Article submitted by Mbulelo Bikwani (Associate of Business Sculptors) to a number of Business Magazines, 4 August 2008.

Very few people openly admit to being religious, more especially to being Christians. Most would rather claim to be spiritual. Conversations vaguely hinting toward religion are considered taboo, especially in business. And yet, despite being a secular State, 79% of South Africans are claiming to be Christian.

Mbulelo Bikwani, an associate of management consultancy Business Sculptors™, was therefore potentially treading on thin ice when he posed this question to a group of business executives and entrepreneurs recently, where he was guest speaker.

A lawyer by training with a trade union and church activist background, Bikwani is unapologetically Christian. His Christian principles guide his approach to doing business. And this is the message he was trying to convey to this group of young businessmen and women who are at the height of their careers and steadily setting themselves up to being multi-millionaires and billionaires.

“Our sophisticated and largely secular global culture encourages us to draw lines and keep our spiritual lives separate from our secular lives. God is only for Sundays? For those of us who believe in God, our spiritual lives are part and parcel of our working lives,” says Bikwani very boldly.

In attempting to encourage young black people to think differently not only about how they do business but also about where and with whom they do business, Bikwani uses an example of The Great Commission Companies (GCCs), a Christian-led ‘movement’ that converges business and missionary work by using businesses as a vehicle to help transform the lives of the people around them.

This ‘movement’ is perhaps an evolution of Christian missionaries and one which takes the revolutionary enterprise development and corporate social responsibility ‘movements’ a step further.

In Building a Great Commission Company, Steven Rundle and Tom Steffen write that “the holistic nature of a GCC means that it brings both material and spiritual benefits to a community. By bringing meaningful and dignified work to these communities, GCCs are engaging in important ministries”.

Bikwani is advocating for a Christian-led or Christian values-based approach to addressing poverty and other social issues. Perhaps it is relevant that the audience is young and majority black, the future leaders of our country.

“By establishing authentic businesses that employ local workers among the least reached people, they contribute to the economic health of the immediate community and also provide avenues for both physical and spiritual ministries. Great Commission Companies are a way of glorifying God through business. These companies intentionally create businesses in strategic locations, pursuing contribution to ease human suffering before profits while remaining unapologetically Christian in their purpose.”

To bring his point across, he contrasts Great Commission Companies to capitalists companies. “Capitalism as a social system has little (if any) regard for the betterment or preservation of life, human or otherwise. It promotes a culture of ‘dog-eat-dog’ and a scarcity paradigm that would have people believing there aren’t enough resources in the world to go around to everyone, so we all have to fight to get and keep our share.”

He describes the ‘shutting down’ of large companies, leaving hundreds of people jobless as an unfortunate example of capitalist decisions. “I have witnessed friends lose everything they owned due to some big competitor company ‘destroying’ their business through price cutting, or through selling a major stake in their business to some big company and then watching helplessly as mismanagement killed their business. I have, maybe we have, witnessed people being retrenched to make the CEO of a company to be regarded as a turnaround specialist and get a fat ‘dirty’ bonus at the expense of the people s/he retrenched. I have also witnessed our own government literally kill small businesses by their sloppy administration.”

He suggests that in light of growing inequality, his audience becomes weary of the wrong type of capitalism that is devoid of Christian values. To drive home his message he quotes globally respected philosopher Deepak Chopra: “We are spirits living a physical experience - enjoy physicality and acquire nice things; just don't make it all-important”.

Mbulelo Bikwani is an associate of Business Sculptors, and the founding CEO of Zakithi Management Consulting and Founding Managing Director of SAM Headhunting SA. He consults to Christian CEO/MDs about God and Business. He is based in Cape Town. Mbulelo is highly involved in a number of businesses and organizations including Vukani Auctions, Keymix Investments, UWC, Epilepsy SA, V & A Waterfront and the Black Management Forum.