A new spirit at work

• In 1995, Unitel, a Canadian telecommunications company, was losing more than $1 million a day, with inferior products and services, and employee morale measured at one of the lowest levels of 500 North American companies. A new chief executive, Bill Catucci, led a dramatic turnaround by engaging employees in defining corporate values and developing structures to ensure they could live by them. The values they chose: integrity, customer delight, respect for people, innovation, teamwork, and prudent risk-taking.

By 1999, customer turnover had declined by 30 percent, revenues nearly doubled, and the company's value had quadrupled to $1 billion, according to At Work Journal. The firm, which became AT&T Canada, was also among the top five in North America in employee morale. "People are crying out for this," says Mr. Catucci of values-driven management. Now head of Regulatory DataCorp, he says the approach "is just as valid in Latin America and Europe."

• Some major companies in Australia and India are also in the vanguard. McKinsey & Co. and ANZ Bank have seen positive benefits from cultural-change initiatives. SREI International Financial Limited and the Times of India have introduced policies and programs to foster spiritual values.

In the United States, a 1999 study, "A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America," found executives hungry for models of practicing spirituality in the workplace without offending people; but lacking such models, many were afraid to use the word spirituality. Yet, the executives held very similar definitions of what it meant: "a total sense of connectedness in the universe; belief in a deity, and in a moral obligation to do good in the world," says Ian Mitroff, a professor at University of Southern California business school and coauthor of the study.

"We need to use the language of people in business," adds Richard Barrett, a former World Bank official who helped spur an international conference on spiritual values and development. "And values is where it is right now." In the past three years, his consulting firm has worked with more than 300 companies in 24 countries to help them create values-driven organizations.

Patricia Aburdene, coauthor of the Megatrends books, sees the rise of spirituality in the workplace as "a trend that is about to become a megatrend." She says it's reaching the "tipping point" for several reasons:

• The enormous stress people are under due to the economic and security crises of the past two years.

• Demographic data revealing a mushrooming segment of "cultural creatives" for whom values trump money and other trappings of success.

• Business leaders with their own notion of personal transformation or a spiritual path now bringing it into their institutions. (Spirituality in the field of medicine is a bellwether, she says.)

• A convergence of the movements of social responsibility and spirituality.

"All this is coming together to create a transformation of capitalism," Ms. Aburdene predicts. "The tenet of the Milton Friedman school that the sole purpose is to create economic value for shareholders is seen as having led us down the path to troubles, and this is compelling a rethinking of our philosophy of business."

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