At the recent Wisdom 2.0 conference, Ford Motor Company Executive Chairman Bill Ford sat down with Jack Kornfield, founding teacher of the Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock Meditation Center, to discuss what role compassion, mindfulness and wisdom play in modern business. In front of an audience of entrepreneurs, mindfulness...

(You can watch the entire interview here.)

On Culture

Biz: I think about our approach to work almost as...

The New York Times recently put on the front page of their business section an article titled "Silicon Valley Says Put Down Your Devices," along with a picture and quote from me, and many of my friends and Wisdom 2.0 speakers. It addressed the need for...

Backstage at Wisdom 2.0, we asked numerous people -- from wisdom teachers Jack Kornfield and Jon Kabat-Zinn, to Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, to Burning Man founder Larry Harvey -- the question: "What is wisdom?" Below are their answers:

For more by Soren Gordhamer, click here.

In our age of amazing technological advancement, where new apps are created daily and we are busier than ever, it is easy to forget the most essential app we have: our own body and mind. In fact, in a recent National Sleep Foundation study, 63 percent of Americans...

When I was a kid growing up in West Texas, there came a time late at night when the television screen would turn to "snow," a static display that informed the watcher that no more programs were scheduled. They were essentially saying to viewers, "We have no more content to...

The holiday season -- a time for family, friends, less work and more play, right? So you would think that people would be happier and more relaxed at this time, but for many it is just the opposite. It is not a time for "holy days," for true connection and...

A recent study by Wilson Electronics, as reported on the social media blog Mashable, found that 15 percent of people take phone calls during sex. 15 percent! Really?

OK, there is always that few percent that will answer their phone at any time, but during sex? Please.

It is hard sometimes to fathom the extent our lives have changed in recent years:

1. five years ago, engaging in social media was a fringe activity for college students and artists;
2. families generally spent their evenings watching one screen, a TV, rather than their own individual computer screens;...

The Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh is well known for asking his students, "Why do you wash the dishes?"

If you think it is to get the dishes clean, you are mistaken.

The reason to wash the dishes is... to wash the dishes. It is to be fully...

About 2,000 of us came together recently to hear Eckhart Tolle speak at the Riverside Church in Upper Manhattan. Tolle's books have sold over ten million copies, and include such bestsellers as "The Power of Now" and "A New Earth." It was a...

Last month, 350 people gathered in Silicon Valley for the first annual Wisdom 2.0 conference. Speakers ranged from Huffington Post Senior Living Editor, Alana B. Elias Kornfeld; Twitter's Chief of Technology, Greg Pass; Google's Head of Personal Growth, Meng Tan, and many others.

Below is a 6-minute video of...

I just returned from a month offering mindfulness programs in Africa through the non-profit, Between Four Eyes. It may well be that in our increasingly hectic, interconnected world, it is becoming more difficult to survive without it. Mindfulness helps us, among other things, to do the following:

1)...

It seemed like a crazy idea when it popped into my mind two years ago: bring technology leaders together, along with people from wisdom traditions, to explore the intersection of the two.

This next weekend, however, in Silicon Valley for three days (April 30th - May 2nd) several hundred...

There once lived a young man who was very sad and unsatisfied. He went to visit a Zen temple, thinking this may help.

"You must know that I am quite useless," the boy explained upon meeting the Zen master of the temple. "I have never committed myself to anything for...

It's often the first question we ask ourselves when we wake up in the morning, "What am I going to do today?" So we make schedules, set up meetings, arrange phone conversations ... trying to make the best decisions on what to do with our time.

However, while what...

The words technology and wisdom are often not used in the same sentence. We have a "spiritual" life and our "connected" life and often there is not much overlap between the two.

There is a movement, however, to merge these two worlds, to find ways to engage with the...

It seems every generation has ideas of what will make them happy. For years it was a house with two kids, a white picket fence, and a four-car garage. Eventually, people realized the limits of this vision.

Today, it seems that the focus is increasingly on technology. Don't get...

There have always been shifts in the means of communication: the telephone created one-to-one communication possible, across the world. TV allowed for broadcasting to millions of people. The Internet gave us access to countless websites, but social media, and Twitter in particular, is in many ways helping to forge the...

"The person who can split an atom but has no love in his heart is a monster." - J Krishnamurti

There is a story that I have heard in a number of versions. The one for the Internet age goes like this:

A young woman once walked into...