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We have just published Klaus Leisinger’s new book, The Art of Leading, on Amazon.

Initial reactions have been most favorable, with very appreciative comments that it comes at a time of troubles when the leaders which Klaus describes are needed. My colleague, Richard Broderick, is one of those who admires Klaus’ practical wisdom. I include below Rich’s review of the book.

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The Art of Leading: The Significance of Personality and Character in the Choice of Leadership Personalities in the Economy
By Klaus M. Leisinger

A Quick Review by Richard Broderick

Encountering a book aimed at business executives, consultants and academics who teach management theory with a title like The Art of Leading is usually a task that elicits a weary sigh. A reader automatically expects some kind of shallow, boiled-down cross between Machiavelli and Norman Vincent Peale or perhaps a series of simplistic nostrums cobbled together by a columnist moonlighting from a newspaper business section; you know, the kind of tract that offers “on-the-scene” insights on how to get your day-old sushi business up and purring, etc.

In this case, however, the title belongs to a book whose contents are not only worthy of a business audience, but offer an integrated sequence of arguments and analyses all of us could benefit by reading. How many tomes with names like The Art of Leading offer a 27-page bibliography containing citations from sources that range from the Harvard Business Review to online magazines like Alternet to encyclicals issued by Popes John Paul XXIII, Benedict XVI and Francis I? Not many, I assure you.

The book is the work of Klaus Leisinger whose career in academia, business and as founder and president of the Global Values Alliance might lead a reader to expect a weighty tome, offering more work than enlightenment.

Not so. The Art of Leading is a clear and, above all, eloquently expressed thesis that manages, however unlikely it might seem, to demonstrate that Erich Fromm’s groundbreaking The Art of Loving, which argues that being governed by love, in the broadest and most profound meanings of the word, is as much a key to true success in the workplace as it is everywhere in life.

It is, above all, the basis of a form of “success” that benefits all stakeholders of enterprises in the capitalist world, not merely shareholders and upper management. By combining pragmatic compassion – you help me, I help you – with agapé, the embrace of a universal and unconditional love of the cosmos, it is within our grasp, Leisinger argues, to shape an economic system that sustains the environment – natural, human, political and financial – while maintaining the freedom to choose where we work, what kind of work we do, who will serve as our political leaders and more.

Given enough time, human beings can get used to almost anything, Dostoevsky argued. And that, he declared, is both our greatest strength – and our most dangerous weakness. We are very adept at compartmentalizing our lives and our sense of consciousness: a critical skill for a species of relatively small physical prowess (compared to, say, bears and tigers) and a wide and highly variegated range of undertakings necessary for survival.

In the capitalist world, the emphasis of this compartmentalization tends to fall on the individual, as opposed to the collective. I know I can make this happen tends to supersede the deeper question of should I make this happen, regardless of the benefit to others. This emphasis lies at the heart of why capitalism was born and first flourished in the west.

In time, however, that has led to an economic system whose internalizing of profits, while externalizing costs has bequeathed us with a mentality in which industries and individual enterprises operate as if everything and everyone is either a resource or a potential consumer, here to be used, used up and then discarded.

Of late, society’s long-standing objection to profit über alles has taken on an even greater urgency. Today, it’s not just an individual city or region or even country that suffers from irresponsible business practices; it is the entire planet, including the natural environment upon which human civilization – and any kind of economic system – relies for survival.

Can we respond in a manner that is able to reconcile and preserve what is best about capitalism – its enormous power to marshal resources and enrich whole societies – with what must be done to preserve our world?

Yes, Leisinger proposes, if we learn that The Art of Leading depends upon The Art of Loving, where “love” is practiced in the broadest and most beneficent sense.

When reading some of the kind comments I received yesterday and today about my email on VE Day, I recalled my dad once introducing me to the songs of folk singer Josh White. White was well known in the 1940s as using his music for human rights ideals and to end segregation in the White south. He was close to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and followed by many of those in my mom and dad’s generation. But in the McCarthy period of strident anti-Communism, White was marginalized and largely forgotten. He was ignored by the folk revival of the 1960s and the growth of audiences keen for the blues.

Josh White’s song “Free and Equal Blues” used the blues genre to reaffirm our common humanity, regardless of race or ethnicity.

His thinking that the body chemistry shared by all persons has moral implications has just been affirmed by the coronavirus, which can reproduce itself without regard for race, religion, ethnicity or class – thanks to the biology we all share.

You can hear White sing this 1940s anthem of global equality here.

The lyrics of the song are:

I went down to that St. James Infirmary and I saw some plasma there,
I ups and asks the doctor man, “Say was the donor dark or fair?”
The doctor laughed a great big laugh and he puffed it right in my face,
He said, “A molecule is a molecule, son, and the damn thing has no race.”
And that was news, yes that was news.
That was very, very, very special news.
‘Cause ever since that day, we’ve had those free and equal blues.

“You mean you heard that doc declare
That the plasma in that test tube there could be
White man, black man, yellow man, red?”
“That’s just what that doctor said.”
The doc put down his doctor book and gave me a very scientific look
And he spoke out plain and clear and rational,
He said, “Metabolism is international.”

Then the doc rigged up his microscope with some Berlin blue blood,
And, by gosh, it was the same as Chun King, Quebechef, Chattanooga, Timbuktoo blood
Why, those men who think they’re noble
Don’t even know that the corpuscle is global
Trying to disunite us with their racial supremacy,
And flying in the face of old man chemistry,
Taking all the facts and trying to twist ‘em,
But you can’t overthrow the circulatory system.

So I stayed at that St. James Infirmary.
(I couldn’t leave that place, it was too interesting)
But I said to the doctor, “Give me some more of that scientific talk talk,” and he did:
He said, “Melt yourself down into a crucible
Pour yourself out into a test tube and what have you got?
Thirty-five hundred cubic feet of gas,
The same for the upper and lower class.”
Well, I let that pass…

“Carbon, 22 pounds, 10 ounces”
“You mean that goes for princes, dukeses and countses?”
“Whatever you are, that’s what the amounts is:
Carbon, 22 pounds, 10 ounces; iron, 57 grains.”
Not enough to keep a man in chains.
“50 ounces of phosphorus, that’s whether you’re poor or prosperous.”
“Say buddy, can you spare a match?”

“Sugar, 60 ordinary lumps, free and equal rations for all nations.
Then you take 20 teaspoons of sodium chloride (that’s salt) and you add 38
Quarts of H2O (that’s water), mix two ounces of lime, a pinch of chloride of
Potash, a drop of magnesium, a bit of sulfur and a soupֱon of hydrochloric
Acid and you stir it all up and what are you?”
“You’re a walking drugstore.”
“It’s an international, metabolistic cartel.”

And that was news, yes that was news,
So listen, you African and Indian and Mexican, Mongolian, Tyrolean and Tartar,
The doctor’s right behind the Atlantic Charter.
The doc’s behind the new brotherhood of man,
As prescribed at Gettysburg, Iwo Jima, Bull Run and Guadalcanal:
Every man, everywhere is the same, when he’s got his skin off.
And that’s news, yes that’s news,
That’s the free and equal blues!

It is VE (Victory in Europe) Day as I write this. I have been watching the news coverage of the end of the war in Europe 75 years ago, a brutal and bloody war to defeat Hitler and his Thousand Year Reich.

The narrative of the news was in the past tense. I wondered if VE Day was covered mostly out of courtesy to the muse of history. Then, thinking of history, I recalled the Atlantic Charter of 1941. In that document, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt set forth a commitment to achieving a more just human community after the war was won.

The Atlantic Charter said:

The President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill, representing His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom, being met together, deem it right to make known certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they base their hopes for a better future for the world.

First, their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other;

Second, they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned;

Third, they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them;

Fourth, they will endeavor, with due respect for their existing obligations, to further the enjoyment by all States, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity;

Fifth, they desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field with the object of securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security;

Sixth, after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, they hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want;

Seventh, such a peace should enable all men to traverse the high seas and oceans without hindrance;

Eighth, they believe that all of the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons must come to the abandonment of the use of force. Since no future peace can be maintained if land, sea or air armaments continue to be employed by nations which threaten, or may threaten, aggression outside of their frontiers, they believe, pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security, that the disarmament of such nations is essential. They will likewise aid and encourage all other practicable measure which will lighten for peace-loving peoples the crushing burden of armaments.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Winston S. Churchill

And, after the war, the promises of the Atlantic Charter were kept. We now refer to that Atlantic Charter program in action as the “post-World War II international order.”

The greatest achievement of what the Atlantic Charter proposed is the United Nations. Its preamble sets forth the norms and rules of a fair international order:

WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED

to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom

AND FOR THESE ENDS

to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, and to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples

In recent years, considerable angst has been expressed by many committed to that international order of law, no wars of aggression, growing prosperity for all and human rights that the rise of populist nationalism, small wars, migrations and refugees, growing concentration of economic power and inequality of income and wealth have created a bad inflection point in human history, a turning away from the “post-World War II order.”

The ideals embedded in the Caux Round Table Principles for Business and Principles for Governments cannot be disentangled from those in the Atlantic Charter and the Preamble of the United Nations.

VE Day, therefore, is important today, for us and for the world as the scope of justice which it proposed is still wise and needed.

Devry Boughner Vorwerk, a member of our board of directors and a Young Global Leader with the World Economic Forum, is involved in their “#FindingBeauty in Quarantine Times: A 24-Hour Livestream of Art, Culture & Sport” taking place today and tomorrow.

What their program reminds us of is art – beauty, a deeply moral emotion actually open to all of us. We so often let our attention and concerns get wrapped up in organizations, hierarchies, contests of will and power, technologies, money and cold, hard laws of science that we overlook beauty as a source of meaning and hope.

Was it not philosophers who sought to center our lives on truth, goodness and beauty, each one supporting the other?

You can learn about the live streaming here.

I hope you might have a moment to listen in.

Just now in the U.S. and I presume in many other countries struggling to contain the coronavirus, there are differences of expert opinion on how fast to remove restrictions on our personal lives and the economy. There are also conflicting demands from citizens as to what governments should do. Some give priority to getting back to work, while others prefer longer periods of quarantine, just to be sure the virus is in full retreat. Experts differ over the facts, while people have different levels of risk tolerance and different situations – some needing work immediately.

What to do?

Our Principles for Business balance economic goods, narrowly understood, with the non-economic needs of customers, employees and communities, believing that what employment, commerce and finance make possible supports our lives in many important, intangible ways. Our Principles for Government advocate discourse to resolve differences and to mediate conflicting views and priorities on the proper use of public power.

In the U.S. House of Representatives, a small caucus of both Democrats and Republicans, the Problem Solvers Caucus, has proposed a common sense program for returning the U.S. to more normal ways.

You may find their recommendations here.

It is always gratifying when those in positions of authority and influence align their actions with good principles.

One of our fellows, John Dalla Costa, recently sent me a most thoughtful, short essay on implications for our sense of self arising from the current pandemic and the measures we have taken to confine the spread and impact of the virus.

You may read John’s educating observations here.