Corporate Soul: The Monk within the Manager

Do corporations have souls? Should managers be role models of spirituality? The last five years have seen a surge of writings on spirituality and business, attempting to satisfy the hunger for deeper meaning and fill the ethical vacuum left by recent business scandals. Corporate Soul is one such title.

Siddiqui is the author of four management books, most notably The Brave New Manager that won the 1996 All India Management Association's Best Management Book Award. He has 30 years of managing experience. He does not explicitly say what spiritual path he belongs to – the name “Siddiqui” is Muslim – but the book's contents suggest that he takes an eclectic approach to religion.

Siddiqui takes as his starting point that corporations have souls, and that the true purpose of business is to create happiness for all. He argues that managers should study great spiritual leaders and apply their teachings to business. As if to save us the effort, he outlines the teachings for us, stressing their relevance to corporations.

Corporate Soul is divided into several parts, each focusing on a religious or philosophical tradition. The first sections cover Eastern paths, with ideas from Confucius, Lao Tzu, Buddha, and the authors of the Indian epics. In the later sections Siddiqui shifts to Western paths, discussing the words of Solomon, the Psalmist, Jesus, Muhammad, the Greek philosophers, and Kahil Gibran who appears to be his favourite. Siddiqui closes by advocating what he calls intuilogy. The word does not mean – as the etymology suggests – the study of intuition, but a blend of logic and intuition that will help us succeeed.

As women throughout the world, regardless of culture, tend to be more religious than men (Stark, 2002), I expect this book is likely to catch the eye of women managers. However, Siddiqui is clearly not writing for them. Not only is the book replete with sexist language (managers are male, humanity is male, and God is male), but each chapter is a veritable catalogue of male spiritual rules, presented as unchallengeable divine truths.

I am not sure where Siddiqui gets the idea that to be spiritual we have to trawl through pages of what numerous men have said about the subject, but each page is crammed with quotations from men; there is even a motivational quotation from Hitler. Yet, not a single woman is cited. This would be fair if women had nothing to offer on the subject, but there is a whole body of literature on women's spirituality. Examples of female spiritual leaders like Joan of Arc who led the French army to victory, and Teresa of Avila who managed 17 convents, are mysteriously omitted. Instead Siddiqui directs us to the writer Kahil Gibran for advice about spiritual leadership – a man who, according to biographers, spent much of his life drinking alcohol, and sponging off talented women who corrected his syntax and grammar (Irwin, 1998).

However, my central concern about this book is not its sexism, but that Siddiqui's ideas imply a spiritual hierarchy between managers and staff which has no basis in fact. He instructs managers to change workers' mindsets so that businesses can use employees' spiritual energy for capital. In a section on sin, Siddiqui implies that workers are sick: “A manager is like an expert surgeon who cuts out the malignant tumour and saves the patient” (p. 207). All this sounds very much like old authoritarian power games dressed up as advanced spirituality.

Reading Corporate Soul, I kept thinking of a line from The Color Purple when the outspoken Shug exclaims, “Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me” (Walker, 1982, p. 200). Relating this comment to a business setting, I can confidently say – as an employee of a large organisation – that while workers may want deeper meaning, we do not want to pretend that the divine is sourced from higher management. Nor do we want our managers masquerading as messiahs, adding spiritual rules to employment rules, and taking away one of the few individual freedoms we have left – the right to our private spirituality, without exploitation or trivialisation.

Other aspects of this book also leave me feeling uneasy. Words like “should” and “must” appear rather a lot. Also, I suspect that Siddiqui knows less about religion than we are led to believe. His few references are from electronic encyclopaedias, and he makes numerous debatable claims, such as “The aim of all religion is to inculcate in man a sense of loathing towards sinful behaviour” (p. 207). Several paragraphs about religious leaders seem to be introduced under the wrong religion, profound religious ideas are misappropriated and diluted to suit a business angle, and the analysis is saturated with truisms like “Risk‐taking is distinct from committing suicide” (p. 119). Even more disturbing, Siddiqui presumes to tell us what Buddha and Jesus really meant. Holy wars have been started on less than this.

Also, I doubt that either Siddiqui or his editor read the book from beginning to end. There are too many contradictions with no attempt at reconciliation. Some sentences are carelessly written, e.g. “The parable has been published in many Chinese ancient books, including the Harvard Business Review” (p. 293). Passages about what Chinese people believed centuries ago are written in the present tense: did Siddiqui miss the cultural revolution? Equally puzzling, given that the book was published in 2005, is his statement that “Virtuous leadership is perhaps what is required in the next millennium” (p. 237). When an author appears not to know what century we are in, we can only wonder how seriously to take the whole thing.

The subject of spirituality deserves better than this. If you are interested in spirituality in management, the September 2005 issue of Journal of Management Inquiry (2005) contains some stimulating articles, and is available online. If you have already purchased Corporate Soul, I recommend Irigaray's (1984) Divine Women or a biography of Joan of Arc as an antidote.