Approaches to leadership are increasingly taking on qualitative characteristics. Sounds good to me. And in this context a certain attention to spirituality has emerged. In seminars, training programmes or coaching processes we are seeing a greater use of methods, practices and terminology that is being taken from various spiritual traditions (meditation, quiet contemplation, a sense of presence, clear consciousness, standing back from the woes of the outside world, etc.).

I must confess that when I hear or read certain ‘spiritual’ rhetoric in the context of executive education I often recall the words of a politician when he said, ‘Get down, here come our boys’. There is no doubt that if this rhetoric is well received it is because it detects a serious and growing problem, and identifies a certain need. Corporate life and leadership roles today are under levels of pressure, demands and uncertainty that are difficult to cope with and integrate. The complexity of relationships and modern technologies is...

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We are living in an age where innovation and change are totally endorsed. Not only are they seen as politically correct, but they form part of the horizon beyond which no thinking is possible. They are terms that usually carry a positive meaning, precluding any critical examination of what is being proposed or what is happening in the name of innovation or change.

This becomes obvious to anyone who is following to any extent the current debate on the role of the Humanities in educating professionals, and its role in the University. Playing an important part in this debate is A.T. Kronman’s book: Education’s End. Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life, whose title raises the underlying question; a question that goes beyond the ubiquitous debate on moral education and the place of ethics in university education, and directly addresses the provocative question of the place of the Humanities in educating professionals and, by extension, their place in business schools.

Several...

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In the last few years, business education has been much more about business than education. But this does not mean that it has been met with quiet complacency or the self-satisfaction of believing that we only need peripheral touch-ups. On the contrary, numerous initiatives have proliferated which radically question this situation.

An example is the report, Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education, published recently by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Among other proposals, the report signals the need to foment the development of four personal dimensions among students: analytical thinking, multiple framing, reflective exploration of meaning and practical reasoning. This is not just a proposal; simply reading it already represents a critique: business education tends to inflate some of these capacities while neglecting others.

The ability to think...

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Well, if we compare the fairytale with many of the definitions of leadership, then the answer is yes. Besides, I have no doubts that many supposed leaders, were they to speak honestly, would say that they consider something along the lines of the pretentious and petulant protagonist of the children’s story to be a desired model of leadership.

From my point of view, the interesting thing is that the question cannot be answered if the answer does not focus on the vast number of those who have been overlooked by most theories of leadership (to say nothing of the pompously named leadership development programmes): the followers. It is sometimes forgotten, often with malice aforethought, that leadership is a relational structure, and, in addition to attending to the quality of the leader and project, one must address the quality of those who are connected to this leadership. In other words, sometimes I wonder why I always forget that the quality of leadership requires quality in terms of followers, and that without this, then good leadership is absent.

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I have never been fond of jumping into debates on CSR definitions. It is not because I think such debates useless or unnecessary but rather that I am unsure what we hope to get out of them. But above all, my reservations stem from the fact that we have never tackled the dimensions of debates on definitions clearly enough. Power struggles are also part and parcel of these debates. Such struggles arise because every attempt to establish what things are comes with ideas of how they ought to be. Defining CSR is not an academic exercise but a practical one. It is also of a political nature in the broadest sense.

No definition of CSR is harmless. That is because he who establishes a definition usually gets to tell others how to act. Setting a definition gives one a rod to beat others with and decide whether their actions meet the yardstick. The debate on the nature of CSR is heated because words shape deeds. Thus we should not be surprised that there are tussles and disagreements in this field because these...

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On 25 January 2005, land subsidence resulting from tunnel works for Barcelona’s line 5 metro caused buildings in the El Carmel district to sink and 1,276 people were forced to leave their homes.



After losing everything, they had to endure a totally makeshift existence living in hotels, relatives’ houses and temporary accommodation for almost two years. On 11 March 2011, a 9.0 scale earthquake struck northeast Japan and triggered a tsunami that took less than half an hour to hit the coast. 40-metre high waves (16 storeys) flooded an area of over 500 square kilometres, killing 20,000 people, destroying the livelihoods and ruining the lives of many thousands more, and wiping out 100,000 buildings.

On 13 January 2012, the Costa Concordia cruise ship ran aground off the Italian island of Giglio. The hull was gashed open in several places provoking flooding which led it to capsize in shallow waters with serious consequences of 15 dead and 29 missing to date, and the evacuation of 4,200 passengers.

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In his political memoirs, Tony Blair writes of how he felt when he was appointed Prime Minister. As I walked up the steps, I tried to clear my mind and focus on what I was going to say. I finally put my finger on the fear that had risen within me during the day: from now on I would be on my own. There would be no more team spirit, comradeship or feelings shared with a circle of friends. It would be me and them. In a deep sense, I would be unable to enter their lives, as they would be unable to enter mine. One can find any number of similar remarks by leaders in their memoirs and biographies, all expressing the loneliness of those wielding power. In my view, this loneliness can only be mastered and channelled if the leader shoulders the burden of leadership and cultivates an ‘inner life’.

Politicians who have signally failed to cultivate an ‘inner life’ include Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo’ (nicknamed ‘The Sphinx’ for his cold, imperious mien and his unsmiling, taciturn nature) and the enigmatic Mariano Rajoy...

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For some time now, there have been an increasing number of voices insisting, both directly and indirectly, that students must be considered as customers. Especially in universities. And more especially in business schools. Does this insistence make sense? Should we redefine educational institutions as businesses that provide educational services?

There is no doubt that the emphasis on a customer focus has its raison d’être. It has not always been clear that the priority of teachers is that their students should learn. On occasions, education has been so focused on the teacher that sight has been lost of something really fundamental: what matters is not that there is someone teaching, but that there is someone learning. The former does not always guarantee the latter. Sometimes, the student has been reduced to being a receptacle of content to the point that it has been forgotten that the act of learning involves the whole person, not just some cognitive aspects. In the same way that it is said—and the criticism is made—that some doctors treat illnesses rather than the ill, it could be said that there are teachers who concern themselves with content rather than with people. If it is also considered that not everyone learns in the same way, clearly the need to attend to the learner (or the person who declares a wish to learn) cannot be denied. Furthermore, we are talking about adults and, very often, professionals with many years of highly developed experience, so it is both imperative and essential to adopt a focus that gives them genuine joint responsibility in their learning process. Hence the enormous importance of the change of register implicit in understanding that it is the institution as such which educates, and consequently, that the services planned which are peripheral to the explicitly educational activities also educate and transmit values. This is something quite different, incidentally, from believing that it is understandable and acceptable to demand (for the sake of the customer focus) that the services of all kinds required within the framework of an educational institution should develop a relationship with the student that borders on the servile… or to believe that the "customer" has the last word on curricular content.

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One obvious aspect of the path taken in recent years is that the more talk there is of CSR, the less talk there is of business ethics. Since the turn of the last century the growth in CSR has been accompanied by a decline in business ethics.

It must be said that the CSR approach is far closer to managerial logic, which is probably the reason for its success. At first sight, its starting point is far more specific and objective as regards both business management and the classroom discussion of case studies. In short, it is a matter of dealing with the impact and/or social and environmental consequences of business activities (a question no company can elude) because if there is one thing that all companies do, it is take action: and all actions have consequences. The starting point is so undeniable that discussions have focussed on the scope and legitimacy of the demands of responsibility, but not on responsibility itself. Against this backdrop, business ethics inevitably seems to respond to a deductive,...

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Something more than operating in a range of countries, that much is clear. But also something more than thinking globally and having a global perspective when talking about strategy. It also means, if you will allow me to put it this way, undertaking an educative function in the diverse contexts a company operates in. And not exactly by the simple fact of developing internal training programmes, but rather by transmitting, reinforcing and disseminating a specific business culture everywhere.

Issues such as these were going through my mind while I took part in Abertis’ Volunteer Day. Because the appeal of what took place there was that it was not a matter of a simple local event at its corporate central office. It was an event (a range of events) that took place simultaneously in the various countries in which Abertis has established itself.

Thus, the comments that follow are not about corporate volunteering, nor about the ambiguous diversity of initiatives that companies carry out under this heading....

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