Meanwhile, I came across this below article which is quite inspiring to me and he will be coming to Singapore for the APEC CEO Summit and will be one of the keynote speaker in the event. He will also talk at the Trinity Theological College Singapore about his book because he is also a minister. I'll be there and if I don't forget, I'll post something about it after I attend it on 12 November 2009.
See you around.
Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article6571529.ece
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The banker with God on his side
Are Christian values at odds with the discredited world of banking? Not according to Stephen Green, the church minister who’s head of HSBC
by Ruth Gledhill
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Pope Benedict XVI is about to publish a radical new document on social and economic affairs, Caritas in veritate or Love in Truth, in which he is expected to challenge the financial and economic models that he believes are responsible for the financial crisis in the West. He will draw on the full history of the Church’s social teaching to emphasise again the abiding theme of the “common good”. By contrast, the Church of England, which does not even have the recession in a slot for debate at its General Synod in York next month, seems to have left it up to Stephen Green, the chairman of the HSBC bank, to set the moral lead for the nation.
His new book, Good Value: Reflections on Money, Morality and an Uncertain World, is a detailed analysis of the ethical and moral issues arising from the present economic crisis. It is not remotely didactic and it is mercifully free from the self-righteous pomposity that you might expect from a banker who is also an ordained clergyman.
Green is an NSM, a non-stipendiary minister or a “Not Short of Money”, as they have been described. As a result, he is able to mediate between the god of money, our society’s natural deity, and the biblical pretender to that role, the Christian God, from an elevated position — the 42nd floor of the HSBC building in Canada Square at Canary Wharf, East London.
“The banking industry has not covered itself in glory, to say the least, in recent years,” he admits at his penthouse office. “But I think that’s quite a different thing to saying that all banking is corrupt or is there for personal enrichment. It’s not true. What’s more, you can’t have a smoothly functioning modern economy without efficient, effective, well-run banking.” That said, Green acknowledges several times that “there are plenty of lessons to be learnt” and to fix “the breakdown of trust” that is now pervasive across business will require a lot of hard graft.
The industrious message and the almost Victorian rectitude and probity of what he says is reinforced by our surroundings. The 60-year-old’s office oozes asceticism. Images of working-class life adorn its walls. Admittedly, they are original Lowry paintings, but one bears on its back the £35 price tag for which it was acquired by a parsimonious banker many years ago.
Green admits that the underlying issue of “for want of a better word, morality in the markets” needs to be addressed. Like John Bercow, the newly elected Speaker, praising the “upright, decent, honourable” majority in the Commons, or police commissioners rooting around for those few bad apples in the barrel, the HSBC chairman says that he believes “more than 90 per cent of people working in banks have been doing a perfectly honest solid job”. He concedes that “a relatively small number of people were involved in the areas of excess and greed”.
“There was a culture, there was a climate that developed where it’s as if you would say to yourself, ‘If there’s a contract, if it’s legal, if there’s a market, then I’ll do the deal, I don’t have to ask any questions, I don’t have to ask whether it’s right or suitable’. And I do think that we need to get back to that sense of what’s right and suitable and not merely, here’s something that’s a profitable transaction.”
How do we find these elusive rogue bankers, and hold them to account? The answer, apparently, is quite technical. “One way of putting this is that we employ 330,000 people roughly speaking around the world. No senior management group, no board, can guarantee the mode of behaviour in every country, every time zone, every time there’s a transaction with a customer — you can’t set rules that guarantee all the right behaviour all the time. You certainly can’t personally supervise the right behaviour all of the time. You have to make sure there’s a standard of integrity, a standard of culture, a standard of commitment that informs recruitment decisions, that informs training and development programmes, that informs the way people are appraised and rewarded too. This is lots and lots of detailed work and it’s consistent reinforcement. This is the Forth Bridge exercise with a vengeance.
“One of the things that the Christian faith perspective does tell you is that nothing is perfect and that we all know that for any institution any individual — that includes the Church, needless to say. This is about shades of grey.”
Green remains wary of excessive regulation and cites St Paul, who spoke of the limits of the law. “He may have meant this in a slightly different context, but the point is a very well-taken one. No amount of rule making can ensure that the spirit’s there. Some rules may well be necessary but they are never going to be sufficient.”
This is Green’s second book. The first, Serving God? Serving Mammon? was an explicitly Christian book written by a man trying to answer the question of whether a person can, with integrity, have faith and be working in the financial markets. “I don’t think there’s anything different about being in a bank or other kinds of business or in the public sector,” he says. “The fact is if you are where you are and you do have a sense that you have got whatever resources, talents, whatever, the question does stare you in the face: ‘How am I going to contribute to the common good?’ We all, I think, face that question.”
When faced with the question himself, Green’s answer wasn’t simply financial, although he gives away a large proportion of his £1.25 million salary (he and all HSBC directors waived their bonuses last year). He also talks of “servant leadership”, as it is known as in the Church. This, draws on the image of the “servant king” in which the best rulers regard themselves as at the service of their people. It is fundamental to the concept of service in work, an ethic that theologians from the Pope down believe is crucial to the common good.Green thinks “service leadership” might be a better way of putting it for his industry, which he admits has fallen woefully short. “We’ve all become painfully aware of it in the past couple of years.”
Although HSBC received no government cash and said publicly that it can envisage no circumstances in which it will need to accept such help, it wasn’t unscathed by the credit crunch. Its acquisition of the US sub-prime lenders Household International in 2003 was an expensive mistake, especially for the 6,000 people made redundant earlier this year. Green, though, defends his “colleagues in America who’ve borne the brunt of this”, and praises them for the way in which they addressed and tackled the issue once it was recognised. “We don’t feel that this was inappropriate business. I don’t feel that we’ve got any apologies to make for the way in which we faced up to that problem. Indeed, I’m actually rather proud of the institution.”
In spite of the parable of the rich man condemned to eternity in Hades while the beggar Lazarus goes to bliss in Paradise, Christ is more sympathetic to the predicament of the rich than is often thought. Green does not want to address what Christ would think of where we are now.
“It is rather presumptuous to answer the question. Any reasonable reading of the Gospels will tell you that Christ was not automatically hostile to people who are in wealthy occupations.” In the Bible, the rich young man went away “sorrowful” when Jesus told him to give all he had to the poor. Green argues in his book that for the affluent, the biblical practice of tithing, or giving 10 per cent, is “not nearly enough”. As a litmus test, he suggests giving that is both material and “feels like real sacrifice”. And he speaks of the example he has witnessed of people who have tried out the St Francis prayer, “to give as to receive”, and discovered it works. “You hear this phrase all the time: ‘I want to give something back to the community’. It’s an interesting phrase because it bespeaks a sense that somewhere in the person is a recognition that there’s an obligation that he or she owes. That the wealth has imposed an obligation on them, a responsibility on them. Then people can either face their responsibility constructively and with enthusiasm even. Or there are people who don’t. And I think I would argue that the way of spiritual enrichment is to face that challenge and not to duck it.” It may be the way of spiritual enrichment but the question remains whether other, less God-fearing, financiers will ever see the light.
He admits in a rare unguarded moment, “One of my daughters once said, ‘Dad, you are a man of the Nineties, which I thought doesn’t sound too bad, until I realised she meant the 1890s.” Green is personally “well formed” as Christians say, having done a retreat on Mount Athos, and being familiar with the work of Marx, Frankl and most important philosophers, theologians, economists and political writers of the recent and not-so-recent past. One passage that leaps out of his book is where he talks of money in terms of Faust and the demon Mephistopheles.
“No, I don’t believe money is evil, of course I don’t. I believe in the economist’s definition. But as St Paul said, the love of money is the root of all evil. I think that’s probably going some, but it’s clearly a significant temptation and distortion. The rich young man’s story tells you, not that money is, per se, evil, but that you can become spiritually obsessed by it. And there’s ample evidence of that.”
Good Value: Reflections on Money, Morality and an Uncertain World by Stephen Green is published by Allen Lane at £25.
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