Business by the Book: The Complete Guide of Biblical Principles for the Workplace

LARRY

BURKETT

BUSINESS BY

THE BOOK

THE COMPLETE GUIDE OF

BIBILICAL

PRINCIPLES

FOR THE

WORKPLACE

Copyright © 1998 by Larry Burkett

All rights reserved. Written permission must be secured from the publisher to use or reproduce any part of this book, except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles.

Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Nelson Business books may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fundraising, or sales promotional use. For information, please email [email protected].

Edited by Adeline Griffith, Crown Financial Ministries.

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture is taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE ®, © Copyright The Lockman Foundation 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations noted TLB are taken from THE LIVING BIBLE, copyright 1971 by Tyndale House Publishers, Wheaton, IL. Used by permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Burkett, Larry,

Business by the book : the complete guide of Biblical principles for the workplace / Larry Burkett. — An updated ed. of the bestselling classic.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-7852-8797-3 (tp)

ISBN 0-7852-7141-4 (pb)

1. Business ethics. 2. Business—Religious aspects—Christianity. I. Title.

HF5387.B855 1998

658.4—dc21

97-43793

CIP

Printed in the United States of America.

05 06 07 08 09 RRD 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

Introduction

PART 1

BUSINESS BY THE BOOK

1. A Radical Approach to Business Management

2. Basic Biblical Minimums

3. Business Bondage

4. Personal Lifestyle Goals

5. Biblical Business Goals

6. Keeping Vows

7. The Benefits of Counsel

8. Your Business and Your Spouse

PART 2

CRITICAL POLICY DECISIONS

9. Leadership: The Foundation for All Your Decisions

10. Hiring Decisions

11. Firing Decisions

12. Justification for Dismissal

13. Management Selection Decisions

14. Employee Pay Decisions

15. Borrowing Decisions

16. Lending Decisions

17. Discounting Decisions

PART 3

YOUR BUSINESS AND YOUR LIFE

18. Corporations and Partnerships

19. Business Tithing

20. Retirement Decisions

21. Implementing God’s Plan

Study Guide

Foreword

Business by the Book

As President of Crown Financial Ministries, it is my privilege to write the foreword to this revision of Larry Burkett’s classic, Business by the Book. The impact and influence that Larry has had on leading the church back to a biblical perspective of personal and church stewardship— the management of God’s money—has been a matter of God’s providential timing.

Following duty in the Air Force and then working with NASA, Larry responded to God’s direction to begin a ministry career with Campus Crusade. Bill Bright and James Dobson played key roles in Larry’s life and Dr. Dobson advised him to broaden his ministry to more than what seminars allowed. It wasn’t long before his radio programs were being broadcast around the country, and soon the name of Larry Burkett and Christian Financial Concepts could be heard on more than twelve hundred radio stations.

Larry not only understood how biblical financial principles played a critical role in the lives of individual Christians, their families, and their churches, but he recognized the special suitability of these biblical principles for Christian business men and women. He believed that the Bible, God’s Book, makes it clear that God is the owner of all things—including our businesses—and so he set out to help those who were in the business world transform their companies for God’s glory.

My part in Business by the Book

I was employed with Apple Canada, Inc., from 1985 to 1992. Like Larry, I know the importance of leading a successful business enterprise. While with Apple, I was recognized as their Manager of the Year on three separate occasions, and Apple Canada enjoyed the highest percentage of market share for Apple in the world, growing revenues from $78 million to $323 million.

Beginning in 1992, I served with Business and Professional Ministries, a division of The Navigators. During that time I started two businesses: EDiX Corporation, a medical transcription company; and Hockey Network International, which allowed me to use my business and spiritual background to mentor professional athletes with Judeo-Christian life skills.

In February 2000, Howard Dayton approached me about becoming the chief operating officer of Crown Ministries and I joined him and the Crown team in Florida. Then God used me to combine two thriving organizations, Crown Ministries and Christian Financial Concepts. Within five months we were able to bring both these ministries through a rigorous but seamless merger to form the newly created Crown Financial Ministries, with an inception date of September 2000. I became the ministry’s president in January 2002, and our effective operational staff has envisioned and implemented the God-sized goal of teaching biblical financial principles to three hundred million people by September 2015.

Business . . . mine wasn’t always by the Book

I knew the Bible was the Word of God, because I was raised in a Christian home. But I never really considered that there was any way the Bible applied to my business life. In my early thirties and as vice president of a major corporation that was doing a start-up, I struggled to balance my work and home life. I worked twelve-to sixteen-hour days. Work took the majority of my time, and the competing responsibilities of trying to be a good husband, father, and church member took a back seat.

I struggled with that, and if you’ve picked up this book, you probably relate to this too. I recall reflecting on two passages of Scripture. One involved the experience of the prophet Hosea. God asked him to marry a prostitute, because He wanted to make a statement to Israel. In Hosea Chapter 2 verse 6, Hosea prayed that God would put a hedge of thorns around his wife Gomer, so that she would be protected from any potential suitors.

That caused me to wonder if God might be able to put a hedge around my time. But how could the executive of a start-up corporation possibly work just an eight-hour day? The Lord seemed to be saying, Well, why don’t you just test Me and see! So I set a protective eight-hour fence around my business time.

The second passage of Scripture was the account in the Gospel of John, Chapter 6 where Jesus feeds a crowd of five thousand with a few barley loaves and a couple of fish. I saw that God was a multiplier of ordinary things. Surely God could take the work of a twelve-to sixteen-hour workday and allow me to accomplish it in an eight-hour period. I was thirty-one years old and just extreme enough to believe God’s Word. So when I asked the Lord to honor my request to multiply the time I had fenced off—He did it.

At Crown Financial Ministries our annual growth has been in the 200 to 300 percent range as we have been equipping multiple millions of people around the world. Yet, God has allowed me to still maintain a workday of eight hours. God’s Word is powerful, and any business person should realize that it’s a wise and strategic decision to integrate God’s Word into one’s work setting.

The Book says all that?

I began to see other principles in Scripture that applied to my business practices. Statements like "A soft word turns away wrath" (Proverbs 15:1) have kept me from handling confrontational circumstances improperly. And when such situations do arise, I’ve been able to rely on the Lord’s guidance in Matthew 18 as a guide to conflict resolution. After all, it’s God’s way.

In Exodus 18 the Bible provides a delegation process and also offers an excellent hiring policy. Moses was becoming weary from judging all of the people’s issues. His father-in-law Jethro suggested that Moses select capable men from among the people—men who feared God, were trustworthy, and hated dishonest gain. He was to appoint them as officials over groups of thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens. They were to serve as judges for the people but would bring difficult cases to Moses—it worked.

I saw the virtue of integrating those same biblical principles into my employment practices. In a hiring interview I would emphasize how important a person’s ethics were. I began to hire based on a person’s values and trusted that the person would then be competent to do the job as their résumé stated.

In business, honesty is strategic. Moses’ father-in-law recommended choosing people who hate dishonest gain. And Proverbs 12:22 says, The Lord detests lying lips. But He delights in men who are truthful. And in Proverbs 20:7, we read this bonus: The righteous man leads a blameless life. Blessed are his children after him—it works.

Proverbs 29:12 is a basic verse for any business person. If a ruler listens to lies, all his officials become wicked. It’s critical to have leaders surrounding you that are honest and will tell you the truth. Otherwise, untrustworthy people could provide unreliable counsel that might lead you and your staff astray.

The Bible even helps you determine whether a person is worthy of a promotion in your business. Whoever is faithful with little will be given much (Luke 16:10). This simple statement highlights the concept of testing, putting a person through tests of small things to determine whether or not he or she will be capable of taking on bigger responsibilities.

If you’re a parent, undoubtedly you already understand how that works. My father certainly did. He painted a used bicycle for me for one of my birthdays. Dad watched closely to see how I would take care of that bicycle. Would I store it properly, use the kickstand or just throw it on the ground? As I cared for my belongings, my father gave me nicer things and also assigned me with areas of greater responsibility in our home. That’s a principle right out of Luke 16:10.

The Book’s bonus benefits

Those were just a few examples that helped me see how God’s Word applied to my work setting. I began to understand that my business life was a calling from God, so I looked for opportunities to share my faith.

For a long time I struggled about the validity of the profession I was in. Was this really something I was called to do? I searched the Scriptures and discovered that many leaders in the Bible were business people. Daniel was a governor, Nehemiah a counselor to a king. Joseph became the second most powerful person in Egypt, Abraham was a landowner, David was a king, and Lydia sold purple fabric. In today’s world they might have been the leaders of corporations and countries. God placed them where He did so they could influence their world, and He does the same for you and me.

I wanted to influence people for Christ, but I understood that Apple Computer was my employer and wasn’t paying me to share my faith. They paid me to sell and support Macintosh ® computers. All the same, I looked for opportunities to create an environment where a person might ask me why I seemed to approach business issues from such a different perspective.

It didn’t take long for such an opportunity to take place. Even though I was president of Apple Canada, I had no depth of understanding of computers and realized that I needed help. So I hired a very gifted man, Don, who was able to take complicated computer concepts and put them in understandable English—quite a gift.

During his interview, he said had dreamed of working for Apple and that it was his number one priority. He also asked me what my priorities were.

I told him that my first priority was my relationship with God, followed by my relationship with my wife Ann, and then my relationships with my three children. After that came Apple and my community. He seemed satisfied with my priority list, although I could tell he was a little puzzled.

We met every weekday morning at 7:30 a.m. for one hour. Quite frankly, I received an on-the-job MBA in computer science during those one-hour sessions.

As time went on, Don and I got to know each other well. In 1987, the Monday following Easter, we took a trip to California for a week of meetings. We flew there together, but spent the week in separate sessions.

The Monday morning of our flight, I got up and was reading Ephesians 6, which speaks about the armor of God. For the first time in my life, I actually prayed for each piece of the armor on my body. I thought that I might get a chance to share my faith with Don. So, I grabbed my pocket New Testament and went off to the airport.

As was Apple’s custom, Don and I were assigned first class seats, 1A and 1B. During the flight, Don asked me lots of questions, one of them had to do with what the Easter service was like at my church.

This opened the opportunity for me to share my faith with him. After I had done this, I asked Don if he wanted to accept Christ’s gift of life. He said, Yes, so I asked if he wanted to pray right there in seats 1A and 1B. And he said that he did.

He got up out of his seat and knelt down. Now Don is six feet and seven inches tall—a big man. There was nothing for me to do but get up and kneel down beside him while the entire first class section of the airplane looked on. After we prayed and got back into our seats, I took out my pocket New Testament. I reviewed the verses I had shared earlier, so he would know that what I had told him was God’s Word, not mine.

When we parted at the airport I said that we needed to meet the next Monday morning at 7:00, an hour earlier than our usual time, so I could help him start to grow in Christ. I would mentor him first in spiritual things, and then at 7:30 we would get into our computer studies.

The next Monday, Don walked into my office and wanted me to ask him about his weekend. When I did, he related how he had gone home that past weekend and told his wife Debbie everything that I had told him about Jesus. And she asked Christ into her life. I was pleasantly shocked and told Don his assignment had suddenly expanded. Now he would have to disciple Debbie with the things he was learning from me. Each day I’d shared with him out of God’s Word of God and each evening he’d share with his wife.

The following Monday, there was Don with the now familiar request for me to ask about his weekend. I complied and he told me that he and his wife went to visit his parents and he shared with them what had happened with both him and Debbie. He told them about Christ and then his parents asked Jesus into their lives.

I was overwhelmed. Two weekends had gone by. Don became a Christian, the next weekend his wife received Christ, and the following weekend his parents came to Christ. So I told Don the drill was exponentially expanding and that he was now responsible for teaching his parents too.

Well, you can guess what happened the next Monday, same routine, same dialogue. Don told me he had spent some time with a lifelong friend with whom he had frequented some pretty unsavory places and did things that he knew weren’t right. Then Don shared with his friend that through Jesus Christ he was now at peace with God and getting his life straightened out. Then his friend accepted Christ into his life.

That same scenario didn’t occur every Monday, but for the first three weeks it did. And from then on, Don continued to share his faith openly with many people. My administrative assistant at Apple was challenged by Don’s passion for Christ. I noticed Lynn, a devoted Christian, spending the lunch hour at her desk studying the Bible. I asked about it and she said that Don’s zeal had challenged her to become a brighter light for Christ.

Over the next six months, Lynn had the joy of leading four of my vice presidents’ administrative assistants to Christ. During my tenure at Apple Canada, some twenty-five people put their faith in Christ as a result of Don and Lynn’s vibrant testimonies.

Business by the Book . . . for such a time as this

You may wonder why I think this book is so important. When I was at Apple Computer during the late eighties and early nineties there were few resources available to business people who wanted to live for Christ in the marketplace. But Larry Burkett had just written a book called Business by the Book and the man that mentored me had been discipled by Larry, and he deeply influenced me to conduct my business life by The Book.

Today, there are many ministries all over the world that focus on the marketplace. However, as I indicated earlier, in my estimation the pioneering efforts of Larry Burkett, one of God’s men for such a time as this (Esther 4:14), have been a catalyst in calling attention to the important role every Christian plays in the service of God—individually, corporately through the church, and in the business world.

At Crown Financial Ministries, we have developed a number of Business by the Book resources based on Larry’s classic. Some of these excellent tools stand alone and others can be used in small groups, either in the local church or in small business settings.

Although Larry Burkett went home to be with the Lord on July 4, 2003, his legacy of challenging Christians to live as godly managers of God’s blessings lives on. Larry once said, "The purpose of any Christian, in business or otherwise, is to glorify God, not just to make a profit. ‘Whatever you do, do your work heartily, as for the Lord rather than for men’ (Colossians 3:23)."

And I say Amen to that. As a business leader myself, here is what I want you to know. God has called each of us to live for Him where He has placed us. So if you’re a Christian, whether a businessperson, pastor, or employee, each one of us is in full-time service. We have the opportunity to take God’s Word seriously and apply it to our own lives first, and then share it with others out of our experience.

Just consider what could happen if you were to make your business decisions by the Book—the Word of God. You can, because this updated version of the bestselling Business by the Book offers essential principles of business management that go far beyond the Ten Commandments.

I believe that you’ll discover that this revised Business by the Book is a definitive, sound, timely, and God-honoring guide that will help you faithfully fulfill your role in business, your marriage, your family, your church and your community—and you can do it all according to the Creator of all management rules.

The bottom line is this, whether it’s personal life, marriage, family, or business—Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you (Matthew 6:33).

Dave Rae, President

Crown Financial Ministries

Gainesville, Georgia

Dave Rae holds a bachelor’s degree in Physical Education from the University of Toronto and has completed Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program. Dave and his wife, Ann, are the parents of three adult children, Kelly, Brian, and Kristy, and currently reside in Buford, Georgia.

Introduction

There never has been a time in recent history when such emphasis has been focused on business ethics and employee empowerment within the business community. Major U.S. businesses are spending megamil-lions of dollars for consultants to teach their managers how to better interact with their employees. Stiff foreign competition demands more production per work hour, and it recently has been rediscovered that happy employees are more productive.

When Edwards Deming went to Japan in the 1940s to teach modern industrial management techniques to the Japanese, he focused in large part on ethical management and employee involvement. These weren’t new ideas in 1947; in fact, they had been taught in virtually all of the good business management schools through the early part of the twentieth century.

But America’s prosperity and unique monopolistic position after Europe was devastated during World War I allowed American businesspeople to ignore the very principles that had made them great. Our business culture evolved into an elitist management style in which non management employees were on one tier (socially) and management on another, higher tier.

This system of us versus them fueled the union fires that eventually led to frequent strikes, higher overhead, and declining quality and productivity. By the late sixties, the door had been opened to more efficient competition; through which the Japanese and Europeans eagerly stepped. The Japanese in particular had adopted and applied what Dr. Deming had taught them.

By the late seventies American businesses were sending management teams to study Japanese management techniques in order to help recapture some of the market share we had lost. In the adage that everything that goes around comes around, the cycle was being completed.

In this book you will learn the ageless principles that are the heart and blood of all successful businesses in America, Japan, and all the world.

Business by the Book is a step-by-step presentation of how businesses should be run according to the Creator of all management rules: God. In the short run, you can violate these rules and continue to operate, but in the long run, profits will suffer as morale declines.

Decisions like hiring, firing, paying, and promotions will all be discussed from the perspective of what God’s Word says. This isn’t a book for the timid, Sunday-only Christians. God makes it clear that He wants Christians who are willing to follow the straight path, not those seeking the path of least resistance. If you’re willing to follow God’s Word, it lays out the straight and narrow.

We are instructed, Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding (Proverbs 3:5). The purpose of Business by the Book is to help you to trust in the Lord in your business life.

I want to thank Lee Ellis for his help with the information on leadership styles. He is an author, a speaker, a manager, and a friend. To date, Lee and his staff have helped more than 50,000 people with their career directions. Eventually, the testing tools they have developed will revolutionize how Americans choose their careers and how businesses choose their employees. Knowing who you are and knowing how the others around you fit in are critical to developing a successful management team.

Hopefully the tools given in this work will help you to develop a Christ-based management team in your organization.

Larry Burkett  

  (1939–2003)

Part 1

BUSINESS

BY THE

BOOK

1

A Radical Approach

to Business

Management

Early one morning, Will, the owner of a large manufacturing company, was greeted at his office door by his plant manager, John. Without comment, John was submitting his resignation, effective the following Friday. Will was devastated; for the past five years he had been grooming John to become president of the company.

When he questioned John about his reasons for leaving, John refused to discuss it. Will could not even begin to understand why John was leaving. He was paid more than anyone else in the company, including Will. But it was obvious that nothing was going to change John’s mind. He had made the decision to leave.

Will asked John to stay long enough to hire and train a new plant manager, but he flatly refused and reacted angrily when Will asked. Since John had been such a good friend, Will held a company going-away party and gave John a substantial severance bonus.

Three months later, John’s reasons for leaving became apparent when he opened his own company and copied Will’s best-selling product. In time, John’s company grew, and it became one of Will’s leading competitors.

Nine years later Will heard that there was a design problem with one of John’s new products and that several lawsuits were being filed against John’s company. Will had forgiven John years before and regularly prayed for him.

He felt strongly that the Lord wanted him to reach out to John, so he bought one of John’s products, tested it, and discovered what the problem was. Will then put his engineers to work to correct the problem. After he made the necessary modifications and tested it, he called John and told him how to solve his problem.

Radical Christianity! That’s what some would say. Stupidity! That’s what others would say.

Only time will tell how John will respond to this act of unconditional Christ-like love. The results are not Will’s responsibility. His responsibility, like ours, is to do what the Lord tells him to do. Remember, God gave His Son to be crucified by the very people He had helped.

By now you may well be thinking, What school of business did this guy attend? I can tell you with certainty that the business school I attended taught the bottom line: If it doesn’t make money, forget it. But since graduating from business school I have been studying another textbook: It’s called the Bible and, compared to most business schools today, it takes a radically different approach—one more concerned with eternity than with profits.

BUSINESS THEN AND NOW

I am not the first person to discover the principles of business taught in God’s Word. In America the use of the Bible as a business text goes back hundreds of years.

If you were to review a business school textbook from the nineteenth century, you would find that most companies were privately owned sole proprietorships. Businesses expanded through equity funding or selling an interest in the business, and taxes were so inconsequential as to be an incidental entry on year-end reports.

Business principles differed then too. Honesty, ethics, and moral values were taught in the classrooms of all major business schools. Professors placed strong emphasis on a company’s responsibility toward its employees, customers, and creditors.

Why? Because prior to the twentieth century, business courses, and indeed business schools themselves, were based on biblical principles. In fact, it would be erroneous to label them business schools. In reality, they were biblical schools that were training future business leaders.

Things began to change shortly after the Civil War. The federal government assumed a stronger position in the private sector. Politicians, pressured by war-rich industrialists, passed laws that strangled competition. Monopolies sprang up in industries such as railroads, steel, oil, and utilities. The leaders of these industries, greedy for even more advantages, began to use their economic influence to promote laws that punished workers who were seeking minimum wages, shorter work weeks, safer working conditions, and child labor prohibitions. Although pretending to pass laws to protect labor, both Congress and the courts consistently used the law to protect business and control the growing organized labor movement.

Prior to World War I, America remained primarily an isolationist nation, although a few businesses managed to create huge profits in developing countries. By the end of that war, in 1918, the United States had become a global economic power—perhaps the global economic power. America was on a growth binge. The production of every other nation in the world was compared to that of the United States, and the U.S. dollar became the world’s exchange currency.

But clouds hovered on the horizon. The Bible says that we reap what we sow, and America’s business leaders were sowing distrust and animosity between management and labor. When circumstances changed and the unions gained political power, management began reaping the destructive harvest of unionism. Hourly workers and management began to develop an adversarial relationship, and government had to assume the role of regulator. That meant business had to pay. For the first time taxes began to take a significant bite out of profits.

Between 1930 and 1950, the government’s share of business profits grew to more than 20 percent of gross profits. At the same time labor unions continued to gain strength and Congress began to reverse the labor laws it had passed in the previous several decades. Still, America retained its competitive edge in the world marketplace, primarily because we were the most industrialized and enterprising nation on earth. Even as late as the early sixties the stamp of value was the trademark: Made in the U.S.A.

After World War II, however, a more ominous cloud began to form: debt. Prior to the Great Depression we had been an equity-funded nation: businesses had expanded primarily by selling a part of the ownership. But the Great Depression had caused a general lack of confidence in the stock market, and after World War II debt surpassed equity in business. Most companies simply found it cheaper and easier to borrow money than to raise it through equity funding.The decades from the fifties to the seventies saw the peak growth of debt in America. Borrowing became the accepted way to fund business expansion.

Not until the mid-seventies did we begin to see the cost of this debt expansion. Too much easy money eventually makes itself known by way of inflation, which is nothing more than a surplus of easy money in the hands of willing buyers who want to spend it. Such spending inevitably bids up the price of goods and services. Credit is like an opiate because it seems to numb the minds of those who use it.

THE BIBLICAL PERSPECTIVE ON

GETTING AND SPENDING

I began a personal study on the biblical principles of how to operate a business shortly after becoming a Christian in 1970. The one principle that caught my attention most vividly was that God’s people should be debt-free. Unfortunately most Christians weren’t, and they didn’t want to be. As one Christian friend who owned a car dealership told me, Debt-free living makes no sense. Listen, I can finance my cars for 6 percent a year and then turn around and make 12 percent profit when I sell them.

My friend made a common error many Christians make. When the logic of what we’re doing doesn’t match God’s Word, we assume it’s a misinterpretation of the Word. A few years later, when interest rates climbed to nearly 22 percent, he began to see that God meant us to take Scripture literally. Too much debt makes the business vulnerable to the interest rate swings.

Between 1950 and 1970, the average cost of labor rose by 50 percent and government overhead increased to nearly 40 percent. This opened the way for major foreign competition as prices soared. Starting a new business and making it profitable became harder because capital, the key factor in business start-up, became the most costly overhead item. The combined cost of labor, government overhead, and credit sounded the death knell for many previously all-U.S. industries. Without government support, many of those that remained could not compete and make a profit.

During the next 10 years the cost of labor and government grew another 10 percent. Government became, quite literally, a partner in business. Through countless regulations, government made decisions for business and shared in its profits without doing any of the work. Government told farmers what they could grow, advertisers what they could sell, and schools what they could teach. To oversee this regulation, a massive government structure grew