Business is a worldly activity. Business leaders have tended to separate their higher selves from the cut-and-thrust of commercial life. Yet, the line between business and spiritual life is becoming increasingly blurred.

This month, for example, the Missionaries of Charity, the order of nuns founded by Mother Teresa, applied to the Indian patent office for copyright on her name to prevent others from using it. The opportunistically titled Mother Teresa Institute of Management has been persuaded to change its name. Nothing is sacred, it seems, unless it is blessed by a team of lawyers.

Conversely, companies are also getting spiritual. At AstraZeneca US, the American subsidiary of the pharmaceutical giant, thrusting executives are encouraged to get together to listen to poetry, write personal journals and engage in quiet reflection. It’s part of an initiative to mould the company’s high-flyers into more rounded, and spiritual leaders.

The Transformational Leadership programme includes 150 of the company’s top managers. They are exposed to some unusual teaching techniques. The initial four-day seminar includes sessions with a poet, an orchestra, a Jesuit priest and an ethicist to encourage executives to bring “one’s entire self to the workplace”.

Such ideas have been steadily gaining ground. The English-born poet, David Whyte, who teaches on the AstraZeneca programme, has been working with companies in the field of organisational development for more than a decade.

Whyte has an impressive client list that also includes advertising group WPP, aircraft manufacturer Boeing and the oil company Shell. His presentations are sprinkled with the poetry of Dante, Coleridge, Eliot and Blake as well as his own. “It is impossible to build a creative, vital, adaptable workforce unless every member of that team is asking germane questions about their own lives,” he says.

Whether poetry has a serious role to play in encouraging spirituality at work is unclear. But there are those who argue that the issue should not be trivialised. According to Sue Cheshire, managing director, Academy for Chief Executives, a mentoring network for senior managers, increasing chaos in the world is driving the need for a more spiritual understanding of work.

“Spirituality in the workplace starts with business leaders creating order within themselves,” she says. “This will have an impact on those around them, helping to foster a greater acceptance of values and responsibility as the natural qualifications for true leadership.”

Some commentators argue there is a scientific basis for a link between spirituality and business performance. Along with IQ and EQ (emotional intelligence), SQ, or spiritual quotient, has been identified as a third key area of human intelligence. This has given rise to a string of books on the subject.

Among those championing the concept is the American business writer, Danah Zohar, author of SQ — Spiritual Intelligence, and Rewiring the Corporate Brain. SQ, she asserts, is the ultimate human intelligence and a necessary foundation for both IQ and EQ. “IQ is our rational, logical, linear intelligence,” she says. “It is the intelligence with which we solve problems and with which we manipulate and control our environment. SQ, our need for and access to deep meaning, purpose and values, is our transformative intelligence. SQ makes us ask fundamental questions, it rocks the boat and moves the boundaries.”

All of this begs the question: what is spirituality in the corporate context? Definitions are vague. In today’s workplace, it seems spirituality is anything that provides a higher meaning. By this vague definition, it can be reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or religious fanaticism; transcendental meditation or communing with spirits; reading poetry or Buddhism. Or none of the above.

The idea that corporations might have designs on our private belief systems is bound to worry some people. Anti-capitalist protestors are unlikely to be reassured by the thought that companies are bringing the spiritual world into work. Yet this may be just what is required to mitigate the worst excesses of market economies.

If the gurus are right, then bringing spirituality into work could lift business to a more lofty plain. Attempts by the corporate brain to hijack the soul could even give business the conscience that many believe is lacking at present.

Spirituality may be the final frontier to be crossed in pursuit of competitive advantage. But to others it is literally sacred.

SQ — Spiritual Intelligence, The Ultimate Intelligence, by Danah Zohar, Bloomsbury (2000).

The Inner Edge: Effective Spirituality in Your Life and Work, by Richard A. Wedemeyer and Ronald W. Jue, McGraw-Hill (2002).

The Power of Spiritual Intelligence, by Tony Buzan, Harper Collins (2001).

Spiritual Intelligence, by Michal Levin, Hodder & Stoughton (2000).

des.dearlove@thetimes.co.uk

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