Chaumont Armelle Executive MCC Thesis January 2014 2 WE NEED A NEW STORY, A NEW DNA OF BUSINESS: WHERE ARE THE LEADERS OF TOMORROW IN FRANCE? Investigation, meetings, and interpretation 3 INTRODUCTION Holderlin: “Where danger thrives also thrives that which saves.” Tuli Kupferberg: “When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.” Manfred Kets De Vries: “The challenge for twenty-first-century leadership is to create healthy organizations.” Globalization is redrawing the world map I decided to focus this short thesis on France not only because it is my country of origin but also because it seems to me that Europe, which lay in ruins after World War II, was unable, for a variety of reasons, to anticipate the painful awakening that placed it in a new and perhaps definitive position of vulnerability in the world at the beginning of the 21st century. From one day to the next, the emerging future left both France and Europe behind. For the first time in history, our world appeared as a whole, a single planet. Although we may throw around terms like tsunami of globalization, this reshuffling of the deck is not as harsh as it seems and has not affected all countries equally. For some, this shakeup could mean the opportunity to break free from the isolation or willful ignorance that left them with gnawing difficulties: the problems of Africa and the Third World have been brought to light and call out not only to NGOs and various philanthropic outfits, but to the economic, political, and social sense of responsibility of the entire world. The geopolitical situation has shifted and remains unstable. The new USSR is undergoing a gradual democratization; the eastern countries may be able to breathe fresh air into an aging 4 and dramatically ethnocentric Europe. The United States is no longer steering the ship; China, India, and Brazil are expanding effectively. Like it or not, the past is gone for good: after a period of crisis and adjustment, we will need to absorb this emerging global consciousness as soon as possible in order to take full advantage of it. This metamorphosis entails a lucid critical reading of the structures of the past and the rise of new ideas, new ways of thinking, working, and imagining our lives and their many cultural facets: in short, a re-envisaging of the role of people on earth. The past glory of our civilizations long concealed a real intellectual decadence. This obliteration had two main effects: preventing us from seeing and from thinking. Caught up in a race forward, we have let the world change without ourselves changing at the same time. Change is now inevitable, urgent, and challenging, because there is not much time. Why are Europe and the United States in danger ? All sorts of organic explanations could be offered up: civilizations are born, grow, and decline. All that is true, but in this case, things have sped up. When I was a child my parents were discovering with amazement the refrigerator and the television; my mother brought me back from her travels a collection of dolls from all over the country – Alsace, Nice, Brittany, Martinique – which I kept carefully in their celluloid cases. France seemed so vast and exotic to me then! My grandmother, born in the north of France, has never seen the Mediterranean, while I have already been around the world several times and tasted dishes from every country. How have we constructed our western society in such a way that everything is spiraling out of control like this? It is probably the result of an unfortunate interpretation of Cartesian and Newtonian theories: we’ve allowed technical science, algebra, and money to dominate society. 5 Very early on in France, intellectuals such as Simone Weil (the philosopher, who died in 1942) understood the vicious circle: the mind, she writes, “succumbs; it no longer has any criterion other than efficiency. Where the mind ceases to be a principle, it also ceases to be the end” (Œuvres completes, Gallimard. Vol. 4 p. 100). The homo economicus model tends to slow down ethical progress. Auschwitz and the twin towers: the rupture between ancient wisdom and modernity At the end of the 19th century, Europe and the United States were united by a common ethos: that of progress, free enterprise and human rights; ancient humanism passed down through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment placed the human being at the center of the universe as a responsible conscience, generating social, material, and moral values for the good of all. These are the terms of Rousseau’s social contract. The growth of the economy and of industrialization took precedence over those values, and human beings were considered in the same category as machines, as a means of production. Modernity has been tarnished by the tragic decline of values, the secularization of society, the banishment of intellectual, philosophical, and theological reflection. Consumer society made these values obsolete because they were not needed for production or consumption. Efficiency reigned: referring to algebra and to his pencil, the famous French mathematician Poincaré said, “Isn’t it wonderful: it knows more than I do!” The Enlightenment: the lights went out at Auschwitz, where all the voices of the European intelligentsia were silenced for a long time. There, Goethe’s “marvelous garden,” juxtaposed with the camp at Buchenwald, gave modernity the metallic song of materialism perceived as an adequate doctrine: neorealism. That dualism dear to Platonists, the separation of essence 6 from existence, was consumed, and with it our ancient sense of belonging to a whole, of nature and the world. The levels of transcendence were taken away for a long time in the West, and, as Heidegger put it so well, our time became “narrow.” The barbarity of the holocaust in the country of Goethe, Nietzsche, Rilke, Beethoven, Mozart, Hegel, and Kant, among others, killed European philosophical thinking. The Holocaust will never be like any other genocide; the 9-11 attacks will never be like other attacks, because both point to ontological causes. They are black holes that leave behind a no man’s land of thought. Throughout his writing, Georges Steiner denounces the irreparable rupture that the highest civilizations have inflicted on contemporary thought by giving birth to the most bestial violence. In the 1980s when I was studying philosophy at Sorbonne, it was all Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Piaget; the literary types were swimming in deconstructionism, and writers such as Jacques Maritain, Kierkegaard, and Simone Weil rarely made it onto university curricula. In the late 1950s, George Steiner wrote, there was a break “between word and world, between semantic markers and stable sense which became the thesis of deconstruction and post- modernism. It foretold the ‘end of the great stories’” (Georges Steiner, Errata). At that time, when European thought tended toward phenomenology and structuralism, it was well received in the United States: it correlated with fragmented, atomistic thinking, operational effectiveness, the rational, the mechanistic world view, the technology-driven world. Interestingly, Sartre wrote Les Mots but climbed on chairs at the Café de Flore to announce one shouldn’t “désespérer Billancourt,” which is to say he felt it was appropriate to lie about communism to the workers in Parisian faubourgs. 7 “Industrialism created a limitless appetite for resource exploitation, and modern science provided the ethical and cognitive licence to make such exploitation possible, acceptable – desirable.” Vandana Shiva Unlike many members of younger generations, I do not believe American imperialism really existed in France: our allies had saved us, and the shame and the guilt Europe felt after the war left the door wide open for cultural renewal. The Twin Towers Historically, this event was also a first: the United States attacked on its own territory by invisible enemies. This event, which toured the global airwaves, will remain forever imprinted not only the collective memory but also in the individual memories of all. People everywhere can say where they were and what they were doing at that precise moment: the entire planet was invited to the show. I do not wish to shock with these words: few historians, sociologists, philosophers or western intellectuals have dared, faced with such barbarity, to parse the symbolic meaning of this odious massacre. Once again, the great historical narrative is silent: paralysis. Thinking takes a step backward: we take refuge in a primitive fears that are immediately taken out on a scapegoat (the French philosopher René Girard showed in a variety of contexts the logic of the cathartic outlet). A primal and atavistic anger was promptly unleashed on the world’s Muslims, and quirky interpretations of the Koran began appearing everywhere. Once again the intelligentsia remained silent, because, as with Auschwitz, the symbol opened onto a universal, ontological dimension. Those images that made their way around the world seemed like a reply to Hiroshima and, politically correct or not, symbolically knocked out the citadel of greed, the survival of the western capitalist system that threatens to destroy the social, geopolitical, and even the bio-natural balance of the planet. One day we may be able to talk about these images that call into question the burial of the spiritual in the 8 modern world. The images reveal a kind of climactic hubris, recalling certain Old Testament prophecies or Jesus angrily chasing the merchants from the temple. In the depths of our collective unconscious, the almost unreal violence of those images gave rise to a possible contemporary eschatology that could not yet be spoken. “When we truly suspend taken-for-granted ways of seeing the world, what we start to see can be disorienting and disturbing, and strong emotions like fear and anger arise, which are hard to separate from what we see.