Cashing In With Seminars on Personal Values : Kreative Solutions tries to help individuals and businesses change their work in positive ways. The recession may be the best time to make such changes, the company founder says.

Jeanine Just is an unsettling person. She asks questions like, “If money were no object, what would you be doing right now?” and “What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?”

From her offices in Laguna Hills and Lake Arrowhead, where she lives, she arranges seminars and one-on-one coaching sessions to help people identify their personal values and change their work and businesses to fit them.

It sounds like a good idea, but when Just first called me to talk about her business, I couldn’t see why people would pay money for it--or why they should.

Her company, Kreative Solutions, grosses about $90,000 a year, she said. The last thing people need in a recession, I thought, is someone who charges at least $195 for something as intangible as feeling good about work.

But, later, as I sat in on a two-hour job-seekers seminar at the Women’s Opportunities Center at UC Irvine, people there said things that made me re-evaluate the value of Just’s message.

One woman had been laid off from a records-keeping job and is finding that her profession has been replaced by machines in most companies. She was unsure where to turn for a new career. Another woman had been out of college for a few years, working for a family business, and couldn’t think of a single thing she wanted to do with her life.

Several others said their careers had happened to them--they had fallen into job after job. Now that they were out of work, and new jobs are scarcer, they did not know how to redirect themselves.

Just’s message of making conscious decisions instead of living by default began to seem more relevant. People must be prepared for change, especially in times like these.

Just, 42, gave up a career in sales and training to teach values, which began to interest her in 1980. She had become so sick with overwork that she could not see straight or maintain her balance, and she was confined to bed for about a month. She began re-examining what was important in life, and started her current work full time in 1984. She said people have begun listening more closely to her message in the past two years.

“The values message is taking hold because times are tougher,” she said. “For years, I was swimming upstream. I was in Orange County teaching values. . . . If I had been teaching prosperity or get-rich-quick schemes, I would have been right in the mainstream.”

Just talks about what she calls old-fashioned values--integrity, responsibility, finding meaningful work, caring about customers. That would be opposed to what we now consider ‘80s values: greed, fraud, conformity, seeking to excel for status and material things.

Old-fashioned values, she says, will be the answer to the ills of American businesses, institutions and families.

Judith A. McCartney, chief executive of the Orange County Federal Credit Union in Santa Ana, took Just’s course to learn new leadership skills after the credit union laid off 35 of its 135-member staff. A third of the cuts were at the management level.

McCartney liked the course enough that she asked 21 managers from the credit union to attend. She has spent about $20,000 for Just’s courses so far. The results are so positive that McCartney has been asked to speak to other credit unions about the changes.

“People don’t know exactly what it is that’s different, but they see our energy,” she said. “What it did was solidify the group. When I’m out of town and the management group makes a decision, I know it’s fine because we’re on the same wavelength. It’s such a relief.”

McCartney and the credit union managers defined values of health, honesty, integrity, affection and pleasure. It’s a little difficult to imagine how those relate to banking, but apparently they do.

Those in the group translated their values into a new customer-oriented focus, McCartney said. The credit union has begun creating seminars in retirement planning and brochures printed in Spanish, and it is offering four free ATM withdrawals each month.

McCartney said business is very good. The credit union today has 8% of its deposits in reserve, versus 5% before it began making changes--a measure of health in the nonprofit credit union business. The industry standard ranges from about 3% to 6%.

Virginia Mort took Just’s course in values and self-management in the fall of 1990, and it inspired her to start her own business, Virginia Mort Associates, in Santa Ana. Mort trains managers and executives to give more dynamic presentations and advises them about improving customer service.

Mort, 53, had been a schoolteacher and counselor, and she was working as a manager of human resource development at Northrop Corp. when she took Just’s course.

“I was doing OK,” said Mort, whose business is expected to gross more than $100,000 this year, “but (the course) gave me a clear focus. It completely changed my life.”

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