Sorting Eggs at Mepkin Abbey: Entrepreneur’s Lifelong Spiritual Quest Provides Guidance in Today’s Economy
Every year since 1996, August Turak has retreated periodically to Mepkin Abbey in South Carolina, rising at 3 am for the first of eight prayer services, packing eggs from the monastery’s chicken farm, and absorbing a management approach he calls “service and selflessness” from the largely silent Trappist monks. It is part of a lifelong spiritual journey that has helped Turak create two successful technology businesses, found a not-for-profit organization for college students exploring the meaning of life, retire at 49, and keep the current economic upheaval in perspective.
For Turak, the monastery illustrates the fruits of following a spiritual path and letting the rest follow – whether in the living room or the boardroom.
“Here you have 25 monks, most of them over 65, managing a thriving business of forest and agricultural products spread out over thousands of acres as well as a conference center, gift shop and website. They do it part-time and mostly in silence while engaging in hours of prayer every day,” Turak notes. “It shows that you can be successful not despite your spiritual focus but because of it. You learn to think about others instead of yourself and strip away the selfish delusions distorting your decision-making. You gain wisdom, equanimity, and the detachment to make decisions based on fact rather than fear. If you want to succeed, particularly in today’s economy, these attributes will pay off spiritually, personally and financially.”
Or, as Turak’s mentor, the late IBM executive Lou Mobley, used to say, “Business is not about getting things done. It’s about what’s worth doing in the first place.”
LEARNING FROM THE MASTERS
Now 56, Turak dropped out of the University of Pittsburgh at 21 to spend five years unraveling the riddle of life and death with a West Virginia Zen master named Richard Rose. After returning to Pitt to graduate, he traveled the country as a part-time carpet installer and full-time seeker of remarkable men. By chance – or maybe not – that quest led Turak into the business world.
In 1979, Turak became the protégé of Mobley, founder of the IBM Executive School and co-author of a well-regarded history of Big Blue. Turak studied with Mobley for two years while selling the consulting services of Mobley’s post-IBM business, Mobley and Associates. “Lou was a deeply spiritual guy who applied spiritual principles to the IBM Executive School with fantastic results,” Turak says. “He pounded into my head that an executive’s job is to create collective purpose. Profit, he said, is merely the yardstick that measures results.”
From there Turak moved on to work in executive capacities at MTV and the A&E Network during their startup stages and went on to a series of other executive and consulting positions at cable and software firms.
Eventually he found his way to Raleigh, N.C. and made his mark as a technology entrepreneur. His first company, Raleigh Group International, was sold to Israeli-based MuTek Solutions just before the dot-com bust of 2000. MuTek (renamed Identify Software) was acquired by BMC Software in 2006 for $150 million in cash.
FAITH & FORTUNE
Behind the scenes, however, Raleigh Group was actually a grand experiment in running a company according to spiritual principles. Turak had founded Raleigh Group in 1993 with four fellow spiritual seekers and one of his brothers. The goal was to put his spiritual business theory into practice.
“I was convinced that we could stick to spiritual principles like service and selflessness and succeed not despite these principles but because of them,” Turak says. “We didn’t even have a business plan, but we were committed to running a business according to spiritual values like putting other people first.”
As it turned out, Turak and his partners had ample opportunity to practice what they preached and to prove that it worked. Two years after starting the company as a software distributor, for example, their two major suppliers pulled out because their respective companies were being sold. Turak’s immediate reaction was to close the business, but his spiritual mentors had taught him to keep his commitments. “I knew if I gave up and left my partners in the lurch, my whole life would be a fraud, so I decided to hang on.”
Six weeks later, one of the suppliers asked Turak to take $2 million worth of software on account but refused to say why. Turak agreed and soon learned that the supplier was being purchased by Microsoft and had chosen his company to be the exclusive distributor of the $299 product during the transition period after the acquisition was finalized. “Suddenly we were the only place on the planet to buy this product, and it started raining money on our company – all because I refused to walk out on my friends.”
The upshot: two years after it was founded, Raleigh Group was named the eighth fastest growing company in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Then in 1997, another company they founded, Elsinore Technologies, became Microsoft’s 49th fastest growing Independent Software Vendor (ISV) out of 10,000 surveyed.
‘BROTHER JOHN’ BOOK
Since retiring in 2002, Turak continues to spend time at Mepkin Abbey, lecture, and lead groups of students at three North Carolina universities on spiritual issues through a non-profit organization called the Self Knowledge Symposium that he founded in 1998. He also coaches top executives and leads workshops for people striving to duplicate his own success through his service and selflessness management philosophy.
In addition, Turak is working on a book based on his essay Brother John that won the $100,000 grand prize in the John Templeton Foundation’s Power of Purpose Essay Contest in 2004. Turak’s essay, selected out of 7,351 entries from 97 countries, uses the story of a monk at Mepkin Abbey sharing an umbrella with him on a cold Christmas Eve to argue that spiritual self-transcendence through service and selflessness is the real purpose of life. Turak’s book will share the life and business lessons he learned from Mepkin Abbey and a lifelong commitment to spirituality.
“I have visited the monastery during the economic meltdown, and it’s business as usual: serving God by helping others. I guess being part of a 1,500-year-old tradition that survived the fall of Rome and the Bubonic Plague helps keep things in perspective,” Turak says. “If we act selflessly, everything else falls into place – in good times and bad.”
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