nated to needy women and children such as hurricane victims, religious
charities, or women’s shelters. If this sounds like a small program, it
isn’t: 10,000 items a month are returned and donated.
And once again, fairness and justice result in improved numbers. The
Hannadowns participants are Hanna Anderson’s best customers; they
spend three times the money of the average customer. The company
received an additional benefit: They were able to hire some of the for-
mer residents of the women’s shelters, and they have become an ‘‘em-
ployer of choice,’’ no longer needing to advertise positions.
Says Gun Denhart, ‘‘Money is like manure. If you let it pile up, it
just smells. But if you spread it around, you can encourage things to
grow.’’8
‘‘FAIR SHARE’’
The question of ‘‘who gets what’’ has been debated since biblical times.
The Bible has several passages that address the issue of what constitutes
a ‘‘fair share’’ of the proceeds, harvest, or spoils of war. James 2:1–4
points out that rich and poor alike have rights: ‘‘If you show special
attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, ‘Here’s a good seat
for you,’ but say to the poor man, ‘You stand there’ . . . have you not
discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil
thoughts?’’
Of course, the world is not perfectly fair. It has been pointed out that
the law, in its infinite fairness, forbids both rich and poor alike from
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sleeping under bridges. But there are a number of leaders, many of them
very powerful, who subscribe strongly to the concept of ‘‘fair share.’’
According to Sam Walton, who was one of the world’s richest men: ‘‘If
American management is going to say to their workers that we’re all in
this together, they’re going to have to stop this foolishness of paying
themselves $3 million and $4 million bonuses every year and riding
around in limos and corporate jets like they’re so much better than
everybody else . . . It’s not fair for me to ride one way and ask every-
body else to ride another way.’’9
During the economic crunch of the 1980s, Henry Schacht, CEO of
Cummins Engine, decided the fairest thing to do was for top manage-
ment to take the largest pay cut. He and his executives took a 12 percent
to 15 percent pay cut, while the lowest ranks took only a 2 percent cut.
Schacht felt that this was fair, since the executives were the ones most
responsible for the company’s bottom line, whereas the average worker
had little control over it.
This action was in line with the biblical exhortation, ‘‘The man with
two tunics should share with him who has none . . . be content with
your pay.’’ (Luke 3) Two guys with ‘‘two tunics’’ were Ben Cohen and
Jerry Greenfield. Actually, they had seven tunics each (their compensa-
tion was seven times as much as the lowest paid worker), and they felt
that they should limit their pay to this multiple of the lowest salary.
‘‘Just because one person has the skill of filling ice cream containers . . .
and another person happens to have the skill of talking on the phone
and selling ice cream . . . doesn’t mean that one person should get paid
all that much more than the other one,’’ they maintained.10
In addition to giving the employees their ‘‘fair share,’’ Ben & Jerry’s also wanted to give the community their ‘‘fair share’’ of the profits. So
they started giving away 7.5 percent of their profits. When told that this
practice might cause the company to fail, they answered that they ‘‘set
up our corporate philanthropy as a given, like our electric bill or heating bill, we’d just pay it as a cost of doing business . . . We look at our
payments to the foundation as a higher electric bill. It’s coming out of
profits, so it’s not preventing us from being profitable. And it’s only a
small percentage of profits, so it goes up only as our profits go up.’’11
Justice and Fairness
185
And some of you thought these guys were a couple of anti-capitalistic
hippies. What they found is that capitalism, ice cream, and justice can
make a pretty good mix.
Herman Miller, the furniture company based in Michigan, felt that
handing out golden parachutes for a chosen few was only partial justice.
So in 1986, they instituted the ‘‘Silver Parachute’’ for all employees
with over two years of service. In case of a takeover, it will be all em-
ployees, not just the traditional group of top executives, who will get a
‘‘soft landing.’’ Ironically, this not only made the employees feel more
secure and better treated, it made the company a less likely takeover
target.
Herman Miller is also committed to the Scanlon principles of partici-
patory management, productivity, and profit sharing. Employees are
able to become owners, but they earn that ownership; it is not a gift.
Risk and reward are connected logically and fairly, and 100 percent of
the regular employees with one year of service or more are stockhold-
ers. Writes Max De Pree, the company’s ex-chairman, ‘‘The capitalist
system cannot avoid being better off by having more employees who
act as if they own the place.’’
Howard Schultz of Starbucks is convinced that one of his key reten-
tion and productivity tools is the justice of employee ownership. He
feels that it’s ‘‘no accident that the attrition rate at Starbucks is four to five times lower than the national average for retailers and restaurants
. . . I felt very strongly that if people can come to work feeling . . . they have a piece of ownership, however small or large . . . it would give us
a huge competitive advantage.’’ He adds, ‘‘Success is best if it’s shared
. . . if we want to inspire our customers, we have to inspire our people.
They can’t be left behind.’’12
This is the philosophy that helped Joseph devise his ‘‘fair share’’ plan
so that his adopted country, Egypt, would not starve in the famine that
was afflicting the land. Again and again, Joseph could have victimized
the Egyptians. Again and again, he saved them from their own lack of
foresight. He wisely set aside a portion of the grain harvest before the
famine, and sold it to his countrymen when they ran out of grain, pre-
sumably at fair rates of exchange. When they ran out of money, he
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THE BIBLE ON LEADERSHIP
exchanged the grain for their livestock. And when they ran out of live-
stock, he bought their land, but gave it back to them for their use, on
the condition that they keep four-fifths of the harvest for themselves
and give one-fifth to the Pharaoh.
Joseph could have bled his adopted countrymen dry. But his overall
scheme was just and fair—to ensure that they would have enough pro-
ductive capacity and consumable resources to be able to survive the
famine and prosper again once it was over. And, good politician that he
was, he remembered to give ‘‘the boss’’ his fair share as well.
RECTIFYING INJUSTICE
It is one thing for a leader to initially pursue just policies and actions
from the outset. But often, a leader must have the courage to confront
and reverse injustices, some of which may have been promulgated by
his own organization.
At Bear Stearns, Ace Greenberg, chairman of the executive commit-
tee, feels that the reversal of injustice must come ‘‘from the top’’ or it
won’t happen at all. Largely due to Greenberg’s leadership, the com-
pany has never had a major ethical scandal in an industry more famous
for its acquisitiveness than its fairness. Notes Greenberg, ‘‘Mark Twain
said, ‘Fish stink from the head,’ right? And it’s people up top who set
an example of how a business should be run. And if they’re sloppy, or
throw dollars around and have big expense accounts, I think it perme-
ates the whole firm.’’
Greenberg’s antidote is to officially encourage ‘‘whistleblowers’’ to
expose injustices and ‘‘errors.’’ ‘‘We pay them 5 percent of whatever
error they uncover, and we pay them on the spot in cash—I have writ-
ten checks as large as $50,000 and $60,000.’’13 In an environment where
‘‘money talks’’ (and often shouts), these payments are a strong advise-
ment to everyone in the firm that ‘‘justice will be served’’ and injustice
will be reversed.
Paul O’Neill, former chairman of ALCOA and now secretary of the
treasury, also acted promptly when confronted with an injustice. A reli-
Justice and Fairness
187
gious order contacted him and told him that workers in one of his
Mexican plants had been overcome by forklift fumes and had to be
hospitalized. ‘‘I simply didn’t believe it,’’ muses O’Neill. ‘‘But it turned out they were right.’’
It turned out that the division president had known about the inci-
dent and had performed the required investigatory report, but he then