Conscious Business, Conscious Capitalism and Conscious Leaders – Blazing the trail towards a new era
January 30, 2011
It might just be me and the phenomenon that when you’re wanting to buy a blue car, all you see are blue cars, but everywhere I look these days I see references being made to conscious business, conscious leadership and conscious capitalism. There’s some pretty trendy stuff out there.
Patricia Aburdene writes about it in her 2005 book Megatrends 2010: The Rise of Conscious Capitalism. And Peter Russell, a British futurist, talks in his book The Global Brain Awakens about our inevitable move, in the first quarter of this century, from the Age of Information to the Age of Consciousness. I don’t know about you, but I want to be catching that wave, not paddling behind it.
John Mackey, Co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market and one of the founders of Conscious Capitalism, writes convincingly about creating a new paradigm for business. His views are well considered and well-backed. Tellingly, he writes how our traditional economic models belong to the industrial age, where companies were seen as machines with output-input ratios and where, ultimately, the output was singularly seen to be making a profit. He contrasts this with the new paradigm of Conscious Business.
Conscious Business is not a soft option for hippies turned corporate leaders. It doesn’t mean turning into a soft do-gooder. Far from sitting cross-legged chanting on the boardroom table chanting ‘om’, conscious business and conscious leaders are instead concerned with balancing out the interplay of all constituents of their businesses. Employees, suppliers, customers, shareholders and society/the community at large are all considered as part of an indivisible whole. The Conscious Leader’s role is to optimize the health and value of the entire complex, evolving and self-organising system. Focusing only on profits leads to the kind of debacles we’ve seen recently from the global economic recession all the way back to Enron: leaders, and decision-making, led by greed.
Conversely (and pleasantly surprising, in my view), a recent study by Jagdish Sheth (Firms of Endearment: the Pursuit of Purpose and Profit, 2007) showed that 30 companies that are managed to optimize total stakeholder value instead of focusing strictly on profits (i.e. conscious businesses), far outperformed the publicly traded companies on the S&P 500. We’re not talking mom and pop’s shop on the street corner here. We’re talking Whole Foods, Southwest Airlines, Patagonia, Google.
It just goes to show that conscious businesses and conscious leaders can have enormous fun playing on the field of business and competition and making profits, without sacrificing themselves completely to the quest for world domination and the dollar – and, ironically, they seem to do better at it when taking this approach.
I’ve explored these themes further in a new article about conscious business and conscious leadership: Conscious Leadership – Catching the Wave…
Conscious Leadership – The wave is coming
January 26, 2011
Using the lure of Conscious Leadership as a cutting edge phenomenon, I went client hunting with a colleague of mine this week. She has a number of clients in Johannesburg and has already run the full range of her own workshops with them, so she was looking for something new, in the form of my programmes – and especially Conscious Leadership – to offer them.
I must admit I was a bit nervous about these meetings. Not only did I worry how I would package such a vast subject into easily digestible chunks, but I also didn’t know how it would be received. Would they think I was wacky? A bit of a hippie in a corporate suit? From another planet?
As it happens, we had fantastic conversations. They were fascinated by the field of Conscious Leadership, the Consciousness Quotient, and consciousness as a whole. Far from getting the blank stare about how on earth this stuff was applicable to their corporate worlds, I discovered great interest and an immediate resonance about how this could be useful in their organisations. In fact, we ran over time in both meetings, and neither client was the slightest bit concerned, such was their level of engagement.
I sense that something about Conscious Leadership spoke to their human side, to the people they really are, rather than their roles. Instead of becoming involved in an intellectual debate and pow-wow, we connected at the levels of heart and our shared experience of being human.
What a great experience! I can’t wait to see more corporates to talk about the possibilities of this emerging field and what it can do for their organisations. And the more I work with it, the clearer it becomes to me and the more excited I get about what we are creating.
Conscious Leadership is coming…
Making the Consciousness Quotient (CQ) Practical
December 23, 2010
I’m very excited: it seems that Ov (Professor Ovidiu Brazdau), originator of the Consciousness Quotient (or CQ) is keen to collaborate on finding ways to make CQ applicable in the world through research. He has set up a research institute in his native Budapest and has a whole host of psychologists working on the instrument. He’s very positive about working with us to look at how it can be applied.
Here are some immediate thoughts:
I’d like to measure the CQ of coaching clients before and after a cycle of consciousness coaching. In theory, their consciousness levels should go up, which should be reflected in the CQ re-test.
Then, I’d like to use the CQ as a measure of consciousness before and after a workshop we are devising on raising consciousness in organisations called ‘Conscious Self-Management – From EQ to CQ’. It builds on Goleman’s EQ work because, in actuality, relationship and emotional intelligence are just one of the dimensions on which we can become more conscious. This is not to undermine Goleman’s excellent body of work, but we now have the opportunity to go further, broader, deeper – thanks to the natural evolution of our knowledge and thinking.
This is one incredibly exciting field to pioneering in.
See the article here: Demystifying the Consciousness Quotient (Sept 2010)
