Writings
An Epoch Change in Our Paradigms, page 4
Afterword
Before sending this article to press, Reflections asked Bill O’Brien to reflect on his observations during the 13 years since he wrote his letter to Roy Anderson.
Reflections: Not long after you wrote this letter, you left Hanover Insurance. What you came to understand from those who remainedwas that the subsequent leadership ignored many of the previous values you had introduced. In fact, they took the ‘‘Blue Books,’’ in which the values of Hanover were articulated, out of circulation. What are your reflections on this decision by the subsequent leadership?
O’Brien: Leadership is always about a tension between principle and power. It can never be an ‘‘either/or.’’ It is always a mixture of the two. In the decade of the nineties, we find two visible examples of the assertion of principles by those in power in the world political arena.
One was Gorbachev and his principle of perestroika, which was to free the people of the Soviet Union from the oppression of communism. He thought he could do this and remain communistic. He could, with his personal power, have wreaked havoc on the world. Instead, he chose to focus on perestroika.
The other example was de Klerk. Certainly, in the beginning, he could have oppressed Mandela and the African National Congress, but instead he stuck to his principles about ending apartheid in the face of much skepticism. In corporations, leaders are motivated by an obsession with keeping control and power, but there is a higher order than power, which is principle.
Governance, whether involving a nation or corporation, that is driven by leadership’s appetite for power and control oppresses by stifling initiative. Governance with noble aspirations in service of the common good that seeks to help all its people—not just an elite few—in pursuit of their highest destiny is uplifting. Thus, there are some battles in life where it is more important to be on the right side than it is to win.
Reflections: How has the environment for values-based leadership changed in the 13 years since you wrote this letter?
O’Brien: When I wrote this letter, I felt that we were in the midst of an epoch change, which I characterized as a change in the paradigms in which people believed. I compared epoch change with normal changes, those happening because of technology and liberalizing social policies. I think we are still in a period of epoch change.
One observation I made then was the need for unity between science and religion. I see a lot of evidence in the past ten years that this movement is underway. When you look at the New York Times bestseller list, something like 40% of the books are in some way religious. M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled was on the list for 13 consecutive years.1 These kinds of things fall in the ‘‘boiled frog’’ category, so gradual that we barely notice them.
Fortune magazine had a cover story on ‘‘God & Business.’’2 Ten years ago, that never would have happened. In fact, roughly 10 years ago, Fortune sent a reporter to a conference held by the Organizational Learning Center [now the Society for Organizational Learning] at MIT. He was on the verge of writing it up as a ‘‘New Age gathering’’ until he talked with a number of us and saw it for what it was.
In another related article, Jim Collins wrote about Level 5 Leadership.3 He describes a guy from Kimberly Clark, a spiritual guy, humble with a sense of stewardship about the future, who characterizes the spiritual dimension of leadership. Fifteen years ago, someone with those qualities would have been seen as flaky, not tough, and would have been weeded out.
Looking on down the road, I believe we have to grow leaders who are skilled at both the technical side and the spiritual side. Collins talks about leaders who have integrated business and technical proficiency with spiritual formation. I think these dimensions have to be integrated in a single person. You don’t hire a human resources person to bring in the spiritual dimension.
I see the CEO as an orchestra leader who brings people in. There are a lot of people who talk about the spiritual side, but when they actually lead the music, they just beat the drums for profits, for the numbers, too strongly. When you’re leading an organization, you have to bring in the human, strategy, and customer sides. When you blow any one of these horns all day long, that’s what people presume you want.
In rereading my letter, I think that the central direction I pointed to is still accurate. There is a lot of evidence that science and religion are coming together. The reality of the world is that we need both faith and reason to know the truth. There are certain things we can’t know by faith and other things we can’t know by reason. There’s no such thing as a Christian approach to chemistry. In the same way, you can’t get at the questions of ‘‘Who am I? Where am I going? Is there life after I die?’’ or at issues such as raising children or being married by reason. Those things require a window of faith. Together, faith and reason get at the full truth of the world.
Notes
- Peck, M.S. The Road Less Traveled (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).
- July 9, 2001.
- Collins, J. ‘‘Level 5 Leadership: The Triumph of Humility and Fierce Resolve.’’ Harvard Business Review 79 (January-February 2001): 42-48.