Cambridge Business Association
Finding the Space to Lead
Book

Finding the Space to Lead

A Practical Guide to Mindful Leadership

Janice Marturano
Bloomsbury Press, 2014
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Editorial Rating

6

Qualities

  • Applicable

Recommendation

Today’s nerve-racking pace makes it impossible to focus, see the big picture or catch a breath. Business leaders have a hard time keeping up when everything they do feels like it’s a fire to put out. Janice Marturano, executive director of the Institute for Mindful Leadership, details how businesspeople can use mindfulness training to find the space they need to work without duress. The World Economic Forum invited Marturano to conduct a mindful leadership workshop at its 2013 gathering of world leaders in Davos, Switzerland. The author’s recommended two daily meditation sessions – plus numerous purposeful pauses and meditative reflections – might not seem practical to already overscheduled business professionals. Still, getAbstract recommends Marturano’s approach to distracted, oppressed leaders everywhere.

Summary

Business is Busy-Ness

Today’s executives lead “hurried, fractured, complex lives,” and “seem to be more easily losing the richness and engagement that come from being in the present moment.” For many leaders, business is all busy-ness today. They have no time to think, reflect, consider what the future might hold or learn from their mistakes. Everything is reactive, including the decisions leaders make while thinking about something else. Work and life no longer satisfy. One leader summarizes, “I’m simply checking the boxes on the to-do list, but I’m not really there.”

“Mindful leadership” can help you operate in the moment and gain the psychological space you need to get in touch with your work, your projects, your colleagues and yourself. You can focus on what matters, enhance your creativity, make the smartest choices and become a more compassionate leader. Mindful leadership puts you in the present and shows you how to experience life as it is – not as you want or assume it to be. You’ll begin to see life as it occurs, minute by minute.

Mindful leadership enables you to “fully inhabit” every minute and benefits those around you – your work colleagues, friends...

About the Author

Janice Marturano, executive director of the Institute for Mindful Leadership, is a former vice president and deputy general counsel for General Mills.

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