On September 11, the problems of the world impaled themselves into the heart
of American life.
No longer can citizens of the United States ignore the global village to
which they belong. If poverty and ignorance are allowed to breed prejudice and
hate anywhere on earth, consequences on American soil may be unavoidable. Just
19 terrorists were able to kill about three thousand people, shut down air
travel nationwide and temporarily bring the U.S. stock exchanges to a skidding
halt. The resulting financial shock spread to every corner of the earth,
simultaneously demonstrating both the fragility and the interdependence of the
world's economic and financial system.
The world is tied together with a slender thread of common economic
interests. In no other area of culture — politics, religion or education — have
the nations of the world come together as they have in business and finance. But
a global economy cannot endure without international authority structures, and
effective authority ultimately depends on a common set of moral values.
Forming a set of multicultural values is the greatest challenge facing the
world today, for it will be the first step toward solving many of the major
problems before us, whether they are poverty or illiteracy, public health or
environmental pollution, the spread of nuclear weapons or global terrorism. At
present, these problems remain intractable precisely because their solution
requires international cooperation, and the world cannot achieve the needed
cooperation because it has not yet come to a fundamental agreement on basic
values. Today's values are local rather than global, biased to particular
cultures and often intolerant of differing points of view.
Creating a consensus on basic values is the chief task of any leader, and in
today's global economy, it is leadership within the business community, more so
than within politics or religion, that must guide the world toward a common
moral ethic. A moral dialogue must begin from some point of reference, and in
this early stage of globalization, shared economic interests provide the best
starting point for mutual understanding. Business is primarily responsible for
building the global economy, and business allocates most of the rewards garnered
from economic activity. Business leaders are therefore in a unique position to
initiate a global moral discourse.
Leadership and Values
The seriousness of the moral task confronting today's business leaders should
not be underestimated. History has shown that leadership can steer a population
toward either prosperity or peril. Among political leaders, Adolf Hitler's reign
in Germany is an example of how leadership can move a society toward immorality
on a massive scale. In contrast, the leadership of Abraham Lincoln has been
lauded for holding together the world's first modern attempt at democracy. In
the Gettysburg Address, in which he so eloquently declared his mission statement
as president, Lincoln said that Americans should "highly resolve . . . that
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government
of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the
earth." Professional and armchair historians have often discussed what the
outcome would have been for the nation — or the world — if a lesser leader had
held the American presidency during the Civil War.
Like all great leaders, Lincoln articulated the purpose and meaning behind a
profound moral conflict. His Gettysburg speech is filled with values. He talked
of bravery, dedication and devotion; of liberty, equality and honor. He then
tied these values to an overriding global purpose: America is dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal, and its purpose is to ensure that
democracy will not perish from the earth.
As Lincoln so ably demonstrated, values and vision are a leader's primary
tools of the trade. They are to an organizational leader what an airplane is to
a pilot, a scalpel to a surgeon or a hammer to a carpenter. Leaders guide
organizational behavior by articulating common values and by tying those values
to a common purpose or vision.
Values and vision are central to leadership because they form the
internalized standards that guide organizational decision making. In modern
society, effective organizational decision making is the most fundamental
prerequisite for achieving practically any goal. Virtually every basic human
need is provided through the joint efforts of innumerable people working within
a myriad of interconnected organizations. Every plate of food requires farmers,
truckers, processors, inspectors, retailers and cooks. A fish eaten today in
Texas may have been swimming on the other side of the planet only a few days
earlier.
And if we are hopelessly dependent on others during adulthood, think of our
dependence as children. All human beings require nurturing from many other
individuals, not just parents, if they are to reach a healthy maturity. The idea
of the "self-made" person is pure fiction.
If organized groups are necessary to meet human needs, then we all have to
find a way of working together. This requires standards of behavior that can
guide individual decision making within a group context. These standards could
be imposed from the outside through rules and regulations, but enforcing rules
is cumbersome, costly and inflexible. Organizations generally don't have the
resources to enforce compliance for more than a small number of rule breakers.
In the United States today, for example, less than 1 percent of the
population is in federal, state and local jails and prisons. If this were to
increase just to 2 percent, the number of criminals would double, requiring
twice as many courts, jails and policemen. Imagine the dilemma we would face if
5 percent of the U.S. population required incarceration — our nation's resources
for law enforcement would be overwhelmed. The same is true in any type of
organization, whether it is a single corporation or a global network. For a set
of ethics to work, there must be voluntary compliance on a very large scale.
Otherwise, the ethic is unenforceable.
Mahatma Gandhi led India through one of the best-known tests of this
principle in the 1940s. He realized Britain's authority over India would
collapse without the voluntary compliance of the Indian people. Accordingly, he
was able to free his country from British rule by leading the Indian people in
nonviolent demonstrations of noncooperation. Martin Luther King Jr. used the
same principle to combat racial segregation in America during the 1960s.
A Balancing of Interests
The events surrounding September 11 reminded us just how much our common
welfare depends on the daily dedication of innumerable individuals in serving
professions — from policemen, firemen and soldiers to clergy, teachers and
health care workers. In the midst of that tragedy, every one of those
professions produced dozens of heroes. Society exists because most people
endeavor to live by moral values and because the average person is ready to
voluntarily sacrifice to achieve a meaningful purpose.
Most people voluntarily make an effort to conform to ethical norms
established in pursuit of shared objectives because they believe that the values
they hold represent the best way to live their lives and the best way to
organize society. In other words, moral values embody a generally accepted
balance of individual and group interests.
One example of this balancing principle is the right of free speech, a value
that is highly prized in countries such as Canada, France, the United Kingdom
and the United States, all of which have laws protecting freedom of expression
as a basic human entitlement. But individual freedom of speech is protected only
up to a point. People have a right to speak in favor of an unpopular political
view, espouse faith in any religion and criticize the government, all without
fear of reprisal. On the other hand, speech that would unjustifiably harm other
individuals or the group can be punished, such as lying under oath, breaking
contractual promises, yelling "fire" in a crowded theater or inciting
others to violence. This delicate balance of individual and group interests in
free expression has been recognized since the ancient Greeks.
In addition to individual and group needs, there is a third basic type of
interest, or dimension, that also must be considered in forming sound moral
values. Less understood and often more overlooked, this third dimension is
common purpose.
Common purpose is what defines the overall scope of organizational authority
over individual and group interests. In the case of free speech, political
speech has more protection than business communications because the purpose of
political discourse is to determine the governance of society, while the purpose
of business communications is to improve profits for individual companies.
Because political speech is more basic to governmental authority than is
economic speech, individual expression requires more protection from the
government when the topic is political. Within limits, a politician may distort
an opponent's record without fear of legal retribution, but a drug manufacturer
could face serious legal consequences if it intentionally distorts the
performance of one of its products relative to a competitor.
In the same way, common purpose defines the overall scope of legitimate
organizational authority in every type of organization. A business leader, for
example, can have no authority over an employee's worship at the neighborhood
church, mosque or synagogue because the purpose of a business enterprise is not
ecclesiastical. Similarly, local government should have limited authority over
the price of eggs at the neighborhood supermarket because government does not
exist to market produce.
Within the scope of its power, the most fundamental function of any kind of
organizational authority is to balance individual and group needs with the
common purpose that justifies and defines the organization's existence. In every
organization, there are only three basic ways of making decisions. People can
make decisions individually. They can make decisions as a group — for example,
by committee or by majority vote. Finally, they can receive direction from some
kind of authority, whether that authority is a leader in a hierarchy, an
external rule or an internalized value. All organizations require individual,
group and authoritative decision making to be effective. Therefore, all
organizations have to achieve a balance of individual freedom, community
consensus and common purpose (see Figures 1 and 2; also, see previous papers in
World Energy, Vol. 5, Nos. 1 and 2).
Figure 1: Freedom, Community and Purpose in the Global
Economy
Individual Freedom. Patrick Henry's famous words of 1775,
"Give me liberty or give me death," represent the strong resolve
that people in many cultures throughout history have displayed in their
belief that individuals are entitled to basic freedoms.
In today's information age, freedom of the individual is on the
ascendancy. Around the world, the increased access to information is
taking power out of the hands of the few and placing it in the hands of
the many, as was shown by the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. When a
Communist coup was struggling to gain control of the Soviet Union's many
republics, the scattered opposition forces were able to maintain contact
and share information through fax machines and telephones. With the advent
of e-mail, the Internet and interdependent global markets, totalitarian
states now have even more difficulty limiting individual access to
information, making it harder to force dogmatic ideas on large, diverse
populations.
The ascendancy of individual freedom has often caused liberty to be
singled out as the preeminent virtue required for continued human
progress. Some philosophers go so far as to look at the struggle for
liberty as the central issue of human history, and their arguments are
compelling. When people are given freedom to act, basic individual human
drives motivate behavior toward the satisfaction of basic human needs. If
those needs are not completely satisfied, individuals will creatively
invent new ways to meet their needs more effectively. Competition will
cause the best ideas to flourish. Consequently, according to this
argument, as long as people enjoy liberty, an "invisible hand"
will inevitably guide human activity toward continued progress. As Adam
Smith once said, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the
brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to
their own interest."
But too much freedom becomes anarchy, and an environment of anarchy is
not conducive to human progress. Over-reliance on free, competitive
markets has often led to serious problems — as it did in the United States
in the 1920s, resulting in the Great Depression, and more recently with
the exposure of corporate accounting scandals. The invisible hand requires
more than freedom if it is to function properly — it requires the freedom
of the individual to be balanced with the needs of the group and the
pursuit of a common purpose.
Community Consensus. In his extensive writings on the history of
civilization, historian Will Durant once noted that the evolution of
mankind during recorded time "has been social rather than
biological." As Durant indicates, the role of organizations in modern
times has been fundamental to human progress. Our prosperity hinges
primarily on our ability to organize ourselves in groups.
The first requirement for any successful group, whether it is a high
school football team or a Fortune 500 company, is that it maintains
internal cohesion, and this cohesion requires the creation of consensus.
Human beings have deep emotional needs for belonging that motivate the
members of a group to build consensus, and a variety of mechanisms exist
for creating the necessary agreement, including long-standing traditions,
political dialogue and majority rule.
Once the necessary consensus is achieved, the members of a group must
curtail their individual desires in order to maintain the group's
togetherness. Maintaining cohesion requires human beings to constantly
face a basic moral dilemma: "Should I follow my own individual
desires, or should I curtail my individual needs in order to satisfy the
needs of the group?" To a large extent, life is a competition between
basic instinctual drives for individual satisfaction and emotional needs
to belong to a community. Various religions often frame this competition
as a battle between good and evil. Goodness is presented as a balance
between the needs of the individual and the needs of the group — in other
words, "love your neighbor as yourself" — while evil is often
presented as an imbalance in favor of either selfish individualism or
intolerant groupthink.
Today, as the many cultures of the world have begun to come together
for the first time in human history as an interconnected global society,
the greatest barrier standing in the way of internal cohesion is
intolerance of religious and cultural diversity. Group cohesiveness on a
global scale will demand nondiscrimination from organizations. If
individuals from various religions and cultural backgrounds are to
function as a unit, they must believe that they will not be subject to
discrimination based upon characteristics such as religion, race,
ethnicity or gender. Global organizations must be, to a large extent,
meritocracies, with rewards based upon hard work, ingenuity and expertise.
Group cohesiveness will also demand religious and cultural tolerance from
individuals. People cannot be allowed to injure or demean others because
of some religious or cultural belief, no matter how sincere that belief
may be. The full weight of society should fall on the heads of intolerant
religious, cultural or ethnic extremists.
The life story of Albert Einstein, one of the world's greatest
scientists, illustrates how nondiscrimination is a mainstay for a
civilization's progress and prosperity over time. By the time Einstein won
the 1921 Nobel Prize for physics at age 42, prejudice against Jews had
escalated in Germany. When the Nazi party, with its official mantra of
anti-Semitism, took power in 1933, Einstein felt forced to flee. Germany's
loss was America's gain.
Because no one knows from what country or religion the next Einstein
will emerge, or whether that person will be male or female, human progress
will be enhanced if everyone has an equal opportunity to contribute.
Achieving equal economic opportunity among individuals, communities or
nations is a social purpose worthy of some kinds of affirmative actions,
providing that those affirmative actions are appropriately balanced with
individual and group requirements for nondiscrimination. In particular,
the global economy cannot ignore the vast majority of the world's
population residing in developing countries, even though those individuals
may have religious and cultural backgrounds that differ from those of most
of the developed world.
Common Purpose. As noted earlier, of the three dimensions of
moral value, common purpose is perhaps the least understood, even though
it is just as critical to human happiness and well-being as are individual
freedom and community cohesion. Our instincts motivate us individually to
satisfy basic needs (eating when we're hungry), and our emotional drives
motivate us to stay with a group (raising children with a monogamous
mate), but it is our desire to achieve that inspires us to make the world
better than we found it. Without common purpose, humanity would still be
living in caves.
As humans, we almost always achieve our greatest works by being part of
an organization of people who have consciously created a common objective.
Neil Armstrong, who became fascinated with flying when he was a young boy,
could never have fulfilled the dream of being the first person to walk on
the moon without the support of the extensive organization of the U.S.
space program behind him.
Motivating a group of people to work together toward a common purpose
requires skillful leadership. History has shown that great leaders aren't
always the smartest, the strongest or the most daring. What sets a great
leader apart is the ability to organize and motivate people to work toward
a common goal.
Henry Ford's name today is synonymous with the birth of the automobile,
yet he didn't invent the horseless carriage, nor was he the first to try
mass production. (Ransom E. Olds holds that honor.) His distinction was
his skill as an inventive and motivating leader, which enabled him to put
together an innovative company that pioneered such techniques as the
moving assembly line. By the time Ford launched his company in 1903, some
car manufacturers had already been in business for a decade, yet the Model
T was soon outselling all other cars — a leading sales position Ford held
for nearly 20 years. Under Ford's leadership, his organization succeeded
at building and selling cars that were affordable to the common man.
Whether the goal is building a better car or exploring the solar
system, the key to success is first to create a sense of organizational
mission that satisfies real human needs, and then to balance that common
purpose with individual and group processes arising from basic human
nature. The basic instinctual and emotional drives that govern individual
and group processes are critically important because they are the most
effective motivators of human behavior. But without conscious direction,
these basic drives are like a powerful speedboat without a rudder. At any
moment, the speedboat can swerve off course toward disaster. Only when
basic human motivators are consciously balanced with the third part of the
balancing act, common purpose, can the progress of human civilization
proceed.
A New Kind of Debate
Just as the September 11th tragedy marked the beginning of a global war
on terrorism, it also marked the beginning of a serious long-term dialogue
on universal values.
Unfortunately, ever since seating arrangements in the French parliament
of the 1790s separated the aristocracy and clergy on one side of the hall
from commoners on the other, social and political dialogue has generally
been characterized by a two-sided debate between the "right" and
the "left." In modern times, this dichotomy has polarized
between those on the right who emphasize individual freedom and private
entrepreneurship, and those on the left who focus on community consensus
and the public interest.
The two-sided dogmas that have dominated the political landscape for
the last two centuries are inadequate for the unprecedented challenges of
the new world order. Today's moral dialogue must have three sides. The
third side of the debate focuses on creating the common vision and values
that will bind global culture together. Global authority structures will
require a broad moral consensus involving diverse cultures and religions.
Only then can individual and community interests — the traditional
concerns of the right and the left — be properly balanced.
Achieving a broad consensus cannot by itself justify the agreed-upon
values, however. Human history is replete with consensus opinions that
proved in retrospect to be wrongheaded. Slavery and segregation achieved
widespread acceptance for thousands of years, and women were not allowed
the full exercise of their political franchise until the last century. Nor
can these moral failings be relegated exclusively to the past. One need
only to look at religious and ethnic atrocities in the Balkans, racial
hatreds in the Middle East or the oppression of Afghan women by the
Taliban to see that these ancient evils can still capture the hearts of
millions, perhaps even billions.
If agreement alone cannot justify universal values, where will humanity
find the common foundation for a new moral consensus?
Since the beginnings of the earliest civilizations, moral and political
authority has been traditionally founded upon religious beliefs. The
Egyptians believed that Pharaoh descended from the sun god Ra. The
Israelites believed that the finger of God inscribed the Ten Commandments.
The British believed that the monarchy ruled through the divine right of
kings.
Today, as in the past, religious beliefs form the foundation for most
core values. Consequently, it would be a mistake to remove religion from
the current moral dialogue. Ultimately, universal moral values will have
to achieve acceptance from a substantial majority of the world's
religions. Otherwise, those values will not resonate with the deep
religious core of most individual value systems.
At the same time, universal values cannot be founded upon any one
religion. Given the world's tremendous religious diversity, religious
tolerance will have to be widely accepted and universally enforced. Thus,
although religion and spirituality remain the foundation for most personal
value systems, they cannot provide the foundation for a multicultural
ethic.
If not consensus or religion, what then can be the common foundation
for universal values? It will have to be the one thing that diverse
cultures all share — our common humanity. In other words, the common
foundation must be our human nature, and more specifically, our human
nature as it applies to organizational relationships. Since human needs
are met almost exclusively through the activity of organizations,
effective organizational relationships are the key to a humane moral
system that will get the peoples of the world working together to solve
global problems. The most fundamental characteristic of human nature in
organizational relationships is the need to balance freedom, community and
purpose. When these key requirements are balanced relatively equally, the
global network of interdependent organizations will operate most
effectively to satisfy aggregate human needs.
Over the long term, a new kind of debate — a three-sided, multicultural
dialogue that focuses on balancing freedom, community and purpose — has
the best chance of producing an effective multicultural ethic. But, as
with any debate, the first step toward a global moral discourse is to
outline the rules and procedures of the discussion.
Every debate has to have leadership — someone who sets the agenda,
frames the issues and moderates between the proponents of conflicting
points of view. In the coming moral dialogue, business leaders must
fulfill this leadership role. The world is primarily tied together
economically, and as a result, business leaders have the global influence
and the practical experience needed to deal with cultural diversity at the
grass-roots level.
Universal values must be rooted in the garden of practical experience.
History has shown that balanced values, like crops of grain, will always
grow among weeds of hate and prejudice. Achieving a global consensus on
universal values will require leaders to tend the garden, planting and
nourishing balanced values in diverse cultures and rooting out the weeds
with every tool at their disposal.
Leaders should realize, however, that the garden of ethical norms is
likely to yield a large variety of crops. Only a limited number of core
values — the ones most critical for the functioning of an interconnected
global society — can be held in common. Outside this limited core, ethical
norms should be the province of nations, communities and individuals,
leading to considerable diversity in non-core values.
In addition to tolerance of diversity, tending the garden of
multicultural values will require patience and a long-term perspective,
for morals are built or destroyed over the course of generations. As
Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, was to breeding peas, so today's
business leaders will be to the evolution of a multicultural ethic.
Careful cultivation over a long period of time can lead to the breeding of
a new universal value system out of today's diverse seeds of culturally
biased values. The goal is the creation and continuing evolution of a
universal moral foundation that can foster expanding opportunity and
prosperity for many generations to come.
The influence of values, for good or ill, reaches far into the future,
transmitted like genes from generation to generation. It has been
estimated that roughly half of juvenile offenders have had an incarcerated
parent, and a majority of abusive parents were abused themselves as
children. The old saw, "like father like son," clearly has an
element of truth, and much of that truth results from the handing down of
values from parental role models rather than the passing on of genetic
predispositions through mere procreation.
Business leaders must realize that, like parents, they are also role
models and mentors, and the values they foster will influence behavior
well beyond their own life span. To fulfill their responsibilities,
leaders must adopt balanced values. They must speak candidly, publicly and
frequently about their own personal value systems, and they must back up
their words with action.
In the family, role models teach core values primarily by example.
Children look at the actions of authority figures — initially their
parents, then other adults and, finally, their peers — to find guidelines
for appropriate behavior.
Although the foundation of core values is set during childhood and
adolescence, values continue to evolve throughout adulthood. Like
children, adults learn new values primarily by watching the behavior of
role models, but adults are more critical than children in their thinking.
Consequently, greater attention needs to be paid to communicating the
purposes that the new values are designed to further. Leaders must provide
a vision of the better future that can be achieved through reliance on a
new multicultural ethic.
As role models, leaders must build balanced values within their own
companies, and they must try to affect the values of other organizations
within the interdependent networks to which their organizations belong.
Through their service on the boards of other companies and nonprofit
groups, business leaders have the opportunity to influence the building of
morals outside of the organizations they themselves lead.
In shaping the global dialogue, business leaders will also have to
aggressively reach out beyond the business sector. Businesses will have to
reorient their role in politics, devoting more time and effort to
long-term global concerns and less time to diverting public discourse
toward short-term special interests. Most importantly, business leaders
must reach out to influence education on a global scale.
Education is not only central to continued technical progress in the
information age, it is also central to the creation of a multicultural
ethic. Education plays the most important role outside of the family in
the socialization of the individual, including the teaching of core
values. Without great attention to education on a global basis, it is
unlikely that a consensus concerning universal values will ever be
attained. Values-free education is impossible. The only question is
whether the values being taught help bring diverse peoples together in a
quest for the common good, or whether they rip the social fabric into
shreds of intolerant cliques and self-absorbed individualists.
Of course, the business community's interest in education goes beyond
socialization. Education increases aggregate knowledge, promoting the
formation of additional human capital. In terms of breadth, education
increases human capital by spreading learning and socialization among a
larger number of individuals. In terms of depth, education places tools in
the hands of individuals so that they can create new ideas and new
technologies. In the information age, the creation of human capital is the
primary engine of growth, but unlike physical or financial capital, human
capital cannot be formed exclusively by the activities of business
organizations. Unless businesses get involved in structured education in a
serious way, the engine of economic growth will inevitably stall.
Shouldering the Moral Burden
Not since Harry S Truman became president of the United States in the
last months of World War II has the world been at such a volatile and
uncertain crossroads.
When Truman took office unexpectedly in the midst of World War II
following the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he well understood
the essential role of leadership during critical junctures of history.
Realizing that his decisions not only would impact his own nation but also
would change the course of world events, he felt the moral
responsibilities of his office weighing heavily on his shoulders. Speaking
to news reporters about the responsibility he felt as he was sworn in as
president, Truman said, "I don't know whether you fellows ever had a
load of hay fall on you, but . . . I felt like the moon, the stars and all
the planets had fallen on me."
Business leaders must now accept a similar weight of moral
responsibility upon their shoulders. Humanity has before it today a
historic moral choice to make between alternative destinies. To choose the
path of prosperity and progress, the peoples of the world must be led
toward an agreement on a common multicultural ethic — a basic sense of
fair play that takes into consideration the common values of all races,
cultures and religions.
The alternative is unthinkable. Without a system of shared values, the
world will inevitably move toward one of three extremes: anarchy, with
terrorism and corruption generating ever-increasing instability;
balkanization, with economic and political polarization into two or more
separate camps; or dogmatic authority, with the threat of diminished
freedom and greater intolerance of diversity in various parts of the
world. The stakes are very high.
With business leading the way in globalization, executives and managers
must take their place on the front lines in shaping the multicultural
ethic needed for world prosperity.
Do our business leaders really have the clout to shape the moral values
of the world? Yes, if they will gather the courage and strength to instill
and enforce a common core of values among workers within their companies,
to support the teaching of ethics in school systems within their
communities, to encourage the governments of countries where they do
business to uphold basic human rights, and to uphold balanced moral values
in their own personal lives.
Business leaders must rely on dialogue to create this multicultural
ethic, and, above all, they must see to it that this common set of morals
balances individual freedom with group consensus and common purpose. Each
moral principle must be put to the test of balancing these three aspects
of organizational relationships; otherwise, the multicultural ethic won't
meet the basic needs of human nature, and it won't have a long-lasting
effect.
Over the course of the past year, we have witnessed first hand the
conflict of values among the world's people rise to a critical boiling
point as terrorists have sought to impose their extremist ideas by force.
Future progress and prosperity are not guaranteed. As President Truman so
aptly noted in the quote at the beginning of this article, progress can
occur only when courageous leaders seize the opportunity to change things
for the better.
Business leaders have that opportunity now. They must seize the moment.
They should lead their companies as though they were morally responsible
for the world, because, in a very real sense, they are.
A. Earl Swift is chairman of the Board of Directors of Swift Energy
Company, a position he has held since he founded the company in October
1979. He also served as the company's chief executive officer until May
2001 and as its president until November 1997, having been succeeded in
both offices by Terry E. Swift.
Before founding Swift Energy, Mr. Swift was employed for 17 years by
affiliates of American Natural Resources Company, serving his last three
years as vice president of Exploration and Production for the
Michigan-Wisconsin Pipeline Company (MWPL) and American Natural Gas
Production Company (ANGP). Prior to that, he was employed for seven years
by Humble Oil Company, a predecessor of Exxon U.S.A.
A specialist in reservoir engineering, Mr. Swift graduated from the
University of Oklahoma in 1955 with a bachelor of science degree in
petroleum engineering. In 1968 he received a juris doctor degree from
South Texas College of Law, and in 1988 he obtained a master's degree in
business administration under the President/Key Executive Program at
Pepperdine University. He is a registered professional engineer in Texas
and a member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers and the Texas Society
of Professional Engineers. He is also a member of the American Bar
Association, the Texas Bar Association and the U.S. Supreme Court Bar.
Mr. Swift is a member of Pepperdine University Associates and
received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Pepperdine School of
Business and Management. In 1997, he was voted Businessman of the Year by
the North Harris County Chamber of Commerce, and for each of the years
1994, 1995 and 1996, he was a finalist for Inc. magazine's Entrepreneur of
the Year. He is also chairman of the Board of Directors of Interfaith
CarePartners in Houston.
Together with his brother Virgil Swift, vice chairman of the Board
of Directors of Swift Energy, Earl Swift represents the third generation
of the Swift family in the oil and gas industry. His son Terry Swift, also
a director of Swift Energy, represents the fourth generation.
