Heroic Leadership: Best Practices from a 450-Year-Old Company That Changed the World by Chris Lowney

Author:Chris Lowney
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2013-08-07T09:47:00+00:00

Those comfortable assuming authority were not reined in but given more. Francis Borgia had been duke of Gandia before joining the Jesuits. Given his administrative experience, it's no surprise that Loyola endorsed one of Borgia's decisions before even knowing it: "Whatever means you shall judge to be better in our Lord, I fully approve.-.-.-. In this matter we have but one will, but you are in closer touch with affairs where you are."35 This wasn't special treatment for a favored lieutenant. A similarly worded letter to Simao Rodrigues betrays Loyola's habitual instinct to delegate aggressively: "I leave everything to your judgment and I will consider best whatever you shall decide."36

More telling was his treatment of those who hung back from flexing authority. When a vacillating Olivier Mannaerts looked to Loyola to decide a local management issue, the ball was quickly batted right back to Mannaerts: "Olivier, cut your suit according to your cloth; only let us know how you have acted."37 As luck would have it, when Mannaerts screwed up the nerve to "go with his gut," he screwed up the decision as well. Confessing the bungle to Loyola elicited not a reprimand but immediate encouragement to get back in the saddle: "I wish for the future you do, without scruple, as your judgment tells you to do according to the circumstances; rules and ordinations notwithstanding."38 Nurturing Mannaerts through early fragility paid off handsomely. Years after Loyola's death, Mannaerts was given charge of Jesuit operations in the Netherlands and Belgium, transforming a region in ruins into an operation of seven hundred Jesuits running nearly thirty colleges.

Loyola resolved the complicated management challenge of building responsive, innovative, globally focused teams. It takes not just "lots of delegated authority," as conventional wisdom would suggest. To be sure, innovation and creativity happen when individuals enjoy a wide berth and the managerial support to take risks and experiment. But speed and a global mindset often require the opposite: a centralized authority to weigh opportunities and mobilize resources quickly against emerging opportunities. In other words, speed, innovation, and global focus happen only when lots of delegated authority sits alongside lots of centralized authority.

That's certainly the way Loyola and his cofounders saw it. Holy obedience, the very extreme of tightly centralized authority ("as if he were an old man's staff"), lay beside wide-open self-initiative ("cut your suit according to your cloth; only let us know how you have acted"). Indifference made it work. Self-aware Jesuits stayed focused on their goal (helping souls). They didn't get tripped up confusing the means with the goal itself. Take an order today, chart a course tomorrow-just as long as we're heading where we need to go.

Ingenuity blossomed when Jesuits layered the "whole world is our house" spirit on top of an indifferent attitude. Ingenuity inspired the confident optimism that solutions were out there, and with imaginative, out-of-the-box thinking, men like de Nobili and Ricci uncovered those solutions time after time.

THE CHALLENGE REMAINS: INGENUITY IN A WORLD OF CHANGE

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.