You’ve heard of a “lifestyle” story? Well this is the equivalent, except for the workplace, also known as a “workstyle” story

Techheads find their quest for a spiritually rich life can both feed and confuse their professional development
In the hyperkinetic world of ecommerce, the word “spirituality” rarely rears its hallowed head. But throughout this whirlwind, get-rich-quick world an increasing number of techheads are turning to a rich spiritual practice. While skeptics might find such pursuits dubious or threatening to professional productivity, those on the spiritual path say that regular meditation, prayer, and work with spiritual guides actually makes them more efficient, clear-headed, and focused.

Whether out of desperation, a desire to increase concentration and productivity, or a long-term yearning to nurture the soul, the number of high-tech professionals seeking more meaning in life than just catching up with the billionaires is escalating.

“Mindfulness teachings are becoming more mainstream,” says Gil Fronsdal, a Buddhist priest and meditation teacher who leads several meditation groups that are peppered with tech professionals in Palo Alto, Calif. “There’s more need or demand now for applicability in daily life or at work.”

Such pursuits can ultimately turn a life upside down, spurring people to change their lifestyles “” or quit their high-stress jobs. The worst danger is when people postpone or dismiss long-term work for the soul in order to focus short-term on material development, says Howard Schechter, a psychologist and author of Rekindling the Spirit in Work. “It’s the fire syndrome: feeling you have to put out the fires, so you’re not able to do preventive work,” he notes.

Among those working hard on both fronts “” professional and spiritual “” while neck-deep in the frenetic Internet culture are Walter Cruttenden III, co-founder and CEO of E*Offering, an online investment bank aligned with E*Trade, and Marcos Sanchez, head of brand marketing at iQ.com, which provides a merchandising platform for online sales promotions and loyalty marketing.

…

No touching
For Marcos Sanchez, it is undoubtedly tougher to seamlessly integrate his spiritual practice with his professional work. He is director of brand marketing at a young and rapidly growing Internet startup, iQ.com, an online marketing venture. But his religion dictates that he can’t touch or be touched by anyone except his wife and priests (even to exchange business cards), he can’t drink alcohol, he can’t be in crowds (one consolation: no more Comdex), he must eat on the ground on a straw mat off a designated plate, and he must always wear white and keep his head covered, even while sleeping. Oh, and no looking in a mirror. (”Shaving is a bit difficult but I’m getting used to not looking,” he says, gesturing how he methodically strokes from the cheekbone downward with a razor.)

On a warm afternoon in October, Sanchez, 30, greets an unexpected potential business partner who had dropped by to visit iQ.com executives. The man holds up his hand with his business card, expecting to be met with a customary shake. But Sanchez instead places his business card before him on his desk, retracts his hand, and explains with an attempted no-big-deal smile that he is suffering from carpal-tunnel syndrome and can’t use his hand. (He doesn’t feel like explaining his religious beliefs to strangers, for fear it might turn them off “” particularly potential customers.) The man says he’s sorry, then while taking a step back casts a curious glance at the floor. “What about the half-eaten burrito on the floor?” Sanchez meekly explains it’s part of a ritual. The man looks increasingly quizzical but continues to talk business.

This all might sound like some sadistic cutting-edge form of high-tech hazing, but for Sanchez, it’s part a willing religious journey to become a santero, a priest of Santeria, an Afro-Cuban religion derived from the African Yoruba religion. A central tenet is that god created orisha, demigods similar to patron saints in the Roman Catholic popular tradition, and gave them the authority to act as his emissaries, watching over and guiding humans. It is believed that everything has an effect on everything else, so adherents try to maintain balance through prayer, offerings, and deeds.

Sanchez started studying Santeria for several reasons: to grow closer to his Latino roots (his mother is from Panama and his father is Puerto Rican), to practice Spanish, and to gain a more spiritual perspective, something he has found lacking in the high-tech world.

“People tend to be very concerned with your startup pedigree, what options you have, and who you know,” he says. “While I can get caught up in that too, occasionally, I try to limit it. Staying in touch with my spiritual side really helps me with perspective sometimes…. And I think it helps me to realize that whatever crisis is the latest, it’s not the end of the world.”

Delicate balance
His perpetual white attire aside, Sanchez looks and acts more like a polished, ambitious Net startup junkie than a self-contemplative priest-in-training. Since he began his high-tech career in 1994 with a stint at a San Francisco public relations firm, Sanchez has jumped to four Internet-related companies “” at each one hoping for the big IPO. One company, NetObjects, a Web development software and service company in Redwood City, Calif., did go public last May but its stock has hardly shown an instant-retirement promise.

In July Sanchez began a three-month training process with a seven-day purification ceremony, during which he stayed in one room under the supervision of his spiritual godmother while Santeria priests made seashell readings, called ita, to divine his future. For those three months, he had to eat on the floor, avoid mirrors, and keep his head covered. After that, some strictures were lifted but some, such as to avoid touching people, wearing jewelry, and being in crowds, and to eat off a designated plate, will continue for another nine months. Once Sanchez becomes a priest at the end of the 12-month training, he will be able to start overseeing rituals, ceremonies, cleansings, and spiritual readings, while learning other spiritual practices.

Luckily, Sanchez and his colleagues treat his spiritual commitment with both respect and humor. “He can’t take documents out of my hand,” says Marcia Kadanoff, chief marketing officer at iQ.com. “So sometimes I throw them at him. You’re supposed to put them on the table, but what if you’re passing him in the hallway?”

Then there’s the mirror that had to be moved from the wall in front of his office and replaced with a framed print. Kadanoff admits that if she had not worked with Sanchez previously, before his priesthood decision, she might not initially have been as accommodating of his special needs.

Carl Meyer, co-founder and CEO of iQ.com, says his initial worries that Sanchez’s highly visible religious practice might affect his performance have faded. “We call him Minister of Buzz,” he quips. “He can spin it the right way.” Adds Tony Hoeber, co-founder and chief technology officer: “It’s good what he’s doing. It reminds us that there’s a commitment to the sacred. It’d be more of a problem if there was a perception that someone’s not [professionally] committed.”

Sanchez appears as committed to the goal of professional success as he is to becoming a priest. And he has no plans to renounce his current career even once he does enter the priesthood “” with or without the Great IPO in the Sky.

— Susan Moran

Related Link
Original source article online

… though privacy issues still loom large

You don’t often hear about massive legal and legislative action against the online sweepstakes industry — and online sweepstakes companies are working hard to keep it that way. However, like many Internet-based businesses, online sweepstakes need to avoid the wrath of privacy advocates. To stay on their good side, practices such as selling personal information to third parties or sending unsolicited e-mail to customers are becoming taboo.

While a direct-mail sweepstakes is a promotion designed to sell products, an Internet-based sweepstakes is supposed to collect information, and that distinction helps protect online sweepstakes companies from the barrage of lawsuits filed by states alleging miscommunication and outright fraud that have plagued their snail-mail cousins.

“The bad press and regulatory activity has not affected online sweepstakes at all,” says Marcia Kadanoff, chief marketing officer at iQ.com, a Saratoga, Calif.-based company that provides the software running many online-sweepstakes games. “First of all, the average online sweepstakes is not promising $100 million. They typically run for an hour, day or week so they have more winners (of smaller prizes). They are usually run to collect (personal) data, so there is no confusion about buying products. People are quite willing to give up an e-mail address if the (sponsoring) company is reputable and the prize is something they want.”

Online sweepstakes so far are only a drop in the bucket when compared to the traditional sweepstakes industry, but observers expect rapid growth in the next few years as consumers grow ever-more comfortable with e-commerce.

“A lot of the Web-based companies are up-and-coming, so they are not at the status of the real-world ones,” says Scott Kurland, president of Windough.com, a Boca Raton, Fla.-based online sweepstakes company. “But more attention is being paid to the online ones (by customers and media). I would guess (the industry) should probably be able to outgrow anything in the traditional industry.”

Meanwhile, traditional sweepstakes companies have been the attorneys generals’ preferred targets for years; they have filed lawsuits accusing companies such as Port Washington, N.Y.-based Publishers Clearing House and Jersey City, N.J.-based American Family Enterprises of deceptive advertising. The lawsuits allege that mailings from the sweepstakes companies have given consumers the impression that buying a product, such as a magazine subscription, would increase their chances of winning multimillion dollar prizes. (American Family Enterprises, which runs the American Family Publishers sweepstakes promoted by Ed McMahon and Dick Clark, recently filed for bankruptcy protection to help settle dozens of state lawsuits.) The traditional sweepstakes’ online cousin, by contrast, has so far remained free of the bad-press and state-lawsuit stigma.

Indeed, Florida — one of the more aggressive states in prosecuting traditional sweepstakes companies — recently dropped an inquiry into online sweepstakes. A sweepstakes, by definition, must be free to enter, and the state initially was looking at whether the money people paid for their Internet Service Provider accounts qualified as a cost to enter. The Florida Department of State and Attorney General’s office decided to drop the matter, however — without a shot fired — since most people can now access the Internet for free through public libraries, according to Linda Goldstein, a partner with Hall Dickler Kent Friedman & Wood LLP, a New York-based law firm specializing in advertising and marketing law.

Partof what saves an online sweepstakes from such uncomfortable inquiries in the first place is that they typically are demographic information-gathering tools, not product sales-centered operations. Participants trade personal information for the chance to win cash and prizes. Little chance, then, that online sweepstakes will generate stories of elderly people waiting for the prize patrol amid a garage full of yellowing magazines.

“I advise clients to use the Web to develop a database for eventual one-on-one communication via e-mail,” says Andy Batkin, CEO of Interactive Marketing Inc., a Manhattan Beach, Calif.-based online promotion marketing company and co-chairman of the New York-based Promotion Marketing Association’s Interactive Promotions Council. “Initially, everyone was doing promotions as a way to sell things and drive traffic to a revenue site,” because they used the same business model as the traditional direct mail-based sweepstakes. However, with the Internet’s ability to foster two-way communication between marketers and consumers, they saw the ability to create databases for use in later, more-personalized sales efforts.

That is not to say the online sweepstakes companies have no worries; as with many Internet ventures, the key consumer issue is data privacy, and online sweepstakes are especially vulnerable on that count because their entire purpose is collecting data. As a result, online sweepstakes companies have to walk a fine line to reassure their customers the data will be kept private.

“We don’t sell the consumer data. We ask for permission every time they enter to win a promotion. We establish trust and loyalty with the customer,” says Steve Krein, CEO of Webstakes.com Inc., a New York-based company running online sweepstakes promotions for e-commerce retailers. “The negative stigma (of traditional sweepstakes) is actually helping to drive our business. Philosophically, the way we deal with data gives marketers a great deal of comfort.”

Online sweepstakes marketers have two options to conduct business and remain under the umbrella of privacy protections: Permission-based marketing lets the customers decide whether to receive information on a specific offer, usually in the form of a personalized e-mail, while the second option is an opt-in program asking permission to use personal data in various marketing campaigns. “Either is politically correct,” Kadanoff adds. “The consumers on the Internet realize they are not going to win a new Palm Pilot for nothing. They know personal data is valuable,” and they trade that information for entry into the sweepstakes.

For example, Windough.com runs a sweepstakes promotion in which registered members — those who already have provided their e-mail addresses — check in from time to time to play. When the members enter, a separate screen opens up with a banner ad at the bottom either announcing an instant win or a link to the Web site of one of the companies involved in the sweepstakes drawings. In addition, each week, Windough.com sends members an e-mail hosted by a character named “Joe.” The e-mails are part of a game, and they include advertising.

Windough.com has been around for two years and has 300,000 registered members so far. The company never sells the names or e-mail addresses of members, according to Kurland.

“Unless companies have an opt-in policy, we won’t even do the promotion (with them),” Batkin adds. “People get really annoyed if you bombard them with e-mail that they haven’t requested. It’s important to change these strangers into friends, then customers.”

— James Heckman

Related Link
American Marketing Association