Web resources for the conscious manager

Here are links to authors and trainers whose approaches to management are

• holistic
• value-based
• practical, and
• proven

These are people I know personally. Most, but not all, are martial art practitioners.

I favor this because... anyone can talk, and they might be telling you the truth or might not. But in movement and physical interaction it all comes out; a teacher either knows his/her stuff or doesn't, and is giving it to you straight or isn't, and you can almost always tell.

The individuals listed here know their stuff and tell it straight.

• Julian Gresser's Logosnet is a community for negotiators and other business people who wish to share successes and challenges in a spirit of honing skills and integrity. Most members have read Julian's book Piloting Through Chaos. The book is particularly strong in methods for dealing with fear, maintaining integrity, and negotiating in international (and particularly, Japanese) settings. Julian is a Zen and Qigong practitioner.
• Ginny Whitelaw's Bodylearning is a site that expands on her book of the same name. Like Gresser's, Ginny's book helps us learn to use cues from our bodies to make choices with our brains. Whitelaw is a Zen priest and an advanced aikidoist.
• Al Chungliang Huang is a Taoist author and Tai Ch'i teacher who collaborated with the late Taoist philosopher Alan Watts. Huang's latest book deals with mentoring in business.
• Modern business requires fast development cycles and fast turnaround on customized orders. As proven at Dell Computer, this in turn requires tight linkages of all business functions - that is, a holistic organization with cross-trained, creative managers. Raymond Yeh at the IC² Institute turns this into a theory of Zero-Time Management. Yeh is a Qigong practitioner.
• Hal Linstone, senior editor of Technological Forecasting & Social Change, advocates looking at problems from multiple perspectives (personal, organizational, political, etc.) in order to make better decisions. A veteran of the aerospace industry and the Rand think tank, Linstone is now Professor Emeritus at Portland State University.His book is called The Unbounded Mind.
• Po-Lung Yu is a Kung-Fu expert and professor of operations research at the University of Nebraska. His beautiful book Habitual Domains helps us overcome the unspoken personal constraints that keep us from our goals.
• The evolutionary study group at Esalen Institute brings influential thinkers and doers like Richard Baker Roshi* and George Leonard to contribute to discussions of interest to the conscious manager.
• I am also impressed with the work of Leif Edvinsson, Director of Intellectual Capital at the Swedish financial services company Skandia. Edvinsson spoke at the IC² Institute's 2nd International Conference on Technology Policy & Innovation, in Lisbon, 1998. Click here for a 1997 interview with him in Knowledge Inc.

* The exception that proves the rule: I do not know Baker Roshi personally. And speaking of people I don't know personally,

• One of the most obvious, and most inspiring, examples of a conscious manager is the Dalai Lama. Temporal as well as spiritual leader of all Tibetan Buddhists, he has hewn to non-violent principles while pressuring the Chinese to recognize Tibetan rights and culture. An amazing book called The Jew in the Lotus (by Rodger Kamenetz, 1995, Harper, San Francisco) describes a dialog between the Dalai Lama and Jewish leaders whom he invited to India to discuss how Tibetan Buddhist exiles might learn, from the Jews, how to maintain cultural identity through a long diaspora.

From right: Ronya Kozmetsky, George Kozmetsky, Kay Charnes, Abraham Charnes, William W. Cooper, Fred Phillips, at a celebration of Charnes' 70th birthday in 1987. (Photo by K. Paek.)