God and Guiness

Guinness got it
The company’s 250-year legacy of God-inspired good provides myriad lessons for today. Among them: A benevolent corporate vision is good for business, for its employees and for the world.
By Stephen Mansfield
It is the mid-1760s, and in Dublin's grand St. Patrick's Cathedral the famed revivalist John Wesley is preaching with all of his might. He is aware that the congregation of St. Patrick's is filled with the city's more successful, comfortable, perhaps self-satisfied souls. And so he thunders against their self-centeredness, rails against their disregard for the poor. "Oh who has courage to speak plain to these rich and honorable sinners?" Wesley writes afterward in his journals.
In the congregation is a young businessman who only a few years before has begun to make his mark in the city. Born in nearby Celbridge and raised on the archbishop's estate that his father managed, this young man has gained something of a reputation for his skill at brewing beer. In fact, he has purchased a defunct brewery at St. James' Gate, along the River Liffey, and, having married well and embedded himself skillfully in Dublin's merchant class, he fully intends to rise.
Now, listening to John Wesley speak of the obligations of wealth, of a God-given duty to care for the hurting of the world, this gifted young man is reminded of values he learned on that archbishop's estate and at his father's knee. They are values that resurfaced in the Reformation of Calvin and Luther and that were set aflame and made personal in the Methodism of John Wesley. This rising entrepreneur hears and allows Wesley's words to frame a vision for his fledgling company: a vision for producing wealth through brewing excellence and then for using that wealth to serve the downtrodden and the poor.
The framework: God's values
We should be glad that he did, for that young man was Arthur Guinness, the founder of the renowned brewery whose 250th anniversary we celebrate this year. His famous dark stout would become one of the most beloved beverages in the world, the Guinness brand among the most recognizable on earth. Yet interwoven throughout these 2 and a half centuries of brewing success is a legacy of benevolence that we ought to know and that is perhaps an antidote to one of the great crises of our age.
The values Arthur Guinness envisioned for his company were first honed in a life of devotion to God. He was an earthy but pious man who frequently thundered his views despite angry opposition. He was beloved throughout Ireland for his defense of Roman Catholic rights, for example, an astonishing stand for a Protestant in his day. He criticized the material excesses of the upper class and sat on the board of a hospital for the poor. He was also the founder of the first Sunday schools in Ireland. When he died in 1803, the Dublin Evening Post declared that Arthur Guinness's life was "useful and benevolent and virtuous." It was true.
Absorbing his philosophy, his heirs often used their wealth for the glory of God and the good of mankind. Missionary endeavors were funded, the poor were tended, and there are monuments in Ireland to this day that express gratitude to the Guinnesses for their generosity during the horrifying years of the Potato Famine. Even the beloved St. Patrick's Cathedral, where Arthur first heard Wesley, was rebuilt through Guinness generosity.
It starts with people
Yet it was in the treatment of their employees as much as in their use of private wealth that the Guinnesses honored their founding principles.
As a Guinness who headed the brewery in the mid-1800s said, "You cannot make money from people unless you are willing for people to make money from you."
This was an exceptionally farsighted and compassionate sentiment for the industrial age, but it was just the type of pillar upon which Guinness built a lasting legacy of good.
A century and a quarter after Arthur Guinness died, a worker at the brewery in Dublin would have enjoyed round-the-clock care from doctors, dentists, nurses and home health workers. There was even a masseuse. Retirees received pensions as a gift from the company, which also paid most funeral expenses.
There were classes on nearly every enriching topic, reading rooms, savings banks, exercise facilities and educational benefits for both workers and their families. Concerned about the detrimental effects of city life upon its employees' health, the company even paid workers to take their families — or their dates — to the country periodically.
And, nearly as important to some weary laborers, the company gave every employee two pints of the lovely dark beer every day, free of charge.
All of this was true in 1928, not a particularly enlightened time for employee care. Even so, Guinness benevolence to its workers then rivals that of Google and Microsoft today.
Wanted: morals and ethics
There are many tales that could be told: Of the Guinness heir who received millions of dollars as a wedding gift but then moved his new bride into the slums to draw attention to the plight of the poor. Or of how the Guinness company promised all of its employees who fought in World War I that their jobs would be waiting for them when they returned, and then paid their families half wages until they did.
The lesson is clear: Guinness strove to improve the lives of its employees with the same intensity as it strove to sell its beer.
Yet there is another lesson for us today. We are tempted in our disgust with Wall Street greed and corporate misdealing to reject the economic engine that has made us great, to prefer the security of the state to the vicissitudes of free market exchange.
What we learn from the Guinness story is that character is king, that markets without ethical boundaries make Madoffs but that corporations driven by a benevolent vision can do vast amounts of good.
It is morals and ethics that we need, then, not a new economic system, and this, perhaps, is the most lasting legacy of the Guinness tale for us today.
Stephen Mansfield is the best-selling author of The Faith of Barack Obama, The Faith of George W. Bushand Pope Benedict XVI: His Life and Mission. His most recent work is The Search for God and Guinness, a celebration of the Guinness legacy.