situations. This approach to teaching values is a sharp contrast to what was taught years ago, when values and ethics were almost exclusively taught from a theoretical viewpoint within business schools.
It has been amazing to see how well this line of research and exploration fits within the Global Citizenship Course and other advanced leadership training courses that have been developed and are being delivered at George Mason. In these courses, students are being encouraged to rank their own values and clarify the meaning within themselves. In this way, values training in universities becomes a means to an end, and graduates can use their own moral compass as a practical decision-making tool on an everyday basis.
The research and material that is being developed is so important for businesses in today’s society, businesses who care about people and the planet, alongside profit. I believe that the way to accomplish this is by values-based leadership and businesses that implement values.
A Broad and Universal Set of Values
I have been told that the Doing Good Model takes a much more comprehensive approach to corporate values because it was developed within several different fields of businesses and also a range of non-profit organizations. With the help of the academic team, we can now envision ways that the Doing Good Model could be implemented just about anywhere.
Implementing it so broadly gives us inspiration that someday we could contribute to solving even bigger complex social and environmental challenges in our world today.
To truly tackle those issues, it is imperative that all levels of business and society cooperate for the good of all. Each part of society brings different things to the table. The business sector, for example, brings innovation, capacity, and ideas, and business has the resources for implementation. Non-profits bring specialized knowledge, credibility, and networks of people who will work passionately for change. I believe that if we find a way for individuals, governments, businesses, and non-profits to work together, we could create a good future for us all.
Expanding the Circles
As a result of the Doing Good Model workshops, our managers and employees are really beginning to connect to the bigger picture. They worked with the first four values through activities that came out of the forums, but now the excitement is spreading quickly, and more and more employees are wanting to engage with the remaining nine values within the model, particularly the ones that speak to their own individual hearts.
It’s to the point now that every day, I am hearing stories about employees at all levels of the organizations who are taking on additional values and bringing them alive. The forum for Vitality sprang up at the Arison Group headquarters because health and wellness is such an important issue for just about everyone today. The value of Language & Communication was initiated by our Salt of the Earth company because the management team there wanted to focus efforts to improve internal communications among its culturally diverse workforce.
There has been tremendous interest from people outside of our companies, including some people who have worked for us in the past and who have moved on while continuing to implement the values in their new workplaces. This high level of outside interest has brought us to the conclusion that our All One forum, soon to start, will be made up of both internal employees and members of the public.
The Doing Good values have settled into most minds and hearts within our workforce. It’s amazing how many conversations about the values are popping up together with creative ideas on how to implement them. For example, I recently attended a meeting of our infrastructure company where they were presenting their yearly review and their strategic plans for the coming years.
The entire management team spoke through a value. Manager after manager stood up and focused his strategy in relation to Abundance, Sustainability, Inner Peace, and so forth. I was surprised and deeply moved! It was fascinating to see how they were taking the initiative to integrate the values into all of their business activities and goals.
Furthermore, the chairman told me that they successfully drilled down their strategic plans to all levels of the company while still using the framework of the values. This approach further connected the management team to the model and was well received by all.
Even outside the company, when we speak to external groups, sharing our approach, they too seem interested in learning more about our values-based model. In fact, I recently spoke to a group of high school teachers at one of their professional development sessions. These were teachers of psychology and economics, and they were inspired and wanted more information on how they could implement the Doing Good Model in the educational system.
Although this vision started within my soul, it has taken many people who have been engaged, worked hard, become living examples, and grown the circles of positive change. I am deeply grateful to all the directors, managers, employees and universities, and people who have come on board in order to create real transformation within our businesses, organizations, and society at large.
Although we have done quite a bit already, growth and expansion never stops. Within our many plans for the future, we are developing an online training program in order to share the Doing Good Model, making it universally accessible.
So now that you have some ideas of how to implement the model, let me share in more detail each of the individual values, starting with Financial Freedom.
Activate Your Goodness Through Individual Prosperity
FINANCIAL FREEDOM
The freedom (and the desire) to choose, based on responsibility and understanding of the framework of abilities and economic possibilities at any given moment.
The Knowledge and Tools to Make the Right Choices
When the value Financial Freedom came to me, it came from deep within myself. Personally, it was not an expression that I had ever heard before that point, but since developing and sharing the Doing Good Model, I have come to realize that “financial freedom” has become quite a common phrase in North America.
This vision came to me because I am always looking for ways to create positive change in everything that I do. In this case, for years I had been contemplating my controlling stake in Bank Hapoalim. What could I do to bring added value in the world of finance? Although I had managed to instill quite a few positive values in the bank when I was on its board, I felt that much more was needed in order to make a real difference in the actions of the bank and the way those actions are perceived by the public.
It has always bothered me that I was part of something that people in general seemed to hate so much. I realize some people had good reasons for distrusting or hating banks, like losing their homes, cars, or businesses, for example.
I felt empathy for people who were up to their ears with loans that they had trouble paying back. Personally, I wanted no part of this, but here I was owning a bank. I kept racking my brain to figure out how I could turn this around. Then it came to me—we could do it by creating
