from March/April 2007
by Adam Bluestein
“Boards have their rituals, and most of what happens here is not that terribly different from other board meetings,” says Charles Lief, 56, a founding member of Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. The establishment, which Lief describes as “a Buddhist-inspired, ecumenical, and nonsectarian leading institution of contemplative education,” is home to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (a writing department co-founded by the late poet Allen Ginsberg) and offers assorted B.A. degrees (music, writing, and traditional Eastern arts among them), M.A.’s (including psychology and environmental leadership), M.F.A.’s (theater being one), and a master’s in divinity.
Those who serve on a more conventional board, not-for-profit or otherwise, might beg to differ. Three times a year, the 24 members of Naropa’s board—about half of whom are American Buddhists—convene for two or three days of meetings at one of the university’s three campuses. Students, staff, and faculty are generally welcome to attend board meetings, so they’re held, whenever possible, while classes are in session. Each day of meetings begins with a half-hour of meditation, which is voluntary, though most board members take part.
The formal meeting begins with all the board members—10 women and 14 men—bending in a formal bow. Then outside chairman Martin Janowitz, 57, a vice president of Jacques Whitford, an environmental consulting and engineering firm with headquarters in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, brings things to order by striking a tabletop gong. The first official piece of business is the check-in, during which board members spend a few minutes updating one another on what’s happened in their lives since they last met. “It’s a nice way to reconnect after four months,” says Lief, who serves on several other nonprofit boards and is a partner in the Hartland Group, a Burlington, Vermont, development and consulting firm.
Buddhist precepts of mindful speech and right action inform the conduct of all board members, Buddhist or not. “There’s a lot of resonance with the Native American council style of communication,” Lief says. To ensure that everyone’s voice is heard when a tough issue is being addressed, those present, drawing on Iroquois tradition, pass a “talking piece” (a short stick) around the table; each person is allowed to speak uninterrupted until he or she surrenders the talking piece to the next in line. Part of the Native American training is to be “lean of speech,” that is, “careful, mindful, clear, and listening from the heart,” Lief explains. “So rather than working on some personal next point or speech, you’re actually practicing really hearing the person speaking at the time they are speaking. And when it’s your turn, you have a much more spontaneous response than if you’ve been writing a lot of notes.”
It would be a mistake to assume that Naropa’s board meetings are all blissful tranquillity. Buddhists do argue. When a discussion gets really contentious, though, the chair—or, for that matter, any director who cares to reach across the board table—takes the striker and rings the gong. Whereupon, says Lief, “we’ll stop the meeting and do some silent meditation.”
Hard as it may be to imagine such a scene in your boardroom, Lief insists that it does not feel contrived, at least in the context of Naropa: “If a sense of real divisiveness or aggression starts arising within the board, people really will try to address the quality of the communication within the context of the meeting.” On other boards, he says, you may come out of a meeting feeling upset and then call the chair to complain. On the Naropa board, “there is a shared responsibility to manage our own work.” (Imagine the discussions in your boardroom: “Why so hostile today, comp committee chair?”)
The ritual and introspection at a Naropa board meeting can take a lot of time. “People watching us could think we’re just processing the questions to death,” says Lief. “And sometimes we do. But mostly, being willing to invest that amount of time means getting issues out in the daylight so you can really work through them.” Perhaps because of this, board votes are almost always unanimous. “I don’t know if we have consensus sometimes because people are exhausted,” Lief admits, “but I can’t think of more than six times in 25 years that a board vote wasn’t unanimous.”
The board’s investment in good process has helped it get through the inevitable rough patches that come when a homogeneous founding group opens itself to diversity and change, which the university has. Naropa was founded in 1974 by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan teacher who played a seminal role in the growth of American Buddhism, and its board was originally composed entirely of his students. In the early ’80s, Lucien Wulsin, then chairman of the board of the University of Denver and a former CEO of Baldwin Piano Inc., became the first non-Buddhist chair. (Wulsin, now 90, is chairman emeritus.) But as the curriculum expanded, so did the number of non-Buddhists on the board. Today these include Lynne Katzmann, 50, president of Juniper Communities, a New Jersey developer and operator of assisted-living facilities, and John Bennett, 58, a former four-term mayor of Aspen, Colorado, who doesn’t want to be classified by religion.
The university president, though, had always been a Buddhist. But when that spot became vacant four years ago, the board narrowed the candidates down to two: then-board member Marty Janowitz, a devoted former student of Chogyam Trungpa (who died in 1987), and Tom Coburn, now 63, a non-Buddhist professor of religious studies. The board voted—unanimously—for Coburn, but behind the scenes, says Lief, “it was a divisive process.”
The divisions were short-lived, not least because the board embraced an unconventional solution, appointing the loser in the presidential race, Janowitz, to chair the board. “People from outside said, ‘This is insane,’” Lief recalls. “It was a bitter campaign—and now here’s the guy who didn’t succeed becoming the chair? How could that possibly work?” Yet rather than the constant second-guessing one might expect, “we’ve had three years of an exceptionally collegial relationship,” says Lief. While he praises the two men’s personal effort—early on, for example, they attended a retreat designed for college presidents and board chairs—he credits the board with having the open-mindedness to give the unusual arrangement a chance.
Lief knows that the board’s Buddhist equanimity will be tested again in the year ahead. In addition to the usual roster of issues facing most universities, Coburn has brought in an outside consultant to help craft a five-year strategic plan that Lief is “absolutely certain will start bringing out all kinds of internal conflicts.” But the well-honed rituals of meditation, nonbelligerent debate, respect for the talking piece, and—whenever called for—appropriate use of the gong should help the board keep its cool and do its job.