Preliminary Summary of Key Conclusions from Global Dialogue

The Caux Round Table 2023 Global Dialogue concluded last Thursday with participant agreement on two observations and one recommendation:

First, our global community systemically lacks leaders.  Many have power over others in government, business and civil society, but too few use their power to advance the common good.

Secondly, our global community is in a disorderly transition from a past coherence to an uncertain future.  We are experiencing aggressions and potential aggressions, dissolutions and divisiveness, all leading to a global disempowering anxiety arising from worrisome uncertainty and mistrust of institutional authority.

Thirdly, our global community can rise about our time of troubles with a re-commitment to comprehensive personal responsibility.

Personal responsibility implies relationship – with those to whom we are responsible or for whom we are responsible.  Responsibility is at the apex of social capital.  It balances individuality with collective well-being.  Taken to extremes, assertion of our personal rights encourages egocentricity and so can undermine the common weal.  Where we impose on others and they on us, there is no justice.

But when responsibility gives moral guidance to rights, society can achieve balance and equilibrium conducive to justice and happiness for all.

Where Confucius advocated “reciprocity” as the most important word of all, Aristotle advocated following the “mean,” Jesus spoke of each doing unto others as if they were ourselves, the Qur’an advises that we should keep the balance (mizan) and the Buddha advocated following a middle path, we should listen and accordingly assume our due responsibilities.  Doing so will naturally position us to do well for ourselves and good to others.

Being responsible implies that there should be limits to our self-seeking.  When responsibility is associated with leadership, stewardship results.  The leader assumes fiduciary duties to serve the community.

Therefore, to enjoy social justice and happiness, we need a balance of responsible leadership in government, business and civil society.  Each sector has its particular responsibilities, all of which contribute to a wholesome community as follows:

I want to send you this preliminary report of my personal takeaways from our global dialogue discussions. Our fellow, John Dalla Costa, is preparing a more comprehensive documentation of the many most interesting points raised in our sessions.

Update from Global Dialogue

The 2023 Caux Round Table Global Dialogue at Mountain House in Caux, Switzerland, opened with notable cross-cultural discussions.

The theme of the dialogue is to begin anew, as our times are new.

Here is a picture of participants and two views from Mountain House:

You may find here my opening remarks on why our time demands new thinking about our responsibilities.

We were joined by Yukihisa Fujita from Japan, who attended the first meeting of the Caux Round Table in 1986, also at Mountain House, and by Bob MacGregor, who was the prime mover of our Principles for Business back in 1994.

June Pegasus Now Available!

Here’s the June issue of Pegasus.

In this edition, we re-publish my article “Capitalism and its Discontents,” which originally appeared in the journal Directors&Boards.

We also include a piece from Michael Hartoonian, our associate editor, on rationality and its discontents.

I would be most interested in your thoughts and feedback.

By the way, If you’ve missed any previous issues of Pegasus, you can find them all in the archive here.

Please Join Us for Lunch July 6 to Reflect on Who’s Right and Who’s Wrong: Business in the Crosshairs in Our Culture War

The Wall Street Journal, in two recent articles, brought forward factual realities of our time, where businesses have become parties to our differences of opinion – should they go with the flow of ESG?  Should they stick to their knitting?  What social/cultural points of view important to their customers and employees should become part of their brand or their products and services?

The controversies are robust and the issues involved both sensitive to all parties and thorny, so that one can easily get pricked trying to get a hand on them.

For example, employees are fiduciary agents of their employers, having assumed duties of due care.  Does this mean that they should exercise self-restraint where their personal beliefs and values are concerned to think first of what is best for the company vis-à-vis all its customers and its brand over the long-term?

Please join us for lunch at noon on Thursday, July 6 at Landmark Center, room 326, in St. Paul to help think through this new challenge for all of us living in a free society, where tolerance and respect must be important moral foundations for community.

Registration will begin at 11:30 am.

Cost to attend is $20, which you can pay at the door.

Lunch will be provided by Afro Deli.

The event will last between an hour and hour and a half.

To register, please email jed@cauxroundtable.net.

Update On Our Global Dialogue

I am very pleased and honored to tell you that Thai Beverage, a major Thai company most supportive of a Buddhist approach to development – the sufficiency economy principles proposed by His Late Majesty King Rama IX – has agreed to sponsor the 2023 Global Dialogue.  With the company’s support, we will have with us at Mountain House several very thoughtful Thai opinion leaders.

Secondly, two of our colleagues from Beijing, professors most conversant with pre-imperial Chinese moral philosophy, have permission to join us.

Thirdly, Klaus Leisinger of the Global Values Alliance, former president of the Novartis Foundation and colleague of Hans Kung, will join us on July 26 to share his concerns and his optimism about what private thought leaders can accomplish in recommending global approaches to our common, shared conundrums.

Fourth, I am especially reassured by notes from a number of colleagues who plan to join the dialogue that our focus on the ethical foundations for our global community, as we move into the 21st century on a note of stress and conflict, is timely and of fundamental importance.

I hope you will find it possible to come to Caux, Switzerland on July 26 and 27.

I attach a copy of the proposed agenda here and the draft civilizational ethic here.

To learn more or to register, please click here.

Can We Find Grace in Our Lives? Please Join Us June 27 on Zoom

A distinctive act of the Protestant Reformation was to place responsibility directly and centrally on the individual.  Ethics and morality thereby became one’s very personal responsibility, part of one’s vocation as a person.  And yet, somewhat to the contrary, Protestant thinkers such as Martin Luther and John Calvin placed limits on the effectiveness of one’s being responsible for giving rise to a claim on God for eternal salvation.  For that, they said, we could only hope for God’s grace and through prayer invoke his beneficence.

Grace, therefore, became a standard for good.

The word grace also connotes that which affords joy, pleasure, delight, sweetness, charm and loveliness.  It is an aesthetic, a source of beauty.  We think of graceful manners, speech, music and dance.

It might be that the work of the Caux Round Table in promoting principles for business and government is a work of grace – grace coming from those who engage in the work and grace in those who live by those principles.

This reference to grace in business ethics, corporate social responsibility, ESG, social justice and political constitutionalism may be innovative, but also possibly instructive.

If we are to seek grace in ourselves and in our world, such work must spring from within us and be manifested outwardly.  It would be more than traditional ethics, either deontological or utilitarian or alignment with moral criteria without much inner authenticity.  In politics, it would be the basis for leadership.

Please join us at 9:00 am (CDT) on Tuesday, June 27 on Zoom to reflect with us on the meaning of grace and its possible contribution to better living.

To register, please email us at jed@cauxroundtable.net.

By the way, in May Pegasus, we include a piece on grace by our colleague, Michael Hartoonian, who will be with us on the call.

The event is free and will last about an hour.

May Pegasus Now Available!

Here’s the May edition of Pegasus.

In this issue, we share with you two papers presented by myself and one of our fellows, John Dalla Costa, at a seminar convened by Kufa University in Najaf, Iraq, last March (John’s is in the form of a PowerPoint presentation).  

We also include a piece on grace from our associate editor, Michael Hartoonian.

I would be most interested in your thoughts and feedback.

2023 Global Dialogue: Foundational Principles for a New Global Ethic

The Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism, in collaboration with Initiatives of Change, will convene a Global Dialogue on Foundational Principles for a New Global Ethic at Mountain House in Caux, Switzerland, on July 26 and 27 and you are invited to join us.

Since this is the first Global Dialogue since the Covid pandemic and since there is a new setting of uncertainty and disequilibrium in our global order, the Global Dialogue proposes to table for its participants the question of what ethics are needed at this time in history?

Can we restore the post-World War II liberal international order?  Are we in some interregnum, searching for new paradigms?  Is our time one where the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must, as Thucydides quoted the ethic of the Athenians so long ago?

The Caux Round Table will propose a draft global ethic incorporating principles from different wisdom traditions.  The Caux Round Table has undertaken a study with Catholic, Sunni and Shi’a colleagues of certain covenants given by the Prophet Muhammad to respect and protect Christians, deepening its understanding of Islamic values.  The Caux Round Table has also engaged with Buddhist thinkers in Thailand on the Buddha’s recommendations on moderation, balance and equilibrium.  These action orientations have inspired an approach to economic justice denominated by the late King Rama IX as a “sufficiency” economy.

We are planning for the participation of our Catholic, Sunni, Shi’a and Thai colleagues in the Global Dialogue.  The goal of the dialogue is to reach a common understanding on a new humanism with responsible individualism in the context of social coexistence at the core of our aspirations for peace and prosperity.

A proposed agenda for the discussions can be found here.

The dialogue will begin with dinner on the evening of July 25 and conclude with a dinner on July 27.  Mountain House is easily reachable by train from the Geneva airport with a transfer at Montreux to a cog railway up the mountain to Caux.  Mountain House is 50 meters from the Caux station.

The registration fee to support administrative expenses of the Caux Round Table is US$549 (includes processing fees).  I expect that the daily accommodation charge at Mountain House, per person, for meals and a room will be CHF150 or about US$166.  Please note this is in addition to the US$549 and would be paid directly to Mountain House.

To register, please click here.

If you have any questions, please email us at jed@cauxroundtable.net.

More Short Videos on Relevant and Timely Topics

We recently posted more short videos on relevant and timely topics.  They include:

Capitalism and the Gilded Age

The Durham Report and Public Trust

Report on a Visit to Thailand

Preparing People to Think

Enablers of the Unethical

All our videos can be found on our YouTube page here.  We recently put them into 9 playlists, which you can find here.

If you aren’t following us on Twitter or haven’t liked us on Facebook, please do so.  We update both platforms frequently.

2022 Dayton Awards Event: Video

On May 2, the Caux Round Table presented Mary Kowalski, owner of Kowalski’s Markets, Kris Kowalski Christiansen, CEO of Kowalski’s Markets and Kyle Smith, CEO of Reell Precision Manufacturing, with our 2022 Dayton Award.

Kris Kowalski Christiansen, Mary Kowalski and Kyle Smith
Kris Kowalski Christiansen, Mary Kowalski and Kyle Smith

The Caux Round Table Principles for Business of 1994 reflect the special legacy of Minnesota business leadership in seeking success through service to community and stakeholders.  This remarkable legacy was epitomized by the Dayton Family – founders and owners of Dayton’s department store and Target Corporation, generous benefactors of the arts and community organizations.

The award seeks to recognize leadership, not position.  In fact, small and family-owned companies contribute more to the quality of our daily lives than do large corporations.  Small businesses constitute 99% of all American companies and employ 47% of working Americans.  We have also found that small and family-owned companies are more in touch with their stakeholders than are large corporations, which tend, on the whole, to favor shareholders.  The companies that made Minnesota prosperous with a high quality of life, honest and dedicated public officials and dynamic civil society nonprofits started as family-owned or small companies.

You can watch the event here.

Many thanks to our participant, Loren Swanson, for recording it.