Business Bodhicitta*

My friend and former colleague, Roger Saillant (many years a top Ford executive, a fellow teacher on the Marlboro MBA in Managing for Sustainability and now Executive Director of the Fowler Center for Sustainable Value at Case Western Reserve University) says it's about, "struggling each day to become a human being."

What on earth is Business Bodhicitta?

It is a matter of bringing compassion into your business and applying wisdom to its work. With a conscious intent to create, run and develop your business on such principles, you will find many problems either melt away or do not even surface in the first place. Business Bodhicitta involves sensing and expressing loving kindness to others.

Bodhicitta energy transforms all your ordinary actions of body, speech and mind – your entire life into positivity and benefit for others.

There is plenty of evidence of selfish grasping in business; look where it goes. The excesses of Wall Street and many financial institutions on Main Street demonstrate what happens if there is a lack of consciousness about when ambition turns into greed.

It is no longer reasonable to leave your inner values at home. Bringing them to work without living them is counter-productive. Working without sharing them will lead to conflict.

The quest for financial wealth as a single purpose leads to destruction. The delicate balancing act of meeting the needs of all parties to the business transaction leads to genuine wealth.

Genuine Wealth

Genuine wealth is based on the concept of wellbeing and is built on five capitals:

Mark Anielski, author of the Economics of Happiness, uses the flower image above with the five petals surrounded by a circle to portray the five capitals of wealth. 'Wealth', he takes to mean conditions of well being and not the narrow output definition of wealth, as in the way most companies (net worth) and nations (Gross Domestic Product) define it.

"To be genuine means to be live in accordance with one's values, the shared values of a family or household or the shared values of a community of households," he suggests. Or, I would add, the shared values of a business. Another relevant view can be seen at EcoBuddhism, a Buddhist reponse to global warming.

Flourishing

John Ehrenfeld, the Executive Director of the International Society for Industrial Ecology and author of Sustainability by Design, asserts that by focusing on the "being" mode of human existence rather than on the unsustainable "having" mode we cling to now, a sustainable world is within our reach. The concept of genuine wealth echoes what John is saying.

This starts from a place of caring. The concept of caring immediately leads one to the other person from the self. John talks about the three primary areas of care:

• The human, or caring for oneself
• The natural, or caring for the world
• The ethical, or caring for others.

John also suggests that sustainability is a matter of flourishing, to grow luxuriantly. The interesting thing about 'flourishing' is that it is a subjective word, which allows you to know it when you see it. This is in contrast to the objective-intense world that preoccupies most of us in business.

"All humans have had at least a moment when their senses revealed flourishing, but all too few live in circumstances where those precious moments reemerge over and over," he says. However, seeking to make genuine wealth flourish with compassion and wisdom allows the possibility of sustainability.

Ethonomics

Ethonomics is a made-up word, but one that is quite sticky. It means the study of ethics in the marketplace. It naturally covers ideas such as corporate responsibility, people-centered leadership, local economics, employee ownership, equal opportunity, fair trade and microfinance.

A new definition of Ethonomics was proposed by Fast Company magazine in February 2009. "We live in a world that's resource-constrained but ingenuity-rich. So an upstart generation of entrepreneurs--and innovators within the world's biggest companies—are founding businesses that are good for the world as well as the bottom line. They are practicing social change through urban revitalization, sustainable agriculture, green IT, alternative energy and online community-powered investing. Any business that claims to be truly sustainable and innovative should be increasingly efficient with energy and natural resources, transparent and accountable, and good on balance for people and other living things. Ethonomics is a hybrid of technology, design, and social responsibility, and at Fast Company we believe it is the future of business."

Peter Senge, in his book The Necessary Revolution, says "visions that truly make a difference come from the heart as well as the head."

Economics as if People Mattered

Such is the sub title title of EF Schumacher's book Small is Beautiful. We all yawn at the naming of economics as the dismal science, but no wonder it is so-called. So much of what we take for granted when we hear about economic growth, depression, upturn or downturn seems to relate not much to our happiness. That is because current western economics measures the wrong things. GDP and consumption is not what brings value.

While as a business person your instinctive reaction may be shock and disagreement, take a look at the work of Buddhist peace activist Sulak Sivaraksa and invest in his small book, The Wisdom of Sustainability. You do not need to swallow his ideas wholesale, but at the very least consider his alternative world view. Read a bit more about this theme of maximizing financial return versus maximizing beneficial return, as you consider your purpose and goals.

Reducing Suffering and Stress

We naturally tend to suffer in the process of living our lives and even more frequently we self-induce stress when we decide to start a business. I know from my own experience that I developed high excitement before starting the business and then after getting going, the excitement and natural compulsion turned into stress.

I wish that I had been more self-aware at that stage of my life. My business might have been even more successful. While it would be exaggerated to claim that meditation would have increased performance, a better mind state would have been healthier and might have allowed more space for effective work.

Reducing suffering and stress is important, though often not an end in itself. It improves our quality of life, can also help to facilitate the integration of the various 'compartments' of your life, typically home and work. Successful entrepreneurs like Bill George (former CEO of Medtronics) and John Mackie (CEO of Whole Foods) describe an emerging business paradigm that is known by different names including authentic leadership (leading from where you are, not where you think you ought to be), conscious capitalism (business with consequences in mind), and mindful marketing (marketing with a sense of purpose).

John Mackie, for example, says, “The whole corporate social responsibility idea is trying to graft something onto the old profit maximization model. What we need is a transformation. The way we think about business, what it’s based on. People want businesses to do good in the world. It’s that simple…. We need a deeper, fundamental reform in the essence of business.”

Mind and Life

There are many ways to align your public and private lives, or to integrate them. Neuroscience is becoming increasingly clear about the way our brains, mind and body function as a system and that we can enter it through any of these gateways. Entrepreneurs are always using their minds; they are naturally mindful, but sometimes the mindfulness they use for business withers when they consider themselves.

What is becoming increasingly clear is that we can train our minds and create physical changes in the brain. We can change our levels of performance as much by such training as we can by simply focusing on results—the way business strategists always claimed was the way to go.

The Mind and Life Institute is dedicated to fostering dialogue and research at the highest possible level between modern science and the great living contemplative traditions, especially Buddhism. It builds on a deep commitment to the power and value of both of these ways of advancing knowledge and their potential to alleviate suffering.

* In Buddhism, bodhicitta is the wish to attain complete enlightenment in order to be of benefit to all sentient beings. The word is a combination of the Sanskrit 'bodhi' (awakening) and 'citta' (enlightenment). Most of us, if we work at it, can aim only at relative bodhicitta, working for the good of all beings as if it were our own.

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