What is wrong with business for the sake of business? What is wrong with being in business just to make money as long as you are not breaking the law?
Nothing. I am a capitalist. Money is simply a storehouse of value. In the earliest times we bartered, which eventually evolved into a system of IOUs. If I give you my basket of apples, you will give me your bundle of wood three months from now. The IOU became a paper note and money was born. What we are really doing with money is storing value.

Not only is there nothing wrong with making money, but in a good capitalistic system both sides walk away with more value than they had before. Transactions should always be win-win, increasing the total amount of value in the environment. However, while there is nothing wrong with making money, you can’t just go into business “to make money.” The second question that comes up – how are you going to make money? – takes you back to service and selflessness. You have to find a way to serve.

Can money be an effective motivator in business?
Only a small percentage of people will say all they want is money, and even those people will tell you it wasn’t what they really wanted when they get it. Money primarily serves to take care of our physical needs. The physical is important. Eating, having a roof over your head, making sure the kids have warm clothes…all of that is important. But it will not satisfy. People will do things that are meaningful that they would never do for a paycheck alone. The question presumes that money is all you need. What does that MasterCard commercial say? Priceless. For everything else there is MasterCard. People are looking for the priceless stuff in life. Providing a way for people to work for the priceless things is the best method to motivate people effectively.

What does service and selflessness have to do with money?
The most important aspect of service and selflessness is that it produces trust. Trust comes from promise and fulfillment. The promise implicit in the dollar bill is that when I take a dollar for an hour of work, I will get the same value when I pay someone else for his hour of work. There is no inherent value in a piece of paper. What we invest in is the promise behind the dollar. On profit and loss statements, accounts receivable are promises other people made to you and accounts payable are promises you made to others. There is no actual money – only promises. You can measure the value of a company, a relationship, or one’s character within the context of promise and fulfillment.

Society suffers from a breakdown of promise and fulfillment and an erosion of trust. Look at marriage and the high rate of divorce – all promise and no fulfillment. When a society has to have cops and lawyers forcing people to keep their commitments, it is the sign of a diseased culture. It all comes back to promise and fulfillment.

Let’s look at it on an individual basis. Richard Rose used to say that the most important thing anyone can be armed with on a spiritual path is character, and he defined character as how well you keep your promises to yourself. Character and trust, the by-products of a healthy system of promise and fulfillment, are essential to the success of any organization. Money is only the measure of how effectively the organization is fulfilling their promise to selflessly serve the needs of others.

What does the monastic process of transformation have to do with business?
What people essentially want is transformation. Change of heart is what people go to the monastery looking for and what the monastic experience provides. Most people think the monks go to the monastery as content people who know what they want out of life. The truth is most of them don’t stay because formation, or the process of becoming a monk, weeds out those who are unprepared or ill-equipped for the serious work required. The monastery is not a static point. You go there to be changed. But it is not just the monk who is looking for transformation. We all want to be transformed. Transformation is the essence of drama because it is the essence of life.

We aren’t really looking for money – we hope that once we have money, a transformation will occur. Most people only transform other people’s impressions, which is why so many of the rich and powerful are so unhappy. Fame, money, and power do transform perceptions, but then the pressure to maintain those perceptions in the absence of true inner transformation exacts a deep psychological and spiritual toll.

The reality is that most successful organizations are transformative. New associates come in on one side, they are pushed through the corporate culture, and someone else emerges from the other side. However, this process is usually unconscious. The problem is, if I say you should work for me because you will be transformed, then people automatically think I am brainwashing you. Training, formation, and acculturation do not mean making everyone the same. Of course, some of that is necessary. Effective formation is actually an individuating or divergent process that illuminates who we are, what we want, and how badly we want it.

If formation is differentiating, how do you create a team atmosphere?
IBM once thought it could train all executives in the exact same way. What they found was that the best executives were all extremely different. When tested they each fell at the periphery of the bell-shaped curve. The best candidates were generalists, curious about everything and interested in other people. Their skills and tactics varied, but they shared a common set of values that allowed for authentic diversity, divergence and growth.

Rose always complained that people would ask for his advice and then not take it. So one day I told him that whatever he advised I would do it. He looked at me intensely and said, “Good – learn to think for yourself.” This could be considered extremely dogmatic, but it is also divergent. The best companies transform employees through a process of formation based on common values and attitudes, allowing diversity and divergence to create a fertile environment for growth.

How do you incorporate spiritual principles into a business without scaring people away?
Spirituality doesn’t need to be overtly discussed. At RGI we spoke openly about spirituality and infusing it into the business, but the company was really about fulfilling promises, pushing yourself to the limit, and finding out who you really are. It all gets back to aiming past the target. The SKS students that came into the company wrote thank you notes, were the most courteous, and always showed up on time. When I asked them what they wanted, most would say, “I want to get into grad school, make a lot of money, travel.” I was trying to teach them that they should want a toolkit for life – to want to be open and honest, to be wise, responsible, reliable, good people who could make a promise to themselves and keep it. If you have a good toolkit, you can apply it to anything. At RGI, we put these principles into play by making it a place where they could develop that toolkit and learn something about themselves.

Companies should have high missions that people can buy into, something that allows individuals to serve something larger than themselves. Once you have that, then you incorporate the principles of service and selflessness by translating those ideals into doing everyday tasks with excellence.

Does service and selflessness begin with a mission statement?
No. It starts with a question: Are you serious? Don’t start by sending it to committee or making any grandiose announcements. Start by deciding on a few ways you can change your behavior tomorrow and then do it. After you have done that, take a division or a department, something small that you can get your arms around, and experiment with it. Try different ways to inculcate an attitude of service and selflessness and let it germinate. Come up with a mission for that department and watch how it impacts the rest of the organization. The last thing I want is a high-minded mission statement that gets shoved into a drawer and forgotten. Instead, start small and simply and build something contagious.

How do you get employees to buy in?
Do a lot of listening. What are the people feeling? What are their common values? Where is their hunger for a mission or purpose and how are they articulating it?

The problem every executive has is the same problem a congressman has: are you elected to reflect your constituents’ wants and desires or to form their wants and desires? No congressman should just poll his constituents and base his leadership on the popular idea of the day. His job is to persuade them that what they really want is that which is most substantially beneficial for them, and to articulate his rationale in a way that galvanizes the support of the people. The best examples of this in a company are those where the employees can take credit for their role in shaping the principles that form the company’s mission.

How does someone in middle management take the message of service and selflessness to senior management?
You don’t. Start with yourself. The biggest obstacle to service and selflessness is that we think of all the other people who need to change first. The last thing we think about is who we may need to apologize to.

When I was in middle management at a subsidiary of a much larger company, Data Broadcasting, I changed the dynamic within my department by personally speaking to every other department head and asking how we could make their jobs easier. Immediately, my department was viewed in a new light, as being committed first to serving the company in a spirit of selflessness. I did not involve the president who hired me on any of this. I did not make it his problem. When he saw what was going on, he liked it so much that he called in all the department heads and told them to do whatever they could to help me. Then a corporate jet came in and I went to a bigger job in New York. I put my own house in order first.

How much of the current economic crisis is a crisis of spirituality?
It would be trite to come up with a simple cause and effect explanation. I will say that Western Civilization is suffering generally and that the problem is not economic. Our biggest problem in America is thinking our problems are economic and that they can be solved as such. Of the sum total of everything we need to be fulfilled, economics is a very small percentage. The fact that we are fixated on the idea that what we need is more jobs when the problems are not economic but psychological, sociological, and spiritual shows how off track we are. Spiritual people tend to do well economically because they do not let economics dominate their lives. What bothers me is not our economic situation but all the prevalent signs of a general spiritual decline in our society and culture. Service and selflessness, promise and fulfillment, character and trust have more power to remedy our predicament than does prosperity alone.