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-