Kenneth Hopper Author of the award winning book

The Puritan Gift

David C Roberts Hopper Foundation for Good Management Practice

What is the Puritan Gift?

The Puritan Gift is a rare ability to create organizations that serve a useful purpose, and to manage them well.

The book depicts how America’s superb managerial culture, originating in seventeenth-century New England, evolved to make the United States the most powerful nation on earth.

What is the Puritan Gift?

The gift is embodied in four intertwined characteristics -- the mind-set if you will – of traditional American society.

A vision for the long term; an aptitude for the exercise of mechanical skills; a moral outlook that subordinated the interest of the individual to the group; and an ability to assemble, galvanize and marshal, financial, material and human resources on a massive ( or lesser) scale.

Characteristics of the Puritan Gift?

The gift is embodied in the characteristics -- the mind-set if you will – of traditional American society.

A vision for the long term

Those in charge having a deep understanding of the organisation

Putting the community before themselves

Superb skill at organisation

America’s Gift to Japan after WWII via the CCS

The mature corporate culture that emerged

would be successfully transferred to Japan

under the US Occupation (1945-1952) by the

CCS initiating at first a managerial revolution,

and then an economic revolution that

transformed a poor country ravaged by war and

lacking natural resources into the second

richest in the world.

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America’s Gift to the World

Moreover, the principles and practices enshrined in this

culture would be re-exported from Japan to other parts

of East Asia in the 1960's and 1970's to the future

Asian Tigers of Taiwan and then on to an impoverished

mainland China which has enjoyed the greatest

economic boom ever experienced anywhere in human

history.

Why is the book important?

It is important because when we look back at East Asia

it was not a peaceful place - the Vietnam War, Pol Pot,

the Great Chinese Famine - this part of the world is

transformed through manufacturing development and

the transfer of the lessons taught to the Japanese through

the CCS.

Have we forgotten the lessons of the Puritan Gift?

We argue that it is important that the message is shared,

especially when we look at the state of the world today.

It’s important for the ongoing success of the people of the

developed world and it’s important for the future success of the

developing world.

And, as we witnessed in Japan - no nation is condemned by its

past.

“The Greatest Management story ever told”Paul Kearns,

The Maturity Institute. “An Astonishing Book”

Sarah Cliffe, Editor, Harvard Business Review.

“This is one of the best books that I have ever read in my long life, and not just Business books”

Russell Lincoln Ackoff

Contact details and links to more information about the Puritan Gift and the work of Ken Hopper

The Hopper Foundation

Ken Hopper’s papers at the Drucker Institute

ThePuritanGift.com

Publishers IB Taurus

Honoring Homer Sarashon

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