Huffington Magazine Issue 60 | Page 46

HUFFINGTON 08.04.13 CORPORATE ZEN on this recent afternoon, she requires no proof. An administrative manager, she spends her workday overseeing the schedules and inboxes of two busy Promega executives. Her brain struggles to keep pace with an unrelenting gusher of correspondence, meetings needing to be arranged, travel emergencies to fix. Her 45 minutes spent breathing and making her mind go blank is her means of getting the static out of her thinking, freeing her to excel at her job. “I have so many action items on my plate at all times that I can’t ever get my brain clear,” Kubly says. “This is a chance to just clear out. If you’re doing what is right for yourself, then you’re doing what is right for your organization. You get clarity, and that helps you make better decisions.” CAPITALISM WITH A SOUL Ask Linton what prompted Promega’s push into yoga and meditation, and he quickly rejects the notion that it was about making more money. “That’s a byproduct of what the purpose is,” the CEO says. “When everything’s all about the bottom line, that creates stress.”  ORK SHOULD W BE MUCH MORE THAN A JOB. Trim and unassuming, with silver hair parted on the right side, Linton, 65, is partial to khakis and navy blue button-down shirts, a style that blends easily into the Midwestern background in which he has spent the last four decades of his professional life. He is fond of extolling the virtues of a cold beer at the end of the workday. But his easy demeanor and everyman sartorial bent mask a mind inclined to challenging traditional conceptions about seemingly established things — not least, the nature and function of business. In Linton’s accounting, a business is merely one component of its surrounding community. It ought to be engineered in the interest of collective well-being. “Work should be much more than a job,” Linton says. “It should be meaningful for those who work at a company and help them develop as people.” Such views fit into a new school of corporate thinking that (at least rhetorically) builds on the supposed failings of business to address the needs of so-