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The Power of Spirituality?From Personal to Organizational
As Hewlett-Packard?s VP and general manager of inkjet cartridge operations, Greg Merten managed 10,000 people and a multi-billion-dollar business. Much of his success, he says, grew out of the transformation he experienced when his son Scott, 16, was killed in an automobile accident. He calls Scott?s loss ?my greatest tragedy and greatest blessing.?
Scott was a ?real people person,? who never had an unkind word for anyone, says Merten. Scott?s example inspired Merten to focus on and invest in his relationships including business. ?I used the tragedy as a source of learning, an occasion to see,? he says.
Specifically, every four to six weeks Merten carved out a full day to meet with his eight senior managers and with coaches Amba Gale and Mickey Connelly. ?We?d update Amba and Mickey on what had happened since we last met, then together ask, ?So, okay, what are we going to do about it?? We explored how to behave differently, find more productive choices, expand our influence and make a bigger difference.
?It was the most concentrated learning environment I?ve ever known,? says Merten, ?because it focused on ?the conversation,? that is, how people operate with each other. In the face of differences, do we inquire? Do we try to understand each other and create value? Or do we need to be right and then defend, disagree, destroy?and waste the chance to generate positive results??
Armed with these conscious techniques, Merten led his group through several business doublings in a year and expanded operations from one to six sites.
As Merten?s spiritual insight blossomed, he learned to ?Let go, forgive and suspend judgment,? then applied these powerful truths at HP. ?I quit competing and starting to think of the other person first.? He ?granted others ?good intentions? even in the face of contradictory evidence.?
How do spiritual principles like these impact corporate success? Put simply, Merten?s enlightened business precepts changed how things got done internally and externally. They inspired people to trust themselves and others. As Merten?s team grew in awareness and consciousness, they ?gained access? to actions and options that were literally unavailable to them before.
Merten says these breakthroughs, in his words, ?contributed hundreds of millions in incremental dollars to HP?s bottom line.?
How so? Merten offers this answer.
?We put up our third site [after Singapore and Puerto Rico] near Dublin twice as fast as it had ever been done in HP history. The Irish contractors literally laughed at us when we told them our due date. How did we do it? Mickey Connelly helped us take the Irish contractors, the developers, the County Kildare officials and HP?s own operations folks through the same protocols on relationship and conversation that we ourselves practice.?
The Dublin success alone, says Merten, ?netted HP hundreds of millions. We needed the capacity that much.?
?You can create results from fear,? Merten admits, ?but I came to see that the greatest results come from a more positive place?community, relationship and conversation.? Greg Merten retired from HP in 2003 and now consults on something he understands well: the art of outstanding leadership.
Let?s start with a simple assertion: business is transforming because people like Greg Merten and other top executives?as well as millions of ?ordinary? managers, some of whom you?ll meet in chapters three and four?work in corporations! As individuals grow in consciousness and Spirit, so do the organizations they inhabit.
The problem is organizations take longer to change than people do. Why is institutional change more difficult? Because it is so complex. Not only does it require time, vision and leadership, it involves greater numbers of people, their commitment and the development of a shared purpose. Institutional transformation relies on human evolution, grows slowly, then finally hits the mark.
In the years that it takes for all these positive ingredients and uplifting circumstances to catalyze, the people inside companies can grow so discouraged, they fall victim to the lie that ?business as usual? would have us believe: the idea that there?s an impenetrable barrier between personal spirituality and corporate transformation, between Spirit and business.
The purpose of this first chapter is to dissolve that firewall.
Meeting the Enemy
Meanwhile, the quest for spirituality flourishes in society at large. I?ll soon cite plenty of figures to illustrate that point. Yet many people, even those who are spiritually aware, envision the business establishment as an armed fortress that will somehow repel the transformation everyone else is going through.
That is not going to happen. Because business does not possess the power to prevent people from transforming. Yet there?s little wonder why we think it does! The business world often portrayed on CNBC and in The Wall Street Journal boasts, not just a single-minded passion for turning a buck, but unmatched devotion to assassinating any high-minded ideal that might get in the way.
Well, guess what? Mainstream business is under siege, from activists and regulators, as expected, but even from investors. And all the barricades in the world cannot defend it. Because the most dangerous adversary of all?a transformed individual?lies within and we are IT. Whether spiritual CEO, activist middle manager or visionary entrepreneur, we?ve opened our minds and expanded our hearts and there is no shutting either of them down. So much so that as I edit this chapter in early 2005, both CNBC and The Wall Street Journal have just run stories on spirituality or faith in business.
Conscious individuals transform organizations. Period. Consider:
? The Fortune 500 CEO and devoted meditator who championed a corporate meditation room that thrives long after his retirement.
? The glamorous female executive whose lifelong spiritual quest leads her to a hot workshop on HeartMath that she later shares with her customers.
? The third generation CEO of a high-profile public company who disdains ?selfish? capitalism and enthusiastically embraces corporate responsibility.
You?ll meet these inspiring leaders in this book?s first two chapters as we begin to explore seven new megatrends accelerating the transformation of free enterprise and the birth of Conscious Capitalism as mainstream business culture.
We start with some off-the-charts numbers on personal spirituality, then look at how Spirit is already starting to transform the bellwether sector of medicine. Later we?ll delve into case studies of CEOs and other top execs whose spiritual journeys are re-inventing their careers and their companies.
Spirituality: from personal to organizational. That?s this chapter?s theme. Put differently, personal ?growth? is about to get a lot less ?personal.? It is about to spill into?and transform?the collective.
The Passion for Personal Spirituality
The quest for spirituality is the greatest megatrend of our era.
Before diving into some illustrative facts and figures, I should like to raise the larger, more substantive question: What does it mean to be ?spiritual?? Or to want more Spirit in your life? Admittedly, it isn?t easy to define: Spirit is intangible, after all. Few of us will agree on the exact definition of spirituality. But it begins, of course, with the desire to connect with God, the Divine, the Transcendent. That said, let me throw out the five hallmarks that I think cover most of the spiritual bases: (1) Meaning or Purpose, (2) Compassion, (3) Consciousness, (4) Service and (5) Well Being.
Many of the things we might call spiritual?inner peace, meditation, wellness, prayer, loving relationships, life purpose, mission, ?giving to others?fall under one of these headings. I may have missed one of your favorites, but I think you?ll agree that all these words have one thing in common: Each and every one of them is sourced in and emphasizes the immaterial. We may live out our spiritual inclinations here in the material world, experiencing compassion for a friend?or well being in our bodies?but the source of our inspiration is the invisible realm of Spirit.
The earthly treasures we all love and enjoy here in the mundane grid of reality?money, hot jobs, gorgeous clothes, a wonderful mate, an Ivy League diploma and a beautiful home?are missing from the ?spiritual? list.
Spirituality means you thirst for something else. For the peace, wholeness and fulfillment that, as Grandma would say, ?money can?t buy.? Perhaps you seek also to know the Source from which all else, both material and intangible, flows.
Well, you?ve got a lot of company.
Spirituality Is ?Off the Charts?
Millions have invited Spirit into their lives, through personal growth, religion, meditation, prayer or yoga. The result is a values shift that is measurable and monumental. A 2004 Gallup survey found 90 percent of Americans believe in God; it jumps to 95 percent when people are asked, ?or a universal Spirit.? Western Europeans, by contrast, have a belief rate of 50 percent.
Sixty percent of Americans say they have absolute trust in God.
But wait a minute. Haven?t Americans always been a religious lot? Maybe so, but in the past decade, the number who call themselves ?spiritual? is decisively higher. In 1994, the Gallup people asked Americans whether they felt the need to experience spiritual growth. Only 20 percent said ?yes.? In 1999, they asked again?and a surprising 78 percent answered in the affirmative. An astounding 58 percentage point gain in five years.
But that was only in 1999. Remember how simple and secure our lives were then? Before terrorism, the market crash, war and corporate scandals. People tend to turn to Spirit in times of stress, trouble and sorrow. In 1999 technology was still riding high; unemployment was low and no one was overly troubled by Enron, Osama or Saddam. Since September 11, 2001, however, 57 percent say they think more about their spiritual lives, reports a Time/CNN/Harris Interactive poll.
It is hardly a stretch to conclude that war, recession, layoffs and financial losses since 2001 have strengthened the ranks of spiritual seekers.
Spirit in Action
The quest for spirituality is shapeshifting human activities, priorities, leisure pursuits and spending patterns.
Some 16.5 million people practice yoga in the United States, said Lynn Lehmkuhl, an editor at Yoga Journal in 2005, up 43 percent since 2002. Ten million American adults say they meditate, twice as many as a decade ago, declares the 2003 Time cover story, ?Meditation.?
? Meditation, the Time article reports, is taught in ?schools, hospitals, law firms, government buildings, corporate offices and prisons.?
? In 1998, Colorado?s Shambhala Mountain Center, which hosts yoga and meditation programs, welcomed 1,342 visitors. By 2003, it was 15,000.
? New York?s Catskills hotels ?are turning into meditation retreats so quickly that the Borscht Belt is being renamed the Buddhist Belt,? quips Time writer Joel Stein.
Do some people do yoga and T?ai Chi or meditate as a form of stress release or exercise? Undoubtedly, but these ancient practices grow out of such profoundly spiritual traditions that I would venture to say that practitioners are connecting to Spirit whether or not they consciously seek to do so.
Spirit in Print
Spirituality has certainly inspired a megatrend in publishing. Over a five-year period, spiritual and religious books outpaced sales in all other categories, surging from $1.69 billion to $2.24 billion, says the Book Industry Study Group. Bestsellers like Conversations with God (Neale Donald Walsch, Hampton Roads, vols. 1?3, 1995?1998) and The Power of Now (Eckhart Tolle, New World Library, 1999) attest to our healthy appetite for soulful matters. By 2005, The Purpose-Driven Life (Zondervan, 2002) by Rick Warren had sold a robust 22 million copies.
Baby boomers, concerned with ethics and their own morality, says Publishers Weekly editor Lynn Garrett, are driving up sales in the spirituality and religion categories. Books like Jesus CEO (Hyperion, 1996) and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (Fireside/Simon & Schuster, 1990), which advises people to cultivate spirituality, illustrate how much Spirit has already penetrated the business category.
?All kinds of answers to the question, ?What is the meaning of my life?? are selling,? says Susan Petersen Kennedy, president of Penguin Putnam Inc.
The Future of Spirituality
Spirituality is today?s greatest megatrend, but where is it taking us? What?s the future of our compelling interest in all things spiritual? To discover the answer, we must first clear up a common misunderstanding about the spiritual path.
Most of us harbor the belief?reinforced in the media?that a passion for the ?inner life? takes us away from the world, rendering us self-obsessed, if not downright selfish.
Well, the truth is: It does. But only at first. During the journey?s initial introspective chapter, many instinctively withdraw from the daily grind of modern life. Why? Because, seekers grow more sensitive and too much stress will overwhelm the fresh, emerging spiritual consciousness.
Often we detach in order to heal: As we fill with Spirit, we release a lot of old emotional baggage, find peace, discover a new inner voice?and that requires a fair amount of energy. When my own lifelong spiritual journey intensified in 1994, I shut off the TV for two years and rarely read newspapers. Good-bye violence, cynicism, TV commercials. Hello silence, meditation and hearing myself think.
But later the spiral path of Spirit takes a different turn and we plunge into an exciting new phase: our return to the world. Now regenerated, we come back to society and service. That is exactly what millions of people?investors, consumers, managers?and the business leaders you?ll meet in this chapter are up to?living their spirituality day to day.
From Silence to Service
The miracle of spiritual healing strengthens and energizes us. Millions of people, long-time meditators, for example, (and people who are . . . ahem . . . age 45 or older) may have spent a decade or more healing negative patterns. They?or should I say we??have soaked up so much spiritual energy that we are transformed. Sure, we will still face plenty of new challenges, but for this life, we?re basically cooked: We will not go back to ?life before Spirit.?
We are chock full of Spirit and consciousness. We?ve hit critical mass. Now what would the Divine do with all that consciousness?
Put it to work!
In a project, cause, mission or place?somewhere in the world that attracts our now-higher consciousness. The power of Spirit embodied in people like you and me is pouring out into organizations?including businesses.
Spiritual transformation, triggered at the individual level, is now spilling over from the personal to the institutional.
Before we discover why the transformation of business is at hand, let?s briefly explore the discipline of medicine, an important bellwether for business, and a field where spirituality is already revamping many established protocols.
From Medicine to Business
If a wise and advanced being were to gaze upon the drama of human evolution, she might say, ?Well, they?re finally starting to get it. Humanity at long last is beginning to see that Spirit activates every part of life?politics, economics, medicine, psychology, business. Some day soon, they may even quit relegating God to the narrow confines of religion and metaphysics.?
So when we talk about transformation, it?s not a shift from the profane to the sacred. What is transforming is our awareness. We are waking up and smelling the roses?that is, the presence of Spirit all around us?and the scent is both comforting and intoxicating.
Most of all it is a relief to emerge from the fog of separation, where God was God, physics was physics, business was business, and medicine was medicine. Free from the illusion of separation, we?re excited about ?new? disciplines like God and physics, spiritual healing, and Spirit in business.
We are awakening to the Truth that always was.
Consider the example of medicine, a near-perfect indicator for ?what is coming next? to business. More than most other fields of endeavor, medicine is investigating and integrating the Truth of Spirit into daily practice.
During medicine?s dramatic metamorphosis, a handful of pioneers spoke their sometimes controversial truth, opened people?s minds, touched and healed them and finally revolutionized the institution of medicine itself.
Bernie Siegel, M.D., told us no physician can inform a patient how long he or she has to live. That?s between you and God, he declared.
Carolyn Myss, Ph.D., opened our eyes to the bonds linking Spirit, our physical bodies and the seven spiritual energy centers called the chakras.
Larry Dossey, M.D., witnessed the healing power of prayer so often, he decided denying prayer to his patients was like withholding a needed medicine.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., and Herbert Bensen, M.D., demonstrated how meditation lowers blood pressure and promotes well being.
Christiane Northrup, M.D., underscored the value of spiritual practice at every stage of a woman?s life: maiden, mother or wise woman.
As practitioners like these legitimized new ways to perceive Spirit and medicine, half of U.S. adults have opted out of the mainstream health system?at least in part?to explore greater well being and innovative solutions through alternative care, reports a 2002 Newsweek cover story. Americans now make more visits to alternative healers such as massage therapists, chiropractors or naturopaths than to traditional M.D.s. Furthermore, since precious little of this ?alternative? care is covered by health insurance, we spend $30 billion of our own funds to partake of these new remedies.
Follow the money, as they say. Is it any wonder that teaching hospitals and universities?from Duke and Johns Hopkins to Harvard?are setting up centers of complementary and integrative (i.e., alternative) medicine?
In chapter six, ?The Wave of Conscious Solutions,? we?ll look at the breakthrough medical research that documents the extraordinary power of prayer in healing?and investigate how other spiritual practices might work in business.
When personal healing, with all of its psychological, spiritual, emotional and physical components, reaches critical mass, people often experience a new or renewed sense of mission or purpose. It is all about critical mass, or as one writer puts it: the ?Tipping Point.?
Critical Mass and the Tipping Point
I wrote about critical mass in Megatrends for Women (Villard, 1992) as a sort of counterpoint to Susan Faludi?s popular (but to my mind, pessimistic) Backlash (Crown, 1991). The more progress women enjoyed, Faludi argued, the more they suffered a sort of retaliation from society. But I didn?t buy it. To my mind women?s social progress from politics to business, religion to sports, had achieved such momentum that success was irreversible. Sure, there?d be setbacks along the way?Faludi is right about that?but no turning back.
Now Malcolm Gladwell?s bestseller The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Little Brown, 2000) treats the notion of critical mass at book length, and I think he explains it expertly. The ?Tipping Point,? says Gladwell, is ?from the world of epidemiology. It?s the name given to the moment in an epidemic when a virus reaches critical mass. It?s the boiling point. It?s the moment on the graph when the line starts to shoot straight upwards.?
Sometime in the 1990s, personal spirituality hit the Tipping Point. Now in the 00 decade, we are translating spirituality into organizations and the collective.
Gladwell, who covered the AIDS epidemic for The Washington Post before landing at The New Yorker, doesn?t stick to epidemiology, though. ?What if everything has a Tipping Point?? he asks. ?Wouldn?t it be cool to try and look for the Tipping Points in business, or in social policy, or in advertising, or in any number of other nonmedical arenas??
Indeed?and it applies to spirituality, too. For many of us, at some point in the spiritual journey, the Divine energy within us reaches a sort of Tipping Point and a once personal quest becomes more universal:
The wounded become healers. The warriors, statesmen. The victims, advocates. And the managers?corporate activists and change agents.
The Tipping Point and Social Change
The Tipping Point, says Gladwell, explains why social change so often comes ?quickly and unexpectedly.? It occurs this way because, he continues, ?ideas and behavior and messages . . . behave just like outbreaks of infectious diseases.?
Invisible one moment, widespread the next. So building on Gladwell?s model, a social epidemic?or a roaring new megatrend?might simmer along, just out of official view, until one day it?s ready to explode.
That is the case with the Rise of Conscious Capitalism which grows out of the lives of millions of transformed individuals. If it is not quite visible to many people, that?s because, like every megatrend I?ve ever studied, it?s a bottom-up phenomenon.
Just remember the formula from this book?s introduction: When changing values meet economic necessity, transformation takes off.
Later in this chapter, you?ll meet Paul Ray, co-author of The Cultural Creatives (Harmony, 2000). Ray laments how the media ignores ?fundamental change going on just beneath the surface of events in American life, ready to break through in a new level of awareness and concern.?
Both Gladwell and Ray explain how maverick notions gradually gain mass and momentum, then suddenly burst onto the scene.
In the 1980s and 1990s, pioneering investors restricted their portfolios to socially responsible funds that limit holdings to stocks that can meet certain social, environmental and governance criteria?a trend largely discounted on Wall Street, until a perfect storm of events?the tech bubble, market crashes, accounting and corporate governance scandals?ravaged mainstream business, provoking reforms, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which requires greater financial disclosure, auditor independence, executive accountability and a public accounting oversight board. As you will see in chapter seven, socially responsible investing has soared 5,000 percent in less than two decades, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Social Investment Forum, a nonprofit association of more than 500 financial professionals and institutions and is shifting from trend to emerging megatrend.
CEOs and Executive Change Agents
Today we all know that capitalism must morph into a more honest, responsible and wholistic economic system. The question is how to achieve that end while securing financial prosperity. In this book?s next chapter, ?The Dawn of Conscious Capitalism,? we?ll delve into that very issue. But first, let?s meet the executive change agents whose personal efforts prepare the way for the kind of social epidemic Gladwell and Ray describe?but in this case, a very positive one.
The Spiritual CEO
For years I?d heard about the multi-billion-dollar medical tech firm whose CEO openly defied Wall Street. ?We are not in business to maximize shareholder value,? he stated heretically. Nevertheless, his company won coveted ?Buy? ratings from tony brokers up and down the Street. During his tenure, in fact, the firm?s market cap soared from $1.1 billion to $60 billion.
How did he pull that off? By masterfully generating the shareholder value he appeared to renounce by committing the company?not to beating the Street by a penny or two a quarter?but to healing patients. Period.
Later, something else caught my eye?a glossy photo of said CEO in his cozy den, eyes closed?meditating. In Fortune magazine, no less.
The company is Minneapolis-based Medtronic, which invented pacemakers. The CEO is Bill George, who recently retired and now writes and speaks about his exceptional life as a successful and moral CEO. His book, Authentic Leadership (Jossey-Bass), was published in 2003.
When Bill George and I talked in 2001, he was still a sitting CEO. Generously, he shared his tales?like the time he staged Medtronic?s moving ?medallion ceremony? (see chapter four) at 3 A.M. for the employees on graveyard shift at a newly acquired factory.
In fact, Bill George was a lot like his colleagues in the Fortune 500, except that he made no secret of passion for Spirit or meditation.
George?s private commitment to meditation amplified Medtronic?s corporate consciousness.
?I?ll tell you a little story,? Bill George told me. ?The fact that I meditate twice a day was published in a USA Today article about the Medtronic innovation machine. The same day, this securities analyst from Morgan Stanley brought in 25 of his largest customers, which represented, oh, maybe $15 billion of our stock, so big shareholders. And this guy (the analyst) started making fun of me. I?d come to talk about where the corporation was headed and he said, a little sarcastically, ?So, it said in the paper this morning that you meditate. Is that how you increase shareholder value???
I couldn?t help interrupting George?s story. So sure was I of exactly how he?d respond. ?I bet you told him, ?as a matter of fact, it is.??
?That?s exactly right,? said George. ?I took him totally seriously. I said, ?You?re right.??
Continues . . .
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