Success, Stress, and Purpose in Today’s Business World

Ken Costa

Rediscovering the religious debate in the corporation

The title for this talk is easier to formulate than it is to answer. Where does one begin? A discussion on success raises as many questions about definition, objectives, and values as there are people in the room. Groucho Marx once pronounced, ‘The key to success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made!’ I am trying to look at success, stress, and purpose from a distinctive perspective. That is a values-based, or specifically Christian, point of view.

But are the two concepts, ‘success’ and ‘Christian teaching’ not diametrically opposed? Surely to be successful one needs to thrive in the competitive, cut-throat demands of the marketplace. There is a widespread popular view that God and the pursuit of success simply don’t mix. Was CNN founder Ted Turner right when he said that Christianity is for losers? As you can imagine, I think not.

The Inconvenient Truth

I recognise that faith is not easy territory. I do not know what your views are on the question of a faith-based values system. Some here would be existing shareholders; having taken the risks of faith you are therefore enjoying its rewards. Others are perhaps convertible bond holders looking for down-side protection of their risk—not yet being prepared to convert into the ordinary equity of belief. Others—the loan stockholders, are perhaps prepared to lend their personal capital and friendship to the God enterprise but do not wish to participate in the equity. Others simply want to invest elsewhere. This is made more complicated as some come from a church background, and others like Herbert Asquith claim to be a buttress of the church: supporting it from the outside.

I believe passionately that the Judaeo-Christian tradition gives all of us—whether members of a faith community or not—practical advice on how to be successful in life, minimise stress associated with our complex everyday lives, and live values-based lives.

Before looking at the issues in detail, it’s worth remembering that for most of our adult lives, religion has been air-brushed out of polite conversation and critical thinking and yet, irritatingly to modern commentators, religion refuses to fade out of the picture. In a recent article in the Spectator, Matthew Parris, examining the dominance of the character and teachings of Jesus, wrote,

There is an annoying knot of gristle at the very centre of the Christian Church, and it is called Christ. Chew and chew though Christians do, time and again pushing this indigestible, discomfiting, and in some ways unlovely object to the edge of the ecclesiastical plate, they cannot obliterate it. It is not least for this that I, an avowed atheist, feel such huge respect for him.

He went on:

When we consider all those painfully counterintuitive sayings and parables—the Prodigal Son, the idea that it is no good restraining your actions if your thoughts are bad, the impatience with good works (‘the poor always ye have with you’) except as a means for personal purification—and when we consider how Jesus keeps saying (from the viewpoint of one with a Thought for the Day to compose) the wrong thing, it becomes ever clearer that he must have been real: if Jesus had been a hoax, the Church could have invented somebody so much more convenient.

The Inconvenient Truth of our time is not climate, important as it is, but Christ. After 2000 years he continues to make his presence felt. Augustine made it clear that our hearts were made for God and we will not rest until they are rested on him.

After a long modernist darkness, religious discussion is now coming out of the shadows and beginning to be debated in depth, in practically every walk of life. For example in the recent Intelligence Squared debate on religion, the debate was sold out and the venue had to be moved due to unprecedented demand for tickets. Our generation, to my mind, will increasingly be characterised by a religious debate and the need for dialogue between religions will become imperative. For many this is a frightening possibility, but it should not be.

When I attended the World Economic Forum at Davos some years ago, the former president of Mexico, Vicente Fox, gave a startling conclusion to an address to this political and economic forum. He said:

No aspect of contemporary life is more notable and less understood than the spiritual discontent and restlessness that is spreading worldwide. This unease is present among those who are safe and wealthy as well as among the poor and desperate. We can now see throughout the world a rejection of crass materialism and an intense, undirected desire for spiritual rebirth.

Finding meaning and purpose in life is, I believe, the greatest global challenge of our time. The search is as essential to establishing lasting peace, sustainable economic activity, and strong communities at ease with each other as any of the other major challenges like climate change, elimination of extreme poverty, or globalisation.

Fox describes the desire for renewal as ‘intense.’ I believe he is right. There is a new intensity in the search for values and a meaningful way of life. Perhaps not at the desk yet, but in the pub and after work the topics of discussion increasingly take on an ethical or religious dimension. This is not surprising. The surge in spiritual hunger, particularly in young people, has increased, and the institutional church has largely found itself unable to provide the necessary food. So, many people’s search continues without guidance—undirected. This undirected search often leads sadly into the dead ends of contemporary fads.

Holistic Grammar

We need to discover a new way of being able to discuss moral and religious topics precisely because the questions being asked are of fundamental importance to living lives at ease with oneself, others, and, I would add, with God. During the drought of the dominance of modernist thinking, our parched souls have not ceased the search for meaning. The God-issue simply will not go away. But we have lost the grammar of ethical and religious discourse. It needs urgent re-discovery as a vital tool of understanding—not only generally, but particularly at work as we try to value the distinctive contributions of people of different faiths and to find a moral framework for our corporate life.

I noticed in the discussion for the change in the teaching methods at Harvard that a new emphasis will appear. Religion will become one of the core courses in the curriculum. For too long, in the title of Harry Lewis’ book on education, our universities like our businesses have pursued Excellence Without a Soul. A postmodern generation seeks both excellence and soul.

We live in a globalised world and yet the debate on globalisation seems to take place as if Hayek’s ‘economic man’ was the only determinant in the debate. Satisfying the desires of this detached, rational, and probably agnostic person has, for most of our lives, been the litmus test for success. But there is a wider and more pressing holistic agenda emerging which requires an understanding of corporate social responsibility, personal commitment, and sustainable human partnerships as well as pure economics.

Globalisation was meant to weaken religious activity in favour of a homogenised international ‘fusion culture’ dominated by economics but has turned out to have the opposite effect. Every international corporation understands the need to work with cultural diversity. But diversity is not merely a neutral tolerance of any and every faith. It now requires us to a greater understanding of the motivations, attitudes, and aspirations of the people in different cultures if we wish to be successful in drawing the best out of a productive and happy workforce.

And we read that the recently acquired Aston Martin, that favourite of 007, will be financed by Islamic bonds by its new owners. At one level this is merely a novel financing technique created by quick-witted corporate financiers, a further example of the way in which different cultures and religions are accommodated in the capital markets. But at another level there is the challenge to understand a particular facet of Muslim faith which should lead to a wider understanding of their creed.

There is an urban myth that material prosperity and material success creates happiness. The urban truth is that this post-war myth is just that. A myth. We have elevated capitalism to what it never was—and could never claim to be—the apotheosis of perfection. Capitalism is a mechanism, perhaps the best we know, but it can’t and never set out to provide purpose for life, define success, or answer the question ‘Why?’

The market mechanism is not the index of success. Christians—and indeed those faith groups who seek a values-based way of doing business—have to assert repeatedly that the market mechanism is a powerful servant and a poor master. There needs to be a values-based context within which the system operates.

Debating the Core

In rediscovering faith there is a rediscovery not just of selfish individualism but of self-interested individuals also concerned for their communities. After all, we face a choice: either we will have to increase regulation over every aspect of personal and corporate life, or there will emerge a new broad-based consensus of values—inspired by the great faiths—that will underpin a new ethic for our business lives, thereby increasing responsibility and reducing the need for the current ineffective but exponential growth in regulation. Of course, we live in an imperfect world and success cannot be seen as gaming the system by sailing close to the regulatory wind. There is a need for a broader understanding of the attitudes, the motivations, the standards of integrity and transparency through which any successful person and organisation will be judged.

In this rediscovery of religious debate, we can foster an extraordinary healthy dialogue by asking the questions of where the most fundamental notions of our commercial life come from. We have lost the connectivity to the roots of so much of the operating system of our financial web. Deep in the Judaeo-Christian tradition will be found the bases for the core values of commercial life: respect of transactions—dictum meum pactum—is part of the vocabulary of the New Testament.

To date, the prevailing view is simply that religion should be left outside the workplace. I understand the thinking behind this notion. After all, who would wish to encourage acrimonious polemic at work? But my basic view is that whereas this was satisfying to a previous generation, emasculated of spirituality, it will not be to a current one, who are restless and searching for meaning, trying to find a broader ethical context within which their day-to-day work, their productive and creative energies, can be deployed.

In this respect, a deeper understanding and a less-embarrassed acceptance of faith based communities in the workplace could allow for the unleashing of a wave of creative energy and partnerships that will strengthen our fragile and tested organisations, all of whom are struggling to retain people within the organisations who question not only their purposes in life, but the purpose of the entire organisation. Henry Ford sullenly complained that he asked his recruiters for executives and they provided him with people instead. Every corporation wishes to have a greater understanding of its people—what makes them tick, what motivates and inspires them. Space will be needed to explore this dimension if we are to have fulfilled, rounded, and well-adjusted people who feel they are understood, working in our institutions.

Success Characterised by Calling

What then characterises the modern successful person? At its very heart I believe that there is a sense of personal calling, a deep internalised sense of destiny with a desire to leave the world a better place. This is crucial to an understanding of success. Calling is not some random event—at least not to the Christian. Our presence in the world is not the result of some divine chaos theory; the flap of an angelic wing in the heavenlies resulting in my having to go to work on Monday.

The successful person is therefore one who is convinced that he or she is called to fulfil a purpose greater than satisfying their own personal ambitions. That is why fulfilment in the search for purpose in life is so linked to our calling. Os Guinness, a mentor to the Trinity Forum, has a telling phrase. He says the trouble with modern people is that we have ‘too much to live with, and too little to live for.’ Some feel they have time and not enough money. Others feel they have money and not enough time, ‘but for most of us, in the midst of material plenty we have spiritual poverty.’ We are largely confused, seeking purpose in means but not in ends. How do we emerge from this spiritual poverty and live enriched lives in the workplace, in the home, in the gym, in our relationships?

I recently had a lunch with the chairman of a FTSE company. At the end of lunch he turned to me and said that he had been reviewing his life. There were several boxes to be ticked. The first was work and he felt—rightly, in my view—that he had been a success. The second was his family relationships. He had been divorced and had made a special effort to make sure that his relationships with his children of his first marriage and his new family were good. This had not been easy but he felt that this was a part of his life which was under control. Another box he marked friendships. During the year he had paid particular attention to his friends, especially those he had neglected in the ceaseless demands of the workplace. He felt enriched by these efforts to rekindle friendships from university and elsewhere.

Then he turned to me and said, ‘But there is one box that is unfilled. I don’t know what to call it, but it would have something to do with the spiritual. I need to make sends of this non-material aspect of my life as I suspect it will give a key to a fuller meaning to the other parts of my life. Somehow this is the missing part of my life.’

Stress and Meaning

Being successful is to discover, in the neglected spiritual dimension, our full humanity, and to be able to enjoy creativity and success at work, and also to have the inner resources and energy to survive stress and the ever-escalating demands of travel, performance, and achievement.

Christ’s legacy to his followers is that they will know peace. And yet wherever we look we are stressed out. How do we reconcile theory with our own practical experience? Stress is not merely physical, but also spiritual. Above all, stress destroys perspective, and forces us to be anxious, introspective, and self-absorbed. Stress strangles our relationships with other people and also with God. Choked by stress, we become obsessive and lose the ability to think beyond a current fixation. How then do we lift our heads to see the wider picture and cope with these bouts of stress we all face? To be clear, many of us thrive under pressure, but wilt under persistent stress.

We cannot deal with the symptoms of stress without recognising one unmistakeable fact. In its very root the stressful lives we lead occur largely as a result of our failure to follow the instructions for living set out in the original prospectus in creation. Lives lived independently of God cannot but be stressful ones, and learning dependence means living in freedom.

I would like to suggest three pointers in this quest. T. S. Eliot in the Four Quartets says that ‘in my end is my beginning.’ One way or another, to live a life of purpose means having to determine the direction in which one is travelling. In Isaiah the prophet writes that God knows the end from the beginning. In the search for meaningful lives we will not be able to find a constantly coherent description of the meaning of life in the atomised, unconnected activities of day-to-day living. All of us—of faith or of none—need to resolve the ultimate question of why I am doing what I am doing, and is there any ultimate end to that activity.

Sustained by Hope

This fixing of our attention to the future needs to be sustained on a day-to-day basis if it is to be effective at work, if it is to provide inspiration greater than that of monetary compensation for the achievements that we long for. Christians are ambitious precisely because they are hopeful. Hope gives energy for day-to-day life. The examples are myriad of the exhaustion and hopelessness that saps the spiritual vitality of work and the nation generally.

The poet Ben Okri wrote of this lack of spiritual oxygen in our society.

‘They are only exhausted
Who think they are
They are only exhausted who no longer
Have a reason to strive
And dream and hope.’
. . . There is no exhaustion
Where there is much to be hoped for,
Much to work towards.’

In the Christian doctrine of resurrection there is unleashed a power that comes from outside of ourselves, that operates in our lives on a day-to-day basis, sustaining, driving, and motivating our activities. Failure and disappointment become tolerable only because of the hope that, as the death of Christ was seen to be a failure by some, the resurrection vindicated a new life.

How often isn’t this repeated when we fail in a project at work, are not promoted, are sacked? We know much of the muscularity of faith and also of the tenderness of love. But hope is the forgotten virtue of our age and the essential ingredient for a successful and purposeful life at work. We have trivialised and domesticated hope to being no more than whimsy or optimism. ‘I hope to win the pitch for this business.’ But radical Christian hope attacks the central anxiety of our age. We don’t know the future. God alone does. Hope therefore looks at the gruesome reality of hard, difficult and sometimes impossible decisions that we have to take each day. And without ignoring these realities, empowers us to tackle them to the best of our ability and with confidence.

That is the strength of the power of God at work. Hope and perseverance go together. Without hope, why persevere? Why not live for the moment, as much of dysfunctional Western society seems to want to do? But without perseverance hope will fall at the first fence. Augustine said that the twin daughters of hope were anger and courage. To be successful is to know God’s anger at injustice and to be willing to respond with courage. Every leader will confront and wish to correct injustices, some at work and relatively minor—the unfair treatment of a colleague—others wider in the society at large.

Essential to the pursuit of hope is that we are passionate about the things we care for—our families, our relationships, our jobs, our communities, the environment. The greatest mistake that the church has made is to divide those at work from those in the church, and to seem to anoint spirituality as being something akin to an emigration from the world. Christianity is a highly materialist faith. The teachings of Jesus abound with everyday examples of people engaged in work, trading, settling accounts, paying debts, being rewarded for work done. God created us with material needs—food, water, other resources. He did so to enable us to be creative and productive and in so doing to glorify him through our work.

Let me give you an example: when a trader buys securities, he exercises knowledge, analytical skill, judgment, conviction, quick-wittedness, planning for the future, providing a service, and communicating. If he buys at a fair price another party benefits and the seed for a future and continuing win-win relationship is established. These are the attributes we share with God. Not surprisingly, as were created in his image. Of course if the trade is accompanied by greed, insider trading, unfair advantage, the transaction is tarnished. But the distortions that sometimes accompany commercial transactions should not lead us to the view that competition, trading, making profit are somehow wrong. On the contrary, properly exercised they are instruments of a god-given economy, directed at efficiency and service to others.

It is worth remembering the example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that apostle of hope who was murdered by the Nazis, who had the opposite and much more Biblical view when he called Christians to be ‘this-worldly,’ by which he meant that we were to have a radical engagement with the everyday world around us—sharing its pains, confusion, pathologies, and crises, while struggling at work with the harshness of commercial compromises, all the while pointing to the joy of the hope in the risen Christ. In this respect my work station is also my worship station.

Wisdom for the marketplace

Not only is success to be determined by knowing why we are here and by hoping for the future but also by demonstrating that most desperately needed value of our age, wisdom. The commercial and financial world has become knowledge-long and wisdom-short.

At the end of 2005 the Queen addressed the General Synod of the Church of England and reminded them of the hunger for meaning in our knowledge-based society.

When so much is in flux, when limitless amounts of information, much of it ephemeral, are instantly accessible on demand, there is a renewed hunger for that which endures and gives meaning. The Christian church can speak uniquely to that need, for at the heart of our faith stands the conviction that all people, irrespective of race, background, or circumstances, can find lasting significance and purpose in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The Google generation has reinforced the message: ‘Google and you will find.’ Not only do we have more knowledge now than ever before, but this knowledge is accessible and able to be mined simultaneously, as easily on the frenzied trading floors of our financial centres as in the dusty community post offices and internet portals of rural Africa. We have been overwhelmed by knowledge and the mere access to this knowledge base has not increased our wisdom nor made us happier, nor satisfied that whoever seeks will find, not mere knowledge but the key to living well. To truly understand this, we need to recover the essence of wisdom at work.

The wise person is not only wise in making practical choices, aware of the consequences of actions at work, but is one who is able to act in this way in every department of life. Whole-of-life policies are not just for insurance salespeople. They apply to our day-to-day lives at work. A fully integrated person struggling with the difficult issues of daily decisions, but conscious of hope, in service to others, is better able to enjoy work, be contented, and relax in the success of colleagues as well as enjoying the rich range of relationships at work.

In his introduction to that repository of wisdom, the book of Proverbs, Eugene Peterson, a translator of the Bible, describes wisdom as having to do with

being skilful in honouring our parents and raising our children, handling our money and conducting our sexual lives, going to work and exercising leadership, using words well and treating friends kindly, eating and drinking healthily, cultivating emotions in ourselves and attitudes towards others that make for peace. Threaded through all these items is the insistence that the way we think of and respond to God is the most practical thing we do. In matters of everyday practicality, nothing, absolutely nothing, takes precedence over God.

God at Work

Here lies the truth: God is at work in this world. The ‘Our Father’ reminds us that his will is done on earth. As it is in heaven. Earth comes first. We remember that this God knows no sacred or secular divide. Wisdom is meant for the marketplace. The Lord of compassion is also the Lord of commerce. The Lord of prayer is also the Lord of profit. The Lord of mission is also the Lord of the money markets.

Through all of this it is clear to me that the great activity of the Spirit of God in our age is not to make us more religious. On the contrary it is to make us more human, more aware of the needs of others, more concerned for our environment, and more determined to be creative at work, to steward the resources he has given, to make a profit, to earn well, and to be generous with our time, our energy, and our money.

The early church leader, Irenaeus, said that the glory of God is a human being fully alive. We are fully alive to God when we live lives fulfilled to the specifications of the original prospectus the Creator gave us when he made us. Our first step is therefore to realign our patterns of living, our aspirations, desires, and achievements at work.

Michael Caine was once asked to differentiate between a great movie star and a great actor. His reply was instructive. The movie star says, ‘How can I change the script and story line to fit my personality?’ The great actor says, ‘How can I change my personality to fit the script and do justice to the story?’ If we want to be written into God’s script for the world, we therefore need to be prepared to change our plans if they are at odds with his purposes, to yield our programmes if they are at variance with his priorities.

The poverty of prosperity

We need at the same time to recognise that the prevailing structure of our society is based on an atomised view of life that celebrates a very individualistic ethic demonstrated by the widespread and relentless pursuit of riches. But to seek wealth without caring for others is ultimately to experience poverty. We are impoverished whenever the wider interests of humanity are excluded from our everyday working lives. Our spirituality is not personal and detached but engaged with the critical issues of our time. Purposeful, successful lives are spiritually enriched in direct proportion to the degree to which we are prepared to commit ourselves to the example of Jesus, enjoying prosperity, being ambitious, while serving others and caring for the marginalised and the excluded.

There is a haunting judgment in the book of Malachi in which God says to the people of Israel that if they disregard his ways, he will curse their blessings. We see each day the tragic consequences of the way in which we have inflicted on ourselves this judgement.

We are prosperous, but our family life is fragmenting before our very eyes. We have a chronic fear of the future. We are frightened in our streets as crimes against the person grow, and in a myriad of ways we see the tapestry of our society torn beyond recognition by the unrestrained forces of consumerism, greed, and envy.

How do we weave back into the tapestry the broken threads that once again could illustrate a picture of God reflected in our places at work and in society around us? Recovering a values-based way of life based upon the wisdom of the scriptures is the way we will learn to be empowered and strengthened each day to withstand the hardships of day-to-day life—and to enjoy the throbbing excitement of creative, purpose-led work.  

Ken Costa is Vice-Chairman of UBS Investment Bank, Chairman of Alpha International, and author of God at Work: Living Every Day with Purpose (Continuum 2007). www.godatwork.org.uk. This article is adapted from an address he gave for The Trinity Forum in London on 19 March 2007.

1 Responses (comments are closed) • Features, Business, Meaning and Calling, Thu 29 Mar 2007