Business Leadership with a Human Face — The compass for Sustainable Development
First of all, I would like to express my deep gratitude for your kind invitation to give today’s SINYI Lecture* at the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies of the Peking University. I especially thank Professor Tu Weiming, whose personality, knowledge, and wisdom I admire.
The context: We live in interesting times
While the origin of the curse “May you live in interesting times” — often mistakenly referred to as a “Chinese curse” — seems to be British1, the deeper truth is obvious: We live in a time characterized, like never before, by a monstrous dimension and overwhelming complexity of social, economic, climatic, and therefore political problems. Most of them are a result of four decades of unsustainable development strategies, business practices, and consumer behavior.
*Sinyi Lecture is a large lecture set up by the Sinyi Center for Cultural Studies at the Institute of Advanced Humanistic Studies at Peking University. With reference to the context of the business world, the lecture aims at providing a platform for advanced exchanges and dialogues around the theme of the modern destiny, mission, and transformation of the Confucian tradition. It invites distinguished scholars and business leaders to discuss topics relevant to business practices, expecting to move across disciplinary boundaries, to overcome the separation between theory and practice, and to uncover, enrich, and apply traditional Confucian resources in spirituality, morality, ethics, and social institutions, so that the value of ren (human-heartedness or co-humanity) can prevail and be broadened, and the exploration and construction of a new business ethics under the perspective of spiritual humanism can be advanced.
Autor: Klaus Leisinger
Published: 2025