Practical wisdom in management from the Christian tradition

Citation

Naughton, M., Habisch, A. and Lenssen, G. (2010), "Practical wisdom in management from the Christian tradition", Journal of Management Development, Vol. 29 No. 7/8. https://doi.org/10.1108/jmd.2010.02629gaa.002

Practical wisdom in management from the Christian tradition

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Management Development, Volume 29, Issue 7/8

About the Guest Editors

Michael NaughtonHolder of the Alan W. Moss Endowed Chair in Catholic Social Thought at the University of St Thomas where he is a full professor. As a faculty member with a joint appointment in the departments of Catholic Studies (College of Arts and Sciences) and Ethics and Law (Opus College of Business), he is also the director of the John A. Ryan Institute for Catholic Social Thought, which examines Catholic social thought in relationship to business.

André HabischProfessor for Christian Social Ethics and Civil Society at the Ingolstadt Business School of Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (Germany) and director of the Center for Corporate Citizenship (Ingolstadt – Germany). He holds a PhD in Theology from Tuebinga University and a professional degree in economics from Free University of Berlin. He is a visiting professor at the International Center for Corporate Social Responsibility at Nottingham Business School. Professor Habisch has taught MA and MBA courses at Bozen University and Catholic University of Milan and has published on CSR, Social Capital and Catholic Social Thought in German, English and Italian. Among his multiple practical engagements he is consulting the Catholic Entrepreneurial Union, the UNIAPAC, he chairs the committee of Bayer Cares Foundation and is member of the Scientific Jury of the “Good Company Ranking” of ManagerMagazin. He served at the German Parliament’s commission on Civil Society and Civic Engagement and is an active member of the European Academy Business in Society (EABIS).

Gilbert Lenssen President of EABIS – The Academy of Business in Society and a former professor of International Management at the College of Europe, Oxford University and Leiden University. Currently professor of strategy and governance at ENPC Paris and visiting professor at the Universities of Reading and Cranfield. He has widely published on corporate responsibility and strategy. Prior to his academic career, he was a business executive for BP in Belgium, the UK, USA, India, the Middle East, Germany and Spain. As a Christian of the Catholic tradition, he became familiar with other religions and traditions during his executive postings (Anglican, Episcopal, Presbytarian, Lutheran, Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic traditions). With Ted Malloch of Yale University and Andrew Kakabadse of Cranfield University, he initiated the project “Practical wisdom for management from the religious and spiritual traditions, a four year journey”.

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? (T.S. Eliot).

In ancient Greece Meno asked Socrates, “Can virtue be taught?” Today, 2,500 years later, in the field of business education we ask a similar question, “Can managers be taught to be wise?” Today’s modern university has provided innovative methodical instruments, more objective analytical tools, more complex scientific methods. They have undoubtedly made the world a better place. Scientific progress has enhanced living conditions for millions of people. Division of labor, specialization and technological advancement are indispensable to achieving the common good.

Yet, even with groundbreaking scientific progress, Meno’s question remains relevant. If our current financial crisis has taught us one thing, it is that virtue cannot be discounted in the understanding and running of businesses, no matter how sophisticated the financial formula, and no matter how complicated the econometric model. It was some of the best educated, the most eloquent and the most so-called “professional” persons and institutions of the capitalist world that triggered processes leading to the recent disastrous events in the financial markets.

T.S. Eliot’s two lines of poetry above capture for us the limit of knowledge and information found in methods, formulas, skills, techniques. We can get so lost in the proverbial forest of knowledge and information that it prevents us from being wise in practical day-to-day affairs. We see only parts and not the whole. We zoom in on a decision, but our lens gets stuck and we cannot zoom back out to get a larger picture. We fail to take counsel from the right people at the right time. We are blind to the foreseeable implications of our actions. We become fixated on one element of the situation and we ignore other factors and considerations.

As businesses and business schools have become more sophisticated organizations of the information society and knowledge economy, there are serious concerns of their institutional wisdom and the wisdom of their leaders and teachers. This is an important time in our history to take stock of our tradition on wisdom which challenges the “bounded rationality” of all knowledge and raises awareness of larger wholeness and higher purpose.

This special issue provides an interdisciplinary exploration of the virtue of practical wisdom within the (Catholic and Protestant) Christian traditions in relationship to business and business education. Initially, this might seem to be an odd and outdated approach for this journal to host. It might be objected that just as society is becoming more pluralistic, why should this journal want to focus in on Christianity and other religious traditions in relationship to management and management? Our response is threefold.

First, we argue that any understanding of virtue and rationality is tradition-specific. To speak of the virtue of practical wisdom, one needs to be honest about the specific tradition one is speaking from.

Second, a healthy notion of pluralism should encourage people to speak from their center in such a way as to allow others to do the same. If, in the name of pluralism, scholars and practitioners systematically exclude moral traditions simply because they hold to a religious faith, pluralism has become a platform for secularist uniformity. Many of the authors of this volume are connected to faith-based organizations (universities, hospitals, monasteries). Others work in secular institutions speak from their inner connectedness to the Christian tradition. They will best contribute to a pluralistic environment by drawing on the distinctiveness of their own religious tradition. If they fail to bring these integrating components together, they reduce their integrity, and lose a chance to contribute to the pluralism that should exist in management practice and education.

Thirdly, while this moral tradition may not be shared by the reader, it is a tradition that is accessible to human reason and can provide insights and practical ways forward to humanize business education and business practice.

Defining practical wisdom

Defining rich ideas in compacted ways is always an elusive task. As the reader moves through this volume, the various elements and perspectives of practical wisdom from the Christian tradition will become obvious. The tradition developed over 2000 years from different sources.

The authors in this special issue offer different but complementary perspectives from the different streams within the Christian tradition. Many go back to the Aristotelian understanding of practical wisdom as “prudence” which ensures the rightness of the means in the pursuit of rightness of ends, coupled with moral virtues such as justice and courage.

In the Thomistic tradition (following Thomas Aquinas), the quality of deliberation to achieve the right reason in action is very important. Right reason is not just instrumental reason, because it refers to the greater good and the righteous life.

The oldest is the Augustinian tradition which emphasizes the purposefulness and wholeness of the world and of life as opposed to the concept of life as self-serving and self-referential. Humans strive for greater meaning, not utility maximization.

The Personalist tradition evolved in the twentieth century and emphasizes that right means should always enhance the integral development of the persons involved. Personalism rejects individualism and materialism, the dominant lifestyles of modern times and emphasizes the dignity and potential of the person as Imago Dei (created in the image of God).

This tradition invites for a deepening of discerning real truth from superficiality and appearance in concrete situations, which embodies the skill of practical wisdom. Fresh interpretations of the original New Testament texts (exegesis) are often provided for this purpose.

Several of the authors in this volume argue that it has been the separation of means and ends, strategy and purpose, efficiency and meaning, economics and ethics in organizational life and business education that has negatively impacted confidence in business today, resulting in a disturbing loss of trust. This loss of trust has come about from the disordering of the end and purpose of business by its self-referential categories. When business refers to its objective function as the maximization of profits only, it voids itself from real purpose and meaning since it fails to serve anything but itself, which ultimately leads to self-corruption.

If today’s business leaders and educators, especially after the business scandals and financial crisis, are to regain trust from the larger society they must lead and educate with practical wisdom. Chester Barnard, one of the great leadership thinkers of the twentyieth century, spoke of leadership as the art of sensing the whole. Too much of business and business education have become fixated on the efficiency of means and have lost sight of any larger purpose and meaning of enterprise beyond profit maximization. At best, they understand management as the skill of balancing, not the art of integrating means and ends, strategy and purpose, efficiency and morality.

In order to critique this crisis of purpose and meaning, the authors draw upon important distinctions such as the subjective and objective dimensions of work, making and doing, moral and instrumental rationality, scarcity and abundance and so forth, that provide managers and their educators with a retrieval of the classical sense of management as a profession.

Origins of this volume

The impetus for this volume started at a seminar at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany (September 2009). The seminar was attended by an interdisciplinary group of scholars in the fields of theology, management, economics, philosophy, and law, and of practitioners in the areas of health care, industry, finance, and education (see: www.stthomas.edu/cathstudies/cst/conferences/PracticalWisdom/default.html). A particular concern of these scholars, teachers and practitioners has been the explosion of instrumental knowledge and its crowding out effect on the formation of character and the awareness of human dignity and the common good within universities. Business schools in particular are prone within this explosion to be deprived of their cultural mission, and find themselves reduced to a mere extension of economic institutions. It should not surprise us that training within our universities with this type of formation actually contributed rather than prevented actions that produced our current financial crisis.

In educating and not merely training business students, participants from the seminar saw the need to be more ambitious in presenting an integral rationality that helps students to see management as a profession. This is a principal contribution of the tradition of practical wisdom and this volume is one small attempt in this direction. While some may object that such an education is not appropriate, possible or even desirable for a business school, we have to remember future managers want to be wise not just smart people. They want to achieve important goals during the span of their life or even realize aspirations to make a difference beyond the limits of their lifetime. Thomas Aquinas captured the attractiveness of wisdom in the human spirit when he said:

Of all the pursuits open to the human person, the search for wisdom is more perfect, more sublime, more profitable, and more full of joy.

Presentation of the papers

The first group of papers focuses on the value of practical wisdom for the practice of management:

• •

  Timo Meynhardt reveals the central role of practical wisdom in the work of Peter Drucker and how deeply rooted Drucker was in the Christian wisdom tradition.

• •

  Mario Molteni and Matteo Pedrini present an embodiment of the practical wisdom through what they call the socio-economic synthesis in management and corporate governance.

• •

  Domènec Melé argues for the necessity of integrating practical wisdom in the managerial decision-making process and contrasts it with two conventional approaches of maximizing and satisficing behaviors.

• •

  Laurent Mortreuil is CFO at a major French bank and provides an approach to analyze the causes of the current financial crisis in the light of (the absence of) practical wisdom.

• •

  William Brinkmann and Dan O’Brien describe how a Catholic healthcare system has designed a measurement tool used to test the degree to which key characteristics of its mission, vision and values are implemented on a pluralist basis.

The second group of papers focuses on practical wisdom as a challenge for the business school experience:

• •

  André Habisch and Cristian Loza Adaui propose ways to “season” analysis of management practice and management formation in business schools with practical wisdom in the light of the recent Encyclical Caritas in veritate.

• •

  Dean Maines and Michael Naughton outline “middle level thinking” approach as a missing link in business education to acquire the virtue of practical wisdom.

• •

  Charles Clark looks at the development of economic theory and its rejection of practical wisdom over time and adresses the question: how should we teach economics at management schools?

The third group of papers reflect the various streams of thought within the Christian tradition. These form the origins of Christian practical wisdom:

• •

  Gilbert Lenssen explores the value of a narrative interpretation (exegesis) of the original New Testament texts in discerning practical wisdom. He takes a implicitly Personalist perspective on using texts in management education.

• •

  Helen Alford critiques current mainstream management theory from an explicit Personalist point of view, especially regarding its incomplete assumptions on human nature and human action.

• •

  Wolfgang Grassl introduces Thomas Aquinas’ psychological theory of action as a useful guide for understanding decision-making in management. This theory allows for harmonization of instrumental rationality, will and personal morality.

• •

  Dermot Tredget, also from the Thomist tradition but from a Benedictine perspective, examines practical wisdom in the Rule of Benedict and the conferences of Cassian.

• •

  Christoph Weber-Berg explores Martin Luther’s anthropology and theology of justification for a modern understanding of practical wisdom. Luther’s metaphor of the “self inclined man” is revealing for understanding the origins of personal failure.

• •

  Luc Hoebeke was invited by the editors to provide an Old Testament perspective of practical wisdom using Hebrew bible resources. He reads the Decalogue as a source of practical wisdom for living well amongst others.

• •

  Eric Cornuel, André Habisch and Pierre Kletz explore Catholic Social Teachings as an adaption of practical wisdom to the emerging social-economic context of modern society.

• •

  Theodore Malloch delivers a principled pluralism perspective on the virtues that constitute spiritual capital and spiritual enterprise.

Michael NaughtonUniversity of St Thomas, Minnesota, MN, USAAndré HabischCatholic University of Eichstätt – Ingolstadt, GermanyGilbert LenssenEABIS The Academy of Business in Society