Hyvejohtajuus: Alexandre Havard (Providentia/Otava 2009)

The book I translated is finally being published. The publishing event is on September 7th (Monday) at 2.00pm downtown Helsinki at Cafe Aalto, the cafeteria designed by Alvar Aalto.

For those of you who understand Finnish, below is the relevant information that I copy-pasted from the invite.

Among the panelists are Mr. Alexandre Havard himself (flying in from Moscow), the Finnish MEPs Mr. Timo Soini and Mrs. Sari Essayah (flying in from Brussels) and representing Providentia is the economist Mr. Oskari Juurikkala.

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KIRJANJULKISTAMISTILAISUUS

Alexandre Havardin Virtuous Leadership (New York: Scepter Publishers 2007) julkaistaan 9. käännöksenä suomeksi Hyvejohtajuus viikolla 37. Sitä ennen pidetään kirjan tiimoilta paneelikeskustelu.

Julkaisia: Providentia
Painotalo: Otava
Design ja taitto: Nordenswan & Siirilä
Suomentaja: Jason Lepojärvi
Myyntiin: viikolla 37

Tervetuloa aistillisen eleganttiin, Alvar Aallon sisustamaan Cafe Aaltoon kirjanjulkistamistilaisuuteen maanantaina 7. syyskuuta klo 14--15.30.

PANEELIKESKUSTELU

Mukana: johtajuuskirjoittaja Alexandre Havard, europarlamentaarikot Timo Soini (PS) ja Sari Essayah (KD) sekä taloustieteilijä Oskari Juurikkala (Providentia). Tilaisuuden juontaa toimittaja Jan Ahonen.

Teemana on johtajuus, hyveet ja niiden yhteispeli nykymaailmassa -- ts. "hyvejohtajuus". Aihe on äärimmäisen ajankohtainen myös Suomessa (vaalirahasotku, talouspetokset).

Yleisöllä ja lehdistöllä mahdollisuus esittää kysymyksiä. Tilaisuuden kieli on suomi.

ALEXANDRE HAVARD

Alexandre Havard (s. 1962, Pariisi) on johtajuuskouluttaja ja Havard Virtuous Leadership Instituten (HVLI) perustaja. Hänen kehittämänsä hyveisiin perustuva hyvejohtajuusmalli soveltaa klassista näkemystä ihmispersoonasta nykyajan organisaatioiden tarpeisiin.

Havard itse luennoi englanniksi, ranskaksi, espanjaksi, venäjäksi -- ja Suomessa asuneena jopa suomeksi.

KIRJASTA POIMITTUA

"Talousskandaaleja seuraa poikkeuksetta vaatimuksia valtiollisen sääntelyn vahvistamisesta, kaupan hallinnon reformista ja eettisten sääntöjen uudistamisesta. Näillä kaikilla on hyötynsä, mutta ne unohtavat jotain olennaista. Talouspetosten kyhäilijät ja muut lainrikkojat tietävät varsin hyvin, että se, mitä he tekevät, on väärin. Kyse on luonteenviasta." (JOHDANTO s. ix.)

TAKAKANNESTA

"Johtajuus on ensisijaisesti luonteen asia -- ei sen, mitä ihminen tietää tai osaa, vaan mitä hän on. Ihmisen luonnetta voidaan vahvistaa, sillä se on vapaan tahdon aluetta, toisin kuin temperamentti, joka on pitkälti jotakin synnynnäistä. Luonteen ytimessä ovat hyveet, toisin sanoen hyvät luonteenpiirteet, jotka näkyvät teoissa.

Hyvejohtajuus tarjoaa hyveissä kasvamisen metodologian jokaiselle. Johtajuus ei ole varattu vain jollekin eliitille, vaan se on monien kutsumus. Kirja sisältää esimerkkejä hyveiden ja johtajuuden yhteispelistä yhteiskunnan joka alalta: liike-elämästä, politiikasta, journalismista, koulutusalalta, uskonnosta, lääketieteestä ja myös vanhemmuudesta. Suomessakin asunut Havard mainitsee mm. saunan, Mannerheimin ja Helsingin Sinebrychoffin puiston."


KIRJASTA SANOTTUA

"Pidin kirjaa äärimmäisen kiehtovana, sillä se meni suoraan asian ytimeen: meidän tulee perustaa päätöksemme todellisuudelle, ja se taas vaatii todellisen käsityksen ihmispersoonasta."
--Francois Michelin, CEO emeritus, Group Michelin

LINKIT

Johtamisblogi hyvejohtajuus.fi.
Hyvejohtajuus Facebookissa.

Sleeping Guards

(This is a Virtuous Leadership article originally published in Finnish here.)

A story about sleeping guards reveals a fundamental problem in society. What’s to be done when control and security measures fail? Character is making a comeback.


A friend of mine who works for the Finnish Embassy in Tanzania built a real sauna in his backyard with a view of the Indian Ocean. One morning he found footprints, dark boot-size stains, on the wall at the end of the long sauna bench. He figured that the night guards had been sleeping in the sauna, so he decided to inspect the following night.

He was right: he found not only a guard in the sauna, but two guards in fact. But he recognized neither of them. Why was this? It turned out that the men were the security firm’s internal inspectors whose job was to visit locations to make sure the guards were present – and preferably awake too. In other words, the guards whose obligation was to make sure the night guards weren’t sleeping, were themselves sound asleep in a Finnish Embassy sauna.

The morale of the story is quite significant. It reveals a certain societal problem that pertains to families, schools, jobs, entire states – and not only in Africa, but also in Western countries.

Control mechanisms fail

The guards are sleeping, and the guards guarding the guards are sleeping. What can one do in this situation? Send more guards patrols to inspect the guards guarding the guards? And what about when these, too, find a comfortable sleeping place, say, the Swedish Embassy sauna? Send another higher patrol to inspect the inspectors of the guards guarding the guards? Clearly this would be an absurd, ineffective waste of resources. Sooner or later we reach a limit.

What should we conclude from this? That security and control mechanisms and procedures are all a waste of time? Certainly not. But alone they do not suffice. There must be another way.

We must understand that the root of many problems in society is not a technical one, something that can be fixed or cured “technically”. The root is, in many cases, fundamentally a moral one. If leaders and people in charge are not people of good character, no level of security and control measures suffice. Everything can be bypassed. There will always be an “inspector” of some sort who will decide to go to sleep – or look elsewhere as others are sleeping.

Alexandre Havard explains: “The business scandals of our time invariably give rise to calls for increased government oversight, reform of corporate government, and revision of codes of ethical conduct. These things may have their place, but they miss the essential point. The perpetrators of corporate wrongdoing invariably know that what they are doing is wrong. And yet they do it anyway. This is a failure of character.” (Virtuous Leadership, New York: Scepter, 2007, p. xiv.)

Competing anthropologies

If we neglect our inbuilt pull towards evil – towards “sleeping” – we will try to fix our societal problems and dysfunctional human behaviour by social engineering and various control mechanisms. We forget a fact humanity has always known to be true: evil is intrinsic to human nature – as is goodness.

T. S. Eliot said that some people “dream of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good” (The Rock, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934).

Nicholas Capaldi is right: a most alarming problem of modern Western societies is the widespread presence of the “failed or incomplete individual”. He writes:

“What really inhibits these people is a character defect, a moral inadequacy… What they end up with are leaders who are their mirror image: leaders who are themselves incomplete individuals and who seek to control others because they cannot control themselves.” (Decadence: The Passing of Personal Virtues and its Replacement by Political and Psychological Slogans, London: Social Affairs Unit 2005, p. 145.)

Back to character

Havard explains that these kind of societies and people replace virtues with political slogans and psychobabble:

“Tolerance, understood as moral relativism, replaces the virtue of justice, statistics and probability theory replace prudence, avoidance of nicotine and trans fats and other dietary fads replaces self-control, self-esteem replaces magnanimity, self-criticism replaces humility – and democracy replaces God” (Virtuous Leadership, p. 51).

The result is a pervasive boredom – to quote George Weigel, “not simply boredom of the day-in, day-out, quotidian sort but boredom on a transcendent, even metaphysical plane: a kind of boredom with the mystery of life itself”. A boredom that, in D. B. Hart’s words, “renders the imagination inert and desire torpid” (Virtuous Leadership, p. 51).

The homes, schools, companies and states that focus and invest in character building (without forgetting control mechanisms) exercise prudence and are the major players of the future. They have understood the reality of things and made decisions accordingly. Others still live and function in an illusion, and over and over again, will be surprised to find failing mechanisms and sleeping guards.

Finnish Police in Vancouver

This was an interesting. The Vancouver Sun reported an incident involving Finland's police hockey team. The headline was: "Fight to the Finnish: Finland's police hockey team halts assault on Vancouver bus driver."

You can read the entire article here. Apparently the Finnish policemen, visiting Vancouver for a police hockey tournament, witnessed a busdriver being mugged. They run after the villain and pinned him to the ground. Vancouver Sun comments: "Surrounded by what looked like odd assortment of fair-complexioned, blue-eyed Canadians, the man was shocked."

"He was very surprised," said Det. Sgt. Antti Karhola. "He had no chance. We felt pretty good about that."

I'm sure they did feel good, considering that they had just been eliminated from the tournament in the first round. But mark my words: this will not happen to the Finnish National Team in the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010.

Office Space

Great news. I got some office space from the Department of Theology that is in the heart of downtown Helsinki, on Aleksanterinkatu 7. The Faculty of Systematic Theology, my faculty, is on the 6th floor. I'm very happy about this, for it gives me an opportunity to study in a very productive and supportive atmosphere. In addition to fulltime research I will be teaching philosophy and ethics for a small group of first-year students. This will keep me pedagogically active, so I don't totally neglect my teaching vocation.