Morality for Managers

U.S. businessmen are constantly faced with moral decisions. Yet what they hear from the pulpit on Sunday seldom seems relevant to the office problems they face on Monday. "In the natural cycle of life -- birth, marriage, death --the church is doing a pretty good job," says Worth Loomis, vice president of Cleveland's Medusa Portland Cement Co. "But it is nonexistent when decisions are being made in man's line of work." Applying Christianity to the decision-making process in offices and factories is the goal of a significant new form of experimental ministry in the U.S.: the industrial missions.

Mechanics & Executives. Far from trying to put God into the marketplace by sermons or commandments, indus trial missions seek to get Christian work ers, from assembly line mechanics, to corporate executives, to articulate the moral issues involved in their work lives. Founder of the movement is Episcopal Father Hugh C. White Jr. Inspired by England's Sheffield Industrial Mission, he quit a pastorate in the Detroit industrial suburb of Ypsilanti to spend three years learning what modern busi ness was all about. In 1956, with the encouragement of the Michigan Council of Churches, he set up the Detroit Industrial Mission. Now there are simi lar missions in ten cities, linked by a national committee that last month held its first organizational meeting in Bos ton, coaxed Father White into accepting its executive directorship. Worth Loomis, a Presbyterian layman, is permanent president of the committee.

The basic tool of the industrial mission is the informal seminar. In Detroit, for example, the mission conducts conferences in the offices of labor unions and such firms as Ford and Chrysler, where labor leaders and executives meet to talk about their job problems and dis cuss theoretical examples with down-to-earth application. A typical moral issue that they are asked to solve: Your boss has been exaggerating the results of your department. During his vacation, you have to file his reports. If you tell the truth, he's on the spot; if you don't, you become an accomplice in a dangerous fraud. What do you do?

Moral Morale. In Flint, Mich., Episcopal Father Erville Maynard lunches weekly with officials from General Motors' Buick division. The conversation turns on such problems as what to do when an employee is ostracized for out standing performance, or how to improve factory morale that has gone sour because of an unpopular promotion.

In Boston, Episcopal Father Scott Paradise works mostly with the Ph.D.s who man the burgeoning research and development industry; with them, he poses issues that are far more speculative. Sample problem: A company has been offered a contract to develop an artificial organ that could prolong life. One key problem is that a lubricant must be added to the patient's blood; while preliminary tests indicate that it is probably harmless, it might possibly affect a patient's mental stability. Since the contract calls for human experimentation, should the company accept the deal, and how should it carry through?

Industrial missionaries know that their job involves more than uncovering the right and wrong of every decision and plumping for the right. Says the Rev. O. Merrill Boggs of Cincinnati's mission, "As a rule there's a little bit of good and bad in all alternatives. We provide the process to confront problems." No manager is expected to base a decision solely on its moral issues, but the clergymen feel that once he has singled them out and contemplated them, they will shape his thinking toward the greatest good.

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