statement of one young woman who

said, "The Board of Directors will let him finish this particular task and then

they will see that he is history." She was right. He was removed as CEO shortly

after speaking to our seminar.

The point is simply this: the majority of successful organisational leaders I

have encountered in Silicon Valley are individuals of high moral and ethical

functioning. The broken and twisted are usually found out and removed before

rising to top leadership posts. Contrary to the impression one might form from

media coverage of business scandals, we found the majority of leaders to be

individuals of great inner depth and goodness. It was their personal

integration that allowed them to rise to positions of leadership."

© Global Dharma Center 2004

http://www.globaldharma.org