When Chris Lowney started his career as an investment banker at JP Morgan in 1983, his background leading up to that job marked an unusual path to the corporation. He had spent the past few years as a Jesuit in formation, after entering the Society of Jesus as a novice straight out of high school. Chris went on to work 18 years at JP Morgan, and during his tenure there, he started realizing that a lot of the stuff he had learned about Saint Ignatius and the history of the Jesuits during his Jesuit formation included a bunch of supremely relevant wisdom that corporate leaders in the “secular world” could learn from. So Chris started working on a book after retiring from the company, and in 2003 Loyola Press published “Heroic Leadership: Best Practices from a 450-Year-Old Company that Changed the World.” “Heroic Leadership” has become a modern classic in Jesuit spaces and pioneered the development what you could call Ignatian leadership studies.

Just this year, Chris is back with a supplement to his first book: “The Heroic Leadership Workbook,” which he wrote with an educational design expert named Judy Wearing. The workbook is a 30-day guide for leaders in any field to help them grow in qualities like self-awareness, ingenuity, love and heroism. The workbook’s exercises are great – they invite deep reflection and are so usable. Host Mike Jordan Laskey invited Chris on the show to talk about “Heroic Leadership” and why Chris thinks the Jesuit charism and history continue to be so helpful to 21st-century leaders both inside institutional church structures and far outside them.

AMDG is a production of the Jesuit Media Lab, which is a project of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States.