Rupert Murdoch does it, Steve Jobs did it, and lessons on how to learn it are the most popular on offer at Google HQ.
Meditation is in the zeitgeist. Once on the fringes, the ancient technique is being dusted off by 21st-century companies and their chief executives as they strive to manage the stresses and hyper-stimulation of the digital age.
“I don’t think it’s some kind of hippy-trippy flower-power kind of stuff at all,” says Gordon Cairns, chairman of David Jones and Origin Energy and a vocal advocate of the practice known as mindfulness.
Mindfulness, or becoming aware of your experience moment to moment, is being embraced by companies from General Mills to banking giant Chase.
Cairns will address 400 leaders from 230 companies across finance, telecommunications, FMCG, government and other sectors in Sydney on Monday at The Wake Up Project’s maiden Mindful Leadership Global Forum.
Other speakers include AFL legend Paul Roos, Mark Britt – former Mi9 chief executive, now the boss of Catcha Group – as well as international speakers from IBM, Stanford University and the World Economic Forum.
Companies that encourage mindfulness – which can be trained through regular meditation practice – claim they see absenteeism falling, productivity rising and business improving.
Eastern spirituality roots
Mindfulness is rooted in ancient Eastern spirituality, in particular Buddhism (which Cairns practices).
But its rising popularity in the West as a method to deal with the stresses of modern life and work was pioneered by Professor Jon Kabat-Zinn from the University of Massachusetts Medical School. His research, which began in 1979, has pointed to the positive effects of regular meditation on brain function, anxiety, pain and psoriasis.
Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) courses – which now run in many parts of the world – are robustly secular, encouraging participation from sceptics who might otherwise shun the idea.
“It is now fact that mindfulness has the ability to rewire you brain . . . and by doing so have a profound affect on one’s health,” says James Doty, clinical professor of neurosurgery at Stanford.
The corporate mindfulness wave started more recently, in Silicon Valley, where companies such as Google and Facebook hold in-house courses.
“They are businesses that are dealing with huge change, constant disruption and innovation, and they need leaders to be able to deal with that in a way that manages the anxiety and pressure,” Britt says. He encouraged meditation training in his time at Mi9, which was half-owned by Microsoft until it was bought out by joint-venture partner Nine Entertainment Co last year.
“Mindfulness is very simple: it’s the practice of being present in the moment. Whether we’re talking about meditation – which has thousands of years of history – or the current business context, it’s really just about being more effective and finding a way to deal with some of the stress and pressure of modern day business environment.”
Still use ‘passion and force’
That does not mean being a soft touch or preclude being “mindfully angry,” he says. “At times you need to deal with a performance issue and you need to be very clear with the organisation about expectations.
“At times, you need to react in a negotiation with a lot of passion and force. But it’s doing that consciously and thoughtfully, and not doing it out of reactivity, which is usually when you say some of the things, or send some of the emails, you might regret.”
The mindfulness phenomenon, he says, has been building for a long time: “It’s just really happening in Oz for the first time – maybe we’re catching up. ”
The test will be whether the populist fashion for a technique that’s thousands of years old can prove to be more than the latest corporate fad.
Alex Malley, chief executive of CPA Australia, admits he is “not overly familiar” with mindfulness but says he is not surprised that the trend has worked so quickly out of Silicon Valley.
“It almost cheapens it trying to put a label on it,” he says. “I believe in driving the emotions of the individual – not a collaborative ‘let’s all sit and sing Kumbaya and sit in a team’ approach.
“That’s bull-dust for me. I am into pumping the individual and finding out what they like doing.”
Burnout, exhaustion and disengagement
Jono Fisher, founder of the Wake Up Project, said he decided to stage the two-day event to “tackle the new challenges of burnout, exhaustion and disengagement” and raise awareness of the leadership style in Australia.
“[It’s] not just a feel-good factor, it unleashes higher performance, innovation and engagement.”
Ambitious Gen Ys are using the brain-training tools, once limited to the counter-culture, to get ahead, shunning the ’60s hippy ethos of “turn on, tune in, drop out” popularised by Timothy Leary. “The change is actually coming from a younger generation saying they want to join a business that’s got a soul,” says Cairns.
“When we come to work we are looking for meaning in our lives and the challenge for business is to provide meaningful work; the challenge for individuals is to tune in – you don’t find meaning in your life by running away.”
Athletes such as basketball star Kobe Bryant use meditation to help them “get in the zone”, while Roos’s wife Tami has taught meditation to players at both the Sydney Swans and the Melbourne Demons, where he now coaches.
“I’ve actually been really surprised that in a very blokey environment, a lot of the players are really receptive to it,” he says.
“The more focus you can have and the more understanding that your thoughts and energies are going to have on the players, the more constructive you can be.”