Okay. Thank you, Scotty McLennan, for visiting with us to talk about love and social justice. Now in the context of love and business, now that you are at the business school rather than at the school for religious life. Welcome. I'd like you to talk about anything you'd like to talk about with regard to love and social justice, but I'm especially interested in this connection between spirituality, or what I hope is love and business. Well, what a pleasure to be with you. Thank you. And we've done some wonderful things in the past. So I think it's really exciting to think about how religion and spirituality interacts with business. There are a lot of people who are now trying to integrate their spiritual or religious life with their work life. And I actually teach a course at Stanford in the fall quarter at the business school called "Finding Spiritual Meaning at Work: Business Exemplars." So we have people who come in from a lot of different religious or spiritual and - not religious backgrounds - Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jewish and a variety of different Christians actually, not category - and talk about how they try to not just check their religion at the door when they go to work in the morning, but then all the understandable problems that arise in - when we have church-state separation and when we really don't want to be proselytized in our workplace by our bosses or our colleagues. But I think love is a really important part of all of this, which is ultimately, I say in my courses, that love is what matters most in doing business well. And that may sound very strange, I say to my students, after you've finished a business school career, but I do think it's true. Well, I was just going to ask about spirituality and love. I mean, it may be one thing to not check your spirituality at the door, but it might be another thing to - to actually be applying love, whatever we may mean by that - and I would encourage you to define it, if you'd like to. You know, are we really talking about the same thing when we talk about spirituality and love? Right. Well, not necessarily, because spirituality, I think, encompasses more than just love as we traditionally think about it. In fact, Saint Paul said faith, hope and love, these three, but the greatest of these is love. So there are other virtues and other considerations that are part of spirituality. But I think it is central to spirituality. And by love, I mean treating another person as - Immanuel Kant said - as an end in him or herself, not as a means to an end. Or as Jesus said, "Love your neighbor as yourself." Or in fact, he went on to say, "Love your enemy." And what that really meant was the Golden Rule, I believe, which is "Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you." So of inherent dignity and respect in every person. In the Christian tradition, in the Jewish tradition, it would be that we're created in the image of God, or as the Quakers would say, there is a Spirit of God in all of us. So it's understanding each person's individual inherent dignity. And how do people apply that, particularly in business? Really and specifically, how are they doing this? Well, let me give you an example of one of the cases that we look at, of Samina Quraeshi, who was - she's now deceased - but was a Pakistani-American, who set up with her husband, who was an architect and she was a design person, a graphic design person - set up a firm in Boston and hired a number of people. And she was taken for three years to Washington to become the head of a design arts section of the National Endowment for the Arts. And two of her most trusted senior associates were running the firm in her absence. She was staying in touch, but - but they were - they were running the firm. And she came back from those three years away to learn that they had decided to leave the firm and take all her clients with them. And she was somebody who came with a Muslim sensibility to her work from the start and always talked about trying to create a family in the workplace. And she talked about, as I was saying earlier, inherent respect for each of her - her employees and trying to see their life in a holistic way and make sure that she, as an employer, was - she's literally said concerned about their spiritual life, their fulfillment, their happiness, their - putting their work life together with their home life, making sure that they were really progressing professionally. And so it was obviously a great shock to her to have these two women, that she very much believed in, say sorry, we're leaving and we're taking all your clients. So she went to a lawyer and thought about what do I do next. And I have - I'm both a lawyer and a minister by background, so I understand that. And I've helped a lot of clients over the years. But ultimately, she decided no, I'm not gonna go the legal route, because love is the centerpiece for me in my life. And that means forgiveness, in this case. And it means not being bitter, myself, about what they've done and trying to understand that they have their own lives and needs. And it's an opportunity for me to recreate my firm and rethink how I do my business. And she did that, in fact, as the internet was becoming much more important in graphic design and some of her old methodology, she had to rethink. And ultimately, I think it was very much a win for her because she was able to avoid that sense of personal bitterness and anger at her employees. She was able to not go the legal route and, you know, try to get some peace out of them for what they've done. And ultimately, I think it was a loving response. Okay. Other examples? Sure, sure. So, Chuck Geschke was the founder of - of Adobe - the co-founder. And he and his partner who co-founded it felt that they were really creating Adobe's core values on Biblical principles. They wouldn't have said that publicly. He did actually say that at Xavier University in a commencement speech that I read, where he said the inspiration for their core values came directly from Christ's words, "Love your neighbor as yourself." But they talked about treating other people as you would want to be treated yourself. And they were very specific in the core values, talking about vendors and how to treat your vendors as you would want to be treated, how to treat your customers as you'd want to be treated, how to treat your employees or the people that you're supervising and how to treat your colleagues in the workplace as you would want to be treated. And there were four or five bullet points, actually, under each of those in their core value statement. So it really did create an atmosphere in the workplace, I think, that was love-infused. And then, terribly, he was kidnapped in the parking lot of his - of the company - of Adobe - and blindfolded, tied up five days thinking he was gonna be killed. Big ransom request made for him. Told that if anyone finds out - the FBI, the police - we'll kill you immediately. And during those days, he found himself praying a lot and thinking about his family; but also, he found himself coming to pray for his captors and trying to understand their situation. They were very poor and they had children that they were worried about putting food in their mouths. And he was beginning to think and pray for them and to think how could I actually help them? I don't think he said this to the captors, but in his heart, he was thinking about scholarship help, other ways that I might be able to - to help this family. And, you know, thinking more broadly, Adobe had its own charitable operation as well. So there's somebody in extremas who is thinking, you know, in a loving way. Luckily, they did go to the FBI; he was freed at gunpoint by the FBI. But there is another example - both in the firm, in terms of their core values, but also how that got played out in his personal life as CEO. Do they actually publish those values up on a wall somewhere or in their annual report or something? Are they holding themselves accountable in that way? Right. Yes. In these cases, they are. Because those core values, Adobe's core values go right up on the wall. And they use them in training for their employees when they first come. And it's very much part of the life of the firm. And they hold themselves accountable to them in performance review, in thinking, in their - of course, their stockholders, and so on. So yes, I think it is very much in the public view. One other example is Noah Alper, who is the founder of Noah's Bagels. Jewish, he - he sold the company a decade or so ago and it's a somewhat different company now, but when he founded it, it was very much on Jewish values. He wrote a book called "Business Mensch," the idea of, you know, how do you, as CEO of a - of a company, try to live out humane values? And so in terms of his customers, as they'd come through the door, he certainly wanted to provide the highest quality product possible. He used kosher baking; he made sure that everything was kosher, that his Jewish customers and others of us - obviously not Jewish, but we appreciate a good bagel and good ingredients and so on. And he also thought about his customers in a more holistic way, which is in the stores, he would try to create a community feeling; not only in the store, but information about the local community, how to get involved in service activities, how to network with others who are like-minded and so on. And in terms of his employees, he made sure that they had the Sabbath off and took that tradition of Judaism seriously and talked about the importance of a Sabbath - that we need time for rest and relaxation and a day that's really different than all the other days of the week, even if you're not Jewish. So that's somebody, I think, who you can see applying those principles in a very customer-centered way. Could we have another example of a businessman who's put these values into practice? Sure. One person that I'm really interested in watching is Jeff Weiner, who's the CEO of LinkedIn. And he has a principle of compassionate management that he lives by and tries to train his whole company in. And it ultimately comes from the Dalai Lama. He was very influenced by reading the "Art of Happiness" early in his life and the idea of compassion as being more than empathy. Empathy is putting yourself in somebody's shoes and trying to understand and be where they are, but compassion is taking the next step and doing something about it. So his notion is that when you're actually working with your employees as a supervisor, you've got to really put yourself in their shoes and understand their situation even if you might be quite unhappy about something that they've done - and then work together on an action plan to - to move the company forward. And he sees it in terms of his customers in LinkedIn. He has a vision, in the long run, of linking the world with a vision of compassion and trying to teach compassion and help from K-12 and on up through, you know, the rest of our lives, to help us be more compassionate worldwide. So he has a vision, in some sense, as broad as the Dalai Lama's, too. The Dalai Lama talks about before I die, I want to reach all, you know, 7.5 billion people on the earth and - and make them more compassionate. Is this a trend in business? Do you think people are much more aware just generally in business? Or - and is that your intent on teaching at the business school, to try to encourage the sort of injection of love in everyday life in business? Well, it certainly is my intent. And I've been teaching a variety of courses over the years. I teach a course called "The Business World: Moral and Spiritual Inquiry Through Literature." We read novels, plays, short stories with business protagonists and ask how they're infusing love into their life. And not only their work life, because it's great; in that case, you'd see them in the boardroom and in the bedroom and you can see them with their children and with their friends and in their - inside their head. I mean, literally, a great novelist can do that for us. But I've taught that course not only here at the Graduate School of Business - well, when I was dean for religious life for 14 years, but also back at Harvard Business School starting in the mid-1980s. And so it's more than 25 years of teaching that course. I've seen quite a change. And having nothing to do with me, but having to do with just the way business is operated in this country. Obviously, we have lots of ethical violations and there's plenty in the news to tell us about that on a daily basis, but business students, as they come through, are getting much more concerned about holistic life for themselves, but also how they do service in the larger community, how they merge their desire to make a good life for themselves with genuine service. They're concerned about environmental issues. They're certainly concerned about issues of diversity and making sure that they're really responsive to everyone in the workplace and in their customer base and their vendors and suppliers and so on. So I find it quite an encouraging time, actually. And I think there's been some significant change. Are you hopeful, given the problems that we're facing and have always faced in the world? Is this trend toward people being there for each other, being kinder and being aware of the power of compassion and kindness? Are we hopeful? I am very hopeful, but that's sort of my personality. My friends and my spouse often say, you know, you're always too optimistic and too hopeful about reality. But it goes back and forth. I mean, we - we are - have equal doses, I think, of good and evil in us and of love and hate in us and of all the other vices and virtues and that's what's - why it's fun to teach these people, in their real lives and in novels, because you see both the - the vices and the virtues. And it's true for companies, too. It seems every company, sooner or later, you know, has something horrible that it does that's unethical. And so we kind of go back and forth over time. But in the long run, I'm quite hopeful and I think love is such a powerful force. I think it's a cosmic force. I mean, I think it's - it's like gravity. It's - you know, you - it's a natural law of the universe and you either align yourself with it and do quite well, I think - and help build a good community, or you fight it and don't align yourself with it and things go quite badly. So yeah, I'm always, in the long run, hopeful. You know, Martin Luther King talked about the arc of justice, you know, bending - ultimately the arc bending to - to justice. And I think it's true for love, as well. It's one of the other great virtues, that ultimately, we humans are loving beings and want to be and we need to set the right conditions to allow that to come out. Thank you so much for being with us. Great pleasure. Thank you.
