Charter for Compassion Business Newsletter, July 2014
Business Metaphors
In the late 19th century, a concept called the Progressive Movement crept through the vineworks of American business thinking. While there were many aspects of Progressivism–including cleaning up local government, one of the more high-minded Progressive theories worked like this: A working factory would be drop-shipped onto an agrarian community and provide prosperity for a local populace surrounded by the natural wonders of clean air and water.
This was a utopian ideal that contrasted with the smudgy skies and open sewage of the contemporary 1800s urbanscape. To superimpose Industrial progress over Agrarian rural communities seemed fantastical, yet businessmen like Henry Ford latched onto the ideals of the Progressive Movement, and moved his fledgling automobile company to Dearborn. Similar Progressive communities sprouted in the pastoral area of Kohler, Wisconsin, where brick manufacturing evolved into today’s Kohler plumbing products. The Amana Colonies in Amana, Iowa are also attributed in part to the Progressive Movement.
Every so often, the men and women who aspire to construct corporate empires need something to live for: an ideal higher than healthy profits.
Compassionate Leaders: a new breed?
Most leaders are still trained to lead with their heads, not their hearts. They’re conditioned to put business before benevolence. The public profile of a good leader espoused in the press, for instance, routinely includes attributes like 'tough, decisive, hard-nosed, quick-to-judge, ultra-rational and results-driven'.
Yet this is changing. Organisations are now showing interest in a more compassionate style – in leading with feelings.
Let’s face it, there hasn’t been a lot of room for compassion in most workplaces – and the shift to a more emotionally intelligent, empathetic and caring style of leadership invokes questions like: 'What is compassion? What does it mean to be a compassionate leader? How can I inspire others to create a more caring culture? Will being more compassionate mean going soft, diluting hard decisions and watering down a solid focus on outcomes?'
There’s no simple definition of compassion and ‘task-first’ leaders used to concentrating on systems, structures, facts and figures can feel ill-equipped journeying into this relatively unknown territory.
Our Business Conference call will be on July 22. We hope anyone who is interested will join us. We will have a speaker from Conscious Capitalism. See the article above.
Calls are 90 minutes long, and you need to register for the call with Maestro Conference. We have the capacity to have up to 500 comfortably on the call. Before you go to Maestro, you'll want to check to see what time the call will happen in your part of the world. Consult the World Clock—Time Converter. Start with Seattle at 6:00 AM and enter your city in the field and click on convert.
If you click on this link you'll be taken to Maestro where you'll be asked to register and given a pin access number.
The Charter for Compassion Initiates a Membership Challenge. This is our first ever membership campaign. Up to now we've been able to build a database of supporters who have contacted us as individuals, signed up for newsletters, or signed the Charter and made contributions to the work of the Charter. We've relied on a few generous friends to help maintain our small staff and budget. In the last year, however, we've grown over 200%, increasing our partners from 150 to 800 and our city initiatives from 60 to 230, but our staff size has remained the same. At the same time, we have increased our on-line presence, the delivery of our newsletters, and weekly conference calls.
Now we need your help to grow a movement that continues to gain momentum daily. We need to increase our staff, work to refine some of our on-line tool-kits, and begin to offer education programs and on-line courses. If you've been with us during the last year, you have witnessed our growth, and many of you have benefited from our outreach. We have great plans for the next years, including establishing geographic hubs for the Charter’s work in several places in the world, supporting pilot projects of cities working across geographic boundaries, offering webinars on Compassion, and increasing our outreach to include the development of new sectors in the arts, social services, and restorative justice. Please join our membership challenge by giving at any level you can, and if you can't give, help us in other ways.
The Tenzin Gyatso Institute, The Charter for Compassion, and Stanford University's Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) are delighted to announce "Compassion Week" in San Francisco from November 10 – 16, 2014. Learn more about the conference.
