Just Love and Serve...By John Behner and his story.

[Guest guest]

1st August 2007

Just Love and Serve

 

" The purpose of business is to make other people happy - serving

your customers and making sure that your customers are happy is the

reason for your business and the reason for your being there. "

 

- John Behner, former Country Manager of Nabisco, El Salvador

 

John Behner, for 20 years, was the Country Manager in El Salvador of

the huge USA-based multinational food-company Nabisco, which started

as a major producer of cookies and snacks, but over the years

expanded into many types of food products. Although born and raised

in the USA, he has for the major part of his life lived in the

Central American country of El Salvador where his wife Rose was born.

 

Spirituality has been the focal point of his

leadership. " Spirituality " he told us " is trying to see God in

everyone and trying to interact with everyone on a very loving

basis - being humble and trying to help. " What is most important to

John Behner is " to realize my oneness with God. I see spirituality

as having a personal relationship with God. What is my goal? It is

to become one with God; in my personal life as well as at the

workplace. "

 

Shortly before starting to work for Nabisco, John R. Behner went to

India, where he met Sathya Sai Baba, who became his spiritual

teacher. A strong work ethic from his youth now became part of a

spiritual quest. " Realizing God by serving others – and trying to

see God in everyone " had become the guiding light on his search for

self-realization.

 

" Spirituality to me is the application of the human values - truth,

right conduct, peace, love and non-violence - in your way of doing

things. But it's also more than that. It's trying to see God in

everyone and trying to interact with everyone on a very loving

basis, seeing everything as being perfect, and not pointing your

finger at anyone or anything. Each of the human values that you are

trying to live and put into practice comes out in reflections of

what you are doing. Being spiritual is being humble and trying to

help. We had a beach house that used to be part of our `God' before

we knew our spiritual teacher, Sathya Sai Baba. The beaches in El

Salvador are very beautiful, and every weekend we were at the beach

with the kids at the swimming pool. Almost immediately after coming

to know Sai Baba, we sold the beach house, because we realised that

weekends were the only times we had when we could do service. So we

got rid of it and tried to devote our time to doing service

activities.

 

" The purpose of business is to make other people happy - serving

your customers and making sure that your customers are happy is the

reason for your business and the reason for your being there. But

not only your customers, your employees too should be happy. There

should be a lot of employee enthusiasm and satisfaction, and this

should be made part of this energy of trying to do the best they

possibly can. I tried to instil in the employees the idea of

serving, and that the reason for them to be there was to serve our

clients and to do the best possible job. For example, if they were

in manufacturing, they were told to look at the quality of the

products as if they themselves were going to eat them.

 

" The idea of serving - and for me trying to see God in everyone - is

my cup of tea. The economic outcome was the result of this

philosophy of serving; the employees prospered, the company

prospered, and everybody was happy in what they were doing. "

 

" After I met Sathya Sai Baba, I started looking more closely at the

products we were dealing with. Nabisco had a big plant in Ecuador

where all the subsidiary companies like ours would buy the raw

gelatine for their factories. The gelatine was made out of the skins

of animals. I started experimenting with a vegetarian gelatine from

a company called Kelko, and found out that if we used this instead

of the animal gelatine, it would not form mould in the refrigerator

after two or three days. To me, that was enough reason to stop

buying gelatine from our company's plant, and instead buy it from

Kelko. " Citing another revealing incident, he says,

 

" In 1986, there was a big earthquake in San Salvador, so we got a

little experience in dealing with a crisis. One of the first things

we saw was that all the supermarkets, which were our biggest

clients, were affected; all their merchandize was all over the

floor. They had a tremendous job of trying to clean what was

saveable and to throw out what was broken and maybe take some kind

of inventory of it. We also saw that our production lines were

useless, because if the supermarkets could not put our products on

their shelves, what good was it to produce it? So we shut down our

production lines and sent the salesmen to all the major

supermarkets. We offered them a team of our production people to

help them clean up. We did this very successfully, and we were the

only company that did it. All the supermarkets were happy to get

this kind of service, which didn't cost them anything. It only took

about a week of very concentrated effort. It got them on their feet

faster, so we could start selling faster.

 

" We took stock of our employees, and we had nine employees who had

lost their homes. Since we had shut down the production, our

maintenance department wasn't doing anything. So we asked these guys

to go and rebuild the homes of these nine employees. Temporary

structures were put up in the nine homes, and the employees were

very grateful. El Salvador gets earthquakes periodically. In 1994

when we had another earthquake, we were all prepared, because we had

already gone through the big one in 1986.

 

" At a certain time, we decided to do some combined publicity for the

company and Human Values-training. We went to local high schools and

offered them an opportunity for the students to come to the plant.

We had an auditorium, and I had each of my managers talk about one

of the five human values: truth, right conduct, peace, love and non-

violence, and how it affected his area.

 

" The Controller would talk about truth, how truth is important in

doing the bookkeeping, the accounting, paying the taxes, etc. The

Sales Manager would talk about right conduct, how you have to treat

the customers correctly. The Plant Manager talked about love,

because he had to keep everybody in harmony, so the production would

be good. The Quality Control Manager would talk about peace, that if

you do your work right, you will be tranquil, because you'll know

that the quality of all the products is fine. The Maintenance

Manager would talk about non-violence, that if you weren't polluting

and contaminating, then you would have non-violence.

 

" The amazing thing was that the students would come in batches of a

hundred, filling the auditorium. The managers were the ones who

benefited the most, because they had to learn about these values to

talk about them. Then they started seeing how the values worked in

their job. The students would also understand the values in relation

to a work ethic. As a result, some of the young people would apply

to work with us, because they liked what they saw. " It was not only

the young people who liked what they saw; under the many years of

John Behner's spiritual-based leadership, Nabisco in El Salvador was

a highly successful and innovative company with dedicated workers

and customers.

 

While the spiritual-based leaders you have met so far have had long

careers, and were at least in their 50's at the time they were

interviewed, the next person you will meet is only in his 30's. He

tells how spirituality challenges him and makes him grow as he works

on the cutting edge of ICT (information/communications technology).

 

Ram Chugani

Kobe, Japan

rgcjp