American Decades
Religion in the Workplace
Corporate Spirituality.
Since 1993 three hundred employees of the Xerox Corporation, from managers to clerks, have participated in "vision quests," a $400 million program designed to revolutionize product development. Alone for twenty-four hours in the New Mexico desert or the Catskill Mountains, workers communed with nature, seeking insights to help the struggling copier company. Many within and outside the company snickered and scoffed, but, says John F. Elter, the Xerox chief engineer who headed the project, "for almost everyone, this was a real spiritual experience." The outcome was one of the most surprising corporate success stories of the 1990s: the production of the 265DC, a 97 percent recyclable copier-fax-printer. Word of this venture attracted senior executives from companies as diverse as Ford Motors, Nike, and Harley-Davidson to Xerox design offices in Rochester, New York, in September 1999, not only to see the machine...
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1990's Business and the Economy
