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Spiritual Capital: Wealth We Can Live by

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Danah Zohar is still probably best known as an author for her 1990 book The Quantum Self. She is also very well-known as a speaker and is one of the select group of people who has driven forward our understanding of ourselves, our organizations and our society as complex adaptive systems. With her holistic view of the world, she is very sensitive to the connections or failures of connection that have such an impact on society and the lives of individuals. This book has as its primary focus the disconnection between the deepest needs and aspirations of humans and acceptance of the single-minded pursuit of profit as the sole imperative on business other than staying within the law.

She argues that maintenance of this disconnect is ultimately unsustainable both for society and for business. She sets out to show why, and how it is possible to move toward sustainability by accepting the creation of 'spiritual capital' as a parallel goal with building material capital.

The basic concepts on which the book rests include:

People, society and business form a system made up of interconnected sub-systems. For such a system to be sustainable requires that the elements cooperate in producing a balanced environment that nourishes the whole. They are holistic ... self-organizing, and exploratory.

Sustainable capitalism and a sustainable society depend on recognition and nurture of higher motivations:
* We need a sense of meaning and values and a sense of fundamental purpose (spiritual intelligence) in order to build the wealth that these can generate (spiritual capital).
* People, organizations and cultures that have spiritual capital will be more sustainable because they will have developed qualities that include wider, values-based vision, global concern and compassion, long-term thinking, spontaneity (and hence flexibility), an ability to act from their own deepest convictions, an ability to thrive on diversity, and an ability to learn from and make positive use of adversity.

She identifies three forms of wealth and three kinds of associated intelligence:

* Material capital, associated with thinking and rational intelligence, the wealth expressed in money;

* Social capital, associated with feeling and emotional intelligence, the wealth that makes our communities and organizations function effectively for the common good;

* Spiritual capital, associated with being and spiritual intelligence, the wealth contained in our shared meanings, values and ultimate purposes.

Much of the book is concerned with identifying the states of being in which a person or an organization can find itself and the principles required for transformation to a state in which higher values can be met and higher needs satisfied and the system remains sustainable. The principles are based on observation of the behavior of (non-human) complex adaptive systems plus principles for human sustainability taken from spiritual thought through the ages.

The qualities that the author identifies as central to a sustainable organization will be familiar to most readers - self aware, vision and value led, holistic, celebrating diversity and similar qualities. She argues that these are the qualities necessary to maintain a system in the dynamic but self-sustaining state we describe as a complex adaptive system - neither stuck in steady-state inflexibility nor falling over the edge into chaos.

Maintenance of this state requires particular behaviors on the part of enough individuals acting as leaders to induce the organization as a whole to behave in that way. Her belief is that, in spite of the system pressures (such as those from the financial markets) to behave otherwise, a sufficient minority of aware people can bring about the necessary changes.

This review is an adaptation of my review published in Personnel Psychology, Summer Issue, 2005.
Zohar is broadly trained and thus taps into diverse resources such as classical literature, physics, religion, and psychology. Marshall is a Jungian-oriented psychiatrist and psychotherapist. Married to each other, the authors would make, I think, engaging conversationalists at my imaginary dinner party, provided that at the table they didn't repeat from their book the following tale by Ovid.
The Greek poet's tale is about Erisychthon, pronounced Erisyathon for any name droppers, a mythological character who, because he was so greedy, was cursed to eat everything in sight including him self after all else had been consumed. He symbolizes, the authors believe, the essence of materialistic capitalism, an insatiable "monster devouring itself."
The authors' main theme is that a "critical mass" of individuals can make a positive difference. This theme seems to have been influenced by Jung's philosophy that "great transformations" in history are a summation of positive changes in individuals.
The authors argue that material capitalism, the kind that predominates in Corporate America and Wall Street, is unsustainable and thus "in a state of crisis." It's depleting our natural resources, creating political and social instability, eroding our moral standards, and degrading the very meaning of life in terms of its deepest values and aspirations. Rather than reject this conventional capitalism altogether, however, the authors advocate transforming it into a more positive, sustainable economic system that they call "spiritual capitalism" in the secular, non-religious sense.
It's defined as the amount of knowledge and expertise available about "meaning, values, and fundamental purposes." It produces not material wealth that ultimately consumes itself but a self-sustaining wealth "that enriches the deeper aspects of our lives." The authors list 12 qualities that companies "high in spiritual capital" would possess. For example, they would be "self-aware," "vision and value-led," and "compassionate" and would "have a sense of vocation."
Are there any companies high in spiritual capital? The authors don't cite any companies that possess all 12 qualities or even most of them, which is an opportunity missed because they developed a set of descriptors that could have been built into a good survey instrument.
The auhors argue that material capitalism is in a state of crisis, which they say is one of negative motivations, with the four primary ones being self assertion or competitiveness, anger, craving or greed, and fear. Most of the book, therefore, is devoted to explaining Marshall's "Scale of Motivations" and in speculating on how it, along with emotional and spiritual intelligence, can be used to raise motivation to a sufficient level among a sufficient number of business leaders to produce a "great transformation" first in their own companies and then for capitalism as a whole.
For his scale, which he has been using in his clinical practice for some 40 years, Marshall expanded Maslow's hierarchy of six needs to eight positive and eight negative motivations. The highest positive motivation is "enlightment," and the lowest negative one is "depersonalization." A person needs to be emotionally intelligent enough, the authors say, to be aware of their own motivational level. This is necessary in order to be able to raise motivations to a higher level. When two persons interact, the authors contend that if one is at a higher level on the scale, then that person can raise the level of the other person. The authors speculate that 2-5 percent of the leadership of any company need to be "knights" at Level 6 and an additional 10 percent need to be "masters" at Levels 4 and 5 in order for the company to start acquiring spiritual capital. It would be rare and impractical to expect anyone to reach the two highest levels, the authors say. This, I have just given you, is a small sample of the authors' very elaborate speculations.
There is much about this book that appeals to me. I agree with their view that the capitalism prevailing today is unsustainable and thus needs to be transformed, not totally dismantled. The authors are creative thinkers who forced me repeatedly to think outside my own relatively narrow paradigms. Some of their ideas are interesting enough to warrant further exploring their possible application throughout business. I've already mentioned the missed opportunity. Another possibility, for instance, would be to do more applied research on their measure of spiritual intelligence beyond a small pilot test that the authors conducted.
Now that I've read the book, I would like to learn more from the authors over a glass of wine and gourmet dinner.

The collaboration of Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall, Spiritual Capital: Wealth We Can Live By offers a highly critical view of the business and ethical practices of capitalism as it is practiced today, with its amorality vested in short-term self-interest, reaping profits, obsession with shareholder value, isolationist thinking, and reckless disregard of long-term consquences. Arguing for the need for a radical new philosophy for corporate governance that adjusts the meaning and purpose of wealth creation, and using the principles of "spiritual capital" and "spiritual intelligence" to define the needs of humanity and human government, Spiritual Capital is a passionately presented charge for people to make a difference