Mindfulness at Work (and Beyond)

I enjoyed yesterday’s report by Lisa Napoli for NPR Morning Edition, Buddhist Meditation: A Management Skill? It features my friend Jeremy Hunter, a professor at the Drucker-Ito School in Claremont, Cal. He was one of the first people I met when I went to Claremont in 2002 to do research for my book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life. Jeremy teaches mindfulness (including meditation) and self-management, geared to the needs and expectations of MBA students. I sat in on one of his classes in 2005. In 2010, he and Scott Scherer contributed a chapter, Knowledge Worker Productivity and the Practice of Self-Management, to the book The Drucker Difference.
Applying the principles of mindfulness to work, which I wrote about in early 2011, remains a hot topic. The MBA-oriented site Poets & Quants recently ran a three-part series by Deborah Knox, Train Your Mind, Improve Your Game: Meditation for the 21st-Century Leader. Workplace.com had a September 6 feature about mindfulness training and multitasking. The August 21 Chicago Tribune piece Be Mindful for a Better Workplace quotes Mirabai Bush, co-founder and Associate Director of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, who is interviewed in an extensive feature in transform, Mirabai Bush: The Work of Compassionate Action.
Bill George, the former CEO of Medtronic turned best-selling author and Harvard Business School professor, has given a considerable boost of credibility to mindfulness and meditation for the benefit of work. In particular, see his 2010 post about a two-day mindful leadership retreat. Having returned from Japan not long ago, I was interested to see Overcoming stress / Psychological, physical methods for mindfulness in The Daily Yomiuri Online on September 9. The British site Personneltoday.com ran Mindfulness: helping employees to deal with stress, on September 3.
There are also a lot of good mindfulness resources for work and beyond at mindful.org. In fact, there are so many good print and online resources about mindfulness that it is difficult to be sufficiently mindful when writing a blog post about mindfulness!