"The Discipline of Love and the Love of Discipline" (by Nicoleta Acatrinei, Ph.D)

 As I start this new mission as executive director of Geneva Agape Foundation, my parents’ wisdom which nourished and watered my mind and soul during my early education resonates in a meaningful way in this new beginning.

I was born in a small town surrounded by hundreds of years old monasteries not far from the Oriental Carpathian Mountains. I grew up among people walking on earth while contemplating the heaven. Their life was made up of love of discipline and of discipline of love. Their days were centred in cultivating love inwardly and outwardly, in contemplation and in action, in silence and in speech, at personal and universal levels. Both, love and discipline are necessary to achieve a sustainable economy.

At the Geneva Agape Foundation, I will draw on this rich and profound spiritual heritage and on my previous research on prosocial behaviour, altruism  and patristic economics  to continue and develop programs for those economic and business actors who already understood that a flourishing society cannot exist without a sustainable economy, and a sustainable economy cannot exist without values & virtues-driven strategies and action programs.

The nexus of this approach is the HUMAN factor. That’s why at the Geneva Agape Foundation we focus on economic actors and on their growth both inwardly and outwardly. This double development is the foundation of a successful and sustainable economic activity capable to build a “beautiful society” with “beautiful humans”. I understand "beauty" in the classical sense of the love of “beauty” as we find it in the ancient yet alive philokalic tradition as well as in the classical Greek philosophy of "Kalos". Read more here Philokalia | Eastern Orthodox texts | Britannica

In this vein of the philokalic inspiration and at the intersection with economics, I propose the concept of the “beautiful disciplined economy”. The practice of a disciplined business is successfully developed at MIT, by William Aulet, Managing Director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, who’s book on disciplined entrepreneurship was translated in more than twenty languages (see here more Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup).