The Case for Contemplative Leadership at GSB
Meditation is misunderstood in Silicon Valley. Popular science articles tout the benefits of meditation for reducing stress and anxiety and improving sleep quality. Yet those benefits barely scratch the surface of what meditation is about.
Contemplative practices like meditation have featured prominently in religious and spiritual traditions for thousands of years. In those traditions, the goal of contemplative practice was not to alleviate negative symptoms. Instead, the aim was to better understand the inner workings of our mind and to develop enduring positive states, like gratitude, equanimity, and compassion. Along the way, practitioners fundamentally transform the way they relate to their thoughts and emotions. Yes, like exercise, meditation can help us to feel a bit better in the moment. But like exercise, reaping the long-term benefits of meditation takes years of commitment.
How does this relate to life at GSB? Contemplative practice is intimately related to everything that we do at GSB and everything that we will do as leaders afterwards. As leaders, we use our minds every day. How can we become experts at our craft if we don’t understand the equipment with which we practice that craft?
Let’s compare GSB to a basketball team. In class, we learn some plays and the proper way to dribble and shoot. We also scrimmage when we role play. Both prepare us for games. Yet to win, we also need to run suicide sprints, hit the weight room, and practice free throws in isolation — the equivalents in leadership are meditation and other contemplative practices.
In Organizational Behavior, we learn that we have deeply ingrained cognitive biases that affect our ability to think clearly and rationally. Meditation can help us to bring awareness to those biases in real-time. In Interpersonal Dynamics, we learn the power of communicating our feelings. Meditation can help us to recognize those feelings as they arise instead of getting sucked into thinking. In MGE and Conversations in Management, we learn the importance of communicating with presence and compassion. Meditation can help us to do that too.
In winter quarter, as part of my final project in Paths to Power, I started a student initiative that soon came to be called the Contemplative Leadership Program, or CLP for short (yes, I’m acutely aware of the irony of doing a power project around contemplative practice). To my surprise, over sixty students signed up. Participants were organized into small groups that met for an hour to discuss contemplative practice and its application to their academic and professional lives. Each group was led by a student facilitator who already had some experience in contemplative practice. Many of the facilitators also enrolled in a contemplative science course taught by Dr. Tia Rich, the director of the Stanford-wide mindfulness initiative Contemplation by Design.
As with any activity at GSB, attendance fluctuated week to week, which was understandable, as GSB presents a never-ending stream of activities and opportunities that compete for our attention. Yet when groups did meet, the reception was positive, and participants found the hour to be a useful pause from normal hustle and bustle of GSB life, an opportunity to reflect on what matters to us most, and to discuss how to use contemplative practice to become more grateful and compassionate leaders.
The interest in CLP points to a desire for deep, introspective experiences. Many of us come to GSB to figure out what to do with the rest of our lives. Business school is exciting and fun, but it’s also disorienting, and it’s too easy to mindlessly fill our schedules and lose sight of why we came here in the first place. For those who already integrate contemplative practice into their lives, I hope that CLP can create a community based on shared beliefs and values. And for others just starting on the contemplative path, I hope that CLP can provide guidance and support.
For me, the best part of CLP was a flurry of new friendships. I’m in the third year of my joint degree and didn’t expect to meet many new people this year. Instead, I’ve been blessed to form deep connections with like-minded MBA1s and MBA2s that I might never have met. I’m especially grateful for the eleven classmates who signed up to lead small groups: Alvina Jiao, Archana Sohmshetty, Andrew Beck, Gabe Charalambides, Joe Byers, Steph Zhou, Dan Oakes, Gail Ratanasopinswat, Glynnis Millhouse, Valerie Osband, and Vica Germanova. You’ve all been rock stars, and it’s been a joy to get to know you better.
As GSB graduates, it’s hard to underestimate the impact we’ll have on the world — through the products and services we’ll create and through the way we treat our employees and customers. We should take that responsibility seriously and use every means at our disposal to do so. Contemplative practice is so much more than a nice way to destress. It’s a time-tested method for tapping into the human potential to live a full and ethical life. We all want to change lives, organizations, and the world — let’s start with ourselves.
