Chade-Meng Tan

Chade-Meng Tan, speaking at a Buddhist organization in Singapore, July 2017.

Chade-Meng Tan (Chinese: 陳一鳴), known informally as Meng, is a former software engineer and motivator formerly at Google known especially for greeting celebrities who visit the Google campus. Meng is also an international bestselling author, thought leader and philanthropist. He retired from Google as its "Jolly Good Fellow" at the age of 45. He co-founded the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, along with , and is co-chair of One Billion Acts of Peace, which has been nominated eight times for the Nobel Peace Prize. He is also an adjunct professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in the National University of Singapore, and a graduate from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Career[]

He was Google employee number 107 and his job title was "Jolly Good Fellow".^[1] He joined Google in 2000 after working for five years at Kent Ridge Digital Laboratories in Singapore. At Google, although he worked for eight years in Engineering, on projects such as mobile search and leading search quality. Tan earned his eccentric Google title after starting “mindfulness training” courses at the company — a groundbreaking mindfulness-based emotional intelligence course called Search Inside Yourself, which was featured on the front page of the Sunday Business section of The New York Times in April 2014.^[2] Search Inside Yourself is also the title of Meng's The New York Times bestseller, which has been endorsed by world leaders such as President Carter of the United States; business leaders such as Eric Schmidt of Google and John Mackey of Whole Foods Markets; and spiritual leaders such as the Dalai Lama.^{[citation needed]}

Mindfulness non-profits[]

Motivated by his belief that happiness is a state of mind, these mindfulness training courses were meant to help Googlers find inner peace and clear their minds to manage stress and negativity. The classes proved extremely successful at Google, which led Meng to write a best-selling book, “Search Inside Yourself”. These successes (outside of his engineering role) led him to work for two years as the Head of Personal Growth and to chair non-profit “Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute” (SIYLI, pronounced “silly”), to bring the same popular Google class to others.^[3][4]

Meng has left Google on October 30, 2015 to focus spreading his message and courses on happiness, meditation and spreading world peace, as announced on his personal blog. He hopes that Search Inside Yourself will eventually contribute to world peace in a meaningful way.^[5]

Meng is part of the team of the non-profit organisation , which was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015. The nomination was signed by six Nobel Laureates.^[6]

In 2018, Meng apologetically stepped down from the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, following results of a third-party investigation citing “inappropriate behavior” prior to the founding of SIYLI.^[7]

Select bibliography[]

• ‘’Search Inside Yourself’’
• ‘’Joy on Demand’’

Celebrity photo collection[]

Meng started collecting celebrity photographs when Jimmy Carter and Al Gore visited the Google campus. This became a tradition, and he now has a large collection of photographs of his meetings with celebrities at Google.^[8]

References[]

External links[]

• Personal website
• Search Inside Yourself — about the book
• Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute
• Chade-Meng Tan at TED