From ruthless corporate life to peace as a Jesuit - Illuminations - author James Martin - Interview

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 26, 2001 by Retta Blaney

In the smelly bathroom of a hospice in Kingston, Jamaica, a man in his late 20s is bathing, shaving and clipping the toenails of dying old men. "Boy, if your friends from Wharton could see you now," says a friend who has just arrived from the United States.

With that anecdote, Jesuit Fr. James Martin begins his latest book, In Good Company: The Fast Track from the Corporate World to Poverty, Chastity and Obedience (Sheed & Ward, 2000). He tells of a journey from a Philadelphia childhood in which Catholicism was of only marginal importance, through a finance degree at the elite Wharton School of Business and six years climbing the ladder at General Electric Co. Up to that point it didn't seem likely to anyone, especially Martin, that he would respond to a call to the priesthood. But, as he has come to realize, nothing is impossible with God.

Martin was at GE during CEO Jack Welch's relentless two-decade campaign to reshape GE, pushing managers to become more and more productive and firing some 100,000 employees as he turned GE from a $13 billion to a $500 billion company. Welch's highly publicized memoir, Jack: Straight from the Gut, was recently published to great fanfare.

What readers won't find in Welch's book is an account from the other side -- what Martin saw as a dehumanizing environment at GE. Among experiences he describes in his book are his duties in the income margin department in New York City. "The first month, I informed one executive that our results were coming in low, we probably weren't going to `make our numbers,' a cardinal sin," he wrote. The executive told him to reverse a few numbers each month to hit the right numbers. "Just do whatever it takes to make those numbers," Martin was told.

In Good Company was written nine years ago when Martin, still in his formation period as a Jesuit, was recuperating from mononucleosis in Nairobi, Kenya. After returning to work, he stored the 202-page book on a computer disk. It wasn't until a couple of years ago that he considered publishing it.

Telling the story

He decided to edit the manuscript as lightly as possible. As he put it, he preferred "to let that younger person -- still fresh with memories of the first stirrings of a vocation, still carrying the glow of the Long Retreat, still full of definite opinions about religious life: that is, still very much a new Jesuit -- tell the story the way he saw it during those long, idle months in East Africa."

Martin, now 40, said it took him only a couple of weeks to write the book, and that publishing it wasn't his motivation.

"I had so much to write about," he told NCR in a telephone interview from his office at America, the Jesuit magazine of which he is an associate editor. "I wanted to get it all down before I forgot it. It was such a clear time for me, from disgruntled executive to happy Jesuit. The story told itself."

The decision to edit little meant being open about his personal life, before and after ordination.

"It's necessary to include chastity and sexuality if you're going to discuss religious life with any honesty," he said. "Chastity is what people want to know about."

It also gave Martin a clearer picture of what had happened.

"For the first time I really understood how God was at work in my life," he said. "When you write, the order becomes more evident. God's graces were more apparent."

Discussing religious life is a fairly new venture for Martin, who admits his early understanding of Catholicism came mostly from several years of religion classes outside Catholic schools. But in the driven, often ruthless world of GE, a world that eventually gave him stomach pains and migraines, he began to realize he needed more than a successful career.

'You were your number'

Martin's disgust at corporate practices grew even more in response to Welch's efforts to make GE "lean and mean," which meant laying off thousands of employees. "That same month, during downsizing, Jack Welch decided to renovate the CEO's office in the building," Martin wrote, explaining that even though corporate headquarters was in Connecticut, "Welch enjoyed having a private office in New York, which he visited roughly two or three days a month."

Martin didn't find the environment any kinder after he moved to the GE capital in Stamford, Conn., where many people had been assigned a number summarizing their potential. Martin's responsibilities had him hiring and placing people in mid-level finance jobs. Many people had been assigned a number.

"It very much reminded me of Brave New World -- you were your number," he wrote. "Managers called up asking for a job candidate and, after I provided a lengthy explanation of someone's strengths or weaknesses, they would say, `Forget it, she's just a 2' Or, `Jim, do you have any 1s for me?' Like we were playing `Fish.' With people."

Martin's stress level on biofeedback tests got so high his psychiatrist tried to calm him with guided meditation. Through talking with the psychiatrist, Martin, who had first explored the idea of becoming a priest two years earlier after discovering Thomas Merton on a PBS special, realized that the priesthood was exactly what he wanted.