MORE NOTES ON SPIRITUALITY AND THE WORK PLACE

For The Bohol Tribune

In This Our Journey

NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS

For this week’s column, I will continue sharing my notes on a subject which has enthralled me since joining the Brotherhood of Christian Businessmen and Professionals (BCBP), the quest for a spiritual work place. I will report on some notes I took in reading “Transformation and the World of Commerce” by Jacqueline Haessly, included in the book “The New Bottom Line,” I cited last week.

The opening lines in the article immediately drew my attention and keen interest. She describes what is happening in the world today:

“The world around us is hurting, crying out in anguish for relief. The news media overflows with the sounds of this pain and affliction. We hear parents crying for the loss of their children due to gaor drug-related gunfire …

“We hear young ones whimpering from too many beatings, too many drugs, too little food, and too few playgrounds to renew their spirits. We hear women, men and children yelling in fear from domestic abuse.

‘We hear women, men and children yelling in fear of domestic abuse.

“We hear the elderly and the disabled weeping in loneliness, deserted by those they love.

“We hear the homeless moaning as they lie shivering at night.

“We hear women and men in offices, universities, factories, and the streets of our cities calling out against sexual and gender abuse.

“We hear children sobbing in shame from the exploitation of their young bodies.

“We hear lovers howling for partners maimed or dead in someone’s war.

“We hear prisoners in war-torn countries screaming in agony from battering and political torture.” (Paragraphing ours.)

The author notes the situation is known by many people:

“As corporate leaders, managers, workers and ordinary citizens, we grieve at this pain and at the pollution and desecration of this planet which we know sustains us. We agonize about these abuses and the complexity of the problems that confront us in this world, in this space, and in this time.”

Many of us “want to stop the pain and bring an end to the suffering.” We ask ourselves two questions:

-How is this suffering related to spirituality and business, or the work place; and

--What can we do as business people (and professionals) to address this suffering.

To rephrase it another way: what does this suffering have to do with commerce and our professional work?

Commerce has been defined since the early days as the “free and mutual interchange of goods, property and services in a way mutually beneficial to all parties…”  In the current economic, social and political situations through the world, however, commerce or the conduct of business does not work this way.

Author Haessly, who contributed this article and wrote the book “Rediscovering the Soul of Business,” observed:

“It is hard to engage in the interchange of most forms of commerce in communities racked by gunfire or other acts of violence or terrorism. It is impossible to engage in mutual exchange of goods, property and services when one is destitute and one’s children are starving. And it would be a travesty to think that children, torn from their families and forced against their will to engage in services that benefit a growing sex industry, are willing participants in any form of reciprocal communication.”

Hence, the answer to the key question about the relationship of current human suffering throughout the world and commerce or business is that  “… this suffering, and our ability as business people to address it, has everything to do with commerce and the work of our lives!”

The key operational question is this:  “How can we, as business leaders, attempt to blend commerce with consciousness in a way that brings both healing and wholeness to a hurting world? What does it mean to use our corporate power for the good of our society? To transform it for the benefit and well-being of the whole of humanity?”

To answer this question, which actually revolves around the issue of power and its relationship to soul, the author draws not from the business world but from “the wisdom and experience of … feminist theologians and spiritual leaders from diverse cultures and continents who not only address the question of soul, but also offer examples which express soul in commerce.”

She asserts:  “These women cross cultures and reflect the religious, economic, political and social experiences of women from widely differing geographical regions of the world: Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, India, the Pacific Islands, Central, North and South America. Each has contributed immensely to a discussion of power in the community and corporate setting. Each has given voice to the ways that business leaders use their power to help heal a hurting world.”

The first issue to consider is the exercise of power and its relationship to soul either in the business organization or the community: “What is power? How do we understand it? How do we use power in our personal life? How do we use power in our business? How is the use of power experienced by others in the corporation? What is our corporate culture in regard to power?”

Power itself is a neutral term “meaning simply to be able; to have potential.” The women theologians understand power, like everybody else, from personal and social experiences with political or economic power.

The author adds: “Some feminist theologians, describing past or current cultural, economic, political, religious, and social relationships between women and men, or between groups within or among societies, refer to the writing of others who link power to control and domination.”   Their views of power have less to do with ability or potential but rather with the exercise of power in terms of control and dominance.

Indeed Machiavellian interpretation of force, control and domination over another has for centuries formed a basis of training for government, military and corporate leadership. “Machiavelli urged the Prince to act in ways that limited the freedom of others and to acquire that which was not properly his. In this paradigm, neither the Prince – whose need for dominance over his subjects led to all manner of manipulative behavior, nor his subjects – who were left without the freedom to make decisions affecting their very lives- were free to reach their full potential, the very essence of the word power. Indeed, under the model suggested by Machiavelli, the Prince must live in a state of perpetual distrust and fear lest he be overtaken by enemies seeking conquest.”

Here is a key issue:  

“In the world of commerce, a corporate culture based on a Machiavellian model of dominance and control can lead to mistrust and suspicion between workers and managers, foster internal competitiveness between workers and departments, and drain energy which could be directed towards achieving corporate goals. Communities, corporations and governments that follow this model find themselves faces with widespread dissension and even rebellion as citizens and workers seek to exercise a voice in the workings of their life.”

The author observes further:

“Business leaders who want to succeed in today’s business environment know they need a different understanding of power. They acknowledge that when control is imposed from without, workers are less likely to sustain personal effort to achieve quality in either performance or service. They recognize that when power comes from within, it is reflected in an individual and group commitment to quality in achieving both personal and corporate work goals. They understand that today’s corporate setting requires a new leadership style, one based on cooperation, team building, and openness to shared decision making.”

This indicates a new concept of power which has nothing to do with control and dominance, one that is based on equality and justice. In this new context, power becomes a “blessing to live in love, in peace with justice, in community.”

“This power is never violent or destructive, ego-centered or domineering. This power is understood, motivated, and exercised by one’s set of values. It serves to foster, enhance, and nurture all of life.”ou

This is a power based on “a spirituality that sees a connectedness between oneself and all others who share life with us on this small planet we each call home. Such a spirituality affirms the diverse ways that women and men express their connection to each other, to their universe and to the Spirit God force Who gives life meaning.”

The book asserts it is this awareness that gives rise to spirituality programs in the work place. 

“People hunger for a sense of connection with a Spirit Being higher than themselves. They also long for a sense of connection to others and for a way to address the complex issues that impact on life … Spirituality, especially a global spirituality that affirms the diverse ways that people express this interconnection with each other and to a Higher Spirit or Power, satisfies this hunger and generates the spiritual power necessary to transform the world.”

For future columns, we will research on specific experiences dealing with this vision to bring spirituality to business or the market-place and in the conduct of one’s professions. For any guidance or suggestions on how best to proceed with this journey, kindly email me at: npestelos@gmail.com.

NMP/23 Dec. 2015/4.43 p.m.

SPIRITUAL VALUES IN THE WORK PLACE

For The Bohol Tribune

In This Our Journey

NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS                                                       

In my research on spirituality and organizations, I chanced upon a book, The New Bottom Line: Bringing Heart and Soul to Business, co-edited by John Renesch, an authority on transformative leadership, and Bill DeFoore, described as an author, psychotherapist, consultant and president of the Institute for Personal and Professional Development.

The book is actually a compilation of articles about spiritual values (not to be confused with religion) and the world of commerce. For this week’s column, I have taken notes on lessons and insights which can be useful in thinking about spiritual values both in business and development work.

The Foreword says that the book, rather than focus on individual spirituality, offers instead “new insights on what constitutes a spiritual workplace and what it can mean both for individuals and corporations in terms of fulfillment and accomplishment.”

Its Preface notes that “the study of larger philosophic issues involving the universe, human destiny and creative futures has been encroaching on the business community for the past several years.” Starting in the 1990s, organizational development theory and related disciplines have been invading, as it were, traditional business circles.

The Introduction, written by the co-editors, states that over the last two hundred and fifty years, materialism-based capitalism has become the dominant force in society, particularly in the industrialized world. It notes that in the mid-1700s, “society was presumed to be a moral, compassionate and relatively frugal marketplace, dependent on much less efficient means of production than the present day.”

In those days, business was presumed “to have a conscience and, even if it didn’t, there was limited negative effect it could have on the rest of society.” Travel and communication took months or years. Manufacturing was considered a craftsman’s art.

Over the past couple of centuries, however, “the Industrial Age has created a huge production-consumption system that is so complex, so vast, that it finds itself pulling all the industrialized world along its tracks.”

This system has become insatiable: “It has become an engine – a machine- that has only one goal: to produce the most profit for the owners of the enterprises of commerce. That is what it does best.” The Introduction quotes Roger Terry, author of Economic Insanity:

“Capitalism no matter whose model you like, requires a constantly expanding market, requires that luxuries become necessities, that we constantly improve and replace products in an endless upward spiral, that we extract an increasing amount of profit, and that we infuse new money regularly into the economic flow. Everyone agrees on this. These are the assumptions behind everyone’s solutions. No one questions the insanity of the system at its most fundamental levels.”

Industrialization requires people to think and act more like machines. The human spirit faces extinction. This phenomenon has been referred to as spiritual bankruptcy.  “It is the result of a loss of meaning in our lives and in our work,” the co-editors Renesch and DeFoore further assert in the Introduction to this landmark anthology, which further observes:

“As these two models overlap – consciousness and commerce – a new bottom line is being born. This new bottom line puts people and nature ahead of profits. It is not anti-business, nor against profit-making. However, some may see this kind of shift in priorities as a threat – a threat to the system that has become so powerful that nothing has been able to slow it down so far.”

Amidst the growing disparity between the “haves” and “have-nots” in the US and the world, “the human spirit reminds our consciousness of our humanness – of our rootedness as spiritual beings. The new bottom live values meaning, diversity, integrity, caring, service, community, connectedness, creativity, intuition, balance and grace. It challenges the old bottom line values of toughness, wealth-amassing for its own sake, stress, domination, control and individual heroes.”

The rest of the 350-page hardbound edition of the book presents the views and insights of 30 contributors who have explained and documented in the process this emerging trend to reflect spiritual values in the market-place, in the world of business and mega capitalism.

Let’s try to pick some gems from this valuable collection of insights and lessons on spiritual values in the work-place:

In business, energy comes from many different sources familiar to most us – ambition, the many forms of security, recognition, self-satisfaction, and completion.  Spirituality or adherence to spiritual values is a “lesser understood source,” which is not to be equated with the promotion of specific religions in the work-place. In a Workplace Values Survey done in the US, a majority of those surveyed “acknowledged some form of spiritual ritual – prayer, meditation, or services of some kind.

A remarkable fifty-five percent claimed to have experienced ‘personal transformation,’ or epiphany of some sort, mostly in the past five years.”  This indicates a hunger for spiritual values in the work-place.

On the subject of business spirituality, the article quotes this passage from a book co-edited by Renesch and Bill DeFoore: “To us, ‘business spirituality,’ may sound like an oxymoron, but if the ancient insight that business has its own divine patronage is difficult for us to comprehend, it only shows us how far we have moved away from religion. Business has found meaning and relevance to us as individuals and as a society, more profound than a secular mind might be capable of imagining.”

The book further asserts: “The relationship between business and community whether local or global, is so serious as to touch upon ultimate values. The business person who seeks only to exploit the relationship for personal gains fails to perceive theological roots of business, the fact that business is deeply involved in matters of ultimate meaning. Ethics in business is not a tangential concern, but speaks to the very heart of business life.”

Here is what the book says on profit: “Sometimes when I speak to business people about the soul in their work, they ask anxiously about profit, the bottom line. If we make profit the ultimate concern of our work, then the soul has no recourse but to appear in negative ways – as low morale, symptoms among workers, conflict society and even poor quality of products.”

Renesch further says in this article on Spirity & Work : “Spiritual values, intuition, community, openness, trust, love and caring, reflection, holistic or systems thinking – these ideals are bridging gaps that have grown wider over the past couple of centuries. As bridges, they will help us reunite with those parts of ourselves that we have kept separate so we can begin to bring all of ourselves to work everyday. When this integration occuse, we find renewed passion and meaning in our work.”

The contributors in this book are talking about spiritual values in the work-place, with focus on business enterprises, but their insights may help us in our reflection on how spiritual values can reinvigorate our development work. This is to say that development planners and implementors may consider how infusion of spirituality may also succeed to enhance the sustainability of projects. It may infuse added energy in undertaking activities and link more effectively the work of project planners to not only to the hearts and minds of the poor, but to their soul as well.

While reading the book, half of brain was thinking about this darkness that continues to hover over us as a country, the greed and indifference of our political leaders and the elite classes. The forthcoming political exercise provides as an opportunity to instill spirituality in our businesses and development work that we may find the courage to fight evil wherever it manifests itself to obstruct the divine spirit in all of us.

We must build strong work teams and organizations with core spiritual values. In his article, The Spirit of Team, Barry Heermann, writes:

“Modern organizations stand at the edge of an abyss. Never before has change pressed in so unmercifully: from rapidly changing markets, doing more with less, multicultural business contexts and downsizing to constantly changing technologies. Simultaneously, organization stakeholders are expecting and demanding effective response to the upheavals of the day: from the environmental crisis, the breakdown of the family, and the widening gap between rich and poor to a multitude of stresses in modern life. A fundamental shift in organizational capacity and capability must be brought forth.”

That shift will require affirming spiritual values in the work-place, business and development work, as articulated in a speech by Vaclav Havel, president of Czechoslovakia:

“Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans, and the catastrophe towards which this world is headed – be it ecological, social, demographic or a general breakdown of civilization – will be unavoidable… The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and in human responsibility.”

Indeed spirituality in the work-place is needed. Now I rest my case. #Spiritualityinbusines

NMP/19 Dec 2015/5.30 a.m. 

PREPARING FOR CHRISTMAS

For The Bohol Tribune

In This Our Journey

NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS

Every time Christmas comes around, I remember my maternal Grandmother. She took care of myself and my younger Sister while Mother worked in a desiccated coconut factory in a nearby town all through our childhood  and adolescent years. How she would prepare us for Christmas day made up a large part of what I remember of those early years.

First, she made sure that poor as the family was, we would have something new – new pair of shoes, clothes, as it was the case with other families in our barangay. Christmas is the time when family members ought to have something new. Whoever started that tradition was a marketing expert. With the chilly air of the season, the Christmas songs filling the air, and the gift-giving parties in schools, offices and localities, we all ended up as willing victims of marketing in preparing for this celebration of our faith.

I recall our Inay Tanda – that’s how we call our grandmother, accompanying us to our relatives both in my father’s  and mother’s sides one after  another on Christmas and the days before the New Year.

All through our high school years, the routine remained practically the same, preparing for these visits by buying something new to wear, visiting relatives and receiving cash gifts from them which would usually compensate for the amount spent for the new items that Inay Tanda would buy for us.

Indeed preparing for Christmas was much, much simpler when we were younger. Life has become complicated in succeeding decades and, at first glance, with all the elaborate decorations in the homes, offices and in the streets, families and local communities have missed out seemingly on the simple message of Christmas – to rediscover our affinity with Him who was born in a manger.

Our faith is anchored on this hope for redemption, something we can realize by doing good for ourselves and our neighbors through deeds which reaffirm our common humanity as defined by enduring values during our temporal existence here on Earth.

Sounds a mouthful, but I have come to believe that the best way to prepare for Christmas is to be alone with oneself for at least one or two days and do some meditation not only how personal and family goals have been met , but how we have tried to help those who are in need.

It is almost Messianic, but this is the only way we can reaffirm our common bond with the rest of humankind especially with those who are more burdened than others.

How can we be a person for others while we pursue goals specifically for ourselves and our immediate family? This is the key question that we need to ask during meditation. Caring for others, especially the poor, is quite a difficult task . It requires vast investment in time and money that otherwise will be used for personal pursuits. In this sense, helping others will mean quite a sacrifice on the part of the person or a group.

In the essay on “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, guru of Transcendentalism, had this to say on this matter:

“Do not tell me, as a good man did today, of my obligation to put all men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I gave such men do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which they now stand; alms to sots, and the thousand-fold Relief Societies; - though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is  wicked dollar, which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.”

This is an extreme option to take but some people prefer this based on the Darwinian principle that only the fittest survive and those who are “helpless are and ought to be doomed to extinction.”  Which is, of course, contrary to the belief of most religions.

To most people, the ability to help is not a philosophical question. Nor it is a question of motives behind the gesture of helping that by-standers delight in speculating. Whatever the motives as long as the service is delivered to the intended beneficiary is commendable in itself.

 More often it is question of finding the time and other resources to help that is the primary concern.  Unless one belongs to an organization that is financially endowed and capable of mobilizing paid staff to facilitate delivery of much-needed services, it will always be a competition for time, money and other resources between personal and social goals.

 Having social enterprises is a worthwhile strategy to pursue for some development organizations. They earn profit from their businesses which enables them to avoid extinction, but they also manage to pursue development objectives in terms of actual service delivery to specific disadvantaged groups or provide skills and employment to families in need.

In preparation for Christmas, a season for cleansing one’s soul of multiple sins, e.g., self-conceit and arrogance, I will try to resolve through meditation some of these issues related to the survival of local organizations, specifically those pursuing self-help initiatives among disadvantaged groups.

I would like to explore more deeply this practice of  sharing personal experiences which I have seen in all organizations of varied persuasions: from the Legion of Mary in my adolescent years, to the Nationalist Corps and like-minded organizations from the political left in those exciting days on the campus, to all sorts of religious or faith-based organizations, including those affiliated with Habitat for Humanity International, in meetings of Narcotics Anonymous I was invited to observe, and now with the Brotherhood of Christian Businessmen and Professionals (BCBP). Indeed all religions are correct in the pursuit of self-transformation goals.

I have just finished a three-month orientation course and I was amazed at how virtual strangers would share their experiences in their own families, the problems they encountered and how they were able to overcome constraints through application of spiritual values. Outside this particular organizational context, it would be embarrassing to tell stories about family quarrels, marital infidelity, addiction to gambling, a personal quest for meaning and salvation, but for the first time in my life, 

I was hearing their stories of human frailties and the heroic struggle to overcome these with courage , the help of family and friends, and the guidance of  a Higher Being “who was made Flesh and dwelt amongst us,” or conceptualized in so many ways by so many creeds and religions through the ages.

Now I must go back to this meditation mode the week before Christmas and, hopefully, gain insights on what has eluded us through forty years of professional community development work – a network of people’s organizations able to decide on their own to create a powerful social force that we may have this sought-after kingdom of equality, justice and prosperity for all.

Spirituality or adherence to common human values has been the missing link through all the past efforts and sacrifices of development professionals and workers we have had the privilege and honor of working with in the past. Now a new journey begins as we prepare for this blessed season. #Development+spiritualvalues