Showing posts with label Maharishi University of Management (MUM). Show all posts
Showing posts with label Maharishi University of Management (MUM). Show all posts

Aug 26, 2019

CultNEWS101 Articles: 8/19/2019




Multilevel Marketing Companies, Maharishi University of Management, Mormon Church, Legal, Lev Tahor

" ... 'We were told very specifically, never post anything negative on your Facebook. No prayer requests, no talking about, I'm having trouble at this. No drama. Like you were supposed to filter your Facebook as though once you joined It Works all your problems went away,' Courtney, a former distributor for It Works, told Business Insider of the pressure she received from other distributors.

It Works is a multilevel marketing company that sells beauty, nutrition, and weight loss products through its network of distributors. It Works is best known for its Ultimate Body Applicators which people wrap around their stomachs or other areas in hopes of tightening, toning, and firming. Courtney says she first learned about this product and the opportunity to sell for It Works after she posted in a mom group about her "mom pouch" about three weeks after having a Cesarean section.

Because recruiting and motivating thousands of independent distributors is fundamental to how MLMs operate, it has caused some to liken these companies to cults.

"Multilevel marketing companies do have some similarities to cults," Jennifer Chatman, a professor at the Hass School of Business at UC Berkeley who researches, teaches, and consults on how companies leverage organizational culture to improve corporate performance, told Business Insider.

"What cults do is they try to recruit people based on relationships. They say, here's a person who is very similar to you and you should forge a relationship with them and they're going to be really nice to you," Chatman said."

"Maharishi University of Management reported 16 safety-related incidents involving students on or near campus or other MUM affiliated properties in 2017. Of the 2,795 colleges and universities that reported crime and safety data, 1,396 of them reported fewer incidents than this."

" ... Based on a student body of 1,530 that works out to about 10.46 reports per thousand students. In 2017, 1,454 colleges and universities reported fewer incidents per thousand students than did MUM."

" ... Crime and safety incidents fall into four broad categories. Disciplinary actions represented 25.0% of all incidents. Arrests related to possession represented none of all incidents. Violence against women represented 43.8% of all incidents. Arrests for major crimes represented 31.2% of all incidents."

" ... Maharishi University of Management reported 16 safety-related incidents involving students while on campus in 2017. Of the 2,795 colleges and universities that reported crime and safety data, 1,475 of them reported fewer incidents than this."

" ... Based on a student body of 1,530 that works out to about 10.46 reports per thousand students. In 2017, 1,577 colleges and universities reported fewer incidents per thousand students than did MUM."

" ... Disciplinary actions represented 25.0% of all on-campus incidents. Arrests related to possession represented none of all on-campus incidents. Violence against women represented 43.8% of all on-campus incidents. Arrests for major crimes represented 31.2% of all on-campus incidents."

Campus crime is greater at MUM than in other colleges. And, 48% of the crimes are crimes against women- higher than the national average.

"A federal lawsuit sure to get attention in Utah claims that the "Mormon Corporate Empire" has driven worshipers to existential crises, suicide, anxiety and depression by peddling a "scheme of lies" centered on the  religion's creation and its scriptures, a onetime member claims.

Laura Gaddy on Monday filed a scathing, 75-page class action against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Represented by Salt Lake City attorney Kay Burningham, Gaddy claims the church, which claimed 16 million members worldwide in 2018, twisted "the foundational history of Mormonism" in a "fraudulent scheme perpetrated for generations."

"The material facts upon which Mormonism is based have been manipulated through intentional concealment, misrepresentation, distortion and or obfuscation by the [LDS] to contrive an inducement to faith in Mormonism's core beliefs," the complaint states."
"Four more alleged members of Lev Tahor, a fringe ultra-Orthodox sect, were indicted in New York for conspiring to kidnap two children from their mother and return them to their sect.

One of the men, Mordechay Malka, was arrested this week at Newark Liberty International Airport and remains in custody, the New York Post reported, citing the US Attorney's Office in Manhattan. Three others — Shmiel Weingarten, Yoil Weingarten and Yakov Weingarten — remain at large.

The charges unsealed Friday in White Plains come days after five leaders of the sect, who were arrested in December, were indicted on similar charges.

They are accused of participating in kidnapping two children — 14-year-old Yante Teller and her 12-year-old brother Chaim Teller."




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Nov 8, 2018

Ben Foster on Growing Up in a Cult and Finding Happiness: ‘I Feel Really Alive’


The ‘Leave No Trace’ star on how living in the woods, becoming a father, and finally embracing his ‘strange’ upbringing in a Transcendental Meditation community changed his life.

Kevin Fallon
November 8, 2018
11.08.18 4:58 AM ET

Ben Foster may be the first actor to actively, excitedly delete his own lines from a script.

He and director Debra Granik went through the Leave No Trace screenplay “compulsively” before the film’s damp shoot in the forests of Eagle Fern Park outside of Portland, Oregon, and put a red line through anything his character didn’t need to say. That character, Will, is a war veteran suffering from crippling PTSD that moves him to strip his life of all belongings, luxuries, and erroneous speech while raising his young daughter Tom (Thomasin McKenzie) off the grid, alone in the woods.

During prep Foster pointed out a key line in the script to Granik, who famously directed Jennifer Lawrence to her first Oscar nomination in 2010’s Winter’s Bone. Will and Tom are at the grocery store and Tom wants to buy a candy bar. “Is it a want or a need?” he asks her. “I said, that is the key to Will,” Foster remembers.

When we meet with Foster in early November, he’s doing a short sprint of press urging awards consideration for Leave No Trace, which was released this summer to raves, especially for Foster’s quiet yet seismic performance as a father caught in between his trauma-mandated lifestyle and doing what is best for his daughter. The script, even before he and Granik went at it with a hacksaw, was sparse. We laugh about the rare actor’s humility to prefer a performance given in silent stares and body language, rather than big dialogue moments.

But it also speaks to how much Foster has learned after two decades in the business. He knows what’s going to work.

“If Thom and I are listening to each other physically then maybe we could get away without have that third-act monologue,” he says. “When the tear drops at just the right point and it zooms in with the score. Maybe we don’t need that. Let’s see what we can get away with. And everyone was game.”
Not that Foster hasn’t performed those monologues before, or, as he says, won’t “climb that mountain joyously” again in the future. He’s had a career that’s spanned TV shows (Flash Forward, Six Feet Under) and big-screen blockbusters (X-Men: The Last Stand). He’s honed a reputation in recent years for a certain intensity—and intense commitment—yielding standout performances in Hell or High Water, The Messenger, 3:10 to Yuma and Ain’t Them Bodies Saints.

He’s the kind of actor who’s remained a tantalizing enigma while racking up a long resume, in the tradition of the business’s most appreciated “serious actors.” It’s not that he hasn’t been in the news, be it for his personal life—he was engaged, twice, to Robin Wright; now he’s married to Laura Prepon—or, more often, making headlines for the extreme method preparation he’s done for roles. He notoriously took performance-enhancing drugs to play Lance Armstrong in The Program, drilled out his own tooth for Hell or High Water, ate handfuls of dirt while shooting Lone Survivor, and slept on the streets before playing a homeless man in Rampart.

True to form, he actually built the camp his character lives in for Leave No Trace. Before filming he learned it all: how to gather water; how to make a fire pit; how to “range out,” which is finding resources for edible food; and how to read the birds, because, he says, “they are the gossips of the forest—they know what’s going on.”

The truth is that there’s something that feels different about Leave No Trace, both from an outsider’s purview and to Foster himself—that feels special, like it’s a moment.

In a piece timed to the film’s July release, Vulture wondered if the movie was “our first look at the real Ben Foster,” going so far as to ask if he’s “the best actor who’s never been nominated for an Oscar?” But it goes beyond a remarkable performance. The making of this film was more personal for the 38-year-old actor than most, if not all, of his earlier projects.

The opportunity to continue to explore how the trauma of war affects veterans was important to him, continuing what “felt like a triptych, or the way that some artists have periods musically or painterly” after playing military men in The Messenger, Lone Survivor, Rampart and on stage in A Streetcar Named Desire.
Committing to this character of a survivalist living in the forest triggered a bit of reflection of his time growing up in rural Iowa, where his parents raised him in a Transcendental Meditation community. It’s an upbringing he describes as “naturally strange” and has had a complicated, but ultimately formative impact on him. But it’s also one that informed his love for being outdoors “near the trees,” which he relished while filming.

Most powerfully, he found out that he and Prepon would be expecting their first child together right before shooting. Ella was born soon after Leave No Trace was released.

“It changed everything,” he says. “Or it simplified everything. Distilled everything is probably the word.” He says the timing of the project couldn’t have been better. Prepon went with him to Oregon for the shoot, though, “my wife doesn’t dig the rain,” he laughs. “She’s like, get us the fuck out of here. It’s beautiful, but it’s gloomy.”

Her presence, and that of the daughter they were expecting, became a part of his process while shooting. “I would put my hands on my wife’s big belly at night and feel our daughter kicking little kicks through her skin,” he says. “We actually had a device to put up so we could hear her heartbeat. We would listen to that before going to bed. Then in the morning I would get up early, go to the rainy woods and watch this being, this young woman [McKenzie’s character] find her own way and be so impressed by that.”

Granik does many things masterfully with her direction of Leave No Trace—channeling Will’s private feelings as he struggles through how to raise his daughter chief among them. But there’s something visceral in how she telegraphs the waterlogged chill of life in the Oregon forests. You feel the coldness when you watch. The extreme elements are almost tangible. For Foster, though, they actually were. It was freeing.

“I really have found great healing with the trees,” he says. He and Prepon currently live in Manhattan. He shudders when remembering a former life, more than 10 years ago, living in what he calls “The Other Place”—Los Angeles. “When I lived in The Other Place, I would have moments where I feel that I have to get out and it was always with one idea, which is go north,” he says. “I need to be around a tree. So I’d find myself needing a drive at 2:30 in the morning. Just jump in the car and go and end up in Big Sur or Marin near woods, and just go be with them.”

A brief Wikipedia factoid mentions that Foster was born in Boston, but moved with his family to “rural Iowa” when he was 4 years old after their home was robbed. We wondered how that upbringing contributed to that sense of security he had in nature, and his relationship to Leave No Trace and understanding of Will.

“It informs work in the way that I like big open spaces,” he says. “I like being near the water. I like being near trees.” But more surprisingly, he explains that his time in Fairfield actually helped him understand a different part of Will’s experience: being devout to beliefs or a practice that others have a hard time wrapping their heads around or are unable to understand. For Will, it’s raising a daughter in wilderness, cut off from society; for Foster, it’s being raised in a community described as “America’s Transcendental Meditation Mecca.”

“It’s a curious town that deserves more attention and longer conversation, which is based on the Transcendental Meditation community that my parents were involved in,” he says. “I don’t talk a lot about it in the press.” It’s true. He and Prepon, who has been linked to Scientology, are consistently private about their beliefs. “But you’re asking.”

Back on the East Coast, his father was a teacher in TM and his mother was a receptionist. “They were like, there’s this town that is going to raise evolved children and meditate twice a day, this old technique, and it’s going to be called Fairfield,” Foster says. So at age 4, Foster started meditating. He says it was a normal school, save for the 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the afternoon marked for silent meditation.

“There were some things that were naturally strange,” he says. “Culty, for sure.” He stopped practicing at one point as an adult, partly as rebellion, partly because he didn’t enjoy waking up before dawn. But now he’s back to taking that 20 minutes in the morning “of centering, so I can just hear my thoughts during the day.”

He understands that when you talk about it casually that “it sounds spooky,” and could be perceived as wacky. But he turns it back on me, and asks if there’s anything I do to clear my head during the day, like exercise. Sure, sometimes I run. That’s meditative, he says.

“I think that anybody who has a practice, there’s enough science behind that to say it’s good for you and it feels good and it’s restorative,” he says. “In a very crazy world with a lot of false urgency and manufactured momentum, you can get quiet inside and practice that, be it sports or walking, drawing, something—breathing, practicing mindfulness, whatever your deal is. I think it’s a great thing. So I take that that’s what I think about for Fairfield.”

After Leave No Trace, he was able to spend a year and a half at home raising Ella, changing diapers, and being a dad. When we finish talking, he’s going to go home to spend some time with his family before leaving the next day to go to Prague, where he’s shooting a big-budget project called Medieval. But he says he finally feels settled, and grateful for all of it.

“It’s really nice to miss somebody,” he says. “I miss my family when I’m not with them. I feel pretty settled. I think I was pretty ornery for a long time. You know, the young man disease of it all. I feel really alive right now, if that makes sense. It’s nice to have a job, but I do miss my family when I’m not with them. So today feels really good. Back to hard tomorrow.”

TRANSCENDENTAL MEDITATION Related Articles 




https://www.thedailybeast.com/ben-foster-on-being-raised-in-a-cult-and-finding-happiness-i-feel-really-alive
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Jun 12, 2017

How a tiny town in Iowa became 'Silicorn Valley'

Young male Indian priests known as "pandits" stand by a gateway arch in Vedic City
John Greenfield
Chicago Reader
May 31, 2017

The club car of Amtrak's California Zephyr was full of Amish families happily and loudly playing Uno as the train rolled west toward the Mississippi. I was heading to Fairfield, Iowa, a town of about 10,000 that's been called the world's largest training center for Transcendental Meditation, a form of silent mantra meditation with an estimated five million practitioners worldwide. I was visiting a buddy from Chicago whose life partner grew up in the TM movement in Fairfield. They'd recently moved into a big house in the woods a few miles from the blissful burg to raise their young sons near family and escape the big-city grind.

As the Amish folk slapped down their cards, I read up on the history of TM, a similarly back-to-basics spiritual movement, and how rural southeast Iowa came to be its American educational headquarters. In the mid-20th century, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi pioneered the technique of meditating twice a day for about 20 minutes while sitting with eyes closed, silently focusing on a mantra. In the 1960s devotees famously included the Beatles.

In 1974 the holy man's Maharishi International University bought the Fairfield campus of Parsons College, which had gone bankrupt and shut down the previous year. Now called the Maharishi University of Management, the school requires students to study TM and offers degrees in Ayurvedic medicine, organic agriculture, and "Maharishi Vedic Science," which is described as "the science and technology of consciousness."

In the decades since then, formerly struggling Fairfield has been transformed as well-heeled urban professionals settled in the area seeking enlightenment. While small-town Iowa has generally lost population in recent decades, Fairfield's population rose by 14 percent between 1970 and 2015. A 2009 study from the University of Iowa's Community Vitality Center found that $250 million had been invested in 50 different Fairfield companies since 1990, including communications, manufacturing, and tech businesses. Accordingly, the area is nicknamed "Silicorn Valley." A typical local enterprise is Sky Factory, a company with about 40 workers that makes windows and ceiling panels showing seaside views or blue skies, used to improve morale for people stuck inside. Artist Bill Witherspoon founded Sky Factory in Fairfield in 2002 in order to support his family and TM practice.

Thanks to this entrepreneurial spirit, plus the discretionary income of Fairfield's many affluent residents and visitors, the downtown is lined with handsomely refurbished buildings and an impressive array of bookstores, cafes, boutiques, and art galleries. There's a surprising variety of international restaurants, offering everything from Caribbean to Vietnamese to Ethiopian to, naturally, Indian cuisine.

In the past, the relationship between blue-collar Fairfield natives and the TM devotees was a bit uneasy, according to a 2008 Wall Street Journal article. Some locals were skeptical in the early 1980s when the university built two giant gold domes on campus for the "roos" (a townie nickname, short for "gurus") to meditate in. Another townie nickname for the newcomers is "floaters," a reference to the advanced meditation technique of "yogic flying," in which practitioners in the lotus position hop, froglike, on cushions and, with practice, can supposedly defy gravity. (Some TM followers consider this term highly offensive.)

Relations have thawed over the years, as demonstrated by the 2001 election of current Fairfield mayor and meditator Ed Malloy—the natives apparently decided that a rising tide (or floating meditator) lifts all boats. The gravel-voiced locally born folksinger Greg Brown summed up the townie perspective nicely in his 2000 song "Fairfield," which is wildly popular among TM folks:

If the floaters come to your town, your town, your town,
Floaters come to your town,
You might wanna stick around.

They meditate and get focused, focused, focused,
They do a little hocus-pocus,
And the money just rolls in.

They know all 'bout computers, your New Age, and foreign food,
They do all that real good,
Fairfield's where to go.

Interestingly, Brown's song is one case in which "floater" isn't considered to be a slur—the tune's wildly popular among TM folks. (Residents of the nearby Quad Cities are probably less enthused about the song's description of the Quads as being "full of dope fiends, blown whores, methamphetamines.")

Four hours after leaving Chicago, the Zephyr pulled into Mount Pleasant, the location of the Amtrak station nearest to Fairfield. I hauled my bicycle off the train and rode 25 miles through a nasty rainstorm to my buddy's country home.

After such a journey, the large wooden house was an oasis of tranquility. Perhaps that was partly due to the fact that my friend bought it from a TM practitioner and, like most roo homes, it was designed using the feng shui-like principals of Maharishi Vastu Architecture. For example, the front door of a Vastu home is always pointed east to greet the sunrise, and the roof holds a golden ornament called a kalash, shaped like a Hershey's Kiss, that's supposed attract positive energy.

On a tour of several landmarks the next day, we stopped first at Abundance Ecovillage, a cluster of 14 Vastu homes that are almost completely off the grid. Developer Michael Halvelka, who moved to the area from Texas to get deeper into his meditation practice, explained that the houses are heated through passive solar energy. Propane gas, used for cooking, is the only nonsustainable energy source. Water is collected by roof catchments, filtered in a cistern, and sent back to the homes. Sewage is processed via a vertical-flow wetland, where it's pumped repeatedly through a gravel bed filled with bacteria and fungi.

Next we headed to the university campus to tour one of its two 25,000-square-foot domes. Over a thousand roos from around the region drive to these structures daily to meditate at 7:30 AM and 5 PM, which creates Fairfield's equivalents to rush hour.

Our guide was Margi Gunn, a sprightly senior who volunteers with the Ideal Community Group civic organization. "Transcendental Meditation is a very easy, simple technique that settles the mind down," she explained. "We don't sit there contemplating our belly buttons."

After we removed our shoes, Gunn showed us around the women's dome, a vast space capped by a roof that resembles a wooden geodesic dome. The floor is lined with foam-rubber cushions to facilitate yogic flying.

Gunn said she's never actually witnessed a roo become airborne. "But you experience pure consciousness, and apparently if you sustain that you start to hover." Friends once told her she'd levitated during one particularly euphoric session. "They said I was high enough to drive a Volkswagen under me."

From there, it was off to Maharishi Vedic City, a separate town that TM practitioners founded a few miles northwest of Fairfield in 2001. Currently home to fewer than 300 residents, the village includes 200 or so Vastu buildings, among them a hotel and a spa. The town is organized around the Vedic principles, ancient Indian rules for promoting health, wealth, and happiness. In addition to meditation and Vastu architecture, these guidelines endorse natural healing and natural foods. As a result, a 2002 ordinance prohibits the sale of nonorganics within the village's borders.

Our first stop in Vedic City was the Vedic Observatory, a ring of ten massive white concrete-and-marble astronomical instruments. Creator Tim Fitz-Randolph claims the implements can precisely track the movements of heavenly bodies, and that the data can be used to promote inner harmony.

Afterward, Gunn took us to a private gated compound at the northwest corner of Vedic City with rows of barrackslike structures. These formerly housed about a thousand "pandits" (pronounced pundits), young male Indian priests who were flown to the U.S. starting in 2006 and paid a small stipend to meditate and chant 40 hours a week in an attempt to foster world peace.

Gunn said fewer than 25 pandits, who are still paid for their services, remain in Vedic City. She blamed their diminishing numbers on issues that arose when some of the priests "went rogue" after their visas expired instead of catching flights home from O'Hare. Gunn presumes many disappeared into the city to find work in Chicago's Indian-owned businesses. "Who can blame them?" she said. "They can make much more here than back in India."

In 2014 the university decided to send home an older pandit who'd encouraged his proteges to defect, Gunn said. According to a Des Moines Register report, administrators asked a sheriff to be present while the priest was removed, but the plan backfired. Up to 80 pandits swarmed and trashed the lawman's truck—highly ironic behavior for men who'd made it their mission to promote nonviolence.

In the wake of the "Pandit Rebellion," there were calls for more transparency in the program, including from Fairfield mayor Ed Malloy, and almost all of the priests returned to India. Currently there's an effort to rebuild Vedic City's pandit population, but Gunn said it's being hampered by Trump's immigration policies.

This tumultuous recent history wasn't in evidence during a recent pandit chanting session. An audience of older people, almost all of them white, settled into comfy red seats in a colorful meeting hall with a Plexiglas screen to separate the crowd from the priests. It wasn't long before about ten white-clad Indian men filed into the room and sat on the floor, chanting in a pleasantly musical manner as incense was lit and small bells were rung. Some of them placed flowers and fruit on an altar with images of Krishna and the Maharishi, and one man rubbed some type of white powder over a large, black, egg-shaped stone.

Feeling sufficiently blissed-out, I departed during an intermission and returned to Fairfield. Pedaling over the green, rolling farmland, I pondered the impact of Transcendental Meditation on the area.

While TM isn't the solution to triggering world peace and curing all the world's ills, as the Maharishi's followers often suggest, it does appear to be an effective mental health tool for many folks. The David Lynch Foundation, founded by the movie and television director, provides free meditation training to veterans, prison inmates, and at-risk youth; a handful of Chicago Public Schools have adopted DLF's Quiet Time program for students.

Like most relatively young spiritual movements, TM has its share of critics who paint it as a manipulative cult. For example, in Claire Hoffman's 2016 memoir Greetings From Utopia Park: Surviving a Transcendent Childhood, the Fairfield native argues that the Maharishi's consciousness movement has evolved into a bottom-line-driven organization that pushes its followers to spend their hard-earned money on expensive classes, products, and housing.

After researching and touring Fairfield, and hearing from my friend about his partner's childhood (she attended the Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment from kindergarten through 12th grade), I left the town with a generally positive impression. The pandit rebellion aside, the Transcendental Meditation movement seems to have had an overall beneficial effect on the area. As a financially thriving, sustainability oriented, cosmopolitan place, Fairfield suggests a possible path forward for other midwestern communities facing the challenges of the new information economy. Could be Greg Brown was right when he sang, "If the floaters come to your town . . . you might want to stick around."

https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/fairfield-iowa-transcendental-meditation-silicorn-valley-mantra/Content?oid=26743992
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Sep 16, 2016

Lean Accounting Awards from the Lean Enterprise Institute Recognize the Research of Professor and Student

The annual award fosters the adoption of lean accounting principles and experiments in higher education and business.

Cambridge, MA (PRWEB) September 16, 2016

A professor and a graduate student at the Maharishi University of Management (MUM) in Fairfield, IA, have won 2016 Excellence in Lean Accounting Awards from the nonprofit Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI).

Professor Andrew Bargerstock, PhD, director of the MBA program and chair of the Accounting Department at MUM, and PhD student Ye Shi won the awards for their work developing case studies illustrating how to "kaizen" or continuously improve accounts payable processes using lean management principles. Both are repeat winners.

Their article "Leaning Away from Standard Costing?" was published in the June issue of Strategic Finance.

Bargerstock first received the professor's Excellence in Lean Accounting Award in 2009 for teaching lean principles to the Institute of Management Accountants and for developing a post-graduate lean accounting certificate program at the university. Shi, a recipient of the 2013 student award for developing lean accounting training materials, currently is researching why U.S. manufacturers that use lean principles in production continue to use traditional accounting practices.

The awards were presented at the annual Lean Accounting Summit, August 24-26, in San Antonio, TX, attended by about 150 finance and operations managers from manufacturing and service companies.

Change Cost Accounting

"The lean accounting movement seeks a shift from traditional cost accounting practices to methods that accurately measure and motivate companies implementing lean management principles," said Jim Huntzinger, president and founder of conference organizer Lean Frontiers. "The shift is needed because traditional cost accounting does not accurately reflect the performance gains made when companies launch a lean transformation."

For example, traditional financial statements do not reveal reductions in inventory or cycle times, or new-found capacity in operations produced by the transformation. Traditional accounting practices also motivate the wrong behaviors in companies implementing lean principals. For instance, conventional efficiency metrics can motivate management to create excess inventory.

"As a nonprofit research, training, and publishing company, the Lean Enterprise Institute's mission is essentially education," said Chet Marchwinski, LEI communications director, who presented the awards. "So it's very fitting that LEI support and recognize professors and students who are advancing lean thinking and practice."

He said the goal of the award program is to bring the principles and practices of lean accounting into higher education, business schools, and, ultimately, companies.

The award recognizes teachers and students who attended a previous Lean Accounting Summit then applied what they learned. Winners are selected by a panel of lean accounting thought leaders. The nonprofit Lean Education Advancement Foundation raises, manages, and distributes scholarship money so professors and students can attend the Summit.

About the Lean Enterprise Institute
Lean Enterprise Institute Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in Cambridge, MA, makes things better through lean research, training, publishing, and events. Founded in 1997 by management expert James P. Womack, PhD, LEI supports other lean initiatives such as the Lean Global Network, the Lean Education Academic Network, and the Healthcare Value Network. Learn more at lean dot org.

About Lean Frontiers

Since 2005 Lean Frontiers has organized tightly focused events aimed at helping organizational silos understand how they can support lean transformations across the organization. The company produces lean events for Accounting, HR, Sales and Marketing, IT, Supply Chain and Logistics, Product Development, and Business Coaching. Learn more at: http://www.leanfrontiers.com/

For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2016/09/prweb13683920.htm

http://www.benzinga.com/pressreleases/16/09/p8464562/lean-accounting-awards-from-the-lean-enterprise-institute-recognize-the
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Jun 11, 2016

In this portrait of TM, Utopia hard to find

Terry Byrne
USA TODAY
June 11, 2016

Greetings from Utopia Park: Surviving a Transcendent Childhood, by  Claire Hoffman, (Harper)

Much has been written about Catholic guilt or lapsed faith, Jews rejecting traditions, the brainwashing of disaffected Muslim youth. As children, we have little choice in our indoctrination.

But imagine being raised by a consciousness-raising hippie learning to levitate.

Claire Hoffman’s gripping memoir, Greetings From Utopia Park (Harper, 262 pp., *** out of four stars), is a deep dive into mysticism and skepticism. The well-credentialed journalist with a master’s in religion received her first mantra at age 3 and estimates spending 2,200 hours practicing Transcendental Meditation as a direct descendant of one of founder Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s pupils.

Hoffman grew up in Utopia Park, essentially a trailer park in the shadow of the Maharishi’s glittering university in Fairfield, Iowa, where thousands flocked for enlightenment in the 1980s. She attended its insular school, where meditation was graded, clothes in colors darker than a leaf were discouraged, and the top achievement was "yogic flying" (no wires).

A rigorous storyteller, Hoffman weaves a world that's part Harry Potter, part Tommy’s Holiday Camp by The Who (magician Doug Henning pitches a $1.5 billion Veda Land theme park) and a whiff of Dirty Dancing. The plot's fit for cinema: After her playful playwright-alcoholic father abandons the family, her stoic mom relies on art, admirers and blind faith for survival. But “Nature Support” (money) is elusive in the meditators' cultish caste system. Their “Heaven on Earth” proves a minefield of anxiety, deception, drugs, possible child molesters.

And rebellion. Hoffman's idol wasn’t the yogi but Marilyn Monroe. When Mom leaves her and her brother alone in their on-campus trailer to practice advanced techniques in the nearby "domes," the sibs get busy "jacking up the air-conditioning, making ... a forbidden non-Ayurvedic snack and turning on a (racy) movie.”

Immersed 24/7, the young Hoffman felt branded by TM. She was an outsider among both taunting “townies” and her "guru" peers because of nagging doubts. That dissociation invigorates her writing. She goes from picturing “the whole planet becoming like a Care Bears cartoon” to a near-bursting of the bliss bubble.

While exposing the machinations of TM’s “man behind the curtain,” Hoffman taps her inner power — like Dorothy in Oz — to find her own way “om.”

Hoffman's tale also gets trippy. She decodes The Beatles’ Sexy Sadie — first titled “Maharishi,” written by a disillusioned John, censored by die-hard George. She describes Maharishi’s wealthy inner circle, his “108s” (108 is a sacred Hindu number), then I check the page number: 108. In a tough test of the tenets of her upbringing, she takes readers along for a levitation lesson.

And what about those mantras? Is it a myth that each one is unique? What if they're all the same?

The suspense nearly kills.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2016/06/11/greetings-from-utopia-park-surviving-a-transcendent-childhood-claire-hoffman-book-review/85366314/
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Apr 13, 2016

The new BoG boss – What you should know about him

Ghana Web
April 6, 2016

Nasiru Issahaku BoG Governo
Nasiru Issahaku BoG Governo
Dr. Abdul-Nashiru Issahaku is an International Development Economist with several years of experience in economic policy management and development, having worked with reputable international and local institutions including the World Bank as a Senior Public Sector Specialist; the African Development Bank as a Principal Governance Expert; the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa as a Development Management Officer; the Canadian International Development Agency as a Socio-Economic Advisor and Project Coordinator; and the National Development Planning Commission, Ghana as a Senior Planning Analyst.

 Before his appointment as Governor of the Bank of Ghana, he was the Second Deputy Governor and Executive Board member with oversight responsibilities of nine departments including Economics, Statistics, Finance, Legal, Banking Supervision and Financial Stability.

 He is Chairman of the Investment Management Committee of the Bank and a member of the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee.

 Dr. Issahaku is a member of Ghana’s Economic Management Team. He chairs the Finance and Administration (F&A) Committee of the Ghana Cocoa Marketing Company and he is the Commissioner and Chairman of the F&A Committee of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

 He was previously the Chief Executive Officer of the Export Development and Agriculture Investment Fund, which he restructured and helped restore to operational effectiveness before his appointment to the central bank in 2013.

 Dr. Abdul-Nashiru Issahaku has a Doctorate in International Affairs and Development from Clark Atlanta University, MBA in Finance and Strategic Management from Maharishi University of Management, USA, and Bachelors in Business Administration from the International Islamic University, Malaysia.

 He has a certificate in Public Financial Management from Harvard University Kennedy School. Dr. Issahaku has effectively managed and supervised complex projects of international proportions.

 He was the Task Manager for Gambia’s Economic Management Programme (2004 – 2009). He also spearheaded the Institutional Budget Support Programme for Tanzania (2005 – 2009). Dr. Issahaku loves writing and has authored several publications including his much-acclaimed research work on the “Political Economy of Economic Reforms in Ghana”, “Capacity Building for Good Governance and Poverty Reduction in Parliamentary Systems” and “Human Rights, Economic Development and Democracy”.

 From the Royal Zambang family of Kunbungu, Dr. Issahaku started his education in Tamale and attended Tamale Secondary School where he obtained his GCE ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels.

 He was a member of the school’s Debate Society and a Senior House Prefect. He was a known sportsman at the school and in the Northern Region where he was once the Table Tennis Champion. Dr. Issahaku is married and has four children.

 http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/business/The-new-BoG-boss-What-you-should-know-about-him-428668
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Apr 9, 2016

How meditating in a tiny Iowa town helped me recover from war

Supriya Venkatesan
Washington Post
April 6, 2016


I didn't know how to be a civilian after six difficult years in the military.

Supriya Venkatesan is a veteran of the U.S. Army and Operation Iraqi Freedom. She is a freelance writer based in Princeton, N.J.

At 19, I enlisted in the U.S. Army and was deployed to Iraq. I spent 15 months there — eight at the U.S. Embassy, where I supported the communications for top generals. I understand that decisions at that level are complex and layered, but for me, as an observer, some of those actions left my conscience uneasy.

To counteract my guilt, I volunteered as a medic on my sole day off at Ibn Sina Hospital, the largest combat hospital in Iraq. There I helped wounded Iraqi civilians heal or transition into the afterlife. But I still felt lost and disconnected. I was nostalgic for a young adulthood I never had. While other 20-somethings had traditional college trajectories, followed by the hallmarks of first job interviews and early career wins, I had spent six emotionally numbing years doing ruck marches, camping out on mountaintops near the demilitarized zone in South Korea and fighting someone else’s battle in Iraq.

During my deployment, a few soldiers and I were awarded a short resort stay in Kuwait. There, I had a brief but powerful experience in a meditation healing session. I wanted more. So when I returned to the United States at the end of my service, I headed to Iowa.

Forty-eight hours after being discharged from the Army, I arrived on campus at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa. MUM is a small liberal arts college, smack dab in the middle of the cornfields, founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the guru of transcendental meditation. I joked that I was in a quarter-life crisis, but in truth my conscience was having a crisis. Iraq left me with questions about the world and grappling with my own mortality and morality.

Readjustment was a sucker punch of culture shock. While on a camping trip for incoming students, I watched girls curl their eyelashes upon waking up and burn incense and bundles of sage to ward off negative energy. I was used to being in a similar field environment but with hundreds of guys who spit tobacco, spoke openly of their sexual escapades and played video games incessantly. Is this what it looked like to be civilian woman? Is this what spirituality looked like?

Mediation was mandatory for students on campus, and the rest of the town was composed mainly of former students or longtime followers of the maharishi. Shortly after arriving, I completed an advanced meditator course and began meditating three hours a day — a habit that is still with me five years later. Every morning, I went to a dome where students, teachers and the people of Fairfield gathered to practice meditation. In the evening, we met again for another round of meditation. During my time in Fairfield, even Oprah came to meditate in the dome.

I was incredibly lucky to have supportive mentors in the Army, but Fairfield embraced me in a maternal way. I cried for hours during post-meditation reflection. I released the trauma that is familiar to every soldier who has gone to war but is rarely discussed or even acknowledged. I let go, and I blossomed. I was emancipated of the unhealthy habits of binge-drinking and co-dependency in romantic interludes, as well as a fear that I didn’t know controlled me.

Suicide and other byproducts of post-traumatic stress disorder plague the military. In 2010, a veteran committed suicide every 65 minutes. In 2012, there were more deaths by suicide than by combat. In Iraq, one of my neighbors took his M16, put it in his mouth and shot himself. Overwhelmed with PTSD-related issues from back-to-back deployments and with no clear solution to the problem, in 2012, the Defense Department began researching meditation practices to see whether they would affect PTSD. The first study of meditation and the military population, done with Vietnam veterans in 1985, had shown 70 percent of veterans finding relief, but meditation never gained in popularity nor was it offered through veterans’ services. Even in 2010, when I learned TM, the military was alien to the concept.

But today, the results of the studies showcase immense benefits for veterans. According to the journal Military Medicine, meditation has shown a 40 percent to 55 percent reduction in symptoms of PTSD and depression among veterans. Furthermore,  studies show that meditation correlates with a 42 percent reduction in insomnia and a 25 percent reduction in the stress hormone cortisol in the veteran population. To complement meditation, yoga has also been embraced as a tool for treatment by the military. With the growing acceptance of holistic approaches, psychological wounds are beginning to heal.

The four-day training course to learn TM is now available at every Veterans Affairs facility for those who have PTSD or traumatic brain injury. Even medical staff and counselors who help veterans at the VA are offered training in both TM and mindfulness meditation. Additionally, Norwich University, the oldest military college in the country, has done extensive research on TM and incoming cadets, and many military installations have integrated meditation programs into their mental health services. When I had first learned to meditate, many of my active-duty friends found it a bit too crunchy. But with the military’s recent efforts at researching meditation and funding it for all veterans, the stigma is gone, and my battle buddies see meditation as a tool for building resilience.

For me, meditation has created small but significant changes. One day, while going for a walk downtown, I stopped and patted a dog. A few minutes later, I came to a halt. I realized what I had done. While in Iraq, during a month when we were under heavy mortar attack, a bomb-sniffing K-9 had become traumatized and attacked me. This, coupled with a life-long fear of dogs, had left me guarded around the canines. I touched the scar on my elbow from where the K-9 had latched on and could no longer find the fear that had been there. Soon I was shedding all the things that held me back from living my life in an entirely unforeseen way.

For the first time in my life, I found forgiveness for those who had wronged me in the past. I literally stopped to smell the flowers on my way to work every day. And I smiled. All the freaking time. I even felt smarter. Research shows that meditation raises IQ. I’m not surprised. After graduation, I went on to complete my master’s at Columbia University.

Fairfield is also home to generations of Iowans who are born there, brought up there and die there. Many of these blue-collar Midwesterners have had animosity toward the meditators. Locals felt as if their town had been overtaken. They preferred steak to quinoa, beers at the bar to yoga and pickup trucks to carbon-reducing bicycles. And with MUM having a student body from more than 100 countries, the ethnic differences were a challenge. However, things are changing. Meditators and townspeople now fill less stereotypical roles. And with the economic boom that meditating entrepreneurs have provided the town, the differences are easier to ignore.

It was strange for me to live removed from the local Iowans. When I went shopping at the only Walmart the town had, I’d see the “Wall of Heroes” — a wall of photos of veterans from Fairfield. One day, I noticed a familiar face — a soldier from my last assignment. Fairfield and other socioeconomically depressed areas are where most military recruits come from. Here I was living among them, but not moving in step with them. Having that synchronous experience made me come back full circle. When I had first learned to meditate, my teacher had asked me what my goal was. I told her, “I want to be in the world, but not of it.” And that’s exactly what I got.

For me, this little Iowan town provided a place of respite and rejuvenation. It was easy for me to trade one lifestyle of order and discipline for another, and this provided me with nourishment and an understanding of self. Nowhere else in America can you find an entire town living and breathing the principles of Eastern mysticism. It goes way beyond taking a yoga class or going to the Burning Man festival. I continue my meditation practice and am grateful for the gifts it has provided me. But in the end, my time had come, and I had to leave. As residents would say, that was just my karma.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/04/06/how-meditating-in-a-tiny-iowa-town-helped-me-recover-from-war/
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