It Comes Naturally
Nearly three decades ago, when Tom and Kate Chappell moved to Maine seeking a simpler life and a deeper connection to the land, they began using natural foods and products.
But they found little on the personal care rack to suit their lifestyle. The solution? They founded Tom’s of Maine and, in 1974, launched the first toothpaste made entirely from natural ingredients.
The company, based in Kennebunk, Maine, expanded into other products and soon grew quite prosperous. But within a few years Tom Chappell realized that something was missing from his American dream. He felt stale and unfulfilled as an entrepreneur.
His midlife crisis came to a head when the new team of MBAs he had installed to propel the company into the mainstream pushed him to add artificial sweeteners to jazz up the taste of the signature toothpaste.
The suggestion, which so sharply opposed his original philosophy, riled Chappell, and he fought tooth and nail to keep additives out. But the battle was so bruising that he set out on a search for, literally, the meaning of life.
That search was conducted for three years at Harvard Divinity School, where he completed a master’s of theology while remaining as Tom’s chief executive. (The company has grown to 90 employees and annual sales of $28 million.)
Chappell, 55, now views Tom’s of Maine as a ministry of sorts, where he espouses the philosophy that doing right by employees, customers and the environment can enhance the bottom line. In 1993, he published “The Soul of a Business: Managing for Profit and the Common Good” (Bantam Books). He speaks often on the topic of how mind and spirit can work together to build market share.
His mantra: “You don’t have to sell your soul to make your numbers.”
Question: What does spirituality in the workplace mean to you?
Answer: I think spirituality really is a connectedness of the self with others vs. the kind of isolation and control that we have come from--that single-mindedness of profitability. If we get too focused on our private hopes, we become isolated and disconnected from one another, from our environment, from our communities, from the world at large. Spirituality is a process of opening up to one another and to creation, whether you think of it as creation or just the inherent worth of nature or human beings.
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Q: Can a corporate leader be a capitalist and a “moralist”?
A: Yes, I do believe that we leaders can integrate those things we expect of ourselves as decent and responsible human beings and those things we expect of ourselves as equity builders and profit makers. It means you have to develop a whole-minded approach to business rather than a single-minded focus on bottom-line decision making. You have to have a more holistic approach, which begins with yourself [as] the agent. We have more than a mind. We have a heart and a soul and we need to entertain our business considerations and make choices during the day that embrace the more enduring aspirations we have as people as well as the private aspirations we have as businesses building market share and profit and return on equity.
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Q: How can big business adjust to achieve a more spiritual orientation?
A: The method that really works is to ask yourself: Who are we as a company, [what are] our convictions and beliefs? By examining collectively what it is you believe in as a company, you get down to the deeper level of what you care about and you start tapping into deeper human concerns and aspirations. Out of the process of identifying your beliefs, you can turn that into a service mind-set. . . . Having a mission statement that’s rooted in the [company’s] set of beliefs--it has to start there. Otherwise, your ethics are always according to the arbitrariness of the people on the top. [A company must attempt] to have a set of values that has a more enduring cultural identity. In the case of Tom’s of Maine, people associate the company with environmental concerns. We use natural ingredients and [recycled, recyclable or reusable] packaging, and we donate at least 10% of our pretax profits to charities serving the environment, education, the arts and human needs. You can’t say one thing and do another. It’s not always easy. It’s easier to return to the tangible bottom line and numbers rather than long-term sustainability or the decency of human beings and diversity. They constrain you on one hand but enrich your strategy on the other.
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Q: How can an individual apply these principles in a hostile environment?
A: There are two steps individuals can take to maintain their integrity. First, they can speak out about business dilemmas or controversies in their small circles of influence, in a group or a team or a geographic location. [They could say], “I believe we shouldn’t do that because it’s dishonest” or “I believe we need to think about the longer-term impact of that decision on the environment or on our people.” Someone will greet them and say, “I actually feel that way too.” They find they will have company. You will begin a process of expanding on that from inside outward, a gradual change in the culture. The second step is simply to leave the company. There is a great deal of freedom people feel when they have tried to do the best within a system and every effort fails. The only freedom they’re going to get is to leave it. It will create uncertainty, insecurity and sacrifice, but it’s a beginning. [Sometimes] there’s no sense waiting for the forces that overpower them to come around.
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Q: How would you reconcile downsizing in such an environment?
A: Downsizing may be an inevitable step. The question is, how do you go about it? [Executives] do have a responsibility to the owners. If their policies and strategies have not worked out as planned, they might have no choice but to reduce the overhead. But do we just all of a sudden realize that we have to downsize? No. These conditions come on gradually. There are things management can do to prepare for them. They can decrease salaries at the top. They can stop filling new jobs when people leave the company. They can stop bonuses. All for the sake of trying to keep everyone employed and the company safe and whole. We’ve had to trim our expenses. We cut executive compensation by 25%, [used] attrition and stopped bonuses. We didn’t have to ask anybody to leave. Management got us in that position, and it was management that made the highest sacrifice.
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Q: Why has business been so resistant to this notion of a spirit-based workplace, the value of which seems so self-evident to you and others? Is there a payoff in keeping workers reined in?
A: It almost seems paradoxical in an age where time is money [to say], “Let’s take time to train our people. Let’s build a strategy with long-term impact instead of short-term gains.” The West is the youngest culture on Earth. We tend to think of either-or. With the spiritual, it’s more integrated, as in Eastern philosophies. We’re beginning to adopt the wisdom of these Eastern philosophies. . . . The fact is, leadership needs to engender spirit in the culture it already has and to awaken the spirit to the broader horizon of values that go beyond return on equity. It includes human potential, sustainability of the environment, contributing to the well-being of the communities in which we work, affirming differences in background and ethnic origins. All of these values need to be embraced and affirmed and included in an integrative approach to doing business.
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Q: Have things gotten better or worse in this regard?
A: What I’m seeing is improvement, though not everywhere, obviously. When you find people talking more and more about values and executing more and more in teams, these are good signs. When you find companies doing more and more for their people, to train them, to keep them and reward them. The free capital in all of this is goodness, and goodness is a spiritual affair. It’s a life force that people transmit from one to another. It’s our source of creative advantage or efficient solutions. And I think we need to start looking within our companies for competencies and for spiritual sourcing to transform and reorient how we think about and conduct business. Business used to be just a transaction between a provider and someone who had a need. Now business has in the last 10 or 20 years put the focus on investors. The investor is not the purpose of the business. The customer is the only excuse for a business, and I think we need to move the focus back to customers. [But] the investor has to be in there with the other stakeholders.
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Q: Are you worried that spirituality is just a fad, like total quality management or est?
A: I don’t see where else business can go except inward. I don’t think this is trendy or quirky. You’re going to hear a lot of lip service, but you’re going to see a lot of companies walking the talk if they get a taste of it and figure out how it works. That’s the subject of my next book: How do you make it work? [The working title is “Managing Upside Down: The Seven Intentions of Values-Centered Leadership.”]
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Q: What is the difference between being spirit-based and being socially responsible, another term making the rounds these days?
A: They’re very close. What we’re talking about . . . is goodness and responsibility, being responsible to owners, to customers, to the community, to employees, to the environment, to government. A socially responsible company is one that is looking at all of these and making policies and decisions in keeping with the multiple claims on our activities. A spiritual company goes a little bit deeper because it’s really getting to the fundamentals of responsible relations. We have to be in a spiritual mind-set. We need to have an attitude that is oriented toward others. That takes some preconditioning in the morning for me, whether it’s prayer or taking the long way to work, finding a way to connect with the natural world around me so that before I arrive at the office I am aware I’m part of a much more vast system of life. As leaders, we’re susceptible to an authoritarian and prideful approach. Spirituality helps us get more humility and a sense of proportion. It’s in that that we begin to find the real jewels and gems of creativity and business strategy. The outcome is that you have a richer product, a richer strategy, a more successful business because you’ve been more open to the universal aspirations of people.
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Q: Short of attending divinity school, what would you recommend for managers who want to embrace some of these ideals?
A: Managers can do a couple of things. First, they can have their personal mission statement--here’s what I believe in, here’s what I want to do with my life, here’s how I want to serve. Second, I think we all need to start becoming more intentional about developing a connectedness with the world beyond ourselves, whether that’s through prayer or meditation or sharing stories about life passages. We ask that our employees devote 5% of their paid time to volunteerism in the community. That means we expect them to give two hours of public service a week. It motivates people and gets them in touch with what they care about. It develops this “others” orientation. The wisdom of asking people to do volunteer work is that they not only feel better about themselves, but they also do a better job at work. They are more motivated, more efficient, more creative--and I’ll take that any day. The paradox here is that you have to give before you can receive. We’re all experimenting. There’s awareness, there’s excitement. We’re all trying different things.
