“Work Zone Madness!” by Nancy Slomowitz

Besides reading books focusing solely on Transcendental Meditation technique, it is also a joy to read books by practitioners of TM.

Nancy Slomowitz, CEO at Executive Management Associates and the author of Work Zone Madness learned Transcendental Meditation as a teenager.

In fact her whole family, following the example of their father, was trained in the technique and practiced it twice a day. It was only forty years later that Nancy Slomowitz really understood the full value of her father bringing Transcendental Meditation into her life.

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Barriers to madness at a work zone: Infrastructure and human resources

In her well-written, fun and educative to read book Work Zone Madness!, Nancy Slomowitz builds up her case by real life examples of how things can go wrong in the corporate world as a result of greed, arrogance, wishful thinking, ignorance, and downright evil. Often, even good people lose their common sense and integrity in a position of power and become, as Slomowitz puts it: kids in a candy store.

Slomowitz offers sound advice on how to set in place proper infrastructure so it’s always clear what is happening behind the facade of growth and success.

Besides speaking of the overarching structures of companies, Slomowitz also speaks about what can go wrong on the individual, human level. First of all, she gives good advice on how to deal with adversity in the form of a fellow worker.

Secondly, Slomowitz emphasizes the need to treat people as valuable resource that needs to be understood and invested in. Her bottom line is that cutting costs on human resources rarely pays off in the long run.

Turning around a mad work place with Transcendental Meditation

As a founder and CEO of a management consultation company, Executive Management Associates, Nancy Slomowitz and her staff spent their days cleaning up the mess that resulted from the rampant greed and corruption of the corporate world.

At one point, however, the atmosphere in her own company had deteriorated to the extent that on Slomowitz herself was contemplating leaving it.

Yet Slomowitz managed to turn things around by following these simple principles:

(1) hire the best people,
(2) treat them well and
(3) offer, for those who so wish, a course of Transcendental Meditation.

In implementing the changes, Slomowitz started by revised her recruiting strategy to really bring in people who fit both the positions and the philosophy of the company. As a result, the unbearably high volatility of staff was suddenly a thing of the past.

The next step Nancy Slomowitz took was using the answer to the question people frequently put to her: “How do you stay so calm?” Slomowitz’s “secret” to her calm, cool and high energy levels was her daily practice of Transcendental Meditation.

So she set up a completely volunteer option for her employees to attend an introductory lecture on Transcendental Meditation. As everyone started noticing the dramatic positive changes in those who took up the practice, more people signed up to learn to meditate. The atmosphere in the entire company improved drastically.

Slomowitz’s analysis and recommendations on best practices for a happy workplace boil down to caring about people – what they do, how they feel and what is vital to their mental and physical well-being.  As she puts it: “a true leader has a servant mentality.”

So, for a great inspiring peek into what decades of Transcendental Meditation practice can result in, pick up Nancy Slomowitz’s Work Zone Madness!

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