by Chris Lowney
Unlike those who taught at the primary education level, those wishing to teach at the university level had to at least meet minimal standards for entering the profession. Though professorships did not require the schooling that they do today, the privilege of a university lectureship and designation of "Master" required years of university study and successful examination results. Needless to say, the quality requirements for entering the profession were relevant only to those lucky enough to attend a university, and the most salient feature of formal higher education at that time was its utter scarcity. If only a quarter of those residing in Europe's wealthiest cities attained basic literacy, less than 1 percent pursued formal higher education.
The secondary education marketplace-fragmented, stagnant, underserved and underled, yet facing "ideological competition" from Protestant communities-perfectly suited the Jesuits' competitive strengths. Their global organization and ready responsiveness were two obvious advantages. Whereas staffing a new college was a daunting challenge even for a town with the will and resources to found one, the Jesuits could rapidly staff new schools by reallocating teams from existing schools and other operations, or by bringing in fresh trainees. The founding faculty in Sicily comprised ten Jesuits representing at least five different nationalities.
While the Protestant reformers focused on primary schooling, the Jesuits instead claimed a field almost entirely devoid of organized competition. In a Europe where curricula and practices were haphazardly thrown together even within a single school, not to mention from country to country, the Jesuits engineered a global plan of attack. Best practices were gathered into a Ratio studiorum (plan of studies). The Jesuit brand became associated with consistently high standards, a boon to parents lost among the dozens of tiny, independent schools serving any large city. In an environment where neither guilds nor civil authorities dictated minimum standards for entering the teaching profession, each Jesuit's rigorous training left him far more qualified than the average secondary school teacher. In sum, the Jesuit company's strengths uniquely matched the needs of the times. No other organization boasted a similar array of competencies, and Jesuit leaders exhibited the risk tolerance, creativity, and aggressiveness to capitalize on the opportunity.
THE PERFECT NETWORK
But why this business? After all, plenty of occupations fit the Jesuits' broad mission of helping souls, and education was hardly the only field where a well-organized, intellectually superior, nimble company could excel.
They dove into education so aggressively because they realized how neatly it dovetailed with their broader agenda. The Jesuits were eager to influence those who would make the greatest impact on society-that their students would, by virtue of their education, often become the elite of their respective communities was a great advantage. A better-educated Catholic populace would shore up efforts to check the spread of Protestantism, another goal dear to Jesuit hearts. And higher education supported the Jesuit mission in countless other ways. It reinforced the scholarly ranks of Jesuits involved in polemical warfare with Protestant reformers; it kept ingenuity-driven Jesuits at the cutting edge of science and scholarship; it provided an academic outlet for the scientific, geographic, and cultural findings constantly flowing in from Jesuits stationed in Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
Students were concentrated in Europe's emerging urban centers, so Jesuits located new schools in key cities that waxed in prominence as the early modern European economy developed. Jesuit schools became civic nerve centers. And once a school infrastructure was in place, other Jesuit activities made use of the facilities. Thus, Jesuit churches, social service centers, and other operations frequently found themselves fortuitously situated at the heart of major cities, catering to Europe's most influential citizens.10
Finally, the schools tempered Jesuit staffing woes in ways they had not foreseen. As envisioned, the colleges enabled them to educate their own recruits to a high standard. But the schools also gathered a vast pool of young, impressionable potential recruits. The diversion of experienced Jesuits into teaching paid for itself many times over as new recruits enlisted annually from the schools' graduating ranks. And if Jesuits scrupulously steered clear of overt recruiting tactics, they were far from naive about the potential to augment their numbers with prospective recruits studying right under their noses. The same Jeronimo Nadal who encouraged Jesuit managers to recruit quamplurimi et quam aptissimi (as many as possible of the very best) also advised each Jesuit faculty to nominate "a promotor who would be especially charged with keeping his eyes open for likely candidates and guiding those who came seeking."11
So Jesuit capabilities and strategic interests uniquely and symbiotically coincided with the needs of an era. Most runaway business successes are rooted in the same happy marriage of core capabilities and market needs.
But one other minor detail further supercharged the product appeal: it was free. Not only were Jesuits offering Europe's best secondary education, they were offering it free of charge. No wonder cities clamored for them. Aside from a handful of isolated civic experiments, nothing remotely so ambitious was being attempted by any other company-or by any government, for that matter. Only a company enamored with "heroic goals" would be foolish enough to launch such a vast, novel, and labor-intensive experiment while plagued by a lack of manpower and funding-and, characteristic of heroes, pull it off.
Jesuit capabilities and strategic interests uniquely and symbiotically coincided with the needs of an era. Most runaway business successes are rooted in the same happy marriage of core capabilities and market needs.
It was free. That fact alone announced a revolutionary social vision: even the poor should have the chance to learn. As it stood, formal education was available only to those few whose families could afford to pay. The resulting inequity only reinforced Europe's social and economic stratification. It would be a gross exaggeration to claim that Jesuits leveled the playing field for those seeking an education in cities with Jesuit schools. No social revolutions or triumphs of humankind came about because of their school openings. Nor did the Jesuits understand themselves as social revolutionaries. They were merely helping souls, driven by their loving outlook on the world. Even though their network dwarfed other privately organized efforts, it was still just a drop in the ocean of illiteracy and inadequate education. Still, the schools afforded a unique opportunity to many poor children who would otherwise never have been educated. The children of the wealthy enjoyed a unique educational opportunity as well: by sharing their classroom with poor children, they experienced what was often their first peer-level interaction with the less privileged and learned a nonetoo-subtle lesson about human equality.
The Jesuits' revolutionary vision was eventually threatened by its very success. The network rapidly expanded even beyond the Jesuits' own heroic imaginings. Loyola himself was responsible for spurring the aggressive expansion; how he and his colleagues dealt with the consequences of that unsustainable growth was to have implications that the Jesuits may not have fully understood-and that Loyola might well have handled differently had he seen those unintended consequences unfold.
THE DIFFICULTY OF MAINTAINING A VISION
Working from an extensive survey of CEOs in 1989, Stanford Graduate School of Business professors James Collins and Jerry Porras identified eighteen premier companies across industrieswhat they called "visionary companies"-and studied them to uncover common traits leading to consistently superior performance. They published their findings in Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies.12 Prominent among the successful habits was committing one's company to-even betting it on-extraordinarily ambitious, barely attainable missions, which the authors call BHAGs-big, hairy, audacious goals. For example, building, within a generation, the world's most extensive, highest caliber higher education system. Pretty audacious for a chronically understaffed company that had never opened a single school.
There was only one problem. It was B, H, and A, all right,
but no one had ever proclaimed it a G. The Jesuits hadn't even set out to build a school system, nor-once they started-had any enterprising Jesuit general resolved to build the world's largest. Instead, Jesuits in the field pressed to open schools wherever they would further their corporate ambition to help souls. And when a school opened, motivated Jesuit faculties usually made it the best secondary education alternative in the region.
The network was built from the bottom up, not visioned top down. Insofar as there was an overarching vision, it was a decidedly retail one: magistri sint insignes-"the teachers should be outstanding." And so they ended up with the best network of schools in the world-one outstanding teacher at a time, one school at a time. It epitomizes the Jesuit principle of heroic leadership. The result was extraordinary, but it was accomplished person by person, each one internalizing and shaping the company mission. Each one was motivated by a spirit of magis to look beyond an ordinary potential outcome and wonder if there wasn't something more, something greater he could accomplish.
Lesson learned about BHAGs from the early Jesuits? Heroismand the BHAGs that come with it-percolates bottom up, from magis-driven leaders. Such heroism can't be bought, bartered, manipulated, or forced. It's freely offered and passed along by self-motivated individuals enthused about their work. Successful leaders know that eliciting heroism is not as simple as dreaming up an ambitious enough BHAG. Instead, they spend their time creating environments where individuals will choose heroism as a way of working and living.
Heroic leadership gets difficult: Coming up short on human rights
As the company waded deeper into uncharted cultural and ideological waters, they navigated a difficult, lonely, and sometimes contradictory course.
Grant Brazil's slave raiders this much: they were consistent. Whether an African, an indigenous Brazilian, or a resident of a Jesuit-run reduction in Paraguay, a slave was a slave was a slave. It wasn't so simple for the Jesuits. The Portuguese Jesuit Antonio Vieira had traded a cushy royal appointment in Lisbon for a controversial commission investigating abuse of indigenous people when he arrived in Brazil in the 1650s. It didn't take him long to alienate every element of Portuguese colonial society; as he wrote to King John IV in Portugal, "We have against us [here] the people, the [other] religious [orders], the proprietors of the captaincies, and all those in the Kingdom and in this State who are interested in the blood and sweat of the Indians whose inferior condition we alone defend."13
Not content to limit his brief to degradations suffered by indigenous people, Vieira spoke out as well against brutal treatment of African slaves arriving in Brazilian ports, "the masters decked out in courtly dress, the slaves ragged and naked; the masters feasting, the slaves dying of hunger; the masters swimming in gold and silver, the slaves weighed down with irons."14 If his championing of indigenous rights had aligned colonial society against him, the rhetorical flourish that came next in the same sermon utterly isolated him from virtually all seventeenth-century Europeans: "Are these people the children of Adam and Eve? Were not these souls redeemed by the blood of Christ? Are not these bodies born and do they not die as ours do? Do they not breathe the same air? Are they not covered by the same sky? Are they not warmed by the same sun?"' 5 Less than a decade after his arrival in Brazil, the colonists had heard enough; Vieira and a handful of his Jesuit colleagues were deported.
While Jesuits charted a path that European society rejected, not even they themselves were bold enough to track that path to its logical endpoint. True, it was largely at Jesuit instigation that freedoms for indigenous people were legislated and in some measure protected in Brazil. Yet not even Vieira was courageous enough to call for the end of African slavery, despite proclaiming its victims equally "the children of Adam and Eve,-.-.-. warmed by the same sun." The most he and other Jesuit activists ever called for was more humane treatment of African slaves. That was radical enough in the seventeenthcentury Americas-but a far cry from uncompromising Jesuit battles for indigenous rights that were to come in Paraguay. Presumably, Vieira was shrewd enough to realize that African slaves formed the alternate labor pool that floated the Brazilian economy after Jesuits helped cut off the steady flow of native slave labor. He may have reasoned that liberties for indigenous people were as much as a resentful colonial population would bear; advocating eradication of African slavery might ignite a backlash, inciting colonial populations to renege on their begrudging acceptance of indigenous liberties.
Still, unimpeachable though such tactical logic might have been, it somehow doesn't sit well with the spirit of those Jesuits in Paraguay who freed indigenous people from encomienda without considering any compromise to placate the colonials. Perhaps the issue of African slavery hit too close to home for the Jesuits; after all, in New World colonies, the Jesuits' extensive network of schools and houses was supported by patronage of large estates and thus, by extension, by one of the largest African slave corps in Latin America.
The Jesuits had not even stretched their courageous defense of the rights of indigenous people in South America to its logical endpoint. True, Jesuit efforts helped the Guarani reach levels of cultural achievement and establish living standards that, albeit still deficient, vastly exceeded those of other Latin American indigenous populations exposed to European colonialism. Yet while the Guarani made themselves successful musicians, artists, builders, and writers, at least one career path eluded them: Jesuit priesthood. The Jesuits, like virtually every major religious order, erected what amounted to color bars throughout the New World. The Jesuits reasoned that the Guarani were too young in the faith for priestly ordination. It was logical reasoning: early reduction settlers were not only the first Guarani generations to encounter Christianity, but also the first to attain basic literacy. They weren't likely candidates to survive the rigorous intellectual formation to which Jesuits subjected their recruits. But that logic wore thin as the generations rolled by.
The underlying point is not that the early Jesuits fell short of perfection but that heroic leadership is never-ending, challenging work. It involves the willingness to continue questioning and probing one's approach, tactics, values, and culture. In the Jesuits' case, that heroic approach often set them apart from mainstream European culture. They wrangled with provincially minded, nationalistic Spanish and Portuguese crowns reluctant to allow multinational Jesuit teams into their overseas colonies. They wrangled with papal authorities unhappy with their radical departures from the monastic tradition. Latin American colonists resented Jesuit defense of the rights of indigenous people. And across Asia, progressive Jesuit missionary strategies rankled non-Jesuit missioners.
Leadership often is a swim against the current. And as hard as it is to swim upstream, it becomes all the more difficult once the seductive opportunity to turn around and drift with the flow presents itself. Heroic, out-in-front leadership became a less compelling choice as the Jesuit company had more and more to lose. It was no different then than it is today: risk taking comes easier to the edgy, nothing-to-lose start-up than to the wellestablished, everything-tolose mainstream player.
Heroic, out-in-front leadership became a less compelling choice as the Jesuit company had more and more to lose.
The phenomenon is as old as eighteenth-century Jesuits and as new as late-twentieth-century Xerox, AT&T, and IBM. Technology aficionados will recall when the personal computer was an exotic novelty, hardly a threat to an information management industry structured around big-box mainframes. Xerox, AT&T, and IBM technologists had all engineered early breakthroughs that proved critical to the personal computer's development. And all three companies had the financial resources to exploit their innovations and dominate the nascent industry-yet none of them did (or none did as early or as well as they might have). Why not?
The reasons are complex, but it's safe to say that the management of each of these three companies decided to stick with what was working rather than pounce aggressively on untested, highrisk ventures-even though all three comp
anies had first vaulted to prominence precisely by innovating and taking risks. Like the Jesuit company-grown a bit too big, complacent, and risk averse for its own good-all three had slipped away from a core value critical to their continued success. While these mainstream behemoths slowly marched forward, poorly capitalized start-ups like Apple and Microsoft surged forward to carve out niches in the evolving business.
Throughout their history, the early Jesuits occasionally gave up the heroic, countercultural course. When they did so, a prophetic voice from the aging founding generation was often there to excoriate them. Loyola himself challenged the company's reluctance to welcome Asian recruits as candidates for full Jesuit membership, encouraging Jesuit managers in India to take more risk: "of the boys who are being educated in the college,-.-.-. those who are more talented and stronger in the faith, better behaved and more presentable, could be admitted [to the Jesuits]."16 His colleagues never quite summoned up the courage to do so, and Loyola was long dead by the time their reluctance had hardened into policy.
Succeeding generations, caving in to political pressure, backtracked on other commitments assumed by the founders. Loyola and his colleagues had taken on more than a few political battles to admit New Christians into the order, but a half-century after Loyola's death, the company imposed crippling restrictions on New Christian candidates. After all, every other major religious organization had had the same restrictions in place for generations; by remaining the odd man out, the company was losing political support across Europe. With most of the founding generation deceased, it remained to Pedro Ribadeneira, himself nearing seventy, to castigate colleagues for selling out the early Jesuit vision.