Author Chris Lowney offers leadership lessons from a 450-year-old company that grappled successfully with the same challenges that test great companies today: forging seamless multinational teams, motivating inspired performance, remaining “change ready” and strategically adaptable. That company? The Jesuits, the religious order founded by Ignatius of Loyola.

“The very last thing the Jesuits would have considered themselves to be was leadership pundits,” Lowney says. “Instead of talking about leadership, they lived it.” Lowney, a former Jesuit seminarian who “morphed into the corporate man” after leaving seminary for a job at J.P. Morgan, saw that the Jesuit approach to molding innovative, risk-taking, ambitious, flexible global thinkers worked—better than many modern corporate efforts do today.

The Jesuits eschewed a “flashy” leadership style in favor of a holistic approach focusing on four unique values: self-awareness, ingenuity, love and heroism. Lowney explores the four principles in detail, illustrating each with anecdotes from Jesuit history. He examines the Jesuit success formula of attacking real-world opportunities with real-world leadership strategies, showing how their formula can be used today to practice effective, whole-person leadership.

The Jesuits were launched into a world that had telling analogies to our own. New world markets were opening; media technology was evolving; and traditional approaches and belief systems were being questioned. The Jesuit organizational architects prized the same mindset and behaviors that modern companies value in today’s complex and constantly changing world, Lowney shows.