Cultivating Leadership Wisdom Across Social Systems
As your focus shifts to cultivating wisdom in yourself and others in a wider sphere, you will recognize that each level of a social system can operate as smart or wise. When you are by yourself, your own actions and your interactions with others are based primarily on your personal thoughts and feelings. But when you are part of a larger social system—a team, organization, or community—your own intentions (expectations), behaviors, and culture (shared values and assumptions) tend to shift based on the social system that you are part of. We elaborate on the evolution of these three aspects of social systems, based on a framework of Kaipa, Newham, and Volckmann, in the next paragraphs.4
A social system can be a group, team, organization, or community. Each social system has its own intention, behavior, and culture. Let’s begin with intention. We generally choose to join a group with a deep desire to belong to it, and that desire shapes our intent. On a team, we stretch and grow to accommodate the shared intent of the team, whereas in a group we might not stretch beyond our comfort zone. In an organization, we focus not on the process of stretching and growing as individuals but on collectively producing results by generating competitive products and services. In a social system like a community—be it a neighborhood community or a large trade association—the focus of all members shifts toward fulfilling the promise of that community.
In correspondence with the intention, behavior also evolves across social systems. In a group, members are primarily focused on supporting each other as long as they don’t have to go outside their comfort zone. A team is more active and goal oriented; hence, its members collaborate and co-create what needs to get done. In an organization, such co-creation takes place over an extended period in a developmental fashion to achieve the desired results. And when one is part of a community, one operates with a higher purpose and one’s actions are geared toward serving others in the community.
Finally, cultural attributes also vary across social systems. A group usually fosters a transactional give-and-take culture. When a group evolves into a team, members become more appreciative of each other and develop deeper relationships beyond one-off transactions. In an organization, people tend to work together synergistically to make the company successful. And in a community setting, the success depends on the care that we take to include each other and serve each other. Of course just like individual leaders, groups, teams, organizations, and communities also tend to operate in the red or the blue zones.
The next sections discuss how groups, teams, organizations, and communities can become wise—and how you can accelerate your own wise leadership development by creating and expanding a field of leadership that extends across these systems.
Wise Groups
The smallest unit among social systems is a group, an ad hoc collection of individuals who get together based on their need to belong. Groups tend to emerge organically, and while the members cooperate and support each other, their interactions tend to be transactional in nature. In the initial stages, some groups tend to operate in the blue zone when everyone in a group could be narrowly focused on addressing their own tactical needs rather than contributing to the group’s collective long-term interest. Entrepreneurial groups helmed by red zone leaders may collectively pursue strategic opportunities for the benefit of all—but such group cohesion tends to be short-lived since the leaders’ own self-interest eventually takes over. The group continues to exist only as long as its members can get what they want from each other. They break up if there is no longer any transactional value. Groups by themselves rarely demonstrate wisdom, and when they evolve into the next level of social systems—a team—they begin to have deeper relationships that lead to deep knowledge and begin to exhibit wisdom from within.
Wise Teams
Just like individuals and groups, teams also tend to operate in red or blue zones. Team leaders and team members, based on their own level of wisdom, can tilt the balance and steer teams toward wise leadership. When the majority of the team operates wisely, its members are more likely to stretch beyond their comfort zone, co-create value for themselves and others, and appreciate contributions from other participants.
A wise team spirit is the cornerstone of Taj Hotels, the largest hotel chain in India, and part of Tata Group. Taj Hotels operates with the core belief that “happy employees lead to happy customers.” Its leaders invest heavily in the personal development of every employee, training them extensively to understand the concepts of integrity, teamwork, initiative, and of course customer satisfaction, to the point where they internalize the Taj Hotels’ noble purpose: “The Guest is God.”
The degree to which Taj employees internalize this noble purpose was poignantly demonstrated in November 2008 when a group of Islamic terrorists carried out coordinated attacks on five well-known sites in Mumbai, resulting in the deaths of 174 people. One of the sites the terrorists targeted was the Taj Mahal Hotel, a flagship property of Taj Hotels. The hotel siege lasted sixty hours. Through it all, many Taj employees demonstrated wise leadership characteristics—discernment, role clarity, fortitude, and selflessness—and managed to save the lives of hundreds of hotel guests and others nearby. Some of them died while helping others escape through secret exits or remained trapped with them in hotel rooms (the hotel had caught fire during the terrorist siege). In one case, a twenty-four-year-old banquet manager named Mallika Jagad single-handedly coordinated the evacuation of executives from the global consumer goods company Unilever, including the outgoing global CEO and the incoming CEO who were attending a private party that night in the hotel.5
The hotel’s general manager, Karambir Singh Kang, lost his wife and two young children, who were trapped in their residence on the top floor of the hotel. When we spoke to Kang, now the head of Taj Hotels in the United States, he told us that he believed the Taj Mahal Hotel team acted as one and stretched beyond the call of duty because the organization had inculcated a strong team spirit. The staff was putting into action what managers had taught them, which focused on doing whatever it takes to keep the customer happy and improvising solutions without having to consult a supervisor.6
H. N. Shrinivas, the senior vice president of human resources at Taj Hotels, echoed this idea when discussing his company’s approach to team training. He told us that Taj Hotels recruits managers from second-tier business schools rather than top-ranking ones because, he says, these managers will be more humble and open to learning.7 New employees are evaluated on their character as well as their smarts, and character building continues as long as they work for Taj Hotels. They receive specific skills training as well as soft skills training in creativity, empathy, and teamwork. Taj Hotels has set up a Special Thanks and Recognition System (STARS) that rewards employees as much for their performance as for their character. It is based on how well they demonstrate integrity, respect for customers, initiative, courage, kindness, and teamwork. Since the implementation of STARS in March 2001, employee engagement has significantly improved, and it has led to a dramatic increase in customer satisfaction. Shrinivas told us that thanks to STARS, his company’s employee satisfaction has shot up above 80 percent—the highest in the Indian hospitality industry. In 2011, Taj Hotels received the Gallup Best Places to Work award—which recognizes the twenty top employers worldwide—becoming the only company in the world to receive this award for three consecutive years.
In our experience, wise teams like those at Taj Hotels are the exception rather than the rule. In most companies where we have provided consultation, employees form teams that tend to operate mostly in either the blue or the red zone, which can lead to poor performance. The Taj teams show that this needn’t be the case.
Building Wise Cross-Functional Teams
We recently had an opportunity to develop a wise team in a large communications company, Comco (not the real name). Comco had bought a start-up for $400 million and had invested another $100 million to develop a new product called HELLO that was based on the start-up’s technology. But Comco had failed to attract interest for HELLO from its channel partners, which traditionally sell and service its products to end users, mostly corporate buyers. These channel partners were not convinced that Comco had the right competencies or the right culture to commercialize HELLO successfully. And they were right.
Indeed, HELLO was more than just a product: it was an end-to-end solution that had to be personalized to meet the unique needs of individual end customers. To be successful, HELLO needed a business model called relational selling, which would require a collaborative approach between Comco and its channels to attract, market, and sell a solution to the end client. This approach is very different from Comco’s traditional business model, which was based on transactional selling, an arm’s-length approach to engaging channel partners by which Comco would first develop an off-the-shelf product, and its partners would later sell it. Not a great deal of collaboration was needed. Knowing that Comco’s culture was steeped in transactional selling, its channel partners doubted the company would ever be able to adopt a relational-selling model.
Comco was on the verge of losing its $500 million dollar investment in HELLO when we were invited to work with the cross-functional team that was attempting to develop and commercialize this product. We quickly realized that the team was operating in the blue zone: every member of the team—R&D, manufacturing, sales, marketing—was primarily focused on executing its specific task without interest in or consideration for how their task was connected to other functions along the value chain. There was minimal collaboration among various functions that made up HELLO’s go-to-market team. The R&D unit, for example, was used to developing products without any input from manufacturing, sales, marketing, or customer service. Once it developed a product, R&D would throw the product over the wall to manufacturing, which would then throw it over to marketing, which would eventually engage the sales force, including channel partners. That might have worked for Comco in the past, but this linear product development and commercialization process wasn’t suited for HELLO, which required that all Comco’s internal functions as well as external partners collaborate intimately and constantly throughout the product’s life cycle.
To understand the root of the problem, we interviewed various team members, including directors and vice presidents, both individually and collectively, across various functions. We realized that they lacked a shared purpose, a collaborative culture, or a system of rewards and recognition that individuals in the team considered fair. They did not operate like a synergistic project team. They supported each other but did not cooperate or collaborate on making decisions and taking actions. There was no willingness to compromise. Nobody wanted to stretch to meet each other’s needs and schedules. In fact, there was a transactional quality to their relationships: they were functioning, in short, as a group rather than as a team, let alone a wise team.
While the team as a whole predominantly operated in the blue zone, its individual members were actually a mix of business smart (red zone) and functional smart leaders (blue zone): sales and marketing members operated in the red zone, whereas manufacturing and IT members functioned in the blue zone. To elevate the entire team into a wise leadership state, we helped develop a shared purpose and a collaborative team culture that supported the relational selling model required for successfully commercializing HELLO. Although the team consisted of managers at the director and vice president levels, they were all focusing just on operations and looked up to the senior executive team to give them strategic direction. We encouraged these managers to think entrepreneurially and identify a clear and strategic intent for the HELLO project. They soon gained enough confidence to develop the business model and strategy that was needed to sell HELLO without active input from the senior executives. Over time, the team evolved into a dynamic start-up inside a large company. They began to take risks and started appreciating each other’s contribution. Eventually HELLO became a big success instead of a huge loss.
We worked with the team to shift their perspective from treating HELLO as an extension of their existing products to embracing it as an entirely new business model that was better suited to commercialize HELLO. Rather than thinking insularly as leaders in the blue zone, some of the key managers began to think and act as wise leaders who were serving a higher purpose that benefited the entire ecosystem.
The evolution from a smart team to a wise team occurs when there is a major shift in the team’s intention, behavior, and culture. When operating in a wise state, team members grow as one unit; they exhibit collaborative behavior as they attempt to co-create value with others, and they appreciate each other’s strengths. They relate to each other rather than look for quid pro quo in their relationship. While it’s relatively easy for a team to learn to operate wisely, it’s much more challenging for an organization to transform itself into a wise organization.
Wise Organizations
What makes a wise organization different from a wise team? Part of it is that an organization can have multiple teams and projects going on simultaneously. Some of the teams could be operating in a wise leadership mode, but others could be operating in the red or the blue zones. The structure, culture, strategy, and purpose of an organization are generally more complex than those of a team. To get at the differences, we can compare and contrast wise teams and wise organizations using the three parameters of intention, behavior, and culture.
In terms of intention, wise team members help each other stretch beyond their comfort zone and learn what they need to learn. Their behavior is focused on collaborating to get a specific project done in a culture in which each person’s contribution is valued and appreciated by others. Wise organizations, however, operate at a higher order, with all members driven by a desire to produce results in alignment with a noble purpose—that is, to manifest the noble purpose. In terms of behavior, they focus not just tactically on the project at hand but rather on developing other people so they can collectively take on bigger projects. The culture of wise organizations is more synergistic, and the outcome is much more than a culmination of individual outcomes.
Given these differences, cultivating a wise organization is generally more difficult and time-consuming than building a wise team. The culture of an organization is more likely to be entrenched; it can take years for many organizations to change their culture. But it is possible, as demonstrated by two companies we have interacted with: Better World Books and a Fortune 500 company we’ll call XCo.
Promoting Literacy: Better World Books
Better World Books is an online bookseller with about $70 million in annual revenue. It was established a decade ago as a for-profit social enterprise by three University of Notre Dame students: Xavier Helgesen, Chris Fuchs, and Jeff Kurtzman. Their vision was to build “a global bookstore that harnesses the power of capitalism to bring literacy and opportunity to people around the world.” Their business model was to collect and sell unwanted books and use a share of the profits to support global literacy projects like Room to Read, Books for Africa, Worldfund, and the National Center for Family Literacy. So far, Better World Books has reused or recycled over 87 million books and raised over $12 million for literacy projects. Under an original initiative called Book for Book, Better World Books matches every book purchase on its website with a book donation to someone in need. So far, it has donated over 6 million books to partner programs around the world.
In order to scale up the company, the founders started looking for an experienced CEO and eventually picked David Murphy, who had been their mentor and a judge in a social venture business competition they had won at the university. Because their company was based on a noble purpose—to encourage and spread literacy—Murphy and the founders decided to register it as a B Corporation (Benefit Corporation or B Corp, for short), a new kind of company that must meet the requirements and goals related to the triple bottom line (planet, profit, and people) and is committed to solving social and environmental problems.8 Hence, from the very beginning, the business model and strategy of Better World Books were firmly in the wise zone, and Murphy helped create structures and processes consistent with the company’s noble purpose.
Based on our personal interview with Murphy, as well as our analysis of the company, we discovered that Better World Books’s culture is built on synergies among its leaders who complement each other but are all driven by a shared desire to serve a noble purpose.9 Murphy brought experience, business savvy, and passion for building a social enterprise, and the young cofounders brought their tech knowledge and commitment to work effectively with each other and Murphy to build the company. The noble purpose helped attract high-quality staff. In addition, most of the employees were given shares of the company.
Beyond its noble purpose, what makes Better World Books a wise organization is the trust-based developmental relationship (rather than transactional relationship) between the cofounders and Murphy during the initial phase of the company, as well as the role clarity of its leaders. Although Murphy was a seasoned business veteran, he held the young cofounders in high respect and saw himself as a trustee of this organization and an equal partner with the cofounders. By the time Better World Books had its best year in 2011, Murphy, satisfied that his work was done, stepped down from his position and helped recruit and mentor a new CEO. In our consulting experience, it’s rare to find the kind of synergistic culture and great role clarity that is found at Better World Books.
The Better World Books story is unique, and isn’t likely to happen in larger and well-established companies that already have structures and operational strategies in place. But it does prove that it is possible to build a wise organization from the ground up if the structure (in this case, a B Corp) and corporate governance model are aligned with a noble purpose.
How do you help large organizations to become wise? Changing structures and governance models is one approach. Culture change is another. Changing the mission, vision and values along with strategy to get to the new vision is the third approach. How each of these can be accomplished is beyond the scope of this book. You can read about them elsewhere, but in this chapter we focus on one approach to culture change: employee engagement.
Culture Change at XCo
XCo (not the real name) is a large organization that wanted to initiate a culture change in its global manufacturing division to increase employee motivation. It hired big consultancies to help drive this change, but these consultancies’ traditional cultural change approaches tended to be process driven and top down. They didn’t work well at XCo, which had a relatively decentralized culture. After two such failed interventions, XCo turned to us for our experience and success in driving change in a bottom-up fashion.
We brought together thirty-six managers from eighteen factories and began talking about what motivated them and when they believed they did their best work. From this feedback, we identified the ten most common elements from their experiences, which reflected what is most important to them in terms of self-motivation and mutual empowerment. These were archetypal—or patterns typical in a larger population—because the assembled managers were from different countries, had different backgrounds, were different ages, and had different job roles.
The four cornerstones of motivation they spoke of were communication from the heart, trust, information to get the job done, and knowing the resource and ethical boundaries. The six key enablers of motivation they identified were openness, learning, responsibility, respect, good communication, and balance. The group also identified four broad metrics for measuring increased motivation: self-esteem, ownership, shared meaning, and a shared vision. We asked this group of managers to identify the next steps needed to convert their insights into an action plan to increase motivation.
One insight was that they were so busy focusing on widgets that they forgot about the people making them. Another insight was that by overemphasizing processes and quality management, the managers ended up focusing on “getting things done” rather than nurturing human relationships with their subordinates. Their rapport with the workforce lacked empathy and compassion. A third insight was that they genuinely cared about their workforce but didn’t know how to engage and communicate with them in an open and transparent manner.
Their action plans included sharing their experiences at the meeting with the workforce and encouraging their teams to engage in similar exercises and openly share and discuss specific moments when they felt most motivated. Then they wanted to have conversations on a regular basis with their workforce about what was working and wasn’t in their day-to-day job. They also formulated action plans for their individual factories, with the workforce involved in figuring out how to improve working conditions. By implementing all these changes, XCo experienced a 15 percent improvement in employee motivation levels and about an 8 percent increase in productivity over the following two years.
The key message here is that the culture of any organization can be positively affected when their leaders take authentic and appropriate actions.
Our research into wise organizations is ongoing, of course, but so far we have found a few that are well advanced on their path toward becoming wise. Tata Group, owner of Taj Hotels, is one of them—it is infused with wise culture. The Tata Group’s structures, reward systems, and talent management are all aligned with its noble purpose. Two-thirds of the shares of Tata Sons, the holding company of the group, are held by philanthropic trusts. Its leaders decide and act with ethical clarity: they do not engage in lobbying and won’t do business in places where ethics are not valued.10
(We are interested in learning about and studying more wise organizations around the world. Please visit fromsmarttowise.com to contribute case studies and learn about other wise organizations.)
Wise Communities
Individual leaders, teams, and organizations all focus on specific outcomes to measure their effectiveness, but for communities this can be difficult. Organizations have a beginning, middle, and an end in their life cycle while communities have beginnings but the end is unknown. We might not experience that end in our lifetime, which makes the effort to develop wise communities even more crucial. Nevertheless, some enlightened individuals are bravely attempting to build wise communities. Oprah Winfrey is one of them. She has been building wise communities through her foundation and multiple nonprofit initiatives such as the Angel Network. Another is Peter Senge, author of the best-selling The Fifth Discipline, who has catalyzed interest in building learning communities around the world.11 Similarly, over many decades, Rick Smyre, founder of Communities of the Future, has been actively involved in efforts to transform neighborhood communities into wise communities worldwide.12
We focus now on the efforts led by three remarkable individuals to build wise communities: Peter Block, Nipun Mehta, and Raj Sisodia. Peter Block, an organizational development expert, is striving to build “abundant” communities (those infused with a sense of abundance rather than scarcity) around the world; Nipun Mehta is a technologist who is trying to leverage the power of social networking technologies to build global communities infused with compassion and a sense of service; and Raj Sisodia is an academic building a community of wise businesses following the principles of conscious capitalism.
Peter Block: Developing Abundant Communities
For over thirty years, Peter Block has helped build wise communities worldwide as a community builder and a consultant. He has written eight books in the areas of organizational development, civic engagement, and community development. Many of his ideas and concepts—such as giftmindedness (focusing on what is possible to achieve with gifts we already have rather than striving to fill in our deficiencies), stewardship, responsibility, and abundant community—are considered seminal in reframing how we think about service, trusteeship, accountability, connectedness, and authenticity in the context of a community.13 For instance, Block’s idea of “abundant community” calls for citizens to stop looking for external sources of happiness and discover an abundance of resources within their local community.
We have personally experienced and witnessed the impact of Block’s ideas in real communities. In India, as early as in 1994, he worked on leadership development with Amul, a large nationwide milk producer cooperative, and the National Dairy Development Board that markets the milk collected by Amul. He has also worked in Ireland, where he cofacilitated peace and reconciliation in communities torn by religious conflict.14 In the United States, he has been working on implementing abundant communities in states like Ohio and Mississippi.
Through his vast experience, Block learned that when it comes to building wise communities, results and outcomes are much less important than invitation, connection, passion, and engagement. Communities today are less engaged directly with each other and more engaged online. If you want to increase engagement in your community and you are passionate about it, you have to take initiative, share your noble purpose, and invite others in the community to engage and create a shared vision for the community instead of waiting for formal leaders (if there are any) to propose it. There are no onlookers, only activists who take responsibility in community building.
Many of Block’s concepts and frameworks are aligned with the wise leadership model in that they help people in communities think and act wisely. Many of the perspectives, principles, and practices that he suggests are conditions under which community wisdom emerges in a bottom-up fashion without any one individual or team taking leadership responsibility. Block believes it’s critical for communities to build an “abundant mentality”—that is, a focus on future possibilities—and when a few people take positive steps in a community toward sufficiency, responsibility, and ownership for themselves, others begin to follow them. That is how organically, a wise community evolves.15
Nipun Mehta: Scaling Up Service and Compassion
Nipun Mehta, founder of ServiceSpace, is in his early thirties, but he has already become known as one of the leading wise community builders of our times. Mehta is building wise communities by focusing on young people (Generation Y and younger) and using social networking tools to reach them. The programs he helped initiate, such as a daily positive news service (dailygood.org), an acts-of-kindness portal (helpothers.org), and Karma Kitchen, a gift economy restaurant, are run entirely by young volunteers.16
Karma Kitchen is a collection of half a dozen restaurants around the world that serve as a real-life laboratory for experimenting with generosity. If you go to any Karma Kitchen restaurant, volunteers will serve you healthy and delicious food prepared with organic ingredients cooked by volunteers (book in advance: the waiting list is several weeks long). The food you have that day is paid for by people who came to the restaurant before you. You can choose to do the same, paying for the food others will be having later if you feel generous—and you are free to contribute any amount you want to.
We have eaten and volunteered at Karma Kitchen several times, and the experience has been memorable. The testimonials posted by volunteers and guests or on karmakitchen.org attest to why this concept built on anonymous generosity is spreading fast across America. Karma Kitchen embodies all the characteristics of a wise community: people come to Karma Kitchen to serve others (their intention) as guests willing to pay for others after them or volunteers who cook in the kitchen or serve guests (their behavior), enriching a culture of caring and love, and creating a sense of fulfillment and inclusivity.
Karma Kitchen is one of the experiments that you can personally experience in community building activities organized by ServiceSpace. The ServiceSpace platform has inspired volunteerism worldwide by allowing young people to stay connected with others interested in service and identify and participate in volunteering projects. The ServiceSpace network boasts over 400,000 members globally.17
Raj Sisodia: Building Conscious Communities
In contrast to Peter Block and Nipun Mehta, community builders with business and technology backgrounds, Raj Sisodia is an academic who is in the initial stages of building another kind of community: a community of business organizations committed to the principles of conscious capitalism.18
Conscious capitalism is a term popularized by Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Prize–winning economist who pioneered the concepts of microfinance and microcredit.19 It has been defined as “a philosophy based on the belief that a more complex form of capitalism is emerging that holds the potential for enhancing corporate performance while simultaneously continuing to advance the quality of life for billions of people.”20 In spirit, conscious capitalism is philosophically aligned with other notions like creative capitalism and compassionate capitalism, and initiatives like B Corporations, all of which look at reinventing capitalism to be more inclusive and caring.
Sisodia, a marketing professor at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, believes that the time is ripe for conscious capitalism. Capitalism today, he says, especially in the West, is focused primarily on maximizing shareholder value and promoting extreme competition, which he believes has led to unsustainable economies—reeling under growing income inequality (for instance, the top 5 percent income earners in the United States currently account for 37 percent of the country’s spending) and environmental degradation.
The genesis of conscious capitalism is an academic research project that Sisodia undertook in the early 2000s about marketing excellence. After studying hundreds of companies, Sisodia noted that customer satisfaction, loyalty, and trust were falling steadily while marketing spending was up. Sisodia also identified twenty-eight companies—eighteen of them publicly traded and ten private—that had lower marketing expenses but higher customer loyalty and trust. He found that customers, employees, and suppliers all trusted these companies. The leaders of these companies had a number of things in common: they led through mentoring instead of controlling, paid themselves modest salaries, and acted as servant leaders.21
What’s more, Sisodia’s financial analysis showed that these companies invest in environmental sustainability and in the well-being of their employees and engage suppliers in win-win partnerships. And it seems to pay off. These companies financially outperformed other companies in their industry by a factor of 9 to 1 over a ten-year period. Having seen the performance data, Sisodia wanted to create an institute that could study this phenomenon in more detail, but it was too large an undertaking at that time. Rather, he captured his thinking in a book, Firms of Endearment, that got the attention of John Mackey, co-CEO of Whole Foods Market. Mackay reached out to Sisodia and they jointly initiated the conscious capitalism movement in 2008. They invited a select group of business leaders and academics and consultants and the Conscious Capitalism organization was born.22 Conscious Capitalism Inc., which is run by Doug Rausch, the former president of Trader Joe’s, is helping to form communities of companies that are run as responsible organizations with conscious leadership, higher purpose, and conscious culture with a stakeholder (not stockholder) orientation.
Again, we have personally experienced and can vouch for the unique approaches and cultures that member companies, including Whole Foods, The Container Store, Trader Joe’s, Panera Bread, and Southwest Airlines, operate and bring to the conscious capitalism community. The community is growing rapidly in the United States, Europe, Australia, and India. Although it is still in its infancy, the potential impact of this community is huge because it is being developed as a wise community from the beginning.
Wise Nations
Nations are far more complex than organizations and communities. They are comprised of highly diverse societies with well-developed cultures and conflicting interests and viewpoints. At a national level, it’s more challenging to achieve consensus on major decisions and to act cohesively. Yet as with individuals, organizations, and communities, it is possible to influence a nation to move toward wisdom by fostering interest in a larger purpose.
Bhutan is a small, landlocked nation set in the towering mountains of the Himalayas. In 1972 it was one of the poorest countries in the world. At the time, Bhutan’s Oxford-educated king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, developed a concept called gross national happiness (GNH) and suggested that gross domestic product be replaced with GNH as an indicator of national progress.23 The king believed that his impoverished land needed to embrace a holistic approach to socioeconomic development that balances economic growth with cultural and religious preservation, universal access to health care and education, and environmental protection. Western educated and yet steeped in Bhutan’s Buddhist traditions, the king wanted to modernize his country in a way so that material and spiritual development take place together.
In 1999 the king created the Centre for Bhutan Studies in Thimphu, Bhutan, which developed the gross national happiness index (GNHI), a multidimensional set of thirty-three indicators that measure the overall well-being of the Bhutanese population. These indicators range from psychological factors to community vitality and guide the formulation of public policy.24
Under the king’s leadership, the Bhutanese government has relied on GNHI to make wise socioeconomic decisions—for example, laws regulating mining and logging protect 70 percent of Bhutan’s forested land. While Bhutan is gradually opening up to foreign investors, tourism remains highly restricted (limited to two thousand tourists annually). There is universal health care, with an emphasis on preventive care, and free education for all. Not surprisingly, in 2006 Bhutan was ranked by BusinessWeek as the “happiest” nation in Asia and the eighth happiest in the world.25
The king invested time and energy to try to spread his ideas outside his small nation and change the perspective of the global community. He advocated GNH at international forums, noting that “there must be some convergence among nations on the idea of what the end objective of development and progress should be.”26
Inspired by Bhutan’s success, several Western leaders have sought to incorporate elements of GNH into their own economies. For example, in 2008, former French president Nicholas Sarkozy commissioned a study by Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, Nobel laureates in economics, to identify indicators other than GDP to measure societies. Based on the recommendations of the report, the official French statistics agency has begun incorporating indicators of the happiness and well-being of its citizens—such as health, status, social connections, and leisure time—as part of the economic assessment of the country.27
The king’s son, Jigme Khesar Namgyel, succeeded him in 2008. He shares his father’s noble purpose to create a veritable shift in the development paradigm. Recognized by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader in 2008, he is striving to incorporate happiness into the agenda of global institutions such as the United Nations. In July 2011, the U.N. General Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution calling for a “holistic approach to development” that can drive sustainable happiness and well-being. “Conscious that the pursuit of happiness is a fundamental human goal,” the resolution recognized “that the gross domestic product [GDP] does not adequately reflect the happiness and well-being of people.”28
You don’t need to be a king to move a nation toward wise leadership. Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Lech Walesa have proven that the power of ideas can be strong enough to shift the direction of a country and raise its level of consciousness. These men rallied their people around a noble purpose and led by example. They were historic wise leaders, as is Aung San Suu Kyi.
Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, has faced an ongoing political struggle since the 1960s when a military dictatorship under General Ne Win was established, followed by counter coups and efforts to oust the regime by protestors. A key figure among the protesters was Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of Aung San, who fought for Myanmar’s freedom from the British colonial rule (Aung San was assassinated six months before his country gained independence in January 1948).
After spending several decades abroad (she was married to an Oxford academic, Michael Aris), Suu Kyi returned to Myanmar in 1988 for family reasons. At the time, she witnessed the brutal repression of student protesters and decided to take action. In an inspiring speech that started her political career, she told protesters, “I could not, as my father’s daughter, remain indifferent to all that is going on.” In 1989, the military regime placed Suu Kyi under house arrest, and she spent the next two decades confined to her residence in austere conditions without a telephone, television, or Internet. She received few visitors and spent her time meditating, reading, and writing.29 In 1997 Suu Kyi demonstrated her iron will and adherence to principle by refusing to travel to England to see her terminally ill husband, fearing that the military rulers wouldn’t allow her to return. Given her tenacity and unwavering commitment to democracy Suu Kyi was unwilling to make any compromise with the military regime. When she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992, the military refused to let her go to Norway to accept it.
Her resilience and capacity for patience were finally rewarded in 2010 when, under pressure from the international community, the junta released Suu Kyi from house arrest and agreed to hold parliamentary elections in 2012 in which Suu Kyi won a seat.
Many wondered why Suu Kyi decided to participate in elections that were run by the same junta that had imprisoned her and kept democracy at bay in the country for decades. Her admirers worried that Suu Kyi, respected for her unwavering adherence to principle, had finally relented and softened her stance. In fact, we believe that Suu Kyi was acting as a wise leader. Taking part in elections run by an illegitimate government was opportune, not opportunistic. She realized that the political system was changing, due in part to pressure from the Obama administration, and that she could do this better from the inside, as a freely elected member of parliament, rather than continuing the struggle from outside as a persecuted political activist.30 In 2011, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton paid a historic visit to Myanmar, paving the way for full restoration of diplomatic ties with Washington a year later, and Suu Kyi went to Oslo in June 2012 to belatedly pick up her Nobel Peace Prize. In November 2012, President Obama visited Myanmar to extend his support to the process of democratization.
From our point of view, Suu Kyi recognized this changing geopolitical context and demonstrated flexible fortitude. While remaining committed to her noble purpose—leading Myanmar to democracy—she pragmatically decided to shift her role from a protest figure to a reformer of the system. In her Nobel acceptance speech, Suu Kyi said: “It is in human nature to contain both the positive and the negative. However, it is also within human capability to work to reinforce the positive and to minimize or neutralize the negative. Absolute peace in our world is an unattainable goal. But it is one towards which we must continue to journey.”31