Heroic Leadership

by Chris Lowney

  Xavier was so long in transit that he lost his chance to become the first Jesuit ever to work outside continental Europe. Well after he departed, two other Jesuits set out on an overseas mission, and they ended it, tails between their legs, while Xavier's ship was still a good three months shy of India. Granted, the two had a shorter trip: over to Ireland to rally resistance against Henry VIII's imposition of Protestantism. One had the foresight to buy a kilt in Scotland before crossing the Irish Sea. Apparently it took more than native clothing to impress the Irish clan chieftains, and the underwhelmed feelings proved mutual: "We actually met some of the chiefs, such as MacQuillan and O'Cahen, and some others. But our eyes were opened to the fact that the disease of internal strife in this country is a hopeless thing-.-.-. because of a savage and barbarous way of life, worse than bestial and hardly to be believed unless actually seen."5 The two accomplished nothing, but merely making it back alive was achievement enough to impress the hardboiled Scots who welcomed them back from unruly Ireland as returning heroes, because "they had not believed they would ever see us again until the day of the resurrection."6

  Neither Xavier nor any other European knew just what he would be dealing with once he arrived in Goa. No one briefed him about Asia before his departure. Who could have? Xavier's own letters were the first correspondence from the Far East ever published in Europe. The map of Asia was still in flux, changing constantly as explorers and traders logged new discoveries. Xavier ended up devoting his most substantial efforts to Japan, a country that was yet undiscovered by Europeans the day his ship weighed anchor in Portugal.

  The prudent course for Xavier would have been to stay put in Goa, the administrative capital of Portugal's emerging Asian empire. The enormous Indian subcontinent would have offered an ambitious enough start to Jesuit multinational operations. After all, the full Jesuit company at the time could have squeezed around an oversized dining table. But Xavier operated according to a more ambitious logic. Far from holing up in colonial Goa, he was almost constantly on the move. He worked his way south to India's Fishery Coast and then traveled east along the spice trade routes to Malacca (Melaka), Java, Amboina (Ambon), and Morotai.

  NEW BUSINESSES IN A NEW WORLD

  These weren't mere reconnoitering trips. By the time Xavier was finished, the tiny Jesuit company had somehow found itself committed to a string of outposts in what are today India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, and the Persian Gulf port of Hormuz. It wasn't only where he went; it was what he did. While Jesuits back in Europe were wondering whether they should enter the education business, a letter from Xavier arrived enthusiastically describing a school he had founded to educate both native children and those of Portuguese colonists. It was the first Jesuit-operated school of its kind anywhere in the world and perhaps the first school of its kind ever. Xavier launched it without even bothering to consult Jesuit headquarters in Rome, and he suggested that his poky colleagues in Europe might want to try the field of education themselves.

  He moved no less aggressively in other directions. Although Jesuits purchased their first company printing press for their showcase Collegio Romano, they only barely beat Xavier. He had a Jesuit printing press operating in Goa by the end of that same year of 1556, well ahead of Jesuits working in Paris, Venice, or other more cosmopolitan settings.

  By the time Xavier was finished, the tiny Jesuit company had somehow found itself committed to a string of outposts in what are today India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, and the Persian Gulf port of Hormuz.

  By force of his own imagi-nation and energy, Francis Xavier had elevated Asia-and, by extension, all overseas activity-to a company priority. Consider, for example, that all ten cofounders had studied in Paris, and four were French nationals. Yet within a few years of Xavier's arrival in Goa, thirty Jesuitsboth European expatriates and Indian nationals-were working there, while a mere thirteen were posted to familiar Paris. What modern American or European multinational has ever been able to make a similar claim? When he landed in Goa, Xavier was the Jesuit presence in Asia. He created a genuine, "if I build it they will come" success story: by the time of his death, more than seventy European and Indian Jesuits labored across Asia, with long lines of volunteers ready to join them.

  Xavier's peripatetic, adventurous lifestyle lends context to the subsequent journeys of men such as Goes and Ricci. These later generations blazed new trails, but in equal measure they simply embraced Xavier's legacy. And the Jesuit style of trailblazing pioneered by Xavier was far more imaginative than merely hitting the highway. Long before Ricci set his sights on Beijing's imperial court, the instinct to aim high inspired Xavier's winter-long journey through rural Japan to the Japanese emperor's court at Miyako (Kyoto). Xavier intended not only to present his credentials but also to pitch history's first East-West academic exchange: to bring professors from the University of Paris and other European universities to the imperial University of Hiei-zan in Japan and to send Japanese professors to Europe. No European before Xavier had even set foot in Kyoto. What madness, or chutzpah-or combination of both-convinced him that he would even reach the capital alive, much less win an imperial audience and approval for his academic exchange?

  Xavier returned from Kyoto empty-handed, his petition for an imperial sit-down summarily rebuffed. No problem. He bounced back soon enough, his restless radar now trained on a new opportunity.

  The people of China I have so far seen are of penetrating intelligence and lofty mind, more so than the Japanese, and they are people much given to study. The country is blessed with all manner of goods, most populous, full of large cities with houses of finely worked stone and, as everyone proclaims, very rich in all manner of silks.-.-.-.

  I think that in this year of 1552 I shall leave for the place where the King of China dwells.?

  Xavier left reinforcements behind in Japan working out of an abandoned Buddhist temple. The Japan team soon realized that Xavier had miscalculated the power of the emperor and his court anyway; the real power lay with the shogun. And two generations after Xavier, a Portuguese Jesuit linguist named Joao Rodrigues found a key to attracting the shogun's interest and favor. It was nothing so high-minded as academic exchanges or astronomy debates. Instead, it was Rodrigues's service as a commercial liaison: when Portuguese ships sailed into the port of Nagasaki to trade cargoes of Chinese silk, they found themselves dealing with an intermediary savvy enough in European ways to negotiate a fair deal for the Japanese-the Jesuit Joao Rodrigues, business attache for shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu.

  Xavier never made it to China. He died on the island of Sancian (Shangchuan) some thirty miles short of the mainland. Years passed before letters announcing his death reached Jesuit headquarters in Rome, after retracing the same thousands-ofmiles-long journey that had begun with "Good enough. I'm ready." Months after Xavier's death-and still months before word reached Rome-Loyola drafted a letter to his friend and cofounder, recalling him to Europe-a poignantly ironic end to Xavier's story. It's clear from Loyola's letter that Xavier hadn't been the only visionary Jesuit at work. The ten-person Jesuit company had sprawled over four continents in less than a decade.

  You also know that much depends for the good of India on the kind of men that are sent there.-.-.-. You could see who are suitable and who are not, who for one place and who for another.-.-.-.

  Over and above these reasons, all of which look to the good of India, I feel that you would stir the [Portuguese] king's interest in Ethiopia. For so many years now he has been on the point of doing something, but nothing is ever done. From Portugal you would also be of no little help in the affairs of the Congo and of Brazil.8

  Although it may seem irreverent to suggest, it certainly redounded to the Jesuits' benefit that Xavier died as he did, when he did. Whatever he might have accomplished in China, the mythology surrounding him was vastly more valuable to succeeding Jesuit generations. And his death within sight of the Chinese coastline was the perfect bookend to his "Good enough. I'm ready." His letters
, copied and circulated among Jesuit houses, created an electric impact. One Jesuit manager in Coimbra, Portugal, reported that his team was so charged up after reading the letters that he would "have little difficulty in transferring the whole college to India."9

  Before Xavier, the Jesuit vision had existed largely on paper. Now the Jesuits had a genuine hero who brought it to life. Sent to India, but single-handedly taking on all of Asia instead, Xavier exhibited the holy ambition so valued by Jesuit managers; heading to Asia on a day's notice, he displayed the indifference Jesuits were encouraged to cultivate; and molding his company's direction as he saw fit, he revealed that prized entrepreneurial instinct.

  Ingenuity was manifest when a nimble Xavier decamped Japan to pursue a more promising opportunity in China, and it was manifest centuries later when manufacturers and financiers made the same strategic shift, fleeing Japan's post-bubble economy in the early 1990s to focus on business opportunities unfolding in China and emerging Southeast Asia. Ingenuity was Xavier's inspired adaptation to unexpected circumstances, just as it was the 3M researcher's insight that the botched batch of glue that didn't hold permanently might be good for something-and the Post-It was born.

  DEPARTURES FROM CLASSIC RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS

  The early Jesuits had exhibit A to prove that their model worked. No religious company had ever tried anything quite like it. Jesuit strategic values-speed, mobility, responsiveness, and flexibilitywere the opposite of everything religious companies had always embodied. To live those Jesuit values, Loyola jettisoned whatever traditional religious practices stood in the way, like praying, or, more accurately, praying according to the monastic tradition. To appreciate the innovative leaps the Jesuits took with their company model, we must dip into some history of how earlier religious organizations operated and show how the Company of Jesus departed radically from the norm.

  Embracing the world rather than retreating from it

  It's little wonder that the disciplines of mainstream religious life in sixteenth-century Christendom didn't serve Jesuit priorities. The Jesuits embraced the world and immersed themselves in its everyday life, living in its cities and cultural centers and traveling and working with its people. The traditions of religious life at that time were rooted in the opposite impulse. Instead of running to embrace the world, the pioneers of religious life had mostly headed fast in the other direction. The third-century St. Anthony of Egypt abandoned his village at age twenty, wandering off to live alone in the desert until his death at 105. Others followed his example all over Christendom, some pressing their desire for solitude to creative extremes. The Syrian monk Theodoret wrote of a hermit who lived for ten years perched above the ground in a tub suspended between two poles. Food was raised in a bucket secured with a rope; presumably other matter came down the same way-one hopes in a different bucket. St. Simeon Stylites played a variation on the theme. Plagued by crowds seeking spiritual counsel at his wilderness hermitage, Simeon erected a series of pillars, the last one sixty feet tall, so that he could live out his final thirtyfive years in solitude. As one might have predicted, the stratagem backfired. Simeon and similarly inspired "stylites" became spiritual tourist attractions, even drawing the occasional Byzantine emperor out into the wilderness for a peek.

  The Jesuits embraced the world and immersed themselves in its everyday life, living in its cities and cultural centers and traveling and working with its people.

  Colorful though these hermits may have been, early religious more typically submitted to a far more prosaic, communal lifestyle. Hundreds of monasteries peppered the fifth-century landscape from Europe to North Africa and Egypt. Each sheltered like-minded souls who left behind worldly pursuits for monastic study, prayer, and manual labor. But aside from gravity, many monastic communities were bound by little else than their own local traditions and the guidance of a (one would hope) wise abbot.

  The sixth-century Italian St. Benedict lived the full sweep of these traditional monastic lifestyles before pioneering a new approach. Repelled by the vice-ridden mores of his native Rome, Benedict retreated to a hermitage. Like Simeon Stylites, his reputation soon attracted wisdom seekers. But unlike Stylites, Benedict was eventually coaxed from his hermitage to reform a monastery grown lax under a succession of degenerate abbots. When his strict leadership proved more than the monks could stomach, they did what any enterprising, disgruntled, wayward monks would do: tried to poison his food.

  Praying on the run rather than in a controlled environment

  The durable Benedict survived, his appetite for monastic reform now truly whetted. He gathered more resolute companions to establish a new monastery at Italy's Monte Cassino, where he authored a fifty-page "rule" that ultimately became the dominant guiding protocol for western monasticism. Benedict's monks gathered for communal prayer at seven set times each day, starting with Matins at 2:00 A.M. and continuing at regular intervals before retiring each night after Compline at 7:00 P.M. The schedule varied only to accommodate the seasonal changes of daylight hours. The summer sun rose early, so the appointed time for morning prayer (Lauds) was accordingly shifted to follow the 2:00 A.M. office, "after a very short interval, during which the brethren may go out for the necessities of nature."10 Hand it to Benedict: his rule ran only fifty pages, but it covered life's most pressing daily contingencies.

  What does it matter how a few monks organized their daily routine? Perhaps not much today, but it mattered far more to a Europe slipping into the darkest of its Dark Ages. As barbarian hordes overwhelmed a dissipated Roman Empire, its cities plunged into decay. Public education, libraries, and even literacy itself were becoming distant memories of a more civilized time. The light of learning was dimming, and monastic scholars and copyists were among the very few torchbearers preserving the light from flickering out entirely. Hence, monastic practices mattered enough that two centuries after Benedict, the Holy Roman Emperor, Louis I-a.k.a. Louis the Pious or Louis the Debonair-saw it fit to summon church bigwigs to debate monastic discipline and afterward ordered all monasteries in his empire to take up Benedict's Rule.

  Was the decree implemented thoroughly? Who knows? News traveled slowly in the ninth century. Some remote monasteries undoubtedly knew little of Louis the Pious or St. Benedict, much less that the former was their emperor and that the latter had composed what was now a binding monastic rule. But whether universally recognized or not, Benedict's vision of religious life fundamentally influenced monastic practices for centuries-right up to Loyola's time.

  Benedict's personal impulse to flee Rome-and indeed the world-profoundly colored that vision. Benedictine communities were self-supporting, self-contained islands. They produced their own food, clothing, and other necessities. They elected their own leaders, each monastery operating autonomously. No one superior was responsible for all the Benedictine houses in any given country, much less throughout the world. Nor did the rule foster an expansionist or missionary impulse to establish new branches. Quite the contrary. Benedict was scandalized by Europe's "gyrovagues," those wayward monks "tramping from province to province, staying as guests in different monasteries.-.-.-. They indulge their own wills and succumb to the allurements of gluttony." 11 As a remedy, each Benedictine monk vowed "stability," to live out his remaining years in the monastic house he joined. Benedictine stability clearly complemented the monastic regimen of daily communal prayer at fixed hours. Centuries later, Loyola and the Jesuits would find little value in stability, or in communal prayer at set times. Instead, Jesuit prayer was individual, on-the-go, and self-regulating-like the examen.

  But Benedict's model was exceedingly well suited to the agrarian Dark Ages in which it was introduced. After all, it wasn't as if the monks could have bought groceries in the nearest large city. Nor were they missing out on a hip, urban scene by retreating to a monastery. Trade had collapsed. There were few cities to speak of.

  Still, European cities did once again stir to life. The growth of the continent's new economy was noth
ing so thrilling as the recent dot-com craze (R.I.P.). But towns slowly came back to life, thanks in part to twelfth- and thirteenth-century cloth merchants, the weavers they employed, and the carpenters, builders, bankers, shippers, food sellers, and others who catered to their worldly needs. These reemerging urban communities had religious, social, and spiritual needs as well. Benedictine monks were ill positioned to deal with the needs of these populations, cloistered as they were and often far removed from emerging town centers. A new model was needed for a new era. And two great monastic reformers happened along to provide it. As Europe moved into the thirteenth century, St. Francis of Assisi and St. Dominic punched a small hole in the monastery walls to experiment with new approaches to religious life.

  Francis of Assisi renounced substantial familial wealth to heed the mandate proclaimed in Matthew's Gospel: "Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff; for laborers deserve their food" (Matthew 10:9-10). Francis took the gospel passage literally. His earliest followers lived hand-to-mouth and day-to-day as itinerant preachers relying on freely given food offerings. Saving money for a rainy day was not an option: his friars were prohibited from even touching coin. Though he never ambitioned a large religious order, his charismatic appeal attracted thousands to live a poor, simple life while finding God present in all natural things.

  Striving for global growth rather than maintaining monastic traditions

  If history best remembers Francis for his simple piety and uncompromising embrace of religious poverty, he might also be remembered as the founder most desperately wanting for a good chief operating officer. Francis envisioned a loosely bound, small band of brothers, and he structured his company accordingly. Every Franciscan enjoyed the authority to accept new members into the ranks. By what criteria? No one seemed too worried about such details. Once new members joined, there was no organized novitiate system to train them. The approach worked fine while Francis ran the equivalent of a corner deli, but the same seat-ofthe-pants style didn't lend itself to oversight of a company the scale of McDonald's.