Brainstorming in Jyväskylä

I just returned from a weekend spent in Jyväskylä, central Finland. It had been years since I last visited that beautiful city. My friend Jussi and I hopped on the Helsinki-Jyväskylä train on Friday and returned a few hours ago.

[Photo of me and Jussi taken by Jani Salokangas.]

Our mutual friend, Jani, who lives in Jyväskylä turned out to be the best of hosts. We ate well, listened to excellent music, took refreshing walks, and - the main purpose of our visit - held several brainstorming sessions together (a creative joint project). Jani lived in Tanzania for two years with his family: that's where we first met. Jani's wife, Laura, spent the weekend at her parents' place with their little girl, Noela, and let us guys take over the house.

Hyvejohtajuus Published

Alexandre Havard's Virtuous Leadership (New York: Scepter Publishers 2007) was finally published in Finnish as Hyvejohtajuus (Providentia 2009).

The book publishing event took place at the legendary and elegant Cafe Aalto, downtown Helsinki. Approximately 100 people followed the panel discussion. Among the panelists were Alexandre Havard himself, who flew in from Moscow, the Finnish MEPs Timo Soini and Sari Essayah (from Brussels), and Providentia's economist Oskari Juurikkala. Jan Ahonen, as the interviewer and host, did an excellent job.

The topic of the discussion -- virtues, leadership, and their interplay in the modern society -- is very serious. Yet the panelists were able to discuss it in a very encouraging and positive way: not unfrequently were there roars of laughter. The host read exerts (is that the word I'm looking for?) from the book and asked a follow-up question, often a very pointed one, say, about the differences of men and women in leadership.

The panelists (from left to right): Oskari Juurikkala, Jan Ahonen, Timo Soini, Alexandre Havard, and Sari Essayah.

The contents pages and the introduction can be read online here. It can be ordered here. For those who pre-order the book, the price is 29,00 € (norm. 39,00 €), this includes delivery in Finland. I saw some people who ordered five copies. I wonder what they'll do with them?

Hyvejohtajuuskirja.fi

Sorry I'm boring, the Virtuous Leadership posts keep on coming. I promise to write something non-leadershipy after the book publication event is over.

Anyway, here's an excellent link with all the relevant information. You can also use the link to advertize the event that takes place at the legendary Cafe Aalto downtown Helsinki.


Exciting news: The book will also be published as a free ebook chapter by chapter during the following 12 months. So students etc. with a low budjet: keep track of the updates. Even an audio book has been planned (podcast).

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.

Virtuous Leadership Blog

Our Virtuous Leadership Blog www.hyvejohtajuus.fi (in Finnish) got a new layout. Go check it out! We publish virtue and leadership related articles weekly; links to thought-provoking leadership articles weekly; a Guestbook Article monthly; and news from time to time.

The next big thing will be the Finnish translation of Virtuous Leadership called Hyvejohtajuus (Providentia Leadership and Otava kirjapaino 2009), which will come out later this summer. Will keep you posted.

True-to-being Memory

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

A leader has a good memory. By memory (Lat. memoria) I mean much more than just our natural ability of recollection. Neither am I referring to some “mnemo-technical” capacity not to forget.

A good memory means above all “truthful” memory. Josef Pieper calls it “true-to-being” memory.

This means that we remember real events and real things as they were and are, truly, not as we would like them to be. Whereas a truthful person speaks the truth, truthful memory remembers the truth.

An obvious truism?

Does this sound obvious to you? Let’s think about it.

A young boy whose tendency to exaggerate, by the time he’s an adult, has got out of control… A young couple who never seem to agree over the details of past arguments… A leader whose autobiographical memoir is a petrified epitome of self-admiration…

Truthful memory is not a truism!

At the heart of wisdom

According to Thomas Aquinas truthful memory is the first prerequisite of prudence. It is the cornerstone of wisdom. It is easy to see why this is so.

Prudence, the virtue of the decision maker, springs from the ability to grasp reality. Prudence seeks to base all action and decisions securely on reality. Reality is the objective world – the real things, events and experiences – in which we live.

But the truth about these things, events and experiences, the truth about the world, is “contained” in the truthful memory.

The pitfalls of “bad” memory

This is actually an important observation. For if truthful memory is the cornerstone of prudence, untruthful misconstruing memory is the stumbling block of prudence.

Josef Pieper writes: “Nowhere else is the danger so great as here, at the deepest root of the spiritual-ethical process, the danger that the truth of real things will be falsified by the assent or negation of the will.”

He continues:

“The peril is the greater for its beings so imperceptible. There is no more insidious way for error to establish itself than by this falsification of the memory through slight retouches, displacements, discolorations, omissions, shifts of accent. Nor can such falsifications be quickly detected by the probing conscience, even when it applies itself to this task.” (Prudence, ch. 2.)

How to train our memory?

Before I introduce a few practical guidelines it is important to remember that, if the fault lay in the foundation, mere white-washing the walls will not suffice.

Again Pieper: “The honesty of the memory can be ensured only by the rectitude of the whole human being which purifies the most hidden roots of volition. Here it becomes apparent how greatly prudence, upon which all virtue depends, is in its turn dependent at its very fundaments on the totality of the other virtues.” (Prudence, ch. 2.)

Alexandre Havard writes: “At the heart of the virtue of prudence is the relationship of a leader’s character to his ability to grasp reality. In other words, the relationship between being and perception, between what we are and what we see.” (Virtuous Leadership, p. 68.)

“The good man judges each class of things rightly, and in each the truth appears to him” says Aristotle (Nichomachean Ethics, III, 4).

Havard elaborates: “The proud man, on the contrary, judges as true whatever flatters his pride; the intemperate man, whatever may grant him power, money, or pleasure; the small-minded man, whatever justifies his cowardice or laziness.” (Virtuous Leadership, p. 68.)

Read Aristotle’s quote and Havard’s comment again but replace the word “judges” with remembers.

We see, interpret and remember things through the lenses of our character. By strengthening our character, in other words by strengthening our virtues, we develop our memory purified by truth.

Practical advice

Because memory is at the heart of prudence, much what applies to the training of prudence in general applies to the training of memory as well. Steps (1) and (2) are from the Virtuous Leadership article “Prudence”.

1. Avoid rationalizations at all costs.

To rationalize is to twist objective data, consciously or unconsciously, to make them fit our pre-conceived notions. Rationalization is a psychological process that distorts reality until it accords with our passions and interests.

2. Recognize and put aside your prejudices.

Rationalization has roots in cowardice. Prejudice stems from ignorance.

Overcoming prejudices requires the training of the virtue of humility, that can be called “the habit of living in the truth”.

Stephen Covey explains: “One of the characteristics of authentic leaders is their humility, evident in their ability to take off their glasses and examine the lens objectively… Where there are discrepancies (prejudice, ignorance, or error), they make adjustments to realign with greater wisdom.” (Principle-Centered Leadership, p. 20.)

3. Practice objective testing.

Heidi Robert’s Virtuous Leadership Guest-article “A Pound of Prudence” includes to practical advice which support the practice of truthful memory as well.

Roberts writes about emotionally charged signals.

“Emotional signals have the tendency of disfiguring the interpretation, making it selective and adjusting emphases in accordance of the receiver’s preferences… One can practice objectivity by, for example, trying to remember the details of a certain event, such as a conversation, without emphasizing the emotional response.”

Much depends on our ability to “adjust our emotions so as not to allow a single emotionally charged message to wholly usurp our thoughts”. Or our memory, for that matter.

Confessions of leaders

Earlier I mentioned the sugar-coated autobiographies. To counterbalance their influence I can wholeheartedly recommend an autobiographical classic that was published recently, about 1600 years ago.

Reading it will confirm in your mind the truth of the platitude “There’s nothing new under the sun”. I’m talking, of course, about St. Augusine’s Confessions.

As the title implies, the confessions are far from being sugar-coated. It is the exemplar of the development of truthful memory. The reader is in for a full treat.

Further reading:
St. Augustine, Confessions.
Heidi Roberts, “A Pound of Prudence” (in Finnish 2009).