religion at workplace
From the Bhakti List Archives
• October 27, 1999
Dear bhakti-members, In the latest issue of 'Business Week' adiyEn came across a very interesting cover-story article about how religion is making entry into American workplace. Since most members are in the US adiyEn wants to know what they think of some excerpts from the article below: Thanks, Sampathkumaran Religion in the Workplace The growing presence of spirituality in Corporate America "... today, a spiritual revival is sweeping across Corporate America as executives of all stripes are mixing mysticism into their management, importing into office corridors the lessons usually doled out in churches, temples, and mosques. Gone is the old taboo against talking about God at work. In its place is a new spirituality, evident in the prayer groups at Deloitte & Touche and the Talmud studies at New York law firms such as Kaye, Scholer, Fierman, Hays & Haroller. Across the country, major-league executives are meeting for prayer breakfasts and spiritual conferences. In Minneapolis, 150 business chiefs lunch monthly at a private, ivy-draped club to hear chief executives such as Medtronic Inc.'s William George and Carlson Co.'s Marilyn Carlson Nelson draw business solutions from the Bible. In Silicon Valley, a group of high-powered, high-tech Hindus--including Suhas Patil, founder of Cirrus Logic (CRUS), Desh Deshpande, founder of Cascade Communications, and Krishan Kalra, founder of BioGenex--are part of a movement to connect technology to spirituality. In Boston, heavy hitters such as retired Raytheon Chairman and CEO Thomas L. Phillips meet at an invitation-only prayer breakfast called First Tuesday, an ecumenical affair long shrouded in secrecy. More publicly, Aetna International (AET) Chairman Michael A. Stephen has extolled the benefits of meditation and talked with Aetna employees about using spirituality in their careers. That's not to mention the 10,000 Bible and prayer groups in workplaces that meet regularly, according to the Fellowship for Companies for Christ International. Just five years ago, there was only one conference on spirituality and the workplace; now there are about 30. Academic endorsement is growing, too: The University of Denver, the University of New Haven, and Minnesota's University of St. Thomas have opened research centers dedicated to the subject.The number of related books hitting the store shelves each year has quadrupled since 1990, to 79 last year. The latest: the Dalai Lama's Ethics for the New Millennium, a new business best-seller. Says Laura Nash, a business ethicist at Harvard Divinity School and author of Believers in Business: ''Spirituality in the workplace is exploding.'' In part, what's happening is a reflection of broader trends. People are working the equivalent of over a month more each year than they did a decade ago. No surprise, then, that the workplace--and not churches or town squares--is where American social phenomena are showing up first. The office is where more and more people eat, exercise, date, drop their kids, and even, at architecture firm Gould Evans Goodman Associates in Kansas City, Mo., nap in company-sponsored tents. Plus, the influx of immigrants into the workplace has raised awareness about the vast array of religious belief. All over the country, for example, a growing number of Muslims, such as Milwaukee lawyer Othman Atta, are rolling out their prayer rugs right in the office. With more people becoming open about their spirituality--95% of Americans say they believe in God or a universal spirit, and 48% say they talked about their religious faith at work that day, according to the Gallup Organization--it would make sense that, along with their briefcases and laptops, people would start bringing their faith to work. ... perhaps the largest driver of this trend is the mounting evidence that spiritually minded programs in the workplace not only soothe workers' psyches but also deliver improved productivity. Skeptics who scoff at the use of the words spirituality and Corporate America in the same breath might write this off as just another management fad. But a recently completed research project by McKinsey & Co. Australia shows that when companies engage in programs that use spiritual techniques for their employees, productivity improves and turnover is greatly reduced. The first empirical study of the issue, A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America, published in October by Jossey-Bass, found that employees who work for organizations they consider to be spiritual are less fearful, less likely to compromise their values, and more able to throw themselves into their jobs. Says the book's co-author, University of Southern California Marshall School of Business Professor Ian I. Mitroff: ''Spirituality could be the ultimate competitive advantage.'' Fully 60% of those polled for the book say they believe in the beneficial effects of spirituality in the workplace, so long as there's no bully-pulpit promotion of traditional religion. NEW SWIRL. All this may seem counterintuitive at a time of scientific and technological apotheosis. But, just as industrialization gave rise to social liberalism, the New Economy is causing a deep-seated curiosity about the nature of knowledge and life, providing a fertile environment for this new swirl of nonmaterialist ideas. ''In this kind of analytical framework,'' says Harvard's Nash, ''suddenly it's O.K. to think about forces larger than yourself, to tap into that as an intuitive source of creative, analytical power.'' And the Internet's power to blast through old paradigms and create previously impossible connections is inspiring fervent feelings that border on the spiritual. ''This new sense of spontaneity has caused even the most literal-minded to say, 'Wow, there's this other force out there,''' says Nash. Spiritual thinking in Corporate America may seem as out of place as a typewriter at a high-tech company. But the warp speed of today's business life is buckling rigid thinking, especially now that the sword-swinging warrior model has become such a loser. Besides, who has time for decision trees and five-year plans anymore? Unlike the marketplace of 20 years ago, today's information and services-dominated economy is all about instantaneous decision-making and building relationships with partners and employees. Often, spiritual approaches can be used to help staffers get better at the long-neglected people side of the equation. It's no wonder high-tech companies are packing nerdy programmers off to corporate charm schools to teach them how to talk to customers and each other. ''More and more people are going to spiritual processes for help,'' says consultant Whiteley, whose clients include Goldman Sachs (GS), Sun Microsystems (SUNW), and Ford (F). All this spiritual revival may have a fin-de-siecle feel--in fact, what's happening now is something of a replay of the spiritual movement that took place at the last turn of the century. The difference is that in those days, workers were considered extensions of machines. Then in the 1930s, the arm-around-the-shoulder theory of management was born. The idea was that bosses need just issue a little praise, and productivity would soar. Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, thinking shifted toward viewing workers not just as bodies needing sustenance but as people with minds, says University of New Haven Management Professor Judi Neal. Fueling today's trend, too, was the collective revulsion over the greed in the late 1980s. That's when CEOs, determined to rout insider trading and other skulduggery from their organizations, furiously crafted ethics statements as a way to give their employees a new moral compass. Once words like ''virtue,'' ''spirit,'' and ''ethics'' got through the corporate door, God wasn't far behind. Best-sellers such as Jesus, CEO and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (one of which is to cultivate spirituality) began to line the oak-paneled bookshelves of America's managers. Seizing the moment, such spiritual gurus as Deepak Chopra and M. Scott Peck began advising corporate chieftains about how they could tie the new secular spirituality into their management techniques. Team-building programs sprouted like mad. So too did the Dilbertian sendups of these efforts, some of which swept through organizations at the same time that downsizing was crushing morale. Body, emotion, brain. The only thing missing from the equation was spirit. But will this revival amount to anything more than a momentary sensation? No matter how it shakes out, in the wake of the Internet's creative destruction, new rules will have to be made. And the physical and human capital that powered the latter part of the 20th century is likely to be coupled with a new kind of social capital. Perhaps it's already coming. By MICHELLE CONLIN ===== __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Bid and sell for free at http://auctions.yahoo.com
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