Spiritual Enterprise: Doing Virtuous Business

by Theodore Roosevelt Malloch

Business leaders have been deeply impressed by the research of scholars on the role of social capital in our personal and professional lives. But in this timely book, Theodore Malloch argues that... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 159403222X
• ISBN13: 9781594032226
• Release Date: May 2008
• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Length: 300 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.3" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Hard & Soft Virtues

In Know Can Do!: Put Your Know-How Into Action, co-author Ken Blanchard suggests that to leverage the power of repetition, repetition, repetition--you should read a book four times. That leadership counsel would definitely apply to this book. You won't get the breadth and the depth in one reading. The recent earthquake in Haiti arrests our senses and prompts us to face many of the big issues of life, death, poverty and sustainability. (Why has Haiti never turned the corner?) With that numbing backdrop, Ted Malloch's unique treatment of "spiritual enterprise" gave me hope again--yet with heavy-duty substance. Malloch begins, "For years, I've paid close attention to something that fascinates me--the ability of people with religious faith and spiritual commitment to make great successes of their businesses. Success comes to them, I believe, because faith changes business for the better, just as it changes lives. It injects into business something that I call `spiritual capital.' Agnostics and nonbelievers make use of spiritual capital as well, but only people of faith renew it. And by replenishing spiritual capital, they benefit us all." If you're a nonprofit leader or pastor, don't skip this book. You can mentor your business colleagues (and donors) more deeply by understanding Malloch's themes of understanding "spiritual capital" and what he calls the hard virtues (leadership, courage, patience, perseverance and discipline) and the soft virtues (justice, compassion, forgiveness, gratitude and humility). If you're a business leader, you'll especially appreciate the author's "Gallery of Virtuous Companies" including ServiceMaster (faith), PepsiCo (honesty), Chick-fil-A (gratitude), IBM (perseverance), Icon Productions (compassion) and seven more. Malloch argues that entrepreneurship is a key to all of this. "It is important to emphasize that what is true of the virtuous creation of wealth in developed countries is also true in underdeveloped countries." He adds, "Development requires economic growth; in turn, growth requires the catalytic drive of the entrepreneur, and entrepreneurship exists only where freedom of action is combined with personal responsibility. In all its myriad forms, accountability is a spiritual asset that is forged by faith that inspires and governs it, and it does not easily come into being in other ways." Reminder: you'll want to read this multiple times. And you may want to weigh your giving to the very long-term Haiti relief effort against a matrix of criteria that includes hard and soft virtues, plus a healthy dose of entrepreneurship. As Michael Novak, author of Business as a Calling: Work and the Examined Life, writes in the foreword, "Businesses similarly are the world's best hope for democracy. If democracy gave people the opportunity to vote for their leaders regularly but offered them no chance to improve their economic condition, they would find democracy very hard to love. What people rightly love about

Building a Better World

Exposing the pitfalls and benefits of Capitalism - Malloch aptly shows readers how business enterprise is the best, if not the only way to empower the poor of the world to success. Beginning with Michael Novak's forward, we begin to understand why - and better yet how we can activate true success through spiritual enterprise. Success - not just for ourselves, or for those who invest in the good idea; but for those we employ, their families, and the clients we serve who are seeking with us, a new and better way of living. Malloch addresses, yet cuts between the slippery slope of self-interest (corporate scandal & deterioration) - and the exhausting road of self-sacrificing humanitarianism. I've been encouraged to build a truly Spiritual Enterprise that will be adventurous and productive - benefitting every stakeholder along the way to success - from the top-down and from the inside, out.