THE SECOND GREAT COMMANDMENT AND THE
LEADER’S GOLDEN RULE
Peter B. Vaill
Antioch University
The Second Great Commandment is familiar to all: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,”1
what is known colloquially as the Golden Rule. In this paper I take this command to be valid,
both in its practical value and importance, and in the moral authority from which it emanates. I
think there would be wide agreement to the first criterion – practical value – but considerable
debate about the second – the question of the divinity of its source. However, I believe it can be
shown that virtually all of the world’s great religions and philosophies have included some
version of the Golden Rule. The nature of love, its power and importance are widely perceived to
be, in theory at least, the most desirable state of affairs among human beings.
Any investigation of the Golden Rule quickly reveals that it itself has been the object of
enormous amounts of ratiocination. What it really means, why it makes sense, what kinds of
variations exist, how its meaning changes with subtle changes in wording – these are all matters
of energetic debate among ethicists, theologians, and men and women of practical interests.
For the most part in this essay I must leave aside all of these distinctions, partly because of my
lack of qualifications to critique them, and partly because the main thrust of this essay is in a
different direction. I want to take the meaning of the Golden Rule pretty much for granted so
that I can ask a related question: is there a way to phrase the Golden Rule in terms the
organizational conduct of all members of a system, but particularly of its leaders? I think the
answer is Yes (or I would not be writing this essay). If the answer is Yes, then the organization
can be said to be constituted to do God’s work (however we conceive “God” to be). If it is
constituted to do God’s work, then a theology of how and why this can be becomes possible,
perhaps even necessary. So this essay attempts to construct the Golden Rule at the organizational
level, as it were.
The Material-Instrumental Model
There is an alternative model of human organizations and other social systems. It does not
presume that organizations are inherently possessed of spiritual character and spiritual potential.
They are merely man-made constructions that have two characteristics: one, they are purely
material entities, and two, they exist only for instrumental reasons: to achieve goals and
objectives that are important to their members and stakeholders. I call this alternative, the “M-I
model.”
1
Matthew 22:39 in New Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible. New York: Oxford University Press.
1
Sociologists call them “formal organizations;” economists call them “economic entities,” and in
the case of corporations, “firms” (increasingly a misnomer for many); in the eyes of the law
corporations are, interestingly, “persons;” and for most practicing managers, the M-I model is
just the way organizations are.
The M-I model has probably been evolving at least since Adam Smith. Huge steps forward,
though, began to occur in the middle years of the 20th Century, through books such as those by
Burnham,2 Barnard,3 Presthus,4 Drucker,5 and Whyte.6 At the same time, pioneering business
schools at Harvard, Penn, Columbia, and UC Berkeley, were developing elaborate visions of the
management and leadership entailed by organizations-as-M.I.-models. In all of the many twists
and turns of the history of the M.I. model, I am not aware that the fundamental model has been
seriously critiqued (except perhaps by Marx and subsequent writers in that tradition). It is as if it
is accepted that formal organizations are the M.I. model, not that the M.I. model is a model or
frame of what human organizations are; for this latter view would permit there to be other
models entirely of what human organizations are.7
Far from being critiqued for its own sake, the M-I model has achieved a deep penetration into the
thinking of managers and management scholars. Bemoaning this state of affairs, Scott and Hart a
few years ago formulated what they called the “organizational imperative.”8 It is as follows:
“Whatever is good for the individual can only come from the modern organization.” Scott and
Hart derive a whole ethos from this “imperative” that supports managers in doing whatever they
can to strengthen the organization. Scott and Hart’s critique is negative and bitter, overdrawn
some might say. Yet many years of working with managers in organizations of all kinds
convinces me that Scott and Hart have put their finger on something important, something that a
theology of organizational conduct will need to confront – the idea that the preservation and
strengthening of the organization is more important than anything else.
I believe the challenge, then, to a theology (or spirituality) of institutions must be to find another
way of talking about what organizations are so there is something to be theological about, while
yet not committing the tautology of declaring the spirituality in the starting model or frame.
The Human Side of Enterprise
After World War II, owing to the pioneering work of Elton Mayo at the Harvard Business
2
Burnham, J. (1941). The Managerial revolution. New York: Putnam.
Barnard, C. (1938). The Functions of the executive. Boston: Harvard University Press.
4
Presthus, R. (1962. The Organizational society. New York: Knopf
5
Drucker, P. (1954). The Practice of management. New York: Harper.
6
Whyte, W. Jr. (1956). The Organization man. New York: Simon and Schuster.
7
Bolman, L. and Deal, T. (2003) Reframing organizations: Artistry, choice, and leadership. San Francisco: JosseyBass suggest four “frames” through which organizations can be viewed, but all of them implicitly accept the M-I
model as fundamental.
8
Scott, W.G., and Hart, D.K. (1989) Organizational Values in America. Lawrence, KS: Transaction Publishers. I
discuss Scott and Hart’s work at greater length in my essay, “Change as Growth,” in Hammond, W.C.III, (2001) 12
Step wisdom at work. London, UK: Kogan Page. Chapter 10.
3
2
School9 and Kurt Lewin at M.I.T. and later with his students at the University of Michigan10,
human behavior in organizations rapidly became the object of a great deal of research, teaching,
and interest among practitioners. A “second generation” of theorists quickly emerged, led by
Chris Argyris11, Douglas McGregor12, Rensis Likert13, and Robert Blake14. Each of their books
was very influential in its time. McGregor, who died in 1964, continues to be a major influence,
his book surely being one of the largest selling management books of all time. Argyris, who has
produced a number of major statements over the years, continues contributing in his teaching and
writing.
The reason for this quick survey is to make one key point: all of these books accepted a
dichotomy between the “human organization” and its other expressions and priorities in
“operations,” “finance,” marketing,” “strategy,” and many other substantive activities,
depending on the type of organization. In other words, there are all of these work processes, so
to speak, and then there is the “human side of enterprise,” to quote the title of Douglas
McGregor’s mega-best selling book.
Roethlisberger and Dickson got the dichotomy started with their report of the Hawthorne
researches in 1939. They posited a “logic of efficiency” that dominated management’s approach
to the organization; and a “logic of sentiments” (i.e., needs, feelings) which dominated the
workers’ (employees’) thinking about the organization.15 The two were opposed and in many
ways denied the legitimacy of the other’s approach. Argyris strengthened the dichotomy, and in
many ways provided the foundation for the Organization Development16 movement with the
assertion that the needs of a healthy person and the needs of machine bureaucracy are
fundamentally incompatible. McGregor crystallized the difference by defining “the human side
of enterprise” in terms of employee needs as expressed in Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of
needs.”17
McGregor devoted the bulk of his book to something he called “the principle of integration.” It
reads as follows:
9
Mayo, E. (1933) The Human problems of industrial civilization. Boston: Harvard University Press; (1945) The
Social problems of industrial civilization, Boston: Harvard University Press. Roethlisberger, F.J. and Dickson, W.E.
Dickson, (1939) Management and the worker. Boston: Harvard University Press.
10
Lewin, K. (1951). Field theory in social science: Selected theoretical papers. Edited by Cartwright, D.. New
York: Harper & Row. Cartwright, D., and Zander, A. (1960) Group dynamics: Research and theory. Evanston, IL:
Row, Peterson & Co., 2nd ed.
11
Argyris, C. (1957) Personality and organization. New York: Harper & Brothers.
12
McGregor, D. (1960) The Human side of enterprise. New York: McGraw-Hill.
13
Likert, R. (1961) New patterns of management. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Blake, R.R. and Mouton, J.S. (1964) The Managerial grid. Houston: Gulf Publishing.
15
Roethlisberger and Dickson, op.cit., Ch. 24, “The Industrial organization as a social system.”
16
“OD,” as it is known was, from the 1960’s to the present, the best known and most influential set of strategies for
instituting organizational change processes. See any contemporary Organizational Behavior textbook or, to quote
Bolman, L., and Deal, T. (2003). Reframing organizations: Artistry, choice and leadership. San Francisco: JosseyBass: “OD [is] a set of change strategies, such as group intervention and survey research, that emphasize data
collection, open communication, and experiential learning, usually with the assistance of consultants or change
agents” (p. 159).
17
Maslow, A.(1954) Motivation and personality. New York: Harper & Brothers, and McGregor, op. cit., pp. 35-43.
14
3
The central principle…is that of integration: the creation of conditions such that the
members of the organization can achieve their own goals best by directing their efforts
toward the success of the enterprise. (McGregor, 1960, p. 49 [emphasis in the original])
McGregor is very clear that this integration cannot be achieved by top-down control and
manipulation; rather, it can only be achieved through the exercise of an enlightened theory of
leading and managing – his famous “Theory Y” – which is based on scientific findings about the
real nature of human motivation. This scientific knowledge is the “hierarchy of needs,”
beginning with the most basic physiological needs and rising through safety, social, esteem and
achievement, and finally culminating in needs for self-fulfillment. These are the needs for
realizing one’s own potentialities, for continued self-development, for being creative in the
broadest sense of that term (McGregor, 1960, p. 39).
Maslow later increasingly defined this highest level of need in more and more spiritual terms. 18
However, in the material McGregor employed, and in the way the Need Hierarchy was
implemented widely in training and development programs as well as academic classrooms, selffulfillment (or self-actualization as it was frequently called) was presented as a secular
psychological concept.19
At about the same time as McGregor, Rensis Likert, at the University of Michigan, published
New Patterns of Management20.It too was based on extensive research on the determinants of job
satisfaction and the role leadership could play in fostering it. Likert formulated his famous
“principle of supportive relationships,” which was stated as follows:
The leadership and other processes of the organization must be such as to ensure a
maximum probability that in all interactions and in all relationships within the
organization, each member, in the light of his background, values, desires, and
expectations, will view the experience as supportive and one which builds and maintains
his sense of personal worth and importance (Likert, 1967, p.47).
Thus it can be seen that Likert implicitly supports McGregor’s “principle of integration” by
insisting that in all of the operations of the organization, the individuals involved should be
supported and affirmed as human beings.
Robert Blake with his associate Jane Mouton had a concept he called “the managerial grid”
which was very influential in the 1960’s and 1970’s.21 Like McGregor’s principle of integration,
and Likert’s belief that supportive relationships must occur throughout the organization, Blake
and Mouton advocated the integration of “concern for production” and “concern for people.”
This took the form of what they called 9,9 management, the nines being scores one could receive
18
Maslow, A. (1970) Religions, values, and peak experiences. New York: Viking Press.
It must be granted that some of those who were working with Maslow’s ideas may from the beginning have seen
spiritual “needs,” if they may be called that, as implied by “self-fulfillment.” However, to my knowledge , open
discussion of such needs and of “spirituality “ did not occur in those years except perhaps in religious institutions
themselves and their associated institutions of higher education.
20
Likert, R. (1961). New patterns of management. New York: McGraw-Hill; and (1967) The Human organization.
New York: McGraw-Hill.
21
Blake, R. and Mouton, J. (1964) The Managerial grid. Houston: Gulf Publishing Co.
19
4
on a test Blake had devised. Once again, though, the “people” these authors were thinking of
were conceived as physical/psychological entities.
Beyond the Human Side of Enterprise
This survey of the foundations of our thinking about human behavior in organizations is intended
to show two things: first, that human beings have been consistently thought of as physicalpsychological entities. The various writers and many others quoted here believed they had made
a giant step forward in elevating the human being from someone concerned only with pay and
comfort, who had to be told what to do at work, to a much more complex view. These writers
were concerned with teaching leaders and managers – chiefly in North America – to think
differently of employees and act differently toward them. Argyris and McGregor probably
should get the credit for the strongest intellectual leadership in this quest. But, significantly,
these two and the other writers put the human being over in something called “the human side of
enterprise,” somewhat divorced from organizational operations. None of these writers, to my
knowledge, undertook to try to change the way management thought of its substantive operations
in the first place.22 Thus, despite all of this work, the M-I model described above remains
intact.23
The second major observation about all this work concerns McGregor’s “principle of
integration,” most clearly articulated by him and by Blake with his 9,9 concept, but accepted
widely I think as the best strategy for getting “the people factor” taken more seriously. But
McGregor’s principle of integration is a fallacy. It commits what logicians know as a category
error; and what is known colloquially as “mixing apples and oranges.” Human needs, goals,
and expectations are one kind of thing; organizational needs, goals, and expectations are another
kind of thing. They don’t “integrate” because they are different orders of phenomena.
Human needs are not felt and formulated in the first place in relation to an organization’s goals.
Moreover, human needs are concrete; organizational needs and especially organizational goals
are abstract because “organizations” are abstract. There is nothing one can point to and say,
“There, that is an organization.” Moreover, the goals of this abstract entity are combinations and
summations of many different sub-parts. It is nearly impossible to create a clear connection
between an individual person’s contribution – even a very high level person – and the attainment
of an organizational goal as stated.
22
Interestingly, a school of thought known as “socio-technical systems” did exactly that – undertook to rearrange
the business “side” of the organization to fit better with human needs and other characteristics. A number of
dramatic experiments were conducted, most notably in coal-mining and in textiles. However, “socio-tech” never
achieved a very high profile, in my view, and was mainly restricted to a small number of academics and like-minded
practitioners. This may have been due in part to the fact that the work originated in Great Britain and was never
marketed very aggressively in the U.S. Also, during the years that the movement was most robust there were
relatively few published material available. The books referenced were published many years after much of the
seminal work was done. See Trist, E., Emery, F., and Murray, H. (1990/1993/1997) The Social engagement of social
science. Vol. I, II, III. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
23
It is worth noting, too, that in the years these ideas were developed and recommended for implementation, there
were no significant calls from these writers for particular attention to the needs of women and of racial and ethnic
minorities in organizations. The rise to prominence of these issues is a separate story; but it did not originate with
these “pioneers” of the status of human beings at work.
5
For McGregor and Blake to have posited the possibility of integration, and further to have made
such integration the center-piece of their whole approach to management, and then to have so
energetically and creatively marketed their ideas to practicing managers, was to put practicing
managers into a no-win game. It was a Sisyphean game at that because every time the M-I model
produced a new form of organizational operations, “enlightened” managers set about the task of
integrating human needs, feelings, and social groupings into the new tasks; only to find too often
that if human needs could not be integrated, the M-I model (and the “organizational imperative”)
authorized management to go ahead and push through the work, as it had defined the work,
anyway, doing “whatever it took” to achieve the objectives. What it frequently “took” was, as all
the writers mentioned so clearly believed, inconsistent with the kind of environment a healthy
human being thrives in.
Furthermore, there has been accumulating over perhaps the past quarter-century a view that
organizations as presently constituted aren’t working. The M-I model is not leading to viability in
the very turbulent environments of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. The extreme hardships
of the great global recession of 2008-2009 and beyond is showing, among other things, that both
individuals and organizations have been operating too close to the line, as it were; too close to
illiquidity and even insolvency in the best of times, let alone when cash receipts slow or stop and
the person or organization is left with enormous debts it cannot service.
The fashionable term is “leverage” and in the recession we hear it said that people and
companies are “too highly leveraged.” The term leverage is apt because what it means is that a
person or company can take a given amount of debt and “pry” desirable acquisitions and
financial returns with it that may be many times what one could achieve if the whole purchase
were to be financed out of “savings” or “retained earnings.”24 It is “leverage” that permits a
family to live in a desirable house that may be worth several times the amount of money they
have put down to buy it. But if its value sinks, or their income shrinks or stops, suddenly they are
“too highly leveraged.”
It is the supposed rightness of the M-I model which has led to the many calculations of values,
returns on investment, and maximum debt loads which have proved erroneous and indeed
disastrous in a period of dramatic contraction. With a different model of an organization, that
honored its many stakeholders (including employees) differently, perhaps the greed and
exploitation that have bankrupted the M-I model might not have occurred. We will never know,
but we can consider for the future a different model of the organization that might value its
members and its stakeholders more highly.
In short, there is no “human side of enterprise” and this is another way in which McGregor’s
principle of integration is a fallacy. Human beings are on all “sides” of the organization. If
anything is to be “integrated,” it is the interests of all of the different players. There is only one
side in this sense, since everything an organization does is done by human beings. Whatever we
think we have discovered about human needs, feelings, potentialities, and weaknesses applies to
everything the organization is doing. Therefore, the choice is not what “side” of an organization
to consider; the choice is whether or not to consider more fully the human beings, all of them,
24
Quoted in Fortune many years ago, the billionaire Texas oil man, Sid Richardson, said, “One thing my Daddy
taught me is the power of a borrowed dollar.”
6
who collectively are the organization; and the many forms of attributes, attitudes, actions, and
feelings these human beings manifest as they work together. The logic of this paragraph to me
seems irrefutable. I also think most of the writers referred to above would agree. However, I am
not aware that any of them ever said so, or followed the logic of this paragraph further. They
chose instead to work over on the human “side,” let organizational operations evolve
independently, and I believe disastrously, and condemn themselves to marginal influence. The
people side ought to be the queen of organizational studies. Instead too often it is the court jester
or worse.
“Encouraging the Heart”
Kouzes and Posner’s approach to leadership and leadership development has been one of the
most interesting and best-received approaches in recent years.25 While they are still writing
within the traditions I have been critiquing, two of their key ideas lead us in a somewhat different
direction, which I would like now to develop.
Kouzes and Posner, through case studies and a very large-scale survey of effective leadership
practices, identified five kinds of behavior that characterize the highest performing leaders: (1)
“modeling the way,” (2) “inspiring a shared vision,” (3) “challenging the process,” (4)”enabling
others to act,” and (5)”encouraging the heart.” Kouzes and Posner discovered these five
functions from studying leaders in all kinds of organizations and at all levels.
The two behaviors I want to focus on are “modeling the way,” and “encouraging the heart.”
Kouzes and Posner write about these two kinds of behavior in just about the way the labels lead
one to expect; it is not necessary for my purposes here to review their discussion in detail. Out of
a conviction that “encouraging the heart” is the most important of the five, Kouzes has written a
follow-up essay that goes into much more detail about that form of leadership behavior.26
I believe there would be wide agreement that a leader should act in ways that exemplify
important values and styles of behavior. Put in the negative, there would also be wide agreement,
I think, that a leader should not act in ways that indicate a disregard of the mission or of the
stakeholders of the organization, especially its employees and its customers. “Modeling the way”
implies both modeling the direction to go and modeling the style in which organization members
move in that direction.
Meanwhile, “encouraging the heart” refers to the form of influence that Kouzes and Posner
believe a leader should practice. The leader is not just speaking to the employee’s hands and
minds, in other words. It is the person’s feeling for oneself, the work, the other members, the
customer, and other stakeholders that the leader is seeking to encourage in this formulation. It is
important to remember that “encouraging the heart” is a research finding, not merely the authors’
normative values.
25
26
Kouzes, J. and Posner, B. (2002) The Leadership Challenge. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 3rd ed.
Kouzes, J. (2003) Encouraging the Heart. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
7
The Leader’s Golden Rule
Remembering the Second Great Commandment, and putting it together with the modeling and
encouraging ideas, I derive the Leader’s Golden Rule as follows: Do unto others as you would
have others do unto others. This is how leadership can both be true to the Golden Rule itself and
can also exercise the leadership function of initiating new ideas, values, goals, and forms of
behavior within the organization. Leading is concerned with change, but the Leader’s Golden
Rule counsels the leader not to become so preoccupied with change that one forgets who
ultimately will bring the change about: organization members, not just the leader. Those
organization members can best be continually led and worked with through encouragement.
It may be worth reflecting, for a moment, on why encouragement can be such a powerful form of
leadership. I believe encouragement does at least three things for the “encouragee:”
 Encouragement helps a person to understand “who I am;”
 Encouragement helps a person to understand what is important;
 Encouragement helps a person to see what next steps he or she can take.
Top-down, control-oriented management and leadership answers these questions for a person
rather than leaving the person more free to work out the answers himself or herself. The controlobsessed leader is not leading; such a person is acting out their own needs for certainty and
control. The M-I model authorizes such behavior because it makes organizational goals, material
ones at that, more important than the leader’s style and more important than the thoughts and
feelings of any member.
An Encouraging Organization?
If the Leader’s Golden Rule were consistently practiced it might over time foster encouraging
behavior by other members of the organization. This might seem to be an impossible condition to
achieve, but it is not; difficult, yes, but not impossible. I make this statement based on at least
two bodies of data with which I am quite familiar; I think there are numerous other examples
confirming these two sources.
First are what I call “high-performing systems”27 (HPS’s). Kouzes and Posner’s five
characteristics are continually evident in HPS’s. The Leader’s Golden Rule is also continually
evident, especially as discussed in Vaill (1998, pp. 49-54) where the leader characteristics of
Time, Feeling, and Focus are explained. Through the amount of time and energy they put in, the
strength and clarity of feeling they have for the system and its members, and the fact that they are
always very focused on what is needed, leaders of HPS’s exercise a powerful encouraging
influence on the system.
27
Vaill, P. “Toward a behavioral description of high-performing systems” in McCall, M. and Lombardo, M. (1978)
Leadership: Where else can we go? Durham, NC: Duke University Press; and “The Purposing of high-performing
systems,” in Vaill, P. Spirited leading and learning. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
8
Second, in the 1980’s and 1990’s, Peters and his colleagues produced several volumes on
“organizational excellence.” Peters has a wonderful nose for excellence and for what is going on
when an organization is manifesting it. In his first book, In search of excellence, he and his
colleague Waterman say something of great significance:
….if we understood the attributes [of excellent companies] well enough, we could do
more than just mutter “leadership” in response to questions like, “Why is J&J [Johnson
and Johnson]so good?” Unfortunately, what we found was that associated with almost
every excellent company was a strong leader (or two) who seemed to have had a lot to do
with making the company excellent in the first place.28
My only concern about this quote is the term “unfortunately.” Perhaps it was chosen because the
authors wanted the reader to focus on the characteristics of excellence and not view the authors’
effort as just the latest leadership book. There is nothing “unfortunate” about the powerful
encouraging presence Peters and Waterman show leaders to be in this and Peters’ subsequent
books. In fact, there is no organizational researcher, in my judgment, with a sharper eye for the
telling anecdote, and a better understanding of the symbolic role of the leader, than Peters.
Excellent organizations as I and Peters and Waterman have documented are found everywhere,
even in tough times, and are occurring continually. This is a very important fact: achieving
excellence does not depending on a felicitous environment. Such systems are filled with
encouraging behavior by leaders and by members. There are strong norms of encouragement,
that is, one gets spoken to if one is not an encouraging presence relative to the other members of
the organization. This norm is most easily seen in smaller groupings where there is a lot of faceto-face interaction. Self-oriented behavior or failure to contribute to the group effort is not
tolerated in high-performing teams.
Encouraging behavior as modeled by leaders and hopefully coming to pervade operations has
many more specific features. However, I will close with three important ones.
Conclusion
First, if encouraging behavior is taken to be the way people are expected to work with each
other, and particularly of leaders with other members, the split between the people “side” and the
operating “side” may be significantly reduced. The reason is that the encouraging is of the very
work a person is expected to being doing. Encouraging, in other words, has to have content and
the content is the person’s work (although of course they may receive encouragement on other
matters, too). It is less clear, in my opinion, with McGregor’s emphasis on meeting employee
needs, what leaders actually do and say; with encouraging, what they do and say is in relation to
what the person is doing for the organization. “Encouragement,” furthermore, is a form of
behavior that is widely understood, even though unevenly practiced. There is nothing mystical or
esoteric about encouraging [sic] managerial leaders to be a more encouraging presence in the
organization.
28
Peters, T. and Waterman, R. (1982) In search of excellence. New York: Harper & Row, p. 26.
9
Second, encouraging behavior directly addresses one of the most pervasive and pernicious issues
in modern organizations of all kinds. This is the issue of fear. Too many leaders are making their
influence felt by threat and intimidation. Significantly, the Total Quality Management movement
which swept through North American organizations in the last fifteen years of the last century
had as one of its cornerstone precepts, “Drive out fear.”29 TQM experiments were tried in many
organizations and for awhile it was the best-known strategy for organizational transformation.
But the doctrines failed in many organizations and today, while there are still organizations
around who declare their adherence to TQM principles, it is no longer regarded as a change
philosophy of great promise. One of the reasons for its decline in popularity, in my opinion, was
that many organizations tried to practice the philosophy without driving out fear. As a result, this
approach became itself something to be feared; and not helped, in my experience, by those
executives who believed TQM was a method for “right-sizing” the organization, that is, laying
people off.
Finally, this essay began by saying a theology of institutions depends on a view of an
organization that permits us to see it trying to do God’s work. I have tried to show how the
Leader’s Golden Rule – Do unto others as you would have others do unto others – extends the
traditional Golden Rule to leaders’ responsibilities to model the desired behavior in the
organization and “encourage the hearts” of its members. As leaders are able to practice this
extension of the Golden Rule, they will be trying to create a climate of relationships in which
persons are valued for their contributions to the system. Such an organization, I believe, would
then merit serious theological reflection.
27 One of W. Edwards Demings’ famous “14 points” which formed the core philosophy of Total Quality
Management.
10