Psychologist Daniel Goleman walked up to the stage atto a packed Emory Student Center to deliver the keynote address at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School’s talk titled “The Future of Leadership is Compassion” on Sept. 30. The purpose of the event was to inform students, faculty and community members on how they can implement compassion into their leadership ventures.
The “The Future of Leadership is Compassion” talk, which about 250 people attended, is part of a larger initiative at Emory to implement Cognitively-Based Compassion Training through the University’s Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics. The center researches ethics rooted in kindness and inclusivity and designs evidence-based programs to cultivate compassion on a global scale.
Goleman began his address with an anecdote showcasing the importance of compassion. He recounted a day in which he left work at The New York Times, his former employer, and found a homeless man slumped over on the street. At that moment, Goleman said he took action to help the man, leading other people who had previously ignored him to gather around and support him. Goleman said this moment helped him reach an epiphany about human compassion.
“TAt the moment I stopped, a crowd gathered to help us,” Goleman said. “This is extremely important because people have the potential capacity for compassion. You just don’t call it forth enough.”
Goleman said that people channel compassion when they begin working on their own emotional intelligence. He said that emotional intelligence begins when one chooses to start understanding themselves and those around them.
“The first part of emotional intelligence is about self-mastery, self-awareness and using that awareness to manage yourself better in ways that would pay off, whatever that may be,” Goleman said.
Following Goleman’s address, he introduced and joined a panel, which included including Kartik Varma, a core member at the Piramal School of Leadership’s School of Health, London Business School; Executive Director of Experiential Learning Kirstie Papworth and Emory Healthcare co-Chief Well Being Officer Tim Cunningham. Associate Professor of Finance Jeff Rosensweig moderated the panel.
The panelists addressed the application of compassion in various spheres, particularly in the business world. Goleman spoketalked specifically about the business world and AI, and said it is important for the business world to remember its own humanity as it experiments with the inclusion of AI in the workplace.
“I don’t think that you would want your boss to be an AI,; you would want a human being,” Goleman said. “I don’t think that AI has, for example, the human experience of loss and grief, and so it can say what’s been said in those situations, but it doesn’t really resonate, and I think that resonance, which is an emotional intelligence capacity, will loom larger and larger.”
Papworth said that in recent years, the corporate sphere has been implementing the idea of empathy more into everyday work activities. At the London Business School, Papworth said she has continued to lead her compassionate leadership workshop due to the positive student response.
“The students would say to us, ‘I wish I’d learned that at the start of my second year,’” Papworth said. “‘I didn’t want to wait till the end.’”
Varma said that the individuals can use compassion not only as a tool for leadership, but also for personal flourishing.
“What would make me happy continuously comes down to just two words: service and love,” Varma said. “For me, flourishing means, if I can live a life that is useful to others, then objectively, empirically, that’s the only thing I can do with my 80, 90- odd years on a planet that is 4.5 billion years old.”
Liam Cochran (28C) said the event highlighted how the speakers are advancing compassion-based learning practices worldwide. He also said the information was new to him, and the event greatly expanded his knowledge about the topic.
“They are moving our society and business and leadership into good directions with good ideas on how that can be best possible, as with making it more monetarily feasible and promoting flourishing,” Cochran said.
Cochran said the talk inspired him to implement more compassion in his daily life.
“I’m definitely going to look out for books and more ways to look into all the writings and teachings that they’ve already done so far, especially with Dan Goleman and all the other speakers on the stage,” Cochran said.
Reflecting on compassion in the business school, Rosensweig noted that students have become increasingly compassionate in their own ventures, echoing the capability of students to drive compassion through all of their work.
“Students now, and not just the handful like it was 10 years ago, maybe the majority, want to do an enterprise, maybe start a business that they feel has some social purpose,” Rosensweig said. “It doesn’t even maybe have to be charitable, could be, but has a social purpose, enhances people’s lives, instead of exploits them.”
