The most exciting breakthrough of the 21st Century will occur not because of technology, but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human.
--John Naisbit, Megatrends 2000Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being humans, and the catastrophe towards which this world is headed &endash; be it ecological, social, demographic or a general breakdown of civilization…
--Vaclav Havel, President of Czechoslovakia, Address to the U.S. CongressIn recent times, interest in the subject of Spirit in Business and Work is reflected in conferences, seminars, videos, books, research studies, the founding of new associations, polls and articles in such publications as Business Week, Fortune, Industry Week, Time, Newsweek, Psychology Today, Leaders magazines and The New York Times. From an individual worker's sense that "something is missing" to a growing corporate awareness of global interdependence and the importance of economic, ecological and social sustainability, (beyond a limited view of "profit" in the financial index's Dow to a broader kind of balance sheet's Tao of business) interest in the subject is increasing.
The purpose of this program is to energize and facilitate an inquiry or conversation that is gathering steam across the United States and the globe, regarding the nature and role of Spirit in Business and Work. A central goal is to help connect who we are, what we do, and what we value. The conversation is multidimensional, multifaceted, and expressed from various perspectives, professional domains and in a variety of word symbols.
The Center for Business Excellence (CBE) and SIB Sponsored Spirit in Business and Work Forums are held in geographically representative regions of central New Jersey. Together they represent a programmatic vehicle of The Center for Business Excellence (CBE) for bringing together senior business, government, educational and community leaders to address the issue of Spirit in Business in a way that is practical, timely, and designed to produce effective change.
The SIB Forums are similar to the CBE's "Breakfasts with Champions" series of seminars featuring business authors, thought leaders, and corporate change agents working to transform organizations, workplaces, and communities in ways that respond to changing opportunities and needs.
Corporations, conference centers, and educational organizations are invited use these materials to sponsor a Spirit in Business Forum at a location of their choosing. The Center will provide panelists, facilitators, and additional materials to assist in the discussion. The costs of presenting, marketing, and hosting the event may be shared with the Center.
If your organization would like to host or sponsor an event, please call us at 908-581-8418 or send an email to jcloud@cbe-nj.org.
The following materials were prepared by Ron Bell as a starting-point for discussion.At the conceptual or theoretical level, the elusive essential quality we call "spirit" may be intrinsically resistant to quantification and limiting definition, yet "it" is something we all experience. At the experiential or practical level, we can be mindfully aware of spirit and cultivate its positive life-generating qualities in life and work.
Peter Senge observes that:
Any description of reality, be it modern or ancient, religious, mythological or scientific can only offer us a story, partial and incomplete about reality. The inquiry in business about building community, stewardship, core values, belonging, and spirit is about "real time, real stuff" that has profound implications for organizations serious about business success, learning, sustainability, competitive advantage, and retention of high caliber people in critical times.Michael Lerner (Spirit Matters) speaks of the conceptual/theoretical limitations of thinking and language and of the mysterious dimensions of Spirit:
That's a problem with Spirit &endash; we can allude to it, but every attempt to define it in itself rather than in its manifestations ends up seeming silly, empty or vague. The deepest spiritual thinkers warn us that the realm of Spirit is the realm of the ineffable. It simply can't be adequately expressed in language. The best we can get is poetry and song, not proprositional knowledge. …Abraham Joshua Hesschel (states): "The heart of being confronts me as enigmatic, incompatible with my categories, sheer mystery. All we have is a sense of awe and radical amazement in the face of a mystery that staggers our ability to sense it."The SIB Forums are intended as opportunities for exploring the nature and role of spirit at work and the practical possibilities for creating more harmonious, creative, sustainable, empowering workplaces and communities, which encourage the integration of spirit, life and work.
Studs Terkel says: "Most people have jobs that are too small for their spirits". A poll suggests that 80 percent of American workers are unhappy in their jobs. Boredom, frustration, lack of personal meaning, significance and value, etc. can exact high tolls in overall health, job satisfaction, productivity and the business "bottom line" (however defined). Most people spend most of their lives at work. Instead of imprisoning and depleting human energy, passion, and vitality in jobs that block and limit spirit, work can nurture and release the human spirit. We can encourage the connection of who we are, what we do, and what we value in work and life, while enhancing a triple bottom line of people, profits and the planet.
Spirit at Work Forums can look into some practical on-the-job expressions of spirit as having to do with such realities as creating and connecting, being vulnerable and authentic, really showing-up and being present, valuing and being valued, contributing and serving, etc. &endash; in other words, with what it means to be fully human at work. I believe that deep down, most of us want to bring our whole selves to work and stick our lives into the gizzard of the business enterprise, organization and community to make generative, finger-print-like positive differences. The dialogues seek to assist each participant in making a real, practical difference and contribution to work and the community.
The root of the word "spirit" means "to breathe life into." Significance, purpose and meaning are not givens in life and work, they are human creations &endash; we create meaning(s). Humans can create multifaceted ways to evoke and express spirit and "breathe life into" work and work environments. Nelson Mandela said:
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us."When the naturally zestful and caring vitality of the human spirit is released, productivity, people, profits, community and the planet all flourish. The wise and witty Pogo expresses our reality and our challenge: "We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities!" It is empowering to re-member that businesses and organizations are human constructions, and as such are subject and open to human reformulation, reconstruction and transformation. (AI Constructionist Principle).
There are multiple faces of the human spirit and a variety of its forms and expressions. Business, work, organizations and the community are composed of a plurality and diversity of perspectives and practices. We will explore spirit in the workplace &endash; not so much as the answer, but as a life-kindling question into what gives life at work &endash; facilitating an ongoing search for what's most meaningful, true and satisfying in terms of one's own individual perspective, values and experience.
The intention is to encourage forums that are inclusive by design and characterized by an appreciation, honoring and valuing of difference, diversity, pluralism, individual tradition, perspective and experience. The aim is to encourage dialogue "spaces and containers" that are safe and large enough to hold together a diversity of individuals and a diversity of apparent competing conceptual polarities, such as: individual and community, autonomy and interdependence, inner-work and outer-work, wounds and healing, being and doing, continuity and change, chaos and order, particular and universal, local and global, past and future, intuitive/mystical and analytic/scientific, material and non-material, essence and existence, implicate and explicate, shadow and light, endarkenment and enlightenment, questions and answers, mystery and meaning, consciousness and commerce, intellectual inquiry and practical action. F. Scott Fitzgerald declared the test of a first-rate intelligence as being the ability to hold two contrary ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. (And once we have mastered paradox, perhaps we can deal with polydox.)
Another intention is to frame the conversation about Spirit and Work in the positive direction of health rather than pathology in the (Appreciative Inquiry) belief/assumption that people and organizations move in the direction of what they inquire about (heliotropic and pygmylion principles). The conscious choice of directing the flow of dialogue from individual and organizational dysfunction toward optimal function or performance and "what gives life" is admittedly not neutral, in the sense that it represents a sort of intervention in and of itself. It also implies and envisions a positive SIB mission:
to connect leaders in a community of inquiry, learning and action, to release the creative power of individuals and organizations for the benefit of the whole, to support and accelerate the trend toward visionary leadership, organizational transformation and evolving business as a agent of community and world benefit.(Excerpted: the National/Global Spirit in Business's Mission, amended).
In the conducting of SIB Forums, I suggest we consider Michael Lerner's (Spirit Matters) question and observation:
What could this workplace, profession, or type of work look like if we had a new Bottom line? … The hardest part of this discussion is getting rid of what I call "the reality police" &endash; all those voices in our own heads that tell us that "they" won't let us make these changes and that therefore we are wasting our time even thinking about all this. As long as people allow the reality police to hold them back, the discussion will remain stunted and uninspired.Visionary and transformational leadership beckons us to become entrepreneurs of the possible.
A few more words about words is important to keep in mind in regard to the CBE/SIB sponsored Spirit in Business Forums. Words and language are objective "facts" in the world by way of human agreement and consensus. In this sense, their "meanings" (consensus reality) exist because folks agree around more or less specific denotations and connotations. This is not to say there is not any specific realities or going-on-ness independent of us and/or our word-symbols. It is to say that the words we use can signify and evoke multiple shades of meanings and emotions, depending on individual differences in mental models, paradigms, perspectives, experiences, assumptions, beliefs, interpretations and conscious or unconscious dynamics and intentions.
It may be useful to make distinctions between the words "spirituality" and "religion." James R. Lucas (in The Passionate Organization- 1999) refers to what he calls "The Red Herring of Religion":
The Red Herring in the area of spirituality, the great big giant distraction from a meaningful approach to the deepest and best part of who we are as humans, is often religion. Although religion can be supportive of our spirituality, it can also easily misguide or devour it. … Religion is our attempt to deal in an organized way with spirituality….Religion itself is not the problem. It's the wrong "application" of religion, the codifying and labeling and restricting and judging and condemning. It's the arrogance that claims to possess all of the answers while others have none. … But the charge to us as leaders is not to throw out the good with the bad, the mystery with the confusion. … My experience tells me that most people are open to spirituality but that many are closed to, bored with, or fanatical about religion. We leaders can &endash; with great care, to be sure &endash; appeal to their spiritual core while avoiding the red herring of religion.Mitroff and Denton (A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America) surveyed or interviewed approximately 1700 people about spirituality and its role in the workplace; this statement represents the most widely held view of spirituality, according to their research:
Spirituality is the basic desire to find ultimate meaning and purpose in one's life and to live an integrated life.It is not uncommon for words like "spirit," "soul," and "spirituality" (or even "business" and "work") to evoke multiple, differing, emotionally laden states and conflicting views. The two views, which follow are illustrative:
"I think that all leadership is indeed spiritual leadership." --prominent management consultant and author Peter Vaill"When the talk turns to the spiritual side of leadership, I mostly want to run." --prominent management consultant and author Tom Peters
From CBE/SIB's perspective in general and for the conducting of Spirit in Business Forums in particular, it is suggested that such words not refer to any organized religion, particular deity or faith tradition. This is not to suggest that there is anything wrong or untruthful with such words and their referents, but that in the context of SIB Spirit at Work Forums, their "red herring" connotations can produce non-useful, unproductive conflicts or detours. This arbitrary distinction is only utilitarian and is intended to be solely facilitative and instrumental; its use does not suggest any truth or untruth, rightness or wrongness, only distinctions as to probable usefulness or un-usefulness, specific to SIB Forums.
The words of the poet Rumi are suggestive::
"Somewhere
out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing
there is a field.
I'll meet you there"An implicit operating and guiding principle for Spirit in Business and Work is that the CBE/SIB is neither representative of, aligned with, nor antithetical to any particular philosophy, political party or faith tradition. Rather it views itself as a bridge-builder and common ground space for all vectors and sectors of business and the wider community. It is a force for collaborative win-wins and a (neutral) field for positive total community-wide possibility. CBE/SIB's process and purpose, its practices and principles, means and ends, programs and mission are intentionally inclusive, not exclusive. Its aim is to understand rather than judge, and to respect and celebrate individual, cultural, ethnic, religious and spiritual differences.
It is my bias and assumption/belief that the word-symbol "spirit" is intrinsically resistant to precise measurement, quantification and definition. Such words as spirit and soul are powerful and useful word symbols, precisely in part, because they refer to and make possible our communication and reflection about social reality and how it fits into a larger context or "big picture" of meaning and ontology of being and existence. John R. Searle (The Social Construction of Reality) refers to this amazing (though often taken for granted) powerful human ability to symbolize:
With consciousness comes intentionality, the capacity of the organism to represent objects and states of affairs in the world (other than itself) to itself. Word-symbols such as "spirit" and "soul" both necessarily reveal and conceal and thus remain mysteries, yet they can also communicate significant and useful meanings which we may agree upon, experience and intentionally cultivate and nourish in our lives and work. Word symbols are both mysterious and practical. I highly value the brief six-line poem of Emily Dickenson:
The word is dead
When it is said
Some say.
I say
It just begins to live
That day.For the complete essay, please read/download the PDF file: ESSAY: SPIRIT IN BUSINESS AND WORK.
To contact Ron Bell, email VastSpirit@aol.com. If your organization would like to host or sponsor a Spirit in Business event, please call 908-581-8418 or send an email to jcloud@cbe-nj.org.
Last revised January 4, 2004
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