Page 69 - The Bible On Leadership

56 THE BIBLE ON LEADERSHIP

with compassion, might be restored to life. (And many a ‘‘dead’’ corpo-
ration has been resurrected by leaders like Lou Gerstner at IBM and Lee
Iacocca at Chrysler.)
Daniel courageously prophesied to King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylo-
nia: ‘‘Oh king, renounce your sins by doing what is right, and your
wickedness by being kind to the oppressed. It may be that then your
prosperity will continue.’’ (Dan. 4:27) He was warning a mighty (and
decadent) ruler that a nation founded on injustice and lack of compas-
sion contains the seeds of its own destruction.
A number of modern managers (if not all kings) seem to have heard
and acted on Daniel’s message. Isaac Tigrett, the founder of Hard Rock
Cafe, hired some of society’s outcasts—street people, bikers, and others
who were on the fringes of society and probably would not have fit
well into more traditional organizations. He called his organization the
‘‘Rainbow Coalition’’ because of its diverse group of social and ethnic
groups. He eliminated ‘‘staff meetings,’’ calling them ‘‘family meetings’’
instead. He instituted an equal pay policy and profit sharing.
Says Tigrett, ‘‘I didn’t care about anything but the people. Just cher-
ish them, look after them, be sensitive to their lives.’’ A hopeless ideal-
10
ist whose business was doomed to financial failure? No, a successful
businessman who sold his business a few years later for over $100 mil-
lion.
Joseph Rebello, the CEO of Citizens Financial Group, is certainly
not your typical banker. Although realizing the importance of profits,
he also has exercised a considerable amount of compassion and kind-
ness. And like Ryder Systems’ Burns, he has been out in the front lines
of philanthropy, not just doling out money from his penthouse office.
Says Rebello, ‘‘If we just make money, we fail.’’
How has this executive avoided ‘‘failure’’? First he donated half of
his $2 million salary to his alma mater. Then, prior to accepting his
CEO job at Citizens Financial Group, he took a leave of absence to
work in a shelter for abused children. He encourages his staff to do
similar charitable works and has been criticized for having ‘‘too much
heart’’ (a criticism leveled at many of the managers and leaders men-
tioned in this book). He accepts this label gladly and replies, ‘‘Ulti-