Customer Reviews

The Soul of a Business: Managing For Profit And The Common Good

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This was a wonderful book to read. After reading it I felt as though I probably know its author pretty good. Not as a friend or someone I'd necessarily like to be friends with, but he seems to be very open about his past, his present, and his beliefs. I am sure that what he discloses in this book will help any wanta-be entrepreneur or small to medium sized business owner rethink whether he or she is leading his or her company in the right direction. I highly recommend that entrepreneurs give this book a read.

Some of the issues addressed are as follows:

1. Will the mission of the company allow the company's leader to enjoy a reasonably good state of mind or conscience?
2. What does a CEO have to do at work to feel fulfilled?
3. Is the CEO of the company a happy and fulfilled person?
4. Are people who work at the company happy at work?
5. Does the company interface well with the community in which it operates?
6. Does the community appreciate the company?
7. Do people trust one another who work for the company?
8. Does much discrimination exist at the company?
9. Is the company all about profits, or not?
10. Is competition good?
11. Is winning always good?
12. Is there more to life than making a buck?

The above issues are just the first 12 that came to mind while I was writing this review. There were many more, but I'm not going to list them all here. The above issues are representative of the content of the book. Maybe the book provides answers, and maybe it doesn't. But the book is great because it reminds business people who are caught up in the rat race of making a living that there is more to business than just making a buck. What comes to mind is: joy, happiness, success, family, friends, and a legacy. Is the business damaging the world, or helping to make it a better place?

I would have enjoyed the book more if the author had not started off explaining what the book "was not." And I would have had a more positive image of the book if the author had not mentioned that he got a lot of his theory from the Harvard Divinity School. There was no need to bring the Gospels into the "story." There is no question that things that can be learned from studying the Gospels are wonderful, but the same things can be learned from other sources. So why throw a religious slant on the issues? I think the book would have been more forceful if religion had be left out entirely.

I enjoyed hearing about the author's wife, but I would have enjoyed hearing more about her thoughts on helping to run the company she and her husband co-founded. I felt a little cheated not hearing a woman's perspective on some of the issues. After all, the author points out that women should be included in management decisions, and that his wife's in fact were.

The Soul of a Business, though lesser known than many of the myriad of business advice books, does a better job than any other in giving a foundation from which to work.

The business guru often spends an entire book telling us how to treat others. Chappell tells us what basic principles he found that led him to this position of responsible commerce.

Shelves are full of books offering cliches and platitudes on why why ethical behavior leads to a better company and eventually more profits. However, Chappell's book goes back to the root question - why should we as individuals or companies seek one kind of relationship over another? In other words, what should guide us in how we treat each other?

For a book that delivers far beyond simple diagrams and behavior modification tricks, a book that provides the philosophical foundations of Buber and Edwards to guide us in how we should interact with our employees, customers and community read Chappell's book. I ended up owning both paperback and audio tape.

For those of us who have had difficulty reconciling our personal desires to make a difference with our career demands to turn a profit, this book connects. It's a study in managing value complexity and speaks well to the enormous rewards of striving for a goal much higher than improving ROE. Not all of us can take the same route as does Tom Chappell, but, if we're to be truly fulfilled by our business lives, we must find our own way to his destination.

This is the Tom's of Maine Tom Chappell. His story picks up after Tom's has become just another profit seeking business infested with MBAs and looking at the bottom line. It seems that Tom is disallusioned, depressed and goes searching for personal answers by enrolling in Harvard Divinity School. His search helps him and his wife bring the company back to the environmentally and socially conscious organization they began. His story gives some insights and suggestions on how to achieve this mind set turn around in any corporate structure.

This book describes Tom Chappell's quest to integrate ideas and beliefs gained while at Harvard Divinity School with his business (Tom's of Maine). The idea is that you can build a successful business by staying true to one's values and treating customers, employees and community as people, not as faceless abstractions. While this is reasonable, the problem is that Chappell leaves many assumptions about the intersection of ethics, spiritual practice and business unexamined. Like most successful companies, Tom's of Maine focuses on growth. But from Zen to Christianity (Chappell is Episcopalian), many spiritual practices emphasize divesting oneself of ego, finances or reputation. Chappell fails to address apparent tensions like these. And while Chappell is justifiably proud of his company's philanthropic efforts, he seems oblivious to the idea that patronage might actually be... patronizing. Chappell used his time at divinity school like a conventional businessman would, stripmining it of ideas. By glossing over incongruities, the theme of the book could come straight out of an advertising manual: life is not fraught with contradictions, tough decisions and cost. You can indeed "have it all."

While I have no particular interest in running a business, I have been for a long time a fan of the Tom's of Maine products and hold the business in high regard. It's hard for me to not like a business so bent on natural products and improving the lives of the surrounding community. When I was given the opportunity to read Tom Chappell's book I was intrigued to not only get a feel-good reading opportunity but to see just how his business strategy differs from others.

The book certainly is one that is focused on making a business succeed, which I think makes this so much more than feel-good fluff. Chappell is a competent president who isolated strategies and proved them to work. He offers his advice in clear, clean statements and even tells how he came to his conclusions. It seems easy enough a process to mimic.

Perhaps it's just my non-business nature, but some of the book did run a tad dry for me and not everything seemed as organized as it could have been. Still, those looking for business strategy ideas might be impressed.

This is a nice book for anyone who owns or plans to own a business, and is seeking more than just financial rewards. Lots of companies are sharing their wealth with the rest of the world, but not many take the time to write a book about how it can be done, and how rewarding it can be. I found this book to be inspiring and entertaining.