MAY 2007
About This Issue
Minding My Motivations—and Yours
Kathleen O'Toole
Editor
Two competing grain elevators, towering Midwestern monuments to American technology, markets, and banking, straddled the entrance to the 12-block town where I spent Saturday and Sunday mornings in my childhood. On Saturdays, I practiced Latin and studied the Baltimore Catechism down the street in Blessed Sacrament Church. On Sundays this time of year, I prayed with all the Protestants and Catholics for the rain necessary to fill those elevators with wheat and corn. Occasionally, Maryknoll missionaries dropped by to tell stories and show pictures of skinny, hungry children in India or Mexico. After Mass my parents usually stopped at Burnstad’s Grocery so we kids could spend our allowance on Tootsie Rolls and candy Lucky Strikes, but not when the Maryknolls came. On those Sundays, we felt we had to drop every last coin into the collection basket.
One Sunday after a missionary visit, I decided there must be a better way. My approach was to convince my father that we could be “Good Samaritans” by using our 1952 Ford truck to haul grain to the railroad for a trip aboard a ship to India. Bountiful harvests and low prices had forced him to store more grain than he wanted, so my plan could solve two problems at once. For good measure, I probably added that it could solve the third problem of mice in our granary.
My Dad liked to nap after Sunday church but he listened and seemed impressed. He said it was a pretty good plan, but that there was just one problem. That problem was politics, which, someday I would understand, got in the way of a lot of practical solutions to problems.
When I read the article in this issue about Jacqueline Novogratz’s search for a more lasting way to help people living on less that $4 a day, I imagined her having similar childhood plans shot down by her father. She didn’t quit trying, however, and now, she even seems to have that old devil, Politics, on the run. I deeply admire her tenacity.
Politics is still a worthy rival, however, as we can see in the article on page (Web link for CSR goes here) about the many ways people interpret the idea of corporate social responsibility. Writer Margaret Steen interviewed a number of faculty, alumni, and students on this topic. The result is a challenge to all of us to think more deeply about what we mean when we use catch phrases like social responsibility or environmental sustainability.
That article reminds me that at the Business School’s 75th anniversary celebration in 2000, the late Nobel economist Milton Friedman argued that organizations don’t have values; only the people in them do. In some ways, his remark makes me think of Politics less as a rival and more as an excuse. As I interpret Friedman, if my family and I had possessed stronger commitments to fight hunger, we could have gotten our wheat to someone similar to Mother Teresa in India—we just didn’t want to risk so much of our own comfort, including our reputation for being a sane, respectable American farm family.
I can see now that social responsibility is a moving target. I, for one, am glad to see innovating individuals and leaders of organizations offering up their own visions in these pages.
