The Doing Good Model. Shari ArisonЧитать онлайн книгу.
various chairmen and CEOs, it then became the role of each of those employees to go back to their respective companies or organizations and implement what was agreed upon within the forums. Implementation was accomplished by planning various activities and projects that supported the essence of the value, which would cause the value to come alive within the business or organization. For example, it was agreed that all employees across the board would go through Sustainability training and Financial Freedom workshops. It was also agreed that all companies and organizations would join in on Good Deeds Day. And of course, many more ideas are constantly being implemented.
It was so incredible when all this began to happen. Within the forums, employees were able to express their voice, make a difference, be creative, and become a part of the bigger picture. The forums also brought the separate companies together as a whole with a common purpose. They each moved from being separate entities to becoming a collective “we,” something I had desired for a very long time.
As each member within the forums shared their ideas, challenges, and successes, everyone else was able to learn and share as well. Within a few meetings, the group members were coming up with creative solutions, and before long, they were celebrating and sharing the successes they were experiencing. We even had a couple of Doing Good Conferences so everyone could share what was happening. Even I was amazed!
With so much going on, it wasn’t long before more and more people started hearing about the forums, and the numbers of attendees kept increasing. The forums are still operating, meeting quarterly, but when the number of employees grew to more than sixty or seventy people in each forum, it was decided to split the forums, going from two to four forums, in order to keep them effective. We have also begun introducing new forums that are now advancing other values within the broader Doing Good Model.
Meeting of the Minds—Business and Academia
Since our goal is to have all thirteen values living and breathing within all areas of the companies and organizations, and we didn’t find a practical way to implement them all at once, we needed help. That was when we decided to turn to the academic world. My team at the Arison Group found the right mix of academic partners who could help us translate our model into an integrated workshop that would introduce all of the values.
We found a passionate and professional group of doctors and professors from top American universities including Harvard, Thunderbird, George Mason, and Babson College. They began researching and putting together curriculum through constant collaboration with my team at the Arison Group.
The academic team then visited our operations in Israel in order to see for themselves what was being done, and we were amazed by everyone’s enthusiasm and comments. The academic team had never seen anything like this before. They did know of many other companies around the world that were sustainable, for instance, or worked with some of the values. However, they had not seen such a diverse operation of companies in such different fields, including philanthropic organizations, implementing such a wide range of values.
I must say that the academic team is amazing. Through their process of research and their skills as educators, they developed an incredible pilot workshop that was held first for our forum members. The employees from the forums gave their comments as to what worked and what did not work, and what they felt could be implemented in their respective companies and organizations.
The academic team took the feedback from those participants and reworked the workshop, redefined it, and presented it again, this time to the chairmen and CEOs. I took part in that workshop and was deeply touched to see that for the first time, even the skeptics were convinced. The next step was to take the new workshop and engage the next level, including the different boards of directors and management teams.
The Doing Good Model workshop, as we call it, gives participants a unique experience of how values impact them individually and within their business and philanthropic lives. I’ve seen people come out changed. The professors use academic-style business case studies, interactive activities, short videos, and team break-out sessions to keep everyone’s attention and really help participants integrate and understand the transformative value that the values have. As a logical next step, we have launched together with our academic partners a train-the-trainers course in order to bring the workshop experience to more and more levels of our organizations.
The Doing Good Endowed Professorship
I invested in an Endowed Professorship at George Mason University in Virginia, USA. in order to advance research into values-based leadership. The research being done has taken on a wide focus. It began by looking into the history of corporate values and how these manifest within the individual businessperson, the organization, and society in general. The research mandate also includes determining the best ways for values to be taught so that the right questions or case studies can be posed to get business students thinking.
The Endowed Professor is also developing practical inclass exercises so that students can understand how various values apply to real-world work situations. This approach to teaching values is a sharp contrast to what was taught years ago, when values and ethics were almost exclusively taught from a theoretical viewpoint within business schools.
It has been amazing to see how well this line of research and exploration fits within the Global Citizenship Course and other advanced leadership training courses that have been developed and are being delivered at George Mason. In these courses, students are being encouraged to rank their own values and clarify the meaning within themselves. In this way, values training in universities becomes a means to an end, and graduates can use their own moral compass as a practical decision-making tool on an everyday basis.
The research and material that is being developed is so important for businesses in today’s society, businesses who care about people and the planet, alongside profit. I believe that the way to accomplish this is by values-based leadership and businesses that implement values.
A Broad and Universal Set of Values
I have been told that the Doing Good Model takes a much more comprehensive approach to corporate values because it was developed within several different fields of businesses and also a range of non-profit organizations. With the help of the academic team, we can now envision ways that the Doing Good Model could be implemented just about anywhere.
Implementing it so broadly gives us inspiration that someday we could contribute to solving even bigger complex social and environmental challenges in our world today.
To truly tackle those issues, it is imperative that all levels of business and society cooperate for the good of all. Each part of society brings different things to the table. The business sector, for example, brings innovation, capacity, and ideas, and business has the resources for implementation. Non-profits bring specialized knowledge, credibility, and networks of people who will work passionately for change. I believe that if we find a way for individuals, governments, businesses, and non-profits to work together, we could create a good future for us all.
Expanding the Circles
As a result of the Doing Good Model workshops, our managers and employees are really beginning to connect to the bigger picture. They worked with the first four values through activities that came out of the forums, but now the excitement is spreading quickly, and more and more employees are wanting to engage with the remaining nine values within the model, particularly the ones that speak to their own individual hearts.
It’s to the point now that every day, I am hearing stories about employees at all levels of the organizations who are taking on additional values and bringing them alive. The forum for Vitality sprang up at the Arison Group headquarters because health and wellness is such an important issue for just about everyone today. The value of Language & Communication was initiated by our Salt of the Earth company because the management team there wanted to focus efforts to improve internal communications among its culturally diverse workforce.
There has been tremendous interest from people outside of our companies, including some people who have worked for us in the past and who have moved on while continuing to implement the values in their new workplaces. This high level of outside interest has brought us to the conclusion