Saturday, February 05, 2005
CEO sees role for human factor
A conversation with Mother Teresa propelled J. Robert Ouimet on a quest to find out how he could reconcile human needs with the productivity needed to succeed in business.
After his discussion with Mother Teresa, Ouimet embarked on a nine-year journey to obtain a doctoral degree with a dissertation evaluating just how to balance the two.
In South Bend Friday to present his argument to a class of University of Notre Dame business students, Ouimet emphasized that spirituality must play a role for a company wanting to balance those two tenets of business.
"In the workplace today, we pursue efforts to increase productivity and profits," he said. "But by doing only that, we forget completely the human side of the organization."
Ouimet is the chairman and chief executive officer of Montreal-based Holding O.C.B. and Ouimet-Tomasso, primarily a frozen pasta producer in Canada that was founded by Ouimet's father.
While he maintained that modern business schools do an excellent job teaching free-market principles, they often neglect the human aspect of a company.
As a result, employees become more burned out, turnover rates increase and workplace morale suffers because businesses forget that their fundamental objective should be to keep humans in mind, Ouimet said.
Balancing the two isn't easy, he acknowledges, especially since the economic and human aspects should carry equal weight in an organization.
"It's not only not easy, it is terribly, awfully, completely, and constantly bloody tough," Ouimet said.
That's where spirituality comes in, to give the head of an organization strength to make tough decisions.
Ouimet pointed to bi-annual employee surveys, outreach efforts that include spending company time at soup kitchens and silent meditation rooms in the workplace as examples of management strategies he initiated at his company that help promote a more value-centered workplace.
But he added that developing a workplace culture that balances profits and people takes years to nurture, and that ultimate responsibility for creating that environment falls on a company's leaders.
"There is only one way to start this, and it is at the top," Ouimet said. "It has to start with the privileged, the powerful, and the wealthy. Then, and only then, will it slowly trickle out into the rest of the organization."
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