In this respect, mindfulness trainings can limit the potential to speak, investigate, and act in ways that threaten existing power relations. One can think of these regulatory influences as a form of “internalized pacification,” promoting a potent form of quietism. If employees are compelled to monitor their inner states, and to self-regulate “destructive emotions” by “being mindful,” they become — as Foucault warned — “docile subjects.”
Another Corporate Fad
Although corporate mindfulness courses are marketed as radically new, they share many of the goals of earlier management science fads. These programs can be viewed as an evolutionary adaptation of a corporate mythology that began in the early twentieth century with Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose “scientific” principles of management were literally touted as a “mental revolution.”18 Taylor’s industrial engineering method stripped workers of their monopoly on the knowledge of production by standardizing and fractionating tasks, thereby maximizing worker efficiency while reducing autonomy and potential subversion. Taylor’s revolution — based on time and motion studies — promised to convert immigrant laborers into “first-class men,” who were more cooperative with management. Obviously, such promises had enormous appeal to the captains of industry.
Corporate mindfulness programs are a continuation of this trend, aligning each employee’s sense of subjectivity to the interests of capital. Taylor’s evangelism, like that of Google’s Chade-Meng Tan, relied on the claim that his techniques were backed by science. Their exuberance describes how objective methods can uncover the secrets of human subjectivity — allowing technocrats to extract even more from labor.
Social scientists are complicit in this managerial enterprise through motivation studies, counseling, personality and attitude surveys, and many other schemes. Indeed, a lucrative social-science industry gave rise to management consulting firms, corporate trainers, leadership coaches, and a growing market for popular business books. Even the American Psychological Association, in 1962, sided with the interests of capital:
While the psychologist’s most basic interest is human behavior, he can help with management’s most basic aim, increasing profitability... Essentially what the industrial psychologist attempts to do is to help the employee come to [a] recognition of how his interests and management’s coincide [to] help the employee adjust to the requirements of a successful enterprise.19
Industrial psychology and management scholarship have claimed to be neutral, scientific and objective, but business schools have a long tradition of masking ideology as management science. According to a book on the subject by two influential writers for the Economist: “Modern management theory is no more reliable than tribal medicine. Witch doctors, after all, often got it right — by luck, by instinct, or by trial and error.”20 Not only has science been invoked to legitimize management interests, the materialistic nature of scientific discourse helps to rationalize the accumulation of wealth. And as the scholar of management Gerard Hanlon notes, the discipline is primarily political, making management the first “neo-liberal science.”21 The nature of its project is to organize life to serve particular interests — historically, those of the elite.
Beginning with the “human relations” movement in the late 1920s, workers were no longer viewed as Taylor conceived of them: as mindless automatons motivated purely by economic interests. Instead, they were increasingly seen as psychologically complex, governed by emotions, anxieties and fears, the management of which required new and sophisticated behavioral science techniques. The human relations approach sought to reshape the attitudes and conscience of the worker, realigning their values with the interests of shareholders. Since then, corporations have tried — within limits — to maintain workplace harmony by providing more participative cultures, engaging employees to make jobs feel more meaningful, and organizing teams to foster a feeling of belonging, ownership, and loyalty to corporate interests. The promotion of a sense of wellbeing is just the latest version of this, offering mindfulness training to stressed managers and employees.
Throughout history, most corporate initiatives have shared the assumption that employee discontent is a subjective condition. The locus of change is the individual, who is expected to adjust to corporate conditions, with occasional concessions. Complaints are sometimes psychologized out of existence. In the 1920s and 1930s, Harvard psychiatrist Elton Mayo was hired by the Western Electric Company to make sense of experimental data at the Hawthorne plant on Chicago’s West Side. Mayo interpreted discontent with poor working conditions and low wages as “emotional reactions” that shouldn’t be taken seriously, especially when coming from women. In many of Mayo’s writings, the worker is viewed as irrational, pathological, and lacking in self-control — but no evidence is given for such scientific claims. Modern social scientists have since dismissed Mayo’s studies, calling his pro-management bias “cow-sociology.” This alludes to the way that contented cows provide more milk, implying that “happy” employees are more productive.
These attempts to manipulate workers — promoting acceptance of exploitative conditions, suppressing and denying conflict, and obfuscating differences in power and interests — have echoes in corporate mindfulness. In Manufacturing Knowledge, Richard Gillespie detects “a persistent tendency in Mayo’s work to transform any challenge by workers of managerial control into evidence of psychiatric disturbance.”22 In the 1930s, workers were “irrational,” “immature,” “hysterical” (especially if one was a woman), or prone to “reveries” on the job; now employees are “stressed,” “distracted,” and exhibit “poor self-regulation” and “self-control,” or are prone to “mind-wandering.” Mayo’s theory of psychopathology reduced workers’ complaints to personal problems and social maladjustment, not to objective, material conditions — just like mindfulness apologists.
Mayo seems to have believed that a managerial elite — not democracy and human rights — would save civilization from industrial unrest. He clearly despised socialism and organized labor. For Mayo, salvation from this “rabble” lay in training managers and supervisors to use sympathetic “human relations” techniques that targeted mental health. His methods helped to legitimize oppression, mystifying it with pseudo-scientific talk about managing the emotions and social maladjustment of assembly-line workers — just as corporate mindfulness targets stress and not structural inequities in power relations, while promoting the most productive exploitation of “human resources.”
The Trojan Horse Myth
Mindfulness zealots have utopian ideas about transformation. They speculate that training in mindfulness will slowly bring changes, inspiring managers to promote more ethical corporate policies and practices. We just need to keep the faith and wait. Those who teach such courses truly seem to believe that what they offer is subversive, and that one day their “Trojan horse” will spark an awakening, giving rise to corporate acts of loving-kindness. Needless to say, there is no empirical evidence to support these ideas.
However, the likes of Jeremy Hunter — director of the Executive Mind Leadership Institute at the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management at Claremont — assure us that mindfulness is a “disruptive technology,” capable of reforming even the most dysfunctional organizations into something more compassionate and sustainable.23
I once sat in on one of Hunter’s presentations at the International Symposium for Contemplative Studies in Boston. Clean-cut and well groomed, Hunter impressed me as the quintessential management consultant. He began with the standard formula of a TED talk — an emotional story of a stressed executive who was saved by mindfulness. His story came across as an over-rehearsed — and over-repeated — shtick. “As more people within the organization become more open and inquisitive,” he gushed, “they become agents for large-scale change.” All by searching inside themselves.
Hunter went on to tell the story of Mirabai Bush, who introduced managers and scientists at Monsanto to mindfulness practice as early
as 1996. After a corporate retreat, one top scientist was said to lament: “I realized that we’re creating products that kill life. We should be creating products that support life.” Having told us a tear-jerking anecdote, Hunter conceded: “It’s a long journey from personal insight like that to large-scale change, but at least we can say that mindfulness was starting to serve as a disruptive technology within the company.” Perhaps. Or perhaps the scientist quit in despair.
Either way, Monsanto — the producer of Agent Orange — has since been bought by Bayer, whose corporate predecessors made Zyklon B. Meanwhile, Monsanto’s promotion of genetically modified crops, patenting of “suicide seeds”, and global efforts to dominate the food supply continue. As for becoming a nicer organization, it cancelled its “mindful leadership” program in 2000.
Hunter’s argument is basically that meaningful transformation starts from within. If one can change one’s own mind to be more peaceful and compassionate — and others do the same — larger-scale changes will naturally follow. However, such injunctions to “be the change you wish to see in the world” (a comment that Gandhi never actually made) are at best wishful thinking. Mindfulness consultants like to use this stance to remain apolitical, which has little impact on the institutional causes of suffering. Hunter’s presentation was painful. I walked away even more skeptical.
He is far from alone though. Barry Boyce, editor of the glossy magazine Mindful, makes similar claims. “Mindfulness may begin at stress relief but it does not end there,” he says. “It naturally leads to inquisitiveness about our own minds and examination of how we are connected to other people, of the causes and effects of our actions.”24 Well, it might stand more chance of doing so if mindfulness trainers drew people’s attention to such connections. Boyce’s flight of fancy continues: “Who knows what a leader — in workplaces from Ford Motor Company to the Los Angeles Fire Department — might do for the greater good with the aid of a little mindfulness?”25 Who knows? It seems on the face of it a reasonable question, apart from the lack of credible evidence that corporate mindfulness programs result in any such “greater good.”
Instead, this sort of logic sounds like the book The Hundredth Monkey, in which Japanese scientists observed how macaques learned to wash sweet potatoes. A critical mass was reached when a hundred monkeys did it, and the same learned behavior spread to monkeys on nearby islands, which became known in New Age myth as the “hundredth monkey effect,” despite the discrediting of the research behind it.26 There is also an echo of outlandish claims for the transformative power of Transcendental Meditation, which were put to the test in Washington DC in the 1990s. In an experiment watched by the media, four thousand TM devotees camped out for six weeks reciting mantras to reduce violent crime.27 They declared success, insisting that the crime rate fell by 23%. In fact, during the experiment, Washington’s weekly murder count hit its highest level ever.28
Integrity Bubbles
Corporate mindfulness is caught in a paradox: it offers employees relief and personal benefits by reducing stress and improving concentration, yet mindlessly ignores external issues, from structural inequalities to corporate behavior. This creates what the communication professor Kevin Healey calls “integrity bubbles,” which offer “glimpses of integrity — enough to enhance employee satisfaction and brand image — even as they undermine the achievement of integrity in the broader context.”29 The managed healthcare company Aetna is a classic example. In Mindful Work, David Gelles hails Aetna’s supposedly benevolent CEO, Mark Bertolini, for offering mindfulness training to a third of its fifty thousand employees.30 The program produced annual per capita productivity gains of $3000, while cutting employee healthcare costs by $2000, saving $6.3 million in total. Mindful employees are good for big business.
Meanwhile, the supposedly mindful Aetna lied about its reasons for withdrawing from Obamacare, which had expanded access to medical insurance. While the company said that mounting losses had required it to pull out of Obamacare exchanges in eleven states, the real reason, according to US District Judge John Bates, was “to evade judicial scrutiny over its merger with Humana,” a $34 billion deal which had been blocked by the Department of Justice for antitrust reasons one month earlier.31 Corporate mindfulness programs don’t train their participants to challenge business practices — that would require a search outside oneself, something modern mindfulness has studiously avoided.
Even so, there might be ways to burst the bubble. Becoming more accepting of oneself, as mindfulness teaches, can be mildly threatening. Ignoring constant corporate messages to seek satisfaction by buying new products is not good for business. And as business scholars have opined in the New York Times: “the very notion of motivation — striving to obtain a more desirable future — implies some degree of discontentment with the present, which seems at odds with a psychological exercise that instills equanimity.”32 However, this discovery had a silver lining: more sophisticated methods would need to be found to appeal to employees’ inner sense of motivation. As long as people feel like they “flourish” by aligning their efforts with corporate needs, business as usual can continue.
chapter nine
Mindful Merchants
Corporate mindfulness training is an extremely lucrative business for savvy consultants. In 2018, the Global Wellness Institute valued “the wellness economy” at $3.72 trillion. The “fitness & mind-body” sector, of which the mindfulness industry is part, is worth $542 billion.1 Sounding mindful of conflicts of interest, the editor of Mindful magazine, Barry Boyce, says “good teachers” are those who “show a strong measure of independence” from their corporate sponsors.2
But is such independence really possible? With such large amounts of money at stake, can we really believe that mindfulness programs wouldn’t dovetail with corporate priorities? How many trainers want to bite the hand that feeds them?
A trip to the Awakened Leadership conference in Los Angeles only amplified my doubts. It all seemed so predictable, starting with the keynote speaker, Dawa Darchin Phillips. Borrowing Aristotle’s tactic of pathos, he began with a dramatic tale of cheating death. I felt emotionally manipulated, but tried to be mindful, setting aside my instinctive reactions and allowing myself to hear how he almost drowned. Then peace washed over him. A friend eventually rescued him, and his life was changed forever.
The spiel soon went downhill. “I want to tell you right away, research is boring,” Phillips said. “And I am going to show you a lot of research.” He wasn’t wrong. What he told us was boring. The research was the same old “this-is-your- brain-on-mindfulness” propaganda. I also noticed a pattern in his slides. Their full-screen, colorful, emotionally laden photos — a smiling child, an elderly loving couple holding hands, a sunset over the ocean — were indistinguishable from those I’d seen at workshops with Search Inside Yourself and Jeremy Hunter. Despite the tedium, there was something just a little too smooth that turned me off. I Googled Phillips and found a slick website. In grandiose terms, it hawked the “Awakened World Global Pilgrimage.” For just $22,500, you could join him on an “ascending journey through the seven chakras of our planet.”3
Back on planet mindfulness, Phillips droned on about why it was so popular in corporations. Don’t tell me — because of employee disengagement? Yep. Out came the same Gallup poll. Did he ask why workers “disengaged”? Was there even an inkling of critical thinking? Nope, just a fat dose of “wow!” Look how bad this problem is. The employees are so disengaged. Businesses are losing tons of money. Mindfulness to the rescue! And don’t worry — it’s not at all weird — check out this science! That was about the sum of his strategy for persuading potential corporate clients in attendance.
During the follow-up Q&A, the conference sponsor asked: “What is your daily consulting fee for delivering a corporate mindfulness training program?” Phillips got a bit cagey. “Well it depends on whether the client is senior management,” he hedged. “And it also depends if we send our senior traine
rs.” That wasn’t specific enough for the sponsor, who pressed on: “Well, can you just give us a ballpark idea?” Phillips hesitated. The fee? “$12,000 per day,” he muttered. The audience audibly gasped.
Mindfulness as a Language Game
How does one actually sell a corporate mindfulness program? Fortunately there is a workshop on just this topic by Richard Fernandez, CEO of the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, and founder of Wisdom Labs. To go incognito, I removed my name badge and sat near the door to make an early exit if I needed to (I eventually did). “We are all experiencing rapid change in our 24/7 connected world,” Fernandez began. This was such an old cliché, and delivered in such vacuous corporate-speak, that I decided to accompany his homily on mindless addiction to devices by checking my iPhone. I got a few dirty looks from the people across from me.
Fernandez’s session chronicled the strategy and tactics he used to sell a large-scale mindfulness program to senior managers at the Ford Motor Company. He began by telling the story of a rival. “This vendor’s business card has a logo of a Tibetan Buddhist mandala on it and the logo appears on all their PowerPoint slides,” he said incredulously. “No! No!” Fernandez stressed. “That’s a No! No!” In a scolding tone, he warned the audience: “You don’t want to have allergy-causing artifacts.” He told us to examine his handout: a blueprint for selling corporate programs. “It’s all about having the right language!” he explained. Unfortunately, I had a strong allergic reaction to this artifact. It droned on about “translation” — suggesting his work selling mindfulness was equivalent to being a translator of the dharma. “It’s about creating a compelling brand!” he said. So that’s why he called his startup Wisdom Labs. Sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it? Getting some of that sexy, scientifically verified, modern Wisdom! Impressive.
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