Topic:
The Space Between – Chaos to Clarity – Pico Iyer
In today’s hyper-connected business environment, the most powerful competitive advantage for CEOs isn’t speed or technology—it’s clarity of thought. Bestselling author Pico Iyer offers a counterintuitive approach to executive leadership drawn from his three decades of deliberate retreat and reflection. After a lifetime of navigating an intense pace across the globe, Pico reveals how strategic periods of silence and contemplation have enabled him to navigate life’s most challenging disruptions—from losing his home to fire to facing illness and uncertainty—with remarkable resilience and insight. These same practices offer transformative potential for today’s decision-makers.
For leaders facing unprecedented complexity, constant digital bombardment, and pressure for immediate results, Iyer presents a compelling case for deliberate disconnection as the pathway to superior leadership. He demonstrates how systematic retreat from noise creates the mental space for breakthrough thinking, revealing how the most successful leaders derive their strategic vision not from more information, but from deeper wisdom. Through powerful examples from both his personal journey and those of renowned business leaders, Iyer illustrates how cultivating this “inner boardroom” of quiet reflection enables executives to build organizational cultures that balance urgency with wisdom and transform personal resilience into institutional strength.
BIO:
Iyer has given four popular TED Talks over the past decade, which together earned over eleven million views. They present new perspectives on longing and belonging, wisdom, and our place in the busy world.
His book The Art of Stillness and accompanying TED Talk speak to the need to open up space in our crowded lives and remember what we care about most. He has spoken to audiences at Google, Coca-Cola, Fox Broadcasting, and the World Economic Forum in Davos, and universities including Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.
His books have been translated into 23 languages, and he has written liner notes for Leonard Cohen, a film script for Miramax, a libretto for a chamber orchestra, and the introductions to more than 90 other works. A regular essayist for more than thirty-five years for Time, The New York Times, Harper’s, National Geographic, Conde NastTraveler and more than 250 other periodicals worldwide, Iyer has reported extensively from more than 45 countries.
Set to publish in January 2025, his forthcoming book, Aflame: Learning from Silence, is a revelatory exploration of the clarity and calm that can be found in quiet retreat. For over three decades, Iyer has made over one hundred retreats to a small Benedictine hermitage high above the sea in Big Sur, California. While not a member of any religious group, he has found his life clarified and transformed by sitting in silence. Through many seasons at the monastery, even as his life is going through constant change and difficulty—from a house burning down, a parent dying, a daughter being diagnosed with cancer—Iyer chronicles wisdom from other non-monastics who have learned from adversity and inner stillness. In their starred review, Publishers Weekly noted Iyer “brilliantly illuminates philosophical insights about the nature of the self, the world, and how silence serves as a conduit between the two, often in elegant, evocative prose: at the monastery, ‘it’s as if a lens cap has come off and once the self is gone, the world can come flooding in, in all its wild immediacy.’ This is stunning.”