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In this video, Turak candidly speaks about his first book: Business Secrets of the Trappist Monks: One CEO’s Quest for Meaning and Authenticity (Columbia Business School Publishing; July 2013). He shares a behind the scenes look at why he first went to Mepkin Abbey back in 1996. Attributing much of his success as a successful entrepreneur, corporate executive, and award winning author to living and working alongside the Trappist monks of Mepkin Abbey, he explains he never could have imagined then that he would write this book… A book that shares the secrets he learned firsthand from the monks as a frequent monastic guest as they grew an incredibly successful portfolio of businesses.

Order now through Columbia Business School Publishing

SUCCESS Magazine and SUCCESS.com say: “Transformation—the human desire to better oneself—is at the heart of this genuine, perceptive and often moving exploration of ethics, authenticity and effectiveness in life and business.  Business Secrets of the Trappist Monks is full of valuable lessons.”

Read the complete SUCCESS Magazine Review in print.

View Turak’s first book on the Reading List at SUCCESS.com

Read The House the Rabbi Built by August Turak.

“I think that you’ll find August’s unique perspective both practical and uplifting.”    - Stephen Lahey

August Turak was recently interviewed by Stephen Lahey on the SmallBusinessTalent.com® podcast on business/personal transformation. The SmallBusinessTalent.com podcast provides you with fresh sales and marketing ideas from real-world experts — people with years of hands-on experience building healthy businesses with strong sales and marketing results.

The free SmallBusinessTalent.com podcast is hosted by Stephen Lahey and is published once a week. Lahey provides you with practical advice and useful sales and marketing content. All podcast episodes are well-edited — condensed to stay focused, but long enough to deliver actionable information. It’s all about helping you grow your business in a more profitable and fulfilling way.

Order now through Columbia Business School Publishing

Book Description: In addition to his work as an entrepreneur, corporate executive, and consultant, for the last 17 years August Turak worked alongside the Trappist monks of Mepkin Abbey, watching firsthand as they undertook new enterprises and sustained an incredibly successful business practice.

Service and selflessness are at the heart of this 1,500-year-old monastic tradition’s remarkable business success, an ancient though immensely relevant economic model that preserves what is positive and productive about capitalism while transcending its ethical limitations and internal contradictions. Combining the lessons he’s learned from thirty years of business experience with intimate portraits of the monks at work, Turak shows how Trappist principles have been successfully applied in a variety of business settings. He demonstrates how the monks and such agnostics as Warren Buffett are wildly successful not despite their fanatical commitment to the highest principles but because of them. Turak also points to other “transformational organizations” that share critical components of the abbey’s philosophy conducive to success.

Order now through Columbia Business School Publishing

I was channel surfing one day when I found myself watching an obviously brain injured young woman being attended to by three nurses. She was in a semi-comatose, twilight condition and the nurses were trying to wake her up.  Propping her limp body into a sitting position, they began poking, prodding, and speaking to her sharply while she, with eyes rolling wildly in fear and confusion, angrily flailed at them trying to get them to leave her alone so she could go back to sleep.

Ignoring her resistance, a nurse eventually forced a tooth brush into her hand. With great effort, her patient finally managed to get the tooth brush somewhere in the vicinity of her mouth. One of the nurses remarked that this was a “good sign” while another branded it a “huge step forward.”

Gradually the camera began panning back, revealing a young woman on a stool with her back to the camera, watching this scene on a monitor along with me. A disembodied male voice from behind the camera said, “Does it upset you to see yourself like that?”  Slowly her head swiveled.  “Oh, no,” she said her face breaking into a radiant smile, “I love watching myself like that!  It makes me so grateful for who I am today and for all the people who never gave up on me.”

I was very moved by seeing such a lovely young woman completely recovered and the intense gratitude that accompanied her recovery.  But there was more to it than that.  I realized that, metaphorically, her story was mine as well. Like her, I had lived in a semi-comatose, dream-like condition while a series of patient and compassionate teachers pushed, prodded, and occasionally shouted at me in an attempt to get me to “wake up.”

And like her angry reaction to her devoted nurses, often all my teachers got from me in return for their effort was angry, self-justifying, fearful resistance. The resistance of a man who apparently just wanted to be left alone so he could sleep his life away in complacent “peace” and ersatz “happiness.” Then, as this radiant young woman’s smile faded to black and the credits started to roll, I too was overcome with gratitude for all the people who never gave up on me.

*     *     *

Whether it is in business, leadership, or our personal lives, the most important things we must learn cannot be “taught” to us. Instead they must “come to us,” sometimes in a flash of realization, and this experience is often described as a feeling of “waking up.” Most of the world’s religious traditions include the notion of “enlightenment;” a term that tries to capture the experience of exchanging the darkness of deep sleep for the light of profound awareness. Socrates spent his life trying to wake people up, and his sleep deprived fellow Athenians eventually put him to death so they could go back to sleep. Socrates repeatedly argued that the values and character traits that every successful life relies on cannot be “taught.” Instead they can only be “discovered” or “realized,” and he described his own role as that of a midwife rather than a teacher: an analogy that neatly captures both the “awakening” that a baby experiences at birth as well as the sharp crack on the behind that the midwife must lovingly administer to get the job done.

Louis R. Mobley, my mentor and the director of the IBM Executive School, firmly agreed with Socrates. Mobley utterly abandoned books and lectures in favor of games and simulations designed to wake his students up to their limitations and limitless potential. Mobley was not looking for intellectual “answers.”  He wanted epiphanies, eureka moments, and revelations: The kind of experiences that produce a change of heart rather than merely a change of mind. Again like Socrates, Mobley believed that leadership cannot be “taught.” But it can be midwifed by facilitating what he described as a “revolution in consciousness.”

It has now been almost 60 years since Mobley began “blowing minds” at the IBM Executive School, and we spend billions to watch cinematic teachers like Yoda in Star Wars and Morpheus in the Matrix use similar shock and awe techniques with their students. Yet despite these powerful examples, we still cling to our books, lecterns, and Power Points in the vain hope that leadership’s most important lessons can be “learned” intellectually.

The reason why we refuse to take these examples to heart is rather simple. Waking up cannot be accomplished without the aid of a certain amount of trauma. Physically, it is impossible to wake up another human being from their slumbers without producing, at least momentarily, a startled state of confusion, fear, and sometimes, anger. Every sleeper experiences a mild traumatic shock before attaining consciousness; this is true no matter how gently they are awakened and even if they awaken on their own.

Similarly, it is impossible for even the most loving coach to get people outside the box of their dream-like condition without inducing a certain amount of trauma as an unintended byproduct. Deep down I think we all know this, and it is our aversion to trauma that often leads us to prefer living a Rip Van Winkle existence to running the risks of being jolted wide awake.

But in our fear we don’t realize that living life in a semi-somnolent state is fraught with an even bigger risk. The risk of missing out on an ineffable opportunity. The opportunity to someday smile into that magical lens that records your life and respond to life’s hidden producer, “Oh, no, I love seeing myself like that! It makes me so grateful for who I am today and for all the people who never gave up on me.”

Follow me on Twitter @augustturak, Facebook http://facebook.com/aturak, or check out my Forbes blog http://blogs.forbes.com/augustturak/ for more tips and strategies for becoming a great leader – and to discover how service and selflessness is the secret to success in business and in life.

In engineering “friction” can be defined as any waste of energy that has been harnessed to produce work. Entrepreneurs grow wealthy by reducing the economic friction between buyers and sellers. In business there is a form of friction that all too often kills plans, wastes energy, and ruins friendships: people fighting with each other.

I’ve investigated my fair share of work place squabbles. I almost never found two-legged villains at the heart of the problem. Instead I discovered hard-working, well intentioned people that had unintentionally allowed a disembodied demon into their midst: Ambiguity.

In one instance a sales department and shipping department were at each other’s throats. Both sides were convinced that they were the victims of a combination of incompetence and evil intentions on the part of the other. After scraping away the rancor, I discovered that the sales department was upset because product was not being shipped “on time.” Shipping was fed up with getting a flood of orders late in the day that they could not possibly ship without working into the night. The real problem was that both sides were operating from entirely different assumptions about what “on time” meant. I quickly brokered an agreement: any order received by shipping before 2:00 PM would ship the same day. Later orders would ship the next. I wrote the new policy down and distributed it. When the ambiguity disappeared so did the problem and the rancor.

I have often argued that a trait that distinguishes great leaders is an ability to creatively use the tension produced by ambiguity. Great leaders don’t live in a black or white world. Instead they love shades of grey. However, this trait is most effective when applied to strategic decisions. It is ambiguity surrounding execution that so often leads to disaster. Business execution is like an intricate, multi-faceted relay race. Ambiguity about who is passing the baton to whom by when almost certainly means that the precious baton will hit the floor and the postmortem recriminations will begin. In business, “crisp execution” is the Holy Grail, and crisp execution relies on eliminating ambiguity.

Again and again I’ve brought warring parties together and patiently heard them out. Then I would politely make a request: “Where’s the paper trail?” In almost every case there was none. All I had to work with were verbal communications based solely on memory, open to an almost infinite variety of contradictory interpretations. This internal friction was usually not the result of either incompetence or bad intentions. It was the result of people operating from entirely different assumptions about their respective responsibilities.

I have developed a tactic to eliminate the problems caused by ambiguity before they can arise. While my memory is still fresh, I summarize in writing everything that was agreed upon in a meeting or phone call and send it to all the participants. I make sure to invite everyone to either “sign off” or get back to me if my summary is either incorrect or incomplete. I also copy everyone not at the meeting that may be affected by our decisions in order to avoid “blindsiding” them further down the road.

We often hear that success is largely a factor of how many friends we make. However, success also depends on how few enemies we make. Clear, written communication has proven remarkably successful at keeping my enemies to a minimum. This discipline also forces me during meetings to focus on negotiating clear, unambiguous, mutually agreed upon action items. This in turn moves the meeting, project or sale along much more quickly.

The vast majority of internal squabbles are leadership problems rather than people problems. It is management’s job to make sure that the process by which people enter into agreements is formalized without becoming burdensome. When disputes arise from miscommunication and misunderstanding, it is management’s fault for not having the policies, procedures, and processes in place that prevent such conflicts in the first place.

In our own company, we made it clear that we had zero interest in refereeing “I said, she said” disputes. It was our policy that substantive meetings should always produce an internal “contract;” and that these contracts should be clearly written, mutually agreed upon, and meticulously kept. Staying on top of this process took discipline, but in the long run it paid off handsomely in increased productivity, team work, and perhaps most importantly, morale. Once our people discovered that without the proper documentation their pleas for “justice” would fall on deaf ears, they quickly adapted and disputes were practically non-existent.

The first step to removing crippling ambiguity is overcoming our distaste for writing and learning how to write clearly and unambiguously. A commitment to follow up “soon” is ambiguous. A promise to follow up at 3:00 PM on November 16^th is not.

The second step is overcoming the misconception that creating a paper trail is a waste of valuable time. My typical summary takes three minutes to write. These communications not only make things run far more smoothly, but have saved me countless hours in ex post facto conflict resolution.

Step three is overcoming our tendency for using ambiguity as tool for staying off the hook. Ambiguity in business is often connected to our fear of accountability. We resist making clear commitments because someone may hold us accountable if something goes wrong. Much of human interaction, consciously or unconsciously, is an attempt to hold others accountable while avoiding accountability ourselves. We crave wiggle room and plausible deniability. As a result, we often default to ambiguous commitments like “I’ll try” rather than “I’ll do.” Only by courageously embracing accountability in our business and personal lives can the friction of ambiguity be successfully overcome. If you want accountability from others, you must offer it first yourself.

Follow me on Twitter @augustturak, Facebook http://facebook.com/aturak, or check out my Forbes blog http://blogs.forbes.com/augustturak/ for more tips and strategies for becoming a great leader – and to discover how service and selflessness is the secret to success in business and in life.