Author: CRT Admin

As we start a new year with the legislature pondering how best to spend $17.6 billion in unallocated public monies, we might also think of what investments in social and human capitals come without great financial cost.

Along with my role at the Caux Round Table, I’m also the chair of the Minnesota Character Council (MCC).  The members of the MCC have drafted this statement on Minnesota’s hope – our children.  Investing in the emotional health and character development of children doesn’t cost much money, but it does cost us in taking time and making sure we care.

We ask that you consider sharing this statement with your networks and colleagues.

Please also let me know if you would like to help us get the message of care out and letting our kids know that they matter in all kinds of important ways.

We have been thinking a bit more, perhaps belatedly, but better late than never, it has been said, about systems and individuals.  One might argue that a casualty of modernity has been charisma – the compelling dynamic of individuals to lead, bring communities to excellence, to heal and to inspire.  We live under the ministrations of great organizations – bureaucracies, hierarchies, peer pressure – encased in our roles, confined by rational/legal criteria of justice, subordinated to celebrity and the alure of going along to be paid for conformity with money, status or power.

Many seem to have given up on the possibility of individual greatness.  Academically, I have been trained in systems theory – the social system; the political system; the economic system; the self-system; etc.

Who can act?  Who is willing to act?

We speak of moral capitalism, but where are the moral capitalists?

Here in Minnesota, we have started an annual recognition award for individuals.  We call it the Dayton Award, in honor of the Dayton family here which, for four generations, has given to society individuals who are willing to act for the common good.

Our colleagues in Mexico, for many years now, give annual awards (a distintivo) to companies which have achieved under their leaderships.

The Caux Round Table will present Dayton Awards for 2022 to Mary Anne Kowalski, owner of Kowalski’s Markets, Kris Kowalski Christiansen, CEO of Kowalski’s Markets and Kyle Smith, CEO of Reell Precision Manufacturing.

Our board of directors has established the criteria for selection of an award recipient as:

-CEO of a Minnesota company or similar operational organization.
-Revenue and profits if relevant to mission.
-Community impact if relevant to mission.
-Demonstrated innovation/response to market opportunities.
-Quality of company culture.
-Care of employees.
-Customer satisfaction.
-Environmental stewardship.
-Personal community commitment.
-Company community commitment.
-Vision and prudence: level 5 leadership traits (Jim Collin’s book, Good to Great)

We seek to recognize leadership, not position.  In fact, small and family-owned companies contribute more to the quality of our 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.

It is the intangible of leadership that counts most for moral success.

There are essential abilities required to lead – integrity, courage, compassion, respect and responsibility:

Integrity is being honest and having strong moral principles.  Having integrity means you are true to yourself and would do nothing that demeans or dishonors you.  Integrity makes you believable, as you know and act on your values.

Courage is strength in the face of adversity and upholding what is right, regardless of what others may think or do.  Courage enables you to take a stand, honor commitments and guide the way.  Courage is a necessary element of responsibility.

Compassion is having concern for another.  It is feeling for and not feeling with the other.  Compassion is concern of others in a more global sense.

Respect is a feeling of deep admiration for someone.  Leaders ought to be respected and they ought to respect those with whom they work.  Demonstrating this perspective is essential to motivate and inspire others.

Responsibility is acting on commitment, will, determination and obligation.  Responsibility implies the satisfactory performance of duties, the adequate discharge of obligations and the trustworthy care for or disposition of possessions.  It is being willing and able to act in a life-enhancing manner.  Responsibility is expected of self, as well as from others.

The nomination of Kyle Smith reported that:

I have never met an individual with more integrity than Kyle Smith.  He holds himself to such a high standard of integrity, beyond what most of us even think about.  He is intentional about everything he does, in business and his personal life.  He is honest and extremely trustworthy.  He knows what he believes and why he believes it and his values are his compass.  He is a humble, servant leader.  Kyle faces into hard decisions.  Many courageous decisions have been made.  In 2009, Reell’s revenue was cut in half.  Kyle became CEO and led the way to greater profitability.  The share price has since grown over 700%.  When he joined the company, the bankers were calling us every day and now we are healthy and debt-free!  Kyle knows the names of every coworker.  His door is always open for anyone to talk about life or work.

The nomination of Mary and Kris Kowalski Christiansen, owners of a family business, reported that:

Mary and Kris became excellent teachers of civic responsibility and the qualities needed to create wealth. They understand wealth as excellence, of which profits are the by-product.  They established a vision, expressed in their mission statement which was developed by “store citizens” and printed on their grocery bags – “Kowalski’s is a Civic Business.”  This is a statement of Kowalski’s continuing commitment to the principles of moral capitalism and citizenship, defined in the company’s educational opportunities for all employees, in the care shown to all stakeholders and in the inclusiveness of the Kowalski mindset regarding their reciprocal duty with the larger community.       

In 1991, Charles Denny, then the CEO of ADC Telecommunications, chaired a presentation by Ryuzaburo Kaku, then Chairman of Canon Inc.  Mr. Kaku spoke of the Japanese business ethic of kyosei or symbiosis, whereby each company thrives due to reciprocal engagement with its stakeholders.  Inspired by Mr. Kaku’s approach, which they found very similar to their own value-based understanding of successful business enterprise, several Minnesotans, including Chuck Denny and Tony Anderson, then CEO of H.B. Fuller, decided to present a set of ethical principles to the Caux Round Table, which met in Caux, Switzerland.  Those principles had been worked out by a group here in Minnesota, including Bob MacGregor and Professor Kenneth Goodpaster of the University of St. Thomas.

The ceremony will be held in April.

After commenting on free speech as a public good in the U.S., I was taken by Jordan Peterson’s defense of the value of free speech for Canadians.

I attach his commentary in the National Post here.

With recent comments on the virtue signaling of wealthy participants in the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, I thought of going back to a commentary of mine from April two years ago.  I was reacting to “wokeness” as a long-hoped for awakening of moral sentiments that would “transform” capitalism into goodness and well-being for all.

Then, I was not convinced that “wokeness” would do any good at all.  I wrote:

For the Caux Round Table, the germane question has thus become: should wokeness be integrated into moral capitalism?

I have been thinking about this for some months now.  I wrote a first draft of this commentary on Christmas Day, 2020.  My considered answer is that, no, wokeness cannot be aligned with moral capitalism.

One of the carols I was listening to that day asserts: “God today has poor folk raised and cast adown the proud.”

Wokeness is a prideful, moralizing narrative about good and evil.  Like many narratives, first and foremost it serves the interests of the narrator.  In a sense, it hews to that peculiar American Calvinist tradition of the Jeremiad – prophetic voices predicting doom for sinners and salvations for true believers.  As in the Old Testament, revered by early Calvinists, prophets are tellers of narratives.  They spin a story of walking in God’s ways and never straying from his purposes, with woe to befall all those who fall short of his righteous demands.

Back in 2021, my conclusion, drawing on the political philosophy of the influential Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was:

For long term stability, any governing class needs its ideology, its narrative, to be accepted by the governed.  And so, for the future of the U.S., we must determine whether the woke narrative is credible or whether it is just another Rousseauist general will, a tale told by some narrator.  Whether it proceeds from the moral sense or from somewhere else in the human repertoire of social intermediations?

Last November, a senior executive at a successful American corporation, Jennifer Sey, published a book on her experience with “wokeness” and her resulting disdain for moralizing and canceling others.

In an excerpt from her book, published in the New York Post, she wrote:

“Woke capitalism” is corporate America’s attempt to profit off Millennial and Gen Z activism, often passive keyboard activism.  It exploits social-justice politics and transforms it into social-justice consumerism — and ultimately, investor profit.  Companies purporting to care about “progressive values” are really doing nothing more than striking a superficial pose meant to signal virtue while distracting from any company’s true motive: financial gain for shareholders.

You can read the full excerpt here.

I think we can be more seriously and prudentially just than mere “wokeness” can ever provide.  Moral capitalism can only make sense if it is grounded in the fullness of reality.  Self-serving personal narratives just don’t cut it when it comes to achieving social justice.

As you may recall, the Caux Round Table provided its good offices to facilitate a study of covenants made by the Prophet Muhammad to respect and protect Christian communities.

By the terms of two covenants, the good faith promises made to respect Christians are binding on Muslims “until the end of time.”

The covenant with the Christians of Najran (in southwestern Saudi Arabia) says:

Whoever contravenes or alters the ordinances of this edict will be cast out of the alliance between Allah and His Messenger. …This must not be violated or altered until the hour of the Resurrection, Allah-willing.

In a letter to me of August 3, 2020, Pope Francis expressed hope that “such covenants will serve as a model for the further enhancement of mutual respect, understanding and fraternal co-existence between Christians and Muslims at the present time.”

Two distinguished colleagues and indefatigable scholars, Professor Ibrahim Zein and his colleague, Ahmed El-Wakil of Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha, have just published, with Routledge, a book on the covenants.

You will find information on the book and how to order it here.

Please do purchase it and circulate its findings to your friends and colleagues.