• Forbes, Friday, April 17, 2009 10:49 AM

About 15 years ago, I wrote a profile about August "Augie" Turak, a successful sales executive who had a proclivity for soaking in wisdom from anyone with anything perceptive to share, from his mentor, IBM's legendary Lou Mobley, to a New York cab driver. Since then, he has drawn much wisdom from regular treks to Mepkin Abbey, a Trappist monastery in Moncks Corner, S.C. And along the way, Turak has found that the monastery's business model can be universally applied with impressive results.

Forbes has adapted a white paper Turak wrote about his experiences with the monks -- "Service and Selflessness: A 1,500 Year-old Management Paradigm" -- into a four-part series that has been running this week. Here's one insight:

"As a sales executive for many years, I spent much of my time on the problem of human motivation .... It was only when I realized that we, like the Marine Corps, will do things for our buddies and the Corps that we would never do for ourselves that we saw the results we were looking for. I stopped managing people and started managing culture. When I did, revenue took care of itself, just like at Mepkin."

Read the whole story at Forbes »