20 Global Ethics for Leadership
base our new management principles and our in-house knowledge-
management principles on those ten values. They have since been com-
plemented by three additional values agreed in a longer selection pro-
cess.
1.5 Values Change the Management Culture
This assessment changed the management culture considerably and
made the discussion on values a prominent theme, particularly within
the working groups. Such was the case that auditors started to criticize
us for being more values-driven than strategy-driven! Obviously our
strategies were influenced by the value basis! From this experience I
learnt that a good system of knowledge-management requires first a
values assessment in order to know which knowledge will remain im-
portant for the future and will serve as the structural capital of an institu-
tion in which the overall institutional knowledge is bigger than just the
total sum of knowledge of its staff.
In the occidental context, the individual rights and therefore the
rights-based approach is very much in the centre of life and activities.
Sometimes so much so that we forget the virtues and even duty to serve
society and its common good, and not only benefit from constitutional
rights. In other cultural contexts such as in Asian countries, virtues do
play a stronger role.
As societies are, partly due to globalization, getting more inter-
culturally mixed, a concept of shared societies, such as developed by the
‘Club de Madrid’ might have good chances to find better understandings
and therefore more security and safety for the members of living com-
munities and/or nations.