Buddhist-Based Organizational Values: Now & Zen in Business by Jack Ricchiuto ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

    In 1982, a New York City Zen Buddhist meditation group led by an aerospace engineer, Bernie Glassman, launched what has become one of the city's premier bakeries. Founded upon the principles of Buddhist social action, the Greyston Bakery approach combines community development and organizational success with personal growth. This enterprise is based upon a belief that people have great potential and that organizations have a social responsibility to empower people's growth on all levels. Making it a priority to hire the homeless and other hard-to-employ people, Greyston assures the company's long-term survival through a focus on growing operating profits, increasing staff as automation increases, and providing employee-growth opportunities in all aspects of their lives.

    Every organization's culture and priorities are shaped by its values and beliefs. Buddhist-based organizations, like the award-winning Greyston Bakery, are founded on two key principles that come out of Buddhist practice: the expectation that all of life is intrinsically both impermanent and interdependent. From a Buddhist perspective, suffering comes from ignoring these principles, and happiness is derived from embracing and living by them.

    The Buddhist belief that change is constant leads us to value agility and innovation. By embracing this concept, we are continuously open to reinventing what we produce and how we produce it. We are able to let go of what is not working and what is no longer of interest to the market. We anticipate change, which makes us naturally more proactive than reactive. Companies and non-profits dedicated to sustainable buildings, renewable energy use and employee-owned business models function from these beliefs and values.

    The Buddhist belief that everything in this world is interdependent leads us to value collaboration over competition and isolation. An organization whose culture is based on this principle offers ongoing opportunities for collaborations and partnerships across departments and levels within the organization. The principle of interdependence invites the discovery that we are smarter when we act together and that everything we do has an impact on the people around us. It causes us to act with more emotional intelligence during difficult conversations and decisions with each other, customers and suppliers.

    People in organizations who operate from the principles of impermanence and interdependence do so because it aligns with their authentic experience of themselves and their world. Buddhism has always been based on the empirical data of experience. Interestingly, we are living in an era when we have more empirical data about the nature of the universe than ever before. All of the “new sciences” in the last several decades have yielded a wealth of new understanding about the nature of our world and our selves. These sciences, which include quantum physics, ecology and the neurosciences, have produced amazing amounts of empirical evidence pointing to the intrinsically impermanent and interdependent nature of ourselves and our universe.

    This new understanding has only further supported the wisdom traditions of Buddhism and their profound implications on how we look at organizations today. The Dalai Lama in a recent NY Times op-ed* piece said that because both science and Buddhism are based on observation, Buddhism needs to change its beliefs if today's science suggests otherwise. As it turns out, Buddhism's beliefs – and all subsequent values – show strong practical evidence of the universality of impermanence and interdependence.

    With this knowledge supporting us, we cannot help but wonder how much more success our organizations would experience if we worked and operated more from these principles. What would it mean for us to embrace change as essential to our personal and organizational growth instead of fearing it as a loss of what is impermanent anyway? What would it mean for us to act more collaboratively with people on our organizational teams, across departments, and with other organizations in our industries and local regions? What would it mean for us to value change and collaboration more? How would we act, interact and treat our resources?

    Moving toward more Buddhist-based values in our organizations begins with conversations about these kinds of questions. Our conversations – in meetings, hallways, at water coolers and across e-mails – are rich opportunities to increase our collective consciousness of impermanence and interdependence and explore the day-to-day implication of basing organizational success on these principles.

    Whether someone is a beginner or teacher in Buddhism, the path is always the same – to simply notice the impermanent and interdependent nature of things. This can happen on a meditation cushion, during a fly-fishing trip, while walking in nature or doing yoga. It can just as easily happen in the boardroom. In any case, the practice offers us the possibilities of looking at organizational success through new eyes.

* An “op-ed” is an essay or guest column published in the opinion section of a newspaper. These are called op-eds because they usually appear on the page OPposite the EDitorial page.

Jack Ricchiuto is corporate facilitator and executive coach across 20 industries and the author of Collaborative Creativity, Accidental Conversations, Project Zen and Appreciative Leadership. He has a 30+ year Zen Buddhist practice and teaches meditation locally. His website is www.DesigningLife.com.