# Moral Leadership

*Exported from [Holy-Writings.com](https://www.holy-writings.com/) on 2026-06-19 — 1 clipping.*

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> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Eloy Anello, Moral Leadership, bahai-library.com.
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> 
> “MORAL LEADERSHIP”
> 
> ELOY ANELLO
> 
> © EBBF, 2001
> Saturday 27–10-2001
> 
> This is a transcript of the lecture as it was presented at the conference
> and has not been edited for content or grammar.
> 
> *****
> 
> It truly is a pleasure to be here. I was here physically yesterday, only partly mentally though
> because I had come a long way – I crossed the big pond, then through Europe to get here, and
> it truly is an exciting event that I am able to participate in.
> 
> I will begin. I’ve prepared a few notes and I would like to read them to you. My discourse on
> the subject – it’s very short. And then I would like to show you a few transparencies that I use
> in my training in the area of moral leadership. And then after that I guess we will do what we
> all do best and interact and ask questions and try to figure out why moral leadership is so
> important in the realm of business and promoting economic and social development.
> 
> If you don’t mind I’d like to sit down to read this to you. I liked the ‘de mores’ style of
> presentation yesterday. It was very calm and relaxed and I’d like to follow on from that.
> 
> I was asked to talk to you about moral leadership and the role of business in enhancing the
> prosperity of humankind. People who work in business are people who are committed to
> developing virtues and whom have strong core values based on ethics and moral concerns.
> And this tends to enable them to climb in to positions of authority and trust. If we can find
> ways to encourage these people to explore with us the dimensions of moral leadership and
> they can see themselves being empowered personally and professio nally, and because they are
> leaders already they can see how they can empower their people, then moral leadership can
> become an important area for both training and development of human resources. This, I
> believe, could then become a significant contribution in bringing into the leadership equation
> the much-needed moral dimension that is currently lacking in today’s business world. People
> who work in the business world are, by nature, constructors of society. Through the
> application of their entrepreneurial talents they can create business organisations that can
> generate wealth.
> 
> Abdu’l-Baha states that:
> 
> “Wealth is praiseworthy in the highest degree if it is acquired by an individuals own efforts
> and the grace of God in commerce, agriculture, art, and industry, and if it be expended for
> philanthropic purposes. Above all, if a judicious and resourceful individual should initiate
> measures which would universally enrich the masses of the people there could be no
> undertaking greater than this, and it would rank in the sight of God as the supreme
> achievement, for such a benefactor would supply the needs and ensure the comfort and the
> well being of a great multitude.”
> This is a remarkable statement on business. The acquiring of wealth for the purpose of
> enriching the masses, to supply the needs and ensure the comfort and well being of great
> multitude. This is a powerful statement for guiding Bahai- inspired efforts and for instilling,
> with a sense of purpose, the noble effort of generating wealth and prosperity for all
> humankind. The quote continues with these final words of encouragement and exhortation for
> moral and social responsibility, a subject that we have been listening to and learning much
> from in the past few days.
> 
> “ Wealth is most commendable providing the entire population is wealthy. If, however, a few
> have inordinate riches while the rest are impoverished, and no fruit or benefit accrues from
> that wealth, then it is only a liability to its possessor. If, on the other hand, it is expended for
> the promotion of knowledge, the founding of elementary and other schools, the
> encouragement of art and industry, the training of orphans and the poor - in brief, if it is
> dedicated to the welfare of society - its possessor will stand out before God and man as the
> most excellent of all who live on earth and will be accounted as one of the people of
> paradise.”
> 
> So, how do we get business, folks, to turn in this direction? To use their entrepreneurial
> capabilities to the promotion of an ever-advancing civilisation that is conducive to the
> common good? The challenge is how to transform the current mentality that prevails the
> business world, which seeks to satisfy only the profit motive without adequate consideration
> of environmental and social concerns. How to get business to look at what Robert Rubenstein
> said yesterday and all of our other guest speakers have referred to up until now as the ‘triple
> bottom line’? Is excruciating pain the only way to get us to a clear and transparent
> consideration of this imperative, to see the bottom line as much more than profit on
> investment? True wealth is that which is generated by quality profits. This I mean profits
> which are sustainable, meaning ecologically and socially sustainable over generations.
> Quality profits require, aga in, a balance sheet which tabulates the quantitative results and
> impacts but also the importantly considers the qualitative impacts of our wealth generating
> strategies on our social and environmental landscapes. To do this is nothing short of being
> respons ive to the moral imperative of exercising justice and fair play to all people and to all of
> nature. It is in essence, as I see it, a best practice of moral leadership.
> 
> In thinking about this I have come up with one helpful way that I have found in working with
> development and educational organisations that I’ve been involved in, and one way is to look
> at their institutional roles and then define the capabilities needed to define these roles. So for
> example, what is business’s primary role in society, and what is society’s role in promoting
> human development and learning. In the ‘Prosperity for Humankind’ document there is a very
> clear and concise role given to business, which is the following:
> 
> “The most important role that economic efforts must play in development lye’s in equipping
> people and institutions with means through which they can achieve the real purpose of
> development. That is laying the foundations for a new social order that can cultivate the
> limitless potentialities latent in human consciousness.”
> 
> When I think of this for a moment I become deeply motivated to want to figure out ways in
> which the resources I generate as an individual - mostly human capital, not too much financial
> capital unfortunately – can be used to help develop the potentialities of human consciousness.
> And then I think about all the resources that others generate and how these, if there were
> enough justice and equity, could be used to raise human consciousness to level where people,
> institutions, and communities can think and act inter-dependently in response to their issues
> and problems which is really the goal of human development and sustainable learning, action
> learning.
> 
> I also will talk a bit about the institution I come from – Nur University. And Nur University in
> its efforts to educate and train new businesses leaders has developed a Bahai- inspired
> conceptual framework of moral leadership, which I have been graciously invited, by the
> EBBF to, present you today. The conceptual framework, which consists of six essential
> elements and eighteen capabilities, have been extensively promoted through training courses
> throughout Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and just recently in India. Primary
> participants, or beneficiaries of our training have been public school teachers, personnel of
> civil society organisations, municipal governments, public health workers and technical staff
> within a variety of public and private institutions. In Latin America we have incorporated the
> moral leadership framework into our MBA program and we have found great receptivity
> among our students and prominent members of the business community. The framework of
> moral leadership, which I will briefly present to you today, is the fruit of many colleagues and
> represents systematisation of the characteristics of individuals who have exercised moral
> leadership in world history and are particularly exemplified in the life of Abdu’l-Baha, a
> nineteenth and twentieth century figure who was considered to have, in words of Stamford
> University’s President, in 1911,
> 
> “Walked the mystical path with practical feet.”
> 
> I might add here a personal observation, and especially pertinent I believe to the youth, I think
> this definition of combining the spiritual with the practical is how I visualise an exemplary
> business person who aspires to be successful in today’s world. It should be noted here also
> that each of the elements of the moral leadership framework and its capacities are amply
> substantiated by the Bahai writings, and especially systematised by a masterful work written
> by Abdu’l-Baha entitled ‘The Secret of Divine Civilisation’ in which he describes the
> conditions of the learned of society and the role they play in promoting an ever-advancing
> civilisation.
> 
> As I present to you this outline of the conceptual framework and read to you I don’t think
> there will be much more time than to familiarise you with the names of the eighteen
> capabilities and where they are pointing to in regards to knowledge, skills, attitudes and
> qualities. And I will read them, but we’ll go into little more depth on the elements of the
> conceptual framework – there are six. But I would like for you to assist me in reflecting how
> we might adapt this model and program to the European business context. This is a context
> which is new to me and I think application has to be done by those, as the Turkish saying says
> ‘a man can not really speak of truth unless he has one foot in the stirrup’ and I think that you
> all have at least one foot in the stirrup in regards to European business.
> 
> Nur University would greatly appreciate your insights and comments in how we might present
> our proposal to your associates. In speaking briefly with George, he has assured me that this is
> an important topic on the agenda of the EBBF at this present time, and I hope we will have
> the opportunity in the next few days to further discuss this at length with him and other
> members. Your reflections, therefore, will be very timely in pushing the idea to its next level
> of application within the European context.
> I’d like to stop there with the reading of my introductory message, and I’d like to show you a
> few slides that I hope will stimulate the kind of discussions we all want to generate with this
> topic.
> 
> Trying to summarise moral leadership (this is a copy of the one hundred and eighty nine page
> manual by the way) but the theme is so broad and the topics and all the spin-off that have to
> do with moral leadership are so extensive that it’s very difficult to summarise this in to a forty
> minute presentation. It reminds me of what Abraham Lincoln said when he was elected
> president; he went to the White House after leaving his home in Illinois. He was a farmer and
> was a simple man they say, and he went off to the White House to be the president. On a
> Sunday he was feeling very nostalgic as he was walking through the gardens and so he
> decides to write to one of his old friends back home and he gets out a whole bunch of paper
> and a feather pen, and he starts writing away, just pouring his heart out that he’s missing the
> farm, missing his friends, and he writes this real huge letter – like six or seven pages. Then at
> the very end he says goodbye and then he says ‘P.S Dear Friend, I wish I could have written a
> shorter letter but I don’t have the time.’ And really preparing this summary is very hard to do.
> First of all, it’s very hard to find the time, so I’m going to try to be brief, but I recognise that
> I’m probably going to … well, hopefully I’ll generate more questions than answers than I
> could possibly give, and I guess that would be a good sign if we can do that, or if this can do
> that.
> 
> One of the main structures of our training in moral leadership has to do with a methodology or
> a process we call ‘transformational training’. And transformational training is about change
> and it’s about getting us from point A to point B. We believe that this is a process and there
> are stages in this process in this change of transformation – personal and collective. This is a
> brief drawing. I’m sure that many of you who are in the field of education and training know
> this concept. But it’s a structure. It’s a way we think about ourselves, it a way we think about
> life, it’s the way we think about the eventual application of moral leadership, in a real context.
> So, this idea that we all start from a point where we have concepts, we have knowledge, we
> have attitudes, we have assumptions, we have beliefs, and we even have prejudices, and those
> need to be unfrozen, or they need to be questioned, and they need to be looked at very
> critically. And so we start of by preparing those that attend our courses, our workshops, our
> seminars, our MBA’s – in whatever context we’re teaching and learning about moral
> leadership. We start out by getting people prepared to question their own thinking – what
> Peter Singe would call ‘the mental models’ we all have - about the subject (in this case of
> leadership, and the moral dimension of leadership). So if we compare this stage of our
> thinking with the sort of rigid ness, the structure, of an ice cube, we start questioning and
> introducing new concepts that work kind of like how the heat would work to ice – it starts to
> melt, or unfreeze the coldness and the rigidity of that structure. So then when we get a
> structure that is very fluid – it’s almost a non-structure. It’s in a state of transition. This is the
> moment of change, it is a time of movement – going form the old to the new, but we don’t
> know what the ‘new’ is yet so we’re defining that by questioning what we know it’s not – in
> other words where we’ve come from, our mental models, our mental structures and ways of
> thinking about things that are no longer conducive or applicable to the worlds situation and to
> our own evolving state of being. Once we get those beliefs and prejudices and assumptions
> and attitudes unfrozen, and we can start moving the liquid of our thinking into a new
> structure. Some like the term ‘re- freezing’, others don’t too much because why do we have to
> go back and be cold again some say. But the idea is here that we have to put our thinking into
> some kind of structure that will serve the purpose of guiding action and we can test it out for a
> time and see how well it works in context as we look at specific applications. So that’s is
> some new form and it’s definitely a form which needs to be consistent with reality, with the
> current thinking, and it needs to be evolutionary – that is it needs to be changing constantly as
> we introduce new challenges and concepts to it. If you can think then of that structure in a
> training context then I think this will help to see how we introduce more leadership. This is a
> quote, universally known - if somebody knows whom the author is, and I’d like to know. I’ve
> used it for a long time, but I don’t know who the author is. Nevertheless, it’s a great quote and
> to me it says ‘ there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose moment has come’ (Unsure
> suggestion from audience that it might be Einstein). It’s Einstein…? Well, whoever it’s by he
> knew that ideas are what move change. This whole idea - and Dahl, of course, was addressing
> this perfectly yesterday when he was describing really what cognitive psychology has been
> telling us for a long time, and I think cognitive psychology is going to have a rebound with
> this and is going to have another better moment with this than when it tried dot convince us of
> this in the sixties and seventies - but really it is how we think about ourselves and how we
> think about our world, what we think our perceptions are, what our mental models of the
> world are that determine our behaviour. The reality of our being, and this is substantiated in
> the Bahai writings, is our thought, and the human mind is where we generate thought. I know
> that in the Bible there is a quote that says ‘As ye thinketh, so ye are’. So, thought has a lot to
> do with how we’re going to bring about change. And if we can work on our thought processes
> and on our thinking then we may be able to move towards action, which is more consistent
> and more applicable. And in the realm of leadership this is absolutely necessary.
> 
> Now mental models, I said, were beliefs, concepts, attitudes, assumptions, prejudices formed
> during childhood and adolescence: How they serve to interpret reality and direct our action,
> they limit our thinking and acting as they have not been examined. That’s one of their
> characteristics and one of the reasons why they need to be examined. One of the reasons why
> they need to be examined is because they have not been examined, they are mostly
> unconscious notions about reality, and then we act on those notions that are really not founded
> on independent investigation. As long as a person remains unconscious of his or her mental
> models, it is impossible to change them. Another assumption. This idea here that our ideas or
> our thinking produces ideas or mental models, the way we perceive reality, produces
> behaviours or conducts and attitudes, and these produce results in groups. If our concept of
> leadership is a paternalistic concept of leadership, then our behaviours and attitudes will also
> be paternalistic and we will disempower the potentialities of human consciousness in the
> groups we work with and so the results will produce people that are basically dysfunctional
> because we have not been able to empower them.
> 
> The mental models will be looked at in this way: we will put a mental model here - lets say
> we will look at authoritarian leadership as a mental model. What is the underlying reasons,
> beliefs, concepts that motivate that kind of leadership? We will look at these questions – what
> are the assumptions of this mental model? What beliefs sustain this mental model? What
> concepts support this mental model? We would be doing this all in the context of the de-
> freezing phase of change.
> 
> We would then start when some of these mental models about leadership, before we actually
> get in to presenting our proposal for moral leadership, we would talk about how these models
> of mental leadership have created the… and really the participants in training, come up with
> all the different causes and effects of these mental models that are produced - the
> dysfunctional society that we live in.
> We would then be talking about change. This is a quote that I like to use personally from
> Herr Veseviokes who has said that before status quo was the norm and change was the
> exception, now status quo is the exception and change is the norm. We move people towards
> the recognition that change is absolutely necessary – later we will see that it becomes a moral
> imperative, but at this point we’re talking about the necessity for change. We’ve been talking
> about the behaviours, attitudes, knowledge, concepts that disempower change, and now we
> want to move towards looking at the alternatives. One of the things about presenting moral
> leadership in the framework, unless we go through some of this preparation in getting people
> to move in a participative way towards the idea of change – changing themselves and then
> being agents of change for society or institutions, we will look at, in preparation for that and
> presenting the moral leadership framework, we will work with people on concepts of this as
> well. This is from Arthur Schoppenhower who, I think, very brilliantly said that
> 
> ‘All truth passes through three stages: First it is ridiculed; second it is violently opposed;
> thirdly it is accepted as obvious’.
> 
> This is a quote, which in 1987, the World Health Organisation came out with very
> disappointed over it’s evaluation of the ‘health for all’ program which was trying to set up
> primary health care systems throughout the world in developing world countries. And it’s not
> all that difficult to set up primary systems, but nevertheless the World Health Organisations
> attempts in most countries failed. So this is taken of their evaluation of that program – ’health
> for all’ – and they say that it is not through lack of scientific knowledge, nor through lack of
> appropriate administrative models or for lack of financial resources, but rather through lack of
> moral leadership at all levels was attributed to failure of that cause – the lack of moral
> leadership.
> 
> Now what we want to do when we get in to looking at the alternatives to the dysfunctional
> mental models, for example these I just mentioned a few of them earlier, but these are the
> dominant or prevailing mental models about leadership, can be systematised into four or five.
> We also include democratic leadership, (but we do a presentation of that separately because
> we have found that there are a number of strengths we would like to build on and use as a
> segway to get to moral leadership) but these are definitely the old mental models that we’re
> all familiar with. We’ll look at those, as I said people will work on these mental models and
> look at their causes and effects in terms of behaviours, attitudes, and then other effects in the
> outer circles - how this leadership effects the groups or the organisations they work with.
> 
> Now, we’re trying to move from the breaking, the questioning and melting down of these
> mental models. We like to think of what we’re doing as transforming the mental models into
> new conceptual frameworks, and these would be a few definitions of what we say would be
> mental frameworks. They are consciousness of our mental model. A consciousness of our
> mental model allows to examine them and see their inconsistencies. Questioning, reflection,
> and acquiring knowledge helps us gradually construct conceptual frameworks – they guide
> our learning and our action. Without this kind of learning, transformation cannot occur.
> Again what we’re doing here is working with a concept of training that we call
> ‘transformational’ and so we’re really after change, we’re really after application, we’re not
> after refining our current thinking, or mental models, or current practices and trying to figure
> out how we can polish and make them better – that’s a technical function which we can get in
> to once we have decided what kind of leadership and where we want to go with that
> leadership once it’s established. Conceptual frameworks need to be consistent and evolve with
> growth and change.
> So, this would like something like this – we’d work on old mental models then would come
> up with the first element of a transformed mental model or come up with the first value or
> principle of a new conceptual framework. I will present to you right now this conceptual
> framework of moral leadership. These are the six elements, again, in training, we allow for
> time working with groups with people to go through each one of these. We look at there
> characteristics, we look also at what kind of behaviour and attitudes and conduct these
> elements or values produce in organisations, in communities and even within the individual
> and personal development and growth.
> 
> The first one is service to the common good. This is one that I’ve been hearing talked about a
> lot in this conference and you’re hearing more and more this come up. I think it was Dahl
> who mentioned yesterday, that (talking about the work ethic) people in organisations if they
> can see how what they do is of service to the social or common good, then they become very
> inspired and they become very enthusiastic and encouraged, and they want to do that. And
> this is one of the motors, the great forces behind the moral leadership framework is this first
> element of service to the common good. In Ecuador I worked with a group of Afro-
> Ecuadorians, a group of Africans that were taken to Ecuador as slaves, and these were public
> school teachers. They came up with this definition after a moral leadership workshop. They
> looked at traditional leadership as those mental models I showed you earlier; ‘seeks to
> dominate and control others so that they will serve the ones in charge’. ‘Moral leadership
> seeks to dominate and control self or ego, so that it is free to serve others’. They came up with
> this definition and I’ve showed this all over the world. I showed it in Africa after going there
> twice this year doing extensive training there with NGO’s and educational institutions, and
> this quote really moves a lot of people. So basically looking at this first element of service to
> the common good, we would say that these styles or behaviours of leadership are centred, this
> whole thinking - the mental models are centred and are based on the ego, on self interest, on
> serving ones self or ones group. Transformation of that is oriented towards service to the
> common good, service to the social good, the leader here in an egocentric leadership
> paradigm is on top and all of his or her follows are below to serve him or her, and in this
> concept service is what enables or empowers a leader to really provide attention to and
> interest in what the group is seeking. So the leader is looked at as one who is able to be at the
> service of others.
> 
> The second one here is investigation and application of truth. Basically, this here would look
> something like this. We look at it as a twin moral responsibility to investigate truth and then
> to apply truth. When we talk about truth here we’re really talking about these two dimensions
> of truth - the contingent truth (how things are), and the ideal truth, which is based on
> principles and values (how things are to be). And investigating truth has to take into
> consideration both these dimensions. Application of truth is the other dimension of this twin
> moral responsibility. Often times truth meaning reality or, like I say, the way things are now
> or the way things are to be, what our aspirations are telling us things aught to be, what our
> vision and what our ideals are telling us things aught to be, there are often times investigated
> but not applied. In order for moral leadership to be effective it would have to be
> indispensable. These two functions, in truth are inseparable – that’s what I wanted to say.
> 
> I like to show this one – it helps to wake people up! This poor guy is out in the desert and he
> comes to a sign after he’s been walking along thinking that this was his salvation - you know,
> for miles ahead he saw this sign - and he finally gets to it, has no water, is starving, and this
> sign tells him ‘at this moment you are precisely here’. Well, this is what we often do, this is
> the way we often treat truth and our investigation of things, of reality. We investigate were we
> are, we investigate the contingent, or the here and the now, and we convince ourselves that we
> are here, that we do not have the power to change much and that we have a lot of limitations
> and we convince ourselves that we are really incapable of bringing about change. Now, the
> reason that that happens is because where we are precisely cannot be determined unless you
> have a point of reference to which you are referring. So how can we determine where we are
> if we do not know where we want to be, where we want to go? And so it get s a little
> philosophical but the idea here is that, really, vision of where we would like to be, where we
> aught to be, the vision that is driven by our values and our principles, and by the ideal truths
> that we are seeking to someday develop in ourselves and in society - unless that’s established
> this makes no sense, it has no meaning. So if this sign said ‘you are precisely here which is
> three kilometres north-east of the next oasis’ then that would be very encouraging for this
> poor guy, because he would see where his ideal future laid, and then he would get motivated
> and stimulated and would go reaching off in that direction to reach his desired future – water.
> So this is the thinking behind the idea of truth being both contingent and future.
> 
> The next idea here is about personal transformation and social transformation. This is really
> the purpose of moral leadership – when we get right down to it this is what moral leadership
> really is about. Service to the common good is an orientation, an orientation that breaks with
> the paradigm that leadership is for control and to dominate. Investigation and application of
> truth really tells us, and we’ve looked at the different moral leaders in history and really they
> were people who when they spoke had done their research before they spoke. They knew
> what they were talking about, they’d investigated truth independently, they were free from
> prejudice, they were free from blind imitation and they did the investigation of truth, but they
> didn’t just investigate the way things are, they looked at the way things aught to be and they
> created a vision. Their vision inspired us to follow them because that vision was based on a
> thorough investigation of truth and not just based on some dream that they had. Personal
> transformation and social transformation, in addition to being a commitment of moral
> leadership, is really the purpose of moral leadership and it really is impossible to imagine the
> application of moral leadership unless we begin with ourselves. So personal transformation is
> really at the heart of social transformation, unless one is able to change and willing to change,
> it is in a process of almost constant learning and change, it is almost impossible to imagine
> that one could ever exercise lasting influence and change in ones group or ones society or
> institution. So really, the dynamic force of example is at the heart of this concept and it begins
> with one’s own commitment and sense of purpose for change.
> 
> The next is the necessity of transcendence. Transcendence here basically has two dimensions
> to it. One is this dimension that Einstein spoke of (or at least it was an adage that was
> attributed to Einstein); that one cannot solve a problem with the same mentality that created
> the problem, and really in leadership we’re always constantly coming upon problems that
> when we all try and jump in and solve the problem with the same mentality we’re no t even
> aware of this because mostly it’s our mental models, which is jumping in a and trying to solve
> problems – grabbing the bull by the horn so to speak, and just dealing with this problem face
> on. Often times what we’re doing is we’re interpreting the problem, first of all, from a
> paradigm or a way of thinking that created the problem itself – so we really can’t extract
> ourselves from the problem long enough to look at it from a new perspective. Transcendence
> gives us that new perspective. Transcendence is being able to play on the playing field and at
> the same time sitting up on the stands. So you can see the whole field, you can see the system
> before you, you can see the patterns that are at work and you can understand the problem
> from a holistic perspective. Once you’ve seen that and you’ve done that in your mind you’ve
> transcended and been able to see that way, you can return to a problem and provide insight
> and fresh perspective which often times brings a fresh breeze of understanding about a
> problem and then people rally around that and you can start working towards significant
> change. But the other dimension of that is, of course, our commitment to values that are
> transcendental or values that are of great purpose or nobility, and often times in the heat of a
> discussion, or the heat that’s generated from tension produced from problem solving, it’s
> often our capacity to remember those values that we’re committed to, those principals and the
> vision of what we’re working for to establish that enables us to transcend those difficult
> moments and to recommit ourselves and it also brings us an inner tranquillity because we’re
> understanding where we’re going and in the beginning and that is very important for
> transcendence.
> 
> The next element is the essential nobility of man, or the essential nobility of human nature (it
> think we should e saying it to be more gender-sensitive). Essential nobility of the human
> being: I think there are so many things that were said today that brought this out – but actually
> this belief or conviction in the essential nobility is what we feel absolutely necessary for
> moral leadership development because if this were not the case… - we look into all the
> different conceptions that have existed historically about the human being and we break
> people up into groups and have a really good discussion about this one, but essentially what
> we’ve always come to as a conclusion is that unless there is this essential nobility in the
> human being, and the at the human nature is essentially one of goodness and nobility, that all
> this other development would have no purpose. Service to the common good really couldn’t
> exist because it would be a contradiction. Investigation and application of truth would be
> meaningless. Personal and social transforma tion would also be impossible to really bring
> about unless we have this essential conviction human nobility. Transcendence would not be
> possible because that requires the human spirit to rise above the baser nature and the lower
> nature of man. So we look at this and there is a quote that I’d like to share. Again it’s taken
> from the Bahai writings and as I said earlier that this is a Bahai- inspired conceptual
> framework and this one here, by the Founder of the Baha Faith, Baha’u’llah, talks about
> education for empowerment. And He said:
> 
> “Regard men as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education, can alone, cause it to
> reveal it’s treasure and enable mankind to benefit there from”
> 
> This is a particularly applicable quote when working with educators and we have worked
> much with educators. But I think that looking at the human being as a mine rich in gems of
> inestimable value is really pointing to this essential nobility in the human being.
> 
> And to end with: I look at this last one as an imperative as the possibility for moral leadership
> development and the possibility for seeing some kind of significant transformation and result
> would depend on the exercise of capabilities. When we talk about capabilities or human
> capacity, we’re talking about these four elements or components. When we are able to
> exercise capacity or human capabilities, if we’re able to build capacity by putting in practice
> capabilities for personal and social transformation, we take our concepts, we take our qualities
> (which really are the values and the virtues that we have identified) and attitudes and skills
> then we have capacity. So a capacity is the combination or the synergy of these four
> components. And I’d like to end by, like I said earlier I wouldn’t be able to do much more
> than to read to you, the eighteen capabilities that the moral leadership framework is based on,
> and I will start - now that you have an operational definition of what we’re talking about when
> we say capacity is again these four elements – concepts, qualities, attitudes and skills. So if
> we look at first of all capabilities that contribute to personal transformation we’ve identified
> seven of those.
> 
> Maybe there isn’t enough time to read all eighteen of these, so maybe we could read one or
> two of them – maybe someone else, a woman’s voice to help balance all of this, could read?
> 
> (Lady’s voice is barely audible) investigating self and weakness without involving the ego;
> self motivation … involving conceptual framework…the ability to take initiative in a creative
> and …way; the capability to endeavour to overcome obstacles in the achievement of goals;
> the ability to oppose one’s lower fashioned and eccentric tendencies… capability to manage
> one’s affairs and responsibilities with rectitude of conduct based on moral and ethical
> principles; and the last on the list, the capability to think systemically in the search for
> solutions.
> 
> So those are the capabilities that we would put under the personal transformation area (or
> concern) and these would be the capabilities that contribute to better inter-personal
> relationships: The capability to review ones thoughts and actions with love, the capability to
> encourage others and to bring joy to their hearts, the capability to participate effectively in the
> process of consultation in group decision making, the capability to be a loving and responsible
> member of a family, the capability to create and promote unity in diversity. Ok, so these then
> would contribute to inter-personal relationships.
> 
> The last one would be the capabilities that contribute to social transformation: the capability
> to create a vision of the desired future based on shared values and principles and to articulate
> it clearly and simply so that it inspires in others a sense of commitment towards fulfilment,
> the capability to understand relationships of domination and to contribute to their
> transformation into relationships based on a reciprocal sharing and mutual service, the
> capability to contribute in the establishment of justice, the capability to commit oneself to the
> process of empowering educational activities, the capability to serve of institutions in society
> in ways that assist their members to develop and utilise their talents and capabilities in service
> to mankind, the capability to perceive and interpret the meaning of present day social
> processes and events in the light of a … perspective.
> 
> So I would just like to close with this last statement I have written here. Now after seeing that
> as a very brief and quick presentation of moral leadership, albeit full of imperfections and
> possibly of just too short to really get into it in any significant way, nevertheless I can imagine
> that any open minded executive or business man or woman would not see the benefit of
> promoting this kind of leadership in their company. The principle challenge for us gathered at
> this meeting will be how we introduce these concepts and how we show their practical
> applications in benefit of business and social project without losing too much economic
> benefit for the company in the long run. I would like to quote with a quote from Steven Karvi
> and another from Abdu’l- Baha respectively.
> 
> “The lesson of history is that to the degree people and civilizations have operated in harmony
> with correct principles, they have prospered. At the root of societies decline are foolish
> practices that represent violations of correct principles”
> 
> And, lastly, from Abdu’l- Baha;
> “The honour and distinction of the individual consists in this: that he become a source of
> social good”
> 
> Thank you very much.
> 
> Yes, mostly in seminars. We are a post- graduate school. Nur University for a good ten years
> was offering moral leadership training for the business centre, small industries and business
> people across the board, small medium and large organisations. Yes, mostly through
> seminars. Of course this can also be introduced for technical systems that a company might
> want to look at its own training program and see how these principles, these concepts, these
> capacities could be applied to strengthen, enhance, enrich their own training program. I think
> it works very well as a human resource development and a leadership education program in
> that it not only has contents that are very challenging and stimulating to apply for better
> business practice, but it also, our program in its entirety, has a lot of methodology and
> techniques and processes that we take people through h in a learning environment and
> stimulating a lot of participation and dialogue so that people really take ownership of these
> concepts and begin to apply them because of their motivation because they have bought into it
> because they basically have participated in a lot of this in the construction of what I was
> presenting. It’s hard to see that in a presentation like this, but we really do get down to
> employing participative methodologies and interactive teaching/learning techniques and
> technologies that really are empowering for learning. So that’s why I say it is both an
> education and a development program and some of that development can be encouraged and
> oriented and guided through technical assistants – we might do consultancies with an
> organisation that wants us to figure out how to motivate the human resources, how to get
> people to be more centred on ideals and how to get people to move in a consistent way
> towards the fulfilment of the institutions vision. We have also been involved in a lot of
> strategic planning with businesses as well, helping them if a strategic planning really has to do
> with this whole contextual analysis, and then visioning and establishing a shared institutional
> vision, then coming up with the mission and then identifying guiding principles for the
> institution and then really coming up with a framework of the process of development for the
> institution and then through this tri-dimensional analysis of context, process and vision, you
> come up with the strategies that can guide an institution that can really be the strategic plan
> for that institution for five or ten years in the future. So we have worked with moral
> leadership concepts in some of our methodologies for getting people to work in groups on
> their strategic plans. But mostly you’re right – mostly we do training, seminars, short courses,
> it depends on the organisation. Sometimes we will do long courses. We have just completed a
> Masters degree in educational leadership, which was based on the moral leadership modules.
> This is module number one. We have sixteen other modules that accompany this for the full
> course, which could be offered as a Masters degree, and we’ve done that in Ecuador where we
> offered this as a Masters degree to teachers. But again your question is about private
> enterprise, private business, and I think that training is a place to start with because the
> training is very empowering and is very, as I say transformational. People come to the
> workshops, often sceptical, saying ‘what is this moral leadership, is it some kind of
> inquisition, is it some kind of religious thing?’ – people come with a mental model and
> concerns and worries about what we mean by moral leadership, but as we begin to work with
> them and create a non-threatening environment and get people to really think deeply about
> their own mental models concerning leadership and the moral or ethical dimensions, and then
> we move into those other stages, so real transformation starts to take place. Organisations that
> go through that kind of training will always ask for more, or will want a larger course. As an
> example of this; I trained a sugar cane co-operative in Santa Cruz, Bolivia they came to one of
> my courses on this and the top executive management team came – there were eight of them –
> and the CEO was there as well all and all the managers of the units were there. They came,
> they went through the course along with other participants (so I think there were about twenty
> five in all) and they were so pleased and happy of what had taken place inside them – their
> own transformational process – that they went back and decided that this was applicable for
> the whole institution so they sent sixteen of their line managers to the course and so we gave
> it again to the sixteen middle management professionals there. So the training is good to start
> with – people to get very enthusiastic about it and interested in it because of what they go
> through.
> 
> We don’t have any official training resources in Europe now. We want to talk with EBBF and
> others. We’ve done some courses. Doctor Illeno was one of the co-authors of the manual, was
> just in Geneva two weeks ago. In fact there are some people here who were at his workshop
> and he gave a four-day workshop on moral leadership. He was supposed to come by the way
> but he asked me to come to replace him, and he was supposed to be here and he really wanted
> to come but, anyway…he did that course, and other courses have been given at different times
> in different places. I think at Landegg. Anyway, we’re supposed to talk about how we might
> be able to do moral leadership training there and more moral leadership training at different
> levels. But that’s about it. There’s no real Nur University representative. Is that what you
> mean by resources? (answer comes back ‘yes’ from audience member).
> 
> (Voice of another man) A task force, which at the present time is applying the same
> moral leadership concept, the same slid es, in Bosnia and they’re working primarily with
> NGO’s and apparently two of our members are involved there – Caroline Suwicky from
> Geneva and also Shervin Seteray from Luxembourg. There’s one other – John Webber who
> spoke at the ISSAC conference with me on that same subject. And in fact we are trying to get
> two or three ISSACers to follow that same course in Bosnia with the thought that if, in fact,
> that is the effective way to develop young ISSACers or ex-ISSACers then perhaps we can
> extend that programme with them and in more comprehensive and vastly expanded way in
> some location. So there’s a lot of synergy.
> 
> …from Carolina. She worked with us at Nur for a few years and she returned (she’s originally
> from Geneva) to Bosnia, and I understand she’s doing a great job there.
> 
> (Audience member) It’s very interesting and very important what you have to say, but
> can you say something more about unfreezing, because surely that’s the greatest problem,
> isn’t it? I would imagine you would have to use some kind of maybe team/group challenge. I
> think we would have to have a challenge like September 11th to wake us up to our real moral
> lead. I’d like it if you could say a little more about your unfreezing technique.
> 
> Well you’re right about it being very challenging and it’s one of the areas that I get the most
> out of every time I’m involved in a workshop. I know that some trainers like to go there real
> quickly and get out of there and get into the exploration and the discovery phase (which is the
> second phase), the mo vement and change phase, and looking for the alternatives that
> apparently we’re all… I mean, some trainers will say to me that ‘we all know that we don’t
> want to stay there too long dwelling over, or lamenting over our mental models and the way
> things are and the way things used to be’, but I don’t think we’re always so conscious of the
> way things are and the way things used to be until we start putting our ideas out on the table.
> And I think it’s important that we start looking more within ourselves personally. I use some
> techniques (I have a few slides here that maybe we could talk about separately in a medium
> among ourselves - I could show you some specific techniques), but I would like to address
> mostly the idea behind the technique here. That is that until people start to personalise these
> mental models of leadership that have truly disempowered and created all these dysfunctional
> relationships and communications among people in organisations, until we start looking
> inside personally it’s not as significant to do that part of the de- freezing. As long as the enemy
> is outside then it’s not that significant – people don’t really see the need for change. But when
> you can create an environment that gets people to look inside and address themselves when
> they’re thinking about authoritarian thinking and style of leadership, or when they are
> thinking about how they are paternalistic, or how they are not- it-all sometimes or express
> attitudes of superiority or how they are manipulative at times and if you get enough people in
> a group to look inside and deeply question the mental models that are there inside themselves,
> again in a non-threatening way and no-one is pointing fingers at anyone else (there are some
> techniques again, to make sure that doesn’t happen). If it’s an empowering environment
> enough people will go there and feel safe enough to go there and look at how a lot of our
> problems, a lot of the mess we’re in, (in terms of human relationships and communication
> styles among ourselves and how, because of these preconceived notions we have of human
> nature and of the human being in general… so it’s very important, I think, in order to get to
> the second phase, to be able to have invested well in the first phase, to get people to look
> deeply within and see how the y’re contributing to the dysfunctionality of leadership practice
> (as it currently is), is exercised in the world around us; in our families, our society, in our
> organisations. But there are some very specific techniques that I could talk to you about
> separately.
> 
> (Comment from audience member) A little while ago we gave a moral leadership course in
> Bosnia in a Muslim populated town and we had some Surf people attending this workshop.
> The situation was tense in the beginning and we were a bit afraid about how these individuals
> could relate to each other especially as it’s very much interactive and work groups and
> people are encouraged to experience moral leadership themselves and I think that actually
> this is the turning point of the whole concept. I think moral leadership makes things seem so
> obvious to us once we hear it very tangible and it’s very logic. So after the first day hearing
> about the concept and experiencing them selves the leadership styles that …(recording ends)
>
> — *Moral Leadership (Used by permission of the curator)*