This season of recently
completed commencement ceremonies and valedictories featured a seemingly
unending spate of references to the writings of NY Times columnist and television pundit, David Brooks. Wherever
one turns of late, one encounters Brooks’ popular construct in which he suggests
that there are two different types of virtues in life: resume and eulogy. As
the names imply, resume virtues are the things we put on our resumes and CVs
that describe the skills we bring to the marketplace. Eulogy virtues, are the
things that get talked about at our funerals, the deeper attributes about who
we are, our relationships and passions, the things we stand for. An irony of
the human condition, as those who invoke Brooks’ paradigm point out, is that despite
insisting “eulogy” virtues are more important than “resume” virtues, most of us
spend our time and energies building up the latter, at the expense of the
former. The predictable message to
graduates, from those who cite Brooks, is that they should avoid these pitfalls,
devoting themselves to the pursuit of loftier attributes instead of being
consumed with more quotidian matters.
As the CEO of an
institution of higher learning, constantly on the lookout for meaningful
commencement messages, I desperately wanted to embrace this ‘resume-eulogy’
paradigm. After all, anything that reminds us that work constitutes just a single
piece of who we are and what we treasure is a message I want to endorse. But as
a lifelong Jewish communal professional, and as the President of an Institute
dedicated to the training and development of Jewish leaders, I am forced to reject
such an oversimplified bifurcation.
Those who work in the
Jewish community – whether for just a few years or over the course of several
decades – have come to understand that separating between “resume” virtues and
“eulogy” virtues is a fabrication, a straw man that deliberately ignores the
value system that lies at the core of our work.
Mr. Brooks has
chosen to overlook something about leadership that the best Jewish communal
professionals have known for a long time. Leadership is always about character.
When we come to work – whether we
work in a venerable Jewish agency or a start up [N.B. Sorry, I just cannot
bring myself to use the more popular term “legacy organization,” which inexcusably
has become a moniker of derision] - we do not leave our moral compass at home
in the bucket marked “eulogy virtues.” No, for those dedicated to advancing
Jewish life and who do so for a living, our eulogy virtues are our resume virtues. Great leadership is always about character.
Integrity,
humility, compassion, a commitment to serving and growing others – these are
what make us great in the office, and
in our personal lives as well. No bifurcation, no separation between virtues.
The great teacher of leadership, Warren Bennis noted, “The process of becoming
a leader is much the same as the process of becoming an integrated human being.
Life itself,” said Bennis, “is the career.” And to succeed in our careers as
Jewish communal leaders, we must embrace and embody the very virtues that
Brooks would reserve only for our funerals.
In suggesting that
the deeper values of character, ethics, and integrity are the seminal values of
the Jewish organizational workplace, I do not suggest that “resume virtues”
have no place in our offices and our careers.
On the contrary; competence and character are never substitutes for one
another. We who toil in the vineyards of Jewish life must be every bit as
proficient, effective, productive, innovative, tenacious, accomplished, and
credentialed as our for-profit counterparts. It is not enough that we be women
and men of great character. There can be no place in our field for morally
impressive but otherwise, inadequate and ineffectual leaders.
At the same time,
by insisting on a separation between “resume” and “eulogy” virtues, Brooks falls
victim to what his fellow journalist, George Will, likes to call the fallacy of
the false alternative. It may be true that the American workplace has rejected
the very virtues we hope will be recalled at our funerals. But in our business – the business of building
a twenty-first century Jewish world – those values are precisely what it takes
to succeed at work. We should not be misled into believing that “eulogy” values
are ‘soft’ or ‘squishy’ or somehow un-businesslike. The truth is,
collaboration, empowerment, power sharing … are not only good values; they are
good business. And we, Jewish communal professionals, if we rise to the
standard, can become shining examples of what good business, good politics, and
good entrepreneurship should be. Relegating things like ethics and mentschlikhkeit to “eulogy” virtues
suggests they are not necessary or essential in the marketplace. The stakes are
too high in our highly volatile, rapidly changing world to buy-in to such a
distortion.
A version of this article was originally published on eJewishPhilanthropy.com
