You cannot model and reinforce healthy, constructive behaviors without some general agreement on what they are, and that means that there has to be a standard independent of personal whim that is discoverable through discourse.........
I don't buy that. We (society) are wasting a lot of time when we could be doing something. I'll bet that a school or a business organization or a community group could pick and agree on, say, ten values that they could all support and then just start supporting them. They may not be the ten most important to society. Certainly they won't be the ten most important to all the participants. But they will be ten values that will be practiced better than they are now with all of us tied up in knots about the source of our values. If everyone could just agree to, for example, keep their word, this would be a better world to live in.
Karen
P.S. I posted this last week as the flames of war were smoldering. Here it is again.
Good for the Soul—and for the Bottom Line
By Bill Broadway
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 19, 2001; Page A01
Talk of soul and spirituality is flowing freely in the workplace these days. Many chief executives are unabashedly defining their companies' business mission in moral terms.
Some are adding a dimension of social responsibility through environmentally friendly practices. Some pay employees to mentor students or work at homeless shelters. Others have infused their employee handbooks with ethics-based philosophy or altered workday routines to allow time for meditation, yoga or napping. (Napping is said to encourage spiritual development and mental and physical renewal.)
Alternately called spiritual economics, soul in the workplace and values-driven leadership, this is a quasi-religious movement, one without a god or theological foundation but filled with moral attitudes and guidelines common to all religions.
The trend has drawn criticism from some ethicists and theologians, who warn that management efforts to promote work as spiritually fulfilling can lure employees into working longer hours away from family and friends.
What seems beyond debate is that emphasizing morality over profitability has turned out to be good for the bottom line. Executives who have embraced the approach are the first to acknowledge that it has helped them build loyalty among employees and customers.
"We were raised to think we had to screw around with other people to be successful. But taking the opposite approach of J.R. Ewing is probably going to be more successful," said Kip Tindell, chief executive of the Container Store.
Tindell's Dallas-based retail chain, which tells workers they are morally obligated to help customers solve problems and not just sell them products, has posted average annual sales increases of 20 percent to 25 percent since opening its first store in 1978 and has been No. 1 for the past two years on Fortune magazine's list of 100 Best Companies to Work For.
In Atlanta, Ray Anderson has repositioned his billion-dollar carpet business to become one of the world's first large companies to be "fully sustainable" – using only renewable energy sources and recycled material.
He acted after reading "The Ecology of Commerce," by Paul Hawken, a book that predicts the demise of humanity if multinational corporations continue to abuse nature's resources.
Anderson describes his conversion seven years ago as "an epiphany – it hit me like a spear in the chest." As head of one of the world's largest manufacturers of commercial carpeting, a petroleum-based product, "I was part of the problem . . . a plunderer of the Earth," he said.
His company, Interface Inc., embarked on a program of technological retooling and organizational restructuring. At least three-fourths of the company's 8,000 employees on four continents have received environmental training, and many of them have created environmental organizations in their communities, said Jim Hartzfeld, Interface's vice president of sustainable strategy.
Anderson, 67, who retired June 1 as Interface's CEO and remains chairman of the board, said the new emphasis on eliminating waste also saved the company $165 million from 1994 to 2000 – a savings far greater than the $30 million cost of reeducating workers and reengineering machinery.
Anderson, a United Methodist, said he is not sure how involved God was in his "emotional awakening." Yet he has no doubt that a change occurred "inside my spirit."
Some corporations have long been known for the faith espoused by their founders, many of them evangelical Christians who speak openly of the religious principles they promote through their businesses.
But the movement that has drawn executives such as Anderson and Tindell avoids specific religious allegiances in favor of a generic spirituality.
"People are reluctant to be seen as proselytizers," said the Rev. Thomas P. Sullivan, director of spiritual life at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass. The umbrella of "spirituality" allows executives to introduce their values in a way few people would find offensive, he said.
The size of the trend is hard to quantify, but there are many signs of a growing interest in finding common ground between business and religion.
Babson College, which specializes in entrepreneurship, hosts an annual symposium on business and spirituality, one of an increasing number of such conferences. The meetings have been held in the United States, Ireland, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Canada, New Zealand and Germany. Even the Dalai Lama is getting into the act, with plans to give the keynote address next April in New York City at a conference called "Ethics, Mindfulness and the Bottom Line."
And scores of publications on the subject – including the books "Bringing Your Soul to Work" and "God Is My CEO" and the journals Business Spirit and Spirit at Work – have increased discussions of workplace spirituality.
"Many, many companies are . . . creating changes at individual and organizational levels to be more spiritual, healthy, functional," said Elizabeth A. Denton, an executive consultant who has worked with dozens of companies and is co-author of the book "A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America."
She and co-author Ian I. Mitroff interviewed more than 100 CEOs and upper-level managers. They found that about one-fourth of them were trying to make their businesses more spiritual and that most of the others wanted to move in that direction but were not sure how to go about it.
The values-driven approach takes many forms when put into practice, but one of the movement's underlying principles is that businesses are obligated not just to pay their workers well but to help them see their jobs as meaningful.
Medtronic Inc., the world's leading maker of medical devices, follows that rule in part by bringing to its Minneapolis headquarters each year a group of people who have benefited from its products. Hundreds of Medtronic scientists, engineers and factory workers meet patients who owe their physical well-being – and sometimes their lives – to the company's stents and pacemakers.
"It's amazingly powerful," company spokesman Bob Hanvik said, when employees leave knowing they have made a difference.
The Container Store seeks to build morale and encourage teamwork through a daily ritual called "the huddle." At each of the company's 22 stores, employees meet just before the store opens to discuss how best to implement a "solutions-based" approach to selling such products as closet organizers and kitchen accessories.
Tindell, the company's co-founder, explained in an interview that "solutions-based" selling means determining and addressing the full scope of a customer's needs, as opposed to simply giving customers what they say they want. The approach satisfies the "moral imperative" of doing the right thing for the consumer, he said.
Another principle among values-based entrepreneurs is that a business should demonstrate social responsibility not just through donations to charity but in its core operations and programs.
For example, Equal Exchange, of Canton, Mass., sells gourmet coffee purchased directly from small Latin American cooperatives, eliminating the middleman and guaranteeing farmers a per-pound return higher than the world market price.
Timberland Co., an outdoor outfitter based in Stratham, N.H., allows employees 40 paid hours yearly to work in after-school mentoring programs, soup kitchens or other nonprofit causes. An increasing number of companies have introduced similar programs.
Jeffrey B. Swartz, Timberland's president and CEO, has spoken openly of how his religious background as an Orthodox Jew gave him an ethical foundation in making business decisions.
"We can be partners with God in the act of creating something from nothing," Swartz said in a speech at this year's Babson College conference on business and spirituality. "The marketplace is a marvelous place for advocating ideas. It's not just 'show me the money.'‚"
Pioneers of the values-based approach include Herb Kelleher, co-founder of Dallas-based Southwest Airlines; Tom Chappell, founder and CEO of health and beauty-aid manufacturer Tom's of Maine, in Kennebunk; and Aaron Feuerstein, president and CEO of Malden Mills Industries in Lawrence, Mass., maker of Polartec fabric.
But the fusion of business and spiritual ideals is disturbing to some ethicists, who say it can mask the harsher aspects of corporate life.
Laura Nash, a senior research fellow at Harvard University who has studied business ethics for 20 years, said the notion that a company is founded on moral principles can be used as a "justifier strategy" for almost any business decision. It becomes easier, for example, to lay off employees when top executives believe that their mission is inherently virtuous, she said.
Lake Lambert III, a Lutheran theologian and assistant professor of religion and ethics at Wartburg College in Iowa, sees a "humongous demand" for spiritual fulfillment in today's society, a demand that churches have been unable to meet. Business, however, is not the place where people should look to satisfy their spiritual yearning, Lambert said, warning that such an attitude can make workers vulnerable to exploitation.
"There's a difference between a corporation allowing for and accommodating the spiritual nature of employees and [its] seeking to meet those needs on a corporate level," he said.
But those who defend companies' attempts to show a spiritual side say it is part of ensuring worker satisfaction – and a key to succeeding in today's competitive labor market.
"People are interested in how they are treated in ways other than pension and salary," said George G. Brenkert, a professor at Georgetown University and director of the Georgetown Business Ethics Institute. "They want to know the balance work will play in their lives."
And Americans do work – an average of more than 2,000 hours a year, the most of any industrialized country, according to the International Labour Organization.
Middle-aged and older employees, in particular, want to know how their jobs fit into the larger context of society, to question "what it all means," said Ray Baumruk, a consultant with Hewitt Associates who has conducted employee surveys and focus groups for dozens of Fortune 500 companies.
In their book, Mitroff and Denton concluded that employers, too, want to bring their "whole selves" to work, to practice the same values they practice at home and find satisfaction beyond a paycheck and benefits. Many used this phrase to describe their workplace goal: "I don't want to park my soul at the door."
© 2001 The Washington Post Company |
