The Interviews

Over the summer of 2008, I decided to interview a handful of people who ‘live somewhere in the overlap’ between spirituality (defined in the very broadest sense) and business. These interviewees included, for example, a corporate executive with a twenty-year meditation practice, a homeopath who counts some of New York’s power players among her clientele, and a legal consultant to hedge funds who took a multi-year sabbatical to study Kundalini yoga.

I decided to conduct the interviews for three reasons. On the most personal level, I am a business consultant and relatively recent practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism. As such I felt a growing need to investigate, and perhaps reconcile, the sense of schism between these two ‘polarities’ within me. Secondly, within my circle of friends and colleagues, and at the level of everyday life in New York City, it seemed as if ‘suddenly everyone is meditating’. Or no longer simply ‘doing yoga’ but now ‘developing a daily yoga practice’, or finding The Secret just old news.

And finally I conducted the interviews from a hard-to-articulate sense that something out there is burning. (All but one interview were conducted before this market melt-down, but the energy of its imminence was in every conversation I had.) On the broadest level, then, I conducted the interviews from a deep sense that the ‘forced separation’ of the realm of business and the real of spirituality is at the root much trouble brewing and boiling over in real time.

The things I heard in these interviews were, to my mind at least, remarkable in at least two ways. First, the ‘energy’ of the responses and the respondents was strong, clear, urgent. It was as if this energy itself commanded me to ‘sit up and pay attention’. And secondly, the themes that emerged were remarkably consistent. As Peter Senge and Otto Scharmer have pointed out in their ground-breaking work on ‘Presencing’, when you ask open questions and then listen quite carefully, you can hear what is trying to ‘emerge from the field of the future’.

Here then is a first installment of what wanted to emerge from the interviews.


The Cosmic Tipping Point is here!


- We are at a “gigantic, cosmic tipping point”, a kind of “second Axial Age” - akin to the one that happened around 2500 years ago when there was a sudden flourishing of major new spiritual/philosophical figures & systems of thinking

- The ‘established way’ is crumbling and some very new paradigm is trying to emerge. The feeling was very much that the ‘point of the tip’ is happening right now, today! Plus a deep sense that ‘it could tip in a very positive or very negative way.” I attempted to tease-out more from the interviews about what exactly is crumbling and what exactly is arising, and how that relates to business.


The Age of Interdependence

- The heart of the interview feedback was that the crumbling paradigm is ‘dualism’ (expressed variously as ‘me versus you’; ‘me right, you wrong’, hierarchy; ‘every man for himself’; ‘logical brain’, ‘patriarchy’…). And the emergent paradigm is ‘interdependence’ (‘we are all connected’, ‘collective intelligence’, ‘intuitive brain’, ‘effect follows cause’..)

- One interviewee articulated this shift very succinctly in respect the nature of current day business challenges – “the new kind of (business) challenges are the exact opposite of the Moon Shot. That was ultimately macho. One problem, one solution. Solved by hard logic. Conquering the thing that couldn’t fight back. Because it’s there. Essentially & fundamentally pointless! We can’t go looking in that same part of the brain to solve today’s challenges….the answer is just not located there.”

- Another interviewee laid-out an ‘interdependence manifesto’ for me, as if she had it already etched in stone and ready to roll. She told me
o “Not operating in accordance with the laws of the universe is ultimately a recipe for business failure
o More specifically, not recognizing the truth of interdependence and cause & effect is ultimately doomed
o Quite to the contrary, recognizing and operating in alignment with these universal laws & truths is a recipe for tapping into an unlimited supply of ideas, creativity, innovation, complex problem-solving abilities (the very resources that will be required to thrive in the new economy)
o In essence, recognizing and operating in alignment with these ‘truths’ is a recipe for tapping into an unlimited supply of abundance…a quantum win-win”

- However, it’s not so simplistic (or dualistic) as ‘something is ending and something else is beginning’, but perhaps that we are waking up to the truth that it has always been thus. As one interviewee explained
o Business and spirituality were never separate to begin with. The failure to recognize this inter-connection is what is manifesting today as toxicity in the workplace – stress, anger, distress, impoverishment
o As we reflect on our work lives we come to feel that ‘something is missing’. There is, perhaps, a growing reflection on this question of ‘what’s missing’ these days



We are the change


- I offer-up here the energy of the interviewees in terms of wanting to be part of helping the balance tip the ‘right’ way. Here is some of what they had to share about their aspiration to play a role in helping the change along
- “For those who are ‘tuned in’ to this meta-change, there is a deep sense of urgency…the whole meta-system will either tip in a ‘healthy’ or very destructive way”
- “For the scales to tip towards the positive side, one of the many things needed is to be able to translate some core ‘spiritual’ imperatives and concepts into the language of business. This is very challenging. The deeper one goes into the spiritual dimension, the more challenging it becomes…Just try bringing the discussion of, say, a Higher Power into the board room and see what happens!”
- “At the heart of this lies the challenge of making a clear, compelling and credible connection between positive ‘spiritual principles’ and tangibly better business results (versus a framework that pits ‘doing good’ against ‘doing well’)”
- “Those of us who live in the cross-over between these two worlds (of spirituality and business) and have recognized this challenge have our work cut out for us. Some of our key tasks/roles are
o Translation – how to translate these ideas so that they are hearable and digestible by the business world
o Innovators – how to build new kinds of frameworks and approaches that live in the cross-over space between the paradigms
o Prototyping – trying different models, experiments etc. until something sticks and works
o Propagators & networkers– how to spread the word, how to find each other and build critical mass”
- And finally, for this installment at least, I end with input from one of the interviewees describing in remarkably direct and daring language how the ‘worlds’ of spirituality and business are not two but one. “For me personally, as a (multi-billion dollar) company president, I always operated from an understanding that the success was coming through me not from me….that I am always tapping into an infinite source of abundance in a very real and ‘measurable’ way. The doubters would hear my approach and say it was soft, not realistic, and I would tell them ‘Just watch my results’…and I consistently delivered four, five, six times above my benchmarks.”