Parents, Priests and Generals - A Guide for How to Change the World for Good

“Behold, I am of small account.” Job, Hebrew prophet

We can change the world. We can right Injustices. We can listen to what our patients are saying with their stories, root out and heal their ailments while helping them see the fullness of life beyond their own. We can create businesses that will outlast themselves through their employees, suppliers, customers and community. We can nurture that damaged and fearful child to a life full of confidence and joy. We can teach our students to share simply because their classmate is valuable regardless of the favor he might or might not return. We can win Martin Luther King’s double-victory over our oppressors. We can lead our parishioners toward intimacy with one another and God. We can write stories and make sculptures that inspire us to be our best selves. We can be diligent and disciplined in our commitments to value others even ahead of ourselves. However, sooner or later we will reach our pain threshold and we will realize like Job, that we are “of small account.” Without some of Joe Mukanwa’s “spirit,” whatever we do to change the world will be a childish and mostly futile exercise in painting by numbers.

“Behold, I am of small account.” Job, Hebrew prophet

We can change the world. We can right Injustices. We can listen to what our patients are saying with their stories, root out and heal their ailments while helping them see the fullness of life beyond their own. We can create businesses that will outlast themselves through their employees, suppliers, customers and community. We can nurture that damaged and fearful child to a life full of confidence and joy. We can teach our students to share simply because their classmate is valuable regardless of the favor he might or might not return. We can win Martin Luther King’s double-victory over our oppressors. We can lead our parishioners toward intimacy with one another and God. We can write stories and make sculptures that inspire us to be our best selves. We can be diligent and disciplined in our commitments to value others even ahead of ourselves. However, sooner or later we will reach our pain threshold and we will realize like Job, that we are “of small account.” Without some of Joe Mukanwa’s “spirit,” whatever we do to change the world will be a childish and mostly futile exercise in painting by numbers.

“We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.” Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

Our imaginations have been captured by the many stories we see and hear on a daily basis. We imagine ourselves in Script's song, on our way to the Hall of Fame. We imagine ourselves as Tom Brady, married to a supermodel and winning the Superbowl. We hope to experience the wealth and power promised by The Secret or the meaning and fulfillment of The Purpose Driven Life.

Literary critic, George Steiner, wrote, “ours is the long day's journey of the Saturday, between suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste on the one hand and the dream of liberation, of rebirth on the other.” Aslan goes farther than Sherlock’s or Schindler’s sacrifices for those they loved. Edmund had betrayed his actual blood brothers and sisters whom he truly did love. He sold out an entire kingdom for nothing more than a truffle. But Aslan chose a path sure to lead him to an undignified death on behalf of someone who had betrayed him and the people he loved. Elevating others over self, helping others to achieve more even if it means we achieve less, valuing every human equally simply because they are human, fighting the good fight – these are stories that touch on the most popular of all Hollywood themes - “Love Conquers All.”

Changing character happens as the listeners imagine themselves in the stories being told. I have a request from my daughters, that you who pursue your dream to change the world through art and entertainment will be careful to tell stories that they will be better for having imitated.

“We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.” Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

Our imaginations have been captured by the many stories we see and hear on a daily basis. We imagine ourselves in Script's song, on our way to the Hall of Fame. We imagine ourselves as Tom Brady, married to a supermodel and winning the Superbowl. We hope to experience the wealth and power promised by The Secret or the meaning and fulfillment of The Purpose Driven Life. 

Literary critic, George Steiner, wrote, “ours is the long day's journey of the Saturday, between suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste on the one hand and the dream of liberation, of rebirth on the other.” Aslan goes farther than Sherlock’s or Schindler’s sacrifices for those they loved. Edmund had betrayed his actual blood brothers and sisters whom he truly did love. He sold out an entire kingdom for nothing more than a truffle. But Aslan chose a path sure to lead him to an undignified death on behalf of someone who had betrayed him and the people he loved. Elevating others over self, helping others to achieve more even if it means we achieve less, valuing every human equally simply because they are human, fighting the good fight – these are stories that touch on the most popular of all Hollywood themes - “Love Conquers All.”

Changing character happens as the listeners imagine themselves in the stories being told. I have a request from my daughters, that you who pursue your dream to change the world through art and entertainment will be careful to tell stories that they will be better for having imitated.

“The aim is to postpone frailty, postpone degenerative disease, debilitation and so on and thereby shorten the period at the end of life, which is passed in a decrepit or disabled state, while extending life as a whole.” Aubrey de Grey, author of Ending Aging

Encouraging the patient to value life above all else will leave her in pain, likely alone, and most certainly afraid. Doctors help slow life’s deterioration. That’s not what we patients need, nor is it what Hippocrates intended with his oath. What we need is a foundation such that in the face of our pain, we will not be overcome by fear. We need reassurance that there is more to being alive than just the length and quality of our own lives. In our vulnerability, medical professionals are maybe “the patient’s only familiar in a foreign country.” The doctor is the example for the patient – living a life lost in those he serves and leading them to life beyond themselves.

“The aim is to postpone frailty, postpone degenerative disease, debilitation and so on and thereby shorten the period at the end of life, which is passed in a decrepit or disabled state, while extending life as a whole.” Aubrey de Grey, author of Ending Aging

Encouraging the patient to value life above all else will leave her in pain, likely alone, and most certainly afraid. Doctors help slow life’s deterioration. That’s not what we patients need, nor is it what Hippocrates intended with his oath. What we need is a foundation such that in the face of our pain, we will not be overcome by fear. We need reassurance that there is more to being alive than just the length and quality of our own lives. In our vulnerability, medical professionals are maybe “the patient’s only familiar in a foreign country.” The doctor is the example for the patient – living a life lost in those he serves and leading them to life beyond themselves.

Foster and Kaplan’s 2001 book, Creative Destruction, showed over the previous 50 years, the life expectancy of firms in the Fortune 500 had declined from 75 to 15 years. Those firms that do remain have only done so by adapting so drastically that they barely resemble the firms they were 15 years prior. General Electric has been around for 123 years. By 2001, the financial arm of GE accounted for 41% of its profits. Under twenty years of Jack Welch’s leadership, the behemoth of industrial manufacturing had become almost as much a financial institution as a manufacturing concern. Because of the 2008 financial crisis and GE's Lehman Brothers-level of financial risk, Welch's successor is on a trajectory to reduce financial services to only 10% of GE's overall business. The GE of 123 years ago has changed drastically, but the team members, customers and community still carry the weight of its values, for better or worse. 

“On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy… your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products… Short-term profits should be allied with an increase in the long-term value of a company.” Jack Welch, Former CEO, General Electric

A business leader interested in changing the world develops a vision like “organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful.” She hires people with shared values. Her occupation is story-teller for this business undergirded by its values, helping create habits of behavior, leading self-sacrificially, making and delivering on commitments and supporting others as she asks them to do the same. These values end up infused into all the activities of the business and as a result into the psyche of the stakeholders. This is the gospel of leadership according to gurus of business. What most gurus don’t realize is the outcome isn’t a longer lasting, more successful firm, but character change in stakeholders that outlasts the firm itself.

“A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security.” Henry Kissinger

It is not surprising that with all the commitment of resources to this work, the United States regularly fails miserably at identifying and supporting effective leaders around the world. Nowhere is this failure starker than in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Belgian government continued to subjugate the Belgian Congo until 1960. The United States inserted itself into the independence movement in the Congo in 1960 to back a junior Congolese Army Officer who would become President. To facilitate this, the United States was at least complicit in killing the popular nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba. President Mobutu Sese Seko would rule in his stead until 1997 while amassing a personal fortune estimated at over five billion dollars. Mobutu was a clown whose distinguishing style was his Leopard-print Fez hat. He and his family and friends all drove expensive new model Mercedes and built multiple Versailles-like residences around Congo while the common people died from starvation, disease and war. President Reagan referred to Mobutu as “a faithful friend to the United States for some 20 years,” describing their relationship as “based on shared interests and perceptions.”

We could have avoided empowering a brutal dictator like Mobutu in Congo. A Just engagement would have approached these based on a value for the other at least equal to Americans. The resulting support would have been conceived out of long-term relationship; invited by, not forced upon, the recipients; driven by empowered local leaders of character; designed in the interests of the local people as determined by the local people.

“A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security.” Henry Kissinger

It is not surprising that with all the commitment of resources to this work, the United States regularly fails miserably at identifying and supporting effective leaders around the world. Nowhere is this failure starker than in the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

The Belgian government continued to subjugate the Belgian Congo until 1960. The United States inserted itself into the independence movement in the Congo in 1960 to back a junior Congolese Army Officer who would become President. To facilitate this, the United States was at least complicit in killing the popular nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba. President Mobutu Sese Seko would rule in his stead until 1997 while amassing a personal fortune estimated at over five billion dollars. Mobutu was a clown whose distinguishing style was his Leopard-print Fez hat. He and his family and friends all drove expensive new model Mercedes and built multiple Versailles-like residences around Congo while the common people died from starvation, disease and war. President Reagan referred to Mobutu as “a faithful friend to the United States for some 20 years,” describing their relationship as “based on shared interests and perceptions.”

We could have avoided empowering a brutal dictator like Mobutu in Congo. A Just engagement would have approached these based on a value for the other at least equal to Americans. The resulting support would have been conceived out of long-term relationship; invited by, not forced upon, the recipients; driven by empowered local leaders of character; designed in the interests of the local people as determined by the local people.

“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” Henry Adams, historian and intellectual, descendant of two US Presidents

History from the most cynical perspective is a cycle of the rise and fall of societies, from Detroit to Rome, represented by shifts in who wields power. Diffusing knowledge for the sake of empowering only facilitates this ongoing dynamic even if takes centuries for some of the powerful to fall and others to rise. Educators truly changing the world is breaking this cycle by teaching Harvard College students and kids at Bessie Buker Elementary that the other is equally valuable as oneself.

In a December 2014 interview with Esquire, Micah White, one of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) founders said, “My thinking is moving away from protest. Instead, I’m more interested with…getting large numbers of people to change their behaviors, to de-pattern themselves…” He realized what he had been doing wasn’t working.

For any of our activism to bring into effect the hoped for ideal of long-term systemic change, it would have to follow the lead of the likes of women’s suffrage. It would go beyond making ourselves feel better in the short-term and aim for changing the character of our imagined enemies. Martin Luther King calls this the double victory:

“To our most bitter opponents we say: ‘We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you… Throw us in jail and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory.’”

“Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation…want rain without thunder and lighting. The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Frederick Douglas

All the work of the women's suffrage movement was calling people to commit to something they already knew was virtuous, to demand of people that they abide their better angels. In order to commit though, men and women had to be willing to advance the interests of women and society as a whole at the perceived expense of their own interests in control and security.

Susan B. Anthony and thousands of others led by disciplined example. They stood in solidarity against great odds. Most political movements last a decade, but their vision was for 150 years or as long as it took. Most importantly, the identity of the women's suffragists was in a cause, “Not for Ourselves Alone.”

“We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Louis Brandeis, US Supreme Court Justice (1856-1941)

A Just society values the individual based on something intrinsic to her humanness, not based on performance or position. We value the newborn child and dying grandfather, the homeless and poor, the wealthy and commercially productive. A Just society’s value for the individual derives from its belief in the individual’s implicit or explicit commitment to act beyond the confines of her own interests. Citizens of a Just society believe in the individual’s capacity to prioritize others over self, and they build institutions to facilitate that.

Making that leap to prioritizing others depends on losing ourselves in something greater than ourselves.

“Forming characters! Whose? Our own or others? Both. And in that momentous fact lies the peril and responsibility of our existence.” Elihu Burritt

Aristotle said “‘Power will show the man;’ for the man in power is at once associated with and stands in relation to others.” Left to our own devices, those of us with relative power will endeavor to meet our own needs, sometimes at great expense to others. Millions still in slavery today; hundreds of millions killed in wars; incomprehensible inequality. There is nothing inherently wrong with the desire to meet our higher-level Maslovian needs, except when it comes at such massive expense to others. By establishing our self-interest as the priority requirement for our leaders, we are responsible for the systems that perpetuate this injustice.

Aristotle calls Justice the “whole of virtue” because it is the one Cardinal Virtue whose foundation is human relationships. Every Justice theory speaks to the interests of one party versus another. It tries to determine a proper, harmonious, right, fair, or equitable way for these interests to be addressed. We are the ones who create the imbalance to these scales that manifests as today’s apocalyptic horsemen of War, Famine and Pestilence.

The Gates Foundation really is eradicating Malaria and Google really is making information accessible to under-resourced people around the world. Jamie Dimon and his compatriots at JP Morgan Chase have made markets more efficient and generated greater profits for the poorest in Africa and the wealthiest on Wall Street. These are not merely drops in buckets. These are real and good and long-lasting world-changing people and activities. But they are only addressing symptoms, not root causes.

The root issue that manifests itself as Injustice is simply the virtue or lack thereof that makes us value others less than ourselves.

“Religion can be the enemy of God. It's often what happens when God has left the building. A list of instructions where there was once conviction; dogma where once people just did it; a congregation led by a man where once they were led by the Holy Spirit. Discipline replacing discipleship.” Bono

None of us today are able to have the same physical face-to-face relationship with a mentor the likes of Jesus from Nazareth. I am a disciple of my business partners, my friends, my family members and so many others who have shaped me hopefully more into the image of God. A religious leader's role is to reflect back to us this commitment beyond self and to co-labor with us as we make good on that commitment.

“Don’t worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.” Robert Fulghum, author of Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

When I got a call from the principal asking if I was available to come to school “right now” to help comfort my daughter, my heart sank. When I arrived, I could hear her screaming from down the hall. As I stepped into the room, she was highly agitated, not in control of her emotions, wandering around the room tipping over chairs and screaming about how she hated this place and her teachers. I was heartbroken for her pain and panicked not knowing how to quickly de-escalate things in this public space. We survived the immediate crisis, left the room and headed toward the car. As soon as the door shut, I could no longer hold back the tears, full of sorrow for what she was going through. My emotions were so raw and uncontrollable. According to the research, it was because my brain chemistry was literally changing. The natural human imperative is for ourselves to become less as others become more.

Conviction is the art of character building – painting by numbers only takes us so far. It is not conviction in the disciplined, committed, deeply held belief sort of way. It is the realization that we are somehow lacking, something less than perfectly innocent. 

“Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy.” Norman Schwarzkopf, US Army General (Ret.) led Desert Storm

The one characteristic of the greatest teams is so uncommon that few even consider it. This may be because none of us really knows how to engineer it. When Seattle Seahawks lineman, J.R. Sweezy takes beating after beating for 60 minutes at a time, day after day, breaking bones and tearing cartilage, it isn’t just for the money and the fame; it’s because he actually cares about running back Marshawn Lynch. He takes the abuse so Lynch doesn’t have to. As popularized in the movie, Lone Survivor, Medal of Honor winner, Lieutenant Michael Murphy of Seal Team 10, having already been wounded multiple times, purposely ran headlong into direct enemy fire in order to reach high ground where he could call for help for his friends. He completed that call, but was shot again through the chest and back and died. In his research into great companies, Jim Collins, of Good to Great fame, outlines an Aristotelian view of the most effective leaders as “ambitious first and foremost for the cause, the organization, the mission, the nation, the work – not themselves…” It is this virtue of putting others ahead of oneself that makes the greatest leaders and the greatest teams.

Valuing others means their progress is our progress, their success, our success, their power, our power. Succeeding in this depends on defining ourselves relative to someone or something greater than ourselves.