FOREWORD
A FEW YEARS AGO, I came across a billboard on a New York City bus shelter. It read, “If your company cared, it would be in the caring business.” The ad was for a jobs site, and the message was clear: the vast majority of companies do not care, and the best thing you can do is to find another company that also doesn’t care, but where you may be somewhat better off.
This cynical but sadly true message is symptomatic of the dominant business culture that exists in the world today. The old clichés about business all still ring true: it is a dog-eat-dog world out there, nice guys finish last, only the paranoid survive, and, most tellingly, “It’s not personal, it’s business.” Business has become dehumanized and impersonal. Human beings are treated as functions or objects, as interchangeable and disposable as machine parts. No wonder employee engagement levels are shockingly low, according to Gallup: less than 30 percent in the United States and only about 13 percent worldwide. The vast majority of people are dispirited and uninspired at work. They feel disrespected, not listened to, and devalued.
Human beings have extraordinary, almost divine capacities. Yet the vast majority of people never get to realize that potential because they are embedded in organizational systems that fail to promote human flourishing. As the expression goes, most people die with their music still inside them. To bring about flourishing, we must pay attention to the “seed” as well as the “soil”—the people as well as the organizational context. Even the most extraordinary seed cannot thrive in toxic soil. Ordinary human beings today are in fact extraordinary, by any historical measure. For one thing, we are astonishingly more intelligent; as unearthed in the Flynn effect, a person whose IQ is considered average today would have tested in the top 2 percent of IQ a mere 80 years ago. What we have today are millions of extraordinary beings stuck in debilitatingly dysfunctional organizations.
The symptoms of this are everywhere. “Thank God it’s Friday” is a sentiment that most working people can readily identify with, so much so that it inspired the name of a popular restaurant chain. People dread going to work and eagerly look forward to their time outside of work—often using drugs and alcohol to dull their pain. We have the sad and stark reality that heart attacks are the highest on Monday mornings, by at least 20 percent compared with other days. More than wars, murderers, and terrorists, our work is literally killing us. As Fred Kofman wrote in Conscious Business, “There are no death camps in corporations, but many apparently successful companies hide great suffering in their basements.”
How can we change this sad reality? We must pay urgent attention to the qualities of the workplaces that we are creating. We must create environments in which people are inspired, feel safe, are cared for, and receive recognition and celebration for who they are and what they do. More than anything else, this requires that we create truly human workplaces that are instilled with a deep sense of compassion, the subject of this important book.
We live in a world of extraordinary pain and suffering. While conditions today are less vicious and brutal than they have been for much of human history, the reality remains that billions of people face a daily struggle for survival and dignity. In such a world, it is imperative that, individually as well as through our organizations, we work toward alleviating the suffering and bringing greater joy. Therefore, every organizational and personal purpose at some level needs to be a healing purpose. If we are not part of the healing, we are part of the hurting. Healing begins with compassion. That is the master key.
Compassion is rooted in a fundamental human drive: the need to care. Human beings have at least three primary drives: self-interest, the need to care, and, increasingly, the need to live a life of meaning and purpose. Unfortunately, we built our system of capitalism on the pillar of self-interest alone. Our need to care is at least as strong as, if not stronger than, our drive toward self-interest. But we have created a world of work in which we are asked to check our humanity at the door, in which there is little to no room for caring. The most human aspects of what it means to be a human being have thus been left out of work. This is an extraordinary deficit for which we have collectively paid a steep price. As Jane Dutton has written previously, organizations can suppress or amplify the human capacity for caring. Unfortunately, most organizations have become hostile to this most human of drives.
Extraordinary things happen when caring and compassion are expressed in the context of work. In 1980, when Whole Foods Market was very early in its journey, with only one store in Austin, Texas, the city experienced one of the worst floods in its history. Many people were killed, and the damage was extensive, including to the Whole Foods store, which was essentially decimated. All the equipment and inventory were destroyed. The company had no warehoused inventory, no more credit, and no financial resources to fall back on. Nearly half a million dollars in the red on that day, the company was essentially bankrupt. What rescued the business and set it on its path to becoming a $14 billion company that has had a huge impact on the food business and on the lives of countless millions? It was the caring and compassion shown by its stakeholders on that fateful day. Customers and neighbors showed up at the store to help clean up the mess, working shoulder to shoulder with employees for weeks to get the store back in shape. Employees worked without any guarantee that they would get paid, since the company’s leaders had no idea how they could restart. Seeing the extraordinary outpouring of support, many of the company suppliers offered to absorb much of the losses and restock the store on credit. Bankers decided to extend more credit to the company, even though there was no logical justification for doing so. The original investors in the business decided to reinvest additional money into the enterprise. Impromptu groups sprang up to organize concerts and other community events to raise money—for a business! Within weeks, the store was able to reopen, and the company was on its way to eventually becoming a transformational force in the culture.
There is no greater power or source of strength in the world than love. As His Holiness the Dalai Lama has said, “Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.” Yet the vast majority of companies continue to shy away from elevating love, caring, and compassion in the workplace. I believe this has a lot to do with the reality that the vast majority of businesses continue to be run by men, based on a very limited set of hypermasculine values, such as domination, aggression, ambition, competition, winning at all costs, short-term thinking, and a zero-sum view of the world. We’re fortunate to be living in a time when feminine qualities such as relationships, nurturing, compassion, vulnerability, caring, and cooperation are finally being recognized, not as signs of weakness but as sources of great strength. These are the most human of qualities that have been sidelined for just about all of human history. It is high time that they were brought to the fore, and we’re fortunate to be living at a time when that seems attainable.
Written by two extraordinary women, this book embodies this wisdom. Awakening Compassion at Work is a timely and critically important book. It powerfully makes the humanistic as well as business case for greater compassion in the workplace, and then provides clear guidance for how to make that happen. Written by two of the foremost scholars in the subject, the book reflects their extensive practical experience helping companies awaken to and then implement these ideas. I am grateful to Monica and Jane for their life’s work, which has culminated in this outstanding book.
Raj Sisodia
F. W. Olin Distinguished Professor of Global Business, Babson College Co-founder and Co-chairman, Conscious Capitalism Inc.