Given her extensive work with the poor and the dying, Mother Teresa seems an unlikely source for business advice.

If you take her out of the religious context and look at her from a management perspective, what do you see? A woman who had a great vision and founded her own organization. In 60 years, she went from founding a small school in Calcutta to having over 600 missions in over 100 countries with over a million people working for her. She was a fundraising machine and a PR magnate.

What were her most important qualities?

I think the thing that made her so unique was her simple and clear vision. You knew what she stood for no matter which way you looked at her and her organization — by the way she dressed, the way she spoke, the way she interacted with others. If you look at some of the most successful brands in the world, we know what they stand for.

What would you say to someone who’s intimidated by her faith?

I would tell them that you don’t have to be a saint to achieve great things. Yes, she operated within a religious context, and that she had faith in something is important. For her that was God; for you that can be something completely different. But you need to have a belief in something that drives you.

Like everyone, she dealt with some unsavory people. What can we learn from how she handled them?

She took money from people whose values were not aligned with hers. And some people say, “How could you do that?”

The way I look at it is, she had a framework. She believed in the work she did. To do it, she needed money. She believed that charity comes from the heart, so she didn’t question where that money came from.

What she didn’t allow people to do was commercialize her name. Multinationals would offer her a tremendous amount of money to endorse their brands, which she didn’t do. That was her line. And the point is to look at that and say, “What is my line?” Once you figure out the framework for yourself, then it doesn’t matter what the rest of the world thinks. What matters is the values by which you live and operate. — Brian Moore