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Mitroff speaks of hope, spirituality

Dr. Ian Mitroff is the Harold Quinton Distinguished Professor of Business Policy at Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. ULV students, friends, alumni and faculty were invited to join in coffee and conversation with Mitroff on Tuesday at the University Bookstore. He presented and talked about his latest book, "A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America," and answered questions from the audience. / photo by Naoko Yokota
Dr. Ian Mitroff is the Harold Quinton Distinguished Professor of Business Policy at Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. ULV students, friends, alumni and faculty were invited to join in coffee and conversation with Mitroff on Tuesday at the University Bookstore. He presented and talked about his latest book, “A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America,” and answered questions from the audience. / photo by Naoko Yokota

by Brice Nixon
Sports Editor

Any utterance of the word “spirituality” tends to immediately spark a reaction among people.

Some consider it inseparable from religion, while others think the two words are distinct concepts.

Dr. Ian I. Mitroff, who has a doctorate in engineering and is co-author of “A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America,” spent two years surveying and interviewing corporate human resource executives and senior managers on spirituality in the workplace or, more correctly, its conspicuous absence.

After completing 60 interviews, Dr. Mitroff, along with Elizabeth A. Denton, who conducted 40 interviews, wrote a book “about one of the most fundamental aspects of the human condition.”

Dr. Mitroff, the Harold Quinton Distinguished Professor of Business Policy at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, shared his ideas and experiences with the University of La Verne community Tuesday at ULV’s bookstore.

Dr. Carol Sawyer, associate professor of public administration at La Verne, introduced topics from the book, subtitled “A Hard Look at Spirituality, Religion and Values in the Workplace,” which Dr. Mitroff then discussed.

Dr. Mitroff believes that today’s organizations are impoverished spiritually. But he said the topic of spirituality is not discussed because it “is so loaded” and it evokes such strong emotions.

Those interviewed by Dr. Mitroff said the thing that gave them the most meaning and purpose, he said, was the ability to realize their full potential as a human being.

But Dr. Mitroff said most corporations do not care enough about their “so called most valuable resources.” They treat employees like dirt and beat up on them, he said, and yet still expect them to “turn out first class products and services.” Dr. Mitroff said that this practice simply will not work.

To remedy that practice, he says, in the book, “organizations, not just individuals, need to become more spiritual, or else they cannot reap the full benefits of their employees,” their aforementioned supposed most valuable resources.

Universities are also corporations, and Dr. Mitroff said they are one of the “least spiritual of organizations.” They are “antiquated archaic, hopeless and useless,” he said. But he maintains hope and said the challenge is “how do we design better institutions?”

Hope is one of the main principles of which he spoke. “It is the essential ingredient of religion,” he said, “and without it, life is functionless.”

Dr. Mitroff said if organizations adhere to his hope principle and stick to their principles, profit will follow.

He has already written 20 books, including “Smart Thinking for Crazy Times,” and is currently working on “The Ten Commandments of Spirituality in the Workplace.”

Brice Nixon, Sports Editor
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