Spirituality in Business

Megatrends 2010:
The Rise of Conscious Capitalism

Spirituality in Business
(This article is reprinted by permission from Patricia Aburdene and may not be reprinted from this site. Please contact the author for reprint authorization.)

Deep in the heart of San Francisco’s bustling financial district, it’s time for lunch. Bankers dodge the traffic and head to Chinatown, while junior analysts flood the corner cafe for carry-out. But over on Montgomery Street, up in the 12th floor office of a national organization whose very name is synonymous with American capitalism, you can hear a pin drop.

Here in the boardroom, 14 kindred spirits—a rainbow of ages and ethnicities—surround a massive conference table, their heads gently bowed in a moment of silence. Debra Mugnani Monroe, president of Monroe Personnel Services and one of the circle’s leaders, recognizes a few of the regulars: Allison, a 40-ish marketing maven, helped produce the Emmies. Max, 33, is an engineer from dot-com Snapfish. Catherine, 30, advises clients on socially responsible investing. Monroe lights a candle and the strain and worry of the morning begin to melt away.

Public affairs consultant Sarah Q. Hargrave, a former marketing and public affairs executive at Sears Corporate Headquarters and VP at Northern Trust, who cofounded the group with Monroe, hands the trusty talking stick to the Asian man on her left, a 50-something CPA, and invites him to talk about any work or spiritual issue that’s “up” for him.

“How do you deal with a culture,” he begins quietly, “that’s focused only on the numbers and financial results?” One by one, people open up and there’s a growing sense of trust and support. Before the hour is over, they will speak their truth, find fresh new insights or offer each other heartfelt advice.

Welcome to the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce’s “Spirit at Work—A Continuing Conversation” brown bag lunch, the monthly get-together that has flourished—during boom times and bust—for more than seven years. Here in one of free enterprise’s most important financial hubs, amidst the grinding stress of daily business, people are evoking Divine Presence and creating Sacred Space.

Over the years, well over one thousand people, from administrative assistants to CEOs, have turned to the Chamber brown bag for spiritual sustenance. They are Indian, Caucasian, Middle Eastern, African-American, Vietnamese and Chinese. Bankers, accountants, public relations experts, high-tech guys and executive coaches.

“There are places you can go to talk about ‘being spiritual,’” says Sarah Hargrave, “and places you can go to talk about business. But here you get to do both.”

We’ll return to the Chamber brown bag later in this chapter to discover what it is that brings people back year after year.

Spirituality in business, having quietly blossomed for decades, is an established trend that’s about to morph into a megatrend.

In true megatrend fashion, Spirit in business is popping up across many geographic regions, as evidenced by recent local headlines.

• “Dallas-based International Organization Offers Spiritual Aid in the Workplace” reports the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 2004.
• “Faithful Are Carving a Niche in the Workplace,” reads a 2005 Los Angeles Times story.
• “Visibility of Religious Beliefs Grows in Workplace,” says the Charlotte [North Carolina] Observer in 2005.
In Boston, a secret, invitation-only ecumenical prayer breakfast for top executives is called “First Tuesday.” New York’s Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church offered a Faith@Work lecture series. In Minneapolis, 150 business leaders lunch monthly and hear leaders like Carlson Companies CEO Marilyn Carlson Nelson speak on topics like how the Bible guides their business decisions.

In Chicago, some 60 mostly Catholic executives, members of Business Leaders for Excellence, Ethics and Justice (BEEJ), have met for more than a decade to break bread and ponder the sacred and secular sides of work. Bill Yacullo, president of Chicago recruiting firm Lauer, Sbarbaro Associates and cofounder of BEEJ, says the group nourishes his spiritual life and helps him be more honest and confident with his clients.

The grassroots appeal of Spirit in business is undeniable. Half of us talked about faith at work in the past 24 hours, reports a Gallup poll. New York’s High Tor Alliance, in a study entitled “Applied Contemplative Disciplines in Work and Organizational Life” for the Fetzer Institute and the Nathan Cummings Foundation, found that 81 percent of respondents use individual practices like prayer, silence or meditation on the job.

“The line between business and spiritual life is becoming increasingly blurred,” concludes the Times of London.

That’s for sure. Consider the following:

In the thick of negotiations to purchase New Age ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s, Terry Mollner, a founder of the Calvert Social Investment Funds— who is trying to buy the company—calls a time out. At this point people are ready to give up, walk out and end the discussion over a deal breaker issue. Mollner invites the table of tense, polarized people to be silent for a few moments and suggests that everyone ask themselves, “What is the truth here? What is the highest good for all?” He then opens the floor to anyone to speak.

One by one people lean forward and restate their position in a way that accommodates the other side. The negotiations move forward. Mollner repeats the ritual three times during weeks of negotiations, each time achieving the same breakthrough.

“The present spiritual movement is probably the most significant trend in management since the human potential movement of the 50s,” says Paul T. P. Wong, Ph.D., a professor at Trinity Western University in British Columbia and president of the International Network on Personal Meaning. And the numbers seem to back up Wong’s assertion.

A few years ago, there were a “couple hundred” nonprofits devoted to spirituality or faith in the workplace, says David Miller, executive director of Yale University Center for Faith and Culture. By 2005, it was at least 1,200. Are Miller’s “faith”-oriented nonprofits about religion or spirituality at work? Let’s review my take on each.

Religion is the formal, institution-based, denominational worship of God. Spirituality is the more personal and universal experience of the Divine, the Sacred, in one’s life.

“For a corporate organization to become successfully faith-friendly, it cannot promote a specific religion,” writes Susan Gonzalez in a story about Miller’s Center for Faith and Culture at Yale. “Instead it must provide a setting in which people of every faith—as well as people who have no particular faith—can feel comfortable.”

Well said. But as the following list illustrates, it sometimes looks as if both spirituality and religion have arrived in business.

• Colorado’s Sounds True, a cataloguer listing 600 inspiring titles, honors the Sacred with group meditations, a moment of silence before each meeting and a meditation room.
• Ford, American Airlines, Texas Instruments and Intel support employee religious groups.
• Weekly department meetings at Saint Francis Health Center in Kansas spend 30 minutes in reflection and 30 minutes in dialogue about spiritual issues in management.
• The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association is training people for workplace ministries. In 2004, it ran its first leadership forum in Asheville, North Carolina.
• At Calcutta, India’s SREI International Financial Limited, there is a temple in the main lobby and altar space for work teams.
• Charlotte, North Carolina’s Coca Cola Bottling Co. recognizes that “employees have a body, mind and soul.” It offers corporate chaplains and a mission statement that “honors God.”
• At HomeBanc Mortgage, which won a seat on Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” list, CEO Patrick Flood opens conference calls with a prayer.

Typically, the spirituality in business movement speaks of Spirit as universal and non-denominational. Most people don’t want overt piety in the workplace, says Gregory Pierce, author of Spirituality@Work (ACTA Publications, 2001) and president of Chicago’s ACTA Publications, a nine-person publishing irm. “I’m not going to pray over you before I sell you something,” says Pierce. “I’m going to give you a good product at a good price and try to be as environmentally sound as I can be.”

But the fact remains, most of the world’s major religions are somehow linked to business or work life. You’ll soon see how major U.S. companies like Intel and Ford juggle religion on the job, whether Muslim, Christian, Jewish or Hindu.

So, are we talking spirituality or religion at work?

The answer, like it or not, is probably both. In any event, there is often a fine line between the two.

Later in this chapter, you’ll meet a former HR executive who says business can address the sometimes sticky issue of religion in the workplace with the same blueprint human resource people invoked to deal with diversity.

Meanwhile, there’s no denying that it may be challenging to distinguish between spirituality and religion in business.

The Restoration Business

What’s the meaning behind the Spirit in business trend? Simply this: It grows out of our desire to celebrate all of our Selves at work.

And that is a serious affront to business as we have known it.

We live in a world where Divine Presence is stripped from companies and work life, as if it didn’t belong there. But Spirit dwells in all of us. And if you tear the Sacred from humanity, you rip out the heart.

So without a heart, how do you get the blood pumping? You provide a substitute. In the eyes of many, we’ve certainly found one. Business, it is said, worships the false god of money. Why else do we speak of the almighty dollar? But idolatry can trigger a lot of pain. Enron, WorldCom and the rest show us the shadow side of capitalism—the cost of barring Spirit from the boardroom and glorifying profit instead of Presence.

But even the crisis of capitalism holds a silver lining.

The corporate accounting scandals sent a karmic call out to millions of sleeper cells encoded with the spiritual mission of restoring Spirit, ethics and values to the marketplace of humanity.

One by one, we are waking up.

What business are you really in? That’s a key question in strategic planning. When it comes to the Spirit in business movement, you might say we’re in the restoration business.

Our market niche is to reunite the Sacred with the human world of business and work.

“Most of us spend so much time working, it would be a shame if we couldn’t find God there . . . ,” says Gregory Pierce. “There is a creative energy in work that is somehow tied to God’s creative energy.”

Spirituality Goes to College

Academia is blessing the emerging megatrend with conferences, courses and new centers:

• At Harvard Business School, a 2003 student-led symposium challenged leaders to reembrace values and explore the bridges between spirituality and business.
• New Orleans Loyola University boasts an Institute for Ethics and Spirituality in Business.
• Santa Clara University is a hotbed of Spirit in business activity.
• The University of New Haven is the new home of the Center for Spirituality at Work.

Now even M.B.A. programs offer spiritual courses, reports The Wall Street Journal: • Columbia University Business School’s Srikumar Rao teaches “Creativity and Personal Mastery,” in which students keep personal journals, attend a weekend retreat and “bare their souls” in class. Rao’s course gets such rave reviews, Columbia runs a version for alums. “You need the work you do to express your values,” says Rao, “and be of benefit to the larger society.”

• At Stanford Grad School of Business, William “Scotty” McLennan teaches “The Business World: Moral and Spiritual Inquiry through Literature.” Among other books, students read The Great Gatsby and Siddhartha and share their own dreams and failures.
• Notre Dame’s “Spirituality and Religion in the Workplace” class invites students to “look behind prestige and salary” and ask if a company is also a good moral and spiritual fit. Although Notre Dame is Catholic, the course draws from Jewish, Protestant and Buddhist sources. Like Columbia, Notre Dame offers a spirituality course to M.B.A. alums.

Spirituality was once taboo in business, admits Thierry Pauchant, the ethics chair at HEC Montreal Business School, but now, “People are suffering by not being able to address that (spiritual) part of themselves.”

In fact, many business leaders actually welcome the Spirit in biz trend. Sixty percent of the executives and managers surveyed for the book A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America by Ian Mitroff and Elizabeth Denton (Jossey-Bass, 1999) acknowledge the benefits of Spirit at work, so long as it stays clear of imposing religion, says Mitroff, a University of Southern California School of Business Professor.

Others agree—especially on the not imposing religion part.

“Folks who feel like they can bring their spiritual values to work,” says Rev. Thomas Sullivan, spiritual director at Babson College, “are happier, more productive and stay longer.” But, he adds, “we still don’t want proselytizing pressure in the workplace.”

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Hello, Teresa Proudlove here. We were thrilled to receive permission personally from Patrica Aburdene author of "Megatrends 2010, The Rise of Conscious Capitalism," to reprint her articles on our site and spread these important, timely messages. All of these articles concern our lifework as human beings. By using our inner guidance, hearts, intuition and intelligence we can all make a difference with this one precious, far-flung life.

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