 Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Leader's Room with the Iklif Leadership and Governance Center. My name is Rajiv, and I'm here today with David Gellis, writer with the Sunday Business Section of the New York Times, formerly with the Financial Times, covering M&As, and also author of the book, Mindful Work. David, it's great to have you with us. Thanks for having me. So, let's go back to the beginning. From covering technology to covering M&A and all the things that you've been writing about, how did you get interested in mindful work and meditation? Well, my interest in mindfulness and meditation actually precedes my work as a business journalist. And some of my friends say, well, if you had enough self-awareness to be a meditator, why did you become a business journalist in the first place? And it's a valid question. But as I found, you know, the two actually go hand in hand today. So my interest in meditation started when I was a college student. I was a philosophy major. I was studying religion. And after studying many different traditions, I started academically reading about Buddhism. And the academic work on Buddhism was so compelling that I wanted to try it out. So I went and I sat my first meditation retreat. I was 19 years old. I sat. And the practice of meditating was so profound that it touched me in a very deep way. So I began sitting Zen meditation, first in California and then in Boston where I was in school. And then I took my junior year of college, my third year of university, to go to India. And I lived in a monastery. I studied with Zen masters, with Tibetan Rinpoches, and with a man named Munindraji, who was in fact a close friend of Gandhi's when he was still alive. And he taught me mindfulness meditation or insight meditation. And that then began what is now a life long commitment to the practice. So you did that when you were, how old you said? Twenty. Twenty. Came back, went back, finished your education and then got into journalism. That's right. I tried a few different things. You finished school. You can bounce around for a few years. So I worked at a website. I designed museum exhibitions. But all the while I was writing on the side. I was writing for newspapers and magazines, whoever would take me. But I wasn't very good. So I finally went back to school. I went to the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, a two-year program, great, great school. And it was there that I really began to not only focus on business journalism, but understand how to excel in this profession, how to find and write really compelling and stories. So, you know, my picture often, I haven't been inside the offices of New York Times, my picture of a newspaper office, particularly covering covering business journalism is noisy people, shouting, screaming, deadlines, pressure, stress. And how does somebody like you in that picture? I can see you in that picture because that's what you do. And then I try to put a picture of meditation and mindfulness on it. Can I help me understand? Where do the two fit? Well, the newspaper newsroom today is actually one of the things that people are always struck by is how quiet it can seem. Everyone's typing. Well, that you know yourself the sound of keys, fingers on a keyboard isn't that loud. We're not working on selectric typewriters anymore. And we still have deadlines and we have deadlines. There are definitely periods where it gets busy. So towards the end of the day, when we're finally putting the paper together, it can get busy. And when a big story breaks, of course, it can be very exciting. There's no better place to be when news is breaking than the newsroom of the New York Times. And yet I have been able to manage the stress of being a business reporter. And there's no doubt about it. There's real stress, you know, whether it's publishing a story on a very tight deadline. You know, I remember when, for example, when 20th Century Fox made a bid for Time Warner, everyone's all hands on deck. This is a big media story that's going to move markets. And we're writing very, very quickly. Or when it's a feature that I've worked on for weeks or even months, when it finally publishes, there's enormous stress just seeing that initial reaction, seeing how sources respond, seeing how social media writes up. These, there's no doubt about it. These are stressful situations. Mindfulness and meditation has helped me. Over the years, it has helped me remain calm, reduce my stress, not let what's happening around me define exactly what kind of experience I'm going to have that day. And so you're right. It's been this wonderful counterweight, a wonderful antidote, if you will, to the inherent stresses of being a journalist. So you mentioned, it helps you stay calm. It helps you stay calm, stay grounded and centered and all that. Is there any scientific basis? A lot of meditators actually say that I feel calm. I feel, you know, my stress is no more and there's that and the other. Is that just talk or is there some scientific basis to it? We can now see in the minds of meditators that certain areas of the brain associated with stress reactions. For example, the amygdala, an almond-shaped region in the center of the brain, which emits all our stress hormones whenever we have that fight or flight reaction. When our chest gets tight and our heartbeat might start accelerating and it feels like the hair on the back of our neck is standing up. That's the stress hormones reacting. That's the amygdala firing up in a fight or fight situation. In the minds of meditators, the amygdala is actually less reactive. Those who have committed to a sustained meditation practice, it doesn't happen overnight. It's not going to happen if you just try meditation one time. But if you stick with it, if you internalize this practice, those people who actually have a sustained mindfulness practice have less reactive amygdalas. They have less volatile fight or flight reactions and they're right there. You're hearing it. You're able to manage your stress reaction more effectively. You said you can see inside the brains of people. Are you referring to any particular study? I personally can't see inside the brains of people, but with technologies like fMRI technology and EEG technology, they have done multiple studies. There's not just one study, of course, but pioneers in the field of what's a wonderful name for this. It's called Contemplative Neuroscience. I just love that name. People like Richie Davidson and John Kabat-Zinn have done tremendous work scanning not only the minds of long-term secular meditators, but also comparing them to the minds of Tibetan monks, for example, who have meditated for tens of thousands of hours. So there is plenty of scientific basis. It's not just people saying something. That's right, but I should hasten to add. What we are seeing there is that there seems to be some correlation. There seems to be some correlation that in the minds of meditators there is perhaps a less reactive amygdala. It's important not to confuse the purpose of meditation with, say, having a less reactive amygdala. The purpose of meditation, of course, is to change our behavior, change our interpersonal relationships, not necessarily to change what hormones get released at a certain moment of time in a certain stress reaction. You don't want a very slow amygdala, either. No, exactly. There's a reason we're trained to run when an alligator is chasing us. Exactly. All right. So what prompted you to, in the world of finance and technology, and I understand you also covered executive compensation, so much to all of this, what prompted you to write Mindful Work? Well, I had been working on a number of different stories at the Financial Times. I had been covering mergers and acquisitions. I had profiled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. I just had an exclusive jailhouse interview with Bernie Madoff, the Ponzi Schemer. And I needed a good story. As a journalist, it's kind of the bread and butter. If I'm not working on a good story, I'm going to be a little antsy. And at the same time, I had been meditating. It was still a big part of my life, but I had never considered it might be part of my professional life. It was something very personal. It was not something even most people in the office knew about. And yet, I was looking for another story, and I came across an initial headline, I think it was the Associated Press, a very brief wire story that said in a big company in Minnetonka, Minnesota, in the middle of the United States of America, a company was practicing meditation in the office. And a light bulb went off in my head. I said, there's probably nobody better qualified to write this story than me. I mean, I'm a long-term meditator and I'm a business journalist. I gotta go check this out. So I got on a plane almost the next day, flew out there, and the company was General Mills, big company. Their products are all over the world, products like Cheerios and Haagen-Dazs ice cream, and the list goes on. And here they were with a meditation room in every building on the corporate campus, and a meditation and mindfulness program that is now engrossed hundreds of the most senior leaders at the company. And what did they find? Well, those leaders were becoming less stressed. They were reporting that they were having better relationships with their reports. And altogether, it had a tremendously beneficial impact, not only on the company as a whole, but really specifically on the individuals who had practiced it. And I always try to bring it back to the individual level. Mindfulness is not something a company does. Mindfulness is something that individuals who happen to work at companies can practice. We say the same thing about leadership, by the way, that at the end of the day, you have to bring it down to what individuals within the company does. It's not what the company does as a whole. That's right. So it all began with General Mills. So you went out there, you found meditation rooms, you found that they were spending time money training their employees or encouraging their employees to meditate? Absolutely. A very robust homegrown program. And I use that as the basis for an article that ran in the Financial Times weekend, FT weekend, called the Mind Business. And it was a first look, you know, how some big US companies were bringing mindfulness meditation into the workplace. That was the jumping off point. Immediately there were questions. Where could people find out more? What other companies were doing this? How could they also bring mindfulness meditation to their workplace? And I had none of the answers. So I endeavored to find out. And I essentially went on a journey into the contemplative heart of corporate America. So tell us a few more companies that you found in match that are doing some good work in this area. Absolutely. Well, I mentioned Facebook earlier, when I profiled Mark Zuckerberg, it was about kind of the core social networking business that he was running. Little did I know that a few years later, his engineers were doing compassion research days, working with Buddhist scientists to try to cultivate compassion at the workplace and use that to inform new algorithms, new policies at the social network to make interactions between users on the platform more harmonious. I then went even to Goldman Sachs of all companies, where they were teaching their traders, their investment bankers to meditate in an effort just to get them to be less stressed out. It's high pressure. So they weren't necessarily trying to change the product that Goldman Sachs offers like Facebook was. They were just saying, if this is a bit of stress relief for you individually, well, that's a good thing. And my travels took me around the country up to Vermont, where Green Mountain coffee roasters had developed a mindful stretching and yoga program for their thousands of blue collar workers who work in factories and drive their trucks all the way back down to Southern California, where a company like Patagonia, founded by Yvonne Chunard, a lifelong Zen Buddhist, still tried to embody that ethos of trying to be a responsible, a parable company from everything they did, from where they source their cotton to how they thought about the afterlife of their products. And so that became the compilation, if you will. Yeah. So I spent several years going around reporting on the book. And then the book Mindful Work, How Meditation is Changing Business from the inside out, it was released last year. Yeah. Yeah, that's wonderful. I have read it. And, you know, it's, it's fascinating to me, though. I often tell audiences in Asia that look, this is something we invented in this part of the world 5,000 years ago, but we've completely forgotten it. And it's become almost like a movement in the West, particularly in the US. So related to that, is it getting becoming too much of a movement? Is it becoming too commoditized? Are there now gimmicks that are being offered in the name of meditation? Are you concerned about that at all? There's a whole term for what you just described, which is this concern that mindfulness is somehow being co-opted, corrupted by capitalism. And it's called mic mindfulness. I love that. Right. And it embodies this notion that something that was, of course, inspired from a very noble tradition. This is essentially the foundational elements of mindfulness are no doubt about it drawn from Southeast Asian Buddhism. They've been adapted for a secular audience, largely over the last 40 years, as mindfulness has become more mainstream in the United States. And now they are actually being divorced from any religiosity or spiritual traditions at all. Mindfulness as it's being offered in the workplace is purely secular. Yes. It has nothing to do with Buddhism. And there's a concern by some among very traditional, you know, kind of traditionalist Buddhist scholars. And on the other hand, by social conservatives who actually feel like maybe this is religion in disguise. And there are valid concerns there. In the course of my reporting, I saw some very successful interventions. And I also saw less successful interventions, where it did seem it did seem superficial. It did seem to be not necessarily promoting sustainable behavioral change that would make people suffer less and be kind to one another. And yet, on balance, I found that the vast majority of people I spoke with and the vast majority of teachers working in this area, we're doing it with really noble intentions. And that the baseline result was at the very minimum, a little bit of stress reduction, and a little bit of more kindness and compassion in the workplace. And I think that alone is a good thing. It's hard to argue with less stress and more kindness in the workplace, especially if some of the other gains happen to be enhanced productivity, better health and wellness, fewer sick days, which ultimately can translate into productivity gains. Yeah, no, I am a complete believer. And my question is more about, you know, are you concerned about the what you call the muck mindfulness? You know, here, these five minutes will change your life. And are there people who are getting into the so-called teaching of mindfulness meditation, who are not as steeped into it, and therefore sort of McDonaldizing it, if you will. That's what I was sure. Well, am I concerned about it? I think it's important to watch out for. I have yet to see really damaging interventions. So am I concerned about it? Sure, but there's lots of things to be concerned about in the world. This isn't too high up the list. We do, however, and you're right to focus on this, face a supply and demand imbalance. The appetite for mindfulness teachings greatly outstrips the number of qualified teachers who are out there. Does that have an impact on quality? So I think it may, I think it may, and yet I have yet to see, and I try to stay abreast of what's going on and what's on the marketplace, have yet to see any really damaging teachings. And I think it's an important distinction to make. There's a difference between a less qualified teacher and a teacher who's really inflicting harm or populating nefarious or bad ideas in the workplace under the name of mindfulness. And that's just something I just haven't seen. I'm attuned to it. And I think if I were to see it, I would be most disturbed, but I haven't seen it yet. I'm neither of I, and that's the good news. But I can't help remember a story. When I was working in New York on Wall Street, I joined a yoga class. And, you know, it was one of those hot yoga studios that all over the place. And there was this young Turk who was like, you know, like Captain America, pushing, come on, you can do it. Come on, you can do it. And pushing, pushing, pushing people. And there were people who were, you know, and the class I joined had 40, 50 people in the big studio. I was new, totally inflexible, unfit, people who'd be doing it for a long time. And everybody was being treated the same way. And come on, you can do it like a military. They stirred me a lot. I think these those that could cause a lot of damage because yoga is not about, you know, pushing you to the limit day one, not at all. So that's where I'm going from because I saw that first hand and I said, ah, this is not okay. And that doesn't sound like a mindfulness teacher to me. No, certainly not. Right? So that's why I was asking the question. But I'm glad you, you know, somebody who's keeping abreast with all this, you haven't come across too many damaging kind of situations. But anyway, I nevertheless love the term that you used. So, you know, companies are now investing more and more in this. And what do you think is the level of skepticism, if any? Among employees, there is deep skepticism at some companies. There's a real willingness to engage with these ideas at other companies. And I, when I talk about my book and talk about this new and emerging field, I don't say that every company should be teaching mindfulness of meditation. I don't recommend that every employee try this out. I'm very attuned to the fact that this is sensitive material. This is very personal material. It may or may not be something that an individual or an organization's culture is in the right space for. And so it's incredibly important to recognize that this is not something that is absolutely for everyone. I say if you as an individual are ready for it and if your company has a culture where this would be appropriate and would be well received, then by all means try it because as we've seen and there are lots of studies now, it can have beneficial effects. But this is no panacea and it's not necessarily something that's going to be a good fit at every company or every organization. You've got to be ready for it. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Let me ask you an undulated question going back to your background. You interviewed Bernie Midoff, you said, in prison. Tell us a little bit about that. What did you learn and what can we learn? Why did he do what he did? Why did those values go so wrong? Yeah. And what can we learn from that? I wish I knew why he did what he did. The closest I can come is to say that I don't believe that he set out with the intent when he made the first bad decision he made, which he did decades ago, of course. I don't believe he did it with the intent of going as far as he did. It was one of these situations where a small series of lies and misdeeds snowballed into a real terrible catastrophe that ruined the lives of many, many people. One of the things that was so disturbing was the banality of this man's... I don't know that evil is the right word, because again, I didn't sense malice. It was more of an indifference. He didn't seem attuned to the suffering that he had inflicted, and that's actually the very definition of a sociopath. It's someone who actually can't feel empathy. It's someone who wasn't able to recognize that he had ruined lives, that he had caused so much suffering. He wasn't repentful. He was not repentful. And you believe he didn't start off with that intention, but somehow got sucked into it after doing one thing and then the other. And what do you think? What can we all learn from that as we all look at our careers? I think it's a great question, and I think the answer is enormously simple. We have to hold ourselves to the highest standards at every single moment. The smallest little decision can snowball and become an absolute mess, and without the vigilance, without being mindful, every step of the way it's all too easy to make steps that could have really dire consequences down the road. Okay, well that makes sense. Thank you so much. One last question. For somebody that is somewhat getting interested in exploring this whole meditation field, what's your advice for beginners? I think try it. See if you can establish a daily practice, even a few minutes a day, five minutes a day. I don't have five minutes a day. We all have five minutes a day. See if you can make the time to be present in the present moment, aware of your body, aware of your breath. If your mind wanders, bring your attention back to the present moment, back to the body or the breath, and just see what it feels like to be here, right here, right now, without being lost in thought. If you can do that for a few minutes a day, that's a great first step. And is there a period of time that one should stick with it before giving up, or is it different for different people? Try ten years. Ten weeks, in all seriousness. It really isn't something that happens overnight, in the same way that we don't go to the gym and expect to have washboard abs and big muscles the next day. We know that it takes it takes weeks, it takes months, it can take years. The same is true when we're building the muscles of our mind. Okay, very good. David, it's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you very much. Thank you. I hope you all enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed talking to David. Lots and lots of lessons to take away, and the one that will stay with me, one of the many that will stay with me is, you know, A, mindfulness meditation is not for everyone, but B, almost everybody should try it, and if you do decide to try it, stick with it for at least eight to ten weeks before you see what it's doing for you or not. Thank you very much. Thank you.