Zen Leadership: The Toughest (Best) Business Decision August Turak's Zen Teacher family man, house painter, and Zen Master hovering just above the poverty line in Wheeling, like these, called “koans” in Zen Buddhism, have long baffled the Western mind. Steeped truth is either A or ~ A, Zen has long been dismissed as little more than mystical double mode of thinking: the same paradoxical thinking that Zen mastered 1500 years ago. know because I think I do.” A Zen master couldn’t say it better or design a Turak with his Zen teacher “Wow, that’s exactly what my Zen teacher was doing!” And like Zen, Mobley argued that teaching others to think divergently could At heart, Zen applies divergent or lateral thinking to metaphysical questions, and that is exactly why Zen is so hard for people steeped in convergent thinking to grasp. The goal of Zen practice is often described as “Solving the Riddle problem solving techniques based on divergent thinking. For Zen, the universe presents a problem to be solved not Rather than incremental “learning,” Zen relies on what my teacher called “a series However for Zen the final box that must be left behind is the “The Matrix.” The ultimate goal of Zen is a final leap into “Satori” or I would pass on to them the wisdom that my Zen teacher and Mobley had passed on to me. I ever made was dropping out of school to study Zen. Because what I learned from my Zen teacher and and the benefit of hindsight to finally learn what my Zen teacher didn’t do that led to his success Here’s a Zen koan for you. If you master Zen you’ be a great leader. But if you study Zen just to become a great leader you’ll never