I am sitting in a packed conference room, somewhere in the heart of London’s financial centre, in an office I have sworn not to identify. It is quiet for a midweek lunchtime. In fact, it is silent. Along with the ex-chairman of a blue-chip company, a handful of executives and board members, a former senior central banker, a Buddhist software engineer, a Benedictine monk and 60 others, I am meditating. Or trying to.
The main thought I am attempting to ignore is this: if the benefits of such “mindfulness” are as clear as science and millennia of human experience suggest, why is the financial services industry not boasting about the practice and rolling out the meditation mats across the sector?
Individuals including Lord Myners, currently working on reform of the governance of the UK’s Co-operative Group, and Bill Gross, founder of Pimco, have talked publicly about how meditation helps them clear their minds and set priorities. A number of big US groups already host mindfulness sessions. They include General Mills, of Cheerios fame, and Google, whose people development expert Chade-Meng Tan is addressing this audience of financial folk about how mindfulness encourages compassionate leadership.
At the global financial group hosting last week’s event, about 1,200 out of 10,000 staff tune in to regular updates about mindfulness, with 150 or so taking part in weekly meditation sessions. The participation rate has “increased dramatically”, says a senior executive. Yet high finance remains a bastion of corporate conservatism: fear of ridicule and industry scepticism means even enlightened institutions such as this one are coy about publicising such initiatives.
Half a century ago similar misunderstanding prevailed about the value of physical exercise for executives. I dug out an FT column from 1957 headlined “Keeping Managers Healthy” that is full of delicious anachronisms (tip no. 5: “Never travel over weekends except for pleasure and then never more than 100 miles”). The main concern at the time was that bosses refused to attend medical check-ups. Even then, the article cited a company doctor’s view that executives “generally have a better-than-average bill of health – or else they would not get to the top”. Only when CEOs kept keeling over from strokes and heart attacks did it dawn on them and their shareholders that the fitness “fad” might mitigate the problem.
In finance a 1950s-era presumption survives that success is, to quote the same article, “a tribute to [executives’] constitutions and physical and mental make-up”. Standing in the way of mindfulness is the worry it may be seen as quirky or “New Age”. Yet brain-imaging research suggests meditation can alleviate anxiety and depression, which still plague Wall Street and City of London executives.
You do not have to believe mindfulness will lead to world peace to agree it is an obvious and relatively cheap way to reduce a growing business risk.
How, then, should companies go about introducing it? Not by compulsion. The biggest successes – including the nascent programme at our anonymous host – start at the grassroots and only later get endorsed by senior staff. Treating mindfulness as a productivity tool is unwise, too. “This should not just be about making us better performers,” says the executive cited earlier.
Forcing God into corporate mindfulness programmes would also be counter-productive. Buddhist Chade Meng-Tan culls language that may be thought religious from his talks to Google engineers. But, as Laurence Freeman, the Benedictine monk, says, meditation is common to many religions. If it brought some sense of the spiritual to secular institutions, that would be a bonus even bankers’ critics could applaud.
Meditation must take a winding route to the workplace, much as physical fitness did. It should get there. Aspiring masters or mistresses of the financial universe would never neglect their physical wellbeing. Yet most gym regimes make disciples look far more ridiculous than a mindfulness workout would.
Even the FT’s 1957-vintage tips for men managing multinationals advise some physical exercise (“gardening and fishing recommended”). Where meditation and mindfulness will prove their worth, however, is in helping modern executives implement tip no. 10 – still the most relevant and most elusive goal: “Learn to relax.”
From: Financial Times