First is the popular class Miller teaches as a lecturer in the religion department, “Business Ethics and Modern Religious Thought,” which takes a case-study approach to business ethics by looking closely at scandals like Enron and ethical dilemmas like profits from vice. The Faith and Work Initiative has four main areas of focus. “And it has continued to promote coincident values, like serving, caring, and selflessness. “Princeton has a faith-based tradition,” he says, referring to its Presbyterian origins. But Melrose sees it both as practical ethics training for students who may be going into business and, just as significantly, as an expression of some of the University’s oldest and most cherished values. It might seem odd that Princeton, which has neither a business school nor a divinity school, should care about this seemingly arcane area of workplace psychology. Called the Princeton University Faith and Work Initiative (FWI), it was created in 2009 under the auspices of the University’s Center for the Study of Religion with the help of a gift from Ken Melrose ’62, the former CEO of the Toro Co., who now leads a company that promotes a leadership style based on service to others. He is the director of an unusual but successful Princeton program that studies the role faith plays in the workplace and as the basis for ethical business practices. No one knows this better than Miller, who has been studying the issue for more than a decade. “And surprise, surprise: They’re realizing that someone who is healthy in the broadest sense of the term is going to be a better employee.”
“The new model is that companies are now thinking: How do I treat my people holistically?” Miller says. It wasn’t just their faith that they were expected to check at the door: It was their gender, sexual preference, and politics, too.īut things are changing. This split existence, which some refer to as the Sunday-Monday gap, was the price employees paid in exchange for a job a generation ago: You were one person at your place of worship on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, and another, living by a different set of values, come Monday morning. At work you should avoid any subject that is likely to turn people off, no matter how important or central it is to your identity, your self-worth, or what makes you tick.’” But in the 32 years that have passed - the first 16 of them spent in international business and finance, the rest in academia studying the question of how faith might operate in the workplace - Miller has come to understand what was being asked of him that day: “What he was really saying was, ‘Don’t bring your whole self to work. If Miller questioned those words at the time, he doesn’t remember it now. Customers want solutions to their business problems, not their spiritual problems.” “Because then someone else will start, and you’ll look dumb,” she said with a smile.David Miller has no trouble recalling the advice he was given as an IBM trainee fresh out of college in 1979: “Whatever else you learn here,” the instructor cautioned, “just don’t forget - religion and business simply don’t mix. “You can’t be afraid to just go ahead and start,” Ruth said. That’s why their advice to women looking to start businesses of their own is to just do it. “So that’s where the whole pivot in my life came from, not wanting to spend more years of this one life that we get doing things that made my unhappy.” “I was more intrigued by the possibility of controlling my own destiny since I spent so much time, I don’t want to say I wasn’t doing well, but I wasn’t content,” she said. “I just always thought it would be cool to be my own boss,” Ruth said.įor Carron, the high is slightly different. For both women, that’s a dream come true. They have 200 customers and thousands more on a waiting list. Shipping days used to be 24-hour days.)īut Sahshé is their full-time job. That extra half hour is a victory, Ruth says. They now have an office space in Newark and are known to work up to 23 and a half hours a day on shipping days. She pulled Ruth into the startup with her, offering her a place to make good use of that engineering degree, and they set about creating a subscription box specifically for women of color. They remained just friends until Carron came up with the idea for Sahshé, a personalized subscription beauty box for women of color. Ruth remembers Carron coming up to her table when she was eating lunch alone one day. Yeah, whoa.They met freshman year, during orientation week. Ruth majored in chemical engineering and worked for Sealed Air Co. Carron speaks Arabic and worked in the State Department. These aren’t just women who love to play with makeup. You really can’t talk about Ruth Fombrun and Carron White and their beauty box company, Sahshé, without mentioning their credentials.
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