Business Secrets of the Trappist Monks: One CEO's Quest for Meaning and Authenticity
August Turak
Abstract
The author of this book is a successful entrepreneur, corporate executive, and award-winning writer 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 transc ... More
The author of this book is a successful entrepreneur, corporate executive, and award-winning writer 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, the author of this book shows how Trappist principles can be successfully applied to a variety of secular business settings and to our personal lives as well. The book demonstrates that monks and people like Warren Buffett are wildly successful not despite their high principles but because of them. It also introduces other “transformational organizations” that share the crucial monastic business strategies so critical for success.
Keywords:
business success,
Trappist monks,
Mepkin Abbey,
economic model,
capitalism,
monastic business,
Warren Buffett,
transformational organizations
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2013 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780231160629 |
| Published to Columbia Scholarship Online: November 2015 |
DOI:10.7312/columbia/9780231160629.001.0001 |
