Getting to the spiritual dimension
Most organizations these days have a mission statement. These
curious pieces of “corporate speak” often sound positively evangel-
ical. The desire they express in most cases is, quite understandably,
the company’s aspiration to be number one or to make the most
money. If mission statements provide a glimpse of an organization’s
soul, you would be forgiven for thinking that most businesses are
pretty soulless places.
With the dot-com revolution and the growth of communica-
tions companies, it has become common for groups of individuals
to leave one large company to set up another that has values with
which they feel more comfortable. Partly as a result of this and
partly, I suspect, out of genuine concern for their people, an increas-
ing number of organizations are beginning to think about the kind
of values they would like most to promote among their staff. If
retaining good people involves respecting their spiritual interests,
this becomes a business rather than a personal issue.
Following the publication of SQ: The Ultimate Intelligence, by
Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall, a serious attempt has been made
to explore the scientific basis for spiritual intelligence and define
this new area of interest.
For me, spiritual intelligence is about the capacity to make
meaning. It is, as Zohar puts it, the “soul’s intelligence.” It is linked
to the capacity to see lives in wholes, not fragments, and to regen-
erate ourselves. Most importantly, it is connected to the ability to
challenge whether we want to play by the rules of the situation in
which we find ourselves. So, a person with a well-developed SQ may
not make a business decision on financial grounds alone, preferring
to be guided by an ethical viewpoint. Or they may choose not to do
something a competitor is doing if there are any concerns about the
morality of the action.
Zohar disagrees with the view of the seventeenth-century
philosopher John Locke: “All ideas come from sensation or reflec-
tion. Let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, devoid
of characters, without ideas.” She argues that to understand
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