Virtue:
Generosity
Other names:
Liberality
Definition:
Not being to attached to your things so much that you're willing to give when appropriate; "restrains the immoderate affection for wealth from withholding seasonable gifts or expenses" (CE)
Advice:
"You are truly avaricious if you longingly, ardently, anxiously desire to possess goods that you do not have, even though you say that you would not want to acquire them by unjust means... If you find your heart very desolated and afflicted at the loss of property, believe me, you love it too much. The strongest proof of love for a lost object is suffering over its loss." (St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life, Part III, Ch. 14, cited in Ralph Martin, The Fulfillment of All Desire)
Empirical Research:
Case examples:
Gifts of the Holy Spirit
Further reading:
Vices opposed:
Greed/Avarice, Prodigality
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn Pizza Tiger, Domino's founder Tom Monaghan explains how he tried to apply the business philosophy of writer David Dunn to his own enterprise. "What Dunn had learned...was that although he was brought up to look upon life as a process of getting, as most people are, he was much happier when he was giving. He started what he called 'giving myself away' in the 1930s, when he sent a suggestion for an advertisement to the New York Central Railroad. The idea came to him aboard the Twentieth Century Limited, now only a nostalgic memory, but then the queen of passenger trains. He began wondering where the Chicago bound and New York bound centuries passed each other in the night. He visualized the copy line 'Where the Centuries Pass,' and he offered it to the railroad with 'no strings attached.'
The idea was used on a calendar that Dunn took great pleasure in seeing the following year in nearly every railroad station and hotel lobby he entered in the United States and Europe. He wrote: 'I made the important discovery that anything which makes one glow with pleasure is beyond money calculation in this humdrum world where there is too much grubbing and too little glowing.' He developed 'giving himself away' into 'an exciting and thoroughly satisfying hobby.'"
"Dunn's secret was that his giving was done without thought of reward. 'Almost anything in the world can be bought for money - except the warm impulses of the human heart. They have to be given,' he wrote. 'And they are priceless in their power to purchase happiness for two people, the recipient and the giver.' Another point that fascinated me was when he said that giving to become known as generous or self-sacrificing is not giving at all. It is merely selfishness in disguise, and is a slow poison to the spirit." (pp. 174-75)
Monaghan draws a connection between this approach and Christianity. "Dunn's idea appealed to me because it showed how to apply Christian philosophy, in a nondenominational way, to the day-to-day business of Domino's. It underscored my own belief that we enrich ourselves most in life when we give ourselves most fully and freely. I told the franchisees that we can do this in Domino's by seeking ways to give more service than the customer expects, by noticing things that will help the customer or the co-workers, or by showing appreciation to suppliers for a job well done." (p. 175) (Monaghan, Pizza Tiger, pp. 174-75)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn his book, The Memo, business professor John Wesley Yoest, Jr. argues that generosity is actually a highly effective means of fostering loyalty. "Many people think, and practice, a variation of this myth: 'Make a person think he owes you something; if he is indebted to you he will appreciate you—if he owes you, he will be grateful to you.'
"This is, of course, a misunderstanding of human nature. It is also how the amateur believes power is wielded. The experienced professional knows better. As the Bible says, …the borrower is slave to the lender, Proverbs 22:7b
"For instance, a bank 'gives' you a loan. You repay the loan over 36 months. You do not love your banker.
"You hate him for each and every month of the term of the loan. Whatever people may believe in the logic of the loan, no one enjoys being in debt.
"The only time death is popular is when the last payment is made on the house. 'Mortgage has as its root word the French word for 'dead'—mort. Even a church, when the building is finally paid off, will burn the mortgage.
"If we hate the bank, we also hate the banker. The banker has power over us; he owns a piece of our soul. So if there is so much influence in this transaction how can we become Power Brokers for good?
"General George Marshall gives us an example of how to work 'debt' to the manager’s advantage. Marshall was described by Winston Churchill as the 'Organizer of Victory.' Marshall’s biographer, Leonard Mosley, used the accolade for his book. Marshall was the U.S. Army’s top military leader during World War II and was the all-powerful decision-maker on key leadership positions.
...
"He well understood the strange, fickle nature of the human condition: If I perform a favor for you, you may or may not be grateful. But you would be much obliged to me much as if I were a banker making a loan to you. This is the root of obligation. And no one wants to be obligated to anyone. General Marshall said, 'If you want a man to be for you never let him feel he is dependent on you. Because he is not going to like you at all. If you really want to have the guy be for you, find some way to make him feel you are in some way dependent on him.' (Mosley 1982)
"Even though Marshall controlled the careers and promotions of thousands of senior officers, he was careful to make sure that the appreciation flowed from the top down." (Yoest Jr., The Memo, ch. 27)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn Made in America, Helen Walton, wife and business partner of Wal-Mart founder, Sam Walton, describes one of the family's charitable practices early in Wal-Mart's history as a largely local business, utilizing resources in small but meaningful ways. "At Christmastime, we would get a list from the welfare office of some children who weren't going to have Santa Claus. We'd get the ages and sizes and that sort of thing. I remember one night we took our children into the store after it was closed and gave them that list and told them to go around and pick out things for them because we wanted them to have some sense of what was going on outside our privileged little family. It was a small town, and we were a real small-town kind of operation." (Walton, Made in America, pp. 93-94)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn 1932, with factories shutting down across the country, the Great Depression was creating such a strain on industrialist and earth-moving machinery inventor R. G. LeTourneau that he was forced to temporarily suspend all salaries within his company. "I went to church the following Sunday," he explains in his autobiography, Mover of Men and Mountains, "taking my place in the choir where I filled the bass section with bulk if not melody. I had forgotten it, but this was the Sunday the annual pledges for missionary work were taken up. I listened to the speakers...and I said to myself 'Lord, I'm sorry, but there just isn't any way I can make my pledge this year. I can't even meet my payroll.' Right then I had the thought that I had failed to share with the Lord the year before when I had my first big profit, promising to share with Him this year when my profits would be big pickings. Certainly in dropping me a hundred thousand in debt He had shown me the error of my ways. Was I to fail him again?"
"I was almost sold on that reasoning when I had another disturbing thought. I had been pledging $5,000 a year for some years past, and I had the feeling that the Lord wanted me to pledge the same amount again." Ultimately, LeTourneau pledged the full amount, horrifying his company accountant, Henry Frost. "'There goes the business,' he said."
"'I don't think so,' I said. 'We'll add the pledge to the payroll, and whenever we can meet the payroll, we'll meet the pledge.'
"'I think I'd better get out of here,' he said. 'The Bible isn't one of the books we use in cold-cash bookkeeping.'"
"'You thinking of quitting?' I asked."
"'No,' he said slowly. 'We can't be any worse off than we are now. I'll stick around to see how the show ends.'
"Within a month, we were meeting the payroll - and the pledge - on time. 'We're making it,' Frost reported.
"'With the help of the Lord,' I said." (LeTourneau, Mover of Men and Mountains, pp. 187-88)
During James Cash Penney's own lifetime, the J. C. Penney Company remained closely connected to the rural, agrarian America in which its founder had come of age. As David Kruger explains in J. C. Penney: The Man, the Store and American Agriculture, Penney strived to practice the golden rule in dealing with the tenant farmers and agrarian workers who maintained his rural estates, "providing profit-sharing opportunities and agribusiness partnerships, just as he had applied the same philosophy in J. C. Penney stores to develop stock clerks into store managers, and in many cases, store managers into independently wealthy men. Like his early J. C. Penney stock clerks, Penney's agrarian workers undoubtedly lacked his financial resources but could mutually benefit from the capital and partnerships he could provide them, sharing responsibilities as well as profits. 'Don't you worry about coming up with the money or the facilities,' Penney once advised a poor but promising cowboy in the 1930s as he offered him a partnership in the Angus cattle operation. 'You just bring the expertise and the labor to make this happen.' In many cases, Penney's goal was not only that his agrarian partners shared profits, but that they might become successful enough to eventually, if they desired, buy their entire agricultural operation from Penney outright. It gave him satisfaction when some of these partners eventually did so during the late 1960s, creating large family farms that continue Penney's agricultural legacy today." (Kruger, J. C. Penney, p. 7)
ReplyDeleteCase Study
ReplyDeleteJohn D. Rockefeller’s generosity was apparent even in his early days as a bookkeeper in Cleveland, as Ron Chernow makes clear in his discussion of young Rockefeller’s personal account book, known as Ledger A. “Rockefeller was fantastically charitable from boyhood. During his first year on the job, the young clerk donated about 6 percent of his wages to charity, some weeks much more. ‘I have my earliest ledger and when I was only making a dollar a day I was giving five, ten or twenty-five cents to all these objects,’ he observed. He gave to the Five Points Mission in a notorious lower Manhattan slum, as well as to ‘a poor man in church’ and ‘a poor woman in church.’ By 1859, when he was twenty, his charitable giving surpassed the 10 percent mark. Despite a pronounced tilt toward Baptist causes, he gave early hints of an ecumenical bent, contributing money to a black man in Cincinnati in 1859 so he could buy his wife out of slavery. The next year, he gave to a black church, a Methodist church, and a Catholic orphanage.” (Chernow, Titan, p. 55)
Case Study (Re-post with page number correction)
ReplyDeleteJohn D. Rockefeller’s generosity was apparent even in his early days as a bookkeeper in Cleveland, as Ron Chernow makes clear in his discussion of young Rockefeller’s personal account book, known as Ledger A. “Rockefeller was fantastically charitable from boyhood. During his first year on the job, the young clerk donated about 6 percent of his wages to charity, some weeks much more. ‘I have my earliest ledger and when I was only making a dollar a day I was giving five, ten or twenty-five cents to all these objects,’ he observed. He gave to the Five Points Mission in a notorious lower Manhattan slum, as well as to ‘a poor man in church’ and ‘a poor woman in church.’ By 1859, when he was twenty, his charitable giving surpassed the 10 percent mark. Despite a pronounced tilt toward Baptist causes, he gave early hints of an ecumenical bent, contributing money to a black man in Cincinnati in 1859 so he could buy his wife out of slavery. The next year, he gave to a black church, a Methodist church, and a Catholic orphanage. (Chernow, Titan, p. 50)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteAs biographer Ron Chernow explains, John D. Rockefeller’s attitude towards wealth was shaped from his youth by the American Protestant tradition that traced its roots back to the Puritans, encouraging Christians to excel at their vocations while balancing the acquisitive spirit against the doctrine of stewardship. This doctrine centered on “the notion of the wealthy man as a mere instrument of God, a temporary trustee of his money, who devoted it to good causes. ‘It has seemed as if I was favored and got increase because the Lord knew that I was going to turn around and give it back.’ Rockefeller said this in his late seventies, and one wonders whether the equation between moneymaking and money giving only entered his mind later. Yet even as a teenager, he took palpable pleasure in distributing money for charitable purposes, and he insisted that from an early date he discerned the intimate spiritual link between earning and dispensing money. ‘I remember clearly when the financial plan – if I may call it so – of my life was formed. It was out in Ohio, under the ministration of a dear old minister, who preached, ‘Get money; get it honestly and then give it wisely.’ I wrote that down in a little book.’ This echoed John Wesley’s dictum, ‘If those who “gain all they can” and “save all they can,’ will likewise “give all they can,” then the more they will grow in grace.’” (Chernow, Titan, p. 55)