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From Steve Jobs to Marc Benioff, a few Silicon Valley tech chiefs take taken a Zen Buddhism approach to their daily lives and their businesses. And it's not only billionaire CEOs. Yoga studios are springing up everywhere and trainers are in demand.

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Some tech companies are bringing Zen to them. Eighty-seven-yr-old Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh was invited by Google last yr to run a training session at its campus, and he also planned to run into 20 other tech CEOs, The Guardian reported.

The Meditation Is the Message

At a Churchill Gild event in Santa Clara I attended last fall — a one-day session billed to help attendees gain ability in order to "change the game" at their companies — a roomful of techies learned to meditate under the guidance of a Shell Oil Visitor executive.

The thought of Zen-like meditation skillful in the tech industry is, somewhat ironically, all the rage effectually the Valley. But isn't there something inherently incorrect with tying inner peace to increased profits and mindfulness to consumer gadgets that constantly bombard people with information?

To exist fair, any form of meditation where one appreciates living in the moment can be an incredible stress reducer in an industry brimming with anxiety. As Arianna Huffington points out in a web log mail concluding calendar month, entitled "Mindfulness, Meditation, Wellness and Their Connectedness to Corporate America'south Bottom Line," there are hard dollars and cents associated with stress in the workplace.

Here are some stats gleaned from a Forbes story nearly ii years ago to back up this claim:

• The 2012 Workplace Survey released past the American Psychological Association found that 41 per centum of American "feel tense or stressed during the workday," up from 36 percent last yr.
• Stress was the most common crusade of long-term sickness absence for both manual and non-manual employees in CIPD's 2011 Absenteeism Direction Survey.
• And finally, the World Health Organization estimates that stress costs American businesses $300 billion dollars a year.

Inner Peace for Profit

Patently, anybody should be entitled to the health benefits of meditation regardless of where they work or how much money they make. Like Tai Chi, with a vast number of people in China (immature and old, rich and poor) performing the moves in the early morning every day, meditation practise doesn't discriminate.

So there's that problematic tie-in to making coin off meditation, as Huffington surmises:

"There'due south zippo touchy-feely about increased profits. This is a tough economy, and information technology's going to be that way for a long time. Stress-reduction and mindfulness don't just make u.s.a. happier and healthier, they're a proven competitive reward for any business that wants one."

Competitive advantage? I don't think I've always heard "mindfulness" and "competitive advantage" used in the same sentence before. You could argue that the most popular tech products with the biggest competitive advantages produced by companies with soaring profits are the polar opposite of the college purpose of meditation — that is, finding meaningful happiness.

In truth, much of today's technology output is superficial and somewhat meaningless.

This sentiment apparently wasn't lost on Thich Nhat Hanh. According to The Guardian, he brash senior Google engineers and the tech industry at large:

"When they create electronic devices, they can reflect on whether that new product will take people abroad from themselves, their family and nature. Instead they tin can create the kind of devices and software that can help them to go back to themselves, to take care of their feelings. Past doing that, they will feel good because they're doing something good for guild."

Of class, this isn't what the tech manufacture does; it makes products that entreatment to the impatient American consumer who doesn't look inwardly just outwardly, expressed with a social networking-styled narcissism. However, in that location are signs that even the most always-on consumers are reaching gadget fatigue and experiencing regrets about the loneliness of today's mobile civilization.

Instead of staring into our iPhones and watching funny true cat videos on YouTube or working at all hours because, you know, time is money and time is best spent when there'southward a financial return on investment, maybe we can accept a moment and merely breathe in silence — for costless.

Tom Kaneshige covers Apple, BYOD and Consumerization of IT for CIO.com. Follow Tom on Twitter @kaneshige. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline, Facebook, Google + and LinkedIn. Email Tom at tkaneshige@cio.com

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Source: https://www.cio.com/article/291229/leadership-management-zen-and-the-art-of-tech-in-the-valley.html

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