The Corporate Mystic: A Guidebook for Visionaries with Their Feet on the Ground

This book is a valuable resource that can help readers change their basic attitudes toward work and life, which are deeply, inextricably related. As trainers, the book can help us become better educators; as businesspeople, it can help us become better - and therefore more successful - people. All in all, it is the best work-related book I have read, and if you allow it to be, it can be a life-changing experience. Even if all you read are the quotes, garnered from many eclectic sources, the effort will be well worth the time. For example, the epigraph for the whole book is from Kahlil Gibran: Work is love made visible.

In this brief review, I will present two excellent lists from the book, and to give an overall idea of the rest of the book, here is an abbreviated Table of Contents:

Prologue: Heart and Soul at Work

Introduction: How to Recognize a Corporate Mystic

Part One: The Mystic as Leader

1. Integrity
2. Vision
3. Intuition

Part Two: The Practical Mystic

1. Inspiring Commitment
2. Communicating with People
3. Managing Projects
4. Creating Wealth

Part Three: The Disciplined Mystic

Under the heading How to Recognize a Corporate Mystic are the Twelve Characteristics of Twenty-First-Century Leaders:

1. Absolute honesty (Say things that are true and say them with total consistency.)
2. Fairness (When I am fair I participate in the way the world is woven together.)
3. Self-knowledge (It's what you learn after you know it all that counts.)
4. A focus on contribution (Ultimately they work for love, the opportunity to serve.)
5. Nondogmatic spirituality (Above all, spirituality means deeds, not words.)
6. They get more done by doing less (They center themselves in the present.)
7. They call forth the best of themselves and others (Focus on who we really are.)
8. A special sense of humor (Corporate mystics can laugh at themselves and often do.)
9. Keen distant vision and up-close focus (See both the forest and the trees.)
10. An unusual self-discipline (You set high standards and you hold to them.)
11. Balance (Focus on four areas: intimacy, work, spirituality, and community.)

At the end of the book are The Seven Radical Rules for Business Success (edited for brevity):

1. Always tell the truth . . . especially about personal facts and feelings.
2. Always take 100 percent responsibility for any activity you're involved in. . . . Equality is possible only through meeting at the 100 percent level.
3. Scrupulously attend to all agreements you make and [that] others make with you. . . . Demand impeccability of others.
4. Never gossip and never get in the middle of communications between other people.
5. Set aside daily creative think-time and make it sacred.
6. Make a to-do list and . . . put your most dreaded activities first. . .
7. Go to the source. . . . Let people have the ten minutes of clear communication that solves most problems.

About the authors: Gay Hendricks has written over twenty books about business and personal transformation; he directs his own consulting firm, the Hendricks Institute in Colorado Springs. Kate Ludeman also runs a consulting company, the Worth Ethic Corporation in Austin, Texas, and is the author of The Worth Ethic, among other books.

I will close with another quote, this one from William James: The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind.

- Jack Turner, Office of Information Services