Testimony of a businessman

“Compassion con­sists in a one-on-one ex­pe­ri­ence. There is this very per­son­al di­men­sion in Compassion.

Businessmen are not com­fort­able with Compassion. Over years, we have been taught in busi­ness schools that busi­ness­men are meant to serve the share­hold­ers who must be their sole con­cern. In this sense, busi­ness­men are a-moral en­ti­ties, cor­po­ra­tions that serve a sin­gle pur­pose: the cre­ation of wealth. They for­get that busi­ness is ac­tu­al­ly the corner­stone of our so­ci­ety. They for­get that busi­ness can serve many dif­fer­ent caus­es be­cause it em­braces so many ac­tors: the em­ploy­ees and the sup­pli­ers but al­so the cus­tomers and, of course, the share­hold­ers.

Our so­ci­ety is nonethe­less more and more aware of the de­struc­tion of na­ture. Businessmen dai­ly tack­le the is­sue of sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment. They should deep­en this anal­y­sis and in­clude- and there is hope that per­haps, one day they will – the hu­man di­men­sion, the hu­man dig­ni­ty. We must un­der­stand that each in­di­vid­u­al -the hu­man as a body (as an an­i­mal), but al­so the hu­man as a soul- is some­thing ex­cep­tion­al that needs to be re­spect­ed and pre­served, just as na­ture.

What does dif­fer­en­ti­ate, or per­haps, what does bring to­geth­er com­pa­nies such as Verizon, Goldman Sachs, Bank of New York or Price Waterhouse? These are com­pa­nies in which the CEO has made a par­tic­u­lar com­mit­ment to Compassion.The CEOs of the­se com­pa­nies gen­er­al­ly have made a per­son­al com­mit­ment not in terms of money but in terms of time. Thay have often com­mit­ted to a one-on-one re­la­tion­ship with a per­son in need.

And they are wise in do­ing so, for the ex­pe­ri­ence of Compassion re­sults in a feed­back pro­cess. If you start on­ce help­ing some­body, reach­ing out and feel­ing what you get in re­turn, it be­comes a drug: you want to ex­pe­ri­ence it again and again.

I think that a cen­ter such as the ICCC could be an ex­cel­lent place to teach Compassion to the cor­po­rate world. I am con­vinced that’s a won­der­ful ob­jec­tive. I strong­ly be­lieve in it.”