Monday, June 11, 2012

CAN SPIRITUALITY AND BIG BUSINESS TANGO?

WHICH ROLE DOES SPIRITUALITY PLAY IN
HOW YOU RUN YOUR BUSINESS COMPANY?
www.huffingtonpost.com -  It is with great pride and excitement that I have once more accepted the invitation of LOHAS 2012 (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) to dialogue with some of the world's top business leaders attending their premiere gathering of thought leaders at their 2012 conference in Colorado this year - June 12-14th, Boulder, Colo. As a leadership and executive coach, privileged with influencing the influencers in business, the issue most on my mind is the necessity for imbedding spirituality back into our business infrastructures. In re-reading important data collected in 1999 by Ian I. Mitroff and Elizabeth A. Denton (A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America) and Dov Seidman's 2012, "The How Report," it is my strong feeling that old and new surveys reflect the same truth: Most human stress is linked to a loss of spiritual foundation in the workplace. Our modern-day plague is not a physical disease, it's an emotional one - unhappiness.

The greatest source of the problem is the lack of humanism in how business is conducted globally. Personally, I don't care how the story has been spun for generations - survival of the fittest, a company's only responsibility is to its profitability, no pain no gain. Bottom line: we do not leave our souls at home when we go to work. Here are the questions I posed: - Does spirituality play a role in how you run your company? - If yes, can you speak about the influence of spirituality in your business model? - If not, can you share your thinking about omitting spirituality? For example, Jay Coen Gilbert, Co-founder of B Lab, says "the social Gospel, engaged Buddhism, karma yoga, tikkun olam, the sufi mystics... all the world's wisdom spiritual traditions say the same thing: We are interconnected, we should treat others as we wish to be treated, and we must be the change we seek in the world".

The author of the article, Debbie Robins, M.A., defines spirituality as a deep sense of interconnectedness with the accompanying behaviors that honor that level of caring. Those behaviors would not include slamming down phones, repeatedly cancelling meetings, or blaming and shaming anyone in person, on the phone, in email, or by text, she explains. Generally, in the field of business, we are surrounded by people with selfish tendency - who act in the plane of explotation - thinking they can favour their interest at the cost of the rest.

WHAT DO THE VEDIC TEACHINGS TELL US? 
Unless we cleanse the pollutions, the artificial impositions that are upon our mind we can’t understand our natural state of health. So the purpose of human life according to the great acharyas, according to the great scriptures is to clean the mind, to make it pure. ... Because think about it, is happiness something outside of yourself, is happiness something you can put in yourself? Real happiness is a state of consciousness. ... Every religious system every religious path that is actually authorized teaches how to clean your heart, how to purify your mind, how to see your true eternal self in the mirror of your consciousness. First thing is we have to stop throwing dirt in our mind by our activities. We should live according to ethical, moral principles. We should live in a spirit of service to others rather than exploitation of others.




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