Jesuit University Business Education Impact on Globalization
Author
Dr. Roger A. Desmarais
14th Annual World Forum
Colleagues in Jesuit Business Education
International Association of Jesuit Business Schools
Business and Education in an Era of Globalization:
The Jesuit Position
July 20-23, 2008
It is an honor to represent Santa Clara University at this 14th Annual World Forum bringing together the International Association of Jesuit Business Schools and the Colleagues of Jesuit Business Education - hosted by Fordham University.
I am thrilled by the search for excellence inherent in the Forum’s Goal of exploring Globalization’s impact on Jesuit Business Education. I am even more thrilled by the explicit exploration of the powerful impact of Jesuit Business Education on Globalization - and the combined Jesuit Business School and Globalization influence of both on the leadership of global organizations impacting the world.
I intend to speak to:
An understanding of Globalization,
The impact of multinational organizations bringing about change,
Emotionally and Spiritually intelligent leaders needed for that globalizing evolution,
Jesuit Business Schools have the perfect educational opportunity, institutional structure, and geographical positioning to impact future leaders powerfully Jesuit Universities have a history of educating the leaders of the world
Jesuit Universities have the perfect opportunity to impact Globalization
BRIEF BIO OF SPEAKER
I speak to the subject from the position that my history includes 20 years as a Jesuit in the Oregon Province and some 37 years managing my own behavioral consulting firm that has provided leadership development processes, programs of organizational, cultural, behavioral, and managerial change programs to major corporations, from the Board Room to the Union Halls, nationally and internationally.
As a Jesuit, I created and managed a graduate program at Seattle University - Seattle University’s Master of Religious Education (SUMORE) - that will celebrate its 40th anniversary in 2009. The focus in 1969 was to liberate those involved in religious education from the hard rubrics of theology and dogma and to embrace with more balance, their humanity in the spiritual and emotional intelligent areas of living.
I carried that same philosophy into my consulting company: by endeavoring to free executives from the hard rubric of command and control in order to become more collegial and more emotionally and spiritually integrated in their leadership. As a result of teaching courses in spirituality for business leaders, I have re-written the “Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius” to a focused “Spiritual Exercises of Leadership”. Over the years, my on-going adaptation of the process of the Spiritual Exercises to leadership training was called many things: teambuilding, talent management, succession planning, executive coaching, executive retreats, off-site work sessions, etc. Regardless the dynamics were the same: First Week: look at dysfunctions; Second Week: look at alternate ways of leading; Third Week: Death and Resurrection - let the old patterns die and reconfirm new competencies; Fourth Week: Contemplatio Ad Amorem - go out and lead!
I have seen the integrated process of Intellectual Intelligence, Emotional Intelligence, and Spiritual Intelligence find root in the business world and witnessed the need for such leadership development being articulated more and more by corporate executives. I have also experienced that same voice being raised by middle managers not only in MBA programs but also from both their organizational positions and from their managing experience - all demanding more than technical skill sets and intellectually intelligent knowledge.
I have been defining and implementing the various elements of EQ for some twenty-five years. At that time when there was great discussion around IQ tests, I heard Dr. Baron and his colleagues ask the question: “Why is it that some people with high IQs fail while others with modest IQs succeed?” The evolving answer has been Social and Emotional Intelligence - the skill to be interpersonally sensitive and talented. We implemented programs around EQ at harsh and hard places such as Three Mile Island. (We were asked by the Chairman of the Board to integrate the international teams responsible for the cleanup.) EQ allowed the program to work - even under international scrutiny and compounding duress and pressures.
On the other hand, the impact of corporate malfeasance in such companies as Enron and others has also surfaced the need for values and virtues in the work place. This process had been evolving and growing but the media and public outrage have sparked a renewed interest in, and demand for, a Spiritual Intelligence - a spirituality of ethics that transcends religions and touches all those who would be leaders.
OPPORTUNITY
That is why this Forum is such a most timely and wonderful opportunity to explore Jesuit Business School Impact on Organizations whose leaders - Jesuit trained and influenced - will integrate and influence the globalization process with a code of ethics based on spiritual values and virtues expected and required of leadership in the world. The Jesuit business Schools will provide an environment and encouragement to implement Spiritual Intelligence as part of the fabric of the scholarship and commitment associated with a Jesuit Degree in Business.
GENERIC THEMES OF GLOBALIZATION:
In order to situate Jesuit Business Schools in the Global Economy, it is important to take a quick look at the movement of Globalization. A synthesis of that awareness will suffice here. Globalization, as the current literature indicates is:
Blurring the lines of national boundaries through organizational and multinational
Corporation identification
Increasing information transfer creating instantaneous presence to knowledge
Increasing trade, travel and educational opportunities - exponentially
Increasing and intensifying a global consciousness of being one world
Increasing globalized family systems creating global interconnectivity
Increasing currency exchanges in billions of dollars through instant arbitrage – creating an Economic integration of the world market by technology
Increasing trans-boundary issues requiring multi-national solutions for concern such as drug traffic and terrorism
Creating a global village of common fate, responsibility and opportunity
Some of that same literature also identifies the downside of Globalization as Organizations begin to define and implement the processes of economic Globalization. Globalization can create:
Insensitivity to human suffering;
A traumatic time of great political and religious and economic change;
Expansion of the distance between the rich and poor nations and their peoples;
Creating a greater separated world with more lost societies: global apartheid;
An erosion of the ability of ‘governance’ to protect and provide for communal societal needs;
Potential threat to the economic welfare and opportunities of nations, large and small;
Current political processes and institutions cannot manage the socio/economic issues
WHAT THEN IS GLOBALIZATION?
Globalization speaks to the expanding scale, growing magnitude, speeding up and deepening impact of trans-continental flows and patterns of social interaction. Distant communities are linked and power relations stretch across the world. Such an awareness of growing interconnectedness creates new animosities and conflicts, and fuels reactionary politics and deep-seated fears around religious issues. A substantial portion of the world is excluded from the benefits of globalization which becomes divisive and contested.
Globalization must, but does not, speak to the need for an emergence of a new harmonious world society or to a universal process of global integration in which there is a growing convergence of cultures and civilizations.
There seems to be no commonly held definition of globalization, nor a comprehensive conceptual framework that would allow political or religious decision makers to consider possible implications of globalization for world safety. However, it is clear that global organizations are able to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper and cheaper than ever before.
There are significant questions by humanity of Globalization such as: how do we humanize and spiritualize globalization and make it serve our habitat and humanity? Where do we begin to bring about an ethical and just world order with an economy that serves people? How work with globalization and its potential for inhuman and cruel consequences? How create the rules appropriate for the new global world and change the old rules and the old cast of characters and institutions that created the narrowness of vision we struggle with today? Where will the world find new voices to address the trans-border issues of poverty, illness, global security, crime, terrorism, financial stability, secure health, and ecological degradation? How maximize the organizational presence and structure of Globalized Corporations for global health?
The answers to these questions indicate that globalization is a most important debate in the education of the world today for the future. The debate needs a resource of great sophistication and wisdom, calling upon rich intellectual and spiritual traditions to re-visit the issues of human life and the global ethical principles of that common life so as to position wisdom and experience effectively and humanly in this debate relative to the direction and evolution of globalization and the future of the world.
GLOBALIZATION AT GROUND ZERO:
There are issues at ground zero relative to the debate about Globalization”
Globalization divides as much as it unites. In the short run there are both winners and losers. Losers can experience the loss of security about the most basic human needs, undergo identity dislocations, suffer humiliation and lost of dignity, face uncompensated mass resettlement to make way for a new dam, or find their job suddenly and irretrievably outsourced.
Globalization has a compounding effect of producing both differentiation and homogenization in its universalizing trend. Globalization will most likely create resistance of more nationalistic and ethnic groups. Repressive suppression by those in control will spring up.
Our society is increasingly interconnected and interdependent. We are all affected by the repercussions of weapons of mass destruction, modified crops, terrorism, global crime, climate changes, new diseases, loss of forests, water pollution, and depletion of fishing stock in the global commons of the ocean - a theme of ‘predatory globalization’.
On the other hand, Globalization presents immense opportunities:
The vision of a global commons,
A shared sense of interconnected human beings,
Promises of improved economics and health stimulate us to rethink the process of the evolution in our world.
Given the pros and cons, the plusses and minuses, there is a growing and present need for some solution of global integration. There are those who would contain the initial harmful effects of globalization through a six-fold strategy:
Contain negative globalization
Mitigate anarchic responses to globalization
Promote new forms of global governance and functional regulating regimes
Expand civil society input and access to inter-governmental organizations
Link globalization to the various national and governmental process
Work for codes of ethics for multinational corporations.
LEADERSHIP OF THE 21ST CENTURY
However, the questions remain for Globalization and Education: who are the leaders in the 21st century who will implement the above suggestions and re-create this expanding world into an interconnected global community? Where will these leaders find their intellectual, emotional and spiritual courage to create that better world? And even more basic question would be who will create those leaders of the future with enough Intellectual, Emotional and Spiritual intelligence to combine and integrate the people of the world at their most fundamental level?
All of us here at this Conference believe in the power and value of Jesuit Business School processes and programs. We believe in the Jesuit mission and vision to influence and impact the world.
FUTURE OF JESUIT BUSINESS EDUCATION INFLUENCING GLOBALIZATION
To continue the dialogue concerning the place of Jesuit Education in the Global Economy, another context is required in which to set the discussion. Catholic Social Theory has provided a direction and an insight into the beginning of a long-term solution to influencing globalization. Rev. John Coleman, S.J., in his book “Globalization and Catholic Social Thought - Present Crisis, Future Hope” brings together the major concepts and ideas germane to this discussion of the future of Jesuit Business Education influencing Globalization.
Rerum Novarum in 1891- and all subsequent Papal Bulls, Papal Social Encyclicals, Episcopal Documents and Pronouncements down through the ages - have focused on social concerns such as employment, inflation, Third-World development and debt, the death penalty, a just war, the environment, the economy, civil society, the state, work, the family, the labor movement, and other reflections on what it means to be a truly authentic human being. Catholic Social Doctrine can be narrowed to a few principles:
Human dignity
Social Nature of the Human Being
The Common Good - Humanity Solidarity
Justice for poor and rich
An Integral Humanism
All of these core ethical elements and spiritual realities need to address current issues of an integral globalization. While it is not clear sometimes how easily these core ethical elements and spiritual realities fit with the globalization process, it is clear that Spiritual Leaders, Catholic or not, must focus on issues of the person and society, government, economics, and culture. It is also clear that Catholic Social Theory must begin (but is not yet prepared) to address the new realities of globalization. Ethical principles need to be refined, develop new contours, and be reformulated when they are applied to real-life cases of the global kind. Discernment must expand and nuance principles of human behavior in the 21st century and should not just apply them. Careful correlation of these principles to the new realities of globalization is a task still to be undertaken. The connection must be made between principles, moralities, and the realities of new instruments of economic strategies that are required, expanded and implemented by globalized organizations.
There is no solid document clarifying these major issues of globalization – at least none that address the globalization phenomenon as a massive social process of integration, requiring reflection by all and focused on a new way of being in the world together. Catholic Social Theory notes failures of the implementation but provides no systematic thought or process given to global governance concerns. There is a great need to translate Catholic discourse on globalization more fully into effective global action networks that motivate and supply a just-ecology of spirituality for all those who would lead.
A quick solid look at the phenomenon of the multinational corporations is needed in the context of Globalization
NOTES FROM SYMPOSIUM ON GLOBALIZATION
I had the good fortune to be present at a Human Relations Symposium at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California on May 14 at which the speakers and panelists spoke to “Globalization - Today’s New Reality”.
PANELIST SPEAKERS WERE:
Dave Pace - former EVP HR of Starbucks
Bill McGowan - EVP HR Sun Microsystems
Doug McDonald - EVP HR SunPower Corporation
Edward Sweeney - VP HR National Semiconductor
Jeannette Liebmann - VP HR Applied Materials
Spencer Clark Moderator and - Chief Learning Officer - Cadence Design Systems
Their united message was that Secular Institutions are dealing with values and norms in a globalization process that is creating a more integrated way of doing business across the world. They are implementing a ‘value-virtue based process’ that creates their ‘non-negotiable’ values and virtues which in turn become lines in the sand they will not cross – norms and values which they expect people in the company regardless of geography to honor if they are to work in that company. Those are the values and virtues by which peoples in that company in any part of the world will live their lives, personally and professionally.
Corporations are not trying to change the cultures and norms, policies and beliefs of other countries into becoming more American, or English, or German, or French. Rather they are beginning to define a universal and global code of ethics by which all people can live and work together - and they are doing it one company at a time. They are sensitive to local issues - and merely state that people who work in Company XYZ will act this way. They are noticing that those ‘company values’ are gradually becoming the values of the local citizens.
The other issue is this: how are these companies going to design, internalize or instill those ‘non-negotiable’ values in their own people who live throughout the world?
The concern is that many companies - Enron comes to mind - do not have their spiritual house in order yet. The point in this Globalization discussion is not to white-wash what is malfeasance - but rather to have all companies look at themselves and begin to live their own norms and values, virtues and ideals even as they march globally. Organizations need leaders who will guarantee, as much as is possible, that the common good of the company and associated companies wherever they are in the world, are motivated by IQ, EQ and SQ.