Looking All Over--Deeper and Higher, Inside and Out--for Meaning of Work

The audaciously titled First International Symposium on Spirituality and Business will be held next month in Boston, with the aim of attracting the emerging community “engaged in transforming commerce and the global economy and creating a lively and vibrant workplace that uplifts the human spirit.”

It is hardly the first conference on the subject, although it is the first to be sponsored by a theological school (Andover Newton). Heap it atop the bevy of recent business book titles laced with the word “soul” or “spirit” (“Redefining Corporate Soul,” “The Stirring of Soul in the Workplace,” “Liberating the Human Spirit in the Workplace,” “The Soul of a Business”), and it’s clear that something’s afoot.

Indeed, a groundswell is building in corporate America, as chief executives and cubicle dwellers alike search for more meaning in their work lives. Increasingly, workers are realizing that big bonuses and fancy titles don’t satisfy a deeper yearning to do something that matters, to make a difference in life. The movement signifies a remarkable turnaround from a few short years ago, when workers feared for their livelihoods as layoffs crackled through the nation like an untamed wildfire.

The latest to weigh in on the topic is management philosopher Charles Handy, whose just-published tome is titled “The Hungry Spirit” (Broadway Books).

“I am concerned,” writes the noted Irish author of nine other books, including “The Age of Unreason” and “Beyond Certainty,” “by the absence of a more transcendent view of life and the purposes of life. . . . Capitalism, which was supposed to set us free, may be enslaving us in its turn, with its insistence on the dominance of the economic imperative.”

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Handy, who was in Los Angeles last week to promote the book, talked about some of the experiences and revelations that led him to write this highly personal treatise.

One was the death 20 years ago of his father, the rector of a small Protestant parish in rural Ireland, whom Handy viewed as an ordinary, unambitious man whose life was not worth emulating. Yet so many people showed up at the funeral that Handy realized his father had affected lives in ways he had never imagined. (Think of George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”) Handy, meanwhile, had dashed about seeking fame and fortune as an oil company executive and professor, giving his family short shrift and emerging unsatisfied.

Another influence was his wife, Elizabeth, a photographer, who encouraged Handy to forgo the comfortable life of corporations and universities and push himself to new heights.

In much the same way, Handy advocates that companies foster an environment in which employees can individually seek a purpose at work and strive to reach beyond themselves.

“If you allow people to develop all their capabilities and . . . they’re immersed in a cause, then you have a wonderful organization, with everybody experimenting and growing,” he says.

Organizations as a whole, too, must learn what their “consuming purpose” is and how they can help society. Some great companies, he notes, already have an identity and know why they exist. He cites examples from James Collins and Jerry Porras, authors who have researched long-lasting companies, including Mary Kay Cosmetics (where the goal is to give unlimited opportunity to women), Wal-Mart (to give ordinary folk the chance to buy the same things as rich people) and Walt Disney (to make people happy).

“The business of business is not just business,” Handy says. “It really is a great endeavor. We trivialize it by saying it’s just making money for shareholders.

“It’s very odd, I think, that Anglo American capitalism feels companies owe more to shareholders than to workers, customers and society.” Increasingly, he notes, the “precious parts of the business are its people. If we don’t pay more attention to those human assets, they will use their legs and leave us.”

This sort of compassionate vision was exemplified by Aaron Feuerstein, the Massachusetts mill owner who became an unlikely celebrity after a fire destroyed his Polartec fleece manufacturing plant in late 1995. Feuerstein continued to pay his employees until the facility was rebuilt; Malden Mills’ three divisions are now running at full capacity, and most of the employees are back at work.

What is called for, Handy says, is nothing less than a reinterpretation of capitalism and a rethinking of companies. One key will be viewing workers as corporate citizens, with a say in major decisions affecting an organization’s future. Handy says these “citizen companies” will have written constitutions, no less.

“A decent capitalism,” he writes in “The Hungry Spirit,” will be built on “companies who aim for immortality and hope that they will deserve it, companies who are communities not properties, who see their people as citizens with all that that implies.”

Does your company encourage employees to experiment and grow? Tell us about it. Write to Martha Groves, Corporate Currents, Business Section, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053, or e-mail martha.groves@

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