Loving Monday

Succeeding in Business Without Selling Your Soul

John D. Beckett

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780830877843
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Instead of grinding it out until Friday and living only for weekends, a successful Ohio manufacturing executive has seen how his work can be filled with meaning and purpose. The key is integrating his work and beliefs. As a result, both grow--along with his love for Mondays.Beckett brings all of life together: work, belief, value, character, relationship, truth, worship and joy. The result is employees who feel valued, enjoy their work, work hard and are successful at what they do. Here is a book for everyone who wants to succeed in business without selling out.Includes study guide and a new afterword.

PART ONE

Foundations

1

Peter Jennings’s Magnifying Glass

NO WAY, I SAID TO MYSELF. We’re not going to let ABC News barge into the R. W. Beckett Corporation, shoot a lot of footage, extract a few sound bites and say whatever they want to say about us on national TV!

So went my reasoning as I hung up after the phone call from ABC’s headquarters in New York. After all, hadn’t they told me they were considering other companies they could feature? Why us? It would just be an intrusion, and for what benefit? In fact, the wrong kind of coverage could be damaging.

The news team had learned about the Beckett Corporation a year earlier. I had spearheaded a national effort, taking issue with the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) after the agency had issued a set of guidelines many thought would restrict religious freedom in the workplace—such as the right to display a poster for a religious event or sing Christmas carols at a company dinner. National media had run stories on the resulting controversy. Now ABC News was following up with our company, wanting to learn more of how we were relating our faith to our business practices.

I knew from earlier experiences with the media that we needed to be cautious. I thought back to the time a regional magazine did a satirical feature story on our company, lampooning some of our most important values. On the title page I was piously caricatured in a robe and a halo—not the most endearing way for a CEO to be profiled to the greater Cleveland business community! I didn’t want something like that to happen again, especially in front of a national TV audience.

But ABC needed an immediate reply. As reluctant as I was to agree, something that had happened earlier that day gave me pause. In a planning meeting with our senior management team, I had talked about how we could do a better job of making an impact on the marketplace with our core values, such as integrity and excellence. I had referred to a verse from the Bible that speaks about our being salt and light in the world, “a city on a hill [that] cannot be hidden.” As I recalled that discussion, I decided it would be hypocritical not to think seriously about ABC’s request. We weren’t going to scatter much salt or shed much light if we yanked the welcome mat from Peter Jennings, America’s most widely watched news anchor.

The day after our affirmative reply, ABC’s news team arrived at the company—a camera crew from Chicago, a producer from New York, and Peggy Wehmeyer, a correspondent from Dallas.

The Shoot

“We’ll need to be here for two days,” said Peggy. “Our crew may do as much as fifteen hours of shooting for our three-minute news segment. We’ll need to see the whole operation, talk to your employees, speak with some of your customers and suppliers, as well as people in the community. We want to talk about your policies and practices. We need to interview you.” I could feel the knot tightening in my stomach. “Tell me again what you’re looking for,” I said, half hoping they would change their minds.

“We understand that you believe your faith has a bearing on the way you do business,” replied Peggy. “We’d like to see the evidence of what you’re doing. How is it affecting people’s lives? How has it made you different from businesses down the street?”

There was no turning back. We were committed to walk out this risky but exciting endeavor—exposing our company, our beliefs and our reputation to ABC’s magnifying glass. In spite of my apprehensions, I sensed we were doing the right thing.

“Peggy,” I said, “we’ll be very open with you—show you whatever you’d like to see and let you speak to anyone you want. But I want to ask a favor. As you know, a lot can happen between now and the final version of this piece. The story can come out a dozen different ways. All I ask for is an honest and fair portrayal of who we are and what we believe.”

“John, I’ll do my best,” replied Peggy. “But the final decisions will rest with Peter. He’s my boss and he really runs the show.”

Show Time

The night of the broadcast, my wife, Wendy, and I held our breath as Peter Jennings eyed his twelve million invisible viewers:

“We begin another season of ’The American Agenda,’ and we start this September with our religion correspondent, Peggy Wehmeyer. It seems to us that everywhere you turn in America these days, millions of people are searching for greater meaning in their lives. Tonight we’re going to concentrate on the growing tendency of business leaders in America to have their personal faith make an impact in their companies. In other words, they are using the Bible as a guide to business.”

“Whew. . . that’s a good start,” I said to Wendy, as I eased back slightly on our den sofa.

Peggy’s voice came in over the first clip:

Nancy Borer, an assembly line worker, is taking a six-month maternity leave with partial pay. On top of that, her employer made the extraordinary offer of three years off so she can raise her children. Eric Hess assembled oil burners until his employer sent him to school and paid his $1500 tuition. Now he’s a plant supervisor.

The man who gave these unusual opportunities to Nancy and Eric is John Beckett, a successful Ohio manufacturer who takes his work and his faith very seriously.

So far so good. But at the next clip, I winced. No, this wasn’t home video. It was national TV, and I was looking at my own face on that TV screen.

Instantly I flashed back to Peggy’s hour-long interview with me in my office. As a cameraman had threaded the microphone wire down my shirt front, Peggy had chatted about Laura Nash’s new book, Believers in Business, which she had skimmed on her flight that morning. “The book is great!” she had said. “It identifies seven areas of business conflict which Dr. Nash discovered in her interviews with sixty evangelical business people. These are conflicts between the walk of faith and the practical world of business. An example is the conflict between caring for employees in a downturn versus tending to the bottom line.”

I saw it coming: I’ll bet she’s going to ask me questions that Dr. Nash took two years to research, and she’ll expect sound-bite answers from me.

And she did exactly that!

One of those questions had concerned my life’s purpose. As I sat watching the broadcast, I heard the response to that question that had made it into the final cut: “My main mission in life is to know the will of God and to do it.”

I swallowed hard and said to Wendy, “You’ve just seen a miracle. Of all the jumbled answers I gave in that high-pressured interview, Peggy has extracted my main goal in life in one short sentence.”

The rest of the news piece came across wonderfully. The integrity of the company, the enthusiasm of our employees, and the relevance of our core values to the everyday world of work were presented in a clear and compelling manner.

Peggy concluded her commentary by observing that for our company and increasing numbers of business people “lasting rewards cannot be measured in dollars. . . satisfaction comes from building a business without selling their souls.”

The unusually positive report hit a responsive chord with viewers, and they let ABC know it. Peggy called me that evening to say the program had prompted the largest number of favorable phone calls ever received for their news broadcast.

We had been put under Peter Jennings’s magnifying glass. What he found, although very imperfect, was a manufacturing company in northern Ohio where faith and work were not mutually exclusive but coexisted remarkably well.

What he didn’t know as he closed his broadcast that evening was that one very relieved business owner was just then leaning over on the sofa, giving his wife a smooch and saying, “Honey, I think I can sleep tonight.”

2

Companions for Life

THEY ARE USING THE BIBLE as a guide to business.” Thus Peter Jennings summarized a small but growing trend in the American workplace. The fact that our company is part of such a trend is gratifying. It might never have happened, however, if my life had taken a different turn at a few key intersections.

I grew up in Elyria, Ohio, a small industrialized town not far from Cleveland. My parents, originally both from Canada, had moved there because my dad had been offered an engineering position with a company in the heating industry. I was born soon after, in 1938. By the mid-forties I had two younger sisters, Beverly and Susan.

Dad and Mother were very principled people who expressed their love, in part, by holding my sisters and me to a high standard. When we stepped out of bounds, they had an uncanny way of finding out. We attended the Episcopal church fairly regularly, but the hour on Sunday was largely detached from the rest of my world.

During my early teens, my parents gave me a handsome black Bible with a leather cover and gold-edged pages. I had been running with a tough group of guys, and I guess they felt it might help.

With good intentions I began reading my new Bible at Genesis, chapter one. (Isn’t that how you read a book?) But when I got to the genealogies and detailed rules and regulations given by Moses, I bogged down. Before long I decided this book wasn’t relevant to my world of friends, studies, dating and sports. That was it for the Bible for several years.

Wendy

Then, during the summer after my first year of college, I met Wendy. It happened the day I went into the Portage Store—a small grocery outlet for campers and cottagers in Algonquin Park in Canada’s north woods. My intent was to buy milk and a newspaper. But I was so dazzled by the beautiful young Canadian gal who waited on me that I left the store in a fog, totally forgetting the newspaper I’d gone in to buy.

Wendy, I discovered, had taken this summer job as a grocery clerk to earn tuition money for entrance into the University of Toronto that fall. It turned out that both our families had cottages on nearby Smoke Lake. On my first visit to see Wendy at her family’s cottage, I arrived to find her sunning on the dock, reading the Bible.

Nobody reads the Bible on vacation! I thought. Though I was intrigued with her choice of reading material, that was not the main attraction. I found myself captivated by Wendy’s sparkling eyes, her engaging smile and her love for the outdoors. It wasn’t long before I realized I’d been smitten and was falling in love. I’m sure my parents were both amazed and amused by my eagerness to do the grocery shopping at the Portage Store the rest of that summer!

In the fall, as I returned to Boston and my second year of engineering at MIT, I found it was especially rough getting back to calculus and physics. Wendy was continually on my mind. I eagerly checked the mail each day, looking for any small clue in her letters that the feelings I had toward her were reciprocal. A visit to her home in Toronto the following Christmas confirmed that she too was falling in love, and from that point on, our relationship became the most important thing in my life.

We were together on every possible occasion over the next four years, especially during the summers. We stayed in touch through a steady exchange of letters, in which we candidly shared our thoughts and feelings (easier by mail than in person, perhaps). The growing prospect of marriage made everything else seem secondary, but we reluctantly concluded it was important for both of us to finish college first.

Working with Max

On my graduation in 1960, I took an engineering position with Lear-Romec, an aerospace firm located in my home town. There, I worked under the leadership of Max Utterback in a department that had responsibility for the design and development of guidance systems for missiles and aircraft.

Max was more than a boss; he was a mentor. He and I conferred by the hour about ways we could use very small electrical forces to position the massive booster engines used to launch spacecraft toward pinpoint targets in outer space. But our talks were more than technical. From Max’s experience and wisdom, I gleaned solid insights into the ways integrity and fair dealing had their place in business decisions, large and small. Max had grown up in a home where the Bible was respected and regularly read, and I couldn’t help wondering if his strong ethical values and good common sense were in some way a result of the Bible’s influence.

Wendy and I were married a few m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface: Coffee & a Bag of Peanuts
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Flight Plan
• PART ONE: FOUNDATIONS
• PART TWO: THE BIG PICTURE
• PART THREE: APPLICATIONS
• PART FOUR: THE WRAP-UP
• Afterword
• Discussion Questions
• Further Reading
• Notes
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright