The Business Anointing: Dr. Ariel Robles on Faith, Leadership, and Finding Purpose in Business

Can you be ambitious in business, pursue success, lead at a high level, and remain grounded in your faith?

Dr. Ariel Robles believes not only that you can, but that the principles behind your faith can make you a better leader.

That idea is at the center of his new book, The Business Anointing: Spiritual Principles for Success in Your Business, in Your Workplace, this week's Books4Guys Featured Book Partner.

The book brings together two major parts of Ariel's life: roughly 40 years as a corporate technology executive and 30 years in Christian ministry. He describes The Business Anointing as the work of his life, combining decades of experience in corporate America with the spiritual principles that have shaped how he approaches leadership, decisions, people, and success.

Faith Doesn't Have to Stop When You Walk Into Work

For many Christians, there can feel like there are two different versions of life.

There's your faith.

Then there's your career.

Ariel challenges that separation.

His message isn't that Christians need to walk into every meeting and start preaching. It's that principles like character, integrity, wisdom, discernment, and responsible leadership don't suddenly disappear when you enter the workplace.

They should become part of how you work.

How do you treat employees and coworkers? How do you manage money? How do you make difficult decisions? How do you respond when something goes wrong? How do you lead when nobody is watching?

Ariel believes those are opportunities to live out your faith without needing to announce it.

The Business Anointing is built around the idea that spiritual principles can extend beyond church and into businesses, boardrooms, corporate America, entrepreneurship, and other places where people have influence.

That makes this much more than a book about succeeding professionally.

It's about deciding what kind of person you want to be while you're succeeding.

ROI Matters. But What About Your ROP?

One of my favorite ideas Ariel introduces is something he calls Return on Purpose, or ROP.

Everyone in business understands ROI.

What's our return on investment?

Are we profitable?

Are we growing?

Are we creating value?

Ariel isn't arguing that those questions don't matter. Businesses need to make money. Without revenue and profitability, companies eventually disappear and people lose jobs.

His challenge is to ask another question alongside them:

What's our return on purpose?

A company can generate a great financial return while slowly losing sight of why it exists. The same thing can happen to an individual. You can earn more money, receive another promotion, build a larger company, or achieve the next professional milestone and still feel like something is missing.

That's where purpose comes in.

Ariel argues that ROI and ROP should work together. Success becomes more meaningful when financial results and professional achievement are connected to something beyond simply making more money.

That's an idea that reaches well beyond Christian business leadership.

It's worth asking yourself:

Am I only building something successful, or am I building something that matters?

Character Over Charisma

Business loves charisma.

The confident founder.

The exciting CEO.

The executive who can walk into a room and immediately command everyone's attention.

Those qualities can be valuable, but Ariel believes there's something more important.

Character.

As he explains in The Business Anointing, charisma can open doors. It can attract attention, investors, opportunities, and relationships.

Character is what sustains you when things get difficult.

Ariel has spent four decades working in technology and corporate environments, and one of his biggest lessons is the importance of remaining true to your principles. Integrity, in his view, isn't something you turn on when it's convenient. It needs to remain part of how you conduct yourself through the highs and lows of your career.

If you can have both character and charisma, great.

But if Ariel had to choose one?

Character wins.

Sometimes the Best Business Decision Is to Pause

We're constantly told to move faster.

Work harder.

Make the decision.

Launch the product.

Close the deal.

Get to the next thing.

Ariel offers another idea that may be even more important: the strategic pause.

During his corporate technology career, Ariel was involved in a major technology transformation. The numbers pointed toward one vendor. The ROI looked good. The financial case made sense.

But something didn't feel right.

Instead of ignoring that feeling and pushing ahead, Ariel paused the process and asked his team to conduct another 30 days of due diligence.

They ultimately selected a different vendor.

Thirty days later, the original vendor collapsed and declared bankruptcy.

That pause potentially saved the company from being stuck with millions of dollars invested in technology that would no longer have the support it needed.

Ariel calls this strategic discernment.

It's a combination of experience, wisdom, faith, information, and knowing when you need to slow down long enough to see something you may be missing.

In a culture obsessed with speed, that's a lesson worth remembering.

Not every pause is procrastination.

Sometimes stepping back is exactly what allows you to make the right move forward.

Building a Successful Business Without Losing Your Soul

There's a line from Ariel during our conversation that captures what this book is really about:

How do you build a successful business without losing your soul?

Because there's nothing inherently wrong with wanting to succeed.

There's nothing wrong with building a profitable company, advancing your career, becoming an executive, growing a personal brand, or making more money.

The question is what happens to you along the way.

The Business Anointing is written for executives, managers, entrepreneurs, small business owners, emerging leaders, and anyone else in a position of influence. But Ariel also believes these principles can apply to people who aren't in formal leadership positions yet.

Character matters before you get the title.

Integrity matters before you own the company.

Purpose matters before you become successful.

The person you're becoming on the way there matters just as much as what you eventually accomplish.

Forty Years of Experience in One Book

Ariel says The Business Anointing took six months to physically write.

But in another sense, it took 40 years.

That's what makes books like this valuable.

You get access to lessons that took someone else decades to learn.

Ariel has combined his experience as a technology executive with decades in Christian ministry to create a nearly 400 page book containing 18 chapters. The book was also released simultaneously in Spanish as La Unción Empresarial: Principios Espirituales para el Éxito de tu Empresa.

Whether you're already leading a company, climbing through corporate America, building something of your own, or simply trying to figure out what success should mean in your life, there's a bigger question behind this book:

What are you building, and who are you becoming while you build it?

Success matters.

Results matter.

ROI matters.

But so do character, integrity, faith, and purpose.

That's why we're proud to have Dr. Ariel Robles and The Business Anointing as this week's Books4Guys Featured Book Partner.

If you're interested in Christian leadership, faith in the workplace, purpose driven business, or becoming a better leader without compromising what you believe, The Business Anointing deserves a spot on your reading list.