Headline April 29, 2016/ ''' !BYE-BYE AXE-MAN? '''

''' !BYE-BYE AXE-MAN? '''

OH DEAR, Dear Me!  A fad  for piety infiltrates  and really takes off, in the the realm of Mammon, as everyone begins  praying for gain  

*Corporate Chaplains* are a booming business in America. There are roughly over 5,000 of them  [precise numbers are hard to come by] working everywhere from giant multinationals to tiny family firms.

And their numbers are growing. America has several thriving  rent-a-chaplain  companies and two seminaries that offer  degrees in corporate chaplaincy,   *yet demand exceeds supply.*

*Corporate Chaplains of America*  which is based in Wake forest, North Carolina, is both newer and small.

It was founded in 1996 and has over  100 full time chaplains on its books who minister to  over  75,000  workers, in  24 states. But it is also booming.

Dwayne Reece, a spokesman, says that the firm would like to have  1,000 chaplains ministering to  1 million workers. And all the chaplain companies talk excitedly about going global.

Marketplace Chaplains expanded into Mexico and Puerto Rico in 2007, and has very high hopes for the British market. Corporate Chaplain has a client who wants it to expand into China......!WOW!.   

And now lets veer to *Chief Fiction Officer*: 

''I've not seen anything that is total BS,  that couldn't happen,'' says Skip Brandon,  -co-founder of Smith Brandon International-

A corporate Intelligence company.

The business community is pretty interesting, with all sorts of characters which brings to life with a level of realism people can relate to, says Bill Teuber, of  EMC , a data storage company.

Business journalism may provide plenty of facts and figures, Mr Finder argues,  but it seldom gives readers much of a feel for corporate life.

Fiction,  in his view, can provide a more accurate picture than anything,  found in newspapers or management literature. At any rate,  Mr Finder is convinced that corporate insiders talk more candidly to him than they do to reporters.

He has found big companies remarkably willing to provide background material. For  ''Paranoia'' he talked with high-ups at Apple, Cisco and Hewlett-Packard   -a computer maker-

Whose subsequent involvement in a real-life  case of corporate espionage may not have come as a surprise to Mr Finder's readers. For  ''Killer instinct'' , NEC helped him to understand what it was like to be an American working for a big Japanese electronics firm.

*Confessions of an Axe-Man*.

MR FINDER still suffers from some predictable literary prejudices for instance, he confesses he finds it difficult to present bankers as sympathetic characters.

But for the most he is refreshingly keen to depict  businessmen  as motivated by more than greed and fear.

In  ''Company Men''  ,  the hero is a boss who has to fire many of his workers. Mr Finder asked several company bosses what it felt like to lay people off.

He says they would see nothing but  ''downside''  in discussing such issues with a reporter.

But they treated him like a confessor, describing  ''how agonizing it was, how their kids had been ostracized, beaten up, how one  CEO  had a glass of wine thrown at him in a restaurant.''

Not all firms are keen to confide. Mr Finder says that when he was preparing his tale of   corruption,  in the aviation industry, Boeing  ''refused flatly, saying    ''What's in it for us?''

Lockheed Martin, by contrast, co-operated; two of its top executives are among the expert commentators on the fictional case study.

Mr Finder thinks that lingering embarrassment about a series of improprieties uncovered at  Boeing  earlier  this decade accounts for the difference.

''Lockheed's scandals are over 20 years in the past. For Boeing, corruption is much more recent and painful.''

Mr Finder believes that even businessmen might a learn a thing or two from his books. the kidnap experts he consulted about  ''Power Play'' , for example, expressed concern that bosses do not think enough about security.

When they take their top lieutenants on bonding retreats. As he says of the novel's grisly plot,  ''If I can think of it, the bad guys have already thought of it. so the guys who run companies should think about it too.''

Instead of running around in the woods, executives might find it safer and more useful to curl up with a good book.  

But before you do that, just hear this: People in the business also argue that corporate chaplains can boost productivity.

Art Stricklin, of Marketplace Chaplains, claims that the turnover rate at Taco Bell outlets in central Texas dropped by a third after they started employing chaplains. And many companies have taken to advertising the fact that they employ chaplains in promotional literature.

Texas Instruments offers  ''serenity rooms''  where employees can go to pray and meditate.

Lawsuits from outraged secular employees are probably only a matter of time.

Maybe, Joseph Finder is right that novels provide better insight into business than journalism.

With respectful dedication to the Corporate world,  Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all on the World Students Society and the the Ecosystem 2011.

''' Intelligent World '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless