Leadership Lessons from the Monastery

Posted by: Steve Hamm on April 23

Even though I’m not spiritual myself, I’m a sucker for people who blend spiritualism and business, so I went straight into a mind groove recently when I met a guy named Augie Turak on the phone. I’m not quite sure why he has a PR firm, or why the PR firm set me up to talk with him. But he’s a refreshing counterweight to conventional wisdom. In a world where business plans and strategies are highly valued, he believes that companies should be established on the basis of a set of human values, and the other stuff can come later. Augie has been a follower of three thought gurus in his life, one a hillbilly Zen master, one a giant of management science, and the last a Trappist monk. This is his story:

Augie, who grew up outside of Pittsburgh and still has the accent plus a raspy voice from smoking cigarettes, got into reading about Zen Buddhism as a 20-year-old studying at Pitt in the early 1970s. He was smitten when he heard a lecture by a guy named Richard Rose, who was a house painter by trade but also happened to be a Zen master. Rose's message: don't follow Zen to seek comfort; follow it to wake up. Augie dropped out of school and moved to Wheeling, West Virgina, and studied at the feet of Rose.

He later finished his undergraduate degree and did some sales jobs before finding his way to Lou Mobley, who from 1959 to 1970 ran the IBM Executive School on Long Island. Mobley had a small management consulting business at the time, and hired Augie as a salesman. "The most important thing I learned from him is what makes for successful people and companies isn't skill and knowledge; it's values and attitudes," Augie told me.

Augie went on to work for MTV and A&E Network during their startup days. Then he and some partners launched a software distributor in Raleigh, N.C. "I was convinced that we could stick to spiritual principles like service and selflessness and succeed not despite these principles but because of them," he says.

While running a succession of tech companies, Augie found his way to the Mepkin Abbey in South Carolina, a Trappist monastery, where he met Brother John, a humble, hardworking monk who quietly got a lot of things done and reinforced Turak's "service and selflessness" mantra. Years have passed, but Augie still goes back to the monastery every once in a while to freshen up his head. In the midst of the economic meltdown, it keeps him grounded. ""If we act selflessly, everything else falls into place--in good times and bad," he says.

At a time when so many people are angry and looking for people to blame, that's a refreshing thought.

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://blogs.businessweek.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/