Value Creation Begins Within

In private equity, we speak of “value creation plans” as though the phrase itself were

self-evident. But what most of these plans describe is not creation. It is capture:

extracting more from what already exists.[1] The distinction matters. Value creation

produces something genuinely new and useful to society. Value capture realises profit

from it.[2] When the two are confused, businesses stop innovating and start extracting

and call it progress.

I work in lower mid-market private equity. I have co-led acquisitions, managed carve-

outs, negotiated SPAs and done post-acquisition turnaround work on factory floors

across Europe. This is a world that runs on analytical rigour, time pressure and

consequential decisions. It is also a world where the reflective capacity to distinguish

creation from capture is often the first thing to be sacrificed. This piece is about how I

found a way to protect it.

How it began

I first encountered Yoga Nidra during my Master’s at Copenhagen Business School, in

a course on innovation in Asian emerging economies. Our professor practised it with

us at the start of every lecture. There was no preamble, no philosophical framing. We

simply layed down, followed his voice for thirty minutes and then moved into group

work.

I noticed something I could not easily explain. After the practice, conversations in our

group shifted. People listened differently. The usual performance like the need to

speak first or to sound clever softened. Problems we had been circling began to reveal

their actual contours. It was subtle but it was unmistakable.

That observation led me to write my entire thesis on the subject: whether Yoga Nidra

could support value creation in group work, and if so, how.

What meditation means to me

Looking back, I consider myself fortunate to have been introduced to meditation so

early, before my career had fully taken shape, before the habits of a high-pressure

profession had calcified. Many people in my field discover practices like these only

after burnout forces the question. I had the luxury of encountering it in a classroom,

when my mind was still open enough to take it seriously.

Yoga Nidra is a guided practice where you lie down and follow verbal instructions

through stages of body awareness, breath regulation, and progressively deeper states

of conscious relaxation. Parker, Bharati and Fernandez define it operationally across

four levels: from deep physical relaxation through a state characterised by enhanced

creativity, problem-solving and inventive thinking, to states of conscious deep sleep

with maintained awareness.[3] Neuroimaging research has demonstrated that the

practice significantly increases dopamine release in the ventral striatum, providing

evidence for altered conscious states at a synaptic level.[4] Other studies show that

meditation training improves white matter connectivity: the neural infrastructure that

lets different brain regions communicate.[5][6] The cognitive effects are well

documented: reduced mind-wandering,[7] improved focus and working memory,[8]

enhanced self-awareness[9] and a measurable reduction in the sunk-cost bias.[10]

That last point is particularly relevant if your job involves deciding whether to continue

investing in something you should walk away from. Which in private equity it does

almost every week.

What the practice gave me was not relaxation. It was a sharper instrument for seeing.

Meditation strips away the noise between you and whatever you are actually trying to

understand. It is a discipline of attention: not calm for the sake of calm, but calm as a

condition for precision. Having built that foundation during my studies, I was able to

carry it directly into deal work, turnaround situations, and the daily rhythm of

managing acquisitions across multiple jurisdictions.

The distinction — and what it changed

The central finding of my thesis and the idea I carry into every deal is that most of what

business calls “value creation” is actually value capture. Bowman and Ambrosini

articulated the distinction rigorously: value creation produces new use value,

something genuinely useful to a customer or society, while value capture extractsexchange value, the monetary delta between input costs and selling price.[2] Revenue,

margin expansion, competitive positioning: these are mechanisms of capture, not

creation.

Why does this matter for a meditation practice? Because seeing the difference requires

reflection not the kind you do scanning emails on a Monday morning but the kind that

emerges when the thinking mind is genuinely quiet. When your cognitive patterns run

on autopilot you default to what you already know. You optimise existing structures.

You mistake efficiency for innovation. That is capture.

Creation requires you to see freshly, to suspend assumptions long enough for

something genuinely new to emerge. Pavlovich and Corner studied exactly this

mechanism: through sustained spiritual practice, entrepreneurs develop an expanded

consciousness that suspends habitual cognitive patterns and opens a direct pathway

to what Porter and Kramer call shared value creation, value that serves both economy

and society.[11][12]

I observed this in my own work. After consistent practice, my relationship to the deals

I was running shifted. I became better at noticing when I was anchored to a thesis out

of momentum rather than conviction, the sunk-cost dynamic that research has

specifically linked to meditation’s capacity to reorient attention toward present

realities rather than past commitments.[10] In negotiations I found myself listening with

more patience, less occupied with composing my next argument, more attuned to what

was actually being communicated: the pauses, the qualifications, the things that do

not appear in any data room.

In post-acquisition turnaround work where I was on the ground translating deal

assumptions into operational realities the practice gave me a steadier base. When you

are sitting with a management team at seven in the morning restructuring a

production workflow your state of mind is not a luxury. It is the infrastructure.

I also noticed changes in how groups around me functioned. When I brought more

presence into a room, meetings shifted. People shared information more openly. The

social dynamics that Tsai and Ghoshal modelled: trust, shared vision, interaction ties

driving resource exchange and innovation — became more visible and more

accessible.[13] Research on affect in groups confirms the pattern: positive shared

emotional states broaden the scope of ideas exchanged and build social resources

among members.[14] Presence it turns out is contagious.

Getting started with Yoga Nidra

You do not need a retreat, a guru, or a particular belief system. You need a floor to lie

on and ten minutes.

Find a Yoga Nidra recording. There are many available, from ten to thirty minutes. Lie

down tonight, not tomorrow. Follow the instructions without judging the experience.

Do it again the next day. After a week notice whether anything has shifted in how you

process your work. Not in dramatic ways,but in the small things: how you listen, how

quickly you react whether you pause before a decision or rush through it.

Community helps. Having even one person in your professional circle who practises

creates accountability and normalises the conversation. In business cultures that still

equate constant activity with competence that normalisation matters more than most

people realise.

Many who try meditation drop it quickly because they expect a result, a feeling, a

breakthrough, a state they can point to. The practice asks the opposite: let go of

expectations. If disappointment arises, notice it. Name the part of you that is

disappointed. Return to the breath. Meditation works like compound interest.

Invisibly at first. Then unmistakably.

A closing thought

Aristotle understood more than two thousand years ago that value is subjective, that

the usefulness of a thing depends on the person, the context and the purpose it serves.

He also understood that rarity confers its own kind of worth.

In a world that rewards noise, speed and relentless output, the ability to be still and

see clearly has become rare. And like anything rare it is valuable, not because it is

scarce but because of what it makes possible.

Value creation begins within. Everything else follows from there.

Julian C. Atanassov is an M&A and Investment Manager based in Copenhagen, working in pan-

European lower mid-market private equity through Anopsen ApS. He holds an M.Sc. in Business,

Language and Culture from Copenhagen Business School, where his thesis investigated the role of Yoga

Nidra in value creation processes.

References

[1] Mazzucato, M. (2018). The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. Public Affairs.

[2] Bowman, C. & Ambrosini, V. (2000). Value Creation Versus Value Capture: Towards a Coherent Definition of

Value in Strategy. British Journal of Management, 11(1), 1–15.

[3] Parker, S., Bharati, S.V. & Fernandez, M. (2013). Defining Yoga-Nidra: Traditional Accounts, Physiological

Research, and Future Directions. International Journal of Yoga Therapy, 23(1), 11–16.

[4] Kjaer, T.W. et al. (2002). Increased Dopamine Tone During Meditation-Induced Change of Consciousness.

Cognitive Brain Research, 13(2), 255–259.

[5] Tang, Y.Y. et al. (2012). Mechanisms of White Matter Changes Induced by Meditation. Proceedings of the

National Academy of Sciences, 109(26), 10570–10574.

[6] Filley, C.M. (2005). Why the White Brain Matters. Dana Foundation.

[7] Killingsworth, M.A. & Gilbert, D.T. (2010). A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind. Science, 330(6006), 932.

[8] Mrazek, M.D. et al. (2013). Mindfulness Training Improves Working Memory Capacity and GRE Performance

While Reducing Mind Wandering. Psychological Science, 24(5), 776–781.

[9] Alberts, H.J.E.M. & Hülsheger, U.R. (2015). Applying Mindfulness in the Context of Work. In Mindfulness in

Organizations. Cambridge University Press.

[10] Hafenbrack, A.C., Kinias, Z. & Barsade, S.G. (2014). Debiasing the Mind Through Meditation: Mindfulness

and the Sunk-Cost Bias. Psychological Science, 25(2), 369–376.

[11] Pavlovich, K. & Corner, P.D. (2014). Conscious Enterprise Emergence: Shared Value Creation Through

Expanded Conscious Awareness. Journal of Business Ethics, 121(3), 341–351.

[12] Porter, M.E. & Kramer, M.R. (2011). Creating Shared Value. Harvard Business Review, 89(1–2).

[13] Tsai, W. & Ghoshal, S. (1998). Social Capital and Value Creation: The Role of Intrafirm Networks. Academy of

Management Journal, 41(4), 464–476.

[14] Rhee, S.Y. (2007). Group Emotions and Group Outcomes: The Role of Group-Member Interactions. Research

on Managing Groups and Teams, 10, 65–95.