A one-day workshop on leadership techniques, effective communication and being skilful in the workplace, featuring a two-hour introduction with Ajahn Sona, Abbot of Birken Forest Monastery. Buddha in the Boardroom© is one of the workshops I designed and developed and which I can deliver in corporate and organisational settings.
Who better to consult in these times of dramatic change than Buddha? It is his ideas that created and sustained over 2,500 years what can be seen as the oldest and largest international corporation known.
His teachings are as practical as they are inspirational, offering help on issues leaders and management face in these challenging times of breathtaking change. Indeed, Buddhism’s speciality is change.
The Buddhist vision, which underpins the centuries-old “corporation,” provides a model of management excellence and leadership from which contemporary leaders, executives and managers can learn.
This model of organisational excellence is the topic of a one-day workshop, Buddha in the Boardroom©. It is presented by S Fuller, founder-president of Unlimited Inç and Spa for the Mind Coaching & Communication Inc. The workshop begins with a two-hour discussion with Ajahn Sona, one of Canada’s most respected practitioners of Buddhist thinking, on the requirements for a well-run and harmonious organisation, skillful leadership, self and corporate awareness and techniques for maintaining a calm mind. The day will include a lunch, morning and afternoon refreshments, a discussion on the benefits and practice of meditation and an afternoon discussion elaborating on the morning’s themes and the ways in which Buddhist thought can inform contemporary leadership principles.
This workshop has been designed out of the material I have developed in the leadership, team-building and communication fields, my training as a meditation instructor, seminars on Buddhist thought conducted since 2001 and the direct development since the fall of 2003 of this particular leadership workshop series.
The first Buddha in the Boardroom© workshop was held in Vancouver in the spring of 2004 and the second in the fall of that year, with participants drawn from the ranks of corporate executives and medical professionals.
In the opening morning session, Ajahn Sona discusses leadership, awareness, harmonious relations, organisational excellence and techniques for calming the mind in terms of Buddha’s teachings. This is structured through the use of an interview format in which I ask Ajahn Sona questions relevant to organisational leadership.
The energy drink Red Bull — created by Thai corporate head Khun Chalerm Yoovidya — starts the day. Lunch is provided, as are afternoon refreshments.
At 11:15 a.m. participants break for lunch until 12 p.m. (Buddhist monks in the Theravada tradition do not eat food after noon. The two meals of the days for monks are breakfast, eaten early in the morning, and then lunch before noon. Only juices, tea without milk, non-dairy dark chocolate and the like may be consumed after that.)
Lunch is followed by 15 minutes of walking meditation in the Lord Stanley grounds.
At 12:30 p.m., participants join in a two-hour facilitated presentation that elaborates on the themes of the morning session with Ajahn Sona, breaking for refreshments at 2:30 p.m.
At 3 p.m., I introduce stress-relief and energizing techniques such as meditation and chanting, the power of which medical science is now discovering. The workshop ends at 4 p.m.
Ajahn Sona — ajahn means teacher — is the Abbot of Birken Forest Monastery and was a participant at a retreat with the Dalai Lama in April 2004. He is a knowledgeable and articulate commentator on Buddhist teachings and a “hands-on manager” of a successful monastery in the interior of British Columbia. He is greatly respected as a Buddhist thinker, practitioner and teacher within the Buddhist community and by the non-Buddhist audiences he has addressed in his capacity as abbot. He has taught, trained and led retreats internationally, establishing the Birken Forest Monastery a decade ago. His teachings are regarded as combining tried-and-true Buddhist wisdom with modern common sense, and his presentation style is witty and engaging S Fuller, too, is familiar with the effective workings of large international organisations, having worked as a full-time journalist and foreign correspondent for Reuters — the world’s oldest and largest multimedia news, communication and information organisation — through the 1980s before immigrating to Canada in 1987.
Since the completion a decade ago of her PhD dissertation on think tanks and the role of ideas in bringing about change, she has worked with groups within large institutions, in management, union and educational environments, ranging in size from five to 125 and including participants from the professional, educational and corporate arenas. She designs and develops workshops, curricula, learning guides and seminar series on team-building and leadership, and is in the process of publishing in book form the first in the series Buddha in the Boardroom.© She is a certified adult educator and coach who has been coaching since 1990.
S Fuller has had the opportunity of working with Ajahn Sona in different organisational settings since 2001. She is a certified meditation instructor within the same tradition as Ajahn Sona, a certified professional coach and an inaugural recipient of the “t” Award for contributing to the evolution of coaching through educational leadership — an award that honours coaching pioneer and master coach Thomas Leonard, who died in February 2003.
In 2002, she assisted colleagues with a seminar presented by international leadership and team-building author and workshop presenter Richard Olivier, son of Sir Laurence Olivier, in which Shakespeare’s Henry V was used as a case study in successful leadership. This model has come to be used extensively in corporate settings around the world.
For details of fees, e-mail S Fuller. Participation in the workshop is limited to 12 individuals, and it can also be done in-house for a single corporate client.
Workshops are held at the Lord Stanley, 1889 Alberni Street from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Future workshops and publications in the series:
Banking on Buddha©
Buddha and the Brokers©
Buddha on the Beat©
Buddha in the Barracks©
Buddha on the Boulevard©
©S Fuller 2011