What Can Business Teach the Buddha?

I spend much of my life packaging material from the “alternative” world to produce a form that appeals to business and the mainstream in general. I use mindfulness in stress workshops, embodied exercises in corporate leadership training and NonViolent Communication on appraisals courses. Next week however I will be doing things the other way around – “selling” business at Buddhafield.

Buddhafield is a wonderful festival of meditation, yoga, and music where you get sent if you’re too big a hippy for Glastonbury. I led a workshop there last year on Embodied Peacebuilding which went down well. This year I decided that for a challenge I would lead a talk on “Conscious Business – Can Business be a Spiritual Practice?” And “What can Business teach Buddhafield?”

I’m still deciding on the content and thought I’d start thinking out loud here. Here are a few thoughts on things that alternative communities I’ve been in contact with might learn from business:

- Effectively coordinating action over time. Rigour and commitment
- Evidence base – i.e. what actually works - the limits of fundamentalism and relativism
- Putting feeling over rationality instead of alongside it.
- Basic ethics and keeping things simple
- Self –reliance (as well as communion)
- Re-owning the urges for power, prestige and achievement rather than repressing them

I’d love to hear from readers who have some additions to these?
My thinking on the matter is influenced by Ken Wilber’s “Post Trans Fallacy” – pre rational/materisalistic and post rational/materialistic look a lot alike but the former is superstitious and dogmatic while the latter “transcends and includes” to be truly integral. In Spiral Dynamics terms it’s the movement from relativist green (much of Buddhafield) to a world view that includes achieveist orange (much of business) and traditionalist blue (old-school business as well as much traditional spirituality).

As for the Buddha – well that was just a nice title. More on Buddhism and business here. Perhaps he set the tone for spiritual practice as “anti-wealth” by renouncing his position as a prince. But then as Fred Kofman points out- the last ox-herding picture in Zen is “return to the market-place with helping hands.” The marketplace not the bloody hot-yoga studio.