On Monday, Saint Louis University welcomed Chris Lowney, author of Heroic Leadership: Best Practices from a 450-Year-Old Company that Changed the World. The author and former Jesuit held a lecture in the Busch Student Center exploring topics from his book and explaining how he sees the Jesuit tradition as the perfect foundation for creating better leaders in today’s world.

After his years in the seminary, Lowney landed a job with J.P. Morgan, where he worked for seven years. He was the managing director, and for most of these years he lived abroad in Singapore, London and Tokyo and was able to see that his Jesuit background was very helpful in being a leader in the business world.

Lowney believes that taking a Jesuit approach to molding better, more innovative, ambitious, flexible leaders is much more successful than any attempts at this in the corporate world.

“The last thing the Jesuits would have considered themselves to be was leadership pundits,” Lowney said. “Instead of talking about leadership, they lived it.”

This Jesuit approach focuses on four unique values: self-awareness, ingenuity, love and heroism. Although he goes into greater detail in his book, on Monday Lowney briefly explored the four principles, showing how each contributes to making a person a better, more capable and confident leader.

Lowney started his presentation by asking the audience who they pictured when they thought of leaders, and what qualities make people good leaders. “We probably have a few George Bush’s out there, I’m sure somebody thought about the Pope,” said Lowney, “but did anybody think of their own name?”

“In our culture, the notion that leaders are only people who are in charge creates a problem. We need to first think of ourselves as leaders.”

To think of ourselves as leaders, Lowney explained that we have to figure out who we are and find the very best in ourselves. “Your claim to leadership is not your position in an organization, but your personal values and how you present them to the world.”

Finding your personal best shows a clear connection to the goals of the early Jesuits.

When the Jesuits first made the transition from educating seminarians to educating everyone, they had a clear idea of what kind of person they wanted to join their team. Their recruiting slogan quamplurimi et quam aptissimi, means in English, “as many as possible and of the very best.”

To encourage students to become the best, Lowney goes more in depth into three aspects of the Jesuit approach-heroism, self-awareness and love-but said that love was the one tenet that people usually misunderstood the most.

“I’m not saying you should go around in your day-to-day life telling everyone you love them,” said Lowney. “Love should manifest itself in deeds, not in words.”

In closing, Lowney again voiced that too many people are “stuck with the broken idea of leadership that has only to do with being in charge.”

Leadership should be more than that, and he is trying to show one path of many that can bring more people to realize that “everyone leads, with role-modeling values like ingenuity, heroism, self-awareness and love.”

Lowney currently works as the Special Assistant to the President on the Catholic Medical Mission Board. His book was chosen by the Freshman Year Experience committee as next year’s freshman summer reading.

This presentation, “Great Issues: Forming Tomorrow’s Leaders the Jesuit Way,” was only one of a number of sessions Lowney did on the SLU campus this week.

“Here at SLU, you are realizing this beautiful 16th-century vision that if young people are given support and guidance they can be come aptissimi, the very best,” Lowney said.