The Spirituality Of Work And Leadership eBook

Humanizing business

Volume I of the Humanizing Business series, is a book for business leaders who want fresh ideas on leading 21^st-century organizations. It is a book for spiritual people, the faithful and the mystics, who want to bring their whole selves to work. It is a book for Humanists and the secularly inclined who have a hunger for meaning that philosophy, science, and spirituality may fulfil. Within, Gibbons, a founder of the workplace spirituality movement twenty years ago, suggests that spirituality touches on every aspect of the human experience at work, on every aspect of human capital, and on the purpose of business and the capitalist economic system.

The book is scholarly in approach, a "think-good" book as well as a "feel-good" book. It relies on the work of Nietzsche on meaning, Harvard's Steven Pinker and Michael Sandel on altruism, Yuval Harari on evolutionary biology, neuroscientist Richard Davidson on mindfulness, Aristotle on happiness, and theologians from the Abrahamic religions. Rather than just a book with philosophical ideas though, Gibbons' describes his experience putting these ideas to work over the last two decades at Shell, Microsoft, Zappos, and HSBC bank.

Here are the questions Gibbons tackles in Volume I:

• What do we mean by spirituality? How is it different from religion?
• What is the link between leadership and spirituality?
• What is the relationship between religion and science?
• Is the world becoming more or less spiritual and why that matters?
• What is the historical relationship between spirituality and work? Where does that leave us today?
• Can we prove workplace spirituality is of value? What is the evidence?
• What are the benefits of private prayer or meditation at work? Can spiritual experiences at work be cultivated?
• What insight does spirituality give us into human motivation?
• What is the purpose of purpose? How do leaders create personal and organizational purpose? How do we create purposeful lives and organizations?
• What would a spiritual consulting firm look like?