Spirituality in Business

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Spirituality in Business

Linda Ortberg

Today we live in a different world. We are on alert for terrorist threats and we read daily about more business corruption reaching into the heart of the world’s largest trading center, the businesses of the New York Stock Exchange. In fact, it seems we have more scandals and worries in our world than ever before. People are willing to risk nuclear war for land, power and riches. Refusing to live in peace, there are many who so easily see humanities differences and fail to see that the similarities between people are really much greater.

But what is this human desire to have it all? That is, how can people believe that it is ok to deceive, steal, and cheat others in order to enhance their own personal wealth? How can this happen especially in our most successful businesses governed by very prominent people?

It was March 2000 that two visiting University of Virginia business professors jotted notes for their course on corporate transformation while sitting at the top of the fifty story office tower that housed Enron’s top executives. In fact, Jeff Schilling, Enron’s President was telling the two visiting professors that Enron was the “World’s Coolest Company.” Little did the two professors realize that they were getting a glimpse into the mind of a man on top of the business world. A man who had performed a magic trick, turning an energy pipeline company into a trading firm of MBAs who lived a culture entailing a frenetic pace, lure of riches and a lack of controls that entailed deceptive, conflicting interests by the managers of Enron, it’s board of directors and it’s accounting firm.

Jeff Skilling later built a 15 room, 8,120 sq. ft. palace with six bathrooms and three fireplaces. Enron’s Chief Executive purchased the entire 33^rd floor of the Huntingdon and the Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow built a 7,600 sq. ft. mansion with four fireplaces and six bathrooms.

Now we know, since almost every day the morning paper brings fresh examples of corporate greed, that there was flagrant deceit, theft and abuses of power at Enron. We have all become only too aware of the flagrant abuses of corporate executives who profiteered through deceit, conflicts of interest, creative and “fraudulent” accounting practices. This all almost seems too far away, too impossible to really impact our lives, yes your life or mine. Surely it could not be possible that I may be confronted some day with a situation where I would have to decide to take money that was stolen. Yes stolen, yet because it was not armed robbery it doesn’t quite seem like stealing but stealing it is. So the question becomes WHAT should I do?

So what has all this to do with Spirituality In Business?

If one believes that the only purpose of business is to make a profit, then we have failed to learn our lesson. There must be more than the satisfaction of individual greed at the sacrifice of others if businesses are to succeed.

Businesses are one of society’s highest forms of human achievement. The ability for a business to provide jobs, stay in business, and provide a quality product or service is paramount to its relationship with the society in which it functions. Businesses must have people. People make up the business. It is the people who make or break the organization. It is the people who create, produce, ship, purchase and use the product or service that businesses provide. So the entire activity revolving around business is a web of relationships. It is the core of activity. It is the feeling of being treated well and experiencing a good service transaction. But it is this activity of relationships that produces the business and the business therefore is the benefactor of people giving. It was Mary Parker Follett an early 20^th century business woman who said that there was no greater service that one could give mankind than their work, for it is in the work that we give of ourselves. No greater gift can be given by a human.

So how is it that we find ourselves, here, America looking at organizations like Enron, Arthur Anderson, Merrill Lynch, Tyco, and Martha Stewart? It is because we have lost our values and our values come from our codes of conduct, our moral character, and our moral character comes from our culture. Our culture has become spiritless, almost dead, as if we were all addicted to wealth, money and power, short term thinking at it’s worst. And addiction is like death, as recovering chemically addicted individuals will tell you who have tasted the sweetness of clean living. People in our organizations have been de-motivated, tuned out, numbed down. They don’t care. So it is that our spirits have been crushed by a western management style that stifles creativity, forsakes the individual, and the community in which it has been a privilege for it to do business.

Tomorrow’s organizations can be spiritual, learning organizations. The people in the new organizations should see themselves as functioning within a whole system of relationships. We can have living healthy organizations with honest feeling people working together in a spirit of cooperation not competition. Business and spirituality can go hand in hand. Spirituality does not divide on religious grounds, in fact it mends differences because it respects all religions and finds the similarities between us. I hope we can now move into a new life founded in values, guiding principles and spirituality.