9780142004098

Since Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi published the groundbreaking Flow more than a decade ago, world leaders such as Tony Blair and former President Clinton, and influential sports figures like Super Bowl champion coach Jimmy Johnson have all been inspired by the book. In today's corporate upheaval, a new business paradigm is evolving. While many CEOs are being exposed for their greed, truly visionary leaders believe in a goal that benefits themselves as well as others. They realize that it is their vision and "soul" that attract loyal employees willing to go above and beyond the call of corporate duty. And their employees are realizing the same thing: while 80 percent of adults claim they'd work even if they didn't have to, the majority of them can hardly wait to leave their jobs and get home. Good Business starts with the premise that this is an age in which business and work have replaced religion and politics as central forces in contemporary life. The book reveals how business leaders, managers, and even employees can find their "flow" and contribute not only to their own happiness, but also to a just and evolving society. It identifies the factors crucial to the operation of a good business: trust, the commitment to fostering the personal growth of employees, and the dedication to creating a product that helps mankind. Good Business is sure to become a must-read text for anyone who values the positive contributions of individuals in the changing world of business.

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Leading the Future

Our jobs determine to a large extent what our lives are like. Is what you do for a living making you ill? Does it keep you from becoming a more fully realized person? Do you feel ashamed of what you have to do at work? All too often, the answer to such questions is yes. Yet it does not have to be like that. Work can be one of the most joyful, most fulfilling aspects of life. Whether it will be or not depends on the actions we collectively take. If the firms that employ an increasing majority of the population are driven solely to satisfy the owners' greed at the expense of working conditions, of the stability of the community, and of the health of the environment, chances are that the quality of our lives-and that of our children-will be worse than it is now.

Fortunately, despite the scandals that have rocked the business world at the start of this century, there are still corporate leaders who understand that they are allowed to hold their privileges only because the rest of us expect them to improve the conditions of existence, rather than help to destroy them. This book is a survey of some of their values, their goals, their mode of operation-a guidebook for a way of conducting business that is both successful and humane.

While the book draws primarily on the experience of leaders of major corporations, it is really about how to improve one's work life at any level-be it janitor or manager. It tries to provide a context for a meaningful life in which work and the pursuit of
financial rewards can find their proper places. The men and women we interviewed* had been nominated by their peers because they were both successful and because they cared for more than success. In one way or another, they all had demonstrated that selfish advantage was not their sole motivation. Their collective wisdom provides a blueprint for doing business that is good in both senses: the material and the spiritual.

Now that the entire nation is finally calling the bluff of rogue CEOs, every business leader is eager to mouth pieties to camouflage his true priorities. After the corporate giant Enron collapsed and became a global byword for irresponsible management, one of its leading executives, Jeff Skilling, described his job as doing "God's work." His CEO, Kenneth Lay, had earlier declared: "I was, and am, a strong believer that one of the most satisfying things in life is to create a highly moral and ethical environment in which every individual is allowed and encouraged to realize that God-given potential."

These are worthy sentiments, but worse than useless if one's actions do not support them. As opposed to those leaders who use language only as a disguise, the people on whose experience this book is based actually have shown that they tried hard to create ethical environments in which individuals could realize their potentials. By no means did they always live up to their stated intentions; but their ideas, words, and example show that doing business can be much more fulfilling than most of us realize. So, based in large part on the experience of these exemplary CEOs, this book will discuss what it means to be a good leader, a good manager, and a good worker.

Bookstores are full of volumes containing very good advice about how to be an effective manager or successful leader. Often such books will instruct a reader to model his or her behavior on the cynical wisdom of Machiavelli, the relentless drive of Genghis Khan, or the ruthlessness of Attila the Hun as a way to achieve power and plunder.Good Businesshas a more modest ambition.

It will explore how leaders who have impressed their peers for both their business success and their commitment to broader social goals go about their jobs-what ambitions motivate them, and what kind of organizations they try to develop in pursuit of those ideals.

The necessity for considering such issues is simple: Today business leaders are among the most influential members of society. While they are all trained to generate profits, many of them are oblivious to the other responsibilities that their new societal leadership entails. In this book, visionary leaders will explain what they consider to be their duties and how they go about fulfilling them. In the process of examining their philosophies and their practical applications, we will focus especially on how leaders and managers and even the concerned employees of any organization can learn to contribute to the sum of human happiness, to the development of an enjoyable life that provides meaning, and to a society that is just and evolving.

These may seem like goals that are beyond human reach, and certainly outside the scope of a book dealing with business. But the way we make a living, the jobs we have, and the way our work is rewarded have a tremendous bearing on our lives, making them either exciting and rewarding, or dull and anxious. For that reason alone anyone in charge of a workplace is obliged to consider the question: How am I contributing to human well-being? This
is certainly not a concern that motivated Genghis Khan, or even Machiavelli. But to follow the examples of such social predators prevents business leaders from achieving their full potential. Of course there will always be single-mindedly ambitious executives concerned only with clawing their way to the top. But is such behavior really the kind of leadership we want in our society? In fact, there are enough people in business who do genuinely value organizations that promote happiness, and it is my hope that this book will help them.

As a first step, we should consider what it has meant to be a successful leader in the past, so that we can understand better what options the future may hold.

As humans, we cannot survive without hope. When we lack reasons for living apart from the urges that biology has built into our nervous system we soon revert to an animal level of existence, where only food, comfort, and sex matter. By contrast, the remarkable cultures that some of the great world civilizations have occasionally achieved were made possible by two very different prerequisites: a reasonable level of resources and the technology to use them, leading to a material surplus; and a defined set of goals that helped their citizens overcome the inevitable obstacles and tragedies inherent in living. If either of these conditions is absent, life devolves to a selfish scramble; if both are lacking, it becomes utterly hopeless.