Chade-Meng Tan

Google hired him as employee number 107, and for years afterward his business card read “Jolly Good Fellow,” a title he invented himself so his job description could officially state: enlighten minds, open hearts, create world peace. Few employment contracts read like that. Chade-Meng Tan spent close to fifteen years turning an engineering job at one of the world’s largest companies into a platform for Buddhist-inflected mindfulness teaching, and then, near the end of that run, an investigation into his own past conduct forced him out of the nonprofit he had built to carry the work forward. Neither half of that story cancels the other.

According to a 2012 profile in The New York Times, Tan joined Google in 2000 as its 107th hire. Fast Company, by contrast, dates his start to 1999; the record doesn’t resolve which is correct, and the gap is small enough not to matter much. Before Google he’d spent five years at Kent Ridge Digital Laboratories in Singapore, and before that he studied as an undergraduate at Nanyang Technological University. His first eight years at the company were unremarkable by Silicon Valley standards: mobile search, search quality, the kind of engineering work that doesn’t predict what followed at all.

Outside the office, though, Tan had trained as a Buddhist practitioner, and he’d started noticing something about the environment around him. The Times described Google’s Mountain View campus in 2012 as a place wrapped in toys, complete with an indoor treehouse, a volleyball court, beehives, heated toilet seats, and a yellow-brick road running through the grounds. Underneath those perks sat a pace that, according to employees the paper interviewed, could wear a person down if they didn’t find some way to cope. Blaise Pabon, an enterprise sales engineer at the company, told the Times exactly that. Larry Page, meanwhile, had promised publicly that Google would keep “a healthy disregard for the impossible.” The Times described Tan, then 41, as tall, thin, and soft-spoken; he set out to give people a way to survive that disregard without falling apart.

In 2006 he used Google’s “20% time” policy, the arrangement that let engineers spend one day in five on projects of their own choosing, to start building a course, as Business Insider later reported. He recruited an unusual mix of collaborators: a scientist from Stanford, several consultants, and Marc Lesser, a Zen teacher who also held an MBA and had run businesses of his own. What they built together, “Search Inside Yourself,” grounded itself in mindfulness and emotional intelligence, but the language stayed deliberately secular and evidence-driven. Engineers and scientists, Lesser later explained to Fast Company, are skeptics by temperament and won’t tolerate anything that sounds like religion. Five components of emotional intelligence organized the curriculum: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills, all rebranded internally as leadership competencies rather than spiritual ones. “I generally describe Search Inside Yourself as a leadership program that uses the tools of mindfulness and emotional intelligence, and that it’s based in science,” Lesser told Fast Company.

The first two-day course launched for Google employees in 2007, shaped, per the Times, with input from nine outside specialists in workplace mindfulness. Demand outpaced almost everything else Google offered. By 2012 it ranked among the most requested of the hundreds of free classes on campus, with waiting lists running for months; Fast Company later estimated roughly 1,500 Googlers enrolled annually, with thousands more in line for open seats. Internally, people just called it “the Zen of Google.” The New York Times put the story on the front page of its Sunday Business section that April. The idea traveled well beyond Mountain View.

By 2012, Tan and his collaborators had spun the program into an independent nonprofit, the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute. Its acronym, SIYLI, is pronounced “silly,” a joke Tan clearly relished. Marc Lesser took over as CEO. Peter Bostelmann, an SAP program engineer, sat through the course in December 2012 and came away persuaded enough to launch a comparable mindfulness effort at his own company. He told Fast Company the training taught people how to “navigate yourself as a human being and an employee and a leader,” and that in an industry where change never stops, it gave people tools “to handle change in a more skillful way.” Mindfulness had always felt like a private matter to Bostelmann; this course, he said, helped him “integrate it” into how he handled workplace conflict directly. His account matters because it’s one of the rare places in the record where an outside participant describes the actual experience of the course, not just its stated goals.

Google eventually gave Tan a title that matched what he’d become: Jolly Good Fellow, more court jester than executive, and it suited him well. He spent two years running the company’s Personal Growth function, a role that grew naturally out of the mindfulness program’s success. Visiting celebrities and politicians started getting photographed with him. ThinkProgress reported that a wall on the Mountain View campus, nicknamed “Meng’s Wall,” filled with photos of Tan alongside Barack Obama, Muhammad Ali, and Bill Murray. His 2012 book, also titled Search Inside Yourself, arrived as the internal course became public knowledge; it became a New York Times bestseller and drew endorsements from Jimmy Carter and the Dalai Lama. He delivered a TED talk at the United Nations and made public appearances beside the Dalai Lama and other Buddhist figures. By his mid-forties, he’d built something like an industry around teaching people to breathe with intention, and he’d done it from inside one of the most closely watched corporations on the planet. ThinkProgress later noted that his standing and visibility had also brought him a $7.5 million home in Santa Cruz, California, an odd detail to sit next to a curriculum built on letting go of craving.

There’s an uncomfortable symmetry in a company facing privacy investigations in one wing while teaching mindfulness in another, and that tension deserves to stay unresolved rather than smoothed over. Tan appears to have believed sincerely in what he was doing, and plenty of Google employees who went through the course say it genuinely helped them. But mindfulness cut loose from the tradition that produced it can bend to whatever an institution needs, becoming a private coping tool instead of a shared discipline aimed at something larger. Ron Purser, a management professor at San Francisco State University and author of McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality, made this case directly in an interview with The Nation: corporate mindfulness programs, he told reporter Zachary Siegel, tend to shift the source of stress away from precarious working conditions and onto the individual mind. “The onus is completely put on the individual to make the right lifestyle choices,” he said, adding that this framing downplays “the whole notion of the social and environmental context.” He named Search Inside Yourself specifically, dismissing it as “an amalgam of childish icebreakers, turn-to-your partner exercises, three-minute breathing meditations, and a hodgepodge of superficial materials on emotional intelligence.” Purser reserved his sharpest criticism for Jon Kabat-Zinn, the MIT-trained biomedical researcher who founded Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction in 1979 and gets much of the credit, deserved or not, for making mindfulness legible first to Western medicine and eventually to Western corporate boards. Kabat-Zinn himself said in a 2017 interview, “The whole idea was to transform and heal the world,” and then, “I know that sounds arrogant, but that was, in fact, the sense of it.” Tan’s course descended from that same lineage: secularized once by Kabat-Zinn, then secularized again for an engineering culture wary of anything resembling religion. It’s a hard judgment to level against a program many people credit with changing how they work. Both readings can hold at once.

Tan left Google on October 30, 2015, according to a post on his own blog, saying he wanted to devote himself entirely to spreading mindfulness and building peace. Retirement, for him, wasn’t quiet. With Marc Lesser and Philippe Goldin, a researcher who’d helped ground the program scientifically, he cofounded the next phase of SIYLI’s work, per ThinkProgress. He also became co-chair of One Billion Acts of Peace, a campaign launched by the PeaceJam Foundation and its cofounders Dawn Engle and Ivan Suvanjieff, aimed at inspiring a billion acts of peace worldwide by 2019. Business Insider reported that in January 2015 the campaign received a Nobel Peace Prize nomination signed by six laureates, naming Engle and Suvanjieff alongside Tan. On his own website, Tan described the news leaving him “shell-shocked (in a good way),” then “over the moon,” before the full weight of it set in. “I work with a wonderful team of more than 100 committed individuals doing amazing, Nobel-Prize-worthy work,” he wrote, “and I get to pretend to be their leader.” Around the same time he took an adjunct position at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, back in the same country where he’d earned his degree at Nanyang Technological University long before Google.

For several years Tan held an unusual dual identity, part tech-world celebrity and part lay Buddhist teacher, welcomed into conversations spanning corporate HR conferences and interfaith peace gatherings. Two more books followed, Joy on Demand and Buddhism for All, each extending the same wager that had made Search Inside Yourself work in the first place: that contemplative practice could be rendered in plain, practical language without losing what makes it useful. Whether something essential gets lost in that translation is a fair question, and Tan’s own success doesn’t really settle it either way.

Then, in July 2018, the SIYLI board asked Tan to step down as chair, following a third-party investigation into what the organization’s public statement termed “inappropriate behavior” from earlier in his life. ThinkProgress broke the story on July 19. SIYLI said the conduct predated the institute’s founding, that Tan had cooperated fully with the investigation and shown remorse, and that the organization holds everyone connected to it to a standard of professionalism. Tan released his own statement the same day, acknowledging that he had once spoken to and treated certain people in ways he mistakenly believed were acceptable at the time, ways he now recognized as hurtful and disrespectful, and he asked forgiveness from anyone he’d wronged. He didn’t dispute the investigation’s findings. Nor did he provide specifics, and neither he nor SIYLI responded to reporters’ follow-up questions.

Of the ten people on SIYLI’s board, four pointed reporters back to the organization’s statement and six said nothing at all. Rich Fernandez, the institute’s CEO and a former head of Google’s executive-development program, declined to comment; Richard Davidson, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds, offered only a two-word reply, “Thank you,” and nothing more.

For a man whose public identity had rested entirely on compassion and self-awareness, this was a brutal reversal, and the irony didn’t escape anyone covering it. Tan didn’t seem to miss it either.

I am saddened by this and will reflect deeply on it.” Back in 2012 he’d told the Times, apparently without irony, “I don’t want to sound megalomaniac, but my whole life is about doing something for the world, from as far back as I can remember.” Six years on, that ambition sat awkwardly beside an unspecified reckoning.

SIYLI itself kept operating after Tan’s exit, with Fernandez running it as CEO. Marc Lesser has continued teaching and publishing under the institute’s name. The course has since spread to companies well past Google, SAP among them through Bostelmann’s own efforts, which suggests Tan’s lasting mark may have less to do with his personal name than with the template he designed: a way of compressing a centuries-old contemplative discipline into a two-day corporate workshop, secular enough to satisfy skeptical engineers, structured enough to satisfy HR departments, and durable enough to outlive its founder’s own standing inside it. His fall wasn’t isolated, either. Other reporting from the same period noted a broader pattern among contemplative teachers: in 2018, facing allegations of sexual misconduct, Sakyong Mipham withdrew from leadership at Shambhala International pending investigation, and that March, Noah Levine stepped away from Against the Stream, the Buddhist community he’d founded. Seen against that backdrop, Tan’s departure from SIYLI looks less like an isolated scandal and more like one instance of a wider reckoning moving through American Buddhist and mindfulness institutions at the time.

Tan was never ordained as a monastic teacher within any formal lineage, and nothing in the record places him inside a specific transmitted tradition; his authority instead came from making mindfulness accessible to a workforce that would never have sat through a traditional dharma talk. That’s a genuine achievement, and it’s also precisely what Purser’s critique takes aim at: mindfulness stripped of its ethical framework and resold to the same institutions whose demands generate the stress it claims to relieve. Purser’s broader argument extends past Tan to the entire self-optimization economy, from meditation apps to corporate retreats, all of it, he writes, placing “the onus completely on the individual” while leaving labor conditions, healthcare access, and social support systems unexamined.

Tan’s own downfall sharpens a question his earlier work never had to answer: can a practice heal an organization while leaving the people inside it, including the person teaching it, unexamined in ways that actually count? He built a wall of photographs with presidents and champions and movie stars. He wrote a bestseller carrying a Nobel Peace laureate’s endorsement on its cover. And he ended up publishing an apology on his own website instead of writing another book. Both belong to the record now. Neither erases the other.