In the great Zen tradition of teaching stories, Marc Lesser relates his own personal and professional trials as he navigates the delicate path of managing a successful business while staying true to his spiritual roots. Struggling through a difficult economic climate, he also faces the usual challenges of running a growing company -- meeting payroll, balancing cashflow, hiring and firing employees, and maintaining relationships with vendors and customers. Guiding him through these difficulties while providing strength and insight is the practice of Zen. Utilizing his training as a Zen practitioner, Lesser learns to apply specific teachings such as the eight-fold path directly to work and life. In chapters such as "Work: The Impossible Request," "Appreciating Uncertainty," and "Accomplishing More by Doing Less," ZBA: The Zen of Business Administration provides readers with intimate, helpful advice, while acknowledging the paradox of applying spiritual practice to the business world.

Entrepreneur Marc Lesser built his company, Brush Dance, from a tiny recycled-paper venture operated out of his garage into a multimillion-dollar publisher of greeting cards and calendars. Armed with an MBA, this founder and CEO grappled with the usual challenges of running a company: meeting payroll and balancing cashflow, hiring and firing employees, and maintaining relationships with vendors and customers. Informing every decision was Lesser’s commitment to Zen practice. As an ordained Zen priest, he has practiced and studied Zen for thirty years. In Z.B.A. he follows the great spiritual tradition of teaching stories to beautifully describe the delicate path of living a working life as a spiritual practice.

A certain kind of busyness is crucial to life, allowing us to earn a living, create art, and achieve success. But too often it consumes us and we become crazy busy, nonstop busy, and we expend extraneous effort that gets us nowhere. Marc Lesser’s new book shows us the benefits of doing less in a world that has increasingly embraced more — more desire, more activity, more things, more exhaustion. Less is about stopping, about the possibility of finding composure in the midst of activity. The ideas and practices that Lesser outlines offer a radical yet simple approach to transforming a lifestyle based on endless to-do lists into a more meaningful approach that is truly more productive in every sense.

Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader evolved out of Marc Lesser's work helping to create Search Inside Yourself, a mindfulness-based emotional intelligence program at Google. In this transformative book, he distills a lifetime of contemplative practice and business experience into seven simple, powerful practices for optimizing mindful leadership at work, as well as living a full and meaningful life: • Love the work • Do the work • Don't be an expert • Connect to your pain • Connect to the pain of others • Depend on others • Keep making it simpler

We all yearn for clear-cut answers to life's problems, yet we rarely get them. Formulas fail and contradictions mount. In 'Know Yourself, Forget Yourself', executive coach and mindfulness teacher Marc Lesser shows that understanding and embracing the points where life feels most confusing, most contradictory can lead us to more satisfaction and joy.Lesser provides clear guidance and simple practices for embracing five central paradoxes in life and navigating them to increase our effectiveness and happiness. Influenced by the revolutionary mindfulness and emotional intelligence trainings he helped develop at Google, 'Know Yourself, Forget Yourself' is a profound book about cultivating the emotional skills to understand the right path through difficulties and challenges.