James O’Toole
The Executive’s Compass
Business and the Good Society
Ledaership III – Spring 2016
Prof. Stephen Adei
Profile: James O’Toole
• Born on April 14, 1945
• Holds a Doctorate in Social Anthropology from Oxford University
(A Rhodes Scholar).
• He served as a Special Assistant to Secretary of Health, Education and
Welfare, and Chairman of Task Force on Work in America.
• He was the Director of Field Investigations for President Nixon's
Commission on Campus Unrest.
• He won a Mitchell Prize for a paper on economic growth policy
• He served on the prestigious Board of Editors of the Encyclopedia
Britannica, and Editor of The American Oxonian magazine. He also was
editor of the New Management Magazine
• He was the University Associates' Chair of Management at USC and
served as Executive Director of the Leadership Institute.
• Director of the Twenty-Year Forecast Project (where he interpreted
social, political, and economic change for the top management of 30 of
the largest US corporations).
• 1994-97 was Executive Vice President of the Aspen Institute. He also
has served recently as Managing Director of the Booz Allen & Hamilton
Strategic Leadership Center, and Chair of the Center's academic Board
of Advisors.
• In 2007 he was named one of the "100 most influential people in
business ethics" by the editors of Ethisphere, and one of "the top 100
thought leaders on leadership" by Leadership Excellence magazine.
• He recently authored his new book Creating the Good Life and
currently moderates leadership seminars at Aspen Institute.
Main Message of the Author
• We differ about the good society because we have different values
and tensions between the elements of the good society namely:
Liberty, Equality, Efficiency and Community
• The way forward for leaders is to understand the complexity these
present and to seek simplicity on the side of the complexity . Among
the various ways to organize the good society, DEMOCRACY seem to
offer the best milieu and like Churchil said, it is the best except that
all others are worse. The power of the book lies in its critical
examination of the great minds on the Good Society from Aristotle
and Plato to Zaleznik
Democracy and the Good Society
COMPLEXITY IN THE
DEFINITION OF THE
GOOD SOCIETY
DIFFERENT VALUES
WITHIN A SOCIETY
DEMOCRACY
Presents a Good
Framework for
remedying the dilemma
The Central Leadership Question is “WHOSE VALUES ?”
Whose Values determine the way to organize the Good Society ?
• We – all of us – will rule ourselves; yet we find we speak different
tongues, desire different ends, have different basic assumptions
about where society, and the corporations we work in, should be
heading. The question indeed is “Whose Values ?”
• A simple unidimensional way of looking at problems is unlikely to
work in a complex, multidimensional world.
• Experience in the Hard-Knocks School of the 1980s has taught us that
the art of leadership requires the simultaneous pursuit of several
values – values that, in the simplicity, this side of complexity, appear
incompatible.
The simplicity, the other simple of complexity, offers a different prospect:
that incompatible values might be made mutually achievable and
reinforcing. The leadership challenge, then, is to get to the other side of
complexity. But how does one get there ? Only one sure route has been
identified: the enhancement of understanding.
• By studying of the great ideas of political, economy and moral philosophy
• Gaining an increased awareness of the sources of both conflict and
consensus in society, and thus are better prepared to navigate their
institutions’ passage through the increasingly turbulent seas of social,
political and economic change. That’s the stuff of leadership
• As a guide to this vast historical and intellectual territory, we use a
“compass card”, a quadrant on which the polar positions are the ideas of
liberty, equality, efficiency, and community:
The tensions among these four ideas create what historian James MacGregor
Burns call ‘the deadlock of democracy’
• Our goal is to get past executives’ often-voiced frustration with this deadlock
to an appreciation of the necessity of tension in the process of democratic
change. First we will examine why these four great ideas are the major
elements out of which a well functioning democracy might construct “the
good society”; we then explore the implications for corporations and end
with practical applications of what we have learned,
• The ideas discussed in these pages are the grist of what Mortimer Adler calls
“the great conversation across the centuries”
• These are leadership issues because, in the final analysis, they require moral
judgments on the part of decision makers. (Decisions based solely on
technical knowledge require no leadership.) Moral choices made by leaders
can be informed only by a deepened understanding of the ideas that
history’s greatest political economists and moral philosophers explicated for
the benefit of future generations.
• Finally, if my bias is not already manifest, I m an unapologetic believer
in democracy. I warn that my other intent is to convince them that
the cure for the undeniable ills of our maddening democracy is,
paradoxically, more democracy
(extracts from the executive’s compass)
The Four Poles
• Liberty
• Economic Liberty…..
• Political Liberty…..
• Religious Liberty……
• Contemporary Liberty ……
• Equality
• Aristotle’s natural hierarchy of the
human race
• Natural Right to Life
• Contemporary Egalitarianism
• Democratic Egalitarianism
• Origin of inequality lay in right to
property
• The painful trade-off
• Community
• Efficiency
• Trade-offs an the opposing views
• Reasons for the break up of the
community
• Beliefs of the communitarians
• Contemporary communitarians
• Good society according to corporatists
• Economic Efficiency
• Leadership Division of Labour
.
The Contrast
Tugging and Trade-offs between the Poles:
• Liberty vs Equality
• Community vs Efficiency
• Efficiency vs Equality
• Community vs Equality
• Community vs Liberty
• Liberty vs Efficiency
What to Expect Under Each Comparison
Opinions and arguments of each pole
Relative Examples
Philosophers who support and their opinions
General Summary of the Poles and
The answering of the big question
Democracy - People Power
Argument for:
Majoritarianism in democracy can bring about a form of tyrannical rule. The solution is Pluralism which is an
adherence to the belief in the validity of a diversity of views and practices demonstrated in a deliberate effort to
see other points of view.
Solutions that tackle two or more components should be aimed at; eg. free education encompassing equality and
efficiency
• It is therefore almost impossible to achieve a perfect synchronous
society
• Democracy is the best attempt to achieving a homogeneous society
Democracy is the best attempt to a good society
The Components of an Impeccable Democracy
• Power
• Voice
• Respect
Critique of works
Positive:
• Clear explanation of the poles of
the compass
• No evidence of bias
• Indication of flaws in the proposed
remedy -DEMOCRACY
• Simplifies very complex concepts
for leaders
• The book is multidimensional and
can be applied to different aspects
of life
Negative:
• There is no focus on the nature of a
good person
• The book is not helpful in the
analysis of religious concerns
• A full understanding of
fundamental ideas is almost
impossible to achieve.
• Democracy has not always been
the solution to achieving the good
society and it’s more effective in
developed economies
Implications for Contemporary Leaders:
• Global repercussions of decisions taken locally
• Consideration of various opinions due to unequal
proportions of values
• Strengthening Africa’s democracy towards efficiency