The following article by Andrew Ferguson was first published in One Earth Magazine Issue No 15 Autumn 1994

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Andrew Ferguson, author of Creating Abundance and Founder of  The Breakthrough Centre in London, writes about the challenge of running a business on holistic, spiritual lines. Breakthrough provides on-going club services which support, guide and facilitate networking amongst holistic enterprises and those who seek to work holistically. After six years in London, where the club has nearly two hundred members, Breakthrough has now also opened in Findhorn and is setting up other joint ventures around Britain.

How do you make the money you need without compromising your ethical or spiritual values? How do you achieve, in the words immortalised by Sting ‘Spirit in a Material World’? There is no escape from the material world, short of death. We all live in it, because we all incarnated into the human context. Becoming a charity, a monk, a Findhorn Foundation member or Mother Teresa does not release you from materialism: it merely changes your relationship to it – and less than you might hope or think. Being a materialist is nothing to be ashamed of: even the Dalai Lama uses aeroplanes, and we all need to eat and clothe ourselves and have a little box to live in.

The world is rarely black and white: spirit and matter are always to be found in every context, even the most blatant excesses of materialism. In some ways, being an obsessive yuppie consumer, workaholic is as tough a spiritual journey as any other. In this distortion of materialism, profit and growth alone define success. Relationships suffer, feelings are trampled; humanity and the environment are abused and systematically destroyed, while all that awaits you is emptiness. Few would knowingly enlist on such a path and few actually do: research shows that only 20 percent of UK adults are ‘conspicuous consumers’, so at least 80 percent have other values, and not even the conspicuous consumers will be totally immoral or obsessive. The obsessives are a very small group, only about 10 percent of the population. They only seem bigger because they are conspicuous, loud, big spenders.

Growth obsessed economists and politicians constantly invite us all to look up to and join this excessive group. But in fact the hold the extremists (politicians and managers mostly) had on the world or work peaked in the 80s. In ten years they mortgaged the whole of the next century to try and accumulate a fulfilling amount or wealth. They failed and they were seen to fail. As a result there is less blind acceptance now of the economics of growth. Caring about people, HRD (Human Resource Development), balance (work and play, work and family) and holistic principles of enterprise are just beginning to be more than empty phrases in Chairmen’s Reports.

The world of work is increasingly disenchanted with itself and seeking new ideas and solutions – but practical, field-tested, hands-on solutions, not academic theories which require a revolution before they can be applied. Similarly frustration grows in the world of spirit. Carolyn Myss expresses it best, “You’ve been nouns too long. It’s time to be a verb!” She also says that it is in the cities that we need to be doing the work. Spirit into Matter means the spiritual end of the spectrum being less snooty and snotty about vulgar enterprise and the material end of the spectrum being less complacent and recognising it is time to accept the deeper challenges of personal, spiritual growth.

The main place to look for holistic enterprise is among the self-employed. This is the territory The Breakthrough Centre inhabits. Here people are taking charge of their lives and engaging in whole person centred work; new models are being pioneered which will gradually replace fossilised institutions. The holistic approach, integrating spirit and matter at work, is no soft option. Single-minded profiteering or New Age cop-out are both much easier though neither generates an ounce of self-fulfilment and both lead to spiritual crisis.

I find there are nine main principles that differentiate a holistic approach from the conventional way: 1) transformative vision, coupled with clear financial objectives, 2) service before profit, coupled with discovering one’s unique market niche, 3) trust and intuition, coupled with planning and marketing, 4) informality, coupled with responsibility, 5) commitment from the heart, coupled with financial risk, 6) flexibility, coupled with systems, 7) a feeling environment, coupled with lively communication, 8) ‘green’ operating principles, coupled with effiicient action, and finally, 9) an entirely new relationship to the work context.

Vision & Financial Objectives
Holistic enterprises feel themselves engaged in a transformative process which includes self-actualization as well as enabling a major transition in their chosen environment. At Breakthrough, for instance, we have been pioneering a transformation in the world of work, so that practical models and support structures are available as the old world crumbles. This can seem quite grandiose and pretentious, with plenty of scope for egos to get out of hand. But the dreary financial facts of life act as an instant feedback loop and force us to remember to think big, but start small, and to take it one lesson at a time. Grand schemes have to have ego and spiritual as well as human incompetence knocked out of them.

Service & the Right Niche
Service must come first, before profit and certainly before personal comfort or aggrandizement. Being a doormat, or forgetting to put your lid on when someone uses you as a dustbin is not service! Nor is withholding difficult feedback, or dumping your anxiety and negativity on others’ ideas before you’ve given them a proper hearing. Service is always positive and supportive. The challenges are in finding the balance, staying in love and not losing trust when service does not seem to produce rewards. You cannot serve everyone: you must find your own niche.

Trust & Intuition with Planning & Marketing
Learning to trust and listen to intuition are two of the principal reasons for working. The other two are to have fun and eat! You must also plan: how else can you have clear intention?

Informality & Responsibility
At Brealkthrough our structure is as non-hierarchical as possible, though sharing the financial risk has proved impossible so far. Ideas can come from anyone and decisions are consensual and informal. Indeed I often have to fight quite hard to get my own way!

Commitment & Financial Risk
Putting your vision to work, risking everything, going out on a limb for what you believe in, serving yourself at all levels and being of service, putting your labour where your love is, is true commitment. How you are with commitment and how you behave when commitments have to be broken speak volumes about whether any of this is real or just Public Relations.

Flexible Systems
Every organisation becomes a bureaucracy before long. This is irksome to the spirit, so systems are only allowed if they improve service and increase time for fun.

One Earth 15 - Andrew Ferguson

Andrew Ferguson

Feeling Environment & Communication
A business, like a relationship, must be a place where feelings can be expressed. A holistic enterprise contains huge scope for the personal expression of frustration, despondency, anger, sadness and negativity, quite apart from anything any of us may bring to the business from the rest of our lives. Holism means being authentic. This is a major challenge. It is one thing to work with the darker side of our natures in therapy. To do it amid the demands of providing a service is quite another.

At Breakthrough we don’t always remember this and the priority of the day often takes over. We went through a very difficult stage twelve to eighteen months ago when finances were especially dire, and we seemed to be falling apart. Anger and resentment festered and had to be expressed before any organisational solutions could come up. Our monthly core group meetings saved us then, because sharing where each of us is at, is the first and main item on the agenda. We had some very noisy times, which also opened up the possibility of more expression of feelings between meetings.

l believe this practice of expressing feelings helps to keep the atmosphere light and bright, because difficulties are worked through. We do a lot of hugging and laughing and wear rather more jeans and trainers than suits and ties. Harmony and beauty in our physical surroundings also help us enormously.

‘Green’ Principles & Efficient Action
‘Green’ is primarily about how we relate to ourselves and each other. At Breakthrough, everything we do (and advise) is driven by attunement and sensitivity to the environment. But recycling is space consuming and often threatens to overwhelm us. We are obsessive about only buying recycled stationery and minimising and reusing everything we can. On the other hand, we’ve been slow to introduce energy efficient lighting and our biggest failing is a badly insulated roof. However, our total energy cost (for 900 sq ft) is £ 1.80 per day, which we think is pretty good.

A Positive Reaction
The fundamental difference between holistic and conventional business is in the way each reacts to problems and successes. When things appear to be going wrong, the greatest challenge is to feel what you feel, and express it without being stopped by it. ‘Push to shove’ can work in the conventional mode; ‘pushing the river’ never works in the holistic mode. It is always necessary to connect with the meaning of any set-back at an emotional level. When the correct diagnosis is made and acted on, energy moves again.

The holistic approach takes efficient management, organisation, planning and financial control as a starting-point and then adds alignment to vision, values, spirit and inner self. The whole process of taking visions into action, of turning noisy nouns into vigorous verbs, requires every level of human energy to be activated and fully involved.

For details on The Breakthrough Centre or Andrew Ferguson’s book Creating Abundance: how to bring wealth and fulfilment into your life (Piatkus £8.99) please write to: The Breakthrough Centre, 7 Poplar Mews, Uxbridge Road. Shepherds Bush, London W12 7JS