Spirit in Action

The Business World as Spirit Work

Business can sometimes seem mostly exploitation and evil (though counter-examples abound, both current and historical). But how does one do good through business, instead of just doing well? Robert Pierson is an engineer who has seen small business from the inside, thoroughly. After years of diverse job positions, and rising to become a systems engineer, the spiritual side of that work led Rob to get a Master of Ministry degree from Earlham School of Religion.

Duration:: 55m
Broadcast on:: 22 Jun 2014
Audio Format:: other

[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along Business can sometimes seem mostly exploitation and even evil Even though we have so many available counter examples And today for Spirit in Action, we'll dig in and try to find the ways in which business can do good Instead of just doing well Robert Pearson is an engineer who has seen a wide swath of business from the inside After serving small businesses in a number of different jobs Rob rose to the position of systems engineer And the spiritual side of his work led him to get a master of ministry degree from Erlen School of Religion He recently wrote an article in Western Friend Called "Do Quakers Mean Business" In which he confronts our stereotypes of business, examines the history of business as a tool for doing good And explores the possibilities of harnessing this power today Robert Pearson joins us by phone from Colorado Rob, it's wonderful to have you here today for Spirit in Action Well thanks Mark, glad to be here Now I saw your article, it was in the Western Friend And for those listening, you can see about that on westernfriend.org The article was "Do Quakers Mean Business" And it's a collection of articles related to functioning in the world I guess you'd say This happens to be the first one in the collection It's very interesting for me, my emotional reaction to business I've had my own small business for a long time And I understand Rob, that you've been involved in working in small business for ages Yes that's true, for small and medium size In spite of that, I have a prejudice against businesses Yes, many of us do Because we know the evils of large corporations Or maybe the good things they do too I'm not sure, what's your overview of business, good or bad, evil or blessing? I think this is one of those cases where you can go to stream and get stuck there I think there's a lot of people we run into every day who have such a positive opinion Of business in a sort of underlying way They sort of trust their lives to a bunch of businesses around them And they're very skeptical of business at every level I mean if you meet people on the street they basically say I don't trust anybody, I don't trust my insurance company, I don't trust the people who are fixing my car So you can have both attitudes at the same time Really be into figuring the businesses the main way we live our lives At the same time be completely distrustful of it I'm sort of advocating, we look at a different dimension from that And say well, where can businesses be forces for good Where can our own action in businesses help the good And try to stop making it a sort of an us versus them situation Where businesses are on one side and also on the other Especially in religious communities where I think that happens a lot You mean you think in religious communities they're specifically a prejudice against businesses? I think so, I think it goes all the way back particularly in the Christian tradition to this idea That there's the world out there and then there's the states where the world is safe over here And the two are set against one another And we can't help but feel if we have that sort of mindset And that comes from thousands of years of being brought up in that tradition That when things start to go wrong, well the evil is out there And it's out there in this worldly business community And even though we make our livelihoods in it Somehow that's associated with badness and with worldliness And with everything that's wrong and we need to retreat from that into a religious haven for goodness And is this connected with the idea pretty commonly held that love of money is the root of all evil Or that you can't serve both God and Mammon? Oh absolutely, and I think that's interesting because that certainly is one of the large messages That come through for people who are in Christian tradition of one kind or another If they actually read the Christian text, which of course not everyone does anymore But it definitely is in there and it leads to the suspicion that money making itself is an evil I think the texts are pretty clear that they are very suspicious The Christian texts are very suspicious that you can get caught up in this idea of making money And money becomes an end to itself You can get caught up in serving the system that only propagates itself and has no other values And I think those things may clearly prove it But it leads to open the question of, well, we still do make a living somehow at some level And we still do depend on other people around us, Paul was a tent maker, people needed tents Right, there's still that part of it that you have to have some way of making a living And some way of serving the world in a very practical way as well as in a religious way It doesn't answer that tension, it just puts it out there and says this is a fundamental tension That you make it so attractive and so caught up in things that you lose your way Is this tension that's only happening out there in the religious circles or other people? Or is this a tension within Robert Pearson as well? Oh, absolutely a tension within Robert Pearson as well, thank you, yes I think the reason why I'm so interested in this topic is because it's a very deep struggle I have been involved in, again, as you guys pointed out earlier, small businesses But mostly technology businesses, my background is in science and engineering Straight out of college, I felt the dilemma of, well, the academic world itself is one kind of system I didn't want to get caught out there, but the business world at that time, the things I was being open to me Were geophysical jobs offshore working on oil rigs that were not very appealing Or other, what seemed to me even at that time, very destructive activities in terms of extractive use of resources without very much Plan for the future or concern So I was really at a loss and I had no spiritual advisors that told me how to navigate those waters And I found by working in small businesses, at least I am closer to the problem, I think, and able to struggle with it day to day And with my peers and allow them some freedom to struggle with it, too I think the experience of working with teams of engineers who very much want to do good as well as doing well I think that has been a very formative experience for me because I find that they want to work for a good enterprise And doing good things, and they're not quite sure how to get there Part of your article, and again the article is "Do Quakers Mean Business?" It's from Western Friend, you can find them on the web at westernfriend.org It's their May, June 2014 article You do a little bit of tracing of history, and I wonder if you could give us an overview You know, you look in the article "Quakers, Attitudes" but also societal attitudes Could you talk about, is there a definite flow of attitudes, a trail of positive negative attitudes about business? There is, and I'm probably a little less qualified to talk the general case and talk the Quaker case But I do think they wrap around one another because Quaker stars in the 1600s very much as a reaction Again, not just I would say the spiritual system of the day, the church system of the day But also against the economic system of the day, and the two were not unrelated Definitely with the time when the two things were pretty closely intertwined And the particular entry point for that for friends was just, and friends by friends I mean Quakers We often choose our main friends for shorthand The entry point for that was that Quakers saw that their ministers were being trained And were part of an economic system where the ministers did extremely well Often the expense of their much poorer people in their congregations And were supportive from a larger economic system that supported that whole system And so they are very critical of all aspects of society And yet despite that criticism, despite that sense of tension with the society around them Quakers went in very large numbers into business in the end I think this was part of what was going on at the time with the rise of science The rise of other very rational ways of dealing with the world and looking at things Quakers along with a lot of scientists at the time saw God expressed in nature Not somewhere out in the world separate from nature But also something that could be experienced directly in gardens And in taking care of nature and using nature for beneficial purposes And so they got involved in practical trades, everything from making clothes, making clothes To making ironworks, iron materials, one thing or another They brought a very large pacifist and alternative stance to what they did So for example, if they went into a community where they lived in a community Famous examples in England where they found that there were great iron deposits Well, what have those iron deposits been used for? Well, they've been used for making cannonballs And that was basically the largest economic force in the country And of course, if there was a war going on, people did well Because they made cannonballs, and the war was not going on There was no work, and everyone was extremely poor And so they said, well, we don't want to make cannonballs even if there is a war And we want to be able to employ people even if there isn't a war And convince them there's another way to live And so they started making pots and pans You know, practical utensils out of the iron that was available And as a result, grew up a great industry in just very practical, day-to-day utensils And because that industry was doing so well, they began to work on iron works In a larger sense of making trains and the first lines, the first railway lines They connected different ports to these communities who were making these kind of utensils And made a bigger industrial world through their actions using baking bridges, making train lines, that kind of stuff And as a result of having to finance those things, they went into banking And became sort of a network of different financing operations for what they had going on And also holding people to very strict accounts So I hope they get some sense of the rise of how they got into these things And how it sort of paralleled and sort of motivated the industrial revolution that was going on at the same time It's a kind of an interesting process that a lot of people look back on and say, wow, that really was sort of the core seed Of what gets things growing out in a network manner And the Quakers very much formed a network of interrelated enterprises with one another And so they created the first sort of business networks and sort of banking and finance networks And then they weren't exclusive about it, they opened it up to others who had good projects At time went by, those things grew large, and in some sense grew unmanageable to some of the Quaker ideas Or to the way they had been managed very closely in the past So you get to a point where the enterprise is somewhat to start to take on that life of their own As we now think of it in the modern world enterprises sort of seem to have gone beyond their creators But you still see a lot of those Quaker managers trying to run them as highly and ethical manner as possible So for example, they would say, okay, I've got now a large number of workers And I see that those workers now are suffering from everything from where they live They're kind of accommodations that they live in They can't afford something decent for their wages and if they can, it's inside of these very industrial urban centers now To the fact that they had nothing like modern health insurance or retirement or any of those benefits And so the Quaker started to put those kind of benefits in place They said, well, really what work is about and what industry is about is creating an environment that works for the workers As well as for the products that's being made So they became innovators and number times they were remembered especially for their chocolate A number of Quakers who had been into tea and other products like that eventually went to chocolate Because they considered it a very beneficial product Something that was much better than people drinking alcohol and that people were just as inclined to drink So they went into the chocolate products and in the first chocolate products You can follow this story in something like Deborah Cadbury's account of the whole Cadbury family Which is called chocolate wars The whole chocolate industry grow up around making this supposedly beneficial product Now we can argue how beneficial that product has been in a long term No argument from me Yeah, it works for me too It's also a great topic to talk to people about industry about because everyone wants to talk about chocolate Even if they don't want to talk about business But they grew very large and they grew very successful And so they start putting in these real social innovations about building their own little towns Out in the country because they had again the same feeling that people should be out Connected to nature and not stuck in industrial school or somewhere in the city Instead of decently the accommodation should have places to get out and play sports And things like that so they built up whole model cities which still exist in England And people go and visit and are still impressed by people eventually were to own their own homes Which was a novel idea of people who were workers were expected to have retirement And have sick leave and people were to pitch in in mutual help societies We'd now call insurance So they came up with some of these innovations as ways of constantly doing what the ethics of the situation They were faced with as things grew in scale Now I think they sort of reach a turning point at the end of the 1800s Because as they grew in scale and actually took on more and more of these social innovations They reached a point where people were actually Quakers in particular They were writing about economic situation and saying why is there still so much poverty? If we're doing so well on this industrial revolution If we've got these businesses that are so productive If we've got people trained up, why is it that we still suffer from poverty? And in fact the poverty situation seems to be getting worse Unfortunately their conclusions were that the paternalistic approach of businesses providing these benefits was insufficient That it was never going to be able to solve these very large-scale social problems That lead to poverty and lead to classes of people having very different amounts of wealth and power So they basically said this is something that can only be solved at the societal at the political level At the government level and so a lot of friends, the Quakers turn their attention to the political scene And to advocating for reforms at a higher level Well interestingly enough one of the outcomes of this is that the general society was also sort of awakening to this awareness and the trouble was now businesses sort of began to look like the crooks and the problem In many cases they were, there's no reason to excuse a lot of the people who had very poor ethics One might say in terms of how they treated their workers or their environment But at the same time the Quakers would come out of the environment where they were trying to do as well as they could on the individual business scale But as they brought the spotlight into what can we do as a whole Business began to look like the enemy and in some ways government released advocacy And the kind of protest movements we have today began to look like the way to go And those protest movements increasingly turned their ire against the evils of some businesses And so business became the bad guy So one of the strange side effects of Quakers becoming so successful was a sort of undermine their own success In the sense of making business as a whole suspect So it's an interesting turn of events and I think Quakers And I think religious organizations as a whole have not kind of recovered from this yet They're still struggling with the aftermath of well, you know, a very simple model that says Well, businesses are on the bad side of the equation and we should be able to do something about it But then you have two choices you can sort of retreat as religions often do and say that's the evil world Or you can heavily engage and then a lot of times you sort of can lose your religious way By very sort of overactive activism I think Merton is known particularly for having warned people against that You can get so lost in your activist stance that you do track of what you're doing So that's a very short capsule of how we sort of evolved over time to the point where business became large Business became powerful force for good and bad But the tide of opinion sort of had to do something with it and put it on the bad side of the equation And ironically made government relatively good in the sense that it could do something about the problem If we could just get government to behave for getting the government itself as a very large system So we're left in this interesting modern world that we're in now Well, there's all kinds of points along the way that I want to talk about to you Both within this Quaker world but really how that reflects how our society is in general has changed You know, we had the Industrial Revolution in the midst of what you're talking about And we've had this corporate development which is really, you know, end of the 1900s up until today Which have gone into hyper international corporations Which so changes the groundwork I was told along the way that capitalism as it was originally conceived by the founders of our country They're talking about farms large farms that that's what capitalism is about You give people the capital of their farm and they produce the products that therefore enrich the world Which is so different from the idea that you have internet connecting the nations and your Google And what you produce is bits and bytes going on electrical cable so very different Yeah, very very different but it's interesting because I think we're still comfortable with that original model In the sense that so many people are willing to provide capital for very small enterprises Micro enterprises around the world one way or another Sometimes for return sometimes just for free because it's part of building up the overall productive society And maybe the word productive hasn't been quite as corrupted as some of the other works but maybe not And actually the issue of Western friend is called on production And there's a phrase that's been going around for the last few years You know we have to honor and be thankful to and what we really have to support is the job creators The workers they don't matter so much but the job creators So even when we don't like businesses we might like labor But I don't know if we really like labor too because they're commonplace There's so many complex prejudices involved in any of this And I'd question that whole thing about job creation Job creation is boy such a phrase now it's used to excuse almost anything It certainly have watched it locally as people the number one thing they'll say Oh this industry is moving in and it's going to create jobs Well I live in a desert and if that industry is going to exhaust all the water The fact that it created some jobs temporarily is not actually the ultimate productive activity It's really interesting how right now that the whole job thing creating jobs I have a suspicion and it may come from my own Quaker roots at this point A suspicion of overly vesting authority with too much power And saying oh yes this company comes in and creates jobs That's the benefit we want And the jobs at that point sound just like this commodity again But it's not a real commodity It's not like it's talking about the thing of value that's created That then makes the livelihood possible for all the people involved Both the people working every day and the people trying to manage the whole business or industry And if we lose focus on that, one of the things I find refreshing about Going back and thinking again about the Industrial Revolution is What are the true things of value we need now? What are the things that make a difference in the long term And can those things be where we put our energies and therefore become employment? I want to talk a little bit more about chocolate You hit on chocolate along the way and it is a favorite topic for all of us I had the question posed to me along the way Because I didn't grow up the Quaker, I grew up in Wisconsin So I learned Quaker culture from the side But I was told that there was a product known as Quaker beer Do we know what that thing was? And the answer is chocolate And I think specifically it was hot chocolate along the way Because that's the way that chocolate was originally consumed Not as what we candy that we think about now I was told and would you confirm or deny this That a number of the companies or the individuals, the factories that Ended up producing chocolate They converted some of them from producing alcoholic beverages That is they went from being a brewery to production of chocolate Do you know of that history yourself? No, I can't confirm that I haven't heard that particularly But it certainly fits I mean it certainly fits the Quakers were a bit more than happy to do exactly that That was their intention, that was their hope early on But in fact this was the kind of drink that would replace alcohol And get rid of some of the social ills connected with alcoholism So they would have been very glad to take over those kind of production facilities And use them for chocolate But I haven't heard that particular story You make reference to a book that I actually haven't read I saw it maybe, I don't know, 20, 30 years ago I think it compares Pennsylvania meeting houses to the Puritan, Massachusetts Whatever, counting houses And the question was which of those influences most carried for and controls our country I think the conclusion of the book was that the Puritans went out The Quakers lost That the kind of Quaker, gentle spirit It was business, but it was business with social values That the Puritan, I don't know, maybe more hard-nosed I don't want to characterize it too harshly, but its money over spirit is how I see it So you referred, I believe, to that book or to that debate What is your perspective on those historical roots in our country? Yeah, you raised a couple things there The book I think you're referring to is by Frederick Toles And called Meeting House and Counting House It's primarily concerned with what happened in the very early 1700s Up until about 1750, 1760 And primarily in sort of the Quaker culture of Pennsylvania And Philadelphia, which of course was one of a major If you want to call anything a city at that time It was certainly a major city and trade center What became the United States later on It's an interesting history because it does sort of start from the Quaker sense That there were sort of true plantations One way and face that it was the two plantations, the inner plantation And the outer plantation, again, very much at a time when you thought in agricultural terms That you need to cultivate both You need to cultivate the outer plantation And have good things that you are growing in the world And you have to cultivate the inner plantation Where your own soul was a matter of concern Or your own relationship to the divine And the two things had to be kept in balance His argument, I think you're correctly categorized Is that by the end of that period, Quakers had come to conclusion That it was a failed experiment There was no way to keep those two in balance And in some ways, they went to a withdrawal period from the world And this whole engagement experiment was a mistake Pennsylvania itself is often called the holy experiment Because William Penn intended it to be ruled by the kind of sort of spiritual sense That he found among friends but also opened other religions And therefore see if you could have this very democratic place That had some of those ambitions written into its very nature At the end of the period, the tolls was talking about basically All the Quakers were drew on mass from politics in Pennsylvania And left it to others to govern And so they sort of said this is just not going to work We can't hold this tension anymore And others who are not as opposed to war And not as opposed to some of the things that we see going on Are going to have to just take it over We can no longer hold this tension So it's an interesting period and it did affect America as a whole I think it's a fair thing to say that these experiments in Pennsylvania Certainly influenced what became the United States of America In terms of the Constitution and the number of rights, freedom of religion Other things that were engaged in that The number of the democratic principles and how things are governed But that late stage when the United States was formed It was already after this sort of period of withdrawal Where Quakers themselves said we don't know We think this is a failed experiment And so what are the lessons from that historical event? We're talking about something that's what 250 years ago What are the lessons for today for the society in general? Or maybe for religious spiritual groups? How do you do that engagement? You stay engaged, you get out, are you going to get filthy If you stay involved in business and government and enterprise? I think that's the core question And I think attempting to answer it one way or the other is probably a problem As opposed to the answer Again, I have been frustrated in my lifetime by the sense of withdrawal The sense of religious withdrawal from more and more of the world What I would call religious isolationism as opposed to engagement Inside of the business world, inside of the political world Now we see, of course, what we call the far right There's been, in a certain way, very engaged I would give them something for that But I would say that movement has a certain limitation And the way it goes about that Whereas there's a core spiritual movement in the entire country A core spiritual need that needs to be expressed both in the livelihood Making side of things and the governance side of things That is being held back because it does not know how to interact in those spheres And we don't encourage it to interact in those spheres So withdrawing entirely doesn't seem to be a good answer I think the examples, both in the 1750 and turn to the 20th century Say that you can withdraw too far and in fact lose a lot of your power Because you're questioning the nature of that power to begin with And perhaps that's always appropriate Questioning the nature of that power that you happen to have in your hands Because of your privilege or how things came about But at the same time, to withdraw from that power entirely And leave it to others to wield is not a faithful response either So there has to be some balance where you keep trying to say We are going to be engaged in our society because we cannot not engage You mentioned earlier, Rob, that there were a number of businesses You mentioned the iron work business and we've talked about chocolate Are there other ones? You mentioned banks, Barclays Bank Or we know Cadbury Chocolates Or can you attach names to them so we can see how pervasive this influence At least was at one point One of the ones that always surprises people is Clark shoes Which is still a fairly high end but really well respected shoe maker And it was funny because as I mentioned in the article One of the things that got my attention and maybe write the article Was I was actually invited by another group who was studying the chocolate wars Studying the chocolate history And they were just founded by the number of names they recognized And Clark shoes were when they came up, Barclays Bank was when they came up And so those are the big names But their experience was that those names were ones that they still had Some modicum of trust compared to other organizations Even though they've gone through this modern process of becoming publicly owned And publicly managed There was still this residual level of trust they had for Clark shoes And someone brought up how Barclays had responded to the scandal Where someone has actually lost billions of dollars They had actually gone into quite depth in terms of their own actions To try to both right the wrong and to prevent it from happening again This is a person who has a method said to me That's the kind of action we're looking to take in the world And it's interesting that there's still this residual force Somehow embedded in some of these companies that can make a difference We'll talk more about this in a moment with Rob Pearson First I want to mention that you are listening to Spirit in Action Which is a Northern Spirit radio production on the web at northernspiritradio.org On that site you'll find almost nine years of our programs For free listening and download You'll find the places where you can connect to us via iTunes Or our RSS feed, etc On that site you'll also find comments, you'll find links You can post comments and we love to a communication So I've said my words now we want to hear your words Also you'll find a place to leave donations That is how we fund this enterprise It's been going for nine years, it's full-time work Your help makes all the difference And even more so I want to encourage you To support your local community radio station They provide an invaluable slice of both news and music That you get nowhere else I love locally grown things and community radio stations Are exactly the kind of things that we all support So please support them first Again we're speaking with Rob Pearson He's the author of an article Do Quakers mean business? It's in most recent western friend You'll find them on the web at westernfriend.org The May, June article 2014 is the one that you want to find And there's a whole list of articles Let me mention a couple of the other names You'll see why this is of such importance To society as a whole Simplicity and our complex economy There's one called the miracle of friendly water Or reluctantly facing an inconvenient truth Or nuclear waste one million years from now There's a whole number of articles there That will be applicable to you whether you're Quaker or not The spiritual issues of our time are all being wrestled with there Rob Pearson wrote the first article in the collection He's a system engineer for a technology company On the other hand, he's also a member of Albuquerque Friends Meeting He writes, he does photography, he leads workshops And I want to ask a little bit right away, Rob, about some of your background Because I think you and I have some things in common Technology is part of my background And I also have this business side I've had my own small business And I'm also spiritually oriented And most people think those things don't go together well Technology and spirituality Give us your history if you would Rob Well, Mark, I started out again in sort of studying science and engineering And I was fascinated by the areas of science and engineering Both which in their own way reflected the divide between the theoretical And the abstract and the practical and hands on Because I got out and started working I ended up at first because my background was in geophysics originally I ended up working out in California at the US Geological Survey Which of course is a very large organization But spread around doing a lot of small projects Very fun work, but what really was coming up at the time was computers And so I got involved in computers and computer programming, computer processing at a time And that was the great thing to do Opened up a lot of doors Ended up in Albuquerque working for a small business That at that time was mostly doing small data processing projects And then science support projects building up small instruments Or measurement instruments for rotation Or acceleration, things like that That could be used in many different applications That of course brought up immediately the problem that Well, these things are used for military applications As well as for commercial applications They use as much for people who want to test something On the military side, it's for people who want to put them in the crash dummies And actually test something that could help people Survive crash, not to build better cars And so I was struggling with those issues right from the get-kill And that's really never stopped It's been a fun ride to work on technology But as time has gone by My interest to really come to be How to work with people to get projects together And how to work with people to envision new uses of technology That are actually more productive And not just follow the buck Because we know where the buck leaves, it leaves the people who want to have The immediate results often in a military direction And so you rose within the business world I mean, you started out maybe as a technician at a lower level But you went up the food chain That's right, if you want to call it the food chain Although it's been interesting Right from the get-go, I saw it as a service chain You know, places where I could serve the people who were working at the company better Yeah, I started from coding and programming I got into a bunch of image processing work And that made me build up image processing systems And then I helped people build those systems Managing those projects, then I was managing whole contracts Then I was managing a small site Then I got involved in business development And operations at the company Basically I've done all of the jobs at the top of the company Except for being CEO, which I told everybody I don't want to do So I've worked in the number two capacity And in what it clearly leads in different areas On both management and business development What I finally found in my niche was in systems engineering Which is an odd combination It's a bit like the conductor is to an orchestra It's the person who tries to get engineers To work together on the same sheet of music To work to produce something of beauty together As opposed to individually doing the best possible job Which can often lead to things that don't quite come together right So systems engineering turned out to be a very good fit to me Partly for the same reasons I went into these other management functions Is that it's a job where you work both with the technology And with the people And neither aspect can be lost And people's ability to see themselves As part of a team is crucial to get things done There's one other part of your development That you didn't mention that I think is extremely relevant At some point you decided to go into the spiritual business Yes, which of course is a very interesting thing to do If you're an engineering business I went back to the early school of religion And decided to get a master of divinity Of course, that's what actually happened in the end Although in Quakers we call it a master of ministry Because we don't like mastering divide very much But the master of ministry program is what I went through At the time all I knew was this very strongly we led to try it And I didn't know if it was going to lead all the way to getting the degree or not Or whether it was going to lead to a different life or not I just knew it was something I had to do One of the things that brought me to that was system engineering itself Because I've been working with larger and larger groups of people And I ended up finding that a great deal of what I was doing Was pastoral care of one kind or another Now I don't want to make that sound too much like I'm getting into their personal lives and stuff But calling out the best in people And calling out the best of what can be done in a situation And having people open up for the possibilities of how their life interacting with others Is a positive thing and how they can be seen as a person In the middle of an organization I found that people who were writing effectively about this Actually were in the religious community They were not in the engineering community Engineers came out right very well About pastoral care And yet it's really there If you look at definition of system engineering This is a classic list I think of like 26 job descriptions that have to do with system engineering But part of them are this sort of ability to organize And orchestrate and work with people to bring out teams activity A lot of those aspects are very close personal interaction and trust building And it goes to people's root meaningfulness in their life What they and the core find valuable and important And sometimes it's very often encouraging people If they're not finding that where they are to move on And to not just try to fit in like a cog to the machine Not try to do something that's going to make them some money for a little while But make them feel miserable in their life as a whole So it can be both aspects of that trying to get people to see one another as human And encouraging them to work to their highest potential Wherever that takes them Again the company might not like to hear that sometimes You're encouraging a good engineer perhaps to look elsewhere But that's sometimes what it takes for the good of all This perspective that you have and you said you're getting it from literature You're seeing it written in other places Does that make you a real odd duck in the business world That you have that kind of thing or is it all supposed to be Just work them to the bone and squeeze every drop of blood out of them and then discard them? Gosh, yes, well there's two aspects of that And perhaps this is why I still feel so much in struggle There seem to be cycles in the business world as whole Go back and forth and become more hard nails and tooth and claw And then cycles where people realize that, yeah, well that didn't help at all To focus in like that and inevitably what you did is End up with someone who focused so closely on the financials And so closely on competing in a merciless way But you lost your good people and you lost your good opportunities And the customers are frustrated with you So then the cycle switches back again and it's like, okay, that by itself is not enough to sustain and build a business And you get back into sort of a period of what I would call real core building inside the business But also you're always forced back into constraints It is a back and forth and you are in an environment where you are driven by literally money that you can get from customers to build them things That's a tough world because it's impacted by outside forces way out of everybody's control So all I could say is that one is a dynamic But the other part of being an odd duck is definitely being an engineer who says he's going to seminary I don't recommend that to people because the very first thing of course is you get the eyebrows raised And the very strange look like what is the matter with you But then once people get over that then eventually they'll ask you like, oh, okay, so once you get done with seminary You know, are you going to be a minister? That gets to be a harder question first of all because among the Quakers that I have There are no ministers and there's certainly no paid ministers So the idea that you're doing it and you're going to get paid for a result doesn't work And that of course really throws people And then secondly I say, well, actually this seems to me to my discernment My work inside of a business like this and engineering business seems to be part of my ministry And that of course really throws people because it doesn't maintain that separation of religion and world That we talked about earlier that people really find so embedded in the way we think about the world You know, one of the dynamic tensions that I've experienced in my life Is you've spoken of kind of the liberal and the liberal Quaker prejudice against businesses But in favor of art, so if you're going into social worker arts You're one of the good people and if you're going into business Then you must be one of those sucking the blood out of the poor, I guess But interestingly enough, you know, 200 years ago Quakers because they shunned the arts Because the arts were so, they brought up the emotion so much They brought us away from our deep centered, the place where you go home That they were actually suppressed And so it's kind of flipped in the last 150 years Where arts and business have switched places in our world So do you have an art side to you too since you obviously want to get masters of ministry? Yeah, I do. I do have an art side. In fact, one of the other aspects of what I was very interested No, I won't say that. I was surprised when I got to seminary to find out that one of the areas I was strongly led into Was to figure out how my photography fit overall into my ministry How in the world depicting or letting the world express itself to you as images Was part of that, of trying to express the beauty and wonder of the world It does connect back to my sort of background in science Which I think does root back to the same thing Quakers would experience the sort of love of the world Love of nature as an expression of God And I think that's one of the things that was inevitable to be this turn over time Although the early Quakers would have been shocked back to expressive art Yes, they would have thought it was horrible And they were along with their Puritan friends at the same time Who also were just dreadfully afraid of music dancing Images of any kind Really worried those were what would be the end of us And I think we've come into a time where now there's some openness that No, but some of these things help us to actually see and experience the world And therefore to see and experience part of the divine that we've been missing So it is a true reversal And one of the things I'm glad you caught in the article is I think it is incredibly ironic How much of a reversal has happened with the suspicion of business Which would have been one of the few things that early Quakers were not suspicious of And are embracing of government I mean we don't want to call it that but allow the non-governmental organizations And the influencers that we have, the different organizations to lobby of one kind or another As well as our expression in the arts As well as how many current friends I think are lawyers Are involved in that kind of activity But all of those were horrible, horrible things to be involved in When you were in the six thousand spread And it traces back to the sense of not being true to yourself At that time the idea that you had to put on a face to be a politician Well that still applies today in many cases Or to be a lawyer you had to represent something that was not necessarily Who you were And the same thing with that fear of the arts Well the arts you had to literally take on another character to be an actor And portray someone who you were not So we could only see that as expressions of the kind of dishonesty That was just right around them in the world as far as they were concerned But I think there is, you know, by going back and forth between these extremes We get to see the different sides of this And understand where expressions of truth can happen In different media that are unexpected One of the influences I understand of early Quaker involvement with business Is the single price system That that became the norm Now I don't know if that's overstating what influenced Quakers had But I do know that they were shunning the idea that You would take people for whatever amount of money you could get from them I've always enjoyed by the way bargaining when I lived in Africa as part of Peace Corps And when I travel, I enjoy that bargaining thing and try and get the best price But Quaker said no, there's one fair price, here it is, you do it Is it your sense that that actually did change the society Or were they just one of many influences leading in that direction? Well I never want to overstate the claim But I think in this case it's pretty close to being an accurate claim That the Quakers threw their forcefulness in putting through that sort of revision Of the way business was done Really did influence things in a very big way They basically decided that that was the way to do business Their shops did business that way It really angered some people, it's funny to look back and see some of the reactions And see how it was thought in some ways despicable And yet from a business perspective, it was a very successful move Because it gained a tremendous amount of trust Whether people liked friends like Quakers or not They would go to their shops because they knew exactly how much something would cost And they could send their kids to those shops And I do not think that's an exaggeration I do not think it's an exaggeration That being able to send your kid out to buy something at a Quaker shop The level of trust was such, you know, they would not be cheated It changed things and I think that's a reasonable place to claim and change things for the better I do understand, like you're saying, you could go the opposite thing Oh, you know, they were so hard frozen, they got so hard over about these ideas That you could see now why they're such a love of experiencing the bargaining process again I'm sure my wife is very glad she hates the bargaining when I've taken her to Africa or Mexico or whatever She, no, just give me a price, I give you whatever you ask, okay, I don't want to talk about it Well, I tried to convince my son who loves going to flea markets like a young boy would in finding bargains I tried to convince him that this is something that you can do and that people really do have a reasonable expectation You'll go back and forth and say this is what I think it's worth and would like it But I've also tried to convince him the other way because we walked up the street one day And bought a beautiful Lego set for I think he got it for a dollar or something like that And he had more and I convinced him and he was quite wanted to walk back up the street and give them more Because he felt it was not a fair price That's beautiful, that's beautiful, and that's a very honorable thing And I think again that way of looking at things like there is some sense of some sense of fairness And that even in open bargain No, you've been talking about Quakers because you're Quaker, I happen to be Quaker And this is part of a collection in Western friend, again website westernfriend.org And their May/June edition is called "On Production" Now, you've talked about Quakers Is it your sense that other religious groups did the same kind of journey? Did the Methodists do the same thing? Did the Unitarians do this coming on the Congregationalists? Did they all go through these kind of evolutions about business, about in the world, being out of the world? Or is this uniquely a Quaker thing? Is this really, I had you on because I thought it would be a universal lesson For people to be going through? Right, I think there are very universal things going on right now I think it cuts across all the branches, religious branches, spiritual seeking branches Of trying to find some answer to this dilemma of how do we actually operate in the world? And I think that is not a Quaker thing in particular at all I think there's a wide struggle. One of the evidence I think of that is, and you don't have to go But you can read the Harvard Business Review, and if you read between the lines, because they don't like to talk about these things in religious terms You will find religious themes being raised in terms of how companies are organized, how they're managed, how decisions are made, how businesses are done What the long-term versus short-term dynamics are, and what ultimately is productive It's funny, I mean because you can go there, and if you read with a religious eye, you'll find these things being discussed very guardedly In the Harvard Business Review, and there are definitely books coming out from others who are not friends Talking about leadership and soul work as leadership, and the soul work that is used by a friend, the soul of work You know, integrity being a growth market, I'm looking at some other books I have, but there's a number of books coming out that are looking at how businesses can be run and operated, and how we look at businesses as a positive force, or institutions in general The one thing that I think we have to keep in mind in talking about a lot of religious, or what makes a distinction about Quakers might be helpful in opening the discussions now are, again, this really difficult divide that has existed for a long time between the world and religion And that could cut much more deeply, even among the historic peace churches, I think that's a good place to go, for example If you think of the historic peace churches, which are, you know, men and I, church of the brethren, Quakers They're very different in how do they get to the peace testimony, they're very different in how they look about the relationship to the world and how we relate to the world, and so models of how we relate to the world, and I would say ministry in the world whether our ministry can be in very practical hands on ways in terms of what we make and how we work with others, what we produce, what we take into account in terms of how we're harming the world or harming other people or engaging in business are kind of practices That's in conversation across the board among denominations, but I think if we listen to different perspectives from the different states, we're likely to hear different aspects that'll help us overall understand how to move forward We need some moving forward, that's for sure Yes, I don't, but editor and I struggled over one word in my article about how, and it basically came down to how strong and agitated to use about modern capitalism and it's how strongly to hold your critique of modern capitalism and business structure that we have today and I both want to suggest that yes, we really need to pay attention to some really difficult fundamental problems inside here On the other hand, we just, we cannot go too far and reject the whole thing as if somehow we can magically put something else in place One of the thoughts that I had, by the way, is it's not that business is bad, but one of the things we all know, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely And as businesses gotten more and more powerful, as it's gotten larger and larger, affected more people, could have sway over our government officials, etc That's where the opening to corruption and disregard disconnection comes in, so that's my perspective on it It doesn't seem to work the same way when an artist becomes better and better On the other hand, maybe I'm wrong about that, maybe as an artist, like Justin Bieber, he does get more powerful, he gets corrupted too But my sense is that we fear businesses that get very large, get very powerful, multinational corporations, etc Because of the damage that they can do in it, which is an influence of being so large and disconnected from roots Absolutely, so how do you combat that, right? I think it's interesting looking at some examples out of history One of the ones that was sort of stunned people is, I think it's Henry Cadbury, one of the Cadbury's, basically getting to the point where he realized how successful, personally, he was getting as a result of his business And basically called the meeting with the entire family, and at that time it would have been the press corps But it would have been his employees and other interested people, and basically said, look, I have made a ton of money I am putting it all into a trust for the public good My children are going to inherit some big, small amount So this has not become a problem for them in the future, either managing this company or doing it things Now that's a shocking approach, and it's a shocking approach to modern sensibilities But for him at that time, he was like, if this corrupts all the people that I have around me, including my family, there will be no future For this business, and the money will all get wasted, which has been built up over the backs of people working and doing things over time Right, whereas it could be going to do good in a civil manner So he created trust, which I've been told from people in England, are still doing all sorts of social good today What an abnormal thing to do from our current point of view, and what a wonderful thing to do, wow I want to mention to our listeners, one more program, someone I interviewed a couple years ago Her name is Judy Wicks, she's author of a book called Good Morning, Beautiful Business The unexpected journey of an activist, entrepreneur, and local economy pioneer That's an article you want to listen to to compliment this one, her work was with the White Dog Cafe in Philadelphia But today we've been speaking with Robert Pearson, he's a systems engineer with small business He's got a wonderful background that makes you, really what you're saying Rob, so applicable to all of us It doesn't seem high in the hoity toity circles at all It seems like a real person engaging with other real people trying to make a difference in the world And that is just so inspirational, I thank you for your article in Western Friends The article was called Do Quakers Mean Business, it was in the edition called On Production You'll find it on website folks at westernfriend.org It's May, June issue of 2014 Again Rob, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts, for doing the work up through business and giving us a business person that we can really want to emulate Well thank you and thank you for your show The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson This spirit in action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website northernspiritradio.org Thank you for listening, I am your host Mark Helpsmeet and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light This is Spirit in Action With every voice, with every song We will move this world along With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing (upbeat music)