Business Secrets of the Trappist Monks

Business Secrets of the Trappist Monks

One CEO's Quest for Meaning and Authenticity

  • Author: Turak, August
  • Publisher: Columbia University Press
  • ISBN: 9780231160629
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780231535229
  • Place of publication:  New York , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 2013
  • Month: July
  • Language: English
August Turak is a successful entrepreneur, corporate executive, and award-winning author 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, Turak shows how Trappist principles can be successfully applied to a variety of secular business settings and to our personal lives as well. He demonstrates that monks and people like Warren Buffett are wildly successful not despite their high principles but because of them. Turak also introduces other "transformational organizations" that share the crucial monastic business strategies so critical for success.
  • Contents
  • Preface
  • 1. The Economic Miracle of Mepkin Abbey
  • 2. What We All Really Want
  • 3. The End of Selfishness
  • 4. Goat Rodeos and the Transformational Organization
  • 5. Mission
  • 6. Selflessness and Community
  • 7. Excellence for the Sake of Excellence
  • 8. Ethical Standards, or, Why Good Things Happen for Good People
  • 9. Faith
  • 10. The Power of Trust
  • 11. Self-Knowledge and Authenticity
  • 12. Living the Life

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