The Wrong Management Model

Posted by Tom McFeely

Wednesday, June 10, 2009 12:43 PM

Edward Whitacre, GM's new chairman (Reuters)

Imagine this news story:

June 10 — Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s highest-ranking Shiite cleric, has served as a Muslim religious leader for his entire adult life. By his own admission, he becomes Pope of the Catholic Church knowing nothing about how his new religion operates.

“I don’t know anything about Catholicism,” Ayatollah al-Sistani said yesterday in an interview after his appointment as Pope. “A religion is a religion, and I think I can learn about the Catholic Church. I’m not that old, and I think the religious principles are the same.”

I’ve manufactured this news story by substituting Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and references to the Catholic Church and religion, for references to Edward Whitacre and references to General Motors and business, in excerpts from this article published today by Bloomberg News about the appointment of Whitacre, the former head of AT&T who has no experience in the auto industry, as the new chairman of GM’s board of directors.

I didn’t do this to ridicule GM’s move of naming Whitacre as its chairman, which was made in the context of trying to recruit outside business leadership to help guide the troubled auto giant out of bankruptcy. Instead, I wanted to highlight the limitations of arguments that the Church should look to the model of American corporate management in order to better govern itself.

The argument that the Church should do this has been made repeatedly in the context of the Church’s sexual abuse scandal in the United States . According to the Catholic Americans who advance this argument, poor management both in Rome and in U.S. dioceses was at the heart of the scandal and consequently the Church would profit by reforming its operations in conformance with the “best practices” of successful American corporate management.

Certainly the American bishops collectively could and should have done better in terms of how they addressed incidents of sexual abuse by clergy in the decades immediately preceding the 2002 revelations about the pervasive abuse scandal. And as with any other human organization there is always room for improvement in how the Church operates.

But the Church isn’t a for-profit corporation, it’s an institution founded two thousand years ago by Jesus Christ himself. And in keeping with the mission conferred upon it at that time by Jesus, the Church is in the business of serving God by saving souls through its proclamation of the Christian gospel. It’s not in the business of serving consumers by selling them material goods and services.

Given that reality, there are obvious limits to the transferability of business management practices as a model for governing the Catholic Church.

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