Corporate Mindfulness is an Oxymoron
For the past fifteen years, I’ve had a front row seat to the Mindfulness movement in the United States. Like most things that enter the American mainstream, I’ve watched its gleeful bastardization by whiteness and capitalism, the twin engines of American empire. I’ve gotten to watch twenty-somethings on stage before thousands talking with gravitas about tweeting mindfully. I’ve gotten to watch Facebook executives wax rhapsodic about the extent of mindfulness initiatives within the company. And, because it needs to be said, I’m here to explain to you that corporate mindfulness is an oxymoron.
Multi-national corporations, and for-profit corporations, in the United States, are the biological equivalent of parasites. Generally speaking, they are optimized to stick a straw into something, and suck out the juice. It could be a metal straw stuck into the ground to suck out oil. It could be a social network that sucks out attention. The general order is that something is extracted: oil or attention, and someone else pays for that.
Any organization with a single bottom line is a parasite.
Corporations are organized, legally, and through structures of governance, to be accountable to shareholders. Shareholders, unless restrained in a Capitalist economy, are seeking profits. Their refrain is Suck harder, faster. Extract more and more. Corporate mindfulness, in the context of single bottom line organizations, lets the corporation suck harder faster. It is a tool of capitalism, disguised as awareness. Capitalists love mindfulness because it trains human resources (consider that phrase for a moment) to work harder, faster. That isn’t mindfulness.
A mindful organization cannot have a single bottom line. I’ve run and scaled several of them over the past fifteen years, and I speak from direct experience. Any organization that is truly mindful has to value its employees, because it has to understand that they are the heart of the organization, its lifeblood. It therefore, at some point, needs to formalize taking care of its people in its financial structuring: its bottom line. If this workforce has any degree of diversity to it (may it!), it will have to do the difficult internal work of grappling with the systemic oppression that pervades the society at large. A mindful organization does not perpetuate social harms internally. It disrupts and dismantles inequity. To do so, it must make differential investments in its female and non-white employees, who are disadvantaged by the social system at large. These investments have to be justified in a budget. Once this is done strategically, the organization has two bottom lines. Concommitantly, any organization that is truly mindful wakes up to the reality of our absolute reliance on a healthy biosphere. At some point, this awareness must be codified into its decision-making, translated into all manner of decisions. The organization must have protocols related to sustainability, because LED lightbulbs have a higher up-front cost, and this needs to be justified, once again, in the budget. Carbon mitigation needs to be justified. Et cetera. Now we have three bottom lines. With three bottom lines, you begin to have an organization that is no longer a parasite. Like the legs on a stool, three bottom lines give us stability. This is where a truly mindful organization begins.
At this point, we’ve eliminated entire sectors of the economy. Oil and gas companies are gone. Mining companies are gone. Many financial institutions, banks, insurance companies are gone. Agribusiness companies are gone. Traditional automobile manufacturers, etc. Once we eliminate all the corporations designed to exploit–the parasites–what is left begins to look much different.
Dee Hock, the Founder of Visa International, which many people do not realize was initially set up as a non-stock membership alliance, asks the question: What’s the difference between a corporation and a community? The answer he provides: a community doesn’t seek to monetize all exchange of value. Once we have a company with a triple-bottom line, it begins to more closely resemble a community, and now we have to re-think our fundamental assumptions about what an organization is, and what it does.
The appropriate investment horizon for decision-making in a mindful organization is not the next fiscal quarter: it is seven generations. The Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy says, “In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.” The Iroquois Confederacy: a mindful corporation. Of course, most indigenous lineages don’t conceptualize themselves as companies, and I’m not suggesting that they are. That would be absurdly reductive. But the word corporation itself, from the Latin, means to combine in one body, and this is partly what a tribe does.
Once we have a triple bottom line, we have the possibility of creating a viable organizational culture, because a culture must value connection and relationship with self, Others, and the Living World. Once we have a triple bottom line, we have an adequately noble purpose to inspire and uplift humans being, not simply humans doing. We now begin to enter the realm of the mindful, and it’s potentialities. These are the kind of organizations we need. If we are looking for mindful organizations, we would be wise to expand the range of structures we examine to include tribes, cooperatives, guilds, alliances. Because these are the structures that begin to emerge naturally when you give everyone a seat at the table, when you value non-humans, when you exchange value outside of money alone.
Corporate mindfulness? Facebook is not a mindful organization. It is a surveillance engine disguised as a nest. Stop pretending. We see through you, and call bullshit. Your motivations are clear from the outside, even if they aren’t clear to your ‘mindful’ employees. Y’all are capitalist tools. Wake up.
