Years ago as a young pup at Price-Waterhouse I was taught to read the Wall Street Journal as an everyday morning discipline. I have continued that practice to this day. But I was still surprised when I opened this morning’s edition and found an article entitled “Business Skills and Buddhist Mindfulness” by Beth Gardiner. You see I have just written a book titled Awakened Leadership: Beyond Self-Mastery, which ties the ancient path of seeking to today’s developmental style of leadership. And Buddhist mindfulness is central to that ancient path of seeking.
Now what does this have to do with Peter Drucker?
Many years ago while pursuing my masters degree in philosophy at Claremont Graduate School, I had the opportunity to occasionally wander in and speak with Peter Drucker. Because I was well known in the M&A world at the time, Peter had met me at various functions in Southern California. He was highly interested in my sense that the ancient seekers journey to awakening was the same as the path to adult maturity, which he saw being developed in leadership theory. I never expected that the themes from our conversations would still live within his legacy. But that is not the case as the article brought back the memories of our conversations.
Here is what the article said!
“Jeremy Hunter, who teaches at the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University outside Los Angeles, believes mindfulness should be at the center of business schools’ teaching. That, he argues, is because it is about improving the quality of attention, and in the modern workplace, attention is the key to productivity.” (from the article)
Thank you Peter
I am grateful that Peter’s encouragement was one of the strong motivations in producing my book Awakened Leadership : Beyond Self-Mastery. You see neither one of us was sure that the corporate universe would be available to borrow understanding from thousands of years of experience. That kind of knowledge was not considered mainstream. If Peter were here today I would gleefully call him and say “We really were on to something way back when!”
Tags: Mindfulness, Peter Drucker
