God is my CEO

>> A local conference asks corporations to confront their own moral bankruptcy

by PHILIP PREVILLE

How wrong Senator McCarthy was. The Communists aren't the godless ones after all. We are.

This small grain of truth came to light at a conference held last weekend at the Université de Montréal. One by one, over the course of two days, participants took the microphone and spoke passionately about the crisis of global capitalism. Corporations are motivated exclusively by greed and cutthroat competitiveness, people said. They treat employees like dirt. They don't care for the environment. They ignore their own codes of ethics.

A gathering of the International Socialists? A rally against the MAI? Nope. Two things set this conference apart. For one, it was not a gathering of political types. The people saying these things were corporate employees, consultants and commerce professors, approximately 200 of them, paying $400 each, all gathered under one roof at the UdeM's prestigious business school, L'École des hautes études commerciales (HEC).

For another, it was a conference about spirituality--the First International Forum on Management, Ethics and Spirituality, to be precise. The people at the microphone weren't expressing political outrage or calling for any government intervention. They were talking about the lack of meaning in the market economy and in their jobs, and they were calling on corporations to reform themselves through some sort of non-denominational, spiritual salvation.

For Cordon Bleu Inc. president Robert Ouimet, a member of the Order of Canada and a co-organizer of the conference, talking about spirituality is the only way for the marketplace to deal with its excesses. "I dare you," the 64-year-old Ouimet challenged this reporter, "I dare you to try to accomplish some good in your lifetime through your work. I can tell you now, you will not be able to do it without adopting a sincere belief in some form of higher being."

Corporate self-help

Perhaps. But from the looks of things, it's also impossible to have a business meeting about spirituality: no one sticks to the agenda, and inevitably it becomes a self-help session. The conference paused numerous times to observe "moments of silence" and to reflect upon such things as the interconnectedness of all life forms, the root causes of poverty, and the lack of coherence in life.

On numerous occasions, participants turned the microphones into confessionals and gave emotional testimony about the soul-destroying nature of corporate work. One woman, near tears, talked about employees who, after years of taking orders and being criticized for minor errors, became unable to think for themselves. Another woman, a recent MBA graduate, berated the academics in the room for the ignorance of human dignity taught in business programs.

Although the proceedings were at times overwrought, the conference featured a number of high-profile speakers and insightful presentations. Claude Béland, the president of Quebec's credit-union conglomerate, Mouvement Desjardins, discussed how competition from the big banks eroded the co-operative, grassroots ethos of the province's caisses populaires. Michel Dion, a theology professor at the Université de Sherbrooke, presented a comparative study on the business ethics among Christians, Jews and Muslims--concluding that they share the same basic values.

Ouimet, meanwhile, emphasized the steps he has taken to bring a spiritual dimension to his own company. He has set up a non-denominational meditation room so that "people can go and speak to their god during the course of their workday." And he insists that all employees meet with their supervisors at least once per year, not as employees, but as human beings.

"For this meeting, they don't set an agenda and they don't take notes," Ouimet explains. "It's forbidden. They get together and talk about the things they can do to make their work more enjoyable. People build up a lot of resentment about little things they do to one another, and this meeting forces them to talk about it and resolve it. People have to like the place where they work."

There is no doubting Ouimet's sincerity, or the sincerity of most other people at the conference. The question is whether to doubt the usefulness of the conference's true objective: to transform corporations, not people, into spiritual entities. Can a corporation have a moral conscience and still turn a profit? For what it's worth, Jesus himself said it would be easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven. Since the whole point of any corporation is to make money, why is anyone even bothering to ask the question?

Consulting fad

The most cynical answer is: because there's even more money to be made. The issue of spirituality in the workplace has recently become fashionable in the corporate world, spawning a bevy of literature, conferences and consulting companies, all of which claim to hold the key to salvation. This conference at the HEC followed on the heels of a similar conference in Toronto last month, and is only a warmup for the much larger International Conference on Business and Consciousness next month in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

For $1,395, corporate executives can pick the best consulting brains in the spirituality sector: Laurie Beth Jones, author of Jesus, CEO; Gay Hendricks, co-author of The Corporate Mystic; Don Bradley, author of Customer Service: A Spiritual Experience; and Richard Barrett, a consultant who claims to have devised a type of spiritual "balance sheet," a scheme for actually measuring and quantifying a corporation's conscience. The Puerto Vallarta conference ends with a keynote address by New Age guru Deepak Chopra.

Solange Lefebvre, a theologian at the UdeM, says the popularity of such conferences is a result of the decline of religion. "A few decades ago, people were born into a religious society," explains Lefebvre. "Religion was the dominant force and everything else--family, politics, sexuality, even work--was profoundly influenced by morality.

"Today we live in a secular society and the religious influence has been lost. Now, people are trying to express themselves spiritually within a secular context. So the concern with spirituality and work is perfectly understandable. People want their work to be meaningful."

But to Ian Mitroff, a commerce professor at the University of Southern California, the Puerto Vallarta conference sounds like the worst kind of corporate-consulting fad. "I part company with all the New-Agey people in this field," says Mitroff, "because they think spirituality is all light and fluffy. It's not. If anything, spirituality is about managing the potential for evil."

According to Mitroff, any corporation which is serious about spiritual values has to completely restructure itself from top to bottom. "Corporations have been telling their employees things like, 'We want all our employees to be committed to their jobs with their whole person,' and 'We need your total creativity,'" says Mitroff. "Then they beat up on their employees for 40, 50, 60 hours a week, and leave them to heal themselves on their own time, through other institutions. That's just crazy. How dare they."

But, put another way, Mitroff's complaint is that corporations want your soul; if so, bringing spirituality into the workplace is just another way for them to get it.

"If corporations want your soul, that's not spirituality," Mitroff says. "You have to pursue spirituality for its own sake, out of a desire to act ethically and responsibly, and a recognition of the interconnectedness of life. You have to want to put an end to greed."