Heroic Leadership

by Chris Lowney

  The early Franciscans convened their full membership for annual "general chapters" to resolve strategy. This worked well for a small band of brothers, but in 1221 as many as five thousand friars descended on Assisi for what surely became more circus than strategy session. They straggled in from all over Europe, some after months of travel, each recognizing no clear chain of command other than Francis's ultimate leadership, each informally trained by whatever monk or monks had admitted him-it's little wonder that the general chapters were unproductive.

  To their great credit, Francis and the similarly inspired founder of the Dominican order (St. Dominic) refocused religious life. At the core of each man's vision was engagement with the pressing problems of an urbanizing Christendom. Their members sallied forth each day to preach or teach. But they remained tethered to the monastery, retaining Benedict's tightly scheduled communal prayer at appointed hours. An impulse to be actively involved in the world inspired their corporate efforts, but each order struggled to shoehorn that impulse into the withdrawn-from-the-world monastic model they inherited. It wasn't a natural fit.

  Both reformers also groped toward "global management," in contrast to the fully autonomous Benedictine monasteries. The Dominicans elected a worldwide master general, but his authority was checked within an exquisitely balanced system that would have wowed the framers of the U.S. Constitution. Each Dominican community elected its own leaders, and each region largely managed its own affairs. As a result, the master general didn't enjoy the broad authority of a modern CEO. In contrast, the Franciscan minister general enjoyed more substantial authority but lacked the organizational infrastructure to wield it effectively.

  Widely distributed authority and democratically elected leadership checked the Dominicans' full corporate potential, and severe "undermanagement" weakened the Franciscans. Neither order managed or even tried to invent a leadership or management model specifically geared to a proactive, mobile, large-scale modern company, as Loyola later would do. And in fairness, neither intended to build a large-scale modern company. Dominic, Francis, and their followers undoubtedly remained quite pleased with what they had created: a balanced life of active service complemented by contemplative prayer. The elegantly simple Dominican motto eloquently conveys the essence of this approach to life, work, and prayer: "to contemplate and to give others the fruits of contemplation."

  Well, Ignatius Loyola did intend to build a proactive, mobile, large-scale modern company-although he probably wouldn't have put it in quite those terms. And while Dominic and Francis stretched the garment of traditional religious life to cover their more activist ambitions, Ignatius Loyola decided that a completely new garment was needed. A thousand years after Benedict and three hundred after Francis and Dominic, Loyola started drafting the Jesuit Constitutions. The finished product incorporated ideas from all three monastic traditions, but they were draped on a model so radically different from what had preceded it that they were almost unrecognizable.

  First to go was the very organizing principle of monastic life: daily communal prayer at fixed hours. The Jesuits' priority was fully engaged fieldwork, which is fundamentally incompatible with a shackling obligation to hurry home periodically each day for communal prayer. The monastic communities prayed in common at multiple fixed times each day; Loyola's Jesuits would pray individually, sandwiching prayer between their work obligations. It was a radical departure from the way things had been done in the past, an ingenious leap that created scope to seize unplanned and unanticipated opportunities to "help souls."

  Basing ministry on opportunity rather than on strict definitions

  Prior to the Jesuits, religious orders frequently confined their missions to particular areas of service or types of work. While Dominic had articulated a clearly focused mission of "preaching and teaching," Loyola refused to pin his Jesuits down. Opportunities would evolve over time, and even in 1540 Protestant Germany's needs differed utterly from those of non-Christian Japan. So Loyola articulated a wide-open mission: "The aim and end of this Society is, by traveling through the various regions of the world at the order of the [pope] or of the superior of the Society itself, to preach, hear confessions, and use all the other means it can-.-.-. to help souls" (emphasis added).12 What might "helping souls" include? Apparently, whatever made sense to a self-aware Jesuit and his superiors, from expeditionary treks to mapmaking to astronomical research. Instead of specifying businesses his Jesuits should pursue, Loyola only warned them to avoid occupations that could tie them down or limit strategic flexibility: "Likewise, because the members of this Society ought to be ready at any hour to go to some or other parts or the world,-.-.-. still less ought they to take charge of religious women-.-.-. or similar burdens which are not compatible with the liberty that is necessary for our manner of proceeding." 13 Well, political correctness was not exactly a hallmark of the sixteenth century.

  The cofounders ensured rapid responsiveness by vowing to mobilize immediately at the pope's request, "without any excuse-.-.-. to any place whatsoever where [the pope] judges it expedient to send them,-.-.-. whether among the faithful or the infidels."14 By explicitly putting themselves at the pope's disposal, they made it impossible to turn back and therefore enforced flexibility. Like it or not, when the pope came knocking they were committed to go.

  Of course, companies don't become strategically flexible and change-ready merely by repeating these goals throughout the company handbook. If it were that simple, corporate America would be awash in nimble, resourceful leadership. It's easy to talk about embracing change; it's far more difficult to live it by risking one's career on untested tactics or by leaving home and friends for distant assignments. The indifference meditations of the Spiritual Exercises mentally prepared early Jesuit recruits for these and other challenges by surfacing attachments that might hinder them. Jesuits not only talked about change-readiness but developed recruits to live it.

  In case he didn't fully absorb the message, each trainee was given a sole-testing. Each was dispatched on a monthlong "Christian man against the elements" pilgrimage. Trainees set out empty-handed, begging for food and lodging along the way, the challenge symbolic and unmistakable: be resourceful, mobile, creative, free of attachments, and able to operate independently. No wonder so many Jesuits ended up with a taste for exploration. When Jacques Marquette joined with Louis Jolliet to explore the Mississippi River, it was hardly Marquette's first journey. His novitiate had included a monthlong, two-hundred-mile roundtrip pilgrimage between Nancy and Trier. Granted, trekking through northeast France was considerably tamer than canoeing past buffalo herds en route to a rendezvous with Illini tribal leaders. But the one-two punch of the Exercises and the monthlong pilgrimage made a far profounder impact on trainees than would a corporate handbook encouraging flexibility and resourcefulness.

  Finding God in the world rather than behind walls

  Loyola had spun the very structure of religious life onto its head. While Benedict's monks pronounced a vow of stability, remaining in one monastery for life, Jesuits were instead committed to mobility. Loyola's lieutenant Jeronimo Nadal barnstormed Europe framing the distinctive Jesuit mindset and lifestyle: "[Jesuits] realize that they cannot build or acquire enough houses to be able from nearby to run out to the combat. Since that is the case, they consider that they are in their most peaceful and pleasant house when they are constantly on the move, when they travel throughout the earth, when they have no place to call their own." 15 The world-friendly sentiment is unmistakable. Far from squeamishly recoiling from change or fleeing the world, the ideal Jesuit embraces life on the move as his "most peaceful and pleasant house." Or, as Nadal told another team, "It must be noted that in the Society there are different kinds of houses or dwellings. These are: the house of probation, the college, the professed house, and the journey-and by this last the whole world becomes [our] house" (emphasis added).16

  Speed, mobility, imagination, and flexibility were the goals. Obstacles were uprooted, in
cluding the very practices most often associated with priestly life. Nadal described a particularly unpleasant dressing down by Loyola: "On the next day [Loyola] sharply denounced me in the presence of others; and, thereafter, he did not make great use of my services." 17 What was the extraordinary offense? Nadal had yielded to Spanish Jesuits' request to pray for as long as an hour and a half each day, and Nadal's saintly, mystic Jesuit boss was apoplectic to hear that Nadal had allowed the Spaniards to do so much praying! Loyola insisted instead that "a truly mortified man needs only a quarter of an hour to be united with God in prayer." 18

  Obstacles were uprooted, including the very practices most often associated with priestly life.

  His point? Not that Jesuits shouldn't be prayerful, but that success in their activist mission hinged on finding ways to remain prayerfully re-collected without withdrawing from action. Or, as Nadal put it when proposing Loyola as the role model, Jesuits should be simul in actione contemplativus" ("contemplative even in action"). Another colleague put it more plainly: "It is unbelievable with what ease our Father [i.e., Loyola] recollected himself in the midst of a tide of business." 19

  What was the key to Loyola's ability to shift gears? Like so much else, the skill traced back to the Exercises. Loyola had abandoned fixed communal prayer but had substituted strategies for maintaining focus and composure in a busy lifestyle. The short mental pit stops of the daily examen enabled refocusing on the fly.

  But refocusing is useless without a focal point. Equally vital was the up-front investment each recruit had made to understand his weaknesses, establish his worldview, and cultivate indifference. So he instinctively knew what to look for when he stopped to refocus. He measured his performance over the past few hours against key goals, the weaknesses that habitually tripped him up, and the attachments that blocked indifference. After the spiritual and mental fine-tuning, he got back into the race.

  No less important to re-collection amid the tide of business was the Contemplation to Attain Love, which first attuned recruits to the divine presence all around them. Jesuits didn't consider it necessary to gather in chapel every few hours to remind themselves of the sort of world in which they worked. Instead, their worldview their lens, their outlook toward others-had been set through the Exercises, allowing them to move through the day with their radar fixed to "find God in all things." What did that mean? Exactly what it said. Loyola told Jesuits to find God "in all things, for example, in conversing with someone, in walking, looking, tasting, hearing, thinking, and in everything that they do." 20

  Previous pages depicted the slow-motion evolution of religious life, the ten-century journey from Benedict's monks to Francis's friars to Ignatius Loyola's world-engaged Jesuits. If religious life evolved slowly, so did the medieval world it mirrored: Loyola's Jesuits would have had no place in Benedict's feudal, agrarian era, or in Francis's thirteenth century, for that matter.

  Today's world changes at a more frantic pace; modern managers pride themselves not only on coping with change but on driving change to seize the competitive advantage in constantly shifting markets. But we may not be as good at change management as we would like to think. In 1982 Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman released In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies; the landmark work was a fixture on bestseller lists for more than three years. The authors' prescriptions for achieving corporate excellence stand up surprisingly well twenty years later. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for many of the companies they lauded as "America's best-run companies." Peters and Waterman sifted corporate America through rigorous sieves and proclaimed that thirty-six companies cleared "all the hurdles for excellent performance" over their twenty-year study period. Some of those thirty-six still shine. But others struggle for their corporate lives, no longer paragons of excellence but fodder for case studies analyzing good companies gone bad (Eastman Kodak, Kmart). Still others are dimly remembered ghosts, casualties of corporate takeovers (Amdahl, Chesebrough-Pond's, Raychem).

  Peters and Waterman didn't make injudicious choices. They chose excellent companies-for 1982. But excellence-like the leadership that engenders it-is no timeless plateau that once attained is never forfeited. The thousands who lost jobs as these onetime corporate role models disintegrated need no reminder that the modern world is tumultuous and always shifting; succeeding in this world requires individuals to cultivate the personal skills needed to thrive in an environment of near permanent change. And thriving amid change is not merely a workplace concern; the same social, technological, and cultural changes that convulse the workplace present an endless stream of threats and opportunities in every facet of life. The abilities to adapt, create, and respond quickly are core personal leadership skills for the twenty-first century.

  Loyola and his colleagues understood the urgency of molding a change-adaptive, creative Jesuit team in the sixteenth century; surely those same skills are all the more critical in the tumultuous twenty-first century. Yet the snuffed-out corporate stars of the In Search of Excellence class of 1982 suggest that many today are far less resilient than the sixteenth-century Xavier who crisscrossed Asia. Why? Perhaps we don't focus as energetically as Loyola's Jesuits did on assembling the internal, personal building blocks of ingenuity.

  About sixty years after Xavier left India, another Jesuit arrived there. Roberto de Nobili would push Jesuit ingenuity to limits that would draw the attention of a wary Vatican-neither the first nor the last time that this would happen in Jesuit history.

  THE JESUIT WHO WORE RED: THE INNOVATIONS OF DE NOBILI

  Not much was overlooked in Loyola's obsession with inventiveness and flexibility-not even clothes. Other religious orders proudly sported distinctive habits as their "team colors." Loyola instead opted for plain priestly attire, "conformed to the usage of the region where one is living."21 He was referring to nuances in Catholic priestly custom and dress across Europe. In Loyola's mind, the dress code must have been little more than a minor grace note in his broader concern that Jesuits blend into local cultures, not set themselves apart. But even Loyola might have been surprised at how aggressively his adventurous Jesuits interpreted "conformed to the usage of the region where one is living" once they found themselves working amid non-Christian priestly classes dressed in anything but priestly black.

  Groundbreaking multiculturalist

  This sketch of Roberto de Nobili, the Italian noble turned sannyasi, was done by his Jesuit colleague Balthasar da Costa. Though da Costa's crude sketch hardly rivals the Jesuit portraiture executed by masters like Rubens and del Conte, it nonetheless captures de Nobili's thorough attempts to adapt to his host culture.

  Jesuits likely arrived in Asia primed for cultural experimentation, given the themes rattling around their heads. Their company mission demanded they use all the means they could to help souls. Each trainee had meditated on the ten thousand ducats to rid himself of controlling personal attachments and to cultivate indifference. Managers like Nadal had reinforced the change-ready message that they were in their most peaceful and pleasant house when they were constantly on the move. No wonder many were quick to shake off the cultural trappings of sixteenth-century Europe in order to conform to the usage of the region where one is living. Few tested cultural frontiers as thoroughly as the twenty-eight-year-old Italian Jesuit and former noble who reached the southern Indian city of Madurai in 1606.

  Roberto de Nobili's pedigree would have been extraordinary almost anywhere other than a Jesuit company that already boasted more than its share of well-connected Europeans. The grandnephew of a pope and son of a papal army general, de Nobili renounced his own title as count of Civitella to remain a Jesuit. Who knows what else he passed up to enter Jesuit life: a sizable inheritance, for sure; probably a palazzo on the family's Tuscan estates; and likely a cardinal's hat had he pursued a conventional clerical career.

  Instead of sitting in cardinal's robes in a Tuscan palazzo, by 1610 de Nobili was sitting in a grass hut a few degrees north of t
he equator. Dressed in a red-ocher robe, his head completely shaved but for a small tuft of hair and his forehead marked with sandalwood paste, de Nobili took his one daily vegetarian meal of rice seasoned with herbs-and didn't complement it with wine from the de Nobilis' Montepulciano vineyards. Noble-born in his native Italy, de Nobili had at first presented himself as a member of the rajah caste, according to his adopted country's practices, a calculated strategy to avoid the label of "untouchable" that Indians invariably accorded his missionary colleagues, forever after hobbling their efforts. But as de Nobili immersed himself in his host country's culture, he adjusted his strategy. He began draping a distinctive triple strand of white cotton from his shoulder down to his waist, marking himself as a member of the Brahmin (priestly) caste. Moreover, he adopted the austere diet and disciplined regimen of a sannyasi, a religious man "who abandons all."

  The sannyasi de Nobili convinced the Brahmin scholar Sivadarma to tutor him in the Hindu scriptures, the Vedas-a double first of sorts. Not only was de Nobili the first European to consult the sacred Vedas with any thoroughness, but he also became the first European to master Sanskrit, the classical lan guage of Hindu India and the language of the Vedas. It was a triple first, actually; de Nobili was there not only to learn but also to participate actively in religious discourse. So after absorbing the Sanskrit Vedas, the sannyasi shifted to colloquial Tamil to draft his Nitya Jivana Callapam (Dialogue on Eternal Life). In what was almost certainly the first theological treatise written by a European in an Indian language, de Nobili offered Hindus his interpretation of the way to attain knowledge of the true Veda.