Best selling authors of The Fifth Discipline and Wherever You Go, There You Are come to What Is Enlightenment? magazine sponsored speakers series in Cambridge to discuss the spiritual foundation of a new emerging business culture.
Cambridge, MA (PRWEB) May 26, 2005 -- Many corporate leaders today are turning to time-honored religious and spiritual traditions in their search for ways to successfully meet the complexity of our times. Words like meditation, collective intelligence, and personal transformation are emerging from pragmatic business leaders, seeping into conversations about global markets, international trade, and sustainability. Is a new trend emerging in our corporate culture? Could the bastion of capitalism itself, big business, be looking for spiritual guidance to help find solutions to its systemic problems?
In a live public dialogue, business guru Peter Senge and meditation teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn will break new ground in their ongoing exploration of the integration of business and spirit. The event titled Leadership, Meditation, and the Business of Changing the World" is part of the Voices from the Edge speakers series, sponsored by What is Enlightenment? magazine. It will take place Tuesday, May 31, 7:30pm, at 38 Cameron in Cambridge.
In a public relations marketplace where the term guru has become all too readily used, Peter Senge is a true master of business strategy. The Harvard Business Review identified his best-selling book The Fifth Discipline, as one of the seminal management books of the past 75 years. In 1999, The Journal of Business Strategy named Senge a Strategist of the Century," and one of twenty-four men and women who have had the greatest impact on the way we conduct business today."
What exactly has Senge done to deserve such accolades? He is widely credited with creating a revolution in the business world by teaching organizations how to transform from rigid hierarchies into more fluid and responsive systems. Senges work places human values at the cornerstone of the workplace, and proposes that vision, purpose, reflectiveness, and systems thinking are essential for organizations to realize their potentials. His special interest is on decentralizing the role of leadership in organizations so as to enhance the capacity of all people to work productively toward common goals.
Senge is also Founding Chair of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL), a nonprofit global community of corporations, researchers, and consultants who in their own words are committed to increase our capacity to collectively realize our highest aspirations and productively resolve our differences" through the mutual development of people and institutions. His latest work, Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future, which he co-authored, documents the development of an emerging theory about change and learning that articulates an innovative way of seeing the world and of understanding our part in creating it—as it is and as it might be.
Jon Kabat-Zinn is the best-selling author of such books as Wherever You Go, There You Are and Full-Catastrophe Living. He is the founder of the internationally renowned Stress Reduction Clinic at the UMass Medical Center which brings mindfulness meditation techniques into mainstream institutions such as medicine, health care and hospitals, schools, corporations, prisons, and professional sports. His clinic was featured on Bill Moyers PBS Special, Healing and the Mind, and in the book of the same title. Kabat-Zinns research focused on mind/body interactions for healing, on various applications of mindfulness meditation training for people with chronic pain and/or stress-related disorders.
So what does all of this have to do with Peter Senge and big business you might ask? Well in his new book Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness Kabat-Zinn concludes that our lack of awareness of our impact on the rest of the world amounts to "a kind of auto-immune disease of the earth." And that it is only through mindful awareness that we will become conscious of our true interconnectivity with each other and the universe. It is that realization of our wholeness Kabat-Zinn believes that will create an entirely new perspective from which we can create new structures for our society and institutions.
Together Peter Senge and Jon Kabat-Zinn will explore the merger of industry and inner meaning, of corporation and conscience, and its implications for the future of our global culture.
Peter Senge is available for interviews through Kenzo An at 617.407.2558.
38 Cameron is located at 38 Cameron Avenue., near the Cambridge/Arlington line; 5-minute walk from Davis Sq. and the Red Line. Tickets: $20, students w/ID $10: available at the door or purchase online at www.38cameron.com (strongly recommended since space is limited). The evening will include an audience Q+A, and a reception with Senge and Kabat-Zinn.. Wheelchair-accessible. For more information, visit 38cameron.com or call 617-492-4091.
What Is Enlightenment? magazine (WIE) was founded by Andrew Cohen in 1991. It is published quarterly by What Is Enlightenment? Press, a nonprofit, educational organization dedicated to a revolution in human consciousness and culture. What Is Enlightenment? also sponsors the Voices from the Edge speakers series which offers an annual calendar of lectures and seminars featuring innovative thinkers and prominent leaders in various fields of expertise. WIE has an international readership of 75,000 and growing. wie.org
submitted by Kenzo An for Voices from the Edge and 38 Cameron 617.407.2558.
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