One of the largest corporations in the United States turned to the Maharishi Corporate Development Program in an effort to improve employee health and effectiveness. Managers and employees in a large Midwestern manufacturing plant of the Fortune 100 Company as well as those in a Pennsylvania distribution company learned the Transcendental Meditation technique (company names withheld in accord with corporate policies). After 3 months the employees who learned the TM technique were compared with a control group of non-meditating employees who worked at similar job sites, held similar job positions, had similar demographics (age, education, etc.), and similar personality characteristics before the study began. More than 10,000 business people in Japan have learned the Transcendental Meditation technique. Over 2,000 of them are top executives of leading Japanese companies including Sumitomo Heavy Industries, Toyota Motor Company, Kyocera (Yashika), and One World Supermarkets. Over 100 Japanese companies have introduced the TM program to their managers and employees. After the implementation of the Transcendental Meditation program at Sumitomo Heavy Industries, a high technology company with about 8,000 employees, research on the project was conducted by the National Institute of Industrial Health of the Japanese government's Ministry of Labor. The study evaluated 447 participating managers and employees in comparison to 321 controls at the same company. Participants showed substantial improvements in physical and mental health, including significant reductions in anxiety, insomnia, depression, emotional instability, physical complaints, smoking, and digestive problems.
