Heroic Leadership

by Chris Lowney

  How Clavius helped fix our day planners

  Though Clavius's astronomical views were being eclipsed even before his death, another of his achievements has admirably stood the test of time. Indeed, though few have heard of Clavius, everyone who has ever consulted a calendar or opened a day planner has unknowingly paid him tribute. During Clavius's lifetime, the Julian calendar guided the rhythm of European life, as it had for centuries since its institution by Julius Caesar. But it was malfunctioning. The Scriptures recorded Jesus Christ's crucifixion and resurrection as taking place during the Jewish Passover, which occurs in the first month of spring. The Catholic Church accordingly fixed Easter Sunday to occur on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal (spring) equinox. But for reasons that were not well understood, the spring equinox was slipping backward with each passing century (and therefore, so was Easter Sunday). By the sixteenth century, Easter Sunday was slowly but inexorably migrating toward Christmas.

  Pope Gregory XIII asked Clavius to head a commission investigating the increasingly embarrassing problem. What was going wrong with the calendar? As it turned out, the actual solar year was shorter-674 seconds shorter, to be exact-than the Julian calendar year. What's 674 seconds? Not much in a year, but problematic once compounded over centuries. Three days were added every four hundred years, and Easter Sunday continued its march toward Christmas Day.

  Clavius's commission largely adopted the analytical approach of the Italian Aloysius Lilius and his elegantly simple solution. Lilius, who died not long before the commission was formed, had proposed that century years only be leap years when evenly divisible by four hundred. In other words, the year 1900 would not be a leap year, but the year 2000 would. This subtle recalibration of the leap-year mechanism remains intact, and Christians regularly celebrate Easter in spring, blissfully unaware of their debt to Lilius and Clavius. Clavius was modest and politically astute-and most likely never given a choice in the matter-when the time came to promulgate what would later become known as the Gregorian calendar in honor of Pope Gregory XIII.

  Not everyone immediately rallied around the new calendar. The late 1500s was a decidedly less ecumenical age than our own. Protestants and Catholics engaged in regular, bitter, and often bloody skirmishes all over Christian Europe. Who was to say that the new calendar was not some deviously clever jesuitical or papist plot? Even if the new calendar was superior in its accuracy, Protestant leaders had little interest in backing a calendar revised by the Roman pope and a Jesuit mathematician. Catholic Italy immediately adopted the new calendar; militantly Protestant Britain did not. Catholic regions in the German states signed on; neighboring Protestant regions in Germany did not. For years it was one date in one part of Germany and a different date in another.

  Loyal Catholics weren't necessarily pleased with the new calendar either. In order to undo more than a millennium of compounded damage from the Julian calendar, Clavius's commission had Pope Gregory XIII proclaim that in the year of 1582-and only in 1582, thankfully-the day after October 4 would be October 15. Even loyal Catholics had cause to grumble: their lives had been shortened by nearly two weeks. As confusion over the new calendar dragged on, Clavius prepared what should have been the final word on the subject. With Pope Gregory and all the other commission members long dead, the aging Clavius published his definitive, eight-hundred-page mathematical analysis and proof supporting the new calendar.

  Still, old prejudices die hard. Nearly two hundred years passed before Great Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752. Russia adopted it in 1918, a decade after calendar confusion had caused the country's athletes to arrive twelve days late for the 1908 Olympics. Meeting planners and calendar makers were eventually relieved of the nightmarish scheduling headache brought on by inconsistent calendars, though hardcore partygoers unfortunately were deprived of what would have been a wonderful opportunity to celebrate the second millennium twice.

  Old prejudices certainly do die hard. Only in 1822 did the Catholic Church formally allow heliocentricity to be taught in Catholic countries. And only in 1992 did Pope John Paul II definitively close a long-open chapter by issuing the Catholic Church's posthumous apology to Galileo.

  A DIFFERENT WAY TO THINK ABOUT LEADERSHIP

  Goes, Ricci, and Clavius: three unlikely leadership role models. After all, don't leaders lead other people? And don't the greatest leaders lead lots of people? None of these three ever managed more than a handful of others; for most of their respective working lives, each led only himself.

  Which is precisely the point: they led themselves. They didn't shrink from this task, the first and most crucial leadership challenge that every leader must face.

  Leadership lessons from unlikely sources

  What do leaders do? A quick study of Goes, Ricci, and Clavius reveals the leadership qualities present in all of them. Leaders

  • are always teaching and learning: Matteo Ricci achieved fluency in Chinese and absorbed the wisdom of the Confucian Four Books, introduced Confucian thought to Europe by translating the work into Italian, and all the while taught his mandarin teachers everything from Euclidean geometry to astronomy to the Christian message.

  • mold "brilliant and eminent" men and women: Christopher Clavius challenged students in his Collegio Romano master classes year after year for more than forty years.

  • persevere: Benedetto de Goes pressed on with his journey through three-mile-high mountain passes despite bitter cold and fear of not finding the mysterious Cathay.

  • energize themselves by the sheer ambition of their heroic goals: Goes journeyed through thousands of miles of unmapped Asian hinterland in search for his route to China; Ricci set his sights on the imperial audience that eluded three centuries of Europeans; Clavius envisioned a corps of unparalleled talent unleashed on the world.

  • innovate by approaching their challenges in ways their predecessors never imagined: Ricci developed an improbable strategy to win attention for his Christian message-by translating geometry texts and reconfiguring world maps.

  • devote themselves to excellence: Clavius painstakingly produced an eight-hundredpage mathematical proof underpinning his calendar reform.

  • remain open to new ideas, even in old age: At seventy-three, Clavius carefully duplicated Galileo's observations.

  • honor the truth above their egos: Goes frankly admitted that he had not found an easier way to China, despite all he had personally invested in the quest; Clavius endorsed Galileo's observations, well aware of the threat they posed to theories Clavius had spent a lifetime defending.

  • influence others by their example, their ideas, and their coaching: Clavius inspired Ricci and subsequent astronomers in China, and all three-Clavius, Goes, and Ricci-continue to influence Jesuits today.

  Leadership is not merely getting the job done; it's how the job is done. For all leaders, including Goes and Ricci and Clavius, this means influencing, visioning, persevering, energizing, innovating, teaching.

  Certain assumptions have over time come to dominate our cultural stereotypes of leaders and leadership:

  • A leader is a person "in charge"-the one running a company, heading a government, coaching a team, or captaining troops.

  • Leadership produces direct results, and the most effective leadership behavior produces immediate results.

  • Leadership is about "defining moments"the decisive battle, the championship game, the new business strategy.

  Goes, Ricci, and Clavius make a very different statement about who leaders are and how lives of leadership unfold. Despite the exotic challenges they faced, they nonetheless represent a leadership model relevant to the real life that most of us live:

  • Most people never face the challenge of motivating armies of subordinates; we face Goes's more prosaic day-by-day chal lenge to motivate ourselves through long and sometimes unpromising journeys.

  • Rarely does life unfold with the predictability of the carefully scripted stra
tegic plan; far more leadership is improvised. As with Ricci in unfamiliar China, most life challenges emerge at unexpected times in unanticipated ways. Such circumstances don't come with a leadership handbook and don't fit the well-planned life strategy; instead, we rely on our wits and accumulated wisdom.

  • Unlike the general heading into battle or the coach heading into game seven, few of us experience dramatic defining moments. Rather, our defining "moment" is a pattern slowly etched through a lifetime studded with ordinary opportunities to make subtle differences: Clavius's conscientious tutoring of the hundreds and hundreds of Jesuit recruits that passed through his classrooms over a forty-eightyear career.

  • And like Goes, Ricci, and Clavius, few of us can discern our leadership impact in the world with the same clarity and certainty of one billiard ball sharply cracking another. Most of us must derive satisfaction not from manifest results but from the mere personal conviction that our actions, decisions, and choices have value.

  The stereotypical company counts relatively few leaders, all in positions of substantial authority or influence. The Jesuits built a company in which every employee was a leader. Those at Stereotype, Inc., instinctively look around for one of their few leaders when defining moments arise; those in the Jesuit company looked in the mirror. Moreover, they understood that every moment-not just the defining ones-was an opportunity to make an impact, to build a life of leadership.

  Unlike the general heading into battle or the coach heading into game seven, few of us experience dramatic defining moments. Rather, our defining "moment" is a pattern slowly etched through a lifetime studded with ordinary opportunities to make subtle differences.

  Everyone leads, and everyone can lead all the time. On rare occasions those leadership moments are dramatic and obvious; more often they are subtle, easily overlooked opportunities that, taken together, can form a lifetime of positive leadership influence. And if everyone is leading all the time, it follows that most inspired, motivated leadership performance must be self-initiated and self-led. Following chapters explore the Jesuits' unique leadership vision and how it helped them maintain a successful track record for close to five hundred years.

  CHAPTER 5

  "To Order One's Life"

  Self-Awareness As the

  Foundation of Leadership

  he person who knows what he or she wants can pursue it energetically. No one becomes a great teacher, parent, violinist, or corporate executive by accident.

  Only those who know their weaknesses can deal with them or even hope to conquer them. Executives with careers stalled by poor selfconfidence can resume an upward trajectory only by identifying and attacking their weaknesses.

  Those who have identified what moves them to wholehearted engagement have little trouble staying motivated.

  There is no news in these statements. Yet as obvious as they are, few people make the personal investment to benefit from them.

  Many people invest significant time and money to acquire the professional credentials and skills needed to succeed. Leaders invest equally in their human skills, in their capacity to lead. An introspective journey-whether done all at once or over an extended period-builds the foundation for success. This journey involves

  • appreciating oneself as talented

  • identifying personal, derailing baggage that prevents the realization of full poten tial, especially weaknesses that manifest themselves as habitual tendencies

  • articulating personally motivating goals and ambitions-not being content to merely drift along but instead living according to one's personal sense of magic

  • determining what one stands for, what impact one wants to make

  • developing a worldview that guides interaction with others

  • acquiring the habit of updating oneself regularly, indeed daily, on all the above

  Those who acquire this portfolio of personal skills become vastly more capable of committed, energetic action. Imagine the consolidated power of a team of thousands who possess these personal skills. No wonder that Vladimir Lenin, no friend of the Jesuits-or of any religious believers, for that matter-envied Loyola's team, reportedly once sighing that with only a dozen cadres as talented and dedicated as the Jesuits, his Communist movement would sweep the world.

  The good news is that everyone has the capacity to cultivate these leadership skills by committing to the personal introspective investment that will develop them. No one lacking the requisite technical skills would naively waltz into a company and expect to succeed: who imagines that he or she will be a successful accountant without ever learning accounting, or a successful lawyer without learning the law? Yet we remain naive enough to believe that those who don't know themselves-their strengths, weaknesses, values, and worldview-can achieve long-term success. As the world becomes even more complex and changes even faster than Loyola's topsy-turvy sixteenth-century environment, it becomes increasingly clear that only those with a deeply ingrained capacity for continuous learning and self-reflection stand a chance of surfing the waves of change successfully. Harvard Business School professor Joseph Badaracco has written eloquently of the vital importance of this habit of self-reflection. After interviewing corporate leaders to understand how they successfully navigated crises or decision points for their respective companies, Badaracco concluded:

  They are able to take time out from the chain of managerial tasks that consumes their time and undertake a process of probing self-inquiry-a process that is more often carried out on the run than in quiet seclusion. They are able to dig below the busy surface of their daily lives and refocus on their core values and principles. Once uncovered, those values and principles renew their sense of purpose at work and act as a springboard for shrewd, pragmatic, politically astute action. By repeating this process again and again throughout their work lives, these executives are able to craft an authentic and strong identity based on their own, rather than someone else's, understanding of what is right. And in this way, they begin to make the transition from being a manager to becoming a leader.1

  Only those with a deeply ingrained capacity for continuous learning and self-reflection stand a chance of surfing the waves of change successfully.

  If self-awareness is critical to leadership success, as Loyola, Peter Drucker, Daniel Goleman, Badaracco, and others have argued, our ideas about leadership and about how we help leaders develop must be revisited. First, no one can make another person self-aware, so leaders must largely mold themselves. Only I can muster the will, courage, and honesty to search myself. Others-coaches, managers, friends, parents, and mentors-help, of course, but primarily by playing a role similar to that of the "director" in Loyola's key self-awareness tool, the Spiritual Exercises. The director's job is "to point, as with the finger, to the vein in the mine, and let each one dig for himself."2

  Leaders "finger the vein" for others: their children, employees, coworkers, and friends. But first they make their own lifelong commitment to pursue self-awareness. All leadership begins with self-leadership, and self-leadership begins with knowing oneself. First comes the foundation: goals and values, an understanding of personal strengths and obstacles, an outlook on the world. Then comes the invigorating daily habit of refreshing and deepening self-knowledge while immersing oneself in a constantly evolving world.

  A TEN-MAN/No PLAN COMPANY: THE EARLY SURGE OF JESUIT GROWTH

  The Jesuits strained to keep pace with their runaway success. The "ten-man/no plan" operation launched in 1540 grew a hundredfold within fifteen years. Loyola found himself running a thousandstrong company with dozens of outposts on four continents.

  Enterprising Jesuits sniffed out opportunities in places known to few Europeans and visited by a relative handful-what are now Japan, Brazil, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and elsewhere. King John III of Portugal sometimes learned more about his colonial empire from overseas Jesuits than from his own courtiers, explorers, or diplomatic corps. While his emissaries hunkered down in
the relative safety of coastal trading posts, Jesuits burrowed into local communities and mounted embassies to royal courts.

  The company was no less adventurous and even more successful on its home turf of Europe. More than thirty Jesuit colleges were up and running by the year Loyola died-not bad progress for a company that a dozen years earlier had never opened or run a school. European operations weren't limited to establishing institutions of higher education. Church bureaucrats enlisted well-trained, resourceful Jesuits for Counter-Reformation efforts to shore up wavering congregations or recapture communities already lost to Protestantism across central and northern Europe.

  As Jesuit triumphs attracted new clients and new demands for their services, opportunities soon outstripped resources. One Jesuit described his brutal counseling workload: "At present, I can't get away until midnight. On some mornings I find that they have scaled the walls and are actually settled inside my house waiting."3 The cofounders were no doubt thrilled with notoriety and success that surpassed their greatest hopes. But with success came an unshakable, chronic staffing headache. As waves of Jesuits fanned out and established beachheads around the world, they inevitably looked back to headquarters for reinforcements. Back in Rome, Loyola puzzled over a staffing equation that simply didn't work.

  Tempers began to fray. Jerome Domenech probably expected a speedy, positive response when he wrote Loyola complaining about understaffing. After all, he was running a Jesuit showcase operation in Sicily: the Jesuits' first school opened primarily for lay students. The response from Rome was speedy, all right. But instead of reading that help was on the way, Domenech learned from Loyola's secretary that his complaints had almost cost him his job. "Indeed, if our father [i.e., Loyola] were not restrained by certain considerations, he would show in a much more effective way his dislike of your reverence's complaints, which reflect discredit on him-.-.-. because you also condemn [his appointments] as bad in the presence of others." Not that Domenech had asked, but Loyola's secretary went on to enumerate the staffing woes vexing Loyola in Italy alone: