Business on Fire Part II: Could Business Mindfulness Have Stopped the Failure of Steve Jobs' Protege Ron Johnson at JC Penney?

This is the second episode of a three-part series on fabled merchandiser, Ron Johnson, and how he failed to restore JC Penney to its former leadership in retailing. In this episode we're going to be talking very explicitly about business mindfulness and how it applies.

If you want to understand "business mindfulness," this is the episode for you. If you'd like some background on scaling mindfulness, you'll like Episode 2 on self-similarity (our first full episode). If you'd like to hear our detailed failure analysis of Ron Johnson and JCPenney, that's in Episode 11, the one just before this.

Mindful businesses share a set of six characteristics, which we introduce at the beginning. Then we talk about different examples of each characteristic, from some mindful businesses we know about, such as Toyota and Trader Joe's, and with counterexamples from JCPenney.

References

• Sutcliffe, K. M., & Vogus, T. (2014). Organizing for Mindfulness. The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Mindfulness, I, 407–423. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118294895
• Weick, K. E., Sutcliffe, K. M., & Obstfled, D. (1999). Organizing for high reliability: Processes of collective mindfulness. Research in Organizational Behaviour, 21, 81–123.
• Greening, D.R., Mindful Business characteristics, twitter thread, https://twitter.com/greening/status/1554164846022823936
• Langfitt, F. (Director). (2010, March 26). 403: NUMMI (No. 403). In This American Life. National Public Radio. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/403/nummi-2010

Credits

• "DAVOS/SWITZERLAND, 23JAN13 - Janice Marturano, Founder and Executive Director, Institute for Mindful Leadership, USA, speaks during the WorkStudio 'Experiencing Mindful Leadership' at the Annual Meeting 2013 of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 23, 2013," Photo by World Economic Forum, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0), https://www.flickr.com/photos/worldeconomicforum/8408308078
• Women watching sticky notes, image source Copyright-Only Dedication (based on United States law)or Public Domain Certification, https://pxhere.com/en/photo/1431647

Staff

• Daniel Greening, host, agile consultant, software executive
• Mirela Petalli, co-host, meditation guide, and neurocritical nursing instructor
• Dan Dickson, business coach, executive and management consultant

Links

• Mindful Agility Substack ("The Mindful Sprint" weekly brief)
• Mindful Agility web site
• Mindful Agility Community Facebook group
• Mindful Agility Youtube channel