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White Collar Zen: Using Zen Principles to Overcome Obstacles and Achieve Your Career Goals. By Steven Heine. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. ix þ 198.
In these days of corporate corruption, downsizing, and outsourcing, not to mention the continuous cutbacks in the Academy, it is no surprise that people are open to unconventional ways of looking at life and work. Several years ago, Epicurus became a best-selling author in Italy, and more recently we have seen philosophical approaches from authors such as Alain de Botton (Consolations of Philosophy), Lou Marinoff (Plato, Not Prozac), and Tom Morris (If Aristotle Ran General Motors), to name a few. Steven Heine's White Collar Zen: Using Zen Principles to Overcome Obstacles and Achieve Your Career Goals applies as well to the academic as to the corporate workplace.
Heine has written White Collar Zen from the standpoint of a scholar of Buddhism and a professional academic administrator. That he has been extremely successful at both should make one take a serious look at this book. Given the indifference of both institutions and the natural world to human suffering (think of Enron and Hurricane Katrina), we all need survival skills, and Heine shows us how we can acquire them in our professional lives by applying Zen philosophy. While his expressed purpose is not to illuminate the subtleties of Zen, the attentive nonspecialist reader can glean much about the tradition nonetheless and, like the Zen specialist, find new paths for navigating around the foxholes in organizations.
Zen, as Heine points out, infiltrated American culture over one hundred years ago and has made its way into subcultures beyond the American-Japanese, for example the worlds of psychotherapy, the arts, medicine, and even some of the more liberal branches of Judaism and Christianity. In case a novice feels unprepared to use Zen for success, Heine points out that Zen has great flexibility, that it is not orthodoxy. "Discover your own way . . . of 'being Zen,"' he tells us (p. 10).
While it might seem clear that Zen could foster creativity, introspection, and selfunderstanding, the philosophical reader might raise two questions about using Zen to achieve worldly power. First, how can Zen, with its well-known requirement for periods of solitude, be a guide...