Faith Based Enterprise: A Manifesto

Every movement needs a manifesto. Faith Based Entrepreneurship, based on the principles of Faith, Identity, Community, Empowerment, and Transcendence, provides not only a context of living a fuller life, but also a formula for building successful enterprises.

Every movement needs a manifesto. No less Faith Based Entrepreneurship. What is it? How does it differ from traditional notions of Entrepreneurship? How is it similar?

Faith Based Entrepreneurship differs from traditional notions of Entrepreneurship in being primarily defined by five principles: Faith, Identity, Community, Empowerment, and Transcendence.

It begins with an act of faith. It is not just belief, but the type of certainty that commits us to action, knowing in fact that God has a plan for our lives and committing ourselves to finding it and making it a reality. This is how we begin to discover our Identity, who we are at the deepest level of our being.

Finding out what we truly value, those things that we can be passionate about and energize us, this is the beginning of finding out who we are and recapturing our Identity. Recognizing our natural gifts, our talents, the endowment we that we have been given, is the second step. It is in combining these two elements and living a life devoted to this God given drive while using our God given talents that establishes our Identity. Living this kind of life is not the same as living a life of selfishness or self-absorption. It is about service, finding out how we can use our passion and talents to bless others, doing the research necessary to find out how we can use these to solve the problems of others or provide them with better opportunities. In business parlance it is what Jim Collins speaks of when he identifies the most successful companies as those which do what they love, what they are good at and what people will pay for. It is from this process that the idea of the enterprise is found and then planning begins. But the key is service to others.

Faith Based Entrepreneurship shows us that we can only become fully who we are and live out God’s plan for our lives in Community. Max Weber reminds us that we live in the web of our relationships. That’s where life happens. Faith based enterprises are communities where people build deep and committed relationships not only to their work, but also to each other. There are no employers and employees. There are instead leaders, each member a leader with varying degrees of responsibility, each committed equally to the mission and to bringing out the best in each other. Mission and mutual support are two values that guide the culture of the enterprise.

The other communities that these enterprises are committed to are the people that they are immediately involved with outside of the enterprise. They are not just customers. They are one of the main reasons for the enterprise’s existence, and what is crucial is not selling them something but understanding their problems and solving them, and providing them with positive opportunities that they did not have before. And all of this is held in the larger context of the larger Community. How can we do what we do for the people we work with inside and outside the enterprise and make the world better? This is one of the questions that drives a faith based enterprise.

When such a culture is articulated and lived in an enterprise, Empowerment ripples through all three of these communities. How would you feel if you were in an environment where you were doing what you loved and were good at with a group of people who had a deep commitment to your success and actively supported you in doing that, where no matter what your position you were expected to lead, to be innovative, make meaningful contributions from your valuable insights, and have your contributions appreciated? No doubt you would feel like the proverbial 800 pound gorilla.

And what about the people that you directly serve outside of the company? Suppose they felt that every time you showed up there would be someone really enthusiastic about what she was doing, who was creative and committed to solving their problem or giving them a new opportunity? That isn’t a sales call. It is the building of a deepening and powerful relationship; and consider how the larger community would be empowered by seeing a model of enterprise that actually did something worthwhile, where everyone involved was totally alive, productive, and producing positive results. The transformative power of a number of such enterprises could create a critical mass that could transform the culture of how business is done.

Finally, there is the element of Transcendence, holiness actually, the knowledge that we are doing all of this for God, that we are in business to do good, to truly care for all those that we come in contact with, not as coworkers or customers, but as God’s creation. It is this sense of awe that empowers the morality of what we do and the deep caring for others with which we do it.

No doubt, Faith Based Entrepreneurship shares many of the fundamental characteristics of traditional entrepreneurship but with these five principles it does so in a much different context. Like the classical definition of an entrepreneur, it involves “shifting economic resources from an area of lower production to an area of higher production and yield.” But unlike traditional notions of business there is not a singular focus on transforming an asset to a higher value like taking raw petroleum and refining into gasoline. Though faith based enterprises do take assets to a higher level of value, the real assets that they look to transform are people, relationships, and possibilities.

Like traditional entrepreneurs, their faith based counterparts have faith in what they are doing but it is a transcendent Faith, informed by a highly developed spirituality. Like them, they are inspired and passionate about what they do and this unleashes enormous creativity and gives them the courage and fortitude to take continual risks and come back after repeated failures. But these attributes are seen to spring from a higher source and are held in a context of Transcendence.

A cynic may dismiss these five principles as an unnecessary “add on”, as reasons not attributes that can be quantified and produce measurable results. But many business case studies and much statistical research say otherwise.

The work of such scholars in leadership studies as Toney and Oster show that as a group, leaders who make business decisions in a transcendent faith context consistently produce better profits than their secular counterparts. The work of Martin Seligman, Jim Collins and others shows that where people are in supportive environments with deep relationships doing what they love, they thrive and do their best work, that when people trust and have a real relationship with the companies that serve them they become loyal customers that not only give the companies more business, but also tell their friends and colleagues about them, generating even more business. And if you pick up any business journal, you will see how such companies are inspiring change globally.

The people that work for companies where they know who they are, love what they do are valued for doing it in a supportive environment thrive. Two of the fastest growing companies in the United States show how real this is. The next time you spend a mindless evening zoning out in front of the television like we all need to do at times, watch the Sam Adams commercials. You can tell that the men and women working there love beer. They love to make it, love to drink it, and if you asked them what they do on their day off, it probably has something to do with beer. And they are good at it. Sam Adams is the largest independent brewer in the United States, highly profitable in a business otherwise occupied by overleveraged global conglomerates. You can also tell that the people in these commercials actually like each other and enjoy working together. The same is true of Zappos, the fasting growing shoe distributor in America. Zappos has such a strong positive corporate culture that they offer everyone who goes through their training program $2,000 to leave if they don’t feel that they really love the company’s mission and aren’t truly supportive of their coworkers. Their customers know that they are not only getting the latest fashions, highest quality, and best prices, but also that there is always a real person on the phone to help them with any problems that they have: problem solving and giving new opportunities. Once people buy from Zappos they seldom go anywhere else.

But do you really need a lot of Faith and Transcendence? Do you have to load it on and make it part of every aspect of the enterprise to be successful? Isn’t a mix of a little faith, identity, community, and empowerment enough to produce success? Why bring God into it all of the time? Because when you do something miraculous happens. You get unparalleled success. The best example of this is the most successful enterprise that I know of, one that has over 20, 000 leaders operating at a high level of success in 112 countries and five continents. It is a company that has been in existence for almost five hundred years and continues to thrive in its mission. No other enterprise that I know of has been in existence so long and been so successful on a continuous basis.

It’s name is the Society of Jesus, what you might know as the Jesuit Order, a group of Catholic priests and brothers that revolutionized the idea of education during the Renaissance and continue to lead the field worldwide with more than 30 colleges and 50 preparatory schools just in the United States. Throughout the years they have continued to exercise their influence and have educated such leaders as Bill Clinton, Fidel Castro, and Charles De Gaulle, not to mention such past luminaries as Cervantes, Voltaire, John Donne, and Sir Arthur Canon Doyle.

The founder of the order, Ignatius Loyola, was not the type of person that you would normally place a bet on. Unsuccessful in two careers as a soldier and courtier, illiterate, and with a quick temper that led to multiple arrests and run ins with the Inquisition, he developed a reputation as a brawler in the first two thirds of his life. But in the last third of his life he devoted himself to prayer and had a compelling vision to save souls, which manifested in revolutionizing Catholic education and influencing the larger world of education as well. Though an aging adult, he attended grammar school and wound up at the University of Paris where he met his first ten recruits. After founding the order with these ten men (and secretly with one woman) he embarked on a career that saw the order grow to over 1,000 and establish over 30 colleges during his lifetime.

How did he do it? It began, of course, with an unwavering and active faith, but he combined this with a set of guidelines for running an enterprise that we now call the “Ignatian Principles”. The first was self-awareness, discovering your identity, knowing your strengths and weaknesses, using the former and working on the latter. The second was creativity, unleashing each member’s unique talents and bringing them to any task with the kind of independence that comes only from subordinating self-interest to a mission. The third was love, yes love, the active caring engagement of colleagues and those served, seeking to cultivate the best in them; and the last was heroism, the devotion to do great things in the name of God, not little things, but great things. All of these were suffused with a worldview of transcendence, a knowledge that all they did they did in prayer, serving God and saving souls.

It’s easy to see how these principles are aligned with and support, even amplify, the guiding principles of Faith Based Entrepreneurship. When the principles of Faith Based Entrepreneurship are applied in large measure as they were by Loyola, they produced large results. The Jesuits are perhaps the best example of how powerful and practical these principles are when they are in fact put to work in an intensive way. Think of the enormous possibilities that lie before you. Have the faith to seize them and begin.

Live in faith,
Live your life,
Take care of one another,

Leonardo

Coming up soon, our first audio class of Building a Faith Based Enterprise