| The Case For Good Business
Max De Pree Challenged a Generation
to Lead With Vision and Integrity
After a while, the headlines all look the same: some of the
country’s most visible business entities — from Enron to the New York Stock Exchange
to Martha Stewart — charged with unethical, even criminal activity.
“In
Genesis, we’re told that man was made in God’s image,” says
De Pree, who lives for part of the year in Phoenix. “For a
Christian leader, if everybody with whom she works is made
in God’s image, that carries tremendous implications.”
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It’s no wonder that public confidence in corporate ethics is
arguably at an all-time low. But lest you think business has become
synonymous with scandal, Christian business leader Max De Pree
has another story to tell.
The chairman emeritus of Herman Miller
Inc., one of the world’s largest manufacturers of office furniture,
Max De Pree dedicated his career to leading a Fortune 500 company
with passion and integrity. After his retirement in 1987 as president and CEO, he was elected
to Fortune’s Business Hall of Fame and received the Lifetime Achievement
Award from the Business Enterprise Trust. He has also written five
books, including best-sellers Leadership Jazz and Leadership Is
an Art, which earned accolades from the likes of Time, The
Christian Science Monitor, Tom Peters, Peter Drucker and Bill Clinton. When
De Pree makes the case for good business, people listen.
As someone
with such a wide-ranging view of business, De Pree is not surprised
by the scandals that continue to rock the corporate world. But
to pronounce that business has gone bad? He tells Response that’s
taking things too far: “This is not solely a business problem.
This is American society today. If you follow baseball, you see
the ongoing Pete Rose scandal and the absolutely foolish way in
which he has responded to his own lying. And you see this in people
in the entertainment world, in education and in government.”
What’s
more, he points out, the story of good business is one you won’t
often find at the newsstand. As a consequence, few hear about companies
who value people as well as profits; CEOs who risk their jobs to
do the right thing; managers who don’t step on others to climb
to the top; or businesses who donate time, expertise and money
to the community. “
Take the pharmaceutical company Merck, for example,” says
De Pree. “They developed a solution to the problem of river blindness
in Africa. The people who had river blindness couldn’t afford the
medicine, so they gave it to them. You see, BusinessWeek could
care less about a good story like that, and there’s an awful lot
of that kind of thing that goes on in business.”
Though a company
that makes office furniture doesn’t cure diseases, it can improve
the lives of people who use its products. Famed for design elegance
and innovation, Herman Miller invented among other things the modular
workstation, which ultimately changed the American office landscape
from desks lined up in one big room to private office spaces for
workers.
De Pree’s Herman Miller was not only innovative and responsive
to the market, but also highly productive and profitable. Most
distinctive, however, was the emphasis the company placed on people-centered
systems and corporate integrity. During De Pree’s 40-year tenure,
Herman Miller embodied a groundbreaking management style — a participatory
model where managers and employees worked side-by-side to achieve
the best results.
The art of leadership, De Pree wrote, is “liberating
people to do what is required of them in the most effective and
humane way possible.” This simple yet revolutionary principle propelled
Herman Miller’s phenomenal success. As a consequence, almost every
study on leadership written in the 1990s cited De Pree.
“Max is
certainly the only CEO of a major organization to make an original
contribution to the study of leadership,” says Professor James
O’Toole of the University of Southern California’s Center for Effective
Organizations. Author of the foreword to Leadership Is an Art,
O’Toole says, “There have been hundreds of books written by executives
about leadership, but Max’s are the ones that stand out as unique
and lasting. Max is a true original — and he practiced what he
preached.”
Though his books were written for a general audience,
De Pree makes no secret of the fact that the principles he championed — character,
integrity, relationships, teamwork, service, mentoring, respect — come
out of his Christian faith. “In Genesis, we’re told that man was
made in God’s image,” says De Pree. “For a Christian leader, if
everybody with whom she works is made in God’s image, that carries
tremendous implications.
“There’s a place in Scripture that says
God has planted eternity in man’s heart. Well, if eternity is planted
in your heart as a Christian leader — whether it’s in business,
sports or academia — you have to figure out, what does that mean
for the way in which I behave in relation to other people made
in God’s image?”
For De Pree, it means that three principles should
drive the work of Christian business leaders: “They need to establish
moral purpose in their organizations, build community, and develop
and nurture relationships. Because, you see, these all arise out
of scriptural direction.”
Where does making money fit in a scriptural
view of business leadership? “Most businesses are started in order
to meet an unmet need,” says De Pree. “What an entrepreneur hopes
for is that there is going to be enough of a market to keep him
and his family alive. People start businesses to serve others.”
Most
businesspeople, he says, have a complex view of their role in society.
They serve on school boards and other community organizations,
and they encourage their employees to do so. They make “giving
back” to the community a company value.
The ethical problems associated
with profits lie in two areas, De Pree suggests. “One is the failure
to have equitable distribution of results, which is unscriptural.
For instance, I think there ought to be a relationship between
what a CEO gets and what workers get.”
The second problem is a
lack of personal restraint exercised by those in power. “If you
look in the book of Amos, you’ll find that one of the jobs of a
leader is to care first for the people at the bottom of the ladder,” says
De Pree. “So I don’t see an ethical problem with profit per se,
but I see serious ethical problems with the way in which profits
are distributed. The primary function of profit is to fund the
future of the company.”
With De Pree at the helm, Herman Miller
formed a profitsharing program that allowed employees the opportunity
to purchase stock in the company. These were really “Silver Parachutes,” because
in the case of an unfriendly takeover, employees had to be bought
out. This practice stands in sharp contrast to the notion of “Golden
Parachutes” — huge severance packages — negotiated by many of the
country’s top executives for themselves.
An equitable distribution
of resources also means reaching out to surrounding communities
and cultivating a diverse workplace, says De Pree. “For a long
time, people thought that the way to deal with diversity in business
was to have a few African-Americans present. Well, being present
has nothing to do with being included or having equal opportunity.
Leaders have to work very hard and very intelligently to make these
things happen.”
In the De Pree philosophy, the practitioner of
good business leadership is also a cultivator of new leaders. De
Pree challenged an entire generation of CEOs to lead with vision
and integrity, and he continues to invest in the future of American
business. Now 79 years old, he has taught at the college level;
serves on the board of trustees of Fuller Theological Seminary
in Pasadena, California; and is a member of the advisory board
of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management.
Others
are drawing on the principles De Pree applied at Herman Miller
to challenge up-and-coming leaders. “Max De Pree has been my mentor
for 22 years,” says Walter Wright, executive director of the De
Pree Leadership Center in Pasadena. “The Center was started by
a businessman who wanted more Max De Prees in the world, to create
more leaders who focus on integrity, character and theology. We
try to encourage leaders to reflect on who they are and what kind
of legacy they’ll leave. Leaders, as Max would say, are really
teachers of values.”
For Seattle Pacific University, the training
of future business leaders is key, says De Pree. “To succeed, you’ve
got to be very up-to-date on the technology side of business. Second,
you have a responsibility to instruct students in the fact that
you can’t reach your potential technologically until you reach
your potential relationally — there is such a thing as relational
leadership. The third area, I believe, for SPU, is that you have
to teach character, and that really means basing a lot of the instruction
in Scripture.”
It’s a message that rings true with Seattle Pacific
President Philip Eaton, who considers De Pree a friend and mentor. “Our
work in SPU’s School of Business is to teach good business, which
is always based on principles of Scripture, and to graduate leaders
whose competence and character will change American business culture.
Max De Pree has demonstrated that the combination of excellence
and integrity can indeed change the world.”
De Pree’s legacy of
good business persists: His books are instrumental in the teaching
of leadership and business ethics; thousands of people emulate
his approach to management; and Herman Miller’s innovations reside
not only in offices worldwide, but also in permanent collections
at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Louvre’s Musée des Arts
Décoratifs.
De Pree recently spoke on the topic of ethics to an
adult Sunday school class in his hometown of Holland, Michigan. “It
isn’t a matter of knowing ethical principles,” he told them. “It’s
a matter of working out how you’re going to live in a secular world
based on what God tells you. The Westminster Shorter Catechism
says that the chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him
forever. How are you going to do that?”
— BY SARAH JIO
— PHOTOS BY MIKE SIEGEL
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