Awakened Leadership: Mindfulness in Business (Lenz Foundation)

Registration closed on May 26, 2016.

The Frederick P. Lenz Foundation for American Buddhism is hosting a 2.5 day conference at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles to bring Buddhist organizations and Foundation grantees together with leaders from business and community organizations to discuss the potential for mindfulness and meditation to transform management and leadership practices.

The conference, entitled Awakened Leadership: Mindfulness in Business, seeks to both embrace and go beyond many of the popular discussions on mindfulness in the work place.

The conference will begin on June 1, 2016 with a half-day workshop for grantees on the role Buddhist organizations can play in the transformation of workplaces, address any discomfort that may arise with expanding into this arena, and look at where organizations may be able to improve their own strategy and leadership approaches.  Grantees will be given a model for embarking on this endeavor and be led by teachers who have many years of experience in bridging the two worlds.

The grantees and our business/community leader invitees will kick off the conference together with an opening dinner on the evening of June 1, 2016.  The following two days (June 2-3) will be comprised of panels and workshops discussing what awakened leadership truly looks like and how we can all move beyond the fear of failure into expansive and innovative thinking.  Workshops will be held on such topics as what mindfulness practices really look like in the workplace, the anxiety related to money and finances, and how we reconcile Buddhist practices with living and working as lay practitioners in the West.

The roster of teachers includes NYU and Stern School of Business staff, Sharon Salzberg, Fleet Maull, Dawa Phillips, Allen Weiss, Diana Winston, Larry Yang, Susan O’Connell and others.  Rama students – Chris Jones, Mila Kandibur and Barbara Smith – will also be presenting at the Conference.  There will be presenters from the business world who have successfully applied mindfulness training to their enterprise.

Through this shared learning in mindfulness and its application to organizational development, the Foundation hopes to open a pathway of work and cooperation between the Lenz Foundation’s network of grantees and business leaders that will continue beyond this time together.

For more information, please see http://fredericklenzfoundation.org/awakened-leadership-mindfulness-business-and-work

RMS has registered for the Lenz Foundation conference.  The upcoming conference will be a business intensive for grantees.  Rama considered successful business endeavors to be an important part of our practice, so you are encouraged to join us.  For interested members of the Rama student community who would like to attend as part of the RMS group, please send an inquiry to info@ramameditationsociety.org.  Thank you.