Sharing the Rock

Shaping Our Future through Leadership for the Common Good

Bill Grace

• Verlag: Common Good Works
• ISBN:
  9780975544075
• Thema: Business
• Thema: Leadership

In this revolutionary new book, author Bill Grace presents an innovative leadership model designed to cultivate a worldview suited for today's interconnected global society. He offers a framework for people aspiring to live for the good of others because they know that is ultimately the only way to thrive. Through concrete exercises, Sharing the Rockhelps readers determine their deepest values, which Bill proves are the heart and soul of leadership. He then demonstrates how living by these ideals allows the advancement of the common good. Readers learn a practical model for integrating ethics into everyday life and how to make choices based on concern for all. Bill's groundbreaking approach emphasizes attention to justice, care, and inclusiveness, and stresses the urgent need to adopt these practices immediately.Sharing the Rockpresents seven principles at the core of this new leadership model. These include traditionally valued leadership traits, such as commitment and vision, and expand on them to include such important practices as seeking out the perspectives of the marginalized, welcoming unpopular points of view, and cultivating the leader's genuine expression and voice.

Part I

FUNDAMENTALS OF LEADERSHIP FOR THE COMMON GOOD

IF WE ARE ALL ONE FAMILY, why not share the earth and its resources so that everyone has enough to live a decent, fulfilling life? This simple idea offers a straightforward if elusive solution to dozens of complex global problems. The common good is a big idea, easily embraced from a perspective miles above the planet, where the wholeness of the earth and interconnectedness of all life cannot be missed. On the ground, it is a harder idea to hold on to.

The common good, however, is ultimately a moral vision, approachable through a moral framework. It aligns with the highest, or third, level of moral development, where choices are governed by principle and inclusiveness. In this book, that third level is referred to as the third circle. The behaviors and choices associated with this moral territory offer a practical way of living that advances the common good.

Bringing the moral behaviors and choices of third-circle orientation to bear on leadership yields four cornerstones of leadership for the common good. Leadership for the common good is the pathway to get us to a future in which everyone on the planet has a sufficient and sustainable lifestyle and humanity is living within a new worldview that mirrors the oneness of the earth.

1 Shifting to a Common Good Worldview

THE FIRST PHOTOGRAPH of the whole earth from space was taken on December 24, 1968, by the astronauts of Apollo 8, the first manned mission to orbit the moon. As the Apollo 8 capsule emerged from the far side of the moon, crew commander Frank Borman rolled the capsule so its windows and antenna faced the earth to pick up radio reception again with mission control. As he did, our beautiful blue, living planet, set against the dark, cold backdrop of space, appeared above the lunar horizon. Borman exclaimed: “Oh my God! … Here’s the earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty.”¹ He grabbed a black-and-white camera and took a picture, followed by William Anders, who took several color shots. Nature photographer Galen Rowell later described the famous photo “Earthrise,” taken by Anders, as “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken.”²

The view of the earth from space in that photograph irrevocably shifted our collective perspective on who and where we are. It showed us that humanity shares a common home and destiny along with every other form of life on the planet. Viewed from space, clouds flow in broad patterns that touch every portion of the earth, the five great oceans appear as one body of water, and the continents look like puzzle pieces that at one time fit together. Rivers and mountain ranges roam across national boundaries, as do the migratory birds and butterflies that call multiple continents home. Viewed from out in space, the wholeness of our planet is impossible to miss.

Today, more than four decades after the Apollo 8 voyage, humanity is consciously living in the interconnectedness the first photograph of earth from space revealed to us. Events across the planet are intertwined to a degree unknown in history. Through sophisticated communications and flight technology, we know about happenings in the global community as readily as our grandparents knew what was going on in their hometown. An economic downturn in Asia results in instant price drops on the New York Stock Exchange. Terrorism in England causes the U.S. National Security Agency to raise the threat level to orange. A new flu strain in Mexico affects airplane travel on multiple continents.

Moreover, science has confirmed that we really are all one family. Genetic research now proves that all humans have 100 percent of the same genetic material and, perhaps more humbling, humans share 92 percent of genetic material with all other mammals.

As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in 1963, “We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.”³ Although he was writing about issues of justice in the United States, today his words apply to global interconnectivity.

Yet even though we are coming to recognize that we are all one global family, humanity’s cultural systems and structures, and the beliefs that govern our individual and collective behaviors are not yet in sync with this perspective. They remain based on the assumption of differences between people, an “us” versus “them” perspective.

The us-them framework has operated as the prevailing worldview across cultures throughout human history. Humans have lived in tribes and clans, kingdoms and nations, and have fought over hunting territory, trade routes, religious differences, and access to resources since time immemorial. This perspective has influenced virtually every aspect of human life, including politics, economics, sociocultural institutions, and spirituality.

The us-them worldview has worked well enough for humanity to survive. Today, however, it is our greatest risk. Our weapons have become too powerful and regions of the world too interconnected to be spared the potential dangers resulting from an us-them orientation. The drive on the part of nations having the upper hand to claim and use more than their share of the world’s resources has strained the earth’s usually resilient ecosystem to the brink of failure. The future depends on whether humanity can shift to a worldview that acknowledges and supports the unity of the global system.

THE COMMON GOOD AS A NEW WORLDVIEW

The essential work of our time is to learn to live together as a global family, caring for one another and sharing the land and resources of our planet. The necessary worldview to achieve this emerges from the ethic of the common good, according to which every member of a community has the inherent right to enjoy the good things of life that the community has to offer, including resources, relationships, and dignity.

As a concept, the common good has a long history. In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle taught that the goal of politics was to create a society that affords a good life for a community of equals. Further, the medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas believed that leaders care best for the community by enacting laws on behalf of the common good rather than for the good of an elite few. The common good was also a fundamental idea among many Enlightenment writers and philosophers, whose works fueled movements for liberty and equality in Europe and were the basis for the founding documents of the United States. Francis Bellamy, who authored the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance in 1892, capsulized the spirit of the common good in the pledge’s final words: “with liberty and justice for all.”

As an ethic, the common good has occurred throughout history alongside the dominant ethic of us-them. Just as human communities have fought over differences, they have also looked out for the common good of communities as essential for survival. However, the common good has been practiced mostly within groups—such as families, tribes, institutions, and nations—with members sharing resources and supporting one another so the groups remained strong. Thus the common good orientation has historically played a secondary, supporting role to the us-them perspective, which has governed the competitive, and often conflictive, relations between groups.

The work before us now is to raise the common good to the level of a worldview by making it the dominant ethic. As a worldview, the common good supports the vision of humanity as all one family. It involves the stewarding of global resources justly and compassionately so that every corner of the earth is a safe place for a child to be born; a place where families, communities, businesses, and the environment can flourish; and a free place where people can govern together. The ideal of global common good is compelling because people sense intuitively that it’s right. It’s in line with the fundamental wholeness of where we live and who we are.

Making the common good our worldview requires us to invert the existing relationship between us-them and the common good, giving prominence to our commonality and subordinating our differences. Doing this calls for examining the ethical, political, and economic assumptions that shape the nature and quality of public life, including the supremacy of the market economy as we know it. It means embracing a more complex network of social, emotional, and intellectual relationships and a more inclusive view of spirituality. This involves opening ourselves to engage with people we might otherwise avoid and joining with them in moving toward a common future. It also involves learning to manage differing points of view so we enrich the whole without creating divisions. The benefits made possible by a common good worldview—peace, security, and the satisfaction of knowing that we are honoring the inherent wholeness of the created order, in other words, sharing the rock—are well worth the price tag of change.

While making the common good a worldview may seem impossible, this is only because of its comprehensive scope and because it has not yet been dared. Any great human achievement begins with a vision that is inspiring yet daunting and unproved. One of the great visions of the twentieth century was President John F. Kennedy’s declaration in 1961 that the United States, by the end of the decade, would put a man on the moon. At the time President Kennedy spoke these words, the technology to accomplish such a task had not yet even been developed. Indeed, one of the remarkable facts about the Apollo program is that NASA learned how to put a man on the moon in the process of doing it.

Shifting worldviews is no less compelling a vision of a preferred future. We do not yet have a detailed and comprehensive description of how and when we will arrive at the common good, but from the vision we can deduce the means that are likely to get us there, and we can let the vision inspire our innovation.

PUTTING THE COMMON GOOD INTO ACTION

Innovative new social programs and projects promoting the common good are already being developed around the world. What they have in common is that they grow out of awareness of the inherent wholeness of the earth and unity of the human family, as well as the realization of our vulnerability on the earth, a tiny island of life with finite resources suspended in a sea of dark space.

Awareness of these ideas is encouraging people to respond with initiatives in many fields, some on a global scale. As Stewart Brand, founder and publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog, a publication begun in 1968 that highlights the interconnectedness of earth and humanity, comments: “It is no accident of history that the first Earth Day, in April 1970, came so soon after color photographs of the whole earth from space were made by homesick astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission to the moon in December 1968. Those riveting Earth photos reframed everything. For the first time humanity saw itself from outside. Suddenly humans had a planet to tend to. The photograph of the whole earth from space helped to generate a lot of behavior—the ecology movement, the sense of global politics, the rise of the global economy, and so on. I think all of those phenomena were, in some sense, given permission to occur by the photograph of the earth from space.”⁴

Currently, people the world over are devising initiatives, technologies, and programs involving solutions to social, economic, and environmental problems that make it possible to live on the earth without destroying it or ourselves. Eco-philosopher Joanna Macy calls this comprehensive movement for change directed at the common good the “Great Turning,” the heart of which she defines as “a shift from an industrial growth society, dependent on accelerating consumption of resources, to a sustainable or lifesustaining society.”⁵

One important initiative conceived on a global scale is the Millennium Development Goals. In September 2000, the largest assembly ever of world leaders gathered for the Millennium Summit at United Nations headquarters in New York City to consider the role of this organization as the world ushered in the new millennium. A key concern articulated in the summit’s Millennium Declaration was how to address global inequities: “We recognize that, in addition to our separate responsibilities to our individual societies, we have a collective responsibility to uphold the principles of human dignity, equality and equity at the global level. As leaders we have a duty therefore to all the world’s people, especially the most vulnerable and, in particular, the children of the world, to whom the future belongs.”⁶

The following eight Millennium Development Goals, set to be achieved by 2015 and supported by all member states of the United Nations plus more than twenty international organizations, read like a list of what it would take to advance the common good in every corner of the world:

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
2. Achieve universal primary education
3. Promote gender equality and empower women
4. Reduce child mortality
5. Improve maternal health
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases
7. Ensure environmental sustainability
8. Develop a global partnership for development

Another worldwide initiative inspired by the beginning of the millennium is Jubilee 2000, a call for debt forgiveness for impoverished developing nations. The program was based on the biblical concept of the Jubilee year, during which debts were forgiven and social equity restored. As a result of Jubilee 2000, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have granted debt relief to twenty-two of the world’s most debt-ridden countries.

Other innovations focused on the common good are born of a global awareness but implemented on a local scale. Two prominent examples are the environmental, or green, movement and the organic farming movement, which maintain that every family who recycles plastic bottles or buys produce grown without pesticides contributes to the care of the earth’s air, soil, and inhabitants. A related innovation is community-supported agriculture, in which individual consumers or families pledge financial support to a local farm operation in exchange for fresh produce and other foodstuffs supplied through the growing season. Since such farms operate locally, they avoid using the fossil fuels for transportation of foodstuffs and the packaging materials that are part of the standard grocery retail system. They also foster a sense of community between consumers and farmers, since no middlemen take a portion of the profits. A further innovation based on the common good is the cohousing movement, in which residents in intentional collaborative communities live in separate homes but share common facilities, with the purpose of conserving resources as well as supporting a rich, interactive community life.

The world of business is also changing. In the United States, the Business Alliance for a Local Living Economy (BALLE), a network of socially responsible local businesses, is dedicated to aligning commerce with the common good. BALLE’s vision is to create “within a generation … a global system of human-scale, interconnected Local Living Economies that function in harmony with local ecosystems, meet the basic needs of all people, support just and democratic societies, and foster joyful community life.”⁷

Internationally, one of the fast-growing business innovations is fair trade, a market-based movement to promote equity in trade as well as sustainability in developing countries. Focused especially on exports such as coffee, tea, handicrafts, chocolate, and produce, fair trade companies offer direct market access to marginalized producers, which means higher wages as well as improved living standards. At the sam...