Faith and Hope in Business

Faith in business is having trust and confidence in whatever you set out to do, regardless of circumstances or condition, such as economic recession or an entity's ability to continue as a going concern. Faith in business is some fixed points of reference for business leaders to stay ethically and professionally. Faith in business is like a compass for many CEOs. For Ford Motor Company, Episcopalian is the compass for Henry Ford. For Whole Food, Buddhism is the compass for John Mackey.

Hope in business is the belief that things will get better, whether the financial data or evidence indicates it will or not. Hope in business is like a road in the world; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.

The difference between faith and hope in business is that hope always looks to the future, while faith is now. Moreover, hope is a subset of faith. Entrepreneurs must have hope to have faith, but they don't have to have faith to have hope. Faith always inspired entrepreneurs to do fearless action, but hope doesn't do that. Faithful business does not always aim at profit; one of the most typical examples of this is Chick-fil-A, a company that has been well known for operating on Christian principles and values. To honor the biblical teaching to rest on the Sabbath, Chick-fil-A always closes on Sundays, thus forgoing one of the highest revenue days of the week for the restaurant industry. Another typical example of faith in business is the operation of the Grameen Bank Project, which object was to extend banking facilities to poor locals in rural Bangladesh. On the other hand, hope in business can be just simply that entrepreneurs hope their entities could make an acquisition in the future, such as Google hope to acquire Linux and replace Chrome OS to have their own official OS exclusively for PCs' and combine it with all the Features and Design of Chrome OS to become more powerful than ever.