January 18, 2021
“The crises we face are not a science problem, they are a human problem.” – Doug McMillon, CEO, announcing Walmart will become a “Regenerative Company”
Introduction:
Doug McMillon is right. As we confront the triple, mutually reinforcing, challenges of: an uncontrolled pandemic, wrenching social inequity and the mounting threat of irreversible environmental breakdown, we must acknowledge that these are driven by human beings and are, therefore, “a human problem.” In part because these crises can be informatively understood as arising out of an “industrial age paradigm” of public and private leadership and 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. Fortunately, a new leadership paradigm is being developed for broader society and those businesses willing to acknowledge they are rightly understood to be dependent on, and embedded within, societies. Dr. Donna Hicks’ Leading with Dignity; How to Create a Culture That Brings Out the Best in People” (2017) provides a resonant central motif and approach supported by Michael Pirson’s academically rigorous “Humanistic Management; Protecting Dignity and Promoting Well-Being” (2017) and the International Humanistic Management Association, Inc. Pirson leads. Their work supports an emerging, relatively simple, 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 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 that embrace this approach should enjoy a flourishing that will be first their own but – as science suggest is necessary – expressly for the benefit others. Which can be realized through lived commitments and attitudes that reflect their reverence for the complexity and beauty of life which they can be humble before as servant leaders enlivened by their shared and urgent mission.
What follows is an informal survey of the leading thinkers, recent books and even choice quotes that help support this new paradigm of leadership. First in enterprise strategy, then in economic theory and then in economic policy. To promote an approach in an increasingly complex and chaotic time that puts the needs of people and the natural environment that sustains us, first.
From Optimizing Markets For “Efficiency” to Human Centered Leadership to Vindicate “Dignity”
Fifteen years ago, Walmart’s public commitment to “Corporate Sustainability” helped build what was then a small and esoteric field. On the 15th anniversary of Walmart’s commitment to Corporate Sustainability, CEO Doug McMillon committed Walmart (which is now the world’s largest private employer operating in 28 countries) to becoming a “Regenerative Company, one dedicated to placing nature and humanity at the center of our business” to help transform the world’s supply chains to be regenerative and help reverse nature loss. This commitment was made through a remarkable 14 minute video through which McMillon pledged that Walmart would move beyond achieving its goals of 100% renewable energy, zero waste to landfill and its success in increasing its minimum wage more than 50%. Because “more must be done urgently” to grapple with the public health crisis, wrenching economic and racial inequity in the U.S. and abroad and also, in particular, because we face a “climate crisis” that threatens to become irreversible.
Walmart’s CEO recognized “that this is a watershed moment in history, where all of humanity is coming together, whether we realize it or not” and that “we have created an astonishing moment of truth” wherein we must confront the threat of human caused, irreversible and self-accelerating climate breakdown. McMillon went further and recognized “the crises we face are not a science problem, they are a human problem” and that although “technologies are important . . . the ultimate power to change the world does not rely on them alone, it relies first and foremost on reverence, respect and compassion for ourselves, all people and the natural environment that sustains us all. This is regeneration.”
In the stark, necessary, challenges it identifies and in its soaring optimism that those challenges can be met with the approach he details, McMillon’s speech is a study in leadership communications. It contrasts sharply with a mushrooming industry of academics and writers who don’t seek to lead as much as report the very real horrors of climate and ecological breakdown and who, therefore, regularly only offer wistful and qualified hope we will meet these existential challenges. One such writer is Jed Purdy who was raised in rural West Virginia and recently joined the faculty of Columbia Law School. His analysis and eloquence focuses on the intersection of the global environmental crisis American politics, law and culture. His new book “This Land is Our Land; The Struggle for a New Commonwealth” (2019) is aligned with McMillon’s speech in that it recognizes that we face an urgent existential challenge in potentially irreversible environmental breakdown and that it is a “human problem.” But he is far less confident we have any real prospects for success and in the last chapter observes that “we are suffering not from ignorance or innocence but from a lack of faith that understanding can help us.”
For me that evokes a poem W.B. Yeats wrote a hundred years ago communicating a similar lack of faith among the educated about the future social importance of integrity and truth. Yeats published “The Second Coming” in 1920 and it reflected the disillusionment the slaughter of the first world war inspired as well as elite foreboding about the even greater horrors to that seemed to be gathering in an always more unsettled world. Then as now many of the most extensively educated agreed with Yeats that: “The ceremony of innocence is drowned, the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Which in its unnerving despair reminds those that would lead: although academics and poets are essential to facing the “human problem” we must solve to restore a widely felt sense of hope about the future, we also need many different type of leaders. Which in this age of globally ascendent businesses and faltering nation states, necessarily includes business leaders and their particular insights, style, creativity and courage in change.
Do Business Leaders Need To Focus On This “Human Problem”?
Many business leaders will assert that speaking about what Walmart’s CEO describes as an “astonishing moment of truth” wherein “the entire world is coming together whether we realize it or not” and the “human problem” that is driving its threatening dimensions, is beyond what most any business leader can meaningfully address – except maybe for the CEO of the world’s largest employer. But the argument business leaders should focus tightly on the practical productivity of those they are charged with managing, may well be part and parcel of the “human problem” Walmart’s CEO suggested was at the heart of health, social and ecological crises we face.
As Stephen Covey – author of the hugely popular “7 Habits of Highly Effectively People” (1990) – recognized in “The 8th Habit; From Effectiveness to Greatness” (2004) 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” – which can be described as a model (as opposed to individual human being) focused ethics that seeks efficiency through control, extraction and exchange of “things” – Covey seems to have been striking at the root of what Walmart’s CEO recognized as our current “human problem.” Which 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.”
Can Leaders Transcend Assumptions & Drive Fundamental Change?
Steven Covey is as mainstream and successful a business expert as exists. But in his “The 8th Habit; From Effectiveness to Greatness” he was demonstrating the power of Donella Meadows’ work. Meadows was an Environmental Scientist at Dartmouth focused on Systems Change to avert environmental collapse who died too young in 2001 but seems only more important in 2021. Meadows published a seminal essay in 1999 entitled: “Leverage Points; 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 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. In regard to 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. Meadows applied the concept to deliberate societal change and used the example of Ronald Reagan’s persistent and ultimately successful assertion of a new fundamental framing of American politics when he pushed beyond discourse about the proper role of government to assert that the government, itself, “was the problem.”
This concept that both Covey and Meadows promoted that regularly unconscious or only partial conscious fundamental frameworks or “paradigms” (from the Greek “paradeigmata” or exemplar mythic story) out of which complex systems can arise – aligns with both ancient wisdom and emerging science. Plato recognized how stories can shape character, culture and behavior and in the dialogues within “The Republic,” the argument that “our first business is to supervise the production of stories and choose only those suitable and reject the rest” was well presented and proposed to apply to the most cherished stories from the nursery to affairs of state and religion. Similarly, as contemporary economics was taking shape following World War II, MIT’s Paul Samuelson observed, “I don’t care who writes the nation’s laws or advanced treatises, if I can write its economics textbook.”
More recently, Israeli intellectual historian Yuval Noah Harari’s wildly well received “Sapiens” (2011), “Homo Deus” (2015) and “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” (2018) each review the growing evidence in evolutionary psychology, social psychology and cognitive science that Homo sapiens evolutionary adaptation includes a defining ability to develop and share stories and meanings about subjects without any physical existence; which facilitates sapiens unmatched ability to cooperate to overcome adversity and reproduce. So social psychologist John Haidt only had it half right in “The Righteous Mind; Why Good People Are Divided By Politics & Religion” published in 2013 that Sapiens are “90% chimp and 10% bee,” since we are also believers in shared meanings, from conceptions of divinity to national histories, to currencies and “human rights” which is an evolved capacity that has helped sapiens cooperate across continents, centuries and wars to reproduce into the billions.
So, if we agree with Meadows that leaders can transcend their received traditions and that largely unconscious paradigmatic frameworks of perception can be identified and deliberately changed through concerted effort to effect great practical change system-wide – can we agree that the paradigm that needs to change is the one identified by Stephen Covey as “the problem” in his second chapter by that name in “The 8th Habit”? Covey defined “the problem” causing so much unhappiness in the modern workplace as the “industrial age paradigm” which treated people as “things,” which defies Immanuel Kant’s famous definition of “human dignity” as a quality that requires that humans ‘must never be treated as just means to an end, but as an ends in themselves.’
As 2021 begins, can we also recognize the error of the “industrial age paradigm” includes it’s unthinking instrumentalization of parts of living co-dependent ecological systems as “things”? In 2009, the philosopher and ethicist Robert Audi of Notre Dame recognized in “Business Ethics & Ethical Business” the environment is rightly understood as “an end not just a means” and that the “principle of intergenerational justice” obligated businesses to act responsibly even in the absence of legal requirements. In 2015, Pope Francis went further in his epic encyclical on Integral Ecology, “Laudato Si; Praise Be Our Common Home” to propose an evolution of consciousness. There the pope (who was a working chemist before his eleven years of intellectual and spiritual training to become a Jesuit) argued human beings of every religious persuasion and those without religion, could recognize we are “part of the single garment of creation” and what we perceive as the rest of creation is not ours to assume we can “utilize” and we could, instead, respond to what we perceive as the “rest of reality” with praise.
Evolving from a Model Wherein Individuals “Extract Value” to “Shared Purpose”
To the extent Covey’s “industrial age paradigm” model of behavior focused on controlling, extracting and exchanging “things” is a degrading instrumentalization of the natural world, then it is exactly the type of paradigm Meadows would hope leaders could transcend and 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. Often through a network of colleagues who share a commitment to the superior fundamental framework. Consequently, to follow Meadows’ lead, it is necessary to move beyond a critique of the faltering “industrial age paradigm” and to examine the advantages of a proposed, superior, paradigm.
Steven Covey’s proposed new “knowledge economy paradigm” in “The 8th Habit” was one that invited the managers to find their “voice” and “purpose” and inspire those they lead to do the same. This approach to managing is likely to resonate better with today’s knowledge workers over the “industrial age paradigm” on several levels. First, it proposes a system centered on the human beings involved instead of on the optimization of the system. Second, it recognizes the manager needs to become more self-aware of her own “voice” and “purpose”; and third, it recognizes managers must seek to “inspire” and facilitate the “voice” and “purpose” of her teammates. Unfortunately, writing in 2004 before the depth, breadth and urgency of the threat of irreversible environmental breakdown was widely understood in business, Covey does not emphasis the need for a new relationship with our environment in his description of the required new leadership paradigm (although he does delineate a need to pay systematic attention to “conscience” through which this concern would now manifest).
Almost a generation after Covey published “The 8th Habit,” an ever-growing number of knowledge workers have come to understand that climate science warns of the mounting threat of irreversible, self-accelerating, environmental collapse as the ultimate price of production costs that are “externalized” from current economic value creation models. Consequently, as 2021 begins, it seems appropriate and even necessary to include a fundamentally changed relationship with the world at large as part of new paradigm of leadership that is capable of meeting today’s challenges. Supporting this type of audacity is a growing chorus of top business and thought leaders now extolling the need to think bigger and even “reimagine capitalism”. In-part because prevailing economic patterns are obviously unsustainable.
A leader among these leaders is Rebecca Henderson who recently published “Reimaging Capitalism; In a World on Fire” (2020). The first two words of that title is the name of what is reportedly 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 highlighting leaders who embrace a shared purpose driven, multi-stakeholder, approach to long-term value creation. Henderson even quickly mentions business leader’s engagement with economic development at large. Specifically, she sites Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s 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 and she recognizes that 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. Henderson does not focus on delineating the new paradigm for leadership itself.
Fortunately, that is something a scholar focused on excellence in leadership has recently done just across the Charles River from Rebecca Henderson at the JFK School of Government. Dr. Donna Hicks is a psychologist who gained global notice through her efforts to help advance the peace process in Northern Ireland and between Palestine and Isreal. In her 2017 “Leading with Dignity; How to Create a Culture that Brings Out the Best in People” Dr. Hicks has proposed a new paradigm for leadership that is premised on a scientific understanding of human nature and centered on a leader’s relationship with herself, 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 organizational leadership was developed outside of any business school and as a model for leadership in societies 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. Coming from beyond the walls of a business school or consultancy, 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 re-evaluation of the human nature that has occurred over the last generation. Which she explores to help explain the success she has had centering “dignity” in international dispute resolution and in teaching and advising on enterprise leadership strategy.
A New Paradigm for Leadership in a Challenged & Purpose Driven Age
What Dr. Hicks proposes is relatively simple and aligned with Stephen Covey’s guidance from “The 8th Habit” in that it focuses on personal excellence and relationships as opposed to system or model optimization. But unlike Covey, Dr. Hicks expressly focuses on the quality of relationships including an important relationship with the broader world. Dr. Hicks guides leaders to focus – first, foremost and regularly – on three connections: a connection to self, a connection to others and a connection to the broader world. In each instance, Hicks guides the leader to address – in what might well be described as a reverential manner – our own pricelessness and vulnerability as a human being, the same in those we serve as leaders as well as the pricelessness and frailty something greater than us such as the broader world. Failing to observe this three-pronged discipline causes inefficiencies since it is premised on our needs as irreducibly social, purpose seeking, beings with a developed and vulnerable sense of our own fundamental, inalienable, worth – or “dignity” – and hunger for greater, more fairly earned, “respect.”
In “Leading with Dignity” Hicks praised Michael Pirson’s 2017 Book “Humanistic Management; Protecting Dignity and Promoting Well-Being” and the International Humanistic Management Network Pirson leads. Pirson’s book provides an academically rigorous explication of the management science supporting Hicks approach to leadership in “Leading with Dignity.” In that book Hicks cites leading evolutionary psychologists and social psychologists and, specifically, the work of neuroscientist Bruce Perry and his co-author Maia Szalavitz who claim we are “born for love” in a 2010 book by that name. Which is all consistent with Harvard University’s great biologist E.O Wilson “The Social Conquest of the Earth” in 2015 which helped established the “eusocial” (i.e., hyper social) nature of Homo sapiens. Wilson observed in that memorable book: “morality, conformity, religious fervor and fighting ability combined with imagination and memory produced Homo sapiens as a winner in terms of survival.” Hicks’ approach is also aligned with the work of Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and sociologist who directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale (inspired by the cross-discipline re-evaluation of human nature) who two years after Leading with Dignity published: “Blueprint; The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society” in 2019 which further summarized relevant theoretical and experimental based science.
The new paradigm for leadership offered by Dr. Donna Hicks in “Leading with Dignity” is, therefore, premised on current science about our irreducibly social needs (which is important to contrast with the endless “wants” assumed by contemporary economics) as human beings and provides a path to highlight and address the important change in context that science is revealing to all the stakeholders of an enterprise about the existential threat of human caused environmental breakdown. Consequently, Dr. Hicks’ leadership paradigm is an excellent approach for women and men who want to address the “human problem” Walmart’s CEO acknowledged. In part through acknowledging that the part of nature we have most painfully misunderstood is human nature and its needs; which we must address to improve our relationship with ourselves, others and with the boarder world. Three relationships influenced by the context science is revealing about the threat of irreversible environmental breakdown.
Furthermore, Dr. Hicks’ proposed paradigm for leadership is also aligned with, first, the emerging consensus in micro-economic 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 current science about human nature as well as complexity theory and the mounting existential threat of human caused environmental breakdown.
Leading With Dignity Into a New Micro and Macro-economics
The emerging consensus at the enterprise or micro-economic level is more than academic. As noted earlier on this Sustainable Leadership blog, 181 CEOs of America’s largest corporations who participate in the Business Roundtable committed in August of 2019 through a full page Wall Street Journal ad to a new “Statement on the Purpose of the Corporation” which committed them to a purpose driven, multi-stakeholder approach to long-term value creation. In the statement they specifically recognized that corporations exist to benefit stakeholders such as customers, employees, suppliers and host communities as much as shareholders. This represented a specific reversal of a Business Roundtable publicly declared definition of the purpose of the corporations in 1997 that: “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.
The change to a more science based, ecologically sophisticated, macroeconomics has also been developing for a generation if not the forty plus years that a multi-stakeholder approach to enterprise value has been. A new economics in the broad sense began to gestate when Paul Hawken published in 1993 (a decade before he began advising Walmart) “Ecology of Commerce; A Declaration of Sustainability”. And took meaningful form in Hawken’s magnum opus in 1999 with Hunter & Amory Lovins’ “Natural Capitalism; Creating the Next Industrial Revolution,” which helped create a generation of sustainability activists as it made clear contemporary economics was woefully unacceptable in accounting for and preserving our vitally important environment. As the authors noted in “Natural Capital”, contemporary economics: “neglects to assign any value to the largest stocks of capital it employs – the natural resources and living systems, as well as the social and cultural systems that are the basis of human capital.”
More recently Thomas Piketty, an Associate Chair of the Paris School of Economics, has written what may prove to be an era shaping critique of contemporary economics – on its own terms. It has helped devastate the brand of “Neo-liberal Economics,” encouraging the conversion of that term into an insult; despite the fact it describes much of U.S. and global macro-economic thinking. Piketty did this through his massive “Capital in the Twenty First Century” in 2014 and his equally ambitious “Capital & Ideology” in 2020, which has succeeded in making more economists conclude publicly economics must change. In “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” Piketty provides a rigorous quantitative analysis of global economic history, by country, concluding: capital concentrates inefficiently; and in “Capital & Ideology” Piketty examined the interplay of ideology and capitol to conclude: inequality is largely unnatural and economically counter-productive and it shapes the ideology and institutions (Piketty’s “the regime of inequality”) that evolve to justify it. Consequently, macro-economics appears as prepared as micro-economics for a new approach informed by current science on human nature and what we have done to the natural world that sustains us.
Enterprises Are Embedded In Economies That Must Vindicate Dignity
As noted on this Sustainable Leadership blog, the Covid-19 crisis has reminded business leaders of Five Lessons about the relationship between businesses, states and nature. As Kate Raworth, an Oxford development economist who helped guide the creation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, has long argued: economies are embedded in societies and societies are embedded within our natural world and it is only natural for human beings to seek shared meaning and value quite distinct from the utility maximization expected by classic economic theory.
In Kate Raworth’s 2017 book “Doughnut Economics; 7 Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist” the former long-time economist for Oxfam is especially cogent when arguing against a macro-economics that assumes perfect information, rationalism and the absence of politics. Only 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 citizens, parents, children and faith and community participants before they are perfectly informed, 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 but what makes life worth living.” And fails to measure all sorts of value – like that of parenting – as well as all sorts if costs, like the world threatening cost of carbon pollution. So, Raworth proposes a well-being – or dignity first – centered “Donut Economics” that acknowledges it is necessary to meet real human needs 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. This is an approach that has won an enthusiastic following within several smaller economies including those of New Zealand, Scotland, Wales, Iceland and the Amsterdam metropolitan area which have officially adopted the “well-being” based economics Kate Raworth promotes. They have also established the Well-being Economies Working Group within the Organization of Economic Co-operation & Development.
This argument for a more sustainable macroeconomics is complimented and expanded by Mariana Mazzucato, Professor of Economics of Innovation and Public Value at the University College of London and her 2018 book “The Value of Everything; Making and Taking in the Global Economy”. Wherein 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” which needs to be expressly tied to how an item or process within complex systems advances human purposes. Which 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.
It is the conventional, reductionist economics, however, that unquestionably dominates economics and has long influenced other social sciences. Consequently, the assumptions inherent in conventional economics have become both a contributing part, and component of, the “industrial age paradigm” Covey recognized as “the problem.” It is possible, however, to imagine how the explication of a richer, scientifically based, understanding of human nature as part of a new “Sustainable Leadership Paradigm” could helpfully support both emerging multi-stakeholder micro-economic value creation strategies and increasingly understood and respected “well-being” focused macro-economics it reinforces. Especially if this new, science based, understanding of human nature and challenging natural context was described and promoted in a manner designed to resonate across current intellectual and political cleavages.
Dignity as the Third Dimension of Our Souls
A thought leader who may be able to help is Francis Fukuyama. He was promoted as a global star by leaders of the “neo-conservative” political movement after the viral popularity of his 1989 essay “The End of History and the Last Man”. That helped him grow the essay into a 1992 book by the same name which many have pointed out was incorrect to assert any part of history ended with the triumph of liberal democracies over the Soviet Union. He became more welcome in progressive circles after his books on social trust and biotechnology and his ascension to Director of the Center for Democracy and the Rule of Law at Stanford. He was as welcomed by progressives as he will ever be after he completed his two volume master work: “The Origins of Political Order and Political Decay” (2011 & 2014). Which was a magisterial survey of human political history from the cave to the Arab Spring. It included a wise re-appraisal of the great Enlightenment thinkers who failed to understand human beings evolved as social beings and a cogent political history of Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Europe and the Americas to conclude: the lawful, relatively autonomous and meritocratic administrative state was the key to building the social trust needed for societal flourishing.
After the rise of nationalist politics globally and the political success of Donald Trump who seemed to personify the patrimonialism Fukuyma warned in 2014 regularly ends flourishing societies, he published “Identity; The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment” in 2018. In that luminous but flawed book, 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 violent, authoritarian, white nationalist reaction. It is a thin book and the best part of it is the first half on the second chapter entitled: “The Third Part of the Soul.”
In that chapter, 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 contemporary science has revealed. 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 his collaborator the mathematical psychologist and cognitive scientist Amos Tversky’s 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.” A theory that 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 economist 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 and 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) which is 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 naturally self-motivated to advance enterprise goals and also creative but require leaders who recognized that and facilitate their more independent contributions. In 2021, 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.”
Have We Evolved To Be Self-Sacrificing Guardians?
Perhaps because evidence of predictably self-sacrificing, pro-social, human proclivities is established elsewhere, Fukuyama does not examine experimental 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 well spring of human motivation. One 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 an especially morbid scene. Through dialogue they concluded this was evidence thumitikon (from thymos), a third dimension of the soul that is often translated as “spiritedness” located in the chest that may be best described as a passionate hunger for recognized social worth or dignity.
Fukuyama contends that Thymos has been a central part of the philosophical, religious and political discussion of human nature for centuries. Hegel recognized it as a central driver of human affairs and even the progress of history itself. But outside of Fukuyama and a few other Hegel scholars like the Russian émigré to France Alexandre Kojeve whom Fukuyama has referenced as an inspiration, the notion of Thymos was eclipsed in the modern era. First by the rise utilitarian and then economic thinking (Neo-classical, Marxist and Keynesian) which came to assume desire for material benefit drove human choices, societies and history. But it seems to be appropriate to revive a discussion of Thymos since rigorous science and real-world business successes both suggest that there is a sound basis for the ancient assumption that either all or at least a meaningful portion of human beings regularly have a passionate hunger for a more than material recognition of their dignity.
In “Identity; The Demands for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment” Fukuyama explores how it can be helpful to distinguish an “isothymia” that seeks a recognition of universal dignity from a “meglothymia” that seeks special, exclusionary, honors. He asserts that what was discussed in “The Republic” was, by these definitions, the megalogthymia 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 society committed to universal dignity might be complimented by an aligned system enabling greater self-chosen commitments for exclusive honors.
Even in his ill-considered assertion that an identity conscious politics as practiced in the U.S. is, necessarily, about a demand for exclusionary, as opposed to universal dignity, Fukuyama provides an example of how recovering the discussion of Thymos can 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 a need 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 the hunger, or need, 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.”
Since he wrote “The End of History and the Last Man” in 1992, Fukuyama has argued that the liberal democratic order is challenged by the difficulty it has satisfying the demands of Thymos. Indeed, the “Last Man” in the title of that book is a reference Nietzsche’s “Last Man” in his 1883 book “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” Therein the “Last Man” was opposite of a triumph of history. Neitzsche saw the “Last Man” as the goal of secular and egalitarian modernity which would arrive at the end of history as a “masterless slave” to rational consumption devoid of any Meglothymic hunger – or high passion for great status. He would be as C.S. Lewis speculated, a man with desire and reason but “without a chest.” He was the opposite of the Neitzsche’s Ubermensch or “Superman” (a term adopted by Hitler and his National Socialists) who had the super human strength to hunger for life even in its most terrifying and historically consequential dimensions beyond constructed moral systems.
Fukuyama has no enthusiasm of Nietzsche’s Superman but he does express concern for a dullness of people at the “end of history.” In this Fukuyama is working in the anti-egalitarian tradition of Hegel who thought Christianity an ideology for slaves and many noted thinkers including seminal German thinker Martin Heidegger (once a member of the Nazi party) who saw mass democratic society as incompatible with fully expressed individuality and creativity. Which was a concern of several mid-century American thinkers like Sloan Wilson who wrote “The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit” (1956) and Herbert Marcuse who wrote “The One Dimensional Man” (1964), and that seems a misplaced concern in the 2020s.
Fukuyama benefits in surprising ways from paying attention to the nearly lost tradition of assuming a central role for Thymos as a hunger for more than logic and more than greater material benefit, something closer to what David Hume described as “the passions” when Hume famously observed: “Reason, is, and ought only be the slave of the passions.” “A Treatise of Human Nature”, Book III, Part III, Sect. III (1739). This unusual focus has helped Fukuyama become a rare public intellectual in the U.S. and rarer still, one with readers across party and ideological lines. It also seems to have helped Fukuyama prove prescient in several specific ways. Back in the 1990s Fukuyama hypothesized that if unable to lead society forward to something better than liberal democracy, Megalothymotic leaders around the world might seek to lead societies backwards to theocracy. Fukuyama even specifically mentions Donald Trump in 1992 as the type of Megalothymotic striver that might – if he wasn’t distracted by ambitions in the marketplace – work to dramatically overturn liberal democracy’s table of rational consumption. All to feed his passion for greater social status for himself through hollow promises to feed others need for social status.
What Fukuyama only mentions in the passing when writing on Isothymia and Megalothymia is that they could be made complimentary if a society provides a meaningful sense of universal and inalienable dignity to all citizens that satisfies Isothymotic hunger and enables citizens to both socially accept and consider pursuing for themselves, higher, exclusive, honors to satisfy any Megalothymotic hunger. Fukuyama acknowledges this is possible but fails to observe that arrangement seems to have occurred (with egregious exceptions for racial minorities and the traditionally marginalized) in the U.S. following its success in World War II when national pride swelled and a robust legal system and strong labor rights and wages provided many a feeling of universal dignity and some of the most fortunate strove for special, socially reinforcing, honors through philanthropy (e.g., the Rockefellers) or progressive politics (e.g., the Kennedys).
Science Continues to Reveal Nature & Advance History
Fukuyama is wrong; history in the grand sense is not over. Democratic capitalism as organized in the 1990s is not, fundamentally, the best we can do; nor is it even sufficient to meet the challenges we face. And the changes required are not superficial. Fukuyama believes that scientific innovation combined with human’s thymotic hunger propels history forward. And on the 25th anniversary of “The End of History and the Last Man” he even conceded biotechnology had advanced to make the possibility of transhumanism foreseeable and that if that occurred it would require more meaningful historical change. But what he misses is that science is working unceasingly to: (a) reveal a richer, more social, understanding of human nature than was broadly understood a generation ago, (b) digitally integrate the world socially and economically; and, (c) make clear that that natural environment that sustains us all is increasingly being undermined by human caused climate and ecologic breakdown.
This has all come together to help cause what Walmart’s CEO called an “astonishing moment of truth where all the world is coming together whether we realize it our not.” Fortunately, the emerging scientific understanding of human nature provides a strong basis for reasoned faith in human beings to be true to our exceptional ability to create shared meanings and a shared sense of purpose and mission. And the remarkable communication and transparency made possible by the ever increasing digitalization of the global economy, is making it possible to imagine the success of a dignity first, commitment led approach to multi-stakeholder value creation at both the level of the firm and at the level of the society the firm operates in and rightly serves. What is unfortunate, is the proliferating opportunity for the sort of sustained heroic commitments required to build a genuinely new society that is as distinct from the liberal democratic capitalism of the 1990s that Fukuyama argued was the “End of History” as that ordering was distinct from the monarchical agrarian ordering that proceeded it. But it means that the last thing our current moment lacks are opportunities for those who hunger to offer great leadership.
Many are already committed to exemplifying a new model of leadership in scaling global enterprises like those purpose driven multi-stakeholder value creators in Rebecca Henderson’s cases studies. Others are are committed to building new models of leadership and relationships including Dr. Donna Hicks approach of leading with dignity. Still others are committed to advancing a new, more ecological, model of economics wherein the entire broader system is explicitly intended to serve the human needs of citizens as in those countries and leading global urban centers who have adopted Kate Raworth’s Donut Economics which is organized by commitments to meeting human needs and purposed for a human flourishing.
Consistent with all this, Gene Sperling, former Chief Economic Advisor to Presidents Clinton and Obama published a book in 2020 entitled “Economic Dignity” bringing this approach to economic policy making. Although he did not mention mention Dr. Hicks or Kate Raworth, in his book Sperling proposes 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 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 too many citizens it was supposed to serve. So, he proposes to now begin with meeting minimum needs first. Which is itself 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.” Hopefully, in 2021 global businesses will begin to see how this foundational principle for public authorities should be applied to the private enterprises that public authorities’ charter.
Towards “Reverence, Respect & Compassion for Ourselves, All People & the Natural Environment”
Science is helping our human community, at every level, turn from watching and reacting to shadows of unreason, to reveal a richer and more accurate understanding of human beings, human purposes and human needs in complex societies. It is also revealing that our challenge is immense and urgent. But our challenge is not best understood as a problem of technology, policy or someone else’s baser appetites versus deracinated reasoning. It is a human problem and it’s ours. We can decide if science supports a richer understanding of human beings as profoundly social and breathtakingly talented at innovative collaboration across cultures, continents and centuries and as motivated by a thymotic passion for dignity at least as much as by reason or base appetite. If we conclude it does, then we can embrace what a young Calvin Coolidge argued back in 1914: “Don’t hesitate to be as revolutionary as science. Don’t hesitate to be as reactionary as a multiplication table.” But it will be necessary to remember that art and politics are far older than science and it is only lately that science is discovering how our human hearts respond to each other. So it will be necessary to work with and through art, politics and tradition.
Those interested in a new paradigm for leadership will benefit greatly from Dr. Donna Hicks’ “Leading with Dignity” and Michael Pirson’s “Humanistic Management.” They need to explore, perhaps with Mariana Mazzucato, author of the coming book “The Mission Economy; A Moon Shot Approach to the Economy,” how fundamental commitments can shape what is considered rational and valuable. This will help determine how leaders can move beyond market-based models seeking “efficiency” to human centered models committed to vindicating (from the Latin: “to avenge”) “dignity.” And, specifically, when, where and how a trinity of commitment: to our best selves, to enabling our colleagues’ and customers’ best selves and to a natural, regenerative, relationship with the environment that sustains us all – can be our shared purpose. At every level of leadership: in family, community, companies, nations and the world. For those interested – as individuals, as leaders in enterprises and as citizens in societies which each flourish more impressively to the extent each level of commitment is made to meet the needs of every citizen’s inviolable and inalienable dignity.
Science is revealing the daunting breadth, depth and urgency of the existential challenge we face in human caused environmental breakdown that is undermining the order of life on earth in our time, for all time. But is also increasingly connecting us as never before on multiple levels and it has begun to reveal to us what ancient art and wisdom have long known: we have a passionate need – and talent – for connection and building dignity. So, we have every reason to have faith in the success we increasingly understand that we must together create. Which helps us understand how and why we can grow from always looking to “utilize” and become, to having a deep sense of gratitude for what we are and what we can be, both for others and for our natural world.
This is a new, centered and calm, attitude of reverence won through recognizing the beauty, complexity and vulnerability of life. It is an attitude more of “being” than “becoming” and more about “caring” than “having”; which is beyond and apart from any given religion as described in John Ehrenfeld of MIT and his former student and now professor at University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, Andrew Hoffman’s “Flourishing; A Frank Conversation About Sustainability” (2013). But it can be experienced joyously in a religious context as Pope Francis suggests in Laudato Si, quoting the presumably Shinto influenced Bishops of Japan when he observed: “to sense each creature signing the hymn of its existence, is to live joyously in G-d’s love and hope.” It is an attitude that inclines us to reject the isolating, utility maximizing, conceit of economists and embrace what Albert Camus – who was a national level soccer player then a Nazi fighting commando before winning the Nobel Prize for Literature – described as the “insane generosity” of solidarity. We can do this by joining with Camus in turning a too cerebral Descartes on his head and asserting:
“I rebel, therefore we are.”
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.
