A Leap of Faith from California to the Mystical East. In 1992, my then-partner and I decamped from the S.F. Bay Area to Tokyo, Japan. This “leap” of faith was prompted by the difficulties my U.C. Berkeley-educated better-half encountered in finding meaningful work; our evolving weariness in coping with the ravages of HIV/AIDS in that city. To provide more context, as we were making our last preparations to depart, the contentious Clarence Thomas confirmation hearing was underway, as was the Rodney King trial in Los Angeles.

I had spent a year in Japan as an under-grad. My better half had university friends who were living and very productively working in Tokyo. I had an offer to work for an American international law firm setting up shop in that city.

Well, the 1990s were heady and formative times in the history of Japan and its interface with the rest of the planet. The Big Banks and financial firms were gearing up to establish Tokyo as the financial hub of Asia, and high-tech firms such as Oracle, Intel, and Texas Instruments were insinuating themselves into the socio-technological firmament. I served in a number of roles relevant to this epoch, transitioning from my legal services incarnation to work in HR consulting focused on the successful transition of very expensive expats into positions in the banks, and other firms. Certainly, it was in this work that I first experienced, heard about, and witnessed on a daily basis, cultural friction based on different work-styles, values, priorities and, often, simple miscommunication. A good day was when I could use my knowledge and experience of “the culture” to guide my clients into safer and more productive waters.

I was building a successful career in this sector and was anticipating a move to a regional role when 9/11 occurred. Suffice it to say that expatriate assignments were severely curtailed after this event, which led to western organizations viewing their international locations and personnel as potential targets of terror attacks.

In climbing off this burning platform, I assessed what I had most enjoyed in my experience of the international mosh pit of expatriate management, and concluded it was people development and organization development functions. I first explored these disciplines in an American/Japanese joint-venture firm, the ostensible focus of which was something called, “team building.” Viewed superficially, experiential learning activities engaged in on-site and in the great outdoors seemed harmless enough. Multi-cultural teams seemed to enjoy this time together, and no doubt relationships were enhanced.

That said, an American consultant colleague at this firm and I, saw a darker side to this approach. For our unfortunate clients, team building entailed submerging individual identity, personal values, goals, aspirations into what has come to be called the hive-mind. This was accomplished, Wizard of Oz-style, through the use of technologies that I did not fully understand at the time. While consultants were endlessly encouraged to realize their personal visions, these visions were in reality the result of a group process facilitated by our managing director. The net result of these “visions” was the paradoxical experience of an absolute sense of agency in one’s work combined with the reality of having no control at all. The worker bee consultants labored tirelessly to embed their DNA into the cultures of our Fortune 500 clients. We noted that while our clients presented a variety of needs and contracted to receive services based on those needs, the same program, or programming, was invariably delivered. We saw, too, that in delivering the program, no sacrifice of human dignity was too great, no detail of a prescribed ritual, too small. Support for the team involved the extraction of sexual favors from female consultants by our guru and his circle of associates, and egregious work schedules that precluded normal family and other social relationships.

People of the Lie

I recall, now, that I consulted a local therapist friend to help me understand what I took to be a one-off experience of a “corporate cult.” I had been surprised by her response. Upon hearing me describe the daily ritual of personal confessions (staff) coupled with fervent commitments to “do better for the team,” she handed me a copy of M. Scott Peck’s, People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil (Simon & Schuster, 1983).

For those whose knowledge of his work may be limited to his best-seller, The Road Less Travelled, Peck had focused his attention toward the end of his career on a small population of patients who had deeply disturbed him. For Peck – a clinician committed to the healing of his clients and society – malignant narcissists had evoked existential concern. Peck differentiated these People of the Lie from other diagnostic groups by their exercise of what he called “unsubmitted will” – a refusal to submit to something higher than themselves – be it God, or truth, or some other ideal (pg. 76). My colleague and I had experienced the exercise of “unsubmitted will” – a boot stamping a human face, forever – in the mundane confines of a consulting firm. As was the case with Peck, this encounter set us off in search of a spiritual explanation and, perhaps, an antidote.

Conversion to Roman Catholicism. Although my colleague and I were both seasoned HR consultants, and veterans of this field and its practice in Asia and although we were well-versed in the unfortunate, albeit, common concatenation of bad bosses, cultural disconnects and faulty business strategies that afflicts organizations in the region, neither of us had the intellectual categories derived from normal human experience that allowed us to understand what we had witnessed in a firm that focused on the innocuous-sounding term team building. Both my colleague and I tried to make sense of what was happening to us in our conversations about religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular. As an American married to a Chinese national, my colleague wanted their child to have some grounding in traditions of the West and an opportunity for his family to participate in an international community of faith. I, a longtime admirer of Catholic theology, wished to formalize my faith and my relationship with the Church. This is what we told ourselves.

We approached a Catholic priest and educator we had both known through our academic work. This individual, a Jesuit of very high standing in that order, graciously heard our requests and set in motion a process whereby we would be baptized and confirmed into the Roman Catholic Church. Our baptisms were accomplished in a small chapel adjacent to the Catholic university campus where we had studied at various times in our lives.

I will say that, in retrospect, neither of us had a clear grasp of what adult conversion to the Catholic faith actually entailed. We imagined that we would receive religious training, some form of catechesis prior to our formal pledge, and we did inquire about this. It would seem, though, that as of 2005, at least, this process had been radically streamlined, and in fact all but eliminated. I recall thinking, “well, I guess we will come to understand the practice of the faith and the sacraments, through some sort of ‘experiential learning’ process; by osmosis, if you will.” Because we attended Mass regularly, we felt safe, or safer, from what we had experienced in “the firm.” We felt that we were healing just a little bit, simply in the contemplation of something greater than ourselves. I continued this practice for some years after my colleague shipped back to the U.S.

Unfortunately, this initial brush with hive-mind building technology was not a one-off experience, but a harbinger of industry and pedagogical trends which had global reach. This trend would be typified by a shift in focus from the mastery of skills and bases of knowledge to Socio-Emotional Learning, with its focus on self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision-making, relationship skills, and social awareness, i.e. good citizen-building.

Favorite media for inculcating these new competencies in the corporate world are the disciplines of Executive Coaching and its systems-focused sister science, Organization Development (OD).

While it is my belief that both disciplines got off to legitimate starts in this world, with coaching methods being adopted for organizational use by consulting psychologists as far back as the 1930s, and the field of OD emerging from the work of social scientist, Kurt Lewin in the same decade, it became clear that pseudoscientific facsimiles were co-opting these enterprises.

It was the on-going experience of the constant disruption of practices and values in my daily duties which led me to ask questions about what it means to be Catholic in one’s work. Frankly, too, I had been put in a series of positions by ever more remote managers of my work, in which I could not serve my clients’ best interests. And, then there was the ten day-long near-death experience that accompanied the 3/11 earthquake, tsunami, and reactor melt-down, which had given us all time to question how we were spending our lives in this thing called “work.”

So, I asked the Jesuit educator who had performed my baptism and confirmation sacraments if we could convene a theology discussion group to consider what it means to be Catholic in everyday life and work. Why I went back to this individual remains a mystery to me, which I can only explain as a matter of simple necessity resulting from the fact that I had not formed other relationships in the Church. Also, I believed that, as an educator, this person could provide insights into implementing Catholicism in the course of facilitating the development of others.

[…] This is just an excerpt from the April 2021 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!