>From the response to Rol's question " Any other thoughts on how to
recognize a morally legitimate leader? " comes Winfried's great question:
" How can one learn or teach a stable balance?"
There's an organisation called Moral Rearmament, some of whose members
have formed a group called 'the Caux round table' - one of the first
international forums to discuss business ethics.
The principles Moral rearmament is based on are simple: an individual
committment to absolute honesty, absolute love, absolute truth and
absolute selflessness.
The cynic in me says 'oh, yeah?!' when it sees this failing. The observer
in me says 'wow' when it sees this succeeding.
The cynical reaction is more a negative reflection on me, than on those
observed. Guess I'm still learning!
My answer to the first question, therefore, is 'you know it when you see
it'. Just as Senge states no company claiming to be an LO can be, unless
that observation is shared by its observers, and no Christian (Jew,
Buddhist, etc.) can claim to be one, unless others see them as such. The
proof of the pudding is in the eating.
My answer to the second is that one can learn/teach a stable balance
through offering such a framework to test oneself against - and measure
one's committment to keep on doing so in order to match up to one's own
individual decision as to how far to go along those lines.
For anyone interested in business ethics, there's information on the web.
The Industrial Society, in the UK have recently produced a 'Managing Best
Practice' Report on Business Ethics.
Leon
Leon Conrad
The Conrad Voice Consultancy
website: http://www.actual.co.uk/conrad
--Leon Conrad <100755.1675@CompuServe.COM>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>