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Energizing the Leader Within
Inspirational Leadership in the Holy Land
“Laissez –faire capitalism holds that the common good is best served by the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest. Unless it is tempered by the recognition of a common interest that ought to take precedence over particular interests, our present system is liable to break down”
- George Soros, Financier
Rationale for the Workshop
Western Civilization is based on two heritages: Athens and Jerusalem. Athens represents the mind, rationality and logic, and scientific thinking. This heritage is responsible for the great technological achievements initiated in the West. Jerusalem represents the heart, our beliefs our values, our spiritual foundations, in short our humanity.
Unlike Eastern cultures where mind and heart live in harmony, we in the West have created an artificial separation as far as the workplace is concerned. We emphasize mainly the mind, and the heart is relegated to a secondary role not just in our work organizations but in our life in general. Words like soul and spirit probably sound exotic and archaic.
Historically, humans have found meaning in work, family, community and shared faith. Although many of us still go to temple, church or mosque, our attendance is mostly passive. Or even worse, the contemporary equivalents of spiritual nourishment are housed in the shopping malls. Our one track obsession, following only the rational road, has failed to solve problems both in society and the workplace. Holocausts, ecological disasters and societal polarization during this century are probably the result of failing to reconnect with our spiritual sources.
Vaclav Havel the writer and first president of the Czech Republic after Communism eloquently captured the limits of modern science, technology and reason to solve our current problems:
“Classical modern society describes only the surface of things, a single dimension of reality. And the more dogmatically science treats it as the very essence of reality, the more misleading it becomes. We may know immeasurably more about the universe than our ancestors did, and yet it increasingly seems they knew something more essential about it than we do, something that escapes us…Experts can explain anything in the objective world to us, yet we understand our own lives less and less.”
Perhaps we lost our way when we forgot that the heart of leadership lies in the hearts of the leaders. To recapture spirit, we need to relearn how to lead with soul, and how to breathe new zest and buoyancy into life.
Twenty-five centuries ago, in one of the most celebrated passages in the history of ideas, Plato in his classic Republic made reference to the conflict between task-orientation, bottom-line results and the spiritual dimension, the heart and the need for continual dialogue, synthesis and integration:
“Unless either philosophers become kings in their countries or those who are now called kings and rulers come to be sufficiently inspired with a genuine desire for wisdom; unless, that is to say, political power and philosophy meet together… There can be no rest from troubles… for states, nor yet, as I believe for all mankind, nor can this commonwealth, which we have imagined ever till then, see the light of the day and grow to its full stature.”
True leadership exists only when power and wisdom coincide in one person.