Paul Laudicina could have been a priest. But four decades after leaving the seminary he preaches from a different pulpit as the global chief of AT Kearney.
Management consultancy and theology may seem poles apart, but there is still something of the vocation in what the 63-year-old Brooklyn-born business guru does.
And his view of where the global economy is heading is not without its own version of fire and brimstone if policymakers should get it wrong.
In the gospel according to Paul, greed is no longer good. Instead, companies need to create value that transcends any other corporate objective. Profits will follow.
Participants in modern capitalism are at a point of epiphany - standing at a crossroads with four possible routes heading to destinations he describes as Top Gear, Terminus, Flatline and Ctrl-Alt Delete.
The scenarios in turn describe the world returning to a pattern of sustainable growth in a triumph of Keynesian economic theory or plunging into terminal decline.
It could also trundle along on its current trajectory or arrive at a fundamental reset point where the entire system of international trade and relations is recalibrated and where corporations begin to start doing well by doing good.
"We are at an inflection point," he says. "If we get it right we can unleash the next generation of opportunity. If we get it wrong we will unleash some very perilous developments."
Some of these observations are contained in his book, Beating the Global Odds, published this month.
They are the sort of scenarios you might expect to hear in an opening address at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Paul Laudicina is a WEF man through and through. He says he will be in the Swiss Alpine resort for its next meeting in January chairing a session that will look at how business and government can work together better.
For him, the big sweep of gatherings such as WEF is a personal passion. He is a big ideas man. So it is perhaps no surprise that when his son told him he wanted to be a weatherman his initial response was not exactly supportive.
"My oldest son who is now in his 30s for the longest time, since he was able to walk and look at the sky, professed an interest in the weather. When he was older, he said, he wanted to be a meteorologist and I did everything in my power to dissuade him. Ultimately I realised that was very bad advice. Individuals need to follow their passions."
The book's publication coincides with the end of his six-year term as managing partner and draws on his three careers, which started with him studying to be a Catholic priest before moving into policy and politics working for the United Nations and in Washington.
He has led AT Kearney since a management buyout of the company in 2006 when it was described by Morgan Stanley as being "on chemotherapy".
Six years later at the AT Kearney office in Dubai Media City, he produces a little card from his inside pocket that he says all employees carry, reminding them of the guiding principles set down by Tom Kearney, the firm's founder.
It reads: "Our success as consultants will depend on the essential rightness of the advice we give and our capacity for convincing those in authority that it is good."
He believes the message is especially relevant today.
"For the first time in history, we have the perfect intersection of doing good and doing well. It is no longer possible to deliver on the needs of your shareholders without doing the same for stakeholders more broadly," he says.
Yet benevolent capitalism may seem like an alien concept in an era when wealth has never been more polarised.
Boston Consulting Group estimates the world's millionaires represent 0.9 per cent of its population but control 39 per cent of its wealth - up from 37 per cent in 2009.
Rising inequality is reflected in the workplace. The gap between chief executive and worker pay has also widened significantly, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Average pay of the top 1 per cent of earners grew 156 per cent between 1979 and 2007. Meanwhile, workers in the bottom 90 per cent recorded pay growth of just 17 per cent during the same period.
But such inequality does not have to be in the script of capitalism, says Mr Laudicina, pointing to the works of Adam Smith, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher and pioneering economist
"We all talk about the father of modern capitalism and the invisible hand and his book The Wealth of Nations.
"But what most people aren't aware of is that to Adam Smith, the much more important volume of scholarship that he worked on before the Wealth of Nations and which he was revising until his death was The Theory of Moral Sentiments in which he quite clearly says it's much more than the pursuit of profits."
The book, which appears before The Wealth of Nations on the author's gravestone, says market participants need to have propriety, prudence and benevolence in order for the system to work properly.
It is hard to see such virtues in the invisible hand that guides international trade and finance today. That is one reason why Mr Laudicina believes we have reached our inflection point.
Another is the proliferation of data that has hobbled our ability to make decisions, he says.
"From the beginning of time to 2003 we created 5 billion gigabytes of data and from 2003 to 2011 we created that much data every 10 days. By 2013 we will be creating that much data every 10 minutes.
"This has confounded decision- making because people are increasingly waiting for empirical certainty before making decisions."
Now the head of AT Kearney is approaching his own inflection point as his six years as managing partner draw to a close at the end of the year.
That may not be long enough for him to see one of his four scenarios unfold. But which exit does he think the world will take?
Top Gear, Terminus, Flatline or Ctrl-Alt Delete?
It is the last of these options which he believes best describes where the world is heading.
"I am fundamentally an optimist and I have to believe that ultimately human nature when confronted with the choice of doing things that are going to create opportunity versus doing things that will create peril, will choose opportunity," he says.
The real question is not whether this will happen but when.