Zen and the Art of Corporate Conduct
When the Dalai Lama came to town this past September to support a fundraising campaign for the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education and give local business leaders a lesson in zen and the art of corporate conduct.
When the Dalai Lama came to town this past September to support a fundraising campaign for the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education, he took part in a series of dialogues – including one with leaders of B.C.’s business
community – and delivered teachings to breathless throngs of admirers. So does the 71-year-old Buddhist monk really have anything to teach corporate bigwigs? And why should we listen?
A few months ago, Jim Gray found himself in Vancouver, preparing to meet the Dalai Lama with a host of fellow business heavyweights. But before that unusual encounter, he did something almost as peculiar. Along with the other corporate types, Gray attended a workshop called “Connecting for Change,” which brought him face-to-face with leaders who have dedicated their lives to helping others. At these sessions, the Calgary resident was to share ideas with a Vancouverite named Ken Lyotier.
Gray is the co-founder of natural-gas company Canadian Hunter Exploration. Lyotier is the co-founder of United We Can, a non-profit that buys millions of bottles, cans and other recyclable containers from street people each year. Gray has had a long and successful business career; Lyotier is a recovering addict who lives in the infamous Downtown Eastside.
Uncomfortable around Gray and the rest of the suits at the event, Lyotier felt he didn’t fit in, so he left. Instead of giving up on the chance to talk to him, Gray went and found Lyotier on his own turf. It was an area of town that Gray had never seen before, and he had lunch with Lyotier amid what he describes as the terrible, drug-infested conditions of East Hastings Street. For that entire afternoon, the two discussed the importance of creating connections between people like themselves.
“We talked about [our] dreams and anxieties, challenges and opportunities,” Gray recalls. “It was beginning this conversation that we are all talking about through ‘Connecting for Change.’ It is the process of beginning trust and friendship between [social activists and business people]. Only by genuine conversation can we establish that trust.”
Gray continues: “I am sure Ken thinks I am going to fly off back to Calgary and never see him again. But I’ll be back. I am going to learn all that I can about the Downtown Eastside, and I’ll be back because we’ve started the process.”
The next day, Gray was one of 60 global and local CEOs and other senior executives who gathered for an intimate chat with the Dalai Lama. Alcoa Latin America president Franklin Feder was there, as were Portland General Electric CEO Peggy Fowler, Weyerhaeuser Canada chair George H. Weyerhaeuser Jr. and BC Hydro CEO Bob Elton. The occasion: His Holiness was making a weekend visit to B.C. to support a $60-million fundraising campaign for the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education (DLC). Due to open at a downtown location in 2009, this yet-to-be built 30,000-square-foot facility is already making its mark on the provincial economy.
“The chance to listen to the Dalai Lama is, frankly, very interesting, from both a human and a business perspective,” says Elton. “He has a very simple way of talking about life’s problems that I think we can all take something from.”
For the most part, the Dalai Lama’s Vancouver visit and its attendant events took place in the public spotlight. But “Connecting for Change” – like the private audience that
followed – was an exclusive closed-door affair. In small groups that mixed oil-and-gas bigwigs with non-profit entrepreneurs and pulp-and-paper barons with environmentalists, participants explored the connections between business and altruism. As well, they looked for ways the DLC could be a global interaction point for their two traditionally opposed groups. Then it was time for a conversation with the 71-year-old monk himself.
At the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, the long echo of a shofar – a ram’s horn blown like a trumpet, usually during the Jewish high holy days – invited the Dalai Lama to a circle of 16 chairs surrounded by 138 more. A delegation of Coast Salish people led by Grand Chief Ed John ¬welcomed him to their traditional land with song and drum. Lead organizer Charles Holmes of the Learning Strategies Group, the SFU business school’s customized-education outfit, ¬presented the Dalai Lama with a small stone given to him by his daughter. With it, Holmes asked His Holiness to cast many ripples in the world business community.
The Dalai Lama didn’t let this reverence last long. He appeared most at ease when the 15 other chairs of the inner circle filled with delegates, making him a part of, rather than the centre of, the dialogue. Severn Cullis-Suzuki, co-founder of the Environmental Children’s Organization, asked the Dalai Lama how both parties in the room could create the will to engage with each other. In his reply, the Dalai Lama stressed that interdependence is more important now than ever before in human history.
“I think the business group and social sector, there is a connection,” he said in a voice that resembled that of Star Wars’ Yoda, only deeper. “In the past, maybe different sections can work more or less independent. Today there is a new reality. All should work ¬together, particularly business people. Of course it’s a very important part of society. Without money you can’t do much. But that the business sector should concentrate only to make profit, it is not sufficient. [Business] should take responsibility for the society or the community, then satisfaction with their business improves and more profit, more respect.”
According to some who attended, this ¬ unorthodox meeting of monastic robes, bleeding hearts and bullet-proof business suits may have – for better or worse – permanently altered the way the business world views B.C. And although it’s easy to dismiss the whole ¬exercise as good optics and empty chatter, the people who were there tell a different story.
Darcy Winslow, Portland-based global GM for Nike’s women’s line, was one of the dialogue participants. She claims that a growing sense of interconnectedness has the biggest businesses in the world changing their behaviour. Not only that: according to Winslow, Vancouver can play a pivotal role through the DLC.
“How you bridge the gap between the corporate world and the social sector is so important. It wants to happen,” she says. “To create a venue where you can bring people together and have true dialogue is pretty significant. Right now, Vancouver is the centre of the radar.”
Why, though, when seemingly every major global industry is courting the Chinese, would representatives of so many prominent corporations show up at such an event? Why would they volunteer time from C-suite schedules to endorse a centre that will bear the name of one of China’s most vocal critics? What are the consequences of Canada granting the Dalai Lama honorary citizenship in a public ceremony at GM Place? To begin answering those questions, you need to turn to Bowen Island resident Victor Chan, executive director of the DLC.
Chan is a swashbuckling ethnic-Chinese nomad, a personality part photographer, part card shark, part Zen monk. Although he’s not a businessman in the traditional sense, Chan has an easy charm that allows him to comfortably move in many social circles. He’s written several books (one with the Dalai Lama), once cycled through the Himalayas and has a Rolodex that houses the names of global business icons and heads of state. Chan is the kind of fellow who could tell you secrets about the sacred sites of Lhasa during one phone call and convince you to cut a cheque for seven figures during another.
The son of a Hong Kong family caught in what he calls the inward-looking Chinese ghetto of the 1950s and ’60s, Chan rebelled against social pressures to become an engineer or a doctor. Instead, influenced by the countercultural revolution in the West, he left home and met the Dalai Lama in an unusual tale of kidnapping and a beautiful girl. (The woman, New York Buddhist Cheryl Crosby, convinced Chan to join her on a trip to meet the Dalai Lama. They were abducted in Kabul and eventually escaped unharmed.) Until he was 27, Chan had never even heard of His Holiness. But on an overland trip set against the backdrop of Afghanistan, Iraq and Burma in the early ’70s, he figured out a way to spend the rest of his life working as a part of the Dalai Lama’s inner circle. From that inner circle, he built the idea of the DLC.
Chan launched the centre with help from such luminaries as Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, former UBC president Martha Piper and Premier Gordon Campbell. According to him, their pull gives Vancouver an opportunity to create a “cultural bazaar” that will affect business thinking everywhere.
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