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Are you feeling courageous? Neal Diamond once said if you really want to write meaningful music, you need only look at your own life and into your own heart. What follows is part of my meaningful music.
I’ve recently been asking myself if there is a moral imperative to leadership. And, if so, what does it look like and how would you define it? What about business, is there a moral imperative there? We all seem to agree that we have a moral imperative in, say, education. Teachers, for instance, should not abuse their students. That’s the standard in our culture and everyone accepts it as a “Moral Imperative.” To date I have, never met anyone advocating physical, sexual, emotional or verbal abuse of their child by a teacher.
So what would be its equivalent in business or leadership?
Sadly, we can’t say ‘do no harm’ because too much harm is already being done. We don’t allow teachers to abuse — but we do allow companies to abuse their customers and the earth with harmful chemicals and products, defending behavior for the sake of profit and jobs. Could that be because the main imperative right now is profit disguised as jobs? Don’t get me wrong, profit is good; companies should be concerned about profit. But profit over all else? I understand profit as an imperative, but I would propose that businesses and their leaders also need an overarching moral imperative as well.
How about compassion? Empathy? Social justice? If we were governed by a moral imperative such as one of those, would we have the extreme discrepancy in pay? Would we so callously hurt the earth? Would we create products that risk death or harm to consumers with carcinogens, addictions or false safety? We need only look at the recent actions Volkswagen, the greed driven causes of the great recession, or the reaction Dan Price received when he proposed raising the minimum wage of his own company to $70,000, to see at least some of the truth in this profit imperative. I know…I just turned a bunch of you off and fired up a whole other lot of you. And I know, morals aren’t black and white. If they were, we wouldn’t have half the ongoing debates we have in the country. All I’m suggesting is a change in the dialogue to challenge the traditional profitability question with this question: What is compassion* and what does it look like in business? How would it affect the decisions we make? How would it challenge–or compliment–our imperative to profit? And where does the courage lie to challenge the tradition for a greater good?
What do you think?
*by definition compassion is: sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others