Imagine this: You're asked to deliver a memo to your CEO in
the boardroom. As you approach you hear the sound of drumming. You cautiously
open the door and on the floor, surrounded by burning candles, you behold the
CEO and board of directors lying, flat with their eyes closed, being drawn into
the rhythmic beat of the drum. Are you hallucinating? No. All is well. Richard
Whiteley, bestselling author of
The Corporate Shaman, is leading them on a
journey to find their power animals. The corporate culture as we have come to
know it may never be the same. An MBA graduate of the Harvard Business School, Whiteley
is a successful management consultant and urban shaman who uses drumming and
shamanic techniques to restore spirit to the business community.
Daniel Pinchbeck, co-founder of Evolver, a lifestyle
community platform that publishes
Reality Sandwich, an online magazine centered
around spirituality, philosophy and activism, proposes "
Business Shamanism"
as a new avant-garde art form. According to Pinchbeck, "business shamanism is the
repurposing of the tools and instruments of the corporate culture and the
mainstream economy to bring about social change, archaic revival, planetary
regeneration, deeper initiation. The goal is to build a platform for radical revision, for a
fundamental shift in perception and behavior, so that the alternative -- what
author Charles Eisenstein calls 'the more beautiful world we know in our
hearts is possible' -- manifests in our time."
