Living Mindfully with Aruna Manathunge

Mindfulness in the Business World - Part 3:

Systematic Abandonment

The benefits gained from reducing harmful levels of stress among the workers are well-known and widely accepted. So let's step into a lesser known but equally important area for the organization through Mindfulness. It flows from last week's introduction to 'Reset of Attention'.

Management Guru Peter F. Drucker

The late Peter Drucker (1909-2005) is considered to be the most influential thinker of Management who contributed to the practical foundations of the modern business corporation. One of the remarkable abilities of Drucker was his ability to foresee and predict 20-30 years ahead of his time with regards to evolution and mapping of organizations.

Drucker talked about the importance of managing one's self and also emphasized a great deal about the fact that as a culture, the modern western societies had over-focused on analysis and thinking and under-emphasized on training perception and seeing. He understood that seeing clearly is essential in a changing world in which our maps of reality become out dated. When our maps are outdated we may unwittingly bring out negative results to our organizations.

There was a practice he termed 'Systematic Abandonment', in which an organization takes a regular inventory of what it's doing and why, and asks whether it is providing good results. If it isn't, the organization needs to change, to free up resources to do something better. This is Mindfulness at an organizational level.

Drucker understood the importance of perception, the importance that human beings habitually do things based on static unchanging fixed views and forget why they are doing those and then run into organizational results they do not want. Drucker laid down a framework for presenting Mindfulness in such situations.

Drucker School of Management

The Drucker School of Management has introduced a 28-week course on Mindfulness for the Management to develop and expand on the framework given by Peter Drucker. The course is developed by Jeremy Hunter, PhD. He is a leading teacher of management and a practitioner of Mindfulness.

In the Executive Development program they spend 7 weeks to train perception and seeing clearly through Mindfulness meditation and actual life events of the participants. One of the trainings practiced during these 7 weeks is 'Reset of Attention', the interesting exercise we discussed in this column last week.

Prof. Hunter says usually the cultural atmosphere in an organization pressurize the workers at all levels to get into what he calls an 'Efficiency Mode'. The workers go on to produce, to create more of what they already do and know - more efficiently. This is good only up to a point. The Reset of Attention exercise and other Mindfulness practices dramatically change the participants of the course to perceive the ever changing business scenario with the freshness of a child's mind. Such managers and organizations can quickly adopt to the change and thrive due to resulting innovation.

New Scientific Research

In addition, new scientific research into Mindfulness is clearly proving the benefits to the organization. Studies show that regular practice of Mindfulness strengthens the immune system of the workers leading to lower absenteeism from work. Studies have also found that regular practice of Mindfulness improves the concentration and memory among the work force. This will help the organizations when introducing new skills and to improve the productivity output.

The regular practice of Mindfulness re-wire the brains of the workforce. It is like a gym for the mind. Just as working at the gym makes the muscles stronger, the regular practice of Mindfulness makes the minds and the spirit of the workforce stronger, supple and agile.

Recently a study was conducted at a service industry by two US universities to find out the relationship between workplace mindfulness and job performance, as well as turnover intention among the practitioners. The study found that workplace Mindfulness improved both job performance and job satisfaction among the workers. (Ref. http://hum.sagepub.com/content/67/1/105.full)

The benefits of Mindfulness to the Organizations are both immense and long lasting.

(Aruna Manathunge has practiced Mindfulness for over 42 years. During the past 7 years he has closely followed the development of Mind Science in the Western world. He has had a long career as the Country Head of Sri Lanka and the Head of the Indian Sub-Continent of an American Pharmaceutical Multinational company. Presently Aruna conducts Coaching in Mindfulness to Schools and Companies. Aruna can be contacted at [email protected])