Concurrent Session 5 – Contemplative Initiatives for Business Education

To what extent can meditation and mindfulness help future business leaders cultivate authenticity, tolerance, and empathy, leading to a heightened sense of belongingness and responsibility to the communities in which they will live and work? Proceeding from this question, this presentation highlights the vital role contemplative practices have to play in equipping business students with higher-order dispositions conducive to sustainability and the creation of shared value. Business stands in need of transitioning towards truly sustainable enterprises based upon more stable, more humanely enlightened foundations rather than egoistic individualism, greed, short-termism, and toxic technologies — all of which take much more than they give back. Management education for our future world requires the courage and wisdom to supply intellectual leadership for the long run, grounded in a clear vision of where we stand relative to larger cycles and trends. Mindfulness, it is argued, ought to constitute a foundational element in a sustainability-oriented business school curriculum.