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NOTES FROM THE REFLECTIVE PRACTITIONER by Paul Pribbenow, Ph.D. |
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Volume Four, Number Four (April 2003) –W. Wordsworth, from "The Prelude" What you think Happy Spring to all. I received several substantive responses to the last issue of Notes. Former colleague and
friend, Jeff Lozer, commenting on unplanned (?) connections between my
essay on peace – especially my discussion of John Courtney Murray’s
definition of barbarism – and my description of the pending “Without
getting into the details of any case, I'd simply say that the mere
presence of litigation in this or any other matter illustrates that
philanthropy is not immune from a peculiar form of cultural barbarism. In
fact, one could argue that a one-sided pitch, over the phone, to an
individual with no prior contact with or passion for an organization and
its mission meets Murray's definition of a barbaric "monologue"
where an organization's "economic interests [have assumed] primacy
over higher values". Legalistic
wrangling (expensive barbarism) that drags the first amendment into this
forced dialogue is further evidence of how far we can slip.” Several
others wrote to state their opinions on this contentious case – we’ll
watch with great interest as things unfold. Reader
Daniel Montplaisir, writing in anticipation of my notes on liberal arts
and the professions in this issue, provides this helpful synopsis: “I
think that using a liberal arts education in the business professions of
accounting, finance, management or law, is accepted and encouraged today
because of the proliferation of information.
Industry and society as a whole need less people who simply execute
techniques in a tedious manner, but rather, thinkers who can assimilate
distinct and unrelated facts. We
must be able to answer the question, “so why is this important?”
Surprisingly, it is skill that we find even more crucial at places
like the CIA or FBI than it was pre 9/11.” Occasionally, I (or my colleagues) refer to items from previous issues of Notes. If you have not been a subscriber previously, and wish to review our conversations, past issues of Notes are available on-line at www.jgacounsel.com. The website version of Notes also includes helpful hyperlinks to sources for purchasing or subscribing to the various publications mentioned in Notes. I thank my friends at Johnson, Grossnickle & Associates for their abiding support for our reflective practice. REFLECT ON THIS Democracy and the workplace A faculty member here at the college recently commented that the best a college community could hope for in its president is a benevolent despot – perhaps a sad comment on the aspirations some of my colleagues have for our college, but perhaps not so far from the standard opinion of most workers. Just let us do our jobs, treat us well, and we’ll be fine… This strikes me as wrong on at least two levels. First, it positions leaders as inaccessible and out of touch – benevolence is delivered from a distance. Second, it excuses members of an organization or community from the responsibilities that all have for making things better. Now, that may be exactly what my colleague believes, but I want to contend that healthy communities call for different visions of both leaders and citizens. Writing in a recent issue of the Harvard Business Review (January 2003), Brook Manville and Josiah Ober (a corporate executive and classics professor, respectively) suggest that “building a company of citizens” is what contemporary organizations need to do to be successful and responsible in today’s knowledge economy. And they suggest that the model for this company of citizens – a system that succeeds and bringing individual initiative and common cause into harmony – can be found in the ancient practices of the Athenians. The richness and vibrancy of the democratic experience of the Athenians, they argue (despite its obvious failings in disenfranchising a significant portion of the population), stands as a helpful challenge to our impoverished modern conceptions of democracy. Manville and Ober outline what they call the “architecture of citizenship,” a framework that is organic – growing out of the needs, beliefs, and actions of a community – and that is holistic – informing all aspects of an organization’s culture and practices. This architecture of citizenship has three critical aspects. (1) Participatory structures – A radically flat organization with a set of clearly defined and universally understood processes and institutions. Citizens take turns on executive teams and in oversight councils. Transparent procedural rules govern all processes, keeping them fair, simple and flexible. Expertise in technical matters is valued, but not as an end in itself. Amateur engagement is preferred as the community seeks to share fresh viewpoints and knowledge. In combination, these various democratic structures come to reflect people’s deep trust in their own ability to chart the course of an organization. And trust is all too rare in modern organizations. (2) Communal values – Motivation to participate in these structures comes from a higher purpose – a sense of shared ownership in a community’s destiny. In such an organization, there comes to exist an integration of individual will and common purpose. This doesn’t mean that individual citizens are not free to express themselves or to pursue private gain. But citizens also are expected to participate and help protect the public welfare. These communal values also put a premium on understanding the community or organization as synonymous with its people. The organization’s interest must reflect its citizens. This sometimes fragile balance between individual initiative and common cause is premised on a sense of moral reciprocity – the important belief that “what’s in it for me” is linked to “what’s in it for us.” (3) Practices of Engagement – Participatory structures and communal values set the framework for the actual work of democracy – the activities and practices that define a culture and how it gets its work done. The practices of engagement are how we do and learn citizenship – how we pursue common work even as we learn to do our work better. There are practices of access that ensure that every citizen has a free and equal opportunity to participate in governing. The rotation of roles is a key aspect of these practices of access. The practices of process ensure that deliberations and decision-making were consistent, fair and timely. Transparent processes, combined with a sense of urgency in decision-making, means that citizen ownership of decisions is more likely to exist. The practices of consequence ensure that process does not become an end in itself – instead, citizens are encouraged to focus on concrete results. Citizens must be accountable for the consequences of actions and they must challenge processes that lead to unfair results. And finally, practices of jurisdiction ensure that every decision is made in the right place, at the right time, by the right people. These practices are designed to put important decisions in the hands of those with the greatest knowledge of the issues and the greatest stake in the outcomes. Manville and Ober have no illusions about the difficulties inherent in implementing this architecture of citizenship in contemporary organizations. Who is a citizen? What are the benefits, rights and obligations of citizenship? How should ownership rights and other rewards be distributed? These are but a few of the questions that will need to be resolved if we are to emulate the Athenian democracy in our time – but the quest seems so very timely and urgent. Liberal arts and the professions Our little college has a long tradition of education grounded in the liberal arts, but with a strong sense of responsibility as well for preparing students for professional lives in teaching, nursing, business and so forth. We’ve recently established a new center to help explore and practice the links between the liberal arts and the professions. As the center’s work unfolds, I have been searching for alternative frameworks for organizing and describing our aspirations for that work. I first looked to the life and work of our alumna, Jane Addams, and discovered these helpful ideas (with a particular focus on the business profession): As we think about educating our students for careers in business (both through our formal curricular programs in business, economics and accounting and our co-curricular leadership initiatives), we find in Miss Addams’ work three clear examples of how the liberal arts are a fitting framework for understanding the world of business: (1)
In a remarkable essay
entitled “A Modern Lear,” (first published in Survey, vol. 39, Apart from the specifics of Miss Addams’ argument in the essay, we find here an example of how the best of human literature, philosophy, science and the arts (the substance of a liberal arts curriculum) allows us to frame and interpret our lives in the world. As classicist Martha Nussbaum has similarly suggested, one of the critical outcomes of a liberal education is the narrative imagination that allows us to understand, critique, empathize and imagine alternative visions of human life. Miss Addams illustrates for us how this narrative imagination is a crucial aspect of understanding the world of commerce. (2) In Democracy and Social Ethics (first published in 1908), Miss Addams offers her most complete analysis of the great divide between the social classes. She suggests that “a standard of social ethics is not attained by traveling a sequestered byway, but by mixing on the thronged and common road where all must turn out for one another, and at least see the size of one another’s burdens” (p.7). Later in the same text, she argues that this standard of social ethics must be applied to relations between employers and employees by crafting policies and procedures to which both shall adhere in the fair and equitable balance of power and responsibility within the corporation. This is a nuanced understanding of the ethics of corporate relationships – not Carnegie’s “responsibilities of wealth,” but a more comprehensive “responsibilities of being human” that reshapes an understanding of common work wherever it occurs. Miss Addams offers us a persuasive vision of the moral life in a democracy that has direct implications for the field of business ethics, focusing our attention constantly on the interests and concerns of all stakeholders in a business organization. Her perspectives prove quite helpful at this moment in our history when corporate greed threatens to undermine not just the fabric of individual corporations, but also indeed the economic and moral well-being of our entire society. We want our business students to have the personal character – and the moral decision-making skills – to understand and practice a social ethic on the ‘thronged and common road.’ (3)
One of the most
fascinating aspects of life at Hull-House was the emphasis on offering a
wide diversity of classes and programs that offered the immigrants in the
neighborhood the knowledge, experience, skills and perspectives they
needed to make a life in the world. From
one of As
a college dedicated to preparing students for life in a complex and global
world, we also recognize our responsibility to ensure that our students
have the range of opportunities needed to be good and successful citizens.
From clubs and organizations (which offer leadership and service
opportunities) to athletic teams (which teach discipline and teamwork) to
computer training (essential skills in today’s workplace) to language
and study abroad programs (responding to an increasingly international
business environment) – not to mention a rigorous curriculum in business
and the liberal arts – Rockford College is living out Miss Addams’
vision for an informed and engaged citizenry.
We believe strongly that the small liberal arts college, with its
opportunities for personal relationships, its emphasis on educating the
entire person, and its many ways of engaging students on and off campus,
is better situated than any other sort of educational institution to
prepare successful and responsible business and civic leaders for the 21st
century. I also discovered a helpful essay by William J. Cronon entitled “Qualities of the Liberally Educated Person” (The American Scholar, Vol. 67, No. 4, Autumn 1998), in which he offers these ten outcomes of a liberal education that shape a professional life: (1) They know how to listen and hear; (2) They read and they understand; (3) They can talk with anyone; (4) They can write clearly and persuasively and movingly; (5) They can solve a wide variety of puzzles and problems; (6) They respect rigor, not as an end in itself, but as a way of seeking truth; (7) They practice respect and humility, tolerance, and self-criticism; (8) They understand how to get things done in the world; (9) They nurture and empower the people around them; (10) They follow E.M Forster’s injunction to “Only connect.” Our new center would do well to explore how well all our students exhibit these qualities as they make lives and livings in the world. Finally, I found Peter Gabel’s essay “Spirituality and Law” (Tikkun, March/April 2003) an important reminder of the ways in which a professional education without the liberal arts too often indoctrinates students into a set of values imbedded in the status quo. Speaking of legal education, Gabel suggests that the case law used to train lawyers ignores the connections between a community’s spiritual and political lives and the practice of law. He reminds us of Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of justice as “Love correcting that which revolts against love” and contends that this is a vision that frames the connections between spirit, law and politics. Our society would be richer if education for the professions introduced the broader range of human values into the discussion of the human drama. Such a discussion and exploration is, of course, the work of liberal education. PRACTICE THIS Generating hot ideas Two recent articles intrigued me with their overlapping descriptions of the important of idea generation within organizations. Thomas Davenport, Laurence Prusak and H. James Wilson, writing in the Harvard Business Review (February 2003), describe a new and critical player in organizational life, “the idea practitioner.” The idea practitioners are those individuals who scout the landscape for ideas, package those ideas for broader organizational consumption, advocate for new ideas within the organization, and then make it happen. Idea practitioners, according to the authors, are optimistic, devoted to ideas in general, self-confident, and not afraid to span boundaries within an organization. The care and feeding of such idea practitioners is critical to organizations in a knowledge economy and world. Do you know one? In a Leadership in Action article (January/February 2003), authors Sylvester Taylor and Stan Gryskiewicz review various processes for generating ideas and suggest that a hybrid approach is often best for organizations. Perhaps idea practitioners arise out of such processes:
Eight steps to integrity Integrity within organizations is my primary professional and academic focus these days. I found Stratford Sherman’s eight steps to integrity a helpful challenge to my thinking, and as he argues, “real integrity can be disruptive and inconvenient.” (Leader to Leader, Spring 2003) The eight steps are:
Resources for your reflective practice I have a new
subscription to The Hedgehog Review, Critical Reflections on
Contemporary Culture – and recommend it heartily.
Published by the I mentioned earlier in
this issue an excerpt from a William Cronon article on liberal education.
I came upon the Cronon article in a very helpful series of several
papers, organized and distributed by I’m reading an elegant book-length essay by Paul Woodruff entitled Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue (Oxford University Press, 2001). More about Woodruff’s work in a future issue of Notes. I’ve also just begun War
is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (PublicAffairs, 2002) by Chris
Hedges, a young New York Times reporter, long stationed in war
zones, who will be our Commencement speaker here at Sabbath Judith Shulevitz, writing in The New York Times Magazine (March 2, 2003) on “Bringing Back the Sabbath: Why even the most secular need a day of ritualized rest,” tells us: “So counterintuitive is the idea of organized nonproductivity, given the force and universality of the human urge to make things, that we can’t believe anyone ever managed to lift his head from his workbench or plow long enough to think of it…. But when (or if), perhaps a millennium earlier, the Jews took over an old Mesopotamian day of taboo and transformed it into one of holy rest, they brought into the world not just the Sabbath but something just as precious, and surprisingly, closely linked. They invented the idea of social equality.” And so, all of us need some organized nonproductivity – our Sabbaths on which to rest. Wendell Berry writes poems on his Sabbath. Here is one of my favorites from his A Timbered Choir (Counterpoint, 1998).
“The clearing rests in song and shade. It is a creature made By old light held in soil and leaf, By human joy and grief, By human work, Fidelity of sight and stroke, By rain, by water on The parent stone. We join our work to Heaven’s gift, Our hope to what is left, That field and woods at last agree In an economy Of widest worth. High Heaven’s Kingdom come on earth. Imagine O dust, arise!” Subscription information Subscriptions to Notes
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(c) Paul Pribbenow, 2003 |