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A short introduction. My up-to-date professional resume can be viewed here, and an overview of my research and teaching work is also summarized here.
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Dr. Rafik Beekun is currently Professor of Management and Strategy and former chair of the Managerial Sciences Department, College of Business Administration at the University of Nevada in Reno, and Co-Director, Center for Corporate Governance and Business Ethics. He has taught at Temple University and the University of Texas. He specializes in strategic management, international management, business ethics, leadership, and the links between spirituality and management. In 1999-2000, he served as a Senior Fulbright Scholar at the University of Mauritius.
He has published in many academic journals, and has authored three books: Islamic Business Ethics, Leadership: An Islamic Perspective (co-authored with Dr. Jamal Badawi), and Strategic Planning and Implementation for Islamic Organizations. He is currently working on an edited book, Islam, Management and Finance, due from Altamira Press in 2007, Insha Allah.
During 2003-2007, Dr. Beekun served as President for the Association of Muslim Social Scientists of North America, an academic organization grouping researchers and university professors. He is a trustee and the Education Director of the Minaret Business Association, a global Muslim Chamber of Commerce. For the past 20 years, he has given training workshops and lectures to upper management executives and Islamic workers globally in the areas of leadership, strategic planning, business ethics, team building, conflict management and communication.
Personal request: Please do not ask me for free or complimentary copies of my books. Each book can be purchased from from the Islamic Workplace E-Store by clicking here. On this site, there are links where you can obtain free qurans in different languages as well as many free Islamic books. I would encourage you to explore Islam so that you can understand its message, and realize that it is truly a religion of truth, integrity and peace, and that Muslims who really understand and adhere to their faith only want to live in peace and harmony.
Your book purchases from our online bookstore help us. They support our research work in this area linking management, the workplace and Islam–especially towards acquiring resource materials to write the books and articles listed on this blog, as well as to pay for the ongoing fees to maintain this website and its associated e-store. Shukran for your interest and support in our work fisabilillah.
We would welcome any feedback about this blog. Please email to us at beekun@theIslamicworkplace.com. Please let us know what workplace-related topics, subjects, or questions you would like us to cover on this blog in the future. If you wish, you can provide us with your name and address, but doing so is optional.
Finally, unless otherwise noted, all articles posted on this blog are written by, and copyrighted 2006-2007 by Rafik Beekun, and all rights are reserved. The articles on this blog are meant only for the individual, personal use of our blog readers, and we wish to stand by their integrity and quality. Please do not reproduce on another website, quote, cite or reprint in any other format, language or manner without first obtaining permission from us. Our e-mail address is beekun@theIslamicworkplace.com. We appreciate your cooperation.
If you find any part of this blog useful, please remember us in your duas. Ameen.
Some webcams important to me
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Mauritius webcams
Mauritius is where I was born. It is an absolutely gorgeous tropical island in the Indian Ocean to the East of Madagascar and South Africa. Beau-Bassin is a town close to the one where I was born. I am still looking for other webcams in Mauritius.
Beau-Bassin webcam
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Mauritius, Club Mistral, Indian Ocean webcam
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Books on My Bookshelf (or not):
1. Authentic Leadership: Rediscovering the Secrets to Creating Lasting Value by Bill George. Publisher: Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA, 2003.
An excellent book to read about leadership and ethical value-maximization. It ties leadership and integrity very well, and is well integrated with excellent examples from George during his tenure as CEO of Medtronics, a leading global medical supplies company. He stresses the following five core dimensions of “authentic” leaders: purpose, values, heart, relationships, and self-discipline. This book has actually been on the required reading list for my MBA students in their corporate strategy course, and has received high ratings from them.
2. Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy, Ram Charan and Charles Burck. Publisher: Crown Business, 2002.Strategy implementation is the missing link in the strategy management process, and yet is what makes or breaks an organization. Bossidy, a former senior executive at General Electric and Allied Signal, came out of retirement to turn Honeywell around. Together with his co-authors, he has written an invaluable but unique book demonstrating exactly how you can get from planning to implementation.
3. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others don’t by Jim Collins. Publisher: Collins, 2001.This book was Amazon’s Best of 2001, and deservedly so. It is a serious, but well written book about why good companies are able to consistently produce superior results. Collins studies 11 that have earned 15 years of increased profit, i.e. Walgreens, Kimberly Clark and Circuit City (notice these are not IBM, GE or Toyota), and uncovers the key to their success including the fact that their CEOS are humble and determined leaders rather than extroverts that constantly seek the limelight. These 11 companies are all strong culture companies, and all use the hedgehog concept.
4. Banker to the Poor by Muhammad Yunus, Winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. Publisher: Public Affairs, a division of Perseus, 2003.This book will move you. Please refer to this blog’s section on Exemplary Stories for a description of Dr. Yunus and his accomplishments as Founder of the Grameen Bank. Instead of my reviewing the book, listen to Yunus himself. Here are two short excerpts from the book:”In the year 1974, Bangladesh fell into the grip of famine. The university where I taught and served as head of the Economics Department was located in the southeastern extremity of the country, and at first we did not pay much attention to the newspaper stories of death and starvation in the remote villages of the north. But then the skeleton-like people began showing up in the railway stations and bus stations of the capital, Dhaka. Soon this trickle became a flood. Hungry people were everywhere. Often they sat so still that one could not be sure whether they were alive or dead. They all looked alike: men, women, children. Old people looked like children, and children looked like old people. [...]The starving people did not chant any slogans. They did not demand anything from us well-fed city folk. They simply lay down very quietly on our doosteps and waited to die. [...]“Later in the book, Yunus narrates an encounter with a woman, a bamboo stool maker, from Jobra village:
“Do you own this bamboo?” He asked.
“Yes.” Sofia (the bamboo maker) answered.
“How do you get it?”
“I buy it.”
“How much does the bamboo cost you?”
“Five taka.” At the time, five taka would be 22 cents.
“Do you have five taka?”
“No. I borrow it from the paikars.”
“The middlemen? What is your arrangement with them?”
“I must sell my bamboo stools to them at the end of the day as repayment for my loan.”
“How much do you sell a stool for?”
“Five taka and fifty poysha.”
“So you make fifty poysha profit?”
She nodded. That came to a profit of just 2 cents.
“And could you borrow from the cash from the moneylender and buy your own raw material?“
“Yes, but the moneylender would demand a lot. People who deal with them only get poorer.”
“How much does the money lender charge?“
“It depends. Sometimes, he charges 10% (interest) per week. But I have a neighbor who charges 10% per day. [...]Sofia Begum earned two cents a day.”
5. Who Says Elephants Can’t dance? Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround. by Louis Gerstner. Publisher: Collins 2002.The former IBM CEO narrates how he turned around IBM. This book is interesting because IBM clearly had reached a strategy inflection point whereby maintaining the course and using the same strategies that had led to its success in the past were now having the exact opposite effect. Gerstner was the first non-IBM person to be hired into the CEO position. The book engages in a lot of self-praise, but has quite a few lessons for those who are trying to turn around a company in distress. The strength of the book lies in the way he tackled the strong culture at IBM, and in the 8 principles that he enunciates for re-shaping this corporate culture.
6. Jack: Straight from the Gut by Jack Welch and John Byrne. Publisher: Warner Business Books, 2003.This is the autobiography of Jack Welch, one of the leading CEO’s of the 20th Century while he was at GE. He increased GE’s market capitalization from about $20 billion to over $300 during his tenure at the company, and he did it by paying attention to several areas: (a) an emphasis on the soft side of the company, i.e. culture, leadership and managerial training, etc., (b) a shift of the company away from centralization and bureaucracy, (c) a focus on meritocracy, (d) strategic adaptation and refocusing of GE’s strategic business units. On the negative side, Jack fired so many people that he became known as “neutron Jack”, and did not clean up the Hudson River pollution mess that GE should have admitted responsibility for.
7. Doing Business with the United Arab Emirates, Second Edition by Marat Terterov (ed) Global Market Briefings © 2006 (259 pages) ISBN: 9781905050055An in-depth, up-to-date assessment of the current economic and investment climate, this book gauges the market potential in key areas, and explains how to do business in the UAE. The authoritative English language guide to investment potential, commercial opportunity and business practice in the Emirates.
8. Lean Six Sigma that Works: A Powerful Action Plan for Dramatically Improving Quality, Increasing Speed, and Reducing Waste by Bill Carreira and Bill Trudell AMACOM © 2006 (286 pages) ISBN: 9780814473474A step-by-step guide to higher quality, customer loyalty, and increased efficiency with an emphasis on detailed, practical processes that let the practitioner get right to implementation.
Books to avoid
1. The Law of Attraction: The basics of the Teachings of Abraham by Esther and Jerry Hicks. Publisher: Hay House, Carlsbad, California, 2006.
When “Abraham” turns out not to be the Prophet Ibrahim (a), but a group of loving entities that the authors are communicating with, it is downhill from there.
2. The True Furqan” by Al Saffee and interpreted by Al Mahdy. 
This new book, titled “The True Furqan” by Al Saffee and Al Mahdy. is being distributed in Kuwait, The Al-Furqan weekly magazine has found out that two printing companies, ‘Omega 2001′ and ‘Wine Press’, are involved in the publishing of ‘The True Furqan’, a book which has also been titled ‘The 21st Century Quran’! It is over 366 pages and is in both the Arabic and English languages.
This book is being potentially misrepresented as the Qu’ran. It contains 77 Surats, which include Al-Fatiha, Al-Jana and Al-Injil. Instead of Bismillah, each Surat begins with a totally different version: “In the name of the Father, the Word, the Holy Spirit, the one and only true God”. And this book which tries to imitate the Qur’an by its name, the title of its Surats, the name of its interpreter (Al Mahdy), etc. opposes many Islamic beliefs. In one of its ‘ayats’, it describes having more than one wife as fornication, divorce being non-permissible and it uses a new system for the sharing out of the will, opposing the current one. This book even goes as far as attacking Allah, Subhanahu wa Tahala!
You can preview the book on its website and judge for yourself. What it states is in direct opposition to what Allah says in the Qur’an: see page 45 about Issa (Jesus) (peace be upon him), page 47 about Issa (pbuh) being crucified, page 61 about the Trinity, page 69 attacking Islam, pages 119 and 346 in the book on polygamy, the chapter on the Excellent Names which is an attack on the Glorious names and attributes of Allah, etc. It even mocks a verse in the Qur’an by challenging the reader to bring forth ’similar chapters’ (see page 317)!
3. The Bab’s New Qur’an. Siyyid `Alí Muḥammad or Báb was the forerunner and prophet of Bhái faith, who claimed to be promised Mahdi. His movement gained thousands of supporters, especially in Iran, and after his execution, Bahá’u’lláh, a follower of Báb, developed the Bhái faith.
The composition Qayyúmu’l-Asmá’ (Maintainer of the Divine Names) is the first alleged scriptual work of Báb, and is considered as revelation by Bháis.
(1) According to the Qur’an (5:3), Allah states, “This day have those who have rejected faith given up all hope of overcoming your religion. Therefore fear them not but fear Me (God). This day have I PERFECTED your religion for you, COMPLETED My favour upon you and have chosen for you ISLAM as your religion.”
(2) Allah states in the Qur’an (33:40), “O people ! Muhammad has no sons among ye men, but verily, he is the Messenger of God and the seal of Prophets. And God is Aware of everything.”
Hence, according to the Qur’an itself, there will no more prophets after Muhammad (s), and Islam was perfected by God and its complete message sent through Muhammad (s). There is no need for others, like Bab, and certainly no need for “a new Qur’an”. For more information, please email the Fiqh Council of North America
