Britt Cruz and Christopher Wong Michaelson of the Melrose and The Toro Company Center for Principled Leadership in the Opus College of Business recently wrote an op-ed for the Pioneer Press exploring how global perspectives can reshape the way businesses approach leadership and responsibility. Drawing on ideas shared at an international business ethics conference in Cameroon, they highlight how concepts such as Ubuntu and Omoluabi can encourage businesses to consider the communities and relationships affected by their decisions.
From the op-ed:
Minnesota companies operate far beyond Minnesota. They manage global supply chains, employ people across borders, and make decisions that affect communities they may never see directly. Yet many of the ideas we use to judge those decisions still come from a relatively narrow set of Western conceptions of business, responsibility, and individualism. But the way we think about those decisions has not kept pace with the reach of the companies making them.
We were reminded of this recently at the International Society of Business, Economics and Ethics World Congress in Yaoundé, Cameroon. The conference brought together scholars, business leaders, artists and storytellers from around the world, with particular attention to perspectives that have often been left out of global conversations about business and society.
More than half of the participants came from countries in the “Global South,” a term the opening session challenged because of its association with a downward direction. Holding the conference in Cameroon, central Africa, made it possible for more scholars and business leaders from the region to participate and created space for ideas that are too often missing from conversations shaped by Western institutions.
One of those ideas was Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a philosophy prevalent in parts of Africa that understands the individual not as self-contained, but as part of a web of relationships. ...
