The words we use to describe best practices tend to imply a long view: sustainable, ongoing, continual. Although it’s true that the best businesses grow over months, years, and decades, we can interact with the trajectory we’re creating in a given day, a given moment. When we take these two factors into account, the path we’ve chosen begins to emerge: we’re responsible for our long-term growth in each short-term situation.

What we need, then, is to skillfully and fully engage with both of these timelines. We need to have a long-term orientation and make it manifest every day. This is the work of instantiating a philosophy: the rigorous daily practices of embodying the changes we want to see in the world. What this demands of us, then, is to have a two-pronged approach: we must engage with our lives with mindfulness and authenticity.

Which brings us to the central project of this chapter: to wed the long-term to the short-term. This requires mindfulness and authenticity, for mindfulness allows us to directly perceive our experiences in the moment, while authenticity acts as a star in the night sky, orienting us toward the future we wish to arrive at. In this way we can align the long view and the present perspective and integrate the macro with the micro.

Let’s begin with the micro.

THE NEED FOR BETTER TOOLS

As we have discussed, one of the privileges and responsibilities of living an entrepreneurial life is that we are able to have agency in the world we experience. However, as we nourish our potential—which, by the way, comes from the Latin word for powerful—we may invite challenges into our lives that require techniques beyond the skill sets we received from school or the culture at large. But this upgrade is not like what an app or a consultant can give you: what we’re talking about is how to manage our own minds amid the constant downpour of messages, meetings, and myriad demands that flood our working lives. We might, as Paul Slakey would say, need tools.

Paul, now LinkedIn’s director of global solutions and services, had what you might call an all-American upbringing. Born in Oakland, California, oldest of six kids, he played baseball, had a newspaper route, and studied mechanical engineering as an undergraduate at Berkeley. He went on to work for IBM and later Hewlett-Packard as an engineer—awesome stuff like designing robots and automated machines. Although he liked being a techie, he realized that his calling was to be a leader, and so he went to the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth to ease his transition into management. There he met Warren Buffett, former Procter & Gamble CEO John Pepper, and former Disney CEO Michael Eisner. “They inspired me to think big,” he said to us in an interview.

Soon after Tuck, Paul found himself in rarefied air: by age 34 he was living near Los Angeles and married with kids. He was working for McKinsey & Company, the highly esteemed consultancy.

We’ll allow him to describe the situation:

 

The premium consulting firm typically consults either for the CEO or really senior folks in an organization and charges high fees. The expectation is that you’re going to deliver a lot of value if you’re going to charge so much. You tend to go in to the client and very quickly put together a hypothesis, and then they expect you to deliver this insight. That leads to 10-hour, 11-hour, sometimes 12-hour days. It’s interesting and exhilarating but stressful at the same time.

I was also commuting an hour at a time. I was living south of Los Angeles, but McKinsey’s office was an hour away in the city. I was fighting traffic on L.A. freeways every day. I was living the good life, but I was getting more and more stressed. It just hit me: there’s got to be more to life than this.

 

As these things tend to happen, a book found its way to him: Wherever You Go, There You Are, the introduction to mindfulness meditation by the meditator, educator, and physician Jon Kabat-Zinn.

“I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I would just sit down in my backyard with my hands folded, close my eyes, and try to just breathe and do something besides worry,” he recalls. “That was the beginning.”

But that phase soon ended: Paul feared that if he started sitting too much, he would start to lose his edge; maybe he’d start to question what he was doing in the rat race.

“Maybe I ought to come back to this meditation stuff after I’ve got another 10 or 20 years in my career under my belt and I’ve made some money,” he remembers thinking. “What happens if I completely lose my desire to work? That’s not going to be good.”

He stopped meditating in 2000. His career at the time was going great; he was working as a venture capitalist during the dot-com boom and soon became CEO of one of his portfolio companies, Flypaper. But then September 11, 2001, came, after which, Paul recalls, money became scarce in Silicon Valley. Soon the company was sold. And although he thought he could hop to another leadership position, the slowdown left a paucity of such gigs.

“I went from Paul Slakey, CEO, to Paul Slakey, unemployed!” he wrote to us. “In retrospect, this turned out to be a very pivotal time in my life. I realized that I had become far too attached to my professional identity. Without the title of CEO, I didn’t know who I was anymore.”

Paul discovered that his happiness and self-worth had become tied to professional success. With a sudden influx of time on his hands, he started going for long runs, writing in his journal, and meditating again.

“These challenging circumstances created the perfect opportunity for me to test the effectiveness of meditation,” he continued. “Gradually I developed a deep sense of calm power that was not dependent on my external success. I came to see that my job was just a role that I was playing—an important role, of course, but not what defined who I am. My career started to take off again in 2004 and has continued to flourish since then. But now my happiness and identity feel much less dependent on that success, and my meditation practice helps me keep that big-picture perspective.”

Paul returned to meditation for the same reason he originally started doing it: to not always feel so wound up, not be so much in his head, and have tools to quiet his mind. Contrary to his initial worry, the mindfulness practice informed and enriched his work: a counterintuitive truth that he saw modeled in Thich Nhat Hanh, the noted Vietnamese monk who spoke while Paul was at Google in 2011. Hanh, whom Martin Luther King nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967, has written more than 150 books and travels the world as a speaker. He’s into his eighties and intensely vigorous. With the way that Hanh was both abundantly calm and staggeringly productive, Paul saw a model for dealing with his earlier fear. Yes, you could be both peaceful and engaged.

Peace and productivity have now found a union in Paul’s working life: in the sense of purpose he feels, in the way he can emotionally relate to people, and in the way he can buoy himself throughout the day.

“When things come up that are challenges or might be stressful, if I’ve meditated that morning, it creates that little gap, that little space where I can pause before I react,” he says. “Then I can react in a more powerful and constructive way. Life always has challenges, especially if you have a position of responsibility, but I think the quiet that I go to when I meditate, I can bring that into the swirling river later on when I jump back into work.”

That river runs fiercely: Paul had 60 people reporting to him when he started in early 2012, whereas at the time of this writing he has 200. He’s a manager of managers. Things are scaling up globally at a rapid pace. He feels pressure to produce results. “But I feel like I can do that in a way that’s not inconsistent with my own values and with my meditation practice,” he says.

EARLY ADOPTION

If we were to put it in product terms, we could say that Slakey represents the early portion of the adoption curve. You could think of mindfulness as a kind of fitness program for consciousness, one that was formalized 2,500 years ago by Siddhartha Gautama, the Indian prince who would be referred to as the Buddha: “one who is awake.” Though a religious structure grew around his teachings, it is not necessary to engage in any specific religion to meet mindfulness meditation. What could be less esoteric than simply sitting with our attention placed on our bodies?

Although this type of meditation was developed to allow for the cessation of personal suffering, contemporary psychology uses the practice “as an approach for increasing awareness and responding skillfully to mental processes that contribute to emotional distress and maladaptive behavior,” as psychologist and former University of Toronto assistant professor Scott R. Bishop wrote.²

Practicing this has lasting consequences. A 2011 meta-analysis conducted by Harvard Medical School and Justus Liebig of the University of Giessen in Germany consolidated decades of research into mindfulness, finding that the process had positive outcomes in attention regulation, body awareness, emotional regulation, and the perception of the self. In short, mindfulness meditation allows you to better regulate your attention, be more aware of your body, more skillfully relate to your emotions, and—perhaps more startlingly—loosen your conception of self.³ A Wake Forest University study found that mindfulness meditation can improve cognition after only four days of training.⁴ A University of California, Santa Barbara study found that meditation increased working memory and reduced mental wandering. Also, breakthroughs in the understanding of neuroplasticity—the ability of the brain to change itself—show that by meditating we can actually change the structures of our brains,⁵ and equally interesting, mindfulness practices change the very way our genes express themselves: since we’re exposing our minds to peace rather than stress, our bodies react accordingly.

SO WHAT IS MINDFULNESS MEDITATION?

Bishop, the Canadian psychologist, supplies us a useful two-component definition of mindfulness: regulating our attention to maintain a focus on our immediate experience and approaching the phenomena of our experiences with curiosity, openness, and acceptance regardless of how desirable we find those phenomena to be.

Essentially, by paying attention to our breath, we observe our internal and external stimuli—what’s happening in us physiologically and emotionally as well as what’s going on in the environment, as Atlantic writer Liz Kulze noted.⁶ Mindfulness allows us to have a more nuanced, articulate understanding not only of the events happening outside of our bodies but of those happening within them.

As your authors have learned firsthand and the various mindfulness practitioners we’ve encountered in life have confirmed, one of the tools that all that sitting gives you is a little bit of a gap between you and your experiences, as Slakey observed. You begin to be a more objective witness of your own experiences: when placed into a situation where you’d normally become aggravated, you can observe your aggravation as it arises. As a meditation teacher once told us, without mindfulness, we are reaction machines. But with mindfulness, we give ourselves some room to move: instead of acting out of our long-held tendencies, biases, and patterns, we can act in a way that serves the situation and serves the people involved.

These personal outcomes have major consequences for organizations. If innovation is something that arises from being able to see the same set of data in a new way, practices that allow us to approach new situations with a fresh, unbiased, and slightly less conditioned state of mind are an asset. If we rely on our colleagues to share the things that cure our blind spots, practices that deepen our relationships are an asset. If we need to be translating long-term goals into daily actions, practices that allow us to introspect with more accuracy are an asset. If we simply need to better navigate the stressful stimuli of our days—the “swirling river” that Paul Slakey spoke of—we need all the tools we can get.

This is one of the many riddles of our beloved matryoshka dolls. Although we thought that we were the centermost figure in this nested doll, there are layers even within ourselves. What a startling sensation! The contents of our identity show up in the interactions we have with our coworkers, the emails we write, the products we create. If we tend to get frustrated with others’ not understanding a subject as quickly as we do, there’s probably a psychological reason for that. (Your authors have experience with such hubristic, self-centered, self-defeating frustrations.) In this way, getting familiar with our patterns of behavior lets us act more freely within the moment. If we know that we tend to get frustrated in team discussions, we can be on the lookout for that particular egoistic bugbear as it arises, wave hello when it arrives, breathe deeply, and allow it to pass. However, that kind of internal dexterity is a skill that takes time to learn in the same way that hitting a baseball, an externally dexterous act, takes long hours of training. Meditation, then, is the batting cage for getting familiar with the fastballs and curveballs of our conscious and unconscious habits. That is precisely why we call it practice.

WHAT THE PRACTICE LOOKS LIKE

The Sanskrit word for mindfulness meditation is shamatha, usually translated as “calm abiding.” The practice is a method not of capture but of releasing. There’s a Zen saying that meditation stretches open the grasping hand of thought; as that image suggests, we become much more pliable and open with sitting practice. To describe it, we’ll paraphrase the instructions given by the American nun Pema Chödrön in her life-affirming Start Where You Are.⁷

 

1. Sit upright with your legs crossed. If you need to sit in a chair, make sure both feet are flat on the ground and straighten your spine, not straining it but allowing the spinal column to rest like a stack of coins. Rest your hands on your thighs.

2. Simply be aware of your breath as you exhale. Be “right there” with your breath as it goes out with the open focus that Chödrön says is “extremely relaxed” and “extremely soft,” with about 25 percent of your attention resting on your breath.

3. As you keep an awareness of your exiting breath, be aware of everything else your senses are telling you: the light on the walls, the sounds on the street, the taste in your mouth.

4. Thoughts will assuredly arise; you will certainly wander off. This is good! When you realize you are talking to yourself in your mind, you can show some compassion to yourself by simply saying to yourself, “thinking.” Whether your thoughts are terrifying or pleasing, name them “thinking” with all your honesty and gentleness.

 

More important, we need to appreciate that this is just a safari of the mind. We’re not trying to win or accomplish. We’re just getting to know the neighborhood. And more than anything, give yourself time to form the habit, for that is another component of devotion. Give meditation a trial run: do this practice for just 10 minutes every day for three weeks. See what happens. Get familiar. This familiarity requires a lot of devotion.

THE MOST IMPORTANT INGREDIENT FOR TRANSFORMING YOURSELF: DEVOTION

If we are going to find and release our blind spots, we need to be devoted.

Devotion is common to expert practitioners in any field, whether it’s Larry Bird taking free throws late into the night or Howard Schultz roaming the streets of Milan and taking in the coffee culture. It’s a hardworking creativity and a sense of craftsmanship. Using the Sanskrit bhakti, Bengali gives us a beautiful word for devotion: shadhona, or “life’s pursuit with discipline.”

I was born not too far from where Buddha was born. Sages and monks are still there debating about longing, suffering, and duties. With my affinity for Eastern philosophy, I find that it is only when devotion turns into discipline—and discipline into devotion—that we can begin to lead ourselves.

Devotion is composed of three parts: right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. These three qualities are mental development components within the traditional Buddhist teachings of the Eightfold Path, which noted Brooklyn-born monk Bhikku Bodhi describes in his lucid and concise The Noble Eightfold Path.⁸

Right Effort

Without effort, nothing can be achieved. As Bodhi writes, each person has to work out his or her own deliverance. No book, no teacher, no mentor, no organization, and no belief system can bring your work into the world for you. Putting your path into practice demands energy; this is why effort is so essential.

Right Mindfulness

We must know our minds directly. Mindfulness meditation allows us to get training in observing our mental actions, though it is not necessary to be sitting on a cushion to be mindful. By closely attending to our experiences—both the parts we like and the parts we don’t like—we’re able to develop an understanding that arises from ourselves. The Tibetan word for meditation is göm, or “familiarization.” If we are going to live and lead with authenticity, we must become intimately familiar with our own minds in all their many colors. As we discussed earlier, this is a day-by-day practice.

Right Concentration

Concentration is unifying the mind. Even if you don’t meditate, a unified mind can be found in the engrossment of reading a good book—we hope you are experiencing this as you read this one—and the thrill of a long, hard run or the awe of taking in a brilliant summer sunset. When we have right concentration, our mental energy becomes focused like sunlight through a magnifying glass, strong enough to burn.

Though thoughts may wander off for a moment, we return to our task and our mission, just as mindfulness meditation trains us to bring our attention back to our breath. Right concentration, right effort, right mindfulness: these three combine into the daily practice we call work. While we cannot control the content of our days, we can cultivate a more skillful navigation of them. With mindfulness, we can better navigate our days. With mindfulness, we can have a sense of shadhona in our careers—an understanding that will reverberate into all the levels of work that we do.

ENCOUNTERING MEDITATION

On a wintry New England day, I walked into a yoga studio in Stamford, Connecticut. I was part of a special meditation session led by Bhante Wimala, a Sri Lankan Buddhist monk. The studio smelled of incense and was well lit and intimate; it could hold no more than two dozen people. Bhante was sitting with his legs crossed in the lotus position and perched slightly above us on an elevated seating area. Walking in, it felt like I was in the presence of Siddhartha Gautama—the Buddha—himself. All walks of life—fathers, mothers, yogis, businesspeople—were in attendance.

The Dalai Lama has praised Bhante, who has been traveling around the world and teaching, for his peace efforts. Bhante authored Lessons of the Lotus, his reflections on leading a wakeful and heartfelt life.⁹ Over the course of two hours, Bhante walked us through the principles of living mindfully. He then led us through a 30-minute session of mindfulness meditation, which focuses on the sensations of breathing inward and outward, helping you abide in the moment.

After the sitting session, Bhante answered questions about life, death, purpose, authenticity, and one’s journey and one’s path. I was struck by how these deep inquiries correspond so much to the questions we have about career and business, this endless asking of What is the point? Who am I? and What am I here to do? Upon reflecting, I can see that this internal work of knowing one’s motivations and habits—you don’t have to call it spirituality or philosophy—inform and are informed by the work we share with the world. When we consider that we live in a transforming, ever more transparent world, it becomes obvious that we need to do our business with authenticity—springing from a deep understanding of who we are—and mindfulness—a deep understanding of what is happening. We need to know the biases and habits that we bring to each day; otherwise we’ll never be aware of the blind spots that prevent us from connecting and innovating with the oomph of meaning.

IF YOU’RE GOING TO BE AUTHENTIC, YOU HAVE TO START FROM THE BOTTOM UP

Think back to the story of the Mayo Clinic in Chapter 1. Here we have one of the great healthcare providers in the world, an organization at the forefront of its field. Instead of remaining in the routines that brought it to that privileged position, it’s journeyed into the frontier of its identity.

By bringing in Ideo to evaluate its patient experience, Mayo was able to reconsider its practice from the bottom up. This demonstrates that reevaluation need not be a reaction to actual or imagined failure but can be a kind of organizational hygiene, a spring cleaning of assumptions. Consciously or not, Mayo’s introspection is also a recognition of the fluidity of the world that businesses—and customers—participate in. Whether or not we hear them, Schumpeter’s explosions are happening somewhere along our networks.

When we consider our business interactions, we can see that there are four interconnected spheres: the leader, the organization, the ecosystem, and the customers. All these spheres are connected. Eruptions happen in each and reverberate across all. This is why having intimacy with ourselves is so important: understanding our interior life leads to understanding the life we wish to sculpt in the world, and take a more active role in its composition. In this way, understanding yourself is leading yourself.

To that end, let me tell you my story.

IN THE CORRIDORS OF CARBONDALE

It was August 1986. I was only 17 and had recently arrived in the United States from Bangladesh. I was studying electrical engineering at Southern Illinois University–Carbondale. To survive, I quickly introduced myself to the art and science of “janitorial engineering” on the graveyard shift. Shortly after building my first commercial software product at age 19, I dropped out of college and joined Pitney Bowes. I later worked for multinationals such as General Electric, founded technology companies including Knowledge Base and EC Cubed, and was part of a GE spin-off. To date, I have raised more than $95 million from angels, strategic partners, and institutional investors.

Like some founders, I got ousted from serving as CEO by my own company, EC Cubed, and survived recession after recession. Regardless of the situation, I have never abandoned my entrepreneurial spirit. Soon after losing my last company to investors in 2000, I founded BTM Corporation to enable large organizations to “architect” sustainable growth with our management software platforms. We then created a leadership think tank called the BTM Institute in collaboration with leading academics. Along with working on this book, in 2013, I started two other software companies—MiND2MiND Exchange to drive actionable thinking and B2B ForeSight to drive growth for entrepreneurs and small businesses.

Over the years, I have realized that life is a process of ongoing transformation spurred by the interlinked qualities of curiosity, purpose, and courage. Whether or not we ask it to, the journey of life tends to make us strong, teaches us to contribute to the best of our abilities, and allows us to pursue a personal legend on our own terms. It is the work of bringing our authentic selves into the world.

This is not a new impulse. Joseph Campbell helps us see why.¹⁰ A student of Carl Jung, who was a student of Sigmund Freud, Campbell founded a new and crucial field when he was flourishing in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States: comparative mythology. Mythology and fairy tales as he reads them are not just bedtime stories—though they are surely that—they are also the notes previous cultures have left us about how to live life, how to take care of one another, and where to find meaning. To ignore myth is to commit a great act of hubris. Although technology has accelerated and in some cases modified human interactions, the questions of love, fulfillment, and ontological mystery that occupied the minds of the debaters of Athens, the roundtables of the Algonquin, and the tribes of the Amazon are still with us. The great questions of Who am I? and What am I to do? renew themselves in every generation and every individual. For Campbell, the most essential narrative is the hero and his or her journey. As entrepreneurs, we are on a journey of doing authentic work.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO KNOW YOURSELF?

Westerners have a rich history of individuality: “know thyself” was inscribed across the Oracle of Delphi’s door. Powerful arguments have been made about the source of this impulse. In The Geography of Thought, the comparative psychologist Richard Nisbett observes that ancient Greece, the prototypical individualistic culture, developed in a jagged, mountainous land where people were separated by their environment, encouraging a diversity-prizing culture to develop, whereas ancient China, the prototypical collectivist culture, developed in broad plains isolated by mountains and seas, leading to a harmony-prizing culture. The book is a must-read for anyone on either side of modern East–West interactions.¹¹

Because the oracle’s dictum is a distillation of the West’s root culture, modern Westerners would do well to consider it. This self-knowledge has become a kind of New Age cure-all for all sorts of dilemmas, and for good reason: our decisions spring from our understanding of the way our experience interacts with the world. We call this experience my identity, myself, yet that’s where these discussions end, for language goes only so far. Although knowing thyself is in part a linguistic endeavor—writing and reading certainly help—it is nonlinguistic, even nonconceptual. It demands observing and becoming intimate with your actions, your habits, and your motivations. This quest for self-understanding is at the center of our intercultural conversations about mindfulness, a conversation that’s crucial to enter into if we are to transform our working lives; in this way we can unite the complementary contrasts of West and East. Of course, we won’t be solving this “problem” in the following pages; rather, let’s go for the more resolvable task of opening a few illuminating discussions that may cure a handful of our blind spots. Since we’ve dug into mindfulness, let us move on to authenticity.

Authenticity comes from the Greek root authentikos, meaning “original, genuine, principle.” Genuine leaders go beyond (and certainly precede) the usual pantheon of business chieftains, historic figures, and technology innovators. They are all around us. To be authentic, you must be “awake,” which means you have the ability to understand who you are, what you want to be, and how you want to fit in the world. In this way, authenticity requires mindfulness.

From Aristotle to Siddhartha Gautama, Rumi to Steve Jobs, Khalil Gibran to Paulo Coelho, thinkers and poets have said that the path to authenticity is to intimately know who you are. Nietzsche wrote of becoming your most true self, positive psychologists speak of self-realization, a Zen koan asks what your face looked like before your parents were born. As David Whyte observes in Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity, work is an extension and expression of self.¹² But what is it to know oneself?

The process of self-discovery, especially for a leader, unites the ancient ideals of the vita activa (active life) and the vita contemplativa (contemplative life). To achieve balance, we must have a balance of doing and reflecting, a movement between investigation and withdrawal, even within a single day. As the research psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has uncovered, becoming more aware of ourselves allows us to better connect with those around us. As Michael Schrage writes in Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become? understanding yourself better allows you to connect better with your customer.¹³ By becoming more aware of ourselves, we can encourage whatever’s waiting inside of us to come into the world, our individual genius.

In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield calls upon the classical notion of the genius. For Pressfield, rather than the province of Einstein, Jobs, or Picasso, genius is something in each of us:

 

Genius is a Latin word; the Romans used it to denote an inner spirit, holy and inviolable, which watches over us, guiding us to our calling. A writer writes with his genius; an artist paints with hers; everyone who creates operates from this sacramental center. It is our soul’s seat, the vessel that holds our being-in-potential, our star’s beacon and Polaris.¹⁴

 

Isn’t this concept of genius beautiful? It’s a kind of creative soul. It is fascinating to think how Western culture give us this ideal of the signature individual creative act. In making something, whether it is a business, a book, or a painting, we bring something into the world that could come only from us. Joseph Campbell, the scholar of mythology we mentioned before, described this as the great Western truth: each individual has something precisely his or her own to offer.

This is where mindfulness is so helpful. When you become a better observer of your own doings, you naturally develop a more realistic sense of yourself. Maybe you aren’t actually so nice to your colleagues all the time, and maybe you shouldn’t have a guilt spiral because of that. Maybe you’re more worried about that deadline than you let on, and maybe you can admit to yourself that you need to talk to a trusted friend about it. Mindfulness helps us see the ways in which our actions aren’t in correlation with ideals we have about ourselves, and in this way it helps us become more aware of our own interior states—which leads to being more empathetic for others—and more authentic. From that authenticity, we become more trustworthy, more truly confident, and better rounded.

TAKING RESPONSIBILITY: DEVELOPMENT AS INTEGRATION

To be a leader is to have a trust in one’s journey. Nietzsche has a Latin term for it: amor fati: the love of fate.¹⁵ As entrepreneurs, we need to love ours.

As we shall see, this isn’t necessarily a self-centered venture. As the research psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi encapsulates near the end of Flow, we construct what we want to achieve in life—our destinies—in a series of shifts of perspective.¹⁶ We begin by needing to preserve ourselves to survive. When the physical self is secure, we can expand our perspective to an in-group, such as a family, a community, or in rare cases a company, and take the values of the group to be the values of the individual. The third phase is “reflexive individualism,” in which the person turns inward, develops an autonomous consciousness, and desires growth and actualization. The fourth and final stage is a “final turning away” from the self and an integration into the collective; the interests of the individual are merged with the whole. This is, the psychologist says, a dialectical movement of differentiation and integration between withdrawal into the self and union with the collective.

This developmental pendulum is of great interest to leaders. Back in Carbondale, Illinois, I entered into graveyard-shift entrepreneurship by default. It was a matter of survival. We can frequently find ourselves among those who stay comfortably in the second stage; you have the feeling that those who desire the security of the “company man” are seeking to reside in the comfort of organizational identity. The third stage, I think, is especially prevalent in entrepreneurs. We chide “yes-men” and exhort one another on our individualistic quests—notice how differentiation is one of the cool new marketing buzzwords. What we hope to do in this book is encourage you and your company to enter into the fourth stage of development, to reunite with the world. This is often achieved by the greatly successful later in life: having fulfilled their individualistic ambitions, they throw their expertise into world-enriching endeavors, one the most obvious of which is Bill and Melinda Gates’s efforts to eradicate diseases and reform education. But this does not have to be so gigantic. Teaching your expertise later in life, becoming a mentor to others—these are the stuff of integrated, mature development. Having turned inward, the more we grow; from that growth, the more we have to give when we turn outward.

The most effective businesses, as Clay Christensen argued in The Innovator’s Dilemma, are those that sense customers’ unvoiced or unmet needs and provide for them. As Ron Adner describes in The Wide Lens,¹⁷ the understanding of an ecosystem is a turn away from egocentric, isolated invention and a recognition of the interdependent integration of any product, for the success of any product, regardless of the company that sells it, depends on an array of interlocked factors. In this way, innovation becomes an empathic act: the leader, through a variety of mechanisms, understands herself, the company, the ecosystem, and the customer to create value for all the parties involved.

And the way to mindfulness, authenticity, and their self-and-other-affirming fruits? Practice.