As a long-time yoga practitioner, I respect the power of balance and enjoy the journey navigating the magic of “balance” which is the key to many advanced yoga poses. I learned the principle of “find the right method, keep trying” after I made some “impossible” yoga poses with years of trying, and this inspires me to keep exploring the potential of my body, my life and my career. 

Balance is a business word too, as Dr. R Edward Freeman discusses in his Stakeholder Theory. Dr. Freeman is a professor at University of Virginia and is considered “The Father of Stakeholder Theory.” Freeman Stakeholder Theory has become a popular topic for corporate governance development in the past few decades along with the ESG advocacy. I attended Dr. Freeman’s session last summer at Harvard and will never forget his interesting personality and engaging speeches. As I prepared a podcast episode called “corporate purpose,” I watched Dr. Freeman’s Stakeholder Theory video today to inspire myself. A few points from his video caught my eyes again: 

• The controversy between business and ethics – business and ethics were not in the same category in academic studies many years ago
• The conflict of stakeholder interests and corporate social responsibility – stakeholder theory is all about business while corporate social responsibility is not about the business at all 
• The differentiation of stakeholders’ interests – different stakeholder’s interests are naturally different

However, in a model business world, companies learn to put ethics at the center of the business, corporations look after all stakeholders’ interests while taking care of social responsibility and businesses search for solutions to align all stakeholders’ interests. As Dr. Freeman summarized, the best way to align these conflicting interests is not through trade-offs, but by navigating the balance. Yes, the journey of navigation might take a long time, but that’s the best way to find the balance, just like making yoga poses.

Two weeks ago, my husband and I took a break and spent some time in the mountains. Having the opportunity to be close to nature, surrounded by trees, rocks, birds and squirrels is such an enjoyable experience. It gave us the ability to relax our muscles and souls after stress from work and the difficulties we all feel from the pandemic, and to search for work-life balance in this new norm. During our trip, I read a Harvard Business Review article titled In Praise of Extreme Moderation and written by Avivah Wittenberg-Cox. Avivah shares her interesting “extreme way” of looking for work-life balance. She also suggests periodically reviewing important pillars that we need to balance in our lives. I cannot agree more with Avivah that navigating our work-life balance is a process involving continuous renegotiation with ourselves and re-prioritizing those pillars. The same principle of balance applies again.

We can easily measure the outcome of balance in yoga practice by the success of our yoga poses. We might not be able to evaluate or even clearly define balance in Dr. Freeman’s Stakeholder Theory and in our work-life balance search. However, the beauty of the journey is the journey itself, during which we do accomplish great things. In my opinion, this is the power of balance!