Doing Well by Doing Good

Despite my skepticism about religion's role in business, I feel bound to disclose that I am a believer, and to explain how I came to write this book. Like most people, religious or not, I have always wanted to live my deepest values at work. That's why I got into journalism 30 years ago. It seemed like a way to make the world a better place-although religion played no role in my life back then.

In truth, Judaism-the religion of my birth-meant little to me until recently. Both my parents grew up in observant households in Europe, but both left their Jewish roots behind when they immigrated to the United States. I grew up in the 1960s in Croton-on-Hudson, a suburb of New York, and became a bar mitzvah at a Reform synagogue. Judaism played only a minor role in our family life. If anything, my father, who had lost close family members in the Holocaust, played down our Jewishness and provided his three sons with the WASPy trappings-Brooks Brothers suits, sailing camp on Cape Cod, and Ivy League diplomas-that he felt would help us to succeed in business, as he had.

But business had no appeal to me. With my privileged upbringing, I felt none of the financial insecurities that my parents had. As an antiwar protestor at Yale, I saw the military-industrial complex and big business as the enemy. When I graduated in 1973, I worked briefly for an environmental group and then became a newspaper reporter. This was the Watergate era-Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman would play Woodward and Bernstein in All the President's Men-and journalism struck me as a noble and glamorous way to earn a living. I intended to "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted," and I covered government and politics before becoming a TV columnist at newspapers in Hartford and Detroit. My column gave me a platform to express my opinions, and I tried not to forget why I'd gone into journalism in the first place.

Twenty years later, I found myself working for "Fortune." (At least it wasn't "Forbes," the business magazine whose motto is "Capitalist tool." Even so, my comrades from the 1960s would have been appalled.) I had grown disenchanted with newspapers; under pressure to grow their earnings, most papers were no longer committed to serious journalism or public service.

I'd also found it hard to connect my own values to my writing; as a news reporter, I'd felt shackled by the limits of "objective" journalism, and as a TV columnist, I spent too much time reviewing sitcoms and chatting up Hollywood stars. More than any of that, though, conventional ambition had gradually subsumed my youthful ideals. Like my father, like most of my Yale classmates and like many of us in business, I had come to define myself by my job, my title and my resume. I worked too hard. And while I tried to give my wife and two daughters the love and attention they deserved, I did not set aside time for religious or spiritual pursuits, for social or political activism or even to give back to the communities where we lived.

My return to Judaism took time. When our family moved to Bethesda, Maryland, in 1991, my wife and I joined a synagogue, but we rarely attended services or practiced at home. Nevertheless, our older daughter, Sarah, threw herself with passion into a Jewish youth group. Her bat mitzvah ceremony was a watershed moment for me. To my surprise, I was overcome by emotion as I watched her lead the service in Hebrew. Something was missing from my life, I felt, but I wasn't sure Judaism was the answer.

I began to read spiritual books and became intrigued by Buddhism. Buddhist thinking made sense to me, with its emphasis on living in the present moment, avoiding attachments, learning to absorb life's inevitable setbacks and striving to serve others. I attended Buddhist lectures and tried meditating. But it never stuck. I gained insights from the Buddhists and began to live my life with more awareness and purpose. I slowed down some, too.

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