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I would note that the formal name the Jesuit founders chose for their company was, in their vernacular, Companìa de Jesus, company of Jesus. And the way they understood ‘company’ is not what we would typically understand today. Although nowadays the meaning of the word company has been almost completely hijacked by commercial enterprise, recall that the Latin roots of the word are cum panis, to break bread together…in the 16th century ‘company’ would more often refer to a religious group, a military troop, or even a group of friends. These early Jesuits clearly saw themselves as companions of Jesus and of each other, and that this companionship would energize their efforts. The Jesuit compania is offering you another challenge: to be sure your respective ‘companias’ or apostolates manifest that root concept: groups characterized by mutual support that energizes team members. Doing so would not only fortify your respective teams and help them past the inevitable obstacles that come up, but might also give students, parishioners, and corporate America a potential alternative model of how to operate—what an incredibly powerful contribution that would be to American life in the 21st century.

These three proactive leadership virtues I’ve discussed—risk-taking, pursuing heroic ambitions, treating people with love—are hard, and Ignatian leaders fortunately have a fourth tool, one more habit, that helps. Self-awareness, primarily won through the Spiritual Exercises, is the foundation of all these leadership virtues. None of the dispositions I’ve spoken about is primarily a disengaged intellectual tool to be used, for example, in the way investment bankers become more effective by using present value calculations. Rather, Ignatian-inspired leaders become more effective at living the magis, detachment, being men for others, and so on, only through some personal conversion and commitment arising from lived experience of the exercises. These tools, if you will, call for real not notional assent to become truly powerful. The Harvard emeritus Abraham Zaleznik once observed that many conventional corporate leaders seem to be individuals who were ‘twice born,’ where some personal crisis like injury, alcoholism, or bankruptcy forced them to come to grips as adults with who they were and what they valued and wanted: if a crisis doesn’t thrust this moment of self-scrutiny upon us, we need to manufacture the process for ourselves, and the Exercises provide such a tool. In my opinion, it’s not enough for Ignatian school teams to merely plaster ideas like ‘magis’ on brochures or parrot them in class: those who do the plastering and parroting have to be deeply engaged and moved by these same ideas through the Exercises.

These Exercises, in addition to motivating and grounding the other leadership virtues, also include a wonderful tool, via the examen, for staying on track. You all know that the examen encourages us each, three times a day if not habitually, to engage in short mental pit stops. In the morning, upon awaking, to remind ourselves of what we have to be grateful for and what we want to achieve. Then, twice more, once in the middle of the work day and once at its end, to again pause, remind ourselves of blessings, remind ourselves of goals, replay the previous few hours, and extract lessons learned.

The Jesuits broke radically by abandoning the monastic practice of gathering together in chapel multiple times daily in order instead to pursue a much more activist lifestyle. Yet, Ignatius had the incredibly modern insight that we in the 21st century typically overlook: if you and I don’t have the luxury of retreating to chapel multiple times daily like monks, we need to find some other way of keeping ourselves focused and recollected as we bob along each day on a tide of e-mails, phone calls, and meetings without ever pulling back to take stock. I’m sure you’ve seen the fallout from this chaotic lifestyle as I have: the person who gets to the end of the day without ever getting to his or her # 1 priority, or the person who has a meeting go badly at 8:30 and remains distracted about it all day, draining productivity….for Ignatian style leaders, the examen also becomes the great regulator of other virtues, for example, am I being heroic or bold enough in my aspirations and goals; or, conversely, in my pursuit of new models, do I risk forsaking core values of either the Society or the church. Put differently, am I balancing correctly the tension between core values and the imperative to adapt to the ever-changing world I work in….And just as Jesuit teams and institutions might role model more effective ways of working through environments of greater love and fear, so too might they distinguish themselves by showing the effectiveness of self-aware workplaces.

Finally, though the premise of my book is that corporate America has a lot to learn from Ignatian wisdom, let me offer two ways in which we as individuals and teams might learn from corporate America. First is a sense of urgency. Anyone who works in a publicly traded company is painfully aware of being measured quarterly, when earnings reports emerge and stock prices swoon or soar. We all can lament the short-sightedness of that system, but let’s grant this much: it has a wonderful capacity to concentrate the mind on the task at hand. I don’t intend the word ‘urgency,’ as so often used today, to mean a permanent state of anxious panic. Recall, after all, the famous maxim of St. Ignatius that we should “Work as if success depended on your own efforts, but trust as if all depended on God.” [I know that the interpretation of this maxim is debated, but since we’re not in the New England Province where Fr. Barrry lives, I hope you will humor me]

The subconscious message of this maxim is incredibly important: our implicit assumption tends to be—if you get yourself into a specific job, you can make leadership impact; their implicit assumption is: you’re going to be making impact whatever job you’re in. Focus on the input you can control, not on what you can’t control. It pre-figures, I believe, so much modern psychological insight: for example, the principle that the healthiest individuals learn to ‘control the controllables’: highly proactive in the areas of life they can control, but free from obsession over what they cannot control. So, I would urge us to approach issues with the urgency that corporate America does so well, yet with Ignatian equanimity rooted in faith.

The second lesson I would like to leave from corporate America is the importance of measuring results. Every corporate executive knows he or she will only get high quality results against objectives that are measured; what’s more, if you don’t measure, how do you know you’re succeeding? Prominently promoted as integral to the mission of virtually every Jesuit school I know is the concept of forming men and women for others. I’m sure that representatives of Jesuit schools here can cite with no difficulty the SAT scores or graduation rates that indicate academic achievement at your respective institutions: can you also give me some statistic of how well you’ve done at turning those same students into men and women for others? With respect to alumni, to use the case of my own Jesuit high school, for example, we know that precisely 46.5% of the class of ‘76 gave money to Regis last year: we don’t have a clue what % of the class are currently ‘men for others.’ That it’s hard to measure a trait like this with any precision is no excuse for doing nothing. Ignatius, in a famous letter to missionaries going to Germany, cites lessons he claims to be taking from Satan: if Ignatius was willing to take best practices from Satan, than surely Ignatian-style leaders of the 21st century should not be shy to take best practices around urgency and measurement from corporate America.

Let me sum up:
1. We can be thankful, in an odd way, if we can each find in the church today some burning platform, some crisis, some moment of danger entwined with opportunity, that will spur us to take the sort of initiative as individuals and in teams that we might otherwise be afraid to.

2. Those gathered in this room should be thankful for the unique resources an Ignatian-grounded team brings to a crisis: Christian faith and hope, and an incredible Jesuit track record of success and of surmounting crises, thanks to the ‘corporate culture’ instilled through the Exercises.

3. That specifically Ignatian corporate culture inspires response to challenge guided by some key characteristics: it’s daring, heroic, and magis-driven; detachment brings freedom and openness, the ability and willingness to change, think outside the box, to be, in a word, ingenious; love binds teams, energizes teams, helps one to treat others with the respect they are due, and thereby helps a team work its way through differences of opinion; self-awareness and the habit of the examen insure that action is bold enough, but that bold action never compromises core values and never wanders too far and too long from what the Spirit wishes.

4. Just as Ignatius learned from Satan, we should be open to learn best practices whereever we can. From corporate America, we might learn to apply these gifts of the Exercises with an appropriate sense of urgency and to be fully accountable by measuring our progress against goals and objectives we consider important.

5. Finally, all these virtues, taken together, form a unique way of doing things, a unique way of proceeding. That way of proceeding looks a lot like what we in the modern world call leadership. Ignatian individuals and teams accept the privilege and challenge of leading themselves and the church, a leadership that they don’t conceive as conveyed by hierarchical status but by manifesting a set of core values in life and work.

Thank you for listening, and best of luck to all of us as we try to make ourselves, families, workplaces and this Province more self-aware, ingenious, heroic and loving.

[Chris Lowney is the author of Heroic Leadership: Best Practices from a 450-Year-Old Company that Changed the World. The book is available through Amazon, in bookstores, or via www.chrislowney.com]

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