Page 198 - The Bible On Leadership

184 THE BIBLE ON LEADERSHIP

sleeping under bridges. But there are a number of leaders, many of them
very powerful, who subscribe strongly to the concept of ‘‘fair share.’’
According to Sam Walton, who was one of the world’s richest men: ‘‘If
American management is going to say to their workers that we’re all in
this together, they’re going to have to stop this foolishness of paying
themselves $3 million and $4 million bonuses every year and riding
around in limos and corporate jets like they’re so much better than
everybody else . . . It’s not fair for me to ride one way and ask every-
body else to ride another way.’’ 9
During the economic crunch of the 1980s, Henry Schacht, CEO of
Cummins Engine, decided the fairest thing to do was for top manage-
ment to take the largest pay cut. He and his executives took a 12 percent
to 15 percent pay cut, while the lowest ranks took only a 2 percent cut.
Schacht felt that this was fair, since the executives were the ones most
responsible for the company’s bottom line, whereas the average worker
had little control over it.
This action was in line with the biblical exhortation, ‘‘The man with
two tunics should share with him who has none . . . be content with
your pay.’’ (Luke 3) Two guys with ‘‘two tunics’’ were Ben Cohen and
Jerry Greenfield. Actually, they had seven tunics each (their compensa-
tion was seven times as much as the lowest paid worker), and they felt
that they should limit their pay to this multiple of the lowest salary.
‘‘Just because one person has the skill of filling ice cream containers . . .
and another person happens to have the skill of talking on the phone
and selling ice cream . . . doesn’t mean that one person should get paid
all that much more than the other one,’’ they maintained. 10
In addition to giving the employees their ‘‘fair share,’’ Ben & Jerry’s
also wanted to give the community their ‘‘fair share’’ of the profits. So
they started giving away 7.5 percent of their profits. When told that this
practice might cause the company to fail, they answered that they ‘‘set
up our corporate philanthropy as a given, like our electric bill or heating
bill, we’d just pay it as a cost of doing business . . . We look at our
payments to the foundation as a higher electric bill. It’s coming out of
profits, so it’s not preventing us from being profitable. And it’s only a
small percentage of profits, so it goes up only as our profits go up.’’ 11