Heroic Leadership

by Chris Lowney

  Loyola's second birth lasted years and saw him wandering a penniless beggar for thousands of miles. But he had discovered a way to spare others the trauma and lost years of his second birth while delivering the fruits of self-awareness that were borne of it. He had translated his own experiences into an accessible program of meditations and practices he called the Spiritual Exercises. The members of his multinational, socioeconomically diverse team had little in common with one another upon arriving in Paris beyond their ambitions for the highest-quality education then attainable. Their unifying team bond became the common experience of undertaking these self-revelatory Exercises.

  Each member of the founding team tells a similar story of undertaking a systematic self-examination under Loyola's personal guidance and emerging energized, focused, and able to articulate life goals and personal weaknesses.

  As their mutual friendship developed, they banded together in a loose association to help souls. To help souls? What did that mean? What were their occupations? What were their products? They couldn't have answered those questions with much precision, and it showed in early endeavors. They first resurrected Loyola's quixotic early ambition to work in the Holy Land, making their way to Italy to obtain papal approval for the pilgrimage. As often happens with ambitious but poorly conceived strategies, neither they nor their plan went anywhere. No ships were sailing for Jerusalem; rising political tensions put ships venturing into the Mediterranean at unacceptably high risk of raids from Ottoman Turkish fleets. So, to their great disappointment-but, as it turned out, to their own and the world's great fortune-the ten were effectively stranded in Italy, occupying themselves by preaching on street corners, working in hospitals, and doing whatever else fit their own broad conception of helping souls. Not all of them were equally talented at street religion. Colleagues remembered Loyola in Italian town squares, gamely preaching away in some nearly unintelligible pidgin of Spanish, Latin, and Italian, ridiculed by children who pelted the balding, limping Basque with apples.

  THE FORMATION OF A COMPANY

  Deeply self-aware or not, the Jesuits had, by superficial appearances, failed. In fact, however, the only thing they really failed at was escaping notice. Their drive, creativity, and resilience attracted attention to even these haphazard early efforts. As so often happens, quality was proving to be its own best advertisement, and Loyola's bungled attempts at street preaching were the only exception to the team's overall performance excellence. The pope and other church officials began to pick the group for scattered missions to preach or lecture. Soon two were destined for Parma, two for Siena, and one for Naples. "Talent will out," as the saying goes, and the Catholic Church's need for talent had rarely been greater. Martin Luther and other reformers had made extraordinary gains in Europe in little more than a generation. For more than a millennium the church had enjoyed near unchallenged hegemony in European spiritual and moral affairs, yet after a twenty-year onslaught by the reformers, the Vatican could count on secure allegiance from only a handful of countries rimming the Mediterranean. The institutional Catholic Church was an easy target: corrupt bureaucrats filled its hierarchy, and the rank and file was riddled with poorly educated, demoralized clerics. Against this backdrop, the energy, integrity, and raw intellectual horsepower of the new arrivals from Paris combined into rare and badly needed tonic.

  But like many of today's rising-star start-ups, the friends rapidly became victims of their own success and reputation. After a few years in Italy, it became obvious that Loyola's little team was on the verge of disintegrating. Already pulled in different directions, the team had amassed a backlog of projects that would have occupied "four times their number." And the centripetal force was accelerating. Within a few years the same ten would be scattered not only across Italy but across Europe and beyond: Portugal, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and India.

  The prospect of inevitable dispersion spurred their first serious debates about their long-term joint future. Should they incorporate as a new religious order and elect a superior general? Or should they continue with their looser association, accepting that their far-flung assignments could mean its eventual dissolution? They discussed the issue intermittently over the course of a summer, work demands allowing. In the end they decided to incorporate. Why?

  Heroism and mutual affection. Hardly what drives most companies today-big, lumbering, bureaucratic, unimaginative, competitive, anonymous modern companies. What holds most companies together today? The critical mass, scale, capital, global reach, and broad capabilities to pulverize opponents, yes. Limited liability? Of course. The chance to become rich by going public? Naturally. But heroism and mutual affection? Not usually.

  The team accepted that work opportunities would separate them physically; indeed, they relished the chances to flex their talent and imagination in uncharted territory. Shunning wideranging, far-flung opportunities merely to remain in close contact was out of the question. Still, they seemed convinced that there was a way to preserve the spirit that unified them even as diverse them physically. The question they asked themselves makes clear that what they got out of their company is not quite what most of us get out of our companies: "Should we have a mutual understanding so that those who are sent from our midst will still be the object of our affectionate concern as we will be of theirs?" 12 After all, why else does anyone form or join a company? Otherwise, why not go it alone?

  They seemed convinced that there was a way to preserve the spirit that unified them even as diverse missions separated them physically.

  Still, the decision to incorporate wasn't straightforward. There were drawbacks to consider. Sixteenth-century religious orders were not highly esteemed, and one cofounder argued that formal incorporation would only damage the team's hard-won reputation for integrity: "It seems this term `religious obedience' has fallen into disfavor and has been discredited among Christian people." 13 Moreover, they envisioned an order that would have wide-open flexibility to pursue emerging opportunities, and they feared the pope might saddle them with an already existing religious rule that would hem them in and "not provide ample opportunity and scope" for carrying out their broad vision. They wanted to protect their ability to mobilize, adapt, and innovate.

  One argument convincingly trumped these negatives: "Obedience issues in an uninterrupted life of heroic deeds and heroic virtues. For one who truly lives under obedience is fully disposed to execute instantly and unhesitatingly whatever is enjoined him, no matter to him whether it be very hard to do." 14

  An uninterrupted life of heroic deeds and heroic virtues. Something else we don't typically associate with most companies. But Loyola's team did. Incorporation was the path to heroism and the best way to preserve mutual "affectionate concern." They resolved to formalize their association and sought papal approval to found a new religious order to be called the Compania de Jesus.

  THE MERGER THAT MIGHT HAVE HAPPENED

  Unfortunately, as they had feared, Vatican bureaucrats did try to fold Loyola's small team into an existing, well-established religious company, the Theatines. It would have made complete sense. The Theatines had everything Loyola's group lacked. They were well connected, founded by a powerful cardinal destined to become pope. They had financial resources and a growing membership, whereas the small Jesuit team was an undercapitalized upstart. But the Jesuits were determined to pursue their own revolutionary approach to religious life, and after some back-channel diplomatic maneuvering that turned a future pope into an enemy, the Jesuits won approval for their own company with its own charter. Still, there were official doubts about their long-term viability. A wary pope initially limited their membership to a maximum of sixty.

  Today more than twenty thousand Jesuits work in more than a hundred countries. There are approximately two hundred Theatines.

  THE LEADERSHIP SUCCESS OF IGNATIUS LOYOLA

  Somehow the story of Loyola the saint works better than that of Loyola the budding corporate leader. One wants to san
d away the rough edges before featuring him in a leadership book. Sure, he was a battle hero, but the stuff about the unkempt hair has to go. And one wants to make the early Jesuit team a bit more focused in their aspirations, a bit more corporate. After all, they built the world's greatest education network. Why not start with their fierce determination to do so and jettison the "mutual affection" stuff?

  How does one become a successful leader today? If Loyola's suggested route involves a wrecked leg, a yearlong pilgrimage, a year of intense meditation, and a couple of arrests, most sane people would say no thank you and opt instead for the old-fashioned way to the top: get an MBA and hitch yourself to a powerful mentor.

  As remarkable as the Jesuits' achievements were during Loyola's final fifteen years, even those sympathetic to his story might be tempted to wonder how much more they might have accomplished had Loyola gotten his act together at twenty-nine instead of forty-nine.

  Maybe they would have accomplished less.

  Rather than recasting Loyola's story into a conventionally acceptable mold, it's worth pondering what his actual life and his team's evolution say about leadership. One is tempted to scan Jesuit prehistory as one scans resumes: looking for tangible accomplishments and dismissing the rest. Loyola had virtually no tangible accomplishments to show for almost two-thirds of his life. But what he and his team did accomplish might have been just as or even more important than the classic resume builders. The Jesuits knew themselves; they emerged from their corporate prehistory with clear ideas about how they wanted to work as a team-driven by heroism, open to new opportunities, and tightly bound by mutual support. When they finally jumped from the corporate starting block, they did so with an explosive momentum rarely seen in their era or any other. Isn't it possible that these facts are more than just coincidental? In other words, the Jesuits' immediate and sustained corporate success just might have had something to do with the self-understanding and team values forged during their prehistory. And such intangibles just might, in the end, be more critical to personal and corporate success than the tangibles we prize when scanning resumes or plotting our own futures.

  Put differently, but for his military mishap at Pamplona, Loyola might well have continued his climb through the military and courtly ranks without ever taking profound stock of his strengths, weaknesses, values, and life goals. Without this self-awareness, it's very possible, even likely, that he would have accomplished less in that career than he did as the founder and leader of the Jesuit company, even though his Jesuit career started late in life, after a circuitous, ten-year detour. Loyola the military man might have steadily moved up whatever passed for a corporate ladder in sixteenth-century Spain. Yet without the setbacks, crises, and challenges that punctuated his real life he might never have grappled with who he was, what he wanted, what personal resources he had, and why he had failed along the way. Only by asking and answering those questions does one develop personal leadership capacity.

  A RELIGIOUS ORDER AMONG MANY

  The question that frames this chapter-What is a Jesuit?-remains only half-answered. It's clear what the Jesuits founded their company to do: nothing specifically. Or, to give them their due, anything and everything that fit a mission statement that was hardly confining: helping souls and doing it heroically. But as broad a strategic playing field as they left themselves, it wasn't completely wide open. They had, after all, formed a religious order, whatever that meant.

  Not all Vatican opposition to the Jesuits' desire to form their own company had reflected animosity toward Loyola and his ideas. Many church bureaucrats had a more basic objection: there were already too many religious orders roaming Europe. Then as now, the great majority of clergy were not members of religious orders but instead tended parishes under the sponsorship and control of a local bishop. But from early in the church's history, groups of clerics or laypeople had banded together outside this network of local dioceses into so-called religious orders. Each order had slightly different rules, different traditions, and different outfits; it was confusing. Because the orders sprawled across diocesan boundaries, they were harder for bishops to supervise, and some bureaucrats feared this was exacerbating the corruption problems plaguing the church.

  Some of these orders had sprouted under the charismatic leadership of a saintly founder. St. Francis of Assisi, for example, who expressed no ambition to lead a large company, nonetheless exerted a magnetism that drew more than three thousand followers within his lifetime. Other orders had been launched for no other reason than to satisfy the sheer monomania of a legacy-building ecclesiastical higher-up. Still others carved out an occupational niche: the warrior monks of the Knights Templar vowed to protect Christian pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land and manned a string of fortifications along popular pilgrimage routes.

  But the Knights Templar were exotic departures in a tradition that spawned more contemplatives than warriors. Most orders followed monastic traditions of one sort or another. The psalmist of the Old Testament had written, "Seven times a day I praised you, and in the middle of the night I arose to confess to you." St. Benedict took the psalmist's words to heart, codifying in the sixth century a famous monastic rule that has governed many religious orders right up to the present. Benedictines pray communally at seven set times each day-including once in the middle of the night. They pass the balance of each day in quiet study, domestic labor, and contemplation. Some monks went further still in pursuit of a contemplative life. St. Bruno led six companions high into the Alps, as far as possible from the distractions of urban life. Both Bruno's order and the sweetish liqueur his monks churned out to support themselves took their name from their remote Alpine cloister site of Chartreuse. The austere Carthusians lived (and still do today) a hermitlike existence. Each cooked his own food in a private cell within a larger communal compound, joining colleagues only for common prayer and a rare recreation period.

  Hundreds of religious orders came into existence, and hundreds survive. Some are well-known, with global memberships exceeding ten thousand: the Jesuits, Dominicans, and Franciscans, for example. Others are much smaller, lesser-known groups boasting mysterious, almost cabalistic names: Scalabrinians, Eudists, Somascans, Rogationists, Rosminians, Premonstratensians, the Order of St. Paul the First Hermit, the Stigmatine Priests and Brothers, the Lebanese Maronite Order, the Camaldolese Order of Monte Corona, the Hospitaller Brothers of St. John of God, and so on.

  AN IDENTITY OF THEIR OWN

  How does one distinguish among the bewildering array? What makes them alike, and what makes them different? And how do the Jesuits fit in?

  First, while each religious order may emphasize certain traditions or practices, all share membership in the Catholic Church and adherence to its core beliefs. That holds even for the Jesuits, though their enemies within the Catholic Church-and perhaps even an exasperated pope or two-have had their doubts. There is no religion of jesuitism, nor do Jesuits exclusively dedicate themselves to a specific occupation, as did the Knights Templar. Though higher education has from early on absorbed a large majority of Jesuit manpower, the founders prepared their members to engage in any occupation that would "help souls." Finally, the Jesuits do not distinguish themselves by unique team colors. Few cappuccino lovers, for example, consider that their beloved stimulant takes its name from the color of the habit of a Capuchin friar; and few pedestrians crossing London's Whitefriars Street spare a thought for the monastery of white-robed Carmelites that once stood there. The Jesuits? Nothing so distinctive in their wardrobe. They were always plain old "black robes" until, as we shall see, some early Jesuits began adapting to Asian cultures in which the priestly classes wore anything but black.

  Jesuits, like all religious order members, pronounce vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. These vows mean exactly what one would suppose: no (material) personal possessions, no spouse, no sex, and when the boss says they need you in Timbuktu, you go. As if poverty, chastity, and obedience don't offer enough challenge, in rar
e cases religious orders have set themselves apart by professing some additional vow. Each member of the centuries-old Order of Merced-the romantically nicknamed Brothers of Ransom or Order of Captives-vowed to exchange himself as a ransom for captives. The Jesuits are another of these rare cases; most members pronounce a special fourth vow to mobilize immediately for any mission requested by the pope. Granted, it's a bit more prosaic than what the Brothers of Ransom came up with, but it's a Jesuit hallmark nonetheless.

  Religious orders may comprise men or women, clerics or laypeople. Sometimes an order is divided into two or three smaller orders. There is, for example, a Dominican order of male clerics, a separate Dominican order of women religious, and a so-called third order of laypeople-all governed separately but following the tradition and vision of St. Dominic. Unlike the Dominican order, the Jesuit order is exclusively male.

  Well, almost exclusively male. Mateo Sanchez would have had something to say about exclusively. Mateo, a.k.a. Juana of Austria, daughter of Holy Roman emperor Charles V, sister of King Philip-II of Spain, widow of the crown prince of Portugal, was obviously very well connected, very much a woman-and just as much a Jesuit. She was one of a long list of powerful, prestigious supporters cultivated by the early Jesuits. Loyola's contacts eventually included key European power brokers such as the pope, the kings of Spain and Portugal, the Holy Roman emperor, and countless "lesser" cardinals, dukes, and princes. Jesuit membership increased fifteenfold and their operations expanded accordingly within only a few years of their founding; the rapid growth vitally depended on opportunities and financial support doled out by patrons. King John III of Portugal reportedly once gushed to an undoubtedly alarmed member of his entourage that "he would like to have the entire Society come to his kingdom, even if that were to cost him part of his empire." 15