What the Financial Times Reported on Meditation and Wall Street, 2014

A summary of the Financial Times column of July 28, 2014, on whether meditation dulls an executive's edge, with links to the original.

Does meditation blunt the aggressive drive that bankers and traders depend on? A Financial Times column by Charles Wallace took up that worry on July 28, 2014, under the headline “Meditate to sharpen your assertive edge,” and reported that one of the world’s largest hedge funds was paying to have its staff taught. This article summarizes the column in our own words. The original is on the Financial Times website.

A copy of the column was once posted on this website as a PDF, and that address now leads here.

The question

Wallace wrote the paper’s The Fit Executive column. The concern he set out to test is common among hard-driving executives: that a calmer mind costs them the competitive edge that wins deals.

Two New Yorkers, a Weill Cornell psychiatrist, Dr. Richard Friedman, and Goldman Sachs’s head of global recruiting, Michael Desmarais, told him they did not think it would.

Bridgewater’s 400

The column’s main business fact was about Bridgewater Associates, the Connecticut hedge fund founded by Ray Dalio, which the paper put at about $150 billion. Bridgewater had hired the David Lynch Foundation to teach 400 of its employees, and the firm paid half of each employee’s fee. Bob Roth, then the foundation’s executive director, pointed the paper to research on heart health and stress; our page on the research sets out what those studies reported.

The $960 price

The column gave the cost of learning TM as $960. That matched the individual fee on this website’s own course page in October 2014; a course held at a company’s office then cost $1,200 a person. For that money, the New York course included an introductory talk, a 90-minute one-to-one lesson, three follow-up classes on consecutive days, four refresher sessions and free follow-up for life. Our page on how the course worked has the details.

A note on the headline

The old press page on this website listed the column as “Meditate to sharpen your creative edge.” The Financial Times headline uses the word “assertive,” which fits the column’s real subject. The paper’s online summary line made the same point, saying Type A personalities need not fear being tamed.

How Bridgewater’s plan began

Business Insider later described how the arrangement started. In November 2016 it reported that Dalio first offered, around 2008, to repay half of the roughly $1,000 course fee out of his own pocket, and that the firm later made it a formal plan. By then about 500 Bridgewater employees had learned TM over eight years. In February 2014 Dalio had told the same publication that he offered to cover half of what staff spent to learn from a teacher.

For the wider list of employer payment models, see our page on who pays when staff learn to meditate.

This page is general information, not medical advice. The Manhattan Business Review is not affiliated with the David Lynch Foundation or any Transcendental Meditation organization, and it does not sell courses. Transcendental Meditation and TM are trademarks of their owners.