Saintly Lessons and Divine Concepts for Business

The saints, for centuries, have been studied for their exemplary model lives for Christians. Their many miracles have fascinated people in the middle ages as they do today. What has been overlooked are the administrative and organizational "miracles" they performed. The saints forged the oldest organization ever in history. They were real life managers, dealing with the difficult world we know. Their successes and failures offer us the accumulated knowledge of two milleniums. The saints have two thousand years of experience in today's biggest challenge of the merger of Western and Eastern cultures. In reality, the saintly organizational structure and techniques are the cooperative evolution of Western and Eastern approaches to management. In the rapid movement toward globalization, it is the history of the Christian church that offers a treasury of management techniques for today's manager. The lives of the saints offer much more guidance than just organization and structure. The ability to bring spirituality into the manager's decision making is an even more powerful tool. In the saints, we, as business people, find a diversity of situations to serve as examples. The amazing thing about the saintly lessons and principles is that their two-thousand-year evolution makes them timeless. The first century information system of the saints is a powerful example for today and the future. Saints like Paul, Clement, Ignatius of Antioch, and Irenaeus were masters of information and pioneers of virtual management techniques. One can only be in awe of the way they used written communication to manage widely dispersed churches while in Roman prisons or on the road. The saintly information systems were a triumph of organization and infrastructure and a model for our century.

Quentin Skrabec Jr PhD