Blog

Please Join Us Online for Presentation of Our Annual Dayton Awards

The globally recognized 1994 Caux Round Table (CRT) ethical Principles for Business reflect the special legacy of Minnesota business leadership in seeking success through service to community and stakeholders. This remarkable legacy was epitomized by the Dayton Family – founders and owners of Dayton’s Department Store and Target Corporation, generous benefactors of the arts and community organizations.

To recognize the continuing importance of socially responsible leadership, the CRT annually recognizes executives who have distinguished themselves and their organizations in service to community.

Please join us online at 1:00 pm (CST) on Thursday, March 25 as we recognize Andrew Cecere, Chairman, President and CEO of U.S. Bancorp, for his determined engagement on behalf of the homeless to provide them with new facilities for shelter and meals.

The CRT will also recognize Don Samuels, CEO, MicroGrants, and Sondra Samuels, President and CEO, Northside Achievement Zone, for their perseverance in opening economic opportunities for citizens of north Minneapolis.

Thirdly, the CRT will commemorate the leadership of James Ford Bell, the Founder and CEO of what is now General Mills, after World War I in mobilizing Americans in agricultural enterprises to provide food for the hunger in Europe.

Agenda

  • Welcome: Stephen Young, Global Executive Director, CRT
  • Presentation of Award to Andrew Cecere: Brad Anderson, Chairman, CRT; former CEO, Best Buy
  • Remarks: Andrew Cecere, Chairman, President and CEO, U.S. Bancorp
  • Remarks: Cardinal Peter Turkson
  • Presentation of Award to Don Samuels and Sondra Samuels: Brad Anderson, Chairman, CRT; former CEO, Best Buy
  • Remarks: Don Samuels, CEO, MicroGrants
  • Remarks: Sondra Samuels, President and CEO, Northside Achievement Zone
  • Remarks: Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, Founding and Managing Partner, Inclusive Capitalism
  • Retrospective Award to James Ford Bell: Mark Ritchie, President, Global Minnesota, and Jeff Harmening, President and CEO, General Mills
  • Closing Remarks: Stephen Young, Global Executive Director, CRT

In particular, the Dayton Awards seek to dramatize leadership capacities of vision and prudence.

In 1994, at the initiative of several senior Minnesota business executives, the CRT published the first set of global ethical principles for business in Caux, Switzerland. Those principles then inspired the United Nations Global Compact. The CRT principles have informed the growing global movement for corporate social responsibility, which provides a road map for a more moral capitalism.

There are essential abilities required to lead – integrity, courage, compassion, respect and responsibility:

Integrity is being honest and having strong moral principles. Having integrity means you are true to yourself and would do nothing that demeans or dishonors you. Integrity makes you believable, as you know and act on your values.

Courage is strength in the face of adversity and upholding what is right, regardless of what others may think or do. Courage enables you to take a stand, honor commitments and guide the way. Courage is a necessary element of responsibility.

Compassion is having concern for another. It is feeling for and not feeling with the other. Compassion is concern of others in a more global sense.

Respect is a feeling of deep admiration for someone. Leaders ought to be respected and they ought to respect those with whom they work. Demonstrating this perspective is essential to motivate and inspire others.

Responsibility is acting on commitment, will, determination and obligation. Responsibility implies the satisfactory performance of duties, the adequate discharge of obligations and the trustworthy care for or disposition of possessions. It is being willing and able to act in a life-enhancing manner. Responsibility is expected of self, as well as from others.

To register, please click here.

Again, this online event will be taking place at 1:00 pm (CST) on Thursday, March 25.

Meghan Markle and Harry Windsor – The Emotional Cost of Holding Office

Many around the world today are still talking about the self-centered presentations on Sunday of Meghan Markle and her husband, Harry Windsor.

I was a bit taken aback after listening to them with the realization that the Caux Round Table Principles for Government set a standard for persons in their position as members of a royal family.

You can read my thoughts here.

Annual Brandl Program: Community Policing – the Way Forward for a Divided America – Friday, March 19

Law enforcement in America is controversial. Is it just? Is it little more than a repressive apparatus, subjecting the vulnerable and the afflicted to the norms of the ruling class in the cause of maintaining “white privilege?”

Police derives from the Greek word for city – “polis,” which came to embrace the idea of political community. In Latin, this became the ‘res publica,’ which gave rise to “republic.” Policing is part of building and maintaining community.

This was recognized by the founder of modern police forces, Sir Robert Peel. When launching the first police force, the London Metropolitan Police, Sir Robert issued ethical principles to direct the application of police power in the community. He insisted that the police are the community and the community the police.

What we must do both to enhance community and to police effectively depends on our insights into human nature – is our species congenitally good or evil or both at once? Human nature – good or bad – guides both members of the community and the sworn officers of every police force. What kind of character is needed for good policing in America today? What kind of character is needed for our citizens to be fair and just with one another?

Please join us for our annual Brandl Program, this year on “Community Policing – the Way Forward for a Divided America” over Zoom at 11:00 am on Friday, March 19th.

The panelists will include John Harrington, Commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, Matt Bostrom, former Sheriff of Ramsey County and Booker Hodges, Assistant Commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Public Safety.

The program agenda is:

-Welcome: John Hinderaker, President, Center of the American Experiment

-Presentation of Speakers: Laura Bloomberg, Dean, Humphrey School of Public Affairs

-Remarks: John Harrington, Commissioner, Minnesota Department of Public Safety

-Response: Matt Bostrom, former Sheriff, Ramsey County, and Booker Hodges, Assistant Commissioner, Minnesota Department of Public Safety

-Q&A with Speakers: Kate Cimino, Executive Director, Citizens League

-Closing: Jane Leonard, President, Growth & Justice

The event is free and open to the public.

To register, please click here.

The program will conclude at noon.

The Brandl Program is sponsored by the Center of the American Experiment, Citizens League, Growth & Justice, Humphrey School of Public Affairs and the Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism.

The Center Cannot Hold – 2

Recently, I sent to our network some observations on the collapse of the center in American culture and politics. A few days ago, a friend sent me the poll results found below, revealing the inconsistent narratives in which the two poles of American culture and politics have separately adopted.

I cannot vouch for any degree of credibility in these poll results, nor in the polling methodology used to obtain them. That inability is one of the afflictions, I think, we suffer from, living in this age of Twitter truths – nothing is really demonstrably true, that all we read might be empty-headed gossip or worse.

Nevertheless, the different opinions reported do track my personal experiences with friends on the right and on the left. Thus, I wanted to share with you this quite dramatic demonstration of how far apart many Americans are from one another.

In such a culture, what can possibly lift-up ethical discourse or promote the common good?

A Reflection on the Ideological Roots of the Post-Modern American Left

For months now, I have been trying to better understand the evolution of the old socialist left into today’s “progressive left,” which has suddenly, since last summer, become so dominant in our media, institutions of higher education, elite culture and politics.

When I was in college, the first stirrings of the “new left,” as it was then called, were of some interest. I remember the 1962 Port Huron Statement of Students for a Democratic Society. That heralded the beginning of a shift in fixing blame for social injustice on culture and not on economic class.

My tutor during junior year was the brilliant American Marxist scholar Barrington Moore, who was firmly set in the classical socialist tradition of class antagonism as the cause of injustice and the economy as the primary determinant of class power and prerogative.

But today’s progressive left in American seems to have switched out economic class for racism as the villain in our society.

The summer’s protests, some violent, led by Antifa and Black Lives Matter, provoked me to read Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence and discover, really for the first time, the historic occurrence of syndicalism, which evolved into national socialism in the 1920s in Italy and Germany.

I had overlooked the long-standing division within the socialist movement between internationalism – classical Marxist preference for the proletariat class in every society – and a more ethnic, even tribal, socialism, which sought justice in one society only. National socialism needed a narrative with which to engage both the workers and the bourgeoisie together in the same national community. The foundational concept was that of a “folk,” an identity construct. The economic system was a corporatist one where production was largely left for profit enterprises under state direction.

To explore the possible emulation of today’s progressive left in America, a cultural force at the root of our current distemper in politics and of older national socialist models, I wrote this personal essay.

I would be grateful to learn your thoughts on reading it.

Request for Support

I ask you to consider supporting the work of the Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism with a donation to our operating budget.

I attach our 2020 Year in Review (annual report) to document our contributions and successes during last year.

We seem to have a unique role to play – in a free space to expand and have influence in between business, academia, foundations and governments, drawing on all, but dependent on none, to fashion with our round tables sound, new departures for action and vision.

At a time of pandemic, when so much in our lives is uncertain, uneasy and stressful, reliable, but most importantly, determined leadership, is more necessary than ever. Leadership, as always, depends on ideas and moral conviction. We, therefore, seek to support all with both, so that their leadership will rise to the demanding challenges of our time. My father used to say “Never show the white feather,” especially when others on the team look to us for reassurance and steady stewardship.

For 2021, our priority will be to launch online certificate educational programs on the theory and practice of moral capitalism and moral government. These web-based modules will be accessible globally. Through education, we plan to inspire and stimulate individuals to make their respective contributions to better outcomes in business and civic justice.

Secondly, we will propose more collaboration and coordination among the now many efforts promoting sustainability, corporate social responsibility, and alignment of enterprise with care for the environment, society and governance.

Thirdly, we will continue to provide thought leadership through round tables, our newsletter Pegasus and workshops on modernizing valuation.

Given the difficulties caused by the pandemic for traditional means of outreach in solicitation of support and personally engaging with donors and supporters, we hope you can be especially generous with your contribution this year.

You can donate via PayPal.

If you would like to mail a check, our address is 75 West Fifth Street, Suite 219, St. Paul, MN 55102.

If you would like to contribute via wire transfer, please reply to this message.

Anything you can give would be most appreciated.