by Mike Smith
Bill Drayton, the founder of the Washington DC-based Ashoka social enterprise network, told me a few years ago, in an interview for The Guardian, that empathy is the number one quality of good business leadership. He meant empathy towards employees, customers, business partners, suppliers, shareholders and the wider community; empathy towards the preservation of creation for the sake of future generations.
It’s easier said than done. If a business faces collapse and closure it may have no choice but to reduce its headline cost of employee wages. Some redundancies may be inevitable, unless everyone is ready to take a pay cut, including in the boardroom. This is a challenge especially for SMEs (Small and Medium Sized Enterprises). And too few board members in big corporations demonstrate that kind of empathy.
The Mumbai businessman Vivek Asrani tells how he helped out a competitor by supplying him with a vital component to allow his business to survive. Asrani might have been happy to see his competitor go out of business. But he felt it was the right thing to do for the sake of saving the jobs of his competitor’s employees. Empathy in action.