Mindful Work: How Meditation Is Changing Business from the Inside Out

David Gelles spent years as a business reporter watching some of America's largest corporations — General Mills, Ford, Target, Google, Aetna — implement mindfulness programs for their employees. Mindful Work is his attempt to understand what they were doing, why it worked when it worked, and what it says about the relationship between contemplative practice and the demands of modern professional life. The book takes the corporate mindfulness trend seriously enough to investigate it critically as well as celebrate it.

Nick Podehl narrates with the clean authority of an informed observer rather than a convert — his voice carries the journalist's perspective that makes the book more useful than a straightforward endorsement of corporate mindfulness. At just over nine hours, this is a nuanced examination of a phenomenon that has grown considerably since the book's initial publication, making the audio version a useful historical document as well as a contemporary analysis.