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Introduction

The Tr adition of the Mindful Leader

ts Tuesday afternoon , and in forty-eight hours,


you and your team have to deliver the nal budget for the new product line. Two of your team members have to catch a ight in eight hours, and they are working feverishly to complete their piece of the plan. The senior product designer is leaving to pick her children up at school, and the nance department is on the phone requestingwell, demanding some preliminary numbers for the CEO to review before the day is out. And you . . . well, youre trying to keep the team focused and coordinated in an atmosphere that feels like a pressure cooker on steroids. And then your boss enters the room and says, I want everyone to stop what theyre doing right now and give me your full attention. Set your laptops aside, hang up the phones, put the spreadsheets away, and stop editing the PowerPoint presentations. Now, such an entrance will grab our attention no doubt, because it hints of some ominous business, indeed. But then your boss says, Now that I have your attention and weve stopped working, lets sit here for a moment . . . just quietly sit here and do nothing at all. For many of us, such a scenario would be absurd. Here we are in the midst of a fast-paced project, trying to meet a tight

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deadline and handle some unpredictable demands, and suddenly we are asked to stop and just sit here?! While such a suggestion may appear unacceptable or even insulting, it is exactly what is happening in many work settings throughout the United States and around the world. People are taking time to simply sit still and practice what is widely known as mindfulness meditation. Lets review just a few examples:
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Confronted with the distressing fact that over 60 percent of medical interns were exhibiting symptoms of severe burnout, Dr. Craig Hassad of Monash University Medical School in Melbourne, Australia, taught his doctors to meditate. Companies such as Raytheon, Proctor & Gamble, Unilever, Nortel Networks, Comcast, and many law rms have offered their employees classes in mindfulness meditation. When Harvard Law School sponsored a conference of practicing attorneys to investigate why lawyers tend to get trapped in adversarial mind-sets and suffer from remarkably high rates of depression, it began the conference by practicing mindfulness meditation. Protecting and Serving without Fear, a seminar offered to law enforcement agents in Madison, Wisconsin, taught the attending police ofcers how to meditate. Executives such as Bill Ford Jr., the chairman of Ford Motor Company; Michael Stephen, the former chairman of Aetna International; Robert Shapiro, the ex-CEO of Monsanto; and Michael Rennie, the managing partner of McKinsey, meditate and consider such a practice benecial to running a corporation.

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So, while such a suggestion as stop and sit still may appear absurd, many of us are, in fact, doing just that in a wide variety of business settings. But why? Why would weor anybody, for that matter stop and sit still for fteen to thirty minutes or even an hour? Recent research seems to be giving us many reasons: repaired immune systems, heightened emotional intelligence, reduced anxiety and depression, sustained levels of joy and satisfactioneven gaining control over some of the most distressing emotional disorders. Scientic studies are indicating that practicing mindfulness is just plain healthy, giving us plenty of reasons, indeed. But despite all these apparent benets, maybe there is another reason why it makes sense to stop and sit stillsomething that has nothing to do with relieving stress or achieving anything at all. Maybe the millions of people throughout history who practiced mindfulness meditation were rediscovering something about being humansomething so simple and so deeply profound that it could only be understood intimately rather than scientically; something so direct and authentic that it demands vulnerability and heart rather than ambition and achievement. The Mindful Leader is about exploring this intimacy of sitting still and learning how such a simple act could transform our complicated and demanding modern workplace. My journey into todays workplace started in the 1980s on Wall Street, where I was one of thousands of determined young people arriving in New York in search of success and personal fulllment. And Wall Street was a fantastic place to get started: a world lled with passion, brilliance, and ambitionever on

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the hunt for prot and seeking business leaders who could lead the way. As my career unfolded, I was invited to attend various leadership seminars and felt honored to be considered a candidate for becoming a leader. At the time, I wasnt sure what being a business leader meant. I knew it involved making decisions, galvanizing teams, assuring quality, and strengthening productivity. But I also had the vague feeling that becoming a business leader was about power, ambition, and success; it was about moving uprather than down and outwhich seemed the right direction to take. At the same time, I was also studying Buddhist meditation under the guidance of Tibetan teachers, foremost among them Chgyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the renowned master. Unlike today, when meditation and yoga have become mainstream, in the 1970s and 1980s, the workplace did not consider studying such topics the brightest thing to do. If the subject of meditation or Tibetan Buddhism came up at work, people would often ask the strangest questions: Is it true that meditation can teach you to y? or Do you have a secret mantra such as Om that can place mystical powers into crystals? Or even more disturbing, Ive heard about that tantric sex stuff. What is it like? How often to do you get to do that? And on occasion, there would be snidely dismissive smiles, as if those who meditate were profoundly out of touch with the adult real world of business and work. There were so many misconceptions about meditation at that time that, generally, I kept my spiritual path to myself, discussing it rarely and only with my closest colleagues. Of course, my Buddhist training had nothing to do with learning to y or meditating on crystals. In fact, my training

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was quite rigorous, requiring daily meditation, frequent solitary retreats, and regular study. And as my Buddhist education naturally mingled with my corporate training, I gradually came to recognize that there was more to leadership than pursuing success or making weighty decisions. My Buddhist training revealed a different model of leadership not based on ambition, will, and achievement but inspired by wisdom, gentleness, and authenticity. While Wall Street was training me to become a business leader, my Buddhist teachers were training me to become a bodhisattva-warrior. I, for one, never considered myself a candidate for the leadership job of a bodhisattva. Traditionally, bodhisattvas were considered spiritually accomplished beings who could overcome arrogance, aggression, and greed and fully realize their humanity. Bodhisattvas were noble leaders who inspired the best in others and worked to help those in need. And while I wanted to achieve such lofty goals, I pretty much considered myself a wannabeor, at best, a gonnabebodhisattva. Over time, however, I came to realize that such leadership was far more down-to-earth than I had imagined and that the workplace, with all its ingenuity and passion, had, in many respects, lost its way and could benet greatly from the vision, skill, and leadership of bodhisattva-warriors. Now, aspiring to be a bodhisattva leader, whether at work or elsewhere, can be tricky business, especially if we have some preconceived notion about making the world a better place. Such spiritual aspirations can often create more confusion than clarity, so its always prudent to be a bit suspicious of such thingsto slow down and get a realistic picture of what we are trying to do. And when we do slow down and get a realistic picture of

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what we are doing, we discover that too often we are speeding past our lives rather than actually living them. Finishing the homework, getting into college, arriving at work on time, scheduling appointments, meeting the targets, landing the promotionits as if we have been managing life as a project rather than truly living it. And it is right here in the midst of this speed and hectic activity that we may catch a glimpse of what it means to lead the life of a bodhisattva-warrior. For even a split second, we may notice the remarkable and vivid fact that we have fully arrived in our lives and we are being invited to appreciate a world in need of our help. Its as if the entire world is inviting us to stop speeding through lifeto sit down and be still and fully appreciate our circumstances. Such a glimpse is more than just a hippie notion of be here now or of being a good girl or boy. It is an invitation from reality to become fully human. Throughout my business career, this glimpse has always brought my bodhisattva aspirations down to earth. This gentle invitation to stop, sit down, and be stillto notice that we have already arrived in our liveshas offered me and thousands of others a mindful way of life. And central to the bodhisattva-warrior tradition is the possibility that such mindfulness can revitalize our workplace and cultivate mindful leaders who could accept the invitation to become fully human and, in turn, lend a hand to a world in need of help. This book imparts some of the basic principles and practices for becoming just such a mindful leader and for bringing such leadership into the organizations where we work. In one sense, there is nothing new here, since all that is presented is drawn from the twenty-ve hundredyear-old Buddhist tradition of the bodhisattva. But at the same time, applying these princi-

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ples in our modern workplace presents us with unique challenges and difculties. When we pause to appreciate work, we discover some true marvels. We can communicate around the world through all kinds of clever devices and travel comfortably to any destination. We produce medicines to soothe our suffering, plentiful food to nourish us, and educational institutions to train and inspire. Cotton cloth, soap, eyeglasses, watches, and music CDsthe list of advances is endless. And each day, we build this astounding world as doctors, librarians, sales managers, scientists, teachers, truck drivers, farmers, parents, psychologists, and fast-food servers. Each of us leads and contributes in our own way, and together we build a world full of wonders. Yet with all our progress and success, we also nd ourselves in a world lled with unprecedented suffering. Sixteen thousand children starve to death every day, and 100 million people are without homes. Even our marvels can morph into tragedies: more than twenty thousand nuclear weapons are hidden throughout the world, and 4.6 million people die each year from air pollution.1 If we pause to truly appreciate the circumstances of our livelihood, we discover that we have fashioned a world that offers great gifts but also demands our help. This book is about how we can wake up to this challenge: how we can appreciate our good fortune and contribute, both at work and throughout our lives in general. In part 1, Inspiring the Best in Ourselves and Others, we will explore an expanded way of leading that is not just a matter of being in charge or making things happen. Instead we will examine how to lead beyond arrogance, fear, and resentment and in turn inspire the best in others. Learning to open up to our daily experience and

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discover a willingness to be counterbalances our incessant drive to achieveand this ability to be present in the moment is a natural wisdom that lies at the heart of being a mindful leader. In part 2, The Ten Talents of a Mindful Leader, we explore in detail how the simple act of sitting still can cultivate the leadership talents needed to revitalize our workplace. By practicing mindfulness meditation, we step past concepts and begin to express poise, courage, humility, and moreif we are willing to engage life on its terms rather than ours. In part 3, Bringing Our Full Being to Work, we examine how to engage our livelihood without hesitation or doubt through becoming synchronized: in harmony physically, mentally, and emotionally. By synchronizing with our work, we rediscover our ability to be authentic, condent, and dignied and, almost magically, realize a powerful possibility: because we are inseparable from what we seek to inuence, our ordinary daily behaviors may be far more potent than we think. Finally in part 4, Practices and Exercises, we explore traditional contemplations for cultivating mindful leadership. Such practices reveal that ordinary activities such as doing our job well, taking a walk in the woods, or raising our family with joy and care are not isolated incidentals, but instead form the foundation for building a positive and decent world. By working with these practices and exercises, we reclaim our natural wisdom and humanity. For my part, engaging this workplace challenge mindfully and honestly has been a lifelong pursuit, and I have had the good fortune to be patiently trained by men and women from both the corporate world and Tibetan Buddhism. In both cases,

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my teachers have been exacting, the circumstances ideal, and my progress always a bit clumsy and resistant. I have learned from Tibetan masters and warehouse clerks, Zen roshis and schoolbook sales reps, Buddhist nuns and CEOs. Corporate America taught me about initiative, ambition, conict, and results. Buddhism taught me about discipline, compassion, toughness, and skill. Each tradition had its unique way of grinding down my arrogance and insecurity and of cultivating my wisdom and condence. Over time and after many hard-earned lessons, these two traditions blended together and taught me one of the most valuable lessons in embracing the marvels and suffering of the workplace. In a sense, it is the basic rule for becoming a mindful leader, and all the practices and advice offered throughout this book can be distilled down into this single guiding principle: More often than not, seeking success for ourselves proves pointless and shallow, whereas seeking success and inspiration for others almost always delivers prosperity and well-being right into our hands. This book is about making this principle come alive in our workplacemoving it from mere words to inspired personal action. And for those who choose to follow the path of the bodhisattva-warrior and cultivate the talents of a mindful leader in the workplace, I offer you a small wish: may you reclaim your natural leadership talents and extend such well-being to all you encounter.

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