Jane’s 5 Universal Business Laws

Over the course of my interviews so far with people who live somewhere in the overlap between spirituality (defined in the broadest possible sense of the word) and business the most fruitful dialog of all was with Jane (I have changed her name here).

Jane is a partner in a legal consulting firm that operates in the very highest echelons of the world of New York City big finance. She is also a 30-year student of many aspects of Eastern-oriented spirituality. A teenager in the Sixties, Jane maintained, matured & deepened her connection to the schools of Eastern mysticism which blew into America in a rather ‘raw’ form with Hippie-dom and psychedelia.

I met Jane in the formal boardroom of her corporate offices in midtown Manhattan. I explained the subject of my interviews, a little about my motivation for conducting them, and then went right into questions about spirituality and business in the most general sense.

I felt, I have to say, rather intimidated by my surroundings and a little embarrassed to be asking about a think so obviously ‘touchy feely’ to a be-suited lawyer. It was, however, apparent from the first few minutes of the conversation that Jane is, in fact, on a spiritual/business mission…..a mission to help bring business – real, big business - into alignment with what she termed ‘universal law’.

The recent happenings of the stock market are, she explained with the smoothness of a closing argument, the direct consequence of businesses violating this universal law (while still, for the most part at least, sticking to the letter of the corporate law). Even as we speak, the global banking system is - the argument ran - suffering the consequences of operating without a full appreciation of universal (one could say spiritual) truths such as interdependence and cause/effect (also known as karma!).

My goal for the rest of the dialog with Jane was to have her codify what these universal laws are, from her perspective at least. Again, the mission-driven quality of her answers was palpable. The feeling I came away with was that she had been crafting these ideas for many years, biding her time until the ‘market’ was ready to hear them. By ‘market readiness’ here I mean that businesses are in enough financial pain, and finding traditional solutions ineffective, and therefore open to perhaps considering more radical alternatives.

Here then are Jane’s 5 Laws of Spirituality & Business, as best as I could capture them.



1) The law of cause & effect – if an action, policy or institution has negative downstream consequences for any constituent (people, the planet, animals….), that action, policy or institution is sowing seeds that will economically dis-benefit that organization in the longer term. One needs to look no further than how the sub-prime situation has played out for the very institutions that benefitted so enormously in the short-term.


2) The law of intention – The impact of an action taken in any business is ultimately dictated by the intention behind it. It a business gives away a million dollars so it can secure social permission to commit a harmful act, that act of ‘apparent philanthropy’ will backfire. Conversely acts done with positive intent which ‘fail’ or appear problematic at first will eventually accrue benefit to the organization. The J&J Tylenol crisis is a powerful example of this law in action. After finding that Tylenol was possibly dangerous to consumers’ health (unintentional) J&J made a multi-million dollar decision to recall it from the shelves. J&J went of from this crisis to become one of the world’s most successful businesses, with arguably the world’s most positive and valuable brand reputations.

3) The law of abundance – This law poses a radically alternative way to think about resource – as infinite. In this way of thinking, classical economic theory is nothing more than an elaborate form of scarcity thinking….”There is only so much to go around, so we have to fight for a bigger slice”. In abundance thinking, the core premise is that wealth (and everything else) is without end. A new idea is created (out of nowhere….out of creativity), that idea becomes, say, the personal computer, and billions of dollars of wealth is created from that same nowhere. That nowhere is the source of infinite abundance that is available always to everyone.

4) The law of transparency – Nothing is hidden from the universe. There is, in the end, no point in trying to ‘hide’ anything at all. This is in many ways connected to cause and effect and intention as described above. The point is, I think, that there is a lot of talk these days about making corporations more transparent….when in fact they already are transparent. If you are running one of these organizations you may as well accept this fact and align with it more and more fully….because the universe is ‘exposing’ in the end. Look at Spitzer. Look at Kozlowski. Look at Enron. Truth will out.

5) The law of hierarchy – This law could also be expressed in the phrase ‘as above, so below’. Organizations as a whole will mirror almost exactly the core characteristics of their leaders. One way of looking at organizations is simply as a gigantic, amplified mirror images of their leadership. This is not a call to ‘blame’ leaders for the dysfunctions of the organizations, but more a call to leaders to look within and take responsibility for the necessary work on themselves to heal their organizations and help them prosper.