Mindful Business
by Kouji Miki
Table of Contents
Prologue
Trying to Define Mindful Business
Customer image and values in the mindful economy
Consumers’ product values regarding products and services that change with time
Prologue
The Chinese character for “mindfulness” is “念(nen)”, which is a combination of the kanji for “今(ima)-now” and “心(kokoro)-mind”. In other words, it is a state where the attention of the mind is full, where the mind is not diffused anywhere else, and where the mind is 100% focused on everything that is happening around you.
In Zen terms, this can be described as “三昧(zanmai)-samadhi.
It is an activity that aims to improve concentration, EQ, and stress resistance by using meditation as a tool to eliminate the religious nature of meditation, which has been used in traditional religions such as Buddhism. It is now being used in alternative medicine, education, and management.
There are many theories about the origin of mindfulness, including Zen and primitive Buddhism, but some believe that its origin is based on Sati (awareness) in Theravada Buddhism. However, we don’t know exactly what it is.
In 1893, at the Universal Congress of Religions held in Chicago, the Japanese Rinzai Zen master Shaku Sōen gave his first lecture in English. D.T. Suzuki, a disciple of Shaku Sounen, stayed in the U.S. twice, from 1949 to 1958, and spread Zen in Western society. Another disciple, Chizaki Nyogen, started the “Floating Zendo” in San Francisco in 1922, teaching Zen to Japanese Americans and Americans of Japanese descent, and lecturing on Japanese culture. Later, during the Pacific War, Japanese Buddhist activities in the United States weakened temporarily.
After the war, in the 1950s and 1960s, several Zen centers, mainly Soto Zen centers, were established in California, and many Americans came to practice Zen. This led to the establishment of several Zen centers, mainly Soto Zen centers, in California, the United States, and many Americans began to practice Zen meditation. Steve Jobs was one of the Americans who did Zen meditation.
After this movement, Zen gradually spread from California to the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. Later, in the 2000s, executives and employees of IT ventures in Silicon Valley began to meditate, and it became empirically known that it was effective in reducing stress, improving concentration, and facilitating human relations within the organization.
Recently, the effects of meditation in enhancing concentration and reducing stress have been scientifically proven by measuring brain waves, and the University of Massachusetts Medical School in the U.S. has published many research papers from a medical approach to meditation, and Stanford University even has a formal class on mindfulness.
At first, mindfulness was mostly introduced by ventures such as Google, Facebook, and Linkedin, but now Intel, a well-established company in the IT industry, has introduced a training program for 100,000 employees around the world that includes meditation as part of their employee education workshops.
In the U.S. and Europe, transformative services and mindfulness-related businesses that provide mindfulness to the general public and corporations have been emerging for about five years. It is expected that businesses that provide this mindful state will start up in Japan in the future.
Trying to Define Mindful Business
Until now, mindful business has only been considered to be in the category of “education,” so to speak, such as training for the general public or for corporations, but I dare to redefine mindful business from a new angle.
We would like to define mindful business as “business that aims to improve people’s mind capability.
There are five elements to improving one's mind capability: “compassion”, which is essential for working as a team; “concentration”, which is necessary not only for family life but also for work; “decisiveness”, which is often required in business; “resilience” to stress, which is needed in today's society; and “creativity”, which is needed most in many companies for innovation.
Until now, mindful business has been limited to a few areas such as corporate training, personal counseling, and alternative medicine. However, in the past few years, there have been sprouts of “mindfulness” in various industries, and even areas that are generally thought to have nothing to do with mindful business are actually becoming “mindful.
So, I thought that every industry today already contains businesses with the goal of creating a “mindful” state.
For example, in the current “IoT” industry, there are gadgets like MUSE that catch the vital information of the human body with sensors, apply biofeedback to themselves, and create a “mindful state” for themselves by monitoring their own state.
In the field of AI (artificial intelligence), if an AI that can comfort a person’s mind by listening intently to his or her problems, or if an AI that can help a person’s mental growth by giving him or her awareness through Zen-like dialogues appears, it could well fall into the category of mindful business.
In other words, each industry already contains products and services that aim for a mindful state, and if we cut out those products and services and add them up, we can get the approximate size of the global mindful business market. That’s what I thought roughly.
Customer Image and Values in the Mindful Economy
The consumer base for businesses in the mindful economy is expected to be the wealthy in a limited number of developed countries such as the United States, parts of Europe, and Japan. These are people who are in the wealthy category in developed countries where capitalism is well established and goods and services are already all around them, and these wealthy people have a stable living base and already have the necessary infrastructure such as houses and cars.
In the mindful economy, which is the market where most mindful businesses are offered, we have defined the values that customers perceive as valuable in four categories as follows.
1. Functionality
This refers to the basic functionality of the product or service being offered. For example, in the case of a washing machine, it is the ability to do the minimum amount of laundry, and in the case of a refrigerator, it is the ability to cool the food in the refrigerator at a set temperature. For example, in Japan, the “Showa” value system for products and services was considered important because the basic functions themselves were lacking in products and services in the past. However, with the passage of time from the Showa era to the Heisei era, the value of these functions became relatively half and changed. Comparing the value of functions and other values from Showa to Heisei, we define that we are at the stage of just half and half in the sense.
2. Design
Design continued to be one of the most important factors for general consumers when selecting products and services, and at the end of the Showa era, design became an important value of products and services, sometimes even surpassing functionality. By the end of the Heisei era (1989), “design” had become the most significant value added to products, apart from functionality. At the same time, however, design-first values have had the adverse effect of halting product life cycles and sometimes making all products and services look very similar in appearance as they change according to trends.
3. Experience
In the mindful economy, the value of “experience” as part of the value of the product for the target customer is becoming very significant. As in other developed countries, the value of experience in Japan has been growing since the beginning of the Heisei era, and by the end of the Heisei era, the value of experience will account for a large percentage of the value for general consumers.
4. Social / Locality
The target customers of the mindful economy are those who have experienced many products and services in the past capital economy, so to speak, those who have benefited enough from capital protection and have been trained in various products and services. For these trained customers, mindful business is a commercial activity that offers them something beyond capitalism, and it is important for them to understand how the products and services they purchase contribute to the community and to what extent they contribute to the environment. It is important for customers to understand how the products and services they buy contribute to the community and to which environment they contribute.
5. Self-transformation
This concept is often confused with the experience described in the previous section, but it is a different concept from the experience in the marketing world. Experience, as defined in marketing, is defined as the loss of memories and altered consciousness over time, while Self-transformation is defined as irreversible. In other words, once a user has experienced a Self-transformation experience, his or her sense of values changes drastically and the state of consciousness is irreversibly altered from that before the experience. It is assumed that the ultimate goal of products and services offered in the mindful economy are products that are designed for self-transformation.
6.Social-transformation
This concept means that the transformation of an organization or society by a group of individuals who have undergone the personal transformation described in 5 will itself become a customer value. Specifically, the transformation of executives and leaders in a large organization will lead to the transformation of the organization and the transformation of society, which is the aggregate of the organization.
Consulting companies specializing in “organizational development” are likely to be the main providers of this kind of value, but it will not necessarily be limited to services; it will also include art, music, architecture, VR, groupware, and devices that support mindfulness.
I have tried to express the changes in the values of the target consumers of mindful business toward products and services in a simple, easy-to-understand Gengo that Japanese people can easily understand with their senses.
1970-1990 values:.
In the market for general consumers, it was necessary for products to fulfill the basic functions required. Therefore, it can be said that the values of the Showa era focused on functionality first. However, with the transition from the Showa era to the Heisei era, general consumers gradually began to seek values other than functionality. A big part of this was design.
1990-2020 values
In the Heisei era, consumers are gradually placing more emphasis on values other than the functions of products and services. Now, at the end of the Heisei era, there is a 50/50 split between functionality and non-functional values (design, experience, and social aspects).
2020- values
This year, Japan will enter a new era. Japan is entering a new era. Japan is a developed country where goods and services have spread to every corner, so what is important to the customers who are at the forefront?
In this new era, the basic functions of products and services that customers consider important will be taken for granted, and the emphasis will be placed on design, experience, and sociality. We believe that the customer’s sense of value will lead to self-transformatoin. This is the reason for the current popularity of mindfulness, and I believe that more and more customers will find value in products and services that have elements that cause self-transformation.
Stay tuned for the next blog post. Look forward to it!…
Thank you very much for taking the time to read my blog. We would like to publish “True Innovation”, a book about Zen innovation theory written in Japanese, in English and other languages. If you are a publisher and would like to help us, please contact us.
A book “True Innovation”
