Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Ruth Blatt for Forbes magazine. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

Rick Rubin photo by Annabel Mehran

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You sit, eyes closed, and turn your attention inward. You focus your attention on an immediate experience, perhaps your breath or a mantra. You become more aware of yourself as a body breathing. When thoughts or emotions come up, you observe them with curiosity, openness and acceptance. Then you bring your attention back to the present. Each moment is a new experience. You enter an intense state of relaxation and alertness.

What does this have to do with producing hit records? According to Rick Rubin, a lot.

Rick Rubin has produced numerous platinum-selling and award winning albums. Some of the albums he produced are considered classics, like thrash-metal band Slayer’s Reign in Blood or early hip-hop albums by the Beastie Boys, Run-DMC and LL Cool J. He has produced career-rejuvenating comeback albums by Johnny Cash, Black Sabbath and the Dixie Chicks. He initiated genre-bending collaborations, such as the rap-rock hybrid “Walk This Way” by Run-DMC and Aerosmith, and Johnny Cash’s covering of a Nine Inch Nails song. According to Eminem, who worked with Rubin on The Marshall Mathers LP 2, Rubin has an uncanny ability “to dip in and out of different genres of music and master all of them.”

But what’s really impressive is how he gets people’s best work out of them. As Metallica’s James Hetfield said, when they wanted to people “to really hear Metallica,” they brought in Rick Rubin to produce. This ability to bring out the full potential of others is essential to all managers and leaders. How does Rubin do this so consistently and with such diverse people? By applying his experience as a life-long practitioner of meditation.

When people meditate, they pay attention in a particular way: “On purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally,” according to Jon Kabat-Zinn, a founding member of the Cambridge Zen Center and creator of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. Practicing this type of attention helped Rubin become a better listener.

“Many people don’t listen,” Rubin told me. “If you listen carefully, people explain to you what it is that they need.” Rubin gets artists to open up about their deeper motives. “I’ll spend time with an artist and listen very carefully to what they tell me and get them to talk about their true goals, their highest, highest goals,” he said. “We’ll go back to the heart of why they started doing what they are doing in the first place.”

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Here’s a direct link to the complete article.

In Ruth’s own words: “I have a Ph.D. in Management and Organizations from the University of Michigan and taught Organizational Behavior and Entrepreneurship at the University of Illinois in Chicago. During my academic career, I published articles about entrepreneurial teams in top-tier academic journals. Since then, I have been applying my business expertise toward the music industry. I am writing a book about teamwork lessons from rock bands.”