As soon as I saw the front cover of this weekend’s FT Magazine (which reads “The Mind Business: How Eastern Vision is Changing Western Corporate Life”), I put aside all other newspapers, and sat to read the article, expecting lots of things–but not what I found.
The article focuses mainly on the experience of General Mills (the company behind brands like Haagen-Dazs, Cheerios, and Betty Crocker, among many others) with mindfulness and yoga in the workplace. Leaving aside how we feel about big food companies, the article presents the goal of the now 7-year project (known as Mindful Leadership) as quite shallow: “The idea is that calmer workers will be less stressed, more productive and even become better leaders, therefore benefitting the entire organization.” [My mindfulness practice helps me with stress, but the main point is becoming a more present and aware person in every aspect of my life, not a more productive employee.] The same lack of depth in the way mindfulness is approached is seen on another paragraph where William George, a board member of Goldman Sachs is presented as a meditator since 1974 (as an aside, if you have a meditation practice could you stomach working for GS???). According to him: “The main business case for meditation is that if you’re fully present on the job, you will be more effective as a leader, you will make better decisions and you will work better with other people”, he tells the FT reporter.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s great that companies are offering their employees the chance to do yoga and have a mindfulness practice. What worries me is the fact that these practices are simply framed as a gateway to greater productivity, rather than as a means to overall well-being and spiritual development.
The article also mentions how General Mills has started to conduct research into the outcomes of the program, saying, for example, that after one of the 7-week courses they offer “83 per cent of participants said they were ‘taking time each day to optimise my personal productivity.'” Am I the only one who is troubled by the fact that mindfulness is being used to make employees work as better oiled machines?
To finish, the FT says Ms. Marturano (one of the people who spearheaded the Mindful Leadership program at GM) “is not troubled by any apparent contradiction around using compassion to breed better capitalist.”
Absent from the article is any mention of whether mindfulness in the workplace can lead to grater corporate social responsibility, changes in business models, or investment decisions. Yoga and meditation are spiritual practices that can help us become more whole and wise individuals, and maybe–after a lifetime of practice–lead to a glimpse of enlightenment. Seeing them used as the FT describes is deeply troubling.
This is a long way away from the teachings of the Buddha and the yoga sutras of Patanjali.
My Yoga Room 