Leading with a Purpose

A Business Week article described a new trend--using the Baghavad Gita and Hindu thought as basis for leadership and management training and thought. The idea is that social responsibility and good-works are the route to leadership satisfaction and management excellence. In the PxP model I've taken the very "bottom-line' perspective that ultimately, everything must be in service of shareholder value. But it begs the question of whether leading for a purpose--or being socially responsible as an end in itself--is reason enough to behave well.

It's difficult to tease out my own personal belief in the basic rightness of simply choosing to do good for its own sake, from my suspicion that business people operate in an amoral context. That is, for many people who go into business, and certainly for the stock market as a non-personal, abstract phenomenon, there must be a material reward that justifies behavior. In order for business leaders and organizational teams to make new choices, that material reward must be at least as big as it would be if one were acting neutrally.

Of course, there isn't any way to really measure this. And probably, there are representatives of every position along the continuum from completely mercenary to utterly altruistic. But is there a critical mass of business leaders willing to view the spritual, social impact and karmic consequence of their actions as primary concerns, rather than their profit margin and stock price?