As I was mulling over the idea of writing this book, I started to notice that a lot of people in different disciplines were talking about the topics in which I was interested. But these were in very different and diverse areas, including the following:
When you start to find the same set of ideas—the same common threads—showing up in different guises in these very different areas, that’s usually a sign. There must be something fundamental and very important lurking under the covers for these similar ideas to be present in so many different contexts.
There’s something fundamental here.
Yoga and meditative techniques seem to be enjoying quite a bit of mainstream popularity these days, and not always for obvious reasons. I noticed an article in an in-flight magazine around October 2005 that trumpeted the headline “Companies Now Offering Yoga and Meditation to Help Fight Rising Health-Care Costs.”
Large companies have not historically embraced such warm-and-fuzzy activities. But the meteoric rise of health-care costs has forced them to take any course of action that might help. Clearly, they believe the studies showing that practitioners of yoga and meditative techniques enjoy greater overall health than the general population. In this book, we’re more interested in the areas related to cognition, but greater overall health is a nice side benefit.
I also noticed that a number of MBA and executive-level courses promote various meditative, creative, and intuitive techniques—stuff that fits in perfectly with the available research but that has not yet been passed down to the employees in the trenches, including us knowledge-worker types.
But not to worry, we’ll be covering these topics here for you. No MBA required.