universities

Cultivating a Purpose-Driven Culture at Universities with Good Character of School Leaders, Faculty, and Students

May 1, 2024May 18, 2024 by Eco-Design Thinking

There have been significant protests at universities in the United States and Europe in solidarity with Palestinians and against Israel’s war on Gaza. At Columbia University and the University of Amsterdam, the police conducted a raid, resulting in the arrest of many students. Students at the University of Texas at Austin have also taken part in protests. The protests are not limited to Columbia University and UT Austin. Other American universities, including UCLA, have also seen demonstrations related to the conflict. These protests have drawn national attention and highlight the impact of the ongoing conflict on college campuses across the United States and Europe.

At universities, a deteriorating culture and mismanagement by university boards often occur under the guise of freedom of speech. These institutions prioritize profit over purpose-driven values, allowing anti-western ideologies to infiltrate their campuses. Consequently, academic standards decline and confidence in these universities is low. Moreover, they fail to provide students with character-forming experiences essential for a free and flourishing society. The influence of professors and external factors contributes to the radicalization of students.

Universities should re-embrace the promotion of high values and character, which have waned in recent years. The shift away from these values in higher education has had a direct impact on our society. To address this, universities must actively foster a diverse range of ethical perspectives both inside and outside the classroom. This involves designing curricula that expose students to various topics and viewpoints, as well as hiring professors who encourage critical thinking rather than prescribing specific beliefs. Schools should uphold unwavering academic excellence, with integrity and empathy as foundational principles. Additionally, international programs can broaden students’ horizons and instill humility by exposing them to different cultures. Creating a campus culture that celebrates character development, discipline, mutual respect, and open dialogue is crucial. As a society, we risk decline if we lose our ability to think critically and engage in constructive, civil discussions. Read also “Fostering a Culture of Ethics on Campus, Academic Integrity, and Sustainable Good Governance at American Universities“.

Holistic model for restoring the higher purpose of universities

Universities have failed to restore their higher purpose and to develop good character in their leaders, faculty, and students. In this article, I provide a holistic model to realize this sustainably, as shown in this diagram. It will aid universities and colleges to cultivate a purpose-driven institution sustainably.

This holistic, never-ending, purpose-driven cycle entails six stages:

Developing the personal purpose of school leaders, faculty, and students entails the foundation for developing their authenticity, integrity, empathy, emotional intelligence, critical thinking skills, and character. Personal purpose is associated with ethical and emotionally intelligent individuals with a sense of direction.
Formulating the personal innovation strategy of school leaders, faculty, and students; this strategy entails a roadmap to translate their personal purpose into measurable actions.
Implement and cultivate their personal innovation strategy according to the Plan-Deploy-Act-Challenge cycle to continuously improve and purposely manage themselves.
Aligning the personal purpose of school leaders, faculty, and students with their behavior and actions to cultivate their personal integrity and empathy skills;
Developing the shared university purpose is about what the university stands for, its reason, and how it benefits society. Shared purpose entails the organization’s soul and joint mission, vision, and core values.
Aligning the personal purpose with the shared university purpose creates uniformity of personal and university values. Matching these two purposes is essential for achieving an ethical, cohesive, unified university and a happy, engaged, committed, and passionate workforce. It’s about aligning the objectives of school leaders, faculty, and students with those of the university and fostering mutual value addition.

This model includes several key elements, such as fostering authenticity, integrity, a sense of purpose, and empathy among school leaders, faculty, and students and integrating sustainability into the curriculum. By following this framework, universities can create a culture that benefits their bottom line and contributes to the greater good, and school leaders, faculty, and students will be genuine and true to themselves. Below, I will elaborate on each of the six stages in the model.

Personal Purpose

Having a higher purpose in life means you’re living your values and beliefs. Finding your higher purpose is discovering who you are, what you stand for, what matters to you, and what you can contribute to the world. When someone feels that his life lacks purpose, he may struggle to find motivation and direction. This can lead to a sense of detachment from his values and a lack of inspiration to enrich his life and those around him. Finding motivation and direction can be easier when you have a purpose in life. This will inspire you to become more effective, ethical, and fulfilled. Having a purpose in life will inspire you to discover ways to become more creative, imaginative, and innovative. Life is never richer, fuller, or more rewarding than moving faithfully and persistently toward a compelling purpose. I therefore advise school leaders, faculty, and students to formulate their personal purpose statement. Remember what Elon Musk said: “Don’t even attach yourself to a person, a place, a company, an organization, or a project. Attach yourself to a mission, a calling, a purpose only. That’s how you keep power and your peace. It worked pretty well for me this far”.

Your personal purpose entails your identity (mission) and dream (vision). Your dream is related to a higher calling. Everyone has a higher calling, a so-called inner assignment. One must be aware of this higher calling and have the courage to follow it. Once you discover the core of your nature, your higher self, and who you really are, you will find it possible to make every dream come true. By discovering and formulating your higher self, you will become visionary, innovative, disruptive, and empathic, unleash your creative potential, and realize you have something unique. Your job is to know what that is and to work at it with passion and love.

Personal mission is aimed at being, and personal vision is aimed at becoming. Your personal mission inspires you, and your personal vision motivates you. Your mission and vision statement (personal purpose statement) embodies your values. Your personal mission encompasses your philosophy of life and your overall objectives, indicating who you are, the reason for existence, why you are on earth, what your purpose here is, what you stand for, what values you are most committed to, what is decisive for your success, what is your life purpose, what do you live for, what are your core beliefs, what are your deepest aspirations, what makes you happy, and what do you do that you are most proud of. Your personal mission is your personal leading light, keeping you steadily in the course of your dream. “Who am I?” is an identity question. It initiates self-examination of your personal identity (the unique position you find yourself in) and a voyage of discovery. My mission is: “Enjoy the freedom to unleash the creative potential in others, especially if this can mean something in their life.”

Your personal vision statement is a description of how you want to realize your dream in the long term. It indicates where you are going, which values, beliefs, and principles guide you on your way, why you are involved in the design industry, what you want to achieve, what you desire for your life, what your long-term intentions are, what talents, skills and experiences you need to add value to your others, where you want to be at the end of your life, what you hope to become, where you would like your life to be headed, the ideal characteristics you want to possess, your perfect job situation, and what you like to be. Ask yourself these questions and answer them honestly. Also, identify the attitudes you need to change and understand how to make your values relevant to others. Your personal vision takes care of the inner guidance and determines your actions to reach the most desired future. It functions as an ethical compass that gives meaning to your life.

Please click on this link to view my personal purpose statement, which also outlines my values and beliefs. You should formulate your personal purpose excitingly and persuasively and make it visible. The biggest problem most people face is writing it down. Take the time to write it down based on your answers to the questions in this framework.

Ask yourself these questions and answer them honestly. By practicing breathing and silence exercises, you can better connect with your inner self and find answers to these questions. This will help you to discover your higher purpose. Read “How Mindful Meditation Boosts Critical Thinking in the Age of AI and “Crafting Your Authentic Personal Brand: A 5-Step Guide”.

Through this process, you’ll cultivate self-knowledge, self-awareness, self-management, and self-learning, which entails a journey toward personal disruptive innovation, as shown in this diagram:

Your purpose is associated with your inner freedom, need, motives, and conscience. You realize your principles through your conscience, which can be effectively rendered through your talents. Thus, you can give direction to your life and create your future through your purpose. Personal purpose is a set of guiding principles that clearly state your dream, where you are going, who you are, what you stand for, what makes you unique, and which key roles you fulfill in life and business. It’s an individualized constitution on which your life and behavior are based. This, in turn, forms the basis for determining your decisions about what you want to achieve and the meaning of your life. Formulating your personal purpose is a spiritual search for your identity and a voyage toward realizing your related dream. It includes a collection of challenges and ethical starting points that form the context for your actions. And the key to action is understanding yourself. Through your personal purpose, you will become a critical thinker and become more creative, proactive, disciplined, empathic, ethical, and responsible for yourself. Your personal purpose allows you to express your ability, dream, intentions, identity, ideals, values, and driving force and gain more insight about yourself. This self-knowledge influences your attitude toward others, empathic behavior, and emotional intelligence.

By formulating your personal purpose, you raise a mirror to yourself and strike a personal note in terms of self-examination. The changes in the thinking process and mindset are meant to prepare you for action, set you in motion, and create inner involvement for the things you love. Based on insights acquired through this process, you will also become more self-assured and work smarter through self-learning and self-knowledge. You become more creative and innovative as you grow more conscious of yourself—your real character, inner processes, and driving forces. To fathom your life and get a better self-image and greater self-knowledge, together with challenges, your learning ability gets greater. This leads to inner harmony, the foundation for personal disruptive innovation. Remember, the more innovative you want to be, the more you should develop self-knowledge.

Consciousness

Your personal purpose is related to self-awareness and self-regulation. Self-awareness is recognizing and understanding your strengths, weaknesses, needs, values, ambition, moods, emotions, drives, and their effect on others. Self-regulation is controlling or redirecting disruptive impulses, feelings, and attitudes. Self-awareness and self-regulation impact personal integrity, empathy, self-confidence, trustworthiness, and willingness to learn. It is an inner, spiritual learning process related to emotional and spiritual intelligence. This internal process starts with self-knowledge or knowing, which is necessary to develop a higher level of consciousness. The more conscious you are, the easier it is to find your higher purpose. Conscious people are guided by fundamental principles that serve as a moral compass, shaped over a lifetime of introspection. These principles have personal integrity, honesty, and fairness as their magnetic north and are grounded in consciousness. Remember: “Personal integrity and honesty are two important values to uphold, but they differ. Honesty is about telling the truth to others, while personal integrity is about being truthful to yourself and staying true to your values and principles. It’s important to be honest with others, but it’s more important to be honest with yourself and live your life by your beliefs, values, and purpose” — Hubert Rampersad.

Introspection and self-reflection

The biggest hindrance to developing self-knowledge is our own thinking. Most people don’t spend much time thinking about their life. I have introduced a breathing and silence exercise that will assist you in turning your attention inward, give you control over your awareness, let you think deeply, and create an atmosphere in which you can listen attentively to your inner voice. Through the breathing and silence exercise, you will discover your ability and get a better hold on your life as your self-awareness increases. Especially in this age of AI, individuals need to be engaged in deep thinking, introspection, and self-reflection. This will also strengthen their leadership and critical thinking skills. University leaders should coach their faculty, and faculty should coach their students in this process. This will also help them cultivate critical thinking skills. The future of work will involve humans collaborating with AI to accomplish tasks more ethically, efficiently, and productively. Because current AI systems excel at imitation but not innovation.

Personal Innovation Strategy

To bring your purpose alive, you must translate it into measurable actions. School leaders, faculty, and students should formulate their personal innovation strategy to get their personal purpose to life. This is a roadmap to developing a growth mindset, authenticity, integrity, empathy, and critical thinking skills. Without continuous improvement based on your personal innovation strategy, you won’t be successful in life and business. The following are the five steps to develop your personal innovation strategy:

Your personal innovation strategy helps you turn your personal purpose into manageable, measurable objectives and milestones in a balanced way. Using this strategy, you can effectively manage your time and become more disciplined, proactive, innovative, and empathetic. Please click on this link to view my personal innovation strategy. Suppose you want to learn more about this personal innovation strategy system. In that case, I recommend reading my articles “How to Redesign Your Life Based on Your Personal Innovation Strategy” and “Cultivating Critical Thinking in the Age of AI.”

Implementation According to the PDAC Cycle

Once you have established your personal innovation strategy, it is essential to consistently implement, maintain, and cultivate it to effectively manage and challenge yourself in your personal and university life. To aid you in this process, I recommend following the PDAC cycle (Plan-Deploy-Act-Challenge), which is a continuous improvement cycle that will help implement your personal innovation strategy effectively, as illustrated in this diagram:

Implementing your personal innovation strategy through the PDAC cycle will lead to self-awareness, happiness, personal disruption, and enhanced authenticity, integrity, empathy, and critical thinking skills. It’s important to regularly update your strategy and repeat the cycle to stay current with new challenges and lessons learned. These 50 tips will assist you in implementing your strategy effectively.

Aligning Personal Purpose with Personal Behavior

The next stage ensures harmony between your purpose and actions, aligning your deeds with your conscience. Our conscience is the inner voice that guides us to distinguish between right and wrong, fact and fiction. By listening to this voice, we can gain better insight into our empathic behavior, strengths, and weaknesses, ultimately impacting our solidarity with others. Albert Schweitzer once said: “The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity and empathy with other human beings.” This diagram illustrates this personal integrity concept.

To enhance empathy and personal integrity, aligning your personal purpose with your behavior is essential. This involves achieving more excellent compatibility between the two elements so that they are in harmony, as shown in the above diagram. When your personal purpose and behavior match, you can work authentically and purposefully without internal conflicts. This will lead to greater empathy, enhanced charisma, transparency, and trustworthiness.

Personal integrity and empathy

I advise school leaders, faculty, and students to balance their personal purpose with their current behavior and actions to develop personal integrity and empathy. During this alignment process, they must reflect honestly on the following questions: What are my personal values, and how do they align with my actions? How can I ensure that my actions are consistent with my values? What are the potential consequences of my efforts toward others? How can I empathize with others and understand their perspectives? Am I staying true to my values and conscience in my actions? Are my thoughts and actions aligned consistently? How do my values and intentions relate to my current behavior? Is there congruity between my thoughts and my actions? Am I always acting according to my personal ambition and empathetic nature? Does my personal purpose reflect my desire to work with ethics and empathy? Are there any discrepancies between my personal purpose and my compassionate actions? Do I keep the promises I make to myself? How do others perceive me and my values? Do they see me as someone who stays true to my core beliefs and remains authentic to myself? They must also ask themselves: Have I always acted by my conscience? Have I always done what was right? Have I always worked morally? Have I performed compassionately regularly?

Shared University Purpose

The shared university purpose statement differs from a personal one, but the fundamental principles remain the same. The shared university purpose entails the university mission, vision, and core values to inspire school leaders, faculty, and students toward a common goal. The mission encompasses the university’s identity, while the vision is its long-term dream, based on several core values used to strengthen the single-mindedness of its people. The related questions are included in this below diagram:

Harvard University’s shared purpose: The university’s mission is to educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society through the transformative power of liberal arts and sciences education. The university’s vision is to set the standard for residential liberal arts and sciences education and to create and sustain the conditions that enable all Harvard College students to experience an unparalleled educational journey that is intellectually, socially, and personally transformative. Harvard University aspires to provide education and scholarship of the highest quality — to advance the frontiers of knowledge and to prepare individuals for life, work, and leadership. The university’s values are to be committed to excellence, to be open to new ideas, to be diverse and inclusive, to be respectful of the rights and dignity of others, to be accountable for actions and decisions, and to be committed to positive social change. It is clear that Harvard University has formulated an excellent higher purpose statement but is not living its values and beliefs.

Aligning Personal Purpose with Shared University Purpose

Aligning personal purpose with shared university purpose creates uniformity of personal and organizational values. Matching these two purposes involves reaching a higher compatibility between personal and university objectives and mutual value addition. To foster better ethics in the organization and become a purpose-driven university, I encourage school leaders, faculty, and students to formulate their personal purpose and reflect on aligning their personal purpose with the shared university purpose, as shown in this Figure. This will help them to find their higher purpose and cultivate a good character.

School leaders must communicate their personal purpose to their faculty and coach them in this alignment process. Faculty should do the same with their students. By unifying the shared university purpose with their personal purpose, you will create a strong foundation of peace, integrity, engagement, and learning upon which creativity, productivity, and growth can flourish, and life within the university will become a more harmonious and ethical culture. This will catalyze innovation by encouraging a learning culture of curiosity and exploration in the organization. This process is about getting the optimal fit and balance between these activities to enhance productivity, create a climate of trust, and cultivate a purpose-driven university. This process is needed because school leaders, faculty, and students don’t work, study passionately, or expend energy on something they do not believe in or agree with. If there is an effective match between their interests and those of the university, and if their values and the institution’s values align, they will be actively engaged and motivated. This will create trust, and they will work with outstanding commitment and dedication toward realizing the university’s objectives. When their personal purpose is in harmony with the shared purpose (are compatible) and combined in the best interest of both parties, the results will be the good character of school leaders, faculty, and students, restoration of their higher purpose, trust, engagement, collective sense of belonging, and cultivation of innovation and sustainability. In this way, they are stimulated to commit, act ethically, and focus on those activities that create value for the university, themselves, and others.

Purpose Meeting

I recommend introducing a purpose meeting between school leaders and their faculty and between faculty and their students to build a sustainable higher-purpose culture. This meeting is a periodical, informal, voluntary, trusted, and confidential meeting of half an hour between the parties, aligning the personal purpose with the shared purpose as a topic. The purpose meeting also includes individual coaching. It is recommended to be held structurally at least once every two months. The leader plays a crucial role in this process. He/she should be an empathetic, trusted leader, coach, mentor, and role model. This approach fosters ethical awareness among school leaders, faculty, and students, creating a purpose-driven university. When they see their efforts as part of a greater purpose, they will be more likely to invest their creativity, passion, and energy into their work and work smarter.

A study by Towers Perrin found that instead of matching the right employee to the correct position for long-term success, most US organizations and human resource departments emphasize simply filling the job as quickly as possible. As a result, American organizations are losing money as fast as they lose employees. Getting the optimal fit between personal and shared purpose has become necessary to enhance workforce productivity and stimulate creativity, learning, engagement, commitment, and passion.

Redefining American Higher Education

Instead of creating a purpose-driven university, American universities and colleges focus on corrupt DEI policies. Read “Reimagining DEI” and“How to Measure and Fix DEI”.

DEI at American universities and colleges does not actually promote inclusivity. It is the opposite of diversity of thought. Students are classified into groups based on their race and heritage. DEI is being used as a cover to justify discrimination. Jews are considered “oppressors” by the DEI system, so the discrimination they face is somehow justified by its believers. This kind of ideology at American universities and colleges needs to be eliminated. Instead of creating an ethical culture of sustainable good governance, incorporating decency, empathy, and personal integrity into the daily lives of school leaders, faculty, and students, American universities and colleges focus solely on formal rules, regulations, guidelines, and race theater. Read “Things About Sustainability, Innovation, and Creativity You Don’t Learn at Universities.“

Read “How STEM Education is Failing in the Age of AI’.

Purpose-driven University

Developing a purpose-driven university requires constant reinforcement of the two discussed alignment processes, as shown in the holistic purpose-driven university model. This benefits society and contributes to the betterment of humanity. To maintain ethical resonance with the audience and to transform society for the better, decency, empathy, personal integrity, and higher purpose must be incorporated into a continuous learning process and ethical culture at American universities. These values should be instilled in all school leaders, faculty members, and students and cultivated from within. The higher their personal integrity, attentiveness, and empathic skills, the more purpose-driven the university will be.

The effective combination of all six phases in the purpose-driven university model fosters a culture of sustainable innovation, belonging, engagement, personal integrity, transparency, and accountability. Based on this never-ending continuous improvement cycle, American universities and colleges will restore the purpose of higher education, which is to form high students’ character sustainably. Read also: “Sustainable Innovation Fueled by Purpose-Driven Culture.”

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D.

If you’re interested in gaining more knowledge about this program, you may want to consider joining our Orlando–Tampa Live Events:

How to Restore the Higher Purpose of American Higher Education

How to Measure and Fix DEI

Cultivating Authenticity, Integrity, Empathy, and Critical Thinking in the Age of AI

Purpose-Driven and Human-Centered AI

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D., founded the Center of Excellence in Human-Centered and Purpose-Driven AI Innovation in Orlando. He is a visionary leader in innovative solutions for genuine sustainability, disruptive design innovation, critical thinking in the age of AI, human-centered and purpose-driven AI, and entrepreneurial leadership. He holds a Ph.D. in Innovation Sciences, an MSc in Technology Engineering & Robotics, and a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from leading accredited universities in the Netherlands (Delft University of Technology, Eindhoven University of Technology). He is a well-known futurist, advocating for genuine sustainability on a global scale. With extensive knowledge and expertise, he has authored 25 books on the topics above in many languages and is highly regarded for his insights in these fields. One of his books, “Total Performance Scorecard,” has been published in 20 languages. Dorothy Leonard, an innovation professor at Harvard Business School, wrote the book’s foreword. Rampersad has also previously served as a guest lecturer at MIT Sloan and was featured in BusinessWeek. He was a senior design innovation coach at ASML, the most important tech company in the world and “Europe’s most valuable tech firm“.

Orlando, Florida | tpsi@live.com | Phone/WhatsApp: +13053992116

How to Become a Purpose-Driven University

January 21, 2024May 1, 2024 by Eco-Design Thinking

Creating a Purpose-Driven University with Good Character of School Leaders, Faculty, and Students

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D.

Ivy League universities have been grappling with issues of antisemitism and plagiarism, which have been widely reported in the media. Critics argue that anti-American ideologies have infiltrated college campuses, leading to a decline in academic standards and a loss of confidence in these institutions among Americans. According to a July 2023 poll by Gallup, Americans’ confidence in higher education has dropped from 57% in 2015 to 36% in 2023. These trends suggest that higher learning has failed to provide many students with the character-forming experiences necessary for a free and flourishing society. To restore the higher purpose of education in forming high students’ character, Pepperdine University President Jim Gash urges university leaders to reclaim the higher purpose of education in creating students’ character in light of scandals rocking college campuses. Read “Pepperdine president warns colleges have failed to develop character in students, offers course correction.”

Gash argues that universities must return to promoting American values and character, which have been lost in recent years. He believes that higher learning’s shift away from these values has directly impacted the well-being of our society, from the workplace to the ballot box. To remedy this, universities must commit to facilitating a diversity of ethical viewpoints in the classroom and outside of it. This means having a curriculum that exposes students to various topics and viewpoints and hiring professors who help students learn how to think instead of what to believe. Schools must demand uncompromising academic excellence, in which integrity and empathy are foundational. They can play a critical role in imparting humility by exposing students to the world through international programs that broaden their perspectives and encourage humble appreciation for other cultures. He also stressed the importance of creating a culture that celebrates freedom, character formation, and open dialogue on campus. We will fade as a society if we lose the ability to think critically and have constructive, civil discussions like we’ve been able to do recently. He also argued that students must learn selflessness through the experience of serving others, and colleges can play a formative role in developing this lifelong leadership trait by helping them identify and meet the needs of others.

Holistic model for restoring the higher purpose of American universities

Gash is right; American universities have failed to restore their higher purpose and to develop good character in their leaders, faculty, and students. In this article, I provide a holistic model to realize this sustainably, as shown in this diagram. It will aid American universities and colleges to cultivate a purpose-driven institution sustainably.

This holistic, never-ending, purpose-driven cycle entails six stages:

Developing the personal purpose of school leaders, faculty, and students entails the foundation for developing their authenticity, integrity, empathy, emotional intelligence, critical thinking skills, and character. Personal purpose is associated with ethical and emotionally intelligent individuals with a sense of direction.
Formulating the personal innovation strategy of school leaders, faculty, and students; this strategy entails a roadmap to translate their personal purpose into measurable actions.
Implement and cultivate their personal innovation strategy according to the Plan-Deploy-Act-Challenge cycle to continuously improve and purposely manage themselves.
Aligning the personal purpose of school leaders, faculty, and students with their behavior and actions to cultivate their personal integrity and empathy skills;
Developing the shared university purpose is about what the university stands for, its reason, and how it benefits society. Shared purpose entails the organization’s soul and joint mission, vision, and core values.
Aligning the personal purpose with the shared university purpose creates uniformity of personal and university values. Matching these two purposes is essential for achieving an ethical, cohesive, unified university and a happy, engaged, committed, and passionate workforce. It’s about aligning the objectives of school leaders, faculty, and students with those of the university and fostering mutual value addition.

This model includes several key elements, such as fostering authenticity, integrity, and a sense of purpose and empathy among school leaders, faculty, and students, as well as integrating sustainability into the curriculum. By following this framework, universities can create a culture that benefits their bottom line and contributes to the greater good, and school leaders, faculty, and students will be genuine and authentic to themselves. I also refer to my article “5 Steps to Cultivate Authenticity, Integrity, Empathy, and Critical Thinking in the Age of AI”.

Below, I will elaborate on each of the six stages in the model.

Personal Purpose

Your personal purpose entails your identity (mission) and dream (vision). Your dream is related to a higher calling. Everyone has a higher calling, a so-called inner assignment. One must be aware of this higher calling and have the courage to follow it. Once you discover the core of your nature, your higher self, and who you really are, you will find it possible to make every dream come true. By discovering and formulating your higher self, you will become visionary, innovative, disruptive, and empathic, unleash your creative potential, and realize you have something unique. Your job is to know what that is and to work at it with passion and love.

Your personal vision statement is a description of how you want to realize your dream in the long term. It indicates where you are going, which values, beliefs, and principles guide you on your way, why you are involved in the design industry, what you want to achieve, what you desire for your life, what your long-term intentions are, what talents, skills and experiences you need to add value to your others, where you want to be at the end of your life, what you hope to become, where you would like your life to be headed, the ideal characteristics you want to possess, your perfect job situation, and what you desire to be. Ask yourself these questions and answer them honestly. Also, identify the attitudes you need to change and understand how to make your values relevant to others. Your personal vision takes care of the inner guidance and determines your actions to reach the most desired future. It functions as an ethical compass that gives meaning to your life.

Your personal vision gives direction to your mission and efforts. A possible way to formulate your personal vision is by asking yourself where you have added value to others and made a difference. Write them down, develop a list of values that identify who you are, and narrow these to a few of the most important ones. Your values are the principles by which you live your life, affecting how you think, feel, behave, and make decisions. It is about what you believe, what you are willing to do to achieve your mission, what is important to you, what you hold to be true, and what you respect. My vision statement is: “I want to realize my mission in the following ways: Enjoying physical health and being imaginative; being empathic; being creative and innovative; and achieving financial security.” According to Elon Musk, the thing that drives him is vision. He said, “I think having an inspiring and appealing future is important. There must be reasons you get up in the morning and want to live. Why do you want to live? What’s the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future?…. In college, I wanted to be involved in things that would change the world.”

Please click on this link to view my personal purpose statement, which outlines my values and beliefs. You should formulate your personal purpose excitingly and persuasively and make it visible. The biggest problem most people face is writing it down. Take the time to write it down based on your answers to the questions in this framework. Ask yourself these questions and answer them honestly.

By practicing breathing and silence exercises, you can better connect with your inner self and find answers to these questions. This will help you to discover your higher purpose. Read “How Mindful Meditation Boosts Critical Thinking in the Age of AI” and “Crafting Your Authentic Personal Brand: A 5-Step Guide“.

Through this process, you’ll cultivate self-knowledge, self-awareness, self-management, and self-learning, which entails a journey toward personal disruptive innovation, as shown in this diagram:

Consciousness

Your personal purpose is related to self-awareness and self-regulation. Self-awareness is recognizing and understanding your strengths, weaknesses, needs, values, ambition, moods, emotions, drives, and their effect on others. Self-regulation is controlling or redirecting disruptive impulses, feelings, and attitudes. Self-awareness and self-regulation impact personal integrity, empathy, self-confidence, trustworthiness, and willingness to learn. It is an inner, spiritual learning process related to emotional and spiritual intelligence. This internal process starts with self-knowledge or knowing, which is necessary to develop a higher level of consciousness. The more conscious you are, the easier it is to find your higher purpose. Remember what Elon Musk said- “I concluded that we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness to better understand what questions to ask. Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.” Conscious people are guided by fundamental principles that serve as a moral compass, shaped over a lifetime of introspection. These principles have personal integrity, honesty, and fairness as their magnetic north and are grounded in consciousness. Remember: “Personal integrity and honesty are two important values to uphold, but they differ. Honesty is about telling the truth to others, while personal integrity is about being truthful to yourself and staying true to your values and principles. It’s important to be honest with others, but it’s more important to be honest with yourself and live your life by your beliefs, values, and purpose” — Hubert Rampersad.

Introspection and self-reflection

Personal Innovation Strategy

Implementation According to the PDAC Cycle

Aligning Personal Purpose with Personal Behavior

Personal integrity and empathy

Shared University Purpose

Aligning Personal Purpose with Shared University Purpose

Purpose Meeting

Redefining American Higher Education

Instead of creating a purpose-driven university, American universities and colleges focus on corrupt DEI policies. Read “Reimagining DEI” and“How to Measure and Fix DEI”.

DEI at American universities and colleges does not actually promote inclusivity. It is the opposite of diversity of thought. Students are classified into groups based on their race and heritage. DEI is being used as a cover to justify discrimination. Jews are considered “oppressors” by the DEI system, so the discrimination they face is somehow justified by its believers. This kind of ideology at American universities and colleges needs to be eliminated. Instead of creating an ethical culture of sustainable good governance, incorporating decency, empathy, and personal integrity into the daily lives of school leaders, faculty, and students, American universities and colleges focus solely on formal rules, regulations, guidelines, and race theater. Read “Fostering a Culture of Ethics on Campus, Academic Integrity, and Sustainable Good Governance at American Universities.”

Read “Things About Sustainability, Innovation, and Creativity You Don’t Learn at Universities.“

Read “How STEM Education is Failing in the Age of AI’.

Purpose-driven University

The effective combination of all six phases in the purpose-driven university model fosters a culture of sustainable innovation, belonging, engagement, personal integrity, transparency, and accountability. Based on this never-ending continuous improvement cycle, American universities and colleges will restore the purpose of higher education, which is to form high students’ character sustainably. Read also: Cultivating a Sustainable Purpose-Driven Design Culture in Tech Companie s

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D.

If you’re interested in gaining more knowledge about this program, you may want to consider joining our Orlando–Tampa Live Events:

How to Restore the Higher Purpose of American Higher Education

How to Measure and Fix DEI

Cultivating Authenticity, Integrity, Empathy, and Critical Thinking in the Age of AI

Purpose-Driven and Human-Centered AI

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D., founded the Center of Excellence in Human-Centered and Purpose-Driven AI Innovation in Orlando. He is a Dutch-American visionary leader in innovative solutions for genuine sustainability, disruptive design innovation, critical thinking in the age of AI, human-centered and purpose-driven AI, and entrepreneurial leadership. He holds a Ph.D. in Innovation Sciences, an MSc in Technology Engineering & Robotics, and a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from leading accredited universities in the Netherlands (Delft University of Technology, Eindhoven University of Technology). He is a well-known futurist, advocating for genuine sustainability on a global scale. With extensive knowledge and expertise, he has authored 25 books on the topics above in many languages and is highly regarded for his insights in these fields. One of his books, “Total Performance Scorecard,” has been published in 20 languages. Dorothy Leonard, an innovation professor at Harvard Business School, wrote the book’s foreword. Rampersad has also previously served as a guest lecturer at MIT Sloan and was featured in BusinessWeek. He was a senior design innovation coach at ASML, the most crucial tech company in the world and “Europe’s most valuable tech firm“.

Orlando, Florida | tpsi@live.com | Phone/WhatsApp: +13053992116

How to Restore the Higher Purpose of American Higher Education

Featured by Eco-Design Thinking

Creating a Purpose-Driven University with Good Character of School Leaders, Faculty, and Students

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D.

Gash argues that universities must return to promoting American values and character, which have been lost in recent years. He believes that higher learning’s shift away from these values has directly impacted the well-being of our society, from the workplace to the ballot box. To remedy this, universities must commit to facilitating a diversity of ethical viewpoints in the classroom and outside of it. This means having a curriculum that exposes students to various topics and viewpoints and hiring professors who help students learn how to think instead of what to think. Schools must demand uncompromising academic excellence, in which integrity and empathy are foundational. They can play a critical role in imparting humility by exposing students to the world through international programs that broaden their perspectives and encourage humble appreciation for other cultures. He also stressed the importance of creating a culture that celebrates freedom, character formation, and open dialogue on campus. We will fade as a society if we lose the ability to think critically and have constructive, civil discussions like we’ve been able to do recently. He also argued that students must learn selflessness through the experience of serving others, and colleges can play a formative role in developing this lifelong leadership trait by helping them identify and meet the needs of others.

Holistic model for restoring the higher purpose of American universities

This holistic, never-ending, purpose-driven cycle entails six stages:

Developing the personal purpose of school leaders, faculty, and students entails the foundation for developing their authenticity, integrity, empathy, emotional intelligence, critical thinking skills, and character. Personal purpose is associated with ethical and emotionally intelligent individuals with a sense of direction.
Formulating the personal innovation strategy of school leaders, faculty, and students; this strategy entails a roadmap to translate their personal purpose into measurable actions.
Implement and cultivate their personal innovation strategy according to the Plan-Deploy-Act-Challenge cycle to continuously improve and purposely manage themselves.
Aligning the personal purpose of school leaders, faculty, and students with their behavior and actions to cultivate their personal integrity and empathy skills;
Developing the shared university purpose is about what the university stands for, its reason, and how it benefits society. Shared purpose entails the organization’s soul and joint mission, vision, and core values.
Aligning the personal purpose with the shared university purpose creates uniformity of personal and university values. Matching these two purposes is essential for achieving an ethical, cohesive, unified university and a happy, engaged, committed, and passionate workforce. It’s about aligning the objectives of school leaders, faculty, and students with those of the university and fostering mutual value addition.

This model includes several key elements, such as fostering authenticity, integrity, a sense of purpose, and empathy among school leaders, faculty, and students and integrating sustainability into the curriculum. By following this framework, universities can create a culture that benefits their bottom line and contributes to the greater good, and school leaders, faculty, and students will be genuine and true to themselves. I also refer to my article “5 Steps to Cultivate Authenticity, Integrity, Empathy, and Critical Thinking in the Age of AI”.

Below, I will elaborate on each of the six stages in the model.

Personal Purpose

Your personal purpose entails your identity (mission) and dream (vision). Your dream is related to a higher calling. Everyone has a higher calling, a so-called inner assignment. One must be aware of this higher calling and have the courage to follow it. Once you discover the core of your nature, your higher self, and who you really are, you will find it possible to make every dream come true. By discovering and formulating your higher self, you will become visionary, innovative, disruptive, and empathic, unleash your creative potential, and realize you have something unique. Your job is to know what that is and to work at it with passion and love.

Through this process, you’ll cultivate self-knowledge, self-awareness, self-management, and self-learning, which entails a journey toward personal disruptive innovation, as shown in this diagram:

Consciousness

Your personal purpose is related to self-awareness and self-regulation. Self-awareness is recognizing and understanding your strengths, weaknesses, needs, values, ambition, moods, emotions, drives, and their effect on others. Self-regulation is controlling or redirecting disruptive impulses, feelings, and attitudes. Self-awareness and self-regulation impact personal integrity, empathy, self-confidence, trustworthiness, and willingness to learn. It is an inner, spiritual learning process related to emotional and spiritual intelligence. This internal process starts with self-knowledge or knowing, which is necessary to develop a higher level of consciousness. The more conscious you are, the easier it is to find your higher purpose. Remember what Elon Musk said- “I concluded that we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness to better understand what questions to ask. Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.” Conscious people are guided by fundamental principles that serve as a moral compass, shaped over a lifetime of introspection. These principles have personal integrity, honesty, and fairness as their magnetic north and are grounded in consciousness. Remember: “Personal integrity and honesty are two important values to uphold, but they differ. Honesty is about telling the truth to others, while personal integrity is about being truthful to yourself and staying true to your values and principles. It’s important to be honest with others, but it’s more important to be honest with yourself and live your life by your beliefs, values, and purpose” — Hubert Rampersad.

Introspection and self-reflection

Personal Innovation Strategy

Implementation According to the PDAC Cycle

Aligning Personal Purpose with Personal Behavior

Personal integrity and empathy

Shared University Purpose

Aligning Personal Purpose with Shared University Purpose

Purpose Meeting

Redefining American Higher Education

Instead of creating a purpose-driven university, American universities and colleges focus on corrupt DEI policies. Read “Reimagining DEI” and“How to Measure and Fix DEI”.

DEI at American universities and colleges does not actually promote inclusivity. It is the opposite of diversity of thought. Students are classified into groups based on their race and heritage. DEI is being used as a cover to justify discrimination. Jews are considered “oppressors” by the DEI system, so the discrimination they face is somehow justified by its believers. This kind of ideology at American universities and colleges needs to be eliminated. Instead of creating an ethical culture of sustainable good governance, incorporating decency, empathy, and personal integrity into the daily lives of school leaders, faculty, and students, American universities and colleges focus solely on formal rules, regulations, guidelines, and race theater. Read “Fostering a Culture of Ethics on Campus, Academic Integrity, and Sustainable Good Governance at American Universities.”

Read “Things About Sustainability, Innovation, and Creativity You Don’t Learn at Universities.“

Read “How STEM Education is Failing in the Age of AI’.

Purpose-driven University

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D.

If you’re interested in gaining more knowledge about this program, you may want to consider joining our Orlando–Tampa Live Events:

How to Restore the Higher Purpose of American Higher Education

How to Measure and Fix DEI

Cultivating Authenticity, Integrity, Empathy, and Critical Thinking in the Age of AI

Purpose-Driven and Human-Centered AI

Orlando, Florida | tpsi@live.com | Phone/WhatsApp: +13053992116

Purpose-Driven and Human-Centered AI Governance

Featured by Eco-Design Thinking

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D.

“The one thing missing from the board of directors of tech companies is a holistic view on cultivating a purpose-driven and human-centered AI governance culture to foster sustainable AI innovations” — Hubert Rampersad

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) and general intelligence (AGI) are transforming the world. They profoundly impact people’s lives and solve society’s most critical challenges. However, the pace of these developments is slowed by some issues, such as data access, algorithmic bias, ethics and transparency, and legal liability. AI systems sometimes draw wrong conclusions from data, confuse fact and fiction, and present a half-baked mixture as the truth. Due to these shortcomings, we don’t maximize AI benefits. Due to the power of AI/AGI and added value for humanity, this must be worked on by not only improving the algorithms and datasets but mainly working on embedding purpose-driven & human-centered AI and human-centered AI governance, building an ethical learning culture in the organization, and making AI purpose-driven so that AI becomes human-centered and thus transform society for the better. Sam Altman’s leadership shift at OpenAI emphasized the importance of transparency and prompted a reevaluation of ethical considerations in AI development and organizational decision-making. The incident raised questions about transparency, accountability, and the need for robust ethical frameworks to guide the development and deployment of AI/AGI technologies.

AI and AGI solutions must be purpose-driven and human-centered.

AI and AGI solutions must be purpose-driven and human-centered to focus on serving humanity, improving our society, and creating a better and just future. To this end, organizations must ensure a culture of ethical people is central to AI/AGI. Their AI initiatives must be human-centered and aligned with personal and shared purposes to better contribute to society. To address the abovementioned concerns, it is essential to establish human-centered AI governance holistically with clear ethical guidelines and regulations that ensure accountability and transparency in AI systems and govern AI’s use in various industries, striking a balance between AI and human values. This article describes this holistic human-centered AI governance framework for building an ethical culture and embedding ethics into human-centered AI. In my other related article, “Purpose-Driven and Human-Centered AI; A Holistic Approach to Aligning Personal and Shared Purposes Towards Sustainable AI,” I introduced a holistic model that provides a solid foundation for purpose-driven and human-centered AI so that AI is developed and used responsibly.

AI uses unsupervised learning algorithms to analyze the patterns and structures within the training data and produce realistic content that shares characteristics with the original input data. However, it is essential to note that AI and generative AI can inherit and perpetuate biases in training data, propagate hate speech and false information, and even generate content that could potentially raise copyright issues. The training data might imply that a particular decision is sound. Still, the AI may breach published policies, procedures, or regulatory guidelines and make non-compliant or illegal decisions due to a lack of context or essential information in the data. Therefore, it is crucial to use AI responsibly and with caution. In the current AI era, job security is a growing concern for many. However, certain professions will always be in demand due to their inherent human-centric nature. These jobs require a human touch that technology can’t replicate. These jobs include healthcare professionals, artists, designers, and other roles requiring creativity, integrity, and empathy.

Purpose-driven and human-centered AI

Purpose-driven human-centered AI is an approach to artificial intelligence that emphasizes the importance of aligning AI initiatives with personal and shared purposes to ensure that AI is used in a way that benefits society and contributes to the betterment of humanity. The alignment of purpose-driven AI with human-centered AI governance will make AI more beneficial to society. Purpose-driven AI is the foundation of human-centered AI governance. Acknowledging that governing AI cannot rely solely on formal policies, procedures, guidelines, and rules that dictate AI research, development, and deployment is essential. To maintain ethical resonance with the audience and to transform society for the better, decency, empathy, personal integrity, and purpose must be incorporated into a continuous learning process and ethical culture. These values should be instilled in AI leaders, developers, and users and cultivated from within. The higher their personal integrity, attentiveness, and empathic skills, the more human-centered and purpose-driven AI will be.

In the next section, I introduce a holistic approach to aligning personal and shared purposes toward sustainable AI/AGI so that it is developed and used responsibly to transform society for the better.

A. PURPOSE-DRIVEN MODEL

In this age of sustainability and AI, tech companies should prioritize profits and promote American values, high character, and critical thinking among their employees. This will help positively impact our society’s well-being, integrity, and empathy. In this article, I provide a holistic model to realize this sustainably, as shown in this diagram. This model is based on my latest book, “Eco-Design Thinking for Personal, Corporate, and Social Innovation.” The model will aid the development of purpose-driven and human-centered AI.

This holistic, never-ending, purpose-driven cycle entails six stages:

Developing the personal purpose of leaders and employees entails the foundation for cultivating their authenticity, integrity, empathy, emotional intelligence, critical thinking skills, and character. Personal purpose is associated with ethical and emotionally intelligent individuals with a sense of direction.
Formulating the personal innovation strategy of leaders and employees; this strategy entails a roadmap to translate their personal purpose into measurable actions.
Implement and cultivate their personal innovation strategy according to the Plan-Deploy-Act-Challenge cycle to continuously improve and purposely manage themselves to become creative, innovative, and empathic.
Aligning the personal purpose of leaders and employees with their behavior and actions to cultivate their personal integrity and empathy skills. Remember: “The higher your personal integrity, the better your attentiveness, the better your empathic skills, the more sustainable your innovation”– Hubert Rampersad
Developing the shared company purpose is about what the company stands for, its reason, and how it benefits society. Shared purpose entails the organization’s soul and joint mission, vision, and core values.
Aligning the personal purpose with the shared company purpose. This creates uniformity of personal and company values and uniformity of personal innovation and corporate innovation. Matching these two purposes and innovations is essential for achieving an ethical, cohesive, unified company and a happy, engaged, committed, and passionate workforce. It’s about aligning the objectives of leaders and employees with those of the company and fostering mutual value addition. It’s about aligning personal innovation with corporate and social innovation.

Below, I will elaborate on each of these six stages.

Personal Purpose

Having a higher purpose in life means you’re living your values and beliefs. Finding your higher purpose is discovering who you are, what you stand for, what matters to you, and what you can contribute to the world. When someone feels that his life lacks purpose, he may struggle to find motivation and direction. This can lead to a sense of detachment from his values and a lack of inspiration to enrich his life and those around him. Finding motivation and direction can be easier when you have a purpose in life. This will inspire you to become more effective, ethical, and fulfilled. Having a purpose in life will inspire you to discover ways to become more creative, imaginative, and innovative. Life is never richer, fuller, or more rewarding than moving faithfully and persistently toward a compelling purpose. Remember what Elon Musk said: “Don’t even attach yourself to a person, a place, a company, an organization, or a project. Attach yourself to a mission, a calling, a purpose only. That’s how you keep power and your peace. It worked pretty well for me this far”.

Your personal purpose entails your identity (mission) and dream (vision). Your dream is related to a higher calling. Everyone has a higher calling, a so-called inner assignment. Personal mission is aimed at being, and personal vision is aimed at becoming. Your personal mission inspires you, and your personal vision motivates you. Your mission and vision statement (personal purpose statement) embodies your values. Your personal mission encompasses your philosophy of life and your overall objectives, indicating who you are, the reason for existence, why you are on earth, what your purpose here is, what you stand for, what values you are most committed to, what is decisive for your success, what is your life purpose, what do you live for, what are your core beliefs, what are your deepest aspirations, what makes you happy, and what do you do that you are most proud of. Your personal mission is your personal leading light, keeping you steadily in the course of your dream. “Who am I?” is an identity question. It initiates self-examination of your personal identity (the unique position you find yourself in) and a voyage of discovery. My mission is: “Enjoy the freedom to unleash the creative potential in others, especially if this can mean something in their life.”

Your personal vision statement is a description of how you want to realize your dream in the long term. It indicates where you are going, which values, beliefs, and principles guide you on your way, why you are involved in the design industry, what you want to achieve, what you desire for your life, what your long-term intentions are, what talents, skills and experiences you need to add value to your others, where you want to be at the end of your life, what you hope to become, where you would like your life to be headed, the ideal characteristics you want to possess, your perfect job situation, and what you desire to be. Ask yourself these questions and answer them honestly.

Through this process, you’ll cultivate self-knowledge, self-awareness, self-management, and self-learning, which entails a journey toward personal disruptive innovation, as shown in this diagram:

By practicing breathing and silence exercises, you can better connect with your inner self and find answers to these questions. This will help you to discover your higher purpose. Please click on this link to view my personal purpose statement. It also entails my values and beliefs. Read “How Mindful Meditation Boosts Critical Thinking in the Age of AI” and “Crafting Your Authentic Personal Brand: A 5-Step Guide”.

Personal Innovation Strategy

To bring your purpose alive, you must translate it into measurable actions. Leaders and employees should formulate their innovation strategy to achieve their purpose. This is a roadmap to developing a growth mindset, authenticity, integrity, empathy, and critical thinking skills. Without continuous improvement based on your personal innovation strategy, you won’t be successful in life and business. The following are the five steps to develop your personal innovation strategy:

Cultivating Critical Thinking in the Age of AI

Implementation According to the PDAC Cycle

Once you have established your personal innovation strategy, it is essential to consistently implement, maintain, and cultivate it to effectively manage and challenge yourself in your personal and company life. To aid you in this process, I recommend following the PDAC cycle (Plan-Deploy-Act-Challenge), which is a continuous improvement cycle that will help implement your personal innovation strategy effectively, as illustrated in this diagram:

Aligning Personal Purpose with Personal Behavior

“Empathy is the key to sustainable innovation. Personal integrity is the foundation of empathy. The higher one’s personal integrity, the more empathetic one becomes. This leads to sustainable innovations”—Hubert Rampersad.

Personal integrity and empathy

I advise leaders and employees to balance their personal purpose with their current behavior and actions to develop personal integrity and empathy. During this alignment process, they must reflect honestly on the following questions: What are my personal values, and how do they align with my actions? How can I ensure that my actions are consistent with my values? What are the potential consequences of my efforts toward others? How can I empathize with others and understand their perspectives? Am I staying true to my values and conscience in my actions? Are my thoughts and actions aligned consistently? How do my values and intentions relate to my current behavior? Is there congruity between my thoughts and my actions? Am I always acting according to my personal ambition and empathetic nature? Does my personal purpose reflect my desire to work with ethics and empathy? Are there any discrepancies between my personal purpose and my compassionate actions? Do I keep the promises I make to myself? How do others perceive me and my values? Do they see me as someone who stays true to my core beliefs and remains authentic to myself? They must also ask themselves: Have I always acted by my conscience? Have I always done what was right? Have I always worked morally? Have I performed compassionately regularly?

Shared Company Purpose

The shared company purpose statement differs from a personal one, but the fundamental principles remain the same. The shared company purpose entails the company mission, vision, and core values to inspire leaders and employees toward a common goal. The mission encompasses the company’s identity, while the vision is its long-term dream, based on several core values used to strengthen the single-mindedness of its people. The related questions are included in this below diagram:

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. OpenAI’s core values are ethical AI, collaboration, openness, and continuous learning. SpaceX’s and Tesla’s corporate ambitions can be viewed here.

Aligning Personal Purpose with Shared Company Purpose

Aligning personal purpose with shared company purpose creates uniformity of personal and organizational values. Matching these two purposes involves reaching a higher compatibility between personal and company objectives and mutual value addition. This stage is also about aligning personal governance (see next section) with AI governance: the emphasis here is aligning personal governance and personal ambition with AI governance and corporate ambition to create uniformity of personal and organizational values. Matching personal governance with AI governance involves reaching a higher compatibility between personal and corporate objectives and mutual value addition. To foster better ethics in the organization and create a culture of sustainable good AI governance, I encourage AI leaders to formulate their personal ambition and reflect on aligning their personal ambition with the shared corporate ambition, as shown in this Figure..

They must communicate their personal ambition, in which their ethical standards and values are included, to their developers and users and coach them in this alignment process, in the usage of appropriate algorithms, data management tools, strategies, and techniques, and in ethical factors like fairness, AI bias, copyrights, data sourcing methods, etc. Without this coaching, your AI teams may run into issues with noncompliance, security, and other avoidable user errors. By unifying corporate values with individual values, you will create a strong foundation of purpose-driven peace, integrity, engagement, and learning upon which creativity, productivity, and growth can flourish, and life within the human-centered organization will become a more harmonious and ethical experience and culture. It’s about aligning personal governance with AI governance and getting the optimal fit and balance between these two activities to enhance productivity, create a climate of trust, and stimulate the purpose-driven organization’s engagement, commitment, integrity, and passion. This process is needed because AI leaders, developers, and users don’t work passionately or expend energy on something they do not believe in or agree with. If there is an effective match between their interests and those of the organization, and if their values and the organization’s values align, they will be actively engaged and motivated. This will create trust in the organization; the employees will trust AI systems, making them more willing to use them to improve society. They will work with outstanding commitment and dedication toward realizing the corporation’s objectives and protecting its most sensitive data assets. When the personnel’s personal ambitions are in harmony with the corporation’s (are compatible) and combined in the best interest of both parties, the results will be higher productivity and sustainable good AI governance. In this way, employees are stimulated to commit, act ethically, and focus on those activities that create value for the organization.

Purpose Meeting

I recommend introducing a purpose meeting between AI leaders and their developers and users to build a sustainable, ethical AI culture. This meeting is a periodical, informal, voluntary, trusted, and confidential meeting of half an hour between the parties, aligning the employee’s personal ambition with the shared corporate ambition as topics and aligning the employee’s ambition with his/her behavior. The purpose of the meeting will include individual coaching, training, and education on AI ethics, regulations, and best practices. It is recommended to be held structurally at least once every two months. The outcome of these informal meetings should be highly confidential and kept out of the personnel file. The leader plays a crucial role in this process. He/she should be an empathetic, trusted leader, coach, mentor, and role model. One needs a confidential, informal, and friendly atmosphere of trust and open communication to talk about the individual’s personal ambition and innovation strategy. This approach fosters ethical awareness among leaders, managers, and employees.

A study by Towers Perrin found that instead of matching the right employee to the correct position for long-term success, most US companies and human resource departments emphasize simply filling the job as quickly as possible. As a result, American businesses are losing money as fast as they lose employees. They do not understand that their employees do not work passionately or expend energy on something they do not believe in or agree with. They do not know that clarity and uniformity of personal and organizational values and principles are essential for the active involvement of their employees. Getting the optimal fit between personal and corporate purpose has become necessary to enhance workforce productivity and stimulate creativity, learning, engagement, commitment, and passion.

B. AI Governance versus Corporate Governance

AI governance is a legal framework and a bureaucratic set of policies, procedures, guidelines, and rules that direct AI research, development, deployment, and use ethically, transparently, and accountably. If utilized correctly, AI governance can ensure that AI systems are transparent, compliant, and trustworthy while promoting efficient AI operations and compliance with relevant data privacy and AI ethics regulations. It is a way to establish, organize, and enforce standards for AI development and use that encourage ethical and compliant practices and transparency. AI governance can improve AI model usage outcomes and help organizations use AI to protect customer data and align with compliance requirements. Establishing independent AI governance can also help your organization get more out of the AI technology you’re using.

Corporate governance is a bureaucratic set of principles and practices that promote accountability, transparency, and ethical behavior in organizations. It refers to the rules, systems, and processes framework to ensure operations’ accountability, fairness, and transparency. Most organizations have comprehensive corporate governance programs with excellent codes of ethics, which are not working. Their traditional approaches to corporate governance are highly formal, bureaucratic, cosmetic, woolly, and non-holistic and, therefore, fail to address corruption and unethical behavior within the organization. Their corporate governance programs worsened things and created a stable basis for more corruption. These programs have been found to fuel corruption instead of remedying it. Read also “Primary reasons behind corporate governance failure.”

Remember what Plato said in 340 BC: “Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.” Why don’t we learn from Plato and focus on creating a sustainable, ethical culture of good people, in which personal values are aligned with the corporate values (corporate laws) and embedded in the people’s minds, instead of focusing on bureaucratical AI/corporate governance laws only? Traditional AI governance will fail as corporate governance did if we don’t humanize it authentically and holistically and embed this in a continuous, never-ending ethical learning process. Governing AI cannot solely rely on formal policies, procedures, guidelines, and rules. Decency, empathy, personal integrity, and purpose must be incorporated into a continuous learning process and ethical culture to maintain moral resonance with the audience. These values should be instilled in AI leaders, developers, and users and cultivated from within. The higher their personal integrity, attentiveness, and empathic skills, the more sustainable AI will be. We, therefore, need genuine purpose-driven and human-centered AI governance instead of the traditional bureaucratical AI governance.

C. Purpose-driven and Human-Centered AI Governance

To address the shortcomings mentioned above, I am launching a unique human-centered AI governance concept that authentically and holistically involves the human perspective in all aspects of good AI governance, embedded in a continuous learning process and ethical culture, to resonate more ethically with the audience. I have defined human-centered AI governance as the systematic process of constant, gradual, and routine improvement and steering of all human and AI governance-related activities within the organization, leading to a high-performance ethical culture and ethics in sustainable AI. It’s a constant, honest voyage of discovery, learning, and improving.

Personal integrity is a core value embedded in human-centered AI governance to ensure that it is reflected in the behavior of AI leaders, developers, and users within the organization so that ethics becomes a harmonious way of life and culture. Sustainable human-centered AI governance starts with personal integrity. I picked up where others left off by launching an innovative and sustainable methodology for creating a sustainable culture of good AI governance in organizations, in which high ethical values are aligned with their AI governance rules, regulations, and guidelines and embedded in their minds. It is partly based on my book “Authentic Governance: Aligning Personal Governance with Corporate Governance.”

D. Purpose-driven and Human-Centered Model

Purpose-driven and human-centered AI governance is a holistic framework for embedding ethics into sustainable AI by linking personal integrity, personal governance, and AI governance, as this Figure indicates. The diagram shows how personal integrity, personal governance, and AI governance are interconnected. Personal integrity is linked to responsible, trustworthy, and ethical people, personal governance is connected to intelligent critical thinkers and disruptors, and AI governance is attached to responsible, reliable, and human-centered AI systems. A strong sense of personal integrity, being attentive, and possessing empathic skills are all critical components of human-centered AI governance. This involves aligning personal values with AI governance laws and instilling these values in the minds of AI leaders, developers, and users rather than solely focusing on AI governance rules and regulations. It’s about decency and not bureaucracy. Human-centered AI governance entails the following elements, as shown in this diagram:

This model entails the following three elements:

Personal Governance: This entails the systematic process of continuous, gradual, and routine personal improvement, steering, and learning based on your personal innovation strategy. It’s about the AI leader and developer’s personal purpose, personal innovation strategy, and implementation (PDAC), as discussed in the previous section.
Personal Integrity: This entails awareness about your actions toward others by aligning your personal ambition with your behavior and actions. It’s about aligning AI leaders’ and developers’ personal purpose with their personal behavior, as discussed in the previous section.
AI Governance: This entails formulating and implementing the AI innovation strategy. It also entails the shared company purpose, aligning the personal purpose with the shared company purpose, and a legal framework and a set of policies, procedures, guidelines, and rules that direct AI research, development, deployment, and use in an ethical, transparent, and accountable manner. Based on the corporate innovation strategy entails the systematic process of continuous, gradual, and routine AI-related corporate improvement, steering, and learning.

It starts with value-based authentic leadership development, embedding personal values in the minds of the AI leaders, developers, and users within the organization and guiding them to reflect on their values sincerely. In this way, you create a way of life within the organization characterized by trust, credibility, transparency, personal responsibility, personal integrity, and a high-performance ethical culture. Ethical behavior will become routine in the organization, and leadership and employees will better understand their responsibility for moral conduct in developing and using AI. They will know that acting ethically on and off duty is their responsibility. This will ensure that AI systems are transparent, compliant, and trustworthy. This is a more sustainable approach to good AI governance and social responsibility. Against this background, I propose an authentic, organic, and holistic approach to AI governance called human-centered AI governance by integrating personal values and integrity into one overall human-centered AI governance framework, in which formal AI policies, procedures, guidelines, rules, and regulations and personal values mutually reinforce each other.

Human-centered and purpose-driven AI requires AI leaders, developers, and users to be engaged in this process of deep thinking, introspection, and self-reflection. This will also strengthen the critical thinking skills of AI leaders, developers, and users to handle scenarios where AI-based decisions could be false, unjust, unethical, or violate human rights. The future of work will involve humans collaborating with AI to accomplish tasks more ethically, efficiently, and productively. Because current AI systems excel at imitation but not innovation. Systems like ChatGPT are trained on large datasets of human-generated text and images, allowing them to summarize existing knowledge smartly. However, unlike humans, they struggle to innovate on these ideas. This is because they lack the creativity and intuition that humans possess, allowing us to think outside the box and develop new and innovative ideas. Therefore, organizations must reskill and upskill their workforce to ensure individuals have the necessary abilities to thrive in this AI-driven future and to ensure their AI systems are human-centered and purpose-driven.

The model provides an excellent framework and roadmap for developing, implementing, and cultivating personal integrity, personal governance, and AI governance systematically and sustainably. It’s a holistic framework for building an ethical culture and embedding ethics into purpose-driven and human-centered AI.

This visionary AI governance blueprint is an inside-out approach and focuses mainly on the human side of AI governance. It places more emphasis on understanding yourself and the needs of others, meeting those needs while staying true to your personal and corporate values, improving yourself and your personal integrity continuously, making ethics a way of life and a continuous learning process, and aligning these with formal policies, procedures, and rules that direct AI research, development, deployment, and use, instead of focusing on exhaustive legal AI rules, practices and guidelines only. The model consists of three phases: the building blocks of creating a culture of sustainable good AI governance in the organization and embedding ethics in purpose-driven and human-centered AI. The AI governance phase also entails two phases, as shown in this diagram: 1) AI innovation strategy and 2) Implementing this strategy.

AI Governance

b) Implementing the AI Innovation Strategy: This step entails implementing and cultivating the AI innovation strategy to govern AI activities effectively. AI governance is the practice of monitoring, regulating, and managing ethical AI usage to ensure compliance with relevant data privacy and AI ethics regulations. Based on the corporate innovation strategy entails the systematic process of continuous, gradual, and routine AI-related corporate improvement, steering, and learning. Organizations can achieve a more efficient AI operation while ensuring the ethical and responsible use of AI technology by implementing effective AI governance policies, standardized processes, guidelines, and rules that direct AI research, development, deployment, and use ethically, transparently, and accountable. To realize this, I recommend following the PDAC cycle (Plan-Deploy-Act-Cultivate), as illustrated in this diagram. Implementing the corporate innovation strategy and AI governance through the PDAC cycle is a continuous journey toward responsible, trustworthy, and sustainable human-centered AI systems.

Good AI governance ensures active compliance with AI policies. These policies are clear guidelines, rules, and procedures for how AI technology should be used and developed within the organization in alignment with the shared corporate ambition. The policies also include a set of approved tools for AI development, roles and responsibilities related to AI usage, procedures for data privacy and AI model evaluation, and reporting AI security issues. They must stay current with the latest regulations and guidelines to ensure their AI systems comply with regional, national, and industry-specific regulations. The AI policies are necessary to provide the responsible use of AI technology, prevent costly errors, and maintain brand value. They should also ensure that AI systems comply with civil liberties, the rule of law, data privacy, and transparency. Accountability built-in AI governance will help prevent and mitigate dangerous biases and emphasize the importance of maintaining personal data privacy and security. AI policies that reiterate regulatory and data security laws and how they apply to your organization must be enforced at all levels. It is essential to keep AI policies up to date as technology and its applications evolve. Dedicated user training ensures that all employees understand the AI policy and the importance of cybersecurity, ethical AI use, and other best practices. Communicating AI standards to stakeholders to establish trust in the organization is essential due to the moral approach to AI.

The board must follow AI regulations to protect user data and ensure responsible AI use. They must also take responsibility for AI oversight and oversee the implementation and use of AI within the organization. With the potential for biased algorithms, the board must ensure AI is used ethically and effectively and that AI systems are continuously monitored and refined to mitigate risks. Transparency and accountability in AI decision-making processes are vital, necessitating clear explanations of how AI systems operate and their impact on stakeholders. Organizations must prioritize ethical AI principles to maintain trust and build responsible and trustworthy AI systems, including fairness, accountability, safety, and privacy. AI systems must be designed and deployed in a way that is consistent with ethical and legal norms and aligned with all stakeholders’ interests. By prioritizing these principles, organizations can ensure that their AI systems are transparent, accountable, and fair and that they protect the privacy and safety of all stakeholders. It is essential to guarantee that AI systems are developed and deployed ethically. One way to achieve this is by having an AI Ethics Committee of experts from various fields, such as ethicists, lawyers, technologists, business strategists, and bias scouts, to review any AI systems the organization develops or purchases. This committee can help identify the ethical risks associated with the AI system and suggest ways to mitigate them. The organization can ensure the AI system is developed and used responsibly and ethically. This committee also addresses moral and ethical questions related to AI. It must ensure that AI ethics are maintained from all angles, including personal privacy, transparent data sourcing and training, and environmental impact. The committee should also be equipped to identify and mitigate any potential risks from using AI.

Summary

The effective combination of all three models fosters a culture of transparency and accountability around AI decision-making. It ensures that AI is used ethically and responsibly and that AI is making ethical judgments that are compliant with regulations. Implementing this holistic human-centered AI governance framework also ensures that AI systems are human-centered, purpose-driven, and adequately governed and trusted by customers and employees, making them more willing to use it to transform society. It provides a point of reference for all relevant stakeholders and a mechanism for accountability in AI development and usage to avoid ethical and compliance issues. In this organic approach, humans are involved in the continuous improvement loop to refine the decision-making in the face of new training data, keeping ethical considerations in mind, monitoring and evaluating potential risks, and adapting and responding to changing contexts. This never-ending continuous improvement process will give your customers more confidence in how your organization uses AI in its operations, enhances its reputation, creates a high-performance ethical culture, and fosters long-term value creation. The purpose-driven and human-centered AI governance framework is also an excellent system for structured coaching of AI developers and users based on both PDCA cycles, from personal ambition, personal innovation strategy, personal governance, and the two alignments to AI deployment, ongoing monitoring, and fine-tuning. This human-centered AI governance approach will proactively align your organization with AI best practices. As AI grows and evolves, it’s essential to stay up-to-date proactively with the latest regulations and laws by continuously following the human-centered AI governance cycle and changing AI policies dynamically. This approach will help ensure your AI is human-centered, purpose-driven, and well-prepared for future changes.

……..Read further “Purpose-Driven and Human-Centered AI.”

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D.

We also offer the Certified Authentic AI Leadership Coaching program. This program is appropriate for AI leaders, managers, and professionals who wish to strengthen their ethical leadership and critical thinking skills, drive their purpose and human-centeredness, and coach others to realize the same.

Read his article “Cultivating Critical Thinking in the Age of AI” to learn more about the human-centered AI governance model.Cultivating Critical Thinking in the Age of AI.”

and “Sam Altman Shows What Genuine Empathetic Leadership Is”

And attending his Orlando–Tampa Events:

Cultivating a Sustainable Purpose-Driven Design Culture in Tech Companies

Human-Centered AI Governance

Purpose-Driven and Human-Centered AI

Hubert Rampersad, Ph., founded the Center of Excellence in Human-Centered and Purpose-Driven AI Innovation in Orlando. He is a Dutch-American visionary leader in innovative solutions for genuine sustainability, disruptive design innovation, critical thinking in the age of AI, human-centered and purpose-driven AI, and entrepreneurial leadership. He holds a Ph.D. in Innovation Sciences, an MSc in Technology Engineering & Robotics, and a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from leading accredited universities in the Netherlands (Delft University of Technology, Eindhoven University of Technology). He is a well-known futurist, advocating for genuine sustainability on a global scale. With extensive knowledge and expertise, he has authored 25 books on the topics above in many languages and is highly regarded for his insights in these fields. One of his books, “Total Performance Scorecard,” has been published in 20 languages. Dorothy Leonard, an innovation professor at Harvard Business School, wrote the book’s foreword. Rampersad has also previously served as a guest lecturer at MIT Sloan and was featured in BusinessWeek. He was a senior design innovation coach at ASML, the most important tech company in the world and “Europe’s most valuable tech firm“.

Orlando, Florida | tpsi@live.com | Phone/whatsapp: +13053992116 | skype: h.rampersad | About the author https://bit.ly/2CQLIfS

Fostering a Culture of Ethics on Campus, Academic Integrity, and Sustainable Good Governance at American Universities

December 15, 2023May 17, 2024 by Eco-Design Thinking

Unifying University Ethics With Personal Integrity to Address the Ethical Challenges at American Universities and Colleges in the 21st Century

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D.

“The one thing missing from the board of directors of American universities is a holistic view on cultivating a purpose-driven culture to foster good governance and sustainable innovation” — Hubert Rampersad

“American companies, colleges, and universities must reconsider their corrupt DEI policies, ensuring they are fair, transparent, and effective. While it’s important to prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion in leadership hiring processes, ensuring that the most qualified individuals are selected based on their expertise and capabilities is equally crucial. Simply hiring leaders in response to the Black Lives Matter and gender movement may not guarantee the desired outcomes and could compromise higher education leadership’s quality. To address these concerns, leaders need to move beyond diversity, equity, inclusion, gender, and race theater and instead focus on implementing sustainable DEI initiatives. Rebuilding trust requires a reconnection with authenticity, humility, and integrity. By fostering empathy and promoting inner alignment, leaders can create an ethical and sustainable culture of ECO-DEI within American companies and education institutions. This shift in focus will ensure that DEI efforts are embedded in the core values and practices of American companies, colleges, and universities, benefiting all community members.” –-Hubert Rampersad

American universities are rife with indoctrination, racism, antisemitism, corruption, politics, faculty bias, mismanagement, corrupt DEI policies, plagiarism, and misleading scientific publications. The Hamas war has highlighted the value of American universities. Higher education in America has become a threat to America. Our corrupt, radical universities feed every scourge, from censorship and crime to antisemitism. Read also “The root causes of our illiberal higher education system.” We can fix the illness of American universities by fostering a culture of ethical campus, academic integrity, and sustainable good governance at these institutions. Read also “American Higher Education in Crisis”.

DEI

Epidemic of Unethical Behavior at American Universities

Some examples of unethical behavior at American universities: The New York Times reported that federal prosecutors charged 50 people, including celebrities and business leaders, for activities involving bribery and academic cheating to gain admission into universities, including Yale, Stanford, and the University of Southern California. Read also, “A Harvard professor raking in over $1 million a year who specialized in ‘dishonesty’ was accused of fabricating research. 3 retractions have already occurred”. Harvard President Claudine Gay Faces Additional Plagiarism Allegations following accusations earlier this week that she had plagiarized portions of her 1997 Ph.D. dissertation and three other published works. Read “Why is Harvard giving Claudine Gay ‘plagiarism privilege’?”, “Higher Ed, Indoctrination and Miseducation”, “Antisemitism issues at elite colleges mask ‘deeper rot’ of DEI dominance in higher education: WSJ editorial” and “Drexel Now Under Investigation By Feds“. Some more related articles: “The Harvard Double Standard”, “It’s clear: Colleges today lack moral clarity”, and “Harvard president plagiarism scandal likely tip of iceberg of widespread academic corruption”.

There is more: Katalin Kariko, a Nobel Prize winner, was not on the tenure track and was told by a University of Pennsylvania official that she was not of faculty quality. Any system that repeatedly snubs someone with the talent to win a Nobel Prize probably deserves scrutiny. Universities tend to focus only on how much a researcher publishes or how widely covered by the media their work is, rather than how innovative the research is: “Nobel Prize winner Katalin Karikó was ‘demoted 4 times’ at her old university job“. She experienced a lot of politics, bias, distraction, rejection, and discrimination at the University of Pennsylvania. Read also “Penn’s Nobel Prize winner wasn’t on the tenure track. How can the system better support talent?”. These are some rare examples of traditional corporate governance at universities not working. Behind all the scandals mentioned above are several common factors, including:

Poor ethical leadership and management incompetence
Lack of personal integrity and empathy
Focus on rules, policies, and guidelines only, with no ethical learning culture

Unethical behavior of the university’s leadership, mismanagement, and violation of corporate governance codes are the main contributors to these scandals. Most American universities have comprehensive corporate governance programs, which are not working. Their traditional approaches to corporate governance are highly formal, bureaucratic, cosmetic, woolly, and non-holistic and, therefore, fail to address the shortcomings mentioned above. Their corporate governance programs worsened things and created a stable basis for more corruption. These programs have been found to fuel corruption instead of remedying it, which is a concerning reality. Remember what Plato said in 340 BC: “Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.” Why don’t universities learn from Plato and focus on creating a culture of good people, in which personal values are aligned with the laws and embedded in the people’s minds, instead of focusing on corporate governance laws only? Personal integrity is a core value that should be embedded in the culture of any school. School leaders should take responsibility for enforcing this principle among the faculty and administration and promoting it among their students to ensure that it is reflected in their actions so that ethics becomes a way of life.

Sustainable Good Governance at Universities

We need a sustainable solution to the epidemic of unethical behavior at American universities and foster better campus ethics. Better campus ethics starts with the enhanced personal integrity of university leaders, faculty leaders, and managers. I picked up where others left off by launching an innovative and sustainable methodology for creating a culture of good people at universities, in which high ethical values are aligned with their corporate governance rules, regulations, and guidelines and embedded in their minds. It is based on my book “Authentic Governance: Aligning Personal Governance with Corporate Governance.” A powerful endorsement for this book:

“Authentic governance is a holistic and sustainable approach to corporate governance that integrates personal integrity and personal governance into one overall framework. Dr. Hubert Rampersad has expanded traditional corporate governance concepts to create a new blueprint for fostering a culture of ethical behavior, academic integrity, and sustainable good governance in which formal corporate regulations and personal values mutually reinforce each other. By unifying corporate ethics with individual ethics and making ethics a way of life, he has written an outstanding synthesis that addresses the ethical challenges in the 21st century”.

Authentic governance is a holistic approach that links to personal integrity, personal governance, and corporate governance, as indicated in this Figure.

A strong sense of personal integrity, being attentive, and possessing empathic skills are all critical components of good people. Plato’s philosophy can be applied to universities to establish a culture of good people. This involves prioritizing aligning personal values with corporate governance laws and instilling these values in leadership and faculty’s minds rather than solely focusing on corporate governance rules and regulations. Authentic governance is an innovative approach for cultivating ethical school leaders, faculty members, and students whose values are closely aligned with university values and deeply ingrained in their critical thinking. This will also create a culture of academic integrity in the university. Authentic governance entails the following three elements:

Personal Integrity: This entails awareness about your actions toward human beings, animals, plants, and the environment by aligning your personal ambition with your behavior and acting.
Personal Governance: Entails the systematic process of continuous, gradual, and routine personal improvement, steering, and learning based on your personal innovation strategy.
Corporate Governance: This entails the systematic process of continuous, gradual, and routine corporate improvement, steering, and learning through formal corporate regulations, procedures, and guidelines.

Authentic governance starts with value-based leadership development, embedding personal values in the minds of the university’s governing board members, president, chancellor, administrative leaders, academic senate, and faculty members, and guiding them to reflect on the values sincerely. This approach is one of the first tangible and measurable means to create a way of life within universities characterized by trust, credibility, transparency, personal responsibility, personal integrity, and a high-performance ethical culture. This will have a positive impact on their students and society.

Good university governance must be an informal learning process and a way of life. This ethical process must be consistently promoted and communicated within the university to all stakeholders. In this way, ethical behavior will become routine in the university, and university leadership and faculty will better understand their responsibility for moral behavior. They will know that acting ethically on and off duty is their responsibility. This is a more sustainable, comprehensive, and holistic approach to ethics and social responsibility. Against this background, I propose an organic and holistic approach to corporate governance called authentic governance by integrating personal values and integrity into one overall authentic governance framework, in which formal corporate regulations and personal values mutually reinforce each other. This theory has been borne out through my leadership experiences in the global corporate world over the past 30 years.

Authentic Governance Model for Universities
I have defined authentic governance as the systematic process of continuous, gradual, and routine improvement, steering, and learning that leads to sustainable high performance and ethical excellence. Authentic governance is a constant, honest voyage of discovery involving continuous, gradual, and routine improvement, steering, and learning. By redefining and governing themselves effectively, university members will gain more understanding about their responsibility regarding ethical behavior and understand that it is their responsibility to act ethically, on and off duty. The figure below shows the authentic governance model, which provides an excellent framework and roadmap to systematically and sustainably develop, implement, and cultivate personal and corporate governance. This new governance blueprint is an inside-out approach and focuses mainly on the human side of good governance. It places more emphasis on understanding yourself and the needs of others, meeting those needs while staying true to your personal and university values, improving yourself and your personal integrity continuously, making ethics a way of life and a continuous learning process, and aligning these with formal university regulations, procedures, and guidelines, instead of focusing on exhaustive formal corporate rules, procedures and guidelines only.

The authentic governance model consists of the following phases, which are the building blocks of creating a culture of sustainable good governance at American universities:

Personal Governance:

a) Personal Ambition: The initial step involves engaging in a reflective process that includes deep thinking, introspection, and self-reflection by school leadership, faculty members, and students. This will also strengthen their critical thinking skills. During this phase, they’ll be introduced to breathing and silence exercises that will aid in developing self-awareness. Self-knowledge is the ultimate goal of this phase. The outcome of this phase will be the creation of their personal mission, vision, and key roles, as illustrated in the diagram below. Through this process, they’ll gain insights into their life and acquire self-knowledge, self-awareness, and self-regulation, which are the building blocks of authenticity, empathy, trustworthiness, integrity, creativity, imagination, and critical thinking. Your personal ambition comprises your mission, vision, and key roles. You can click on this link to view my personal ambition statement. The figure below shows the personal ambition framework.

By practicing breathing and silence exercises, you can better connect with your inner self and find answers to these questions. This will help you to discover your higher purpose. Through this process, you’ll cultivate self-knowledge, self-awareness, self-management, and self-learning, which entails a journey toward personal disruptive innovation, as shown in this diagram:

The best ideas come when you are alone. Self-learning – the ability to gather, process, retain, and evaluate knowledge alone — is the foundation of creativity and imagination. Traditional creativity approaches lack imagination because they neglect self-learning and, because of this, fail to address complex problems. They heavily rely on group meetings and, therefore, miss opportunities to develop innovative and imaginative ideas. Nikola Tesla developed many innovative ideas while working alone for over thirty years. Similarly, Stephen Hawking made significant discoveries while confined to his wheelchair, and Isaac Newton famously discovered gravity while in social isolation. Remember Nikola Tesla’s statement: “Being alone is when ideas are born. This is the secret of innovation”. Albert Einstein said almost the same: “Albert Einstein said almost the same: “Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth. Have holy curiosity. Make your life worth living”.

Based on insights acquired through this process, you will also cultivate emotional intelligence skills and become more ethical as you grow more conscious of yourself. Read “How Mindful Meditation Boosts Critical Thinking in the Age of AI” and “Crafting Your Authentic Personal Brand: A 5-Step Guide“. By practicing breathing and silence exercises, you can better connect with your inner voice and find answers to the ambition questions. University leaders and managers should guide their employees and faculty members in doing the same.

b) Personal Innovation Strategy: To bring your personal ambition to life, it’s crucial to act. This means creating a well-rounded action plan or personal innovation strategy based on your mission, vision, and key roles. A personal innovation strategy includes a roadmap to help you develop a stronger mindset and authenticity, integrity, empathy, and critical thinking skills. Without continuous improvement based on your personal innovation strategy, you won’t become a better human being, which will not lead to your long-term growth and success. The following are the five steps to develop your personal innovation strategy:Your personal critical success factors are the key elements of your ambition and objectives. These factors are broken down into four perspectives: internal, external, knowledge and learning, and financial. Your personal innovation strategy helps you turn your personal ambition into manageable, measurable objectives and milestones in a balanced way. Using this strategy, you can effectively manage your time and become more disciplined, proactive, innovative, ethical, and empathetic. Please click on this link to view my personal innovation strategy. University leaders and managers should guide employees and faculty members in developing their personal innovation strategy.

c) Personal Governance: Once you have established your personal innovation strategy, it is essential to consistently implement, maintain, and cultivate it to manage yourself effectively and continuously improve your ethical skills. I recommend following the PDAC cycle (Plan-Deploy-Act-Challenge) to aid you in this process. This continuous improvement cycle will help you effectively implement your personal innovation strategy, as illustrated in this diagram.Implementing your personal innovation strategy through the PDAC cycle will lead to self-awareness, happiness, and enhanced authenticity, integrity, empathy, and critical thinking skills. It’s important to regularly update your personal innovation strategy and repeat the cycle to stay current with new challenges and lessons learned. These 50 tips will assist you in implementing your personal innovation strategy effectively. University leaders and managers should guide their employees and faculty members to implement their personal innovation strategy and provide feedback and coaching.

2. Alignment with Yourself: Finding a balance between personal ambition and actions is crucial to achieving sustained personal integrity. This figure illustrates this personal integrity concept:

During this alignment process, it is essential to reflect honestly on the following questions: What are my personal values, and how do they align with my actions? How can I ensure that my actions are consistent with my values? What are the potential consequences of my actions toward others? How can I empathize with others and understand their perspectives? Am I staying true to my values and conscience in my actions? Are my thoughts and actions aligned consistently? How do my values and intentions relate to my current behavior? Is there congruity between my thoughts and my actions? Am I always acting according to my personal ambition and empathetic nature? Does my personal ambition reflect my desire to work with ethics and empathy? Are there any discrepancies between my personal ambition and my empathetic actions? Do I keep the promises I make to myself? How do others perceive me and my values? Do they see me as someone who stays true to my core beliefs and remains authentic to myself? This alignment process is an excellent tool for school leaders, faculty members, staff, and students to act ethically.

Aligning your personal ambition with your behavior is essential to enhancing personal integrity. This involves achieving greater compatibility between the two elements so that they are in harmony, as shown below.

When your personal ambition and behavior match, you can work authentically without any internal conflicts. This will lead to greater empathy, enhanced charisma, transparency, and trustworthiness. It is essential to ensure harmony between your personal ambition and your actions to align your deeds with your conscience. Our conscience is the inner voice that guides us to distinguish between right and wrong, fact and fiction. By listening to this voice, we can gain better insight into our empathic behavior, strengths, and weaknesses, ultimately impacting our solidarity with others. Albert Schweitzer once said: “The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity and empathy with other human beings.”

It takes constant awareness of how our actions affect other people, animals, plants, and the environment to achieve a balance between personal ambition and behavior. We must always question ourselves honestly: Have I acted by my conscience? Have I always done what was right? Have I always acted morally? Have I acted compassionately regularly? To foster better ethics on university campuses and to build a culture of sustainable good governance at universities, I encourage school leaders, managers, and faculty members to formulate their personal ambition and reflect on the balance between their personal ambition and their actions and behavior. They must communicate their ethical standards and values to employees and students and coach them in this alignment process.

3. University Governance:

a) University Ambition: this phase involves formulating the shared university ambition, encompassing the university’s mission, vision, and core values. Harvard University’s shared ambition: The university’s mission is to educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society through the transformative power of liberal arts and sciences education. The university’s vision is to set the standard for residential liberal arts and sciences education and to create and sustain the conditions that enable all Harvard College students to experience an unparalleled educational journey that is intellectually, socially, and personally transformative. Harvard University aspires to provide education and scholarship of the highest quality — to advance the frontiers of knowledge and to prepare individuals for life, work, and leadership. The university’s values are to be committed to excellence, to be open to new ideas, to be diverse and inclusive, to be respectful of the rights and dignity of others, to be accountable for actions and decisions, and to be committed to positive social change.

b) University Innovation Strategy: This entails the university’s balanced scorecard to continuously improve its governance processes. Harvard University’s strategy is to guide its culture towards inclusive excellence by convening stakeholders, catalyzing strategic efforts, analyzing university-level progress, optimizing investments, and facilitating university-wide coordination.

c) University Governance: the next step is to implement, maintain, and cultivate the university innovation strategy to govern the university effectively and become an ethical institution. This entails the systematic, continuous, gradual, routine corporate improvement, steering, and learning process. This stage also focuses on implementing formal corporate governance regulations, procedures, and guidelines. Harvard University has a governing board that exercises fiduciary responsibility for the University’s academic, financial, and physical resources and overall well-being.

4. Alignment with your University: the emphasis here is aligning your personal ambition with your university ambition to create uniformity of personal and organizational values. To foster better ethics on university campuses and to build a culture of sustainable good governance at universities, I encourage school leaders, managers, and faculty members to formulate their personal ambition and reflect on the balance between their personal ambition and the shared university ambition, as shown in this Figure. They must communicate their ethical standards and values to employees and students and coach them in this alignment process.

By unifying university values with individual values, you will create a strong foundation of peace, integrity, engagement, and learning upon which creativity and growth can flourish, and life within the university will become a more harmonious and ethical experience. It’s about aligning personal and corporate governance and getting the optimal fit and balance between these activities to enhance productivity, create a climate of trust, and stimulate the organization’s engagement, commitment, integrity, and passion. This process is needed because staff members don’t work passionately or expend energy on something they do not believe in or agree with. If there is an effective match between their interests and those of the university, and if their values and the university’s values align, they will be engaged. They will work with more outstanding commitment and dedication toward realizing the university’s objectives. When the personnel’s personal ambition is in harmony with the university’s (are compatible) and combined in the best interest of both parties, the results will be higher productivity and sustainable corporate governance. Employees are stimulated to commit, act ethically, and focus on those activities that create value for students.

To build a sustainable, ethical culture at universities, I recommend introducing an ambition meeting between school leaders/managers and their faculty members/employees. The ambition meeting is a periodical, informal, voluntary, and confidential meeting of half an hour between the parties, aligning the employee’s personal ambition with the shared university ambition as topics and aligning the employee’s ambition with his/her behavior. This tool fosters ethical awareness among school leaders, faculty, staff, and students. It is recommended to be held structurally at least once every two months. The outcome of these informal meetings should be highly confidential and kept out of the personnel file. The school leader/manager plays a crucial role in this process. He/she should be a trusted person, coach, mentor, and role model. One needs a confidential, informal, and friendly atmosphere of trust and open communication to talk about the individual’s personal ambition. This is essential as human values will be discussed.

The effective combination of all these four phases in this model creates a stable basis for creating a culture of ethical campus, academic integrity, and sustainable good governance at American universities. This authentic holistic approach should, therefore, be included in the curriculum. It will also help students be ethical.

Read “How to Restore the Higher Purpose of American Higher Education”.

If you’re interested in gaining more knowledge about our DEI program, you may want to consider joining our Orlando–Tampa Live Event: How to Measure and Fix DEI

And our free Live Webinar: How to Measure and Manage DEI Initiatives.

You may also want to consider becoming a Certified ECO-DEI Practitioner.

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D., is a Dutch-American visionary leader in innovative solutions for genuine sustainability, disruptive design innovation, critical thinking in the age of AI, authentic personal branding, and entrepreneurial leadership. He holds a Ph.D. in Innovation Sciences, an MSc in Technology Engineering & Robotics, and a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from leading accredited universities in the Netherlands/Europe (Delft University of Technology, Eindhoven University of Technology). He is a well-known futurist, advocating for genuine sustainability on a global scale. With extensive knowledge and expertise, he has authored 25 books on the topics above in many languages and is highly regarded for his insights in these fields. One of his books, “Total Performance Scorecard,” has been published in 20 languages. Dorothy Leonard, an innovation professor at Harvard Business School, wrote the book’s foreword. Rampersad has also previously served as a guest lecturer at MIT Sloan and was featured in BusinessWeek. He was a design innovation coach at ASML, the most important tech company in the world and “Europe’s most valuable tech firm“.

Orlando, Florida | tpsi@live.com | Phone/WhatsApp: +13053992116 | skype: h.rampersad | About the author https://bit.ly/2CQLIfS