Searching for Meaning in Business School: Love in the Ruins of Corporate America

A few decades ago, a well-respected professor of strategy at a business school in Spain wrote a line inspired by Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman on the board of the classroom: “The only purpose of a company is to maximize shareholder profit.”

A young student named Carlos was outraged. He raised his hand. “Do you really think I am going to dedicate my professional life solely to make money for shareholders?” he asked the professor.

“You must be a communist!” the professor shouted.

“I’m not a communist,” Carlos said. “But I think I have made the wrong career choice.”

Carlos Rey, the student in the strategy professor’s class, felt as if he’d just spent the past four years of his life studying something that had nothing to do with his true desires. Disillusioned, he strapped on a backpack and headed to India in search of answers.

When he got there, he embedded himself in a Tibetan refugee camp and began meditating with the Buddhist monks.

He met a journalist there from National Geographic who recommended that he visit the Hindu temple of Kalighat, in the city of Calcutta. The temple was dedicated to Kali, the goddess of death.

“If you want to understand the meaning of his life,” the journalist told him, “you must first face the meaning of death.”

After a two-day train ride, Carlos arrived in Calcutta. He discovered that the temple of Kalighat had been donated to the Missionaries of Charity — the religious order founded by Mother Theresa — and converted into a house for the homeless and terminally ill.

The temple dedicated to the goddess of death was now a hospital for the dying.

Carlos stopped into the house of the Missionaries of Charity early in the morning and found his way to the chapel. Next to him was an old woman who looked to be in her mid to late nineties silently meditating in a small room. He took a seat beside her. She looked vaguely familiar, but he wasn’t sure why. When she turned to face him, he saw her face for the first time: it was Mother Theresa.

After she was done meditating, she motioned to the young man to follow her out onto the patio. She asked Carlos what he wanted.

“Mother, I want to go to Kalighat,” he told her.

She looked at him solemnly. “You can go to Kalighat,” she said. “But every morning before leaving, you must come here and do an hour of meditation.”

Carlos agreed.

He showed up at six o’clock the next morning for an hour of mediation with Mother Theresa and her sisters, and then went on his way to Kalighat.

When he got there, the sisters who ran the hospital asked him to care for an infirmed Hindu man. “You will be his family, his father, his mother, his brother,” they told him.

Carlos slowly adjusted to the stench that filled the room. He gave himself as completely as he could to this man that he had been asked to care for. He cut the man’s hair and nails, bathed him, and read Hindu versus (in Spanish) to him.

Mostly, though, he just sat by his bed holding his hand.

It was only a matter of days before the man he had come to love like a brother died in his arms.

Despite experiencing moments of profound happiness as he was caring for the dying man, Carlos was once again plunged disillusionment and devastation — the same that had brought him to India in the first place.

When Carlos returned to the Mother House of the Missionaries, devastated by the loss, he found Mother Theresa once again praying by herself in the chapel. He interrupted her.

“Mother, I gave everything that I had to this man, and he died in my arms. I don’t know what I’m here for.”

She took him back outside and sat down. Looking into his face with compassion, she simply said: “Put love into everything that you do.”

It may seem like overly simplistic advice, but this saintly woman knew that the way is not hard to find — it’s just hard to travel.

Carlos looked to that moment as a revelation about what it was he was supposed to do. When he had been grappling with his professor about Friedman in the classroom, he hadn’t been able to see the connection between the structures out there in the world and the structure of his own heart. Only love could transform both.

________________________________________________________________________

The story I’ve shared is from my friend Carlos Rey, who helps run the consulting company?DPMC, based in Spain. He shares this story in his book?Purpose-Driven Organizations?(it is open access, so I highly recommend taking a look inside).

Carlos and I got together in Barcelona in the summer of 2019 as I was starting to write?Wanting.?I was looking for examples of corporate structures that transcended the traditional — especially those that seemed equipped to channel desires in positive ways, prevent rivalries, and give people an outlet for expressing their purpose. In short, those built on an adequate anthropology, with an understanding of the human heart.

Carlos directed me to visit one of his client’s, an organization called?Jiménez Ma?a, an auto parts distributor based in Seville which I wrote about?here.

I’ve thought about Carlos a lot over the past few years.

He had to face death in order to understand something essential about what he wanted. And don’t we all? Is death where desire goes to die? And if so, what’s the point?

What Carlos seemed to have learned from Mother Theresa is this: desire which is subsumed by and transformed into love never dies. He realized that he needed to find a way to do that in absolutely everything that he did — even his subsequent career in business. Products, companies, and people come and go, but the love we pour out for them endures.

I’ve thought about this more now than ever before as I care for my dad with Alzheimer’s, who calls me 5 minutes after I leave his room because he doesn’t remember that I was just there. Has me time been wasted? Hardly.

I believe the banality of work — the utter disconnection from purpose that many people feel — has to do with the suppression of, and utter lack of expression of, genuine love and care for others, which has been plastered over by cheap artificial structures which everyone pretends to respect but which deaden our ability to see our own humanity.

Violence & The Sacred

I recently gave a talk to a large corporate group on how mimetic desire operates in organizations. I started out with the story of an incident of stoning in ancient Israel, a woman caught in adultery. The stoning was averted when a person transcended the logic of mimetic contagion to look into the face of an accused person and love them.

I, for my part, was looking into the faces of the people seated in the front row of this talk. They seemed thoroughly perplexed as to why the guy standing in front of them — who was paid to speak to them about cultural change — was talking about stoning a woman caught in adultery.

I could see their eyes, their brains, trying hard to find some connection or logic to the topic at hand, or at least see where I was going with it.

(I’ve given a similar talk to high school students and watched their eyes blaze with fire, hearts burning, eager to know how to escape the Thirst Traps that are before their eyes daily. They know and understand. No sooner do the words ‘thin and thick desires’ come out of my mouth do they nod in understanding. They have not yet grown into bored, acedia-ridden shells of themselves. They know, or at least they sense, that they are battling the inner demons.)

I won’t talk about saccharine things, but I will talk about sacred things.

Beneath the banality of workplace surfaces is a drama that few have chosen to explore. Love is not tame, and it is rarely sweet, and the violent bear it away.