Corporate Soul: the Monk Within the Manager

Citation

(2006), "Corporate Soul: the Monk Within the Manager", Human Resource Management International Digest, Vol. 14 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/hrmid.2006.04414eae.002

Corporate Soul: the Monk Within the Manager

Corporate Soul: the Monk Within the Manager

Moid Siddiqui,Sage, 2005

Keywords: Management styles, Religion, Ethics

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, which won the 1996 All India Management Association “best management book” award. He has 30 years of management experience. He does not explicitly say what spiritual path he belongs to – the name “Siddiqui” is Moslem – 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, Mohammed, the Greek philosophers, and Kahil Gibran. Siddiqui closes by advocating what he calls “intuilogy” – a blend of logic and intuition that he believes will help us to succeed.

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 also each chapter is a catalog of male spiritual rules, presented as unchallengeable divine truths. There are plenty of quotations from men – there is even a motivational quotation from Hitler – yet not a single woman is cited.

However, my central concern about this book is not its sexism, but that Siddiqui’s ideas imply a spiritual hierarchy between managers and staff that 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 tumor and saves the patient” (p. 207). All this sounds very much like old authoritarian power games dressed up as advanced spirituality.

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 trivialization.

Other aspects of the 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.

There are too many contradictions in the book, with no attempt at reconciliation. Some sentences are carelessly written, such as “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 contains some stimulating articles, and is available online. If you have already purchased Corporate Soul, I recommend Luce Irigaray’s (1984) Divine Women or a biography of Joan of Arc as an antidote.

Reviewed by Heather Kavan, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand.

A version of this review was originally published in Women in Management Review, Vol. 21 No. 3, 2006.