The Zen Leader

A guide to using pressure to be a better leader through principles of Zen Buddhism. Leaders today face nearly impossible tasks. Forced to do more with less, expand globally, innovate quickly, inspire broadly and—oh, yes—balance work and family. How can one manage all this pressure? The Zen Leader does not encourage you simply to “be peaceful.” Neither does it suggest you work harder, faster, or ignore the pressure. Quite the opposite: it’s about using the pressure to propel “flips” in consciousness that create transformational leaders, leaders who create the future with joy and enthusiasm, rather than drive themselves and their people to exhaustion. The Zen Leader guides you through ten “flips” that take you from barely managing to mastering change—not by doing more, zoning out, or pretending you have all the answers. Chapter by chapter, you’ll learn how to make the “flips” that reframe your life, your leadership, and your world. Discover how you can get out of your own way and realize the Zen Leader in you. Praise for The Zen Leader “The Zen Leader provides a calm and reassuring voice—telling us what is important about leadership and about ourselves. She distills leadership to its essence, and offers simple, easily understandable tools for any current or aspiring leader to understand, use, and build on his or her own natural gifts.” —David Dotlich, chairman of Pivot and coauthor of Why CEOs Fail; Head, Heart, and Guts; and other books on leadership “The chapter entitled “From Controlling to Connecting” will change how you interact with others, and will enrich your life. You will see the vision of what you want our world to be and help strengthen the business connections we all need.” —Blythe McGarvie, author of Shaking the Globe “Before you can effectively lead others, you must be able to control yourself first. Dr. Whitelaw invites us on a journey of self-discovery using easy-to-follow exercises. By learning to experience for yourself the power of a unified mind and body, you will begin to taste your full potential.” —David Shaner, author of The Seven Arts of Change

What would your work and your life look like if you knew how to stay focused yet flexible, if you got more of the right things done, and if you were helping to create a more peaceful world at the same time? “A mindful leader makes the work environment a generative social field in which compassion, connection, and creativity thrive. The seven accessible practices in this book can teach you how to become just such a leader.” — from the foreword by Daniel J. Siegel, MD, executive director of Mindsight Institute Today’s leaders are grappling with the pace and complexity of change, the challenge of supporting healthy collaboration and alignment among teams, and the resulting stress and burnout. The practice of mindful leadership may be one of the most important competencies in business today if leaders are to move beyond fear, anxiety, nagging self-doubt, and the feeling of constant overwhelm. Marc Lesser has taught his proven seven-step method to leaders at Google, Genentech, SAP, Facebook, and dozens of other Fortune 500 companies for over twenty years and has distilled a lifetime of mindfulness and business experience into these chapters. This incredibly practical yet accessible book draws on Marc’s experience as a CEO of three companies, as cofounder of the world-renowned Search Inside Yourself (SIY) program within Google, and as a longtime Zen practitioner. The principles in this book can be applied to leadership at any level, providing readers with the tools they need to shift awareness, enhance communication, build trust, eliminate fear and self-doubt, and minimize unnecessary workplace drama. Embracing any one of the seven practices alone can be life-changing. When used together, they support a path of well-being, productivity, and positive influence. Practicing mindful leadership will allow you to achieve results — with more energy, clarity, meaning, and connection. Your intentions and actions will be more aligned. You will accomplish more with less wasted effort. After reading this book, you’ll understand why some of the world’s most successful companies routinely incorporate the Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader, integrating mindfulness, emotional intelligence, and business savvy to create great corporate cultures, and even a better world.

In a world of great noise, disruption, and dysfunction, it's hard to be heard or know how to make a difference. But master the principal underlying change, and you can live your most significant, joyful and resilient life. That principle is resonance, and Resonate is your guide. In these pages, you'll discover How resonance does everything How you can become a more resonant being How you can apply resonance to bring about change, from love and relationships, to goals and dreams, to large-scale social change You've likely heard of "being on the same wavelength." But prepare to be surprised by how pervasive resonance is, and how powerfully you can affect it. Resonance connects the inner and outer worlds, linking subjective experience and objective impact. It cannot be faked or fooled; resonance is a physical fact. But how we resonate is a choice, a condition we can cultivate. Combining the physics of energy transfer in the human body with physical practices adopted from Zen training, Resonate uniquely integrates how we can develop ourselves to change our world. Let Resonate show the Way.

Gathers the political, social, and psychological teachings of Chinese Zen masters from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries.

In a world of great noise, disruption, and dysfunction, it's hard to be heard or know how to make a difference. But master the principal underlying change, and you can live your most significant, joyful and resilient life. That principle is resonance, and Resonate is your guide. In these pages, you'll discover How resonance does everything How you can become a more resonant being How you can apply resonance to bring about change, from love and relationships, to goals and dreams, to large-scale social change You've likely heard of "being on the same wavelength." But prepare to be surprised by how pervasive resonance is, and how powerfully you can affect it. Resonance connects the inner and outer worlds, linking subjective experience and objective impact. It cannot be faked or fooled; resonance is a physical fact. But how we resonate is a choice, a condition we can cultivate. Combining the physics of energy transfer in the human body with physical practices adopted from Zen training, Resonate uniquely integrates how we can develop ourselves to change our world. Let Resonate show the Way.

Your guide to the patterns of personality As a senior manager at NASA, Dr. Ginny Whitelaw had access to excellent leadership training. But like most leadership training, it taught leaders from the neck up, not deeply enough to develop the whole and balanced leaders so needed in today's complex organizations. She knew there had to be a deeper, more integrated way of developing effective leaders. There is! Move to Greatness reveals that to lead and live wholly, basic energy patterns must be brought into balance. Out of kilter, these four patterns create the ineffective "buts" in leadership style ("great at making numbers, but hell on staff") and personal performance ("successful at work, but has no life"). Success and failure originate in our use (or misuse) of four fundamental patterns in the nervous system that have been studied over decades: * The Driver pushes into every barrier with speed, directness and intensity and puts a focus on priorities, actions and the bottom line. * The Organizer does the right thing with discipline and order and establishes processes, clarifies roles and assigns responsibility. * The Collaborator swings into playful engagement with life and the people in it, and as a leader, the Collaborator is oriented to customers, employees, loyalty and fun. * The Visionary goes with the flow, hangs out in the chaos, and leaps to new possibilities; the Visionary leader thinks outside the box and creates the future. Using these patterns as a map, you will understand people more easily and more deeply, and see how to lead them more effectively. Moreover, you'll learn how to move yourself to your highest potential. Discover your natural preferences and learn how to literally move yourself-and others-to greatness.

The complexity and relentless pace of our world places exceptional demands on leaders today. They work incredibly hard and yet feel that they are not meeting their own expectations of excellence. They feel disconnected from their own values and overburdened. By the thousands, they seek out books on leadership skills, time management, and “getting things done,” but the techniques these volumes offer, useful as they are, don't often don't speak to the leader's fundamental sense that something is missing. Janice Marturano, a senior executive with decades of experience in Fortune 500 corporations, explains how Mindful Leadership training integrates the practice of mindfulness-meditation and self-awareness-with the practical tools of management, enabling leaders to bring a wider range of their capacities to the challenges at hand. We already know from scientific research that mindfulness practices enhance mental health and improve clarity and focus. FINDING THE SPACE shows how this training has specific value for leaders. This is not a new “leadership system” to add to the burden of already overworked people. It brings the concepts of mindfulness into the everyday life of anyone in a leadership role, through specific exercises that address practical issues-the calendar, schedule, phone usage, meetings, to-do list, and strategic planning, as well as interpersonal challenges such as listening and working with difficult colleagues. Leaders who have experienced mindfulness training report that it provides a “transformative experience” with significant improvements in innovation, self-awareness, listening, and making better decisions. In FINDING THE SPACE TO LEAD, Marturano masterfully lays out her proven techniques for promoting mindfulness in the busy executive's working life.

An illustrated depiction of Steve Jobs' friendship with Zen Buddhist Kobun Chino Otogawa and the impact it had on Jobs' career Apple cofounder Steve Jobs (1955-2011) had such an enormous impact on so many people that his life often took on aspects of myth. But much of his success was due to collaboration with designers, engineers and thinkers. The Zen of Steve Jobs tells the story of Jobs' relationship with one such person: Kobun Chino Otogawa. Kobun was a Zen Buddhist priest who emigrated to the U.S. from Japan in the early 1970s. He was an innovator, lacked appreciation for rules and was passionate about art and design. Kobun was to Buddhism as Jobs was to the computer business: a renegade and maverick. It wasn't long before the two became friends--a relationship that was not built to last. This graphic book is a reimagining of that friendship. The story moves back and forward in time, from the 1970s to 2011, but centers on the period after Jobs' exile from Apple in 1985 when he took up intensive study with Kobun. Their time together was integral to the big leaps that Apple took later on with its product design and business strategy. Told using stripped down dialogue and bold calligraphic panels, The Zen of Steve Jobs explores how Jobs might have honed his design aesthetic via Eastern religion before choosing to identify only what he needs and leave the rest behind.