Introduction

August Turak is a successful entrepreneur, corporate executive, and award-winning author who attributes much of his success to living and working alongside the Trappist monks of Mepkin Abbey for seventeen years. As a frequent monastic guest, he learned firsthand from the monks as they grew an incredibly successful portfolio of businesses.

Service and selflessness are at the heart of the 1,500-year-old monastic tradition's remarkable business success. It is an ancient though immensely relevant economic model that preserves what is positive and productive about capitalism while transcending its ethical limitations and internal contradictions. Combining vivid case studies from his thirty-year business career with intimate portraits of the monks at work, Turak shows how Trappist principles can be successfully applied to a variety of secular business settings and to our personal lives as well. He demonstrates that monks and people like Warren Buffett are wildly successful not despite their high principles but because of them. Turak also introduces other "transformational organizations" that share the crucial monastic business strategies so critical for success.

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Excerpt

Preface

For 1,500 years monasteries all over the world have been calling men and women to a life of prayer and work according to the Rule of St. Benedict. The monastic motto, ora et labora (“pray and work”), tells us that these twin pillars of the monastic life are of equal importance— so much so, in fact, that for a Trappist monk, work is a form of prayer and prayer is a form of work. But while many authors, like Thomas Merton, have taken us behind the cloister walls to explore monastic prayer, very little has been written about the “work” half of the monastic equation. Similarly, although much has been written about the tremendous intellectual debt that Western civilization owes monasticism for preserving Greek philosophy and drama during the Dark Ages, very few have explored the highly successful business methodologies that the monks have preserved and prospered by for centuries.

This book takes a step toward redressing this imbalance by bringing these neglected monastic business secrets to light and sharing them with a wider world. This is not a disinterested academic treatise on monastic business practices; rather, it is a highly personal, nuts-and-bolts account of the business lessons I have learned over seventeen years while living and working with the monks of Mepkin Abbey in Moncks Corner, South Carolina, as a frequent monastic guest. Further, by incorporating case studies drawn from my own career and from the example of other successful companies and organizations, I hope to show you how to apply these monastic lessons to a secular marketplace in order to run a more profitable business and have a more successful career. Perhaps what is more important, I believe that if you take these lessons to heart, you will also enjoy a more meaningful and satisfying personal life. I feel fairly safe in making these assertions because I know that these Trappist secrets don’t work just for monks; they worked for me as well.

Most of my monastic research was conducted firsthand while getting my hands dirty working alongside the monks, but I’m not alone in my fascination with the business success of the Trappists. An article in USA Today about the beer- brewing Belgian monks of St. Sixtus Abbey provides a wonderful three- sentence summary of Trappist business success, saying: “Piety, not profit, is what these monks seek. The St. Sixtus monks break every rule in Business 101 except attention to quality. And therein may lie the secret to their success.”

At first glance this analysis may seem woefully incomplete. Of course delivering a quality product is crucial to the success of a business, but what about pricing, positioning, accounting, human resources, cash management, distribution, marketing, procurement, competition, R&D, customer support, government regulations, patent protection, and access to capital? All these things (and many more) are also necessary— not only for producing a quality product in the first place but for making sure that this product can consistently find a market. However, a closer consideration of the phrase “attention to quality” should help us overcome these qualms. Quality doesn’t just apply to the relative merits of what are commonly referred to as “products.” Attention to quality also implies a qualitative rather than a quantitative approach to business, and it is only through this much larger lens that we can begin to see how the monks regularly break the rules of Business 101 and do it so successfully.

For more than a hundred years, the dominant trends in business have been quantitative and analytic. In 1911 Frederick Taylor published his seminal Principles of Scientific Management, and ever since then economists, consultants, pundits, and legions of business- school professors have been trying to wrest business from the clutches of art in the hope of turning it into a science. Unfortunately the significant dividends that this quantitative approach has produced have often come at the expense of the more qualitative aspects of business— things like mission, purpose, values, principles, integrity, ethics, service, and people, which, the monks would argue, are even more critical to success. These qualitative aspects of business are what the monks have mastered, and the author of the USA Today article aptly sums up all this monastic know- how with a single word: piety.

Piety comes from the Latin word for “duty,” and according to Webster’s dictionary, piety in its broadest sense encompasses the duty we owe to parents, country, and our fellow man, and to any noble undertaking that transcends our purely selfish motivations. For Trappist monks, seeking “piety, not profit” means faithfully paying attention to the sacred duty they owe not only to God but to their customers, lay employees, vendors, local community, each other, the environment, and mankind in general. It is the dutiful, or “prayerful,” way in which the monks attend to these qualitative aspects of business that is the overarching secret to their success. And the paradoxical theme that runs throughout this book is that the monks are successful not despite the fact that they seek piety, not profits, but because they do.

Nothing in this book denigrates the quantitative approach to business or treats it as something superfluous. As a business executive and entrepreneur, I’ve spent countless hours poring over spreadsheets, flowcharts, research, and “the numbers” generally, and I know some monks who are second to none in this regard. Yet if one of the purposes of this book is to redress the imbalance between prayer and work in the world’s appraisal of monasticism, another is to redress the gross imbalance between the quantitative and qualitative approaches to business.

I use the phrase service and selflessness to describe the monastic business model throughout this book, and the key to successfully applying this Trappist model to our secular business challenges is authenticity. Authenticity is the latest business buzzword: we hear of authentic businesses, authentic leadership, authentic products, and authentic brands. But while often positioned as the “next big thing” in business, authenticity is nothing new to the monks: Trappist monks have been building authentic businesses, leaders, brands, and products for more than a thousand years. Trappist authenticity shows up in three distinct areas of the monastic way of life and business, and throughout this book, we will be returning again and again to these crucial areas. The first is mission, the second is personal transformation, and the third is community.

Mission

A qualitative approach to business means articulating a high, overarching mission worthy of being piously served. To be authentic, this mission must genuinely drive the decision making that in turn determines even the tiniest activities of the enterprise. Trappist monks don’t have a mission, something to be kept safely tucked in a drawer until the annual meeting rolls around or someone innocently asks about it. Instead the monks live their mission every single day. It is this critical distinction that is so often missing in our secular organizations— and in our personal lives as well.

Personal Transformation

Authenticity is not a technique that can be mastered and then manipulated for our own ends. It is not something we can turn on and off at a moment’s notice as the situation requires. Authentic businesses, leaders, brands, and products can only be created by authentic people, and that is exactly why the monks are so good at it. In the USA Today article, the St. Sixtus brewmaster, Brother Joris, is quoted as saying, “You do not become a saint just by entering a monastery.” Saintliness is just a religious term for authenticity, and the monastic way of life is designed to take ordinary people and transform them into authentic individuals. One f the secrets to the monks’ success is that they value personal authenticity above everything else. The authentic brands, products, and leaders that the Trappists produce are merely the byproducts of this continual movement toward authenticity. If we want the business benefits that only authenticity can bestow, we ust first become authentic individuals. Just how to make this happen in a secular world and in a secular way is a large part of what this book offers.

Community

Trappist business success relies on the cooperative lubrication that only an authentic community can provide. The Trappist mission and individual drive toward authenticity would amount to little were it not for the monks’ unwavering commitment to community.

It is the constant mutual reinforcement and beneficial peer pressure of community that keeps the monastic mission front and center and does most of the heavy lifting involved in personal transformation.

But the communal commitment that drives the Trappist way of life is not circumscribed by the cloister walls that enclose the monastery. The Trappists’ communal embrace encompasses customers, retreatants, government regulators, their neighbors in the local community, and— through ceaseless prayer— all of us. All these constituencies are authentically treated as “brothers and sisters,” and this is a critical component of Trappist business success.

The Trappist commitment to mission, individual transformation, and community are all intertwined; these three elements feedback on each other in a virtuous cycle that produces what we often describe in business as “culture.” Once again, it is the critical distinction between an authentic culture and an inauthentic culture that makes all the difference to success. Creating and maintaining an authentic business culture is fraught with diffi culty, but how to do it is perhaps the most important thing you will learn from the monks you meet in this book.

The Greek philosopher Archimedes famously said, “Give me a long enough lever and a place to stand, and I will move the world.” The same might be said of the business, professional, and personal “leverage” the Trappists have to offer us all if we take their secrets to heart.

* * *

The problem with life is that it must be lived forward and only understood backwards. When I first drove through the gates of Mepkin Abbey back in 1996, the last thing on my mind was writing a book on Trappist business acumen. I was the CEO of a software start- up undergoing the most severe personal crisis of my life, and I was turning to the monks for the psychological and spiritual help that I so sorely needed and which they so graciously provided. I owe so much more than just this book to the monks of Mepkin Abbey.

It was only eight years later and entirely by accident that I began writing about the monks of Mepkin. In 1987 I started an organization called the Self Knowledge Symposium (SKS) to help college students at local universities answer the perennial question, What is the life worth living? In 2004 a former student got in touch to suggest that I write an essay for the John Templeton Foundation’s Power of Purpose essay contest, but when I clicked on the link embedded in his e-mail, I was dismayed. In 3,500 words or less, I had to answer the question: What is the purpose of life? I’d never written anything for publication before, and the contest was open to professional writers and previously published material. Worse, the deadline for submissions for the yearlong contest was barely a week away.

I took a crack at it anyway, but after several days of head scratching, I had nothing to show for my efforts but a mountain of crumpled paper and false starts. I was venting my frustration over the phone with another former student when he suggested, “Hell, Augie, why don’t you just write up that story about Brother John and Mepkin Abbey that you love telling so much?”

After a couple days of frantic writing, I submitted my essay a few hours before the deadline and then forgot about it, only to get a phone call six months later: my essay, “Brother John,” had won the grand prize and $100,000 besides. I was so shell- shocked that it took the caller a full five minutes to convince me I had actually won.

Several years later and almost on a whim, I decided to write what amounted to a white paper on the business lessons I’d learned from the monks over the years. Although not intended for publication, it found its way to Fred Allen, the leadership editor for Forbes .com, and he asked for permission to publish it as a four- part article. The article, “Business Secrets of the Trappists,” was very successful, and it was Fred Allen who urged me to turn the article into a book. And it was another happy accident— a chance meeting between a friend and my wonderful publisher, Myles Thompson— that led me to Columbia University Press and all the amazing people there who made this book possible.

It was a long series of largely serendipitous events that turned me into a writer, and herein lies another important secret that the monks have to teach. In the manner of the monks of St. Sixtus, I have broken every rule of How to Become a Writer 101, and throughout this book I argue that authentic success— whether personal, professional, or organizational— is usually only the by- product, the trailing indicator, of serving a mission that is bigger than yourself. The Trappist lesson here is that you cannot “game the system” that the monks have to offer. If your goal in reading this book is to find a shortcut to success by merely imitating the monks and their business strategies, you will fi nd little of value. Above all else the secret to duplicating Trappist success lies in sincerity— or at least a sincere desire to become a more sincere person in every aspect of your life.

I have worked very hard throughout this book to apply Trappist principles in a nondogmatic, nonsectarian, and nonreligious way. I sincerely believe that that these Trappist secrets will work for you whether you are a believer or not— as long as your heart is in “the right place.” I would be less than candid, however, if I did not reveal that I believe there is something to the Trappist business model that transcends any “formula,” no matter how well that formula may be articulated. We golfers like to say that the secret to a great round is “just let the hole get in the way of the ball,” and this is just a golfer’s version of the religious admonition to “let go and let God.” Trappist monks don’t just make success happen; they also let success happen, and this may be the deepest and most profound secret they have to share. You can call it grace if you are so inclined, or luck if you’re not, but there is something almost magical about the Trappist Way that seems to attract success whether you are a monk or not. Looking back over all the happy accidents that led to this book and so much of my own business success, I can clearly see this Trappist grace (or luck) at work. As a result I must confess that I have become a “true believer,” and that perhaps my most important goal in writing this book is my hope that you may learn how to invite this Trappist magic into your own life and business ventures as well. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the author:

Preface and Chapter 1: How do you define success? How does this compare to your definition of success? Here are a few additional questions to consider for the preface and first chapter of Business Secrets of the Trappist Monks:
Can you think of a time when you took a more quantitative approach to an important decision? Can you think of a time when you took a more qualitative approach to an important decision? How did they differ?
"Trappist Monks don't just make success happen, they also let success happen." What does this mean to you?
Have you ever had a “Father Malachy” in your life? Who was that person? Did that person change you and how?
Do you actively seek out opportunities to be a role model or mentor to other people? Why or why not?
If "it is in our own self-interest to forget our self-interest," why don't we do it more often?


Chapter 2: Turak defines the major stages on the Hero's Journey as The Call, Resistance to the Call, The Desert, The Great Trial, Death, and Rebirth, and Return to Help Others. Using this model, where are you on the Hero's Journey?


Chapter 3: What would others say is your biggest weakness or difficulty from their point of view? Are you brave enough to put yourself out there and ask others for honest feedback? Sometimes our perception of ourselves and how we are perceived by others can be quite different. Understanding others' perceptions of ourselves is one way to gain greater self-knowledge. Asking friends, colleagues, and family members for a “360 review” will turn them into useful mirrors, revealing those character traits that are too close for us to see.


Chapter 4: Would you classify your current organization or experience as an NT, UT, and CT environment? Why? Is it possible to have a transformation of being with a NT experience?


Chapter 5: The four questions in Truliant Federal Credit Union's "delight index" are listed on page 59. We've modified the questions for personal reflection.
Overall, how satisfied are you with your life?
Consider how you spend your time, energy, and money (dollar votes activity): whose best interest do you have at heart?
How likely is it that you would recommend the life that you are living to a friend, family member or co-worker? How likely is that your friends, family members or co-workers would recommend the life you are living to someone else?
Do you feel like you are living life to the fullest? Or to put it another way: Are you auditing your life, or are you taking the course for credit?


Chapter 6: Can you produce any examples from your own life where you are enjoying the benefits of positive peer pressure?


Chapter 7: Recalling the section on, The Power of Sacrifice. Do you look for situations that require sacrifice or avoid them? Why? What is the greatest sacrifice you have ever been called to make? What did you learn from the experience?


Chapter 8: Most people are ethical when it is easy to do so. Can you identify a time in your own life when you behaved ethically even when it was difficult to do so? What was the outcome? Can you identify a time when you didn’t live up to your ethical standards? What was the outcome?


Chapter 9: A large part of the Trappist business success can be attributed to faith. Not just faith in concepts and ideas, but the faithfulness that keeps us putting one foot in front of the other – even when there seems to be little hope. Has there been a situation in your own life where you acted on faith. How did it turn out? What did you learn?


Chapter 10: Real leadership is built on persuasion, and persuasion relies on trust. Using the criteria for trustworthiness enumerated in Chapter 10 (pages 148-150), on a scale of 1-10 how trustworthy are you? How much conscious time and energy do you spend trying to become a more reliable person towards yourself and others?


Chapter 11: Turak includes David Breashears quotation and later makes the argument that pressure doesn’t only build character it also reveals it. How do you respond under pressure? Can you think of a situation in which pressure brought out aspects of your character that surprised you?


Chapter 12: Most people think inspiration leads to action, but action can also lead to inspiration. What's the difference between the two approaches? Do you tend towards one over the other?

***Note: We have an entire Business Secrets Leadership Development Course and an entire Online Course built around this book which can be offered to the book clubs.

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