I am a Jewish atheist. Nearly four decades after my barmitzvah, I am beginning to understand the relevance of Yom Kippur and the need for formal atonement. Curiously, having spent years listening to rabbis of various institutional flavours, it was an archbishop who opened my mind.
I am privileged to have spent time with Dr Rowan Williams, from whom I learned that trust - the subject of my recent book - and faith have the same root. We cannot have trust in business if we do not have faith in business, with both a small and a capital F. The former Archbishop of Canterbury cited Aristotle and Aquinas. The cornerstone of faith is a belief in the common good. This demands ethical, principled behaviour and leadership.
Dr Williams sparkled on the nature of apology. "We're all familiar with how we feel", he remarked, "when someone says only 'I am sorry that you feel like that', rather than apologising outright". We all know what he means. Sometimes, only a proper "sorry" will do.
We Jews of course do a formal sorry at least once a year. On Yom Kippur, we are enjoined to practise teshuvah - repentance.
How can we understand this in the context of the business world today? We could start by socialising the notion of corporate repentance - a proper sorry for corporate failures and wrongdoing.
Look no further than Thomas Cook, the company recently embroiled in scandal following the tragic deaths of two young children in Corfu. A proper apology was only forthcoming after a huge press and public outcry.
According to the "values statement" on the company website: "We act with integrity. We maintain the highest ethical standards and transparency in our work and in our dealings with customers, partners, stakeholders and fellow employees. We keep our commitments. We are honest, fair and trustworthy".
Commentators have described recent events at Thomas Cook as a PR disaster. This is true. But what we see is not just a failure in communications. It is a substantive failure in behaviour: a failure in meeting the moral and ethical standards that society should demand from modern corporations.
How can anyone trust Thomas Cook - who themselves were compensated over this unfortunate and tragic incident - when they failed to do the right thing?
Part of the problem is that business (and politics, too) appears trapped within a managerial culture that is pathologically risk-averse, terrified of litigation and over-dependent on lawyers and public relations people. I should know - I used to work in PR. This is probably how Thomas Cook ended up where it did - thinking it could spin its way out of trouble, manage the message, and avoid (initially at least) saying it was sorry. Saying sorry remains one of the fundamentals of trustworthiness between corporations, customers and colleagues, just as it is between friends.
In becoming so scared of doing the wrong thing, business has lost sight of how to do the right thing. Judgment - a key facet of leadership - has gone awry. More trustworthy organisations add ethical dimensions to what is legal. Compliance alone is not enough.
Immediately after the 2008 global financial crisis, while chief executives - encouraged no doubt by omnipresent lawyers and PR advisers - hid in public silence, it was often faith leaders who stepped up to articulate what the silent majority already understood. The former Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks, as I wrote then, was an important contributor. In time, they encouraged business to tentatively find its voice and purpose once again.
The Blueprint movement, initiated by the Catholic Church, is one example of this, just as the pre-election Bishops letter - "Who is my neighbour?" - confirmed that a prophetic voice is still needed to hold business and political leaders properly to ethical and moral account.
The interplay between trust and faith relates to the notion of reciprocal vulnerability. Such vulnerability builds trustworthiness between people(s) and politics and indeed between businesses and employees, customers and civil society. In my writing, I have called for progressive leaders to metaphorically "stand naked" to those whom they serve.
The late 12th and early 13th centuries signalled a remarkable philosophical period - an Islamic-led Renaissance in Spain and the death of Moses Maimonides followed within 25 years by the birth of Thomas Aquinas. Eight centuries later, we should remind ourselves of Maimonides' vision for defining purpose and Aquinas's celebration of Aristotelian values and the common good. We still have much to learn from those times - for, since then, we have seen a constant erosion of legitimacy to lead and, to paraphrase Harvard Professor Michael Sandel (recently at least) a constant blurring of the moral limits of markets. We need better definition of both vision and morality to enable safer backdrops for trust and faith to flourish.
The late Tony Judt also championed the Aristotelian concept of social democracy. "We are all children of the Greeks", he observed. We should be more inspired by our heritage than constantly searching for new ideas or new meaning.
Rabbi Naftali Brawer, CEO of the Spiritual Capital Foundation and a Talmudic scholar, has challenged me on my atheist rejection of my familial Jewish faith. "Of course", he observed simply, "your work is absolutely guided by your faith". Well could this be why I am so drawn to issues of morality and ethics and by doing what is right?
Robert Phillips is a strategy consultant and author. His latest book, is ‘Trust Me, PR is Dead’ (Unbound, 2015).
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