Andres Gallo, Ph.D. Professor and Richard deRaismes Kip fellow at the Department of Economics and Geography and Director of the Flagship program in International Business at the Coggin College of Business, University of North Florida. Ph.D. in Economics at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He has several publications in prestigious research journals.

 

The work of Juan Pablo Stegmann is an intellectual endeavor of great importance for our culture of confrontation and extremism. Stegmann delves into deep spiritual and philosophical traditions to bring a bridge to solve matters at the individual, corporate and national levels. This is an impressive work, which should help all of us to question and understand the diversity of decisions we face both personally, at our companies, and as members of society.

This work starts at the personal level, looking for the significant impact of spirituality on our way of thinking and how our spiritual efforts impact our views and attitudes towards life problems. According to Stegmann's research, spirituality is the source of our greatness and leadership. It builds our capacity to lead and approach our lives' challenges.

Second, our leadership strengthens human, social, renewal, and process capital, which Edvinsson calls intellectual capital, the engine of economic growth, social justice, competitiveness, and problem-solving at the micro and macro levels. Accordingly, Stegmann refers to ten dimensions of spirituality linked to creating intellectual capital in society.

Third, Stegmann takes this framework into the political economy arena to create alternative solutions to the more traditional collectivist and individualist approaches. He shows the strengths and limitations of the epistemological foundations of both approaches, which is crucial to ending their confrontations. A leadership culture relies on a realist epistemology which eliminates the social fragmentation and radicalization generated by the confrontation between left and right, empowered by social media and populism. A leadership culture promotes knowledge and relationships, pillars of intellectual capital, social integration, and social harmony.

Stegmann closes this intellectual journey with a positive and hopeful framework that people can use to improve decision-making. He started with a very theoretical and abstract development of spirituality and guided us to a practical and applicable improvement framework. His examples and descriptions help the reader through this journey and bring the value of our spiritual growth in our lives.

This book can be extremely valuable for politicians, economists, business leaders, and any citizen to incorporate a new approach that promotes economic growth, social justice, and social harmony, creating a third political economy orientation based on leadership to solve unsolvable today's problems. Furthermore, this book can be extremely valuable for anyone to learn how to build a leadership culture, transforming the person and society toward world peace.