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Magnificence at Work

Organizations are aiming too low. Pulled by numerous pressures for performance, managers have become overachievers in pragmatism but under-estimators of what creates worth and worthiness. With shifting expectations from globalization, sustainable development, fair trade, equitable outsourcing, governance reform and environmental stewardship, boards, executives and managers increasing face criteria for excellence that are simultaneously moral as well as strategic. Magnificence at work explores the principles and practices for management as a higher possibility, unleashing the deeper human capacities that bring dignity and meaning to work while enhancing creativity and integrity in the workplace.

John Dalla Costa has been the keynote speaker at venues around the world, including the Vienna Peace Summit, The United Nations Forum on Business at the Millennial Summit, and the “Business as Calling” conference in Bilbao, Spain.

Customized for every audience and conference environment, topics and themes explored include:

The Ethical Imperative

For Boards, Managers, Associations, Executive Teams, Brand Marketers

• How to recognize the demanding moral horizon for business performance
• Going beyond codes to cultural transformation
• Integrating Vision and Values with Strategy and Tactics
• Defining the terms and measures for operational integrity
• Exercising dialogue as an early warning system for ethical learning
• How to develop the business opportunity from the ethical quandary

Trust Matters: Managing Integrity in a Time of Suspicion

For Public and Private Sector Organizations, Leadership, Strategic Planners, HR Managers

• Understanding why the public trust is really frayed and declining
• Identifying which behaviours and assumptions exacerbate suspicion
• Measuring costs and impacts on a balance sheet of suspicion and trust
• Deploying “thick strategies” to raise and sustain integrity
• How to recover trust and leverage the assets from credibility
• Seven steps for responsible decision-making

Magnificence at Work

For Managers and Organizations Raising Norms of Accountability

• Recognizing factors that dull moral imagination
• Setting criteria for integrity that is both inspiring and practical
• Applying Thomas Aquinas’ virtue of magnificence to management
• Taking excellence to a higher level by entwining expertise with ethics
• Creating enhancing order beyond the “creative destruction”
• Enabling freedom and dignity through product benefits and services
• Growing worth by elevating worthiness

The Holy Use of Money

For NGOs, Corporate Social Responsibility Executives, Spirituality at Work Practitioners

• Currency as a medium of relationship
• How to value talents and invest creativity
• Restoring the worth of ideals by recognizing them as essential needs
• Money seen anew within a theology of grace
• Calibrating the double ROI from money and morality
• Smart risks serving blessed creation
• The gifts and returns from aiming high

When Work Becomes Vocation

For Managers Aiming For Purpose as well as Profits

• Recognizing the needs of the soul at work
• Practices for reflection and discernment
• Visionary planning through prophetic imagination
• Discovering the latent holiness in mundane tasks
• Aligning hopes with deeds
• Engaging differences to generate insight from diversity
• Making a difference making a living

Radical Fairness: From “Global-I-zation” to “Global-We-zation”

For Multi-National Corporations and Associations, Thought and Opinion Leaders, Global Issues Forums

• Diagnostics for the current adolescence of global trade and markets
• Why many “me’s” do not translate into a coherent “we”
• Confronting the global pressures demanding a collaborative response
• What it takes for the paradigm shift to “we”
• Principles for “Global-We-zation”
• Practices for “leveling the playing field” and “lifting the tide”
• Personal commitments towards our shared inheritance

Seventh Sigma: Integrity from Purpose

For Boards and Ethics Officers, Organizational Leaders, Teams and Team Leaders

• How to embed ethical excellence as a total quality initiative
• Planning for consequences as well as outcomes
• Aligning beliefs, principles, values and ethics
• Integrating ethics with strategy
• Measuring trust and integrity as critical performance variables
• Inspiring innovation from moral investigation
• Continuous ethical improvement

The “Simon of Cyrene” Principle

For Christian Managers, Interfaith Groups, and Dialogues Between Business and Religion

• How work is the locus of the human relationship with the Divine
• Making a living serving God’s creation
• Why “whole and holy presence” is indispensable to integrity at work
• Heeding the call to live faith in action
• Awakening to grace by praying at work
• Using our talents for ROI that is both short-term and eternal
• Embracing the burden for what is right and good that no one else can carry

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