Spiritual Business Processes

Working through what will be different this year, I thought about the age-old concept of karma. If we do good things, good things follow. All effort eventually leads to reward, either good or bad.

This is an old thinking pattern that some would describe as a brutal law of nature. Karma means action or deed.

Karma as a Business Process

The concept of spirituality in business is not new. But to what extent do we look at the cosmically good consequences of our business processes?

A bad execution step or link step in a business process has the consequence of a chain reaction that may eventually lead to the demise of the business.

Likewise, a small step, well done, fuels the success of a business.

Measure What Is Left Undone

Another practical step is not only to measure what we have done, but to ask what we have left undone.

How much time ends up being spent on discussing the bad, while actually we should be focusing on how to do more good?

How much time do we spend on poor performers versus our star performers? In my experience, most businesses get consumed by having to deal with the negative side of this equation.

Is leadership not simply connecting the dots between processes and making sure they flow?

The Eightfold Path in Process Terms

The eightfold path involves the participant having the right view, right intentions, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right concentration and right mindfulness.

This becomes even more profound once applied as principles in a business process context.

Spiritual Measures

When we choose KPIs and metrics, we generally look at outputs. It would be interesting to study to what extent employing some of these spiritual principles as measures would influence the outcome of business processes.

Maybe this is an opportunity for spiritual six sigma.

Some studies have shown that customer and management engagement are among the best predictors of individual job satisfaction and financial performance, compared with bureaucracy and rigid job descriptions being among the most negative factors.

What is engagement, other than sharing a bit of yourself in your day-to-day work, making things interesting, increasing attention and encouraging right behaviour?

Practical Choices

On a practical level, the principle becomes simple:

• When you know it can happen, say yes or maybe rather than no.
• When you can decide to fight or to make peace, make peace.
• When you start getting angry, let it go and be the better person.
• When there is an opportunity that will make it better in the long term, do the right thing.
• When someone complains about the grind, be the one who encourages and shows genuine concern for others.
• When a customer has a problem, actually solve it.
• When you do a job, make sure it is done right, completed properly, closed off and communicated clearly.

That way there is no action, no karma, that has not come to fruition.

Profitability and Consequence

When you decide on profitability, consider the long term: what is right and what is sustainable.

Also think about cause and effect when deciding on changes internally and externally to your strategy. I think that if sales was done in a more spiritually correct way, there would be a lot more solutions, more collaboration and sometimes a simple acceptance that the time may not be right.

Strangely, it sounds conservative. But it would radically change our world if we all applied principles, values and spirit to our work and doings.

The Way of Peace

I think a lot of the time we think of spirituality as a process that happens outside of the business process. But it is really present in every interaction between two people in a business context.

There are always two ways: the way of war and the way of peace.

In business we often consider the art of war. Peace is harder than war and takes a lot more skill, but in the long term it has a better outcome.