03.11.07

Christ, Quakerism, and the Alpha Mind

Posted in Alpha Diary at 10:18 pm by maxhansen

I am starting a new category, and virtually a new blog, right here on Christian Alternative. It’s a diary of my business life, which is restarting as I prepare to leave the pastorate this July.

Why? (Not why am I going back into business, but why am I deciding to blog about it here?)

Because business makes relentless assaults on our Christian values. The focus here will not just be what I do in my business life, but how my efforts there interact with my Christianity.

Some time ago, when my only blog was The Alpha Mind, and I was doing some posting there related to Quakerism, I considered starting a diary there of my life as a pastor. I decided not to, and I’m glad of it. Too much of a pastor’s life is tied up to things that are awfully sensitive. In fact, much of what I’ve dealt with as a pastor has been the sort of confidential matters that I’ll never be able to write about without a lot of veiling.

Now that I’m starting to do consulting again, I can write very openly about veiling, confidences, and other matters, without it in any important way tainting my work life.

Confidentiality, and related concepts, have been at the heart of much of my non-pastoral work for some time now (I’ve done a good deal of ghost writing), and of course are important matters for a Quaker to be thinking about. My friend and counselor, Andy Towl of Friends Meeting at Cambridge, once expressed serious doubts about whether there’s any real difference between confidentiality, which Quakers seem pretty comfortable with, and secrecy, of which Friends have historically disapproved.

I’m pretty comfortable with the distinction. And George Fox was, too. In an important document about Gospel Order, he stated that, if a Friend has been caught in a fault, then there must eventually be one of two statements made: either that Friend’s own condemnation of the sin, or the meeting’s disownment of it and her/him. In either case, though, Fox did not say that such a statement should be published, but that it “should go as far as the fault is known, and no farther.” This is a form of confidentiality, and it makes perfect sense to me. That a Friend has done wrong is no reason to tell anybody who doesn’t already know, since the point of stating repentance is primarily to say “as Christians we shouldn’t act this way.” If somebody doesn’t know you acted that way, what’s the point of saying this?

The core of my new approach to business is the radical opposite of the confidentiality (or is it secrecy) of the ghost writer. Both the blogosphere, where I am an active participant, and Quakerism, which has claimed me for over two decades, have their own different reasons for favoring a radical openness, and I’ve decided to go in that direction, despite the business world’s having a quite different ethic.

Here’s a short description of what I’ll be doing (quoted from this post on Alpha Mind). I’ll elaborate in my next post.

My work is to make intelligent people and organizations sound as smart as they are, and to use their thought leadership to take dominant positions in their fields and industries.

It involves training, handling, coaching, counseling, arguing, promoting, editing, relationship-brokering, ghost-writing…

…and doing part of this publicly, appearing prominently as the thought partner of my client.

Even if we simplify this to “very public ghost-writer,” I don’t know anybody else doing it. (Even I can’t do it with joyous abandon until I leave the public position I’m in with my current employer [Berkeley Friends Church]. But my last client got into the Harvard Business Review and quadrupled his consulting firm’s run rate. And he only worked half the program, and I was in my current job at the time.)

Rereading this, I can see, glaring at me, the other issue about my work that will run slap into my Quaker values: I will be making myself very public. It might be more accurate and less euphemistic to say that I will be pursuing fame, pure and simple. How Quaker is that?

How will it affect my ego? How will Christ stay in charge?

Stay tuned.

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