*The original version of this essay was delivered in a speech at the 2004 international gathering of the World Business Academy.

This is my dilemma. As important as personal leadership development workshops or yoga sessions may be, they are disconnected from the kind of operational and financial decisions that are daily made in the company. So much of our good work in corporate social responsibility gets segregated to the outer suburbs, while the key decisions are being made in the city center.

I am not going to contact Motorola and say, ?Hey, I hear you have an operational enterprise on business ethics.? ?No,? they would reply, ?we are in the business of making cellphones.? With that kind of approach, I would marginalize myself immediately. So I don?t go there; I address core business issues.

But that is easier said than done. About two weeks I was contacted by a large European company that was going through a terrible scandal. I tried to find out first how they felt about what they had gone through. It was a familiar story. A small group of executives considered maximizing profit to mean how it affected their bank account, and the next layer of management beneath them thought, ?How am I going to get my slice of that pie?? A whole ethos of corruption crept into this company.

The head of human resources told me, ?Do you know what our problem is? Greed.? Wow. How do you deal when greed is at the core of how operational decisions are being made? How do you transform greed?

Later that same week I spoke at a Presbyterian Church. I told the story of the European company and a member of the church proclaimed, ?If the problem is greed, the only way to change the culture is to share with them the message of Jesus Christ.?

I replied, ?Well, does that mean you can never ask for any kind of better humanity, better environment, better workplace unless somehow you first come to accept my belief system?? Indeed, some people approach life like that. Once you accept their belief system, then they can begin working with you on change. Unless that happens, they don?t think it?s worth the effort. So they preach THE message.

I take a broader view of spirit in business. I find it embedded in the relationship that a customer has with a company, that a worker has with her boss, that an investor has with management. The degree to which these relationships, these points of connection, create trust and generate real value, then a company is soulful.

Spirit in business only makes sense once you look at the big picture. Of course, there are no big pictures these days. There are only small pictures.

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