A Masters and the Master
As Christians we continually face the problem of integrating our faith with the effects of living in this increasingly fragmented and secularized world. I faced this situation when, for work-related reasons, I recently decided to try to earn a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree in Health Care Administration.
For the record, it took me four and a half years (for financial reasons) to complete a forty-four credit course, taught entirely on the computer through an on-line university. I have heard such programs criticized for two reasons. One criticism of online classes is that they are too easy. I politely disagree, and for proof point to numerous sweat stains and my considerably grayer hair.
The other criticism is that they lack human interaction. To the extent that the classes are not face-to-face, this is so, but having been in many classrooms where the teacher did not relate to the students, and the students did not relate to each other, I appreciate the extent to which my school tried to stimulate personal contact through discussion groups, learning teams, and so on. The fact that online education is booming just like online everything else means we need to get used to it and make the most of it.
The commitment of time and energy to the MBA program was so large that from the beginning I found myself forced to wonder if this degree could contribute to my Christian experience. My first assumption was that I would have to compartmentalize the schoolwork, mentally separating it from the rest of my life.
Not so fast, there, buddy! I was wrong… but let me go into more detail about just why.
Heads you win, tails we’re not really sure. There are no compartments in life. If life is eternal, then it is also indivisible. I realized right way that for better or worse my decision to pursue a degree was of a piece with the rest of my life. To begin with, I made a deliberate choice. I could have chosen to spend my time other ways. The decision to invest all those hours in studying meant that I did not spend my time doing other things. Just as every coin has two sides, every decision is both a yes and a no. So, remembering the Grail Knight from the Indiana Jones movie, the question is: Did I choose — wisely? Well…
He who is not against us is for us. One of the plusses to secularization is that it helps us to see that a number of activities in this life are neither good nor bad in themselves, but tools that can be used either well or poorly. In themselves they have no more ethical content than a hammer or a screwdriver. It is startling to read how John the Baptist does not tell the tax collectors (roughly equivalent to our mob figures) and soldiers (occupation troops) he encounters that they have to give up their professions. Instead, he tells them to carry out their duties ethically.
As I made my way through the MBA program I began to see that I was being given a tool — a remarkably powerful tool, in some ways — that could have any number of applications for God’s work. I am still coming to terms with what those applications might be, but there is no question that the course of studies greatly increased their number. One element in particular surprised me…
Doing well by doing good. My biggest surprise in the entire course was the emphasis put on ethics. There is a history behind this subject. For years the most influential school of business was Harvard’s, which taught that business had only one responsibility, namely, to make money for the company’s stockholders. In choosing this sole emphasis Harvard fell prey to what I consider to be the Modern Disease, that is, the ailment of identifying one part of a situation as the whole of it.
Certainly stockholders are extremely important to a business (assuming it is a for-profit organization): they put up the money to keep it going. But they are by no means the only people involved. There are customers, employees, and the society in which the business operates. The decision that only stockholders matter is an arbitrary one. Fortunately there is an increasing emphasis on what are now called stakeholders — anyone with an interest in how the company does. There are a lot of those around.
Harvard’s emphasis on stockholder returns has led us to disasters like Enron, and it raises numerous ethical points. I should not have been surprised by my school’s emphasis on ethics. I was already familiar with the famous business consultant Peter Drucker’s remark in New Management. He said that “management always deals with the nature of Man and (as all of us with any practical experience have learned) with Good and Evil, as well.” This observation leads to his conclusion that “I have learned more theology as a practicing management consultant than when I taught religion.” One can see why this would be so, because…
Is there a Darwin in the house? Businesses, like other organisms, are devoted to their own survival. We re talking about capitalism here. I went into the MBA program a proponent of capitalism, and left it the same way. As an economic system I do don’t see its equal.
However, capitalism is not a system of morality; it is only an economic principle. The Christian who worships capitalism is worshipping an idol. We can not let an economic system — any economic system — make our decisions for us. (One of the ironies of history is that Marx, despite his attacks on religion, created a religion out of economics.)
I was fascinated to see that virtually everyone I encountered in the MBA program felt that our economic approach has to be balanced by social concern. That is, capitalism needs morality in order to survive. This conviction became especially strong as we focused on the health care industry. Many of the people in my classes work in that field, spending their days trying to balance the ever more complex economic realities of our current health care system with their deep conviction that sick people need to be helped. The more we learned about our present system, the more we all felt it hindered, not helped, that goal.
On the other hand, an economics class is not a class on theology, and the most ethically-oriented instructor will still say, in effect, “You have to develop your own code of ethics.” One understands why, and I would not have been happy being told what my ethical standards ought to be, but from one perspective a “private sense of ethics” is an oxymoron — ethics is a public responsibility. To its credit, the material taught at my school turned resolutely Socratic on this subject, raising questions and challenging us to answer them. Fair enough.
Before I knew the law of supply and demand, I was without sin. If God is One, and if the universe is therefore interconnected, then any part of it ought to lead to any other part. Such is the claim of mystics of all ages, although I suspect most of them did not take MBA courses. In the most earthly sense, this claim can be validated. I have long since learned that if you ask anyone to describe the job they do, the description will be both more elaborate and more impressive than one could ever have imagined. The same applies anywhere: start to study the pedal of a flower, or a single grain of sand, and you will stop only when you want to — not because you have exhausted the pedal or the grain.
The same is true of the business courses I took. They were fascinating in themselves, representing an astonishing amount of scholarship and experience on the part of countless people. The courses farthest away from my own way of thinking, particularly the math-oriented classes like Accounting and Statistics, were in some ways the most interesting. W.H.Auden says that the task of a poet is to “praise all that is for being,” and Paul is surely thinking along the same lines when he tells us to give thanks at all times, even, one presumes, in Statistics class.
The entire story of human striving is implicit in the law of supply and demand. Supply: the things we want. Demand: we want more, we want it now, and we are willing to get it by fair means or foul. The good and bad, the righteousness and the sins of this world show up in business studies, just as in everything else. In particular…
The customer is always. There is no escaping what Jesus has taught us about our responsibilities to others. The most secular business is still influenced by his teaching, whether it acknowledges it or not. I am talking, of course, about “customer focus,” which at heart is nothing more than a business rationalization for the responsibility to “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” (The Golden Rule is in fact the entire operating principle of the Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts chain.) All the better if good customer service (if you can find it) leads to brand loyalty and healthy profits, but “Love your neighbor as yourself” did not start as a commercial motto. Experiencing other people for who they are, listening to them, caring about their needs, taking care of those needs, putting others first… Does any of this sound familiar?
Find a need and fill it. It is easy to forget how many of our commercial businesses began as altruistic enterprises. The life insurance industry is an example. When Charles Ives, the American composer, founded his own insurance company in 1907, he felt he was providing a humanistic service offering people protection against the whims of life. Today we may think of insurance companies simply as elements of the environment, to be propitiated and negotiated with as best we can, but a significant part of their initial motivation was to help people.
This principle applies in most cases I can think of. How could it not? A basic marketing rule is to find a need and fill it. A basic principle of service is to find a need and fill it. The problem, of course, in either business or individual service, is that what begins as an inspired activity tends to become rote and duty. When this happens, “you must be born again” into new understanding, commitment, and dedication to service. One of the advantages of academic life — if it will seize it — is that it can introduce idealism into its worldview. I found this true in the MBA program, and also found in it a reminder to take a new look at my own activities. Are there areas in my life where worthwhile activities have degenerated into rote? (Hint: there are.)
Know any servant leaders? Many times our classes discussed management styles, and we always returned to the same image. It was not the charismatic, driven, and driving leader who so often appears in the business pages. No, rather it was one of whom you might say, “A bruised reed He will not break and a dimly burning wick He will not extinguish; He will faithfully bring forth justice” (Isa 42:3) — in other words, a servant leader. Jim Collins documents this same point in his brilliant discussion of successful businesses Good to Great. Collins points out that the leader whose focus is not on self but on the work at hand is the one who achieves results that last.
We are too familiar with images of Jesus that shape him into our own favorite forms — football coach, soldier, motivational speaker, guru, CEO. Usually these images have the effect of flattering us, not Jesus. But the fact remains that Jesus shows us how God intends for us to relate to each other in all spheres of life. We are to trust God and help each other out through lives of service. That is our (here is that word again) business. To master the task takes, not forty-four credits, but a lifetime. But wherever we are, whatever our field of specialization, our assignment is the same, and so is our Teacher.
