Byte Reading

What's good for the soul is good for the entrepreneur.

By Laura Tiffany

August Turak was 21 years old when the spirituality bug bit him, leading him to quit college to study with a Zen master. Although he went on to finish college and has since founded four software publishing companies, spirituality is still foremost in his mind. "I consider myself a spiritual person who happens to own a business--not a businessperson who does spiritual things," says Turak, founder of Houston-based Elsinore Technologies Inc. and Raleigh, North Carolina-based Flynt Technologies, TeamVizor Inc. and Raleigh Group International.

Turak, 47, spends every Christmas, Easter and summer vacation at the Mepkin Abbey in South Carolina as a monastic guest--living, working and praying with 25 Cistercian monks. Although he jokes his employees fear he won't return from one of his trips, Turak says his business wouldn't be as successful if he didn't go.

He finds his inspiration in the monks (average age: 65), who run several successful businesses and maintain a 7,000-acre farm. "What I take away [from my visits] is marvel and awe of what these quiet men accomplish by having an attitude of `Ask not what the community can do for me, but what I can do for the community,'" Turak says. "They don't teach this kind of behavior, attitude and values in business school. I'm doing what some guys do by going to Harvard Business School for a few weeks every year to bone up on econometrics. I think most of them would be far better off going to a monastery and learning the kind of values that allow them to find, meet and hold on to the right people."

This article was originally published in the October 1999 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Byte Reading.