Additional resources
Blueprint content:
Links to Blueprint resources that provides context or further information on this course topic
Blueprint was pleased to be invited to present a paper at the Common Good Conference, in 2018 at the University of St. Thomas Minneapolis. In Advancing the Common Good through Purpose-led business, Charles Wookey, Helen Alford and Loughlin Hickey share the origins of A Blueprint for Better Business, the ongoing work towards advancing the common good through purpose-led business and early learnings from our work with some major companies.
In this TEDxHeythropCollege Talk, The Wonder of the Human Bridge, Loughlin Hickey, one of Blueprint’s trustees explores how our view of the human person shapes the behaviour of people and how a view of the human person as predominantly self interested has shaped business thinking to the detriment of society and how this can be corrected.
External content:
Links to books & other external resources
On dignity:
Donna Hick’s book, Leading with Dignity. Most people know very little about dignity, the author has found, and when leaders fail to respect the dignity of others, conflict and distrust ensue. She discusses three components of leading with dignity: what one must know in order to honour dignity and avoid violating it; what one must do to lead with dignity; and how one can create a culture of dignity in any organisation.
In this Ted Talk Declare Dignity, Donna Hicks discusses Dignity [20 minute watch – discussion of dignity & how it differs from respect starts 6 minutes in]
This Centre for Public Impact (CPI) paper is an interesting example of how using human dignity as a starting point can lead to different ways of thinking. The paper starts with an exploration of what dignity means and then uses this as a lens to explore to what extent government AI ethics principles, frameworks or directives work to both protect and proactively promote peoples’ dignity. CPI: Exploring the role of dignity in government AI Ethics instruments
On motivation:
People are of course all different and are motivated by different things. But evidence suggests that people are relational and once they have their basic needs met, their motivation comes from a number of things, including mastery, autonomy and a sense of meaning.
Sources from behavioural economics and neuroscience
The work of Edward Deci and Richard M. Ryan in, Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behaviour, which disputes the dominant belief that the best way to get human beings to perform tasks is to reinforce their behaviour with rewards.
Dan Pink writes about human behaviour – these videos provide a helpful introduction to his work.
- Dan Pink, The surprising truth about what motivates us, RSA Animated Video [11 minutes]
- Dan Pink, The puzzle of motivation, TED Talk [18 minutes]
The work of Dr Paul Zak, Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies, reveals the importance of trust.
- Trust, morality — and oxytocin?, TED Talk [16 minutes]
- The Neuroscience of Trust, HBR
- Neuroscience Says Workplace Happiness Comes Down to Experiencing This Emotion Daily, INC
Prof Dan Ariely’s book, Payoff explores motivation in the workplace, drawing on a series of experiments which reveal the vital role of intrinsic motivation. It also describes a case where the way senior management handled a change in a project was completely demotivating of people.
In Bad Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management Practices, Academy of Management Learning & Education, Sumantra Ghoshal argues that academic research related to the conduct of business and management has had some very significant and negative influences on the practice of management. These influences have been less at the level of adoption of a particular theory and more at the incorporation, within the worldview of managers, of a set of ideas and assumptions that have come to dominate much of management research. More specifically, this article suggests that by propagating ideologically inspired amoral theories, business schools have actively freed their students from any sense of moral responsibility.
In Relational Job Design and the Motivation of People to Make a Pro-social Difference, Academy of Management Review, Adam M Grant illustrates how work contexts motivate employees to care about making a positive difference in other people’s lives. I introduce a model of relational job design to describe how jobs spark the motivation to make a prosocial difference, and how this motivation affects employees’ actions and identities. Whereas existing research focuses on individual differences and the task structures of jobs, illuminate how the relational architecture of jobs shapes the motivation to make a prosocial difference.
In Social: Why our brains are wired to connect, Oxford: Oxford University Press, renowned psychologist Matthew Lieberman explores groundbreaking research in social neuroscience revealing that our need to connect with other people is even more fundamental, more basic, than our need for food or shelter. Because of this, our brain uses its spare time to learn about the social world–other people and our relation to them. It is believed that we must commit 10,000 hours to master a skill. According to Lieberman, each of us has spent 10,000 hours learning to make sense of people and groups by the time we are ten.
Sources from philosophy and wisdom traditions
An introduction to Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics via lumenlearning.com
University of Texas McCombs School of Business, Ethics Unwrapped series on Virtue Ethics
Mark Storm provides these short interesting overviews:
Themes of Catholic Social Teaching, Catholic Social Teaching
In 2013 and 2014 we held a series of Interfaith meetings to explore the Blueprint Framework and its relevance to people of different faiths. Mappings/comments on the Framework from different faiths are attached:
On meaning:
Based on rigorous research, The Map of Meaningful Work from Marjolein Lips-Wiersma helps people take practical action to make work and life meaningful.
In this article, How work can be made meaningful, Katie Bailey, Professor of Work and Employment at King’s Business School, discussed how people find meaning in their work. She explores how whilst employers can create the conditions for people to find meaning they cannot deliver that meaning – though they can deliver meaninglessness by undermining any sense that the role or activity has real value.
Man’s Search for Meaning recounts Viktor Frankl’s experiences in the concentration camps of WWII and the school of therapy he invented to help us confront this very question. He points out that the question of what is the meaning of life is always a deeply personal one, and that no one can answer it for another person.
In his book Humankind, Rutger Bregman explores what it means to be human. He brings together a wider range of empirical studies to show how the assumptions we make about others affect the results we get. He demonstrates the remarkable negative impact on an underlying assumption that people are fundamentally self-interested and reveals an array of evidence to show that infact, human beings are naturally cooperative.
In this TED Talk, What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness [13 minutes], Psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, director of a 75-year-old study on adult development, offers unprecedented access to data on true happiness and satisfaction. he shares three important lessons learned from the study as well as some practical, old-as-the-hills wisdom on how to build a fulfilling, long life.