Joy at Work

I've been struggling with work lately. The past few weeks I have had to put in 10-hour days and 6.5-day weeks to keep up, and it is exhausting. Today I had to get away from my desk to hear myself think, so I drove down to the local bookstore and perused for an hour. Finally I stumbled across a book, Joy at Work: A Revolutionary Approach to Fun on the Job.

The author is the co-founder of AES, a principle-driven energy company which by 2002, operated in 31 countries and had $8.6 billion in revenue. He's also an evangelical Christian.

The book is hardly a theological treatise (it is written for a secular audience), but he teases apart some conceptions of business that are at odds with both his faith and, he believes, our humanity. With an efficiency-driven world in mind, he quotes Oxford professor John Kay: "There is a real difference between saying to your workers, 'We care about your welfare because we do,' and saying, 'We care about your welfare because that will make you work harder for us." He insists on the permanence of moral principles (though he also insists that our understanding of those principles can become clearer over time). And he connects the raison-d'être of the corporation with stewardship, "a concept that assumes the resources we are using belong to someone else."

I'm only on Chapter 1, but I think I'm becoming more keenly aware of the "principalities and powers" often at work in the business world. Our obsession with efficiency is dehumanizing. We become cogs in a bigger wheel called The Economy, means to an end. This can't be what God intended for us.

Bakke will be hard-pressed to show how such a business can survive in a cutthroat world. His first chapter already hints at some of the difficulties they faced when they went public. Nor will he probably go far enough in dethroning capitalism. But perhaps he will have some interesting ideas on how to survive in a godless world.