Conscious Capitalism. John Mackey

the world could be and should be. The founders are on fire to create something of relevance, resonance, and permanence—a business that will far outlive them, that delivers real value of multiple kinds to everyone it touches. They want to create a business that their parents and children will be proud of, that aspires to so much more than making money—a force for good that enhances the health and well-being of society. They dream of creating a business that enriches the world by its existence and brings joy, fulfillment, and a sense of meaning to all who are touched by it.

      Picture a business built on love and care rather than stress and fear, whose team members are passionate and committed to their work. Their days race by in a blur of focused intensity, collaboration, and camaraderie. Far from becoming depleted and burned out, they find themselves at the end of each day newly inspired and freshly committed to what brought them to the business in the first place—the opportunity to be part of something larger than themselves, to make a difference, to craft a purposeful life while earning a living.

      Think of a business that cares profoundly about the well-being of its customers, seeing them not as consumers but as flesh-and-blood human beings whom it is privileged to serve. It would no more mislead, mistreat, or ignore its customers than any thoughtful person would exploit loved ones at home. Its team members experience the joy of service, of enriching the lives of others.

      Envision a business that embraces outsiders as insiders, inviting its suppliers into the family circle and treating them with the same love and care it showers on its customers and team members. Imagine a business that is a committed and caring citizen of every community it inhabits, elevating its civic life and contributing in multiple ways to its betterment. Imagine a business that views its competitors not as enemies to be crushed but as teachers to learn from and fellow travelers on a journey toward excellence. Visualize a business that genuinely cares about the planet and all the sentient beings that live on it, that celebrates the glories of nature, that thinks beyond carbon and neutrality to become a healing force that nurses the ecosphere back to sustained vitality.

      Imagine a business that exercises great care in whom it hires, where hardly anyone ever leaves once he or she joins. Imagine a business with fewer managers, because it doesn’t need anyone to look over peoples’ shoulders to make sure they are working or know what to do, a business that is self-managing, self-motivating, self-organizing, and self-healing like any evolved, sentient being.

      See in your mind’s eye a business that chooses and promotes leaders because of their wisdom and capacity for love and care, individuals who lead by mentoring and inspiring people rather than commanding them or using carrots and sticks. These leaders care passionately about their people and the purpose of their business and little for power or personal enrichment.

      Imagine a business that exists in a virtuous cycle of multifaceted value creation, generating social, intellectual, emotional, spiritual, cultural, physical, and ecological wealth and well-being for everyone it touches, while also delivering superior financial results year after year, decade after decade. Imagine a business that recognizes that while our planetary resources are limited, human creativity is unlimited and continually fosters the conditions in which its people can rise to their extraordinary, almost miraculous potential.

      Such businesses—suffused with higher purpose, leavened with authentic caring, influential and inspirational, egalitarian and committed to excellence, trustworthy and transparent, admired and emulated, loved and respected—are not imaginary entities in some fictional utopia. They exist in the real world, by the dozens today but soon to be by the hundreds and thousands. Examples of such companies today include Whole Foods Market, The Container Store, Patagonia, Eaton, the Tata Group, Google, Panera Bread, Southwest Airlines, Bright Horizons, Starbucks, UPS, Costco, Wegmans, REI, Twitter, POSCO, and many others. In the decades ahead, companies such as these will transform the world and lift humanity to new heights of emotional and spiritual well-being, physical vitality, and material abundance.

      Welcome to the heroic new world of Conscious Capitalism.

      The Tenets of Conscious Capitalism

      Conscious Capitalism is an evolving paradigm for business that simultaneously creates multiple kinds of value and well-being for all stakeholders: financial, intellectual, physical, ecological, social, cultural, emotional, ethical, and even spiritual. This new operating system for business is in far greater harmony with the ethos of our times and the essence of our evolving beings.

      Conscious Capitalism is not about being virtuous or doing well by doing good. It is a way of thinking about business that is more conscious of its higher purpose, its impacts on the world, and the relationships it has with its various constituencies and stakeholders. It reflects a deeper consciousness about why businesses exist and how they can create more value.

      FIGURE 2-1

      The four tenets of Conscious Capitalism

      Conscious Capitalism has four tenets: higher purpose, stakeholder integration, conscious leadership, and conscious culture and management (figure 2-1). The four are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. We refer to these as tenets because they are foundational; they are not tactics or strategies. They represent the essential elements of an integrated business philosophy that must be understood holistically to be effectively manifested.

      Higher Purpose

      Business has a much broader positive impact on the world when it is based on a higher purpose that goes beyond only generating profits and creating shareholder value. Purpose is the reason a company exists. A compelling sense of higher purpose creates an extraordinary degree of engagement among all stakeholders and catalyzes creativity, innovation, and organizational commitment.¹¹

      Purposeful companies ask questions such as these: Why does our business exist? Why does it need to exist? What core values animate the enterprise and unite all of our stakeholders? Higher purpose and shared core values unify the enterprise and elevate it to higher degrees of motivation, performance, and ethical commitment at the same time. As the figure shows, higher purpose and core values are central to a conscious business; all the other tenets connect back to these foundational ideas.

      Stakeholder Integration

      Stakeholders are all the entities that impact or are impacted by a business. Conscious businesses recognize that each of their stakeholders is important and all are connected and interdependent, and that the business must seek to optimize value creation for all of them. All the stakeholders of a conscious business are motivated by a shared sense of purpose and core values. When conflicts and potential trade-offs arise between major stakeholders, conscious businesses engage the limitless power of human creativity to create win-win-win-win-win-win (what we will refer to henceforth as Win⁶) solutions that transcend those conflicts and create a harmony of interests among the interdependent stakeholders.

      Conscious Leadership

      You cannot have a conscious business without conscious leadership. Conscious leaders are motivated primarily by service to the firm’s higher purpose and creating value for all stakeholders. They reject a zero-sum, trade-off-oriented view of business and look for creative, synergistic Win⁶ approaches that deliver multiple kinds of value simultaneously.

      In addition to high levels of analytical, emotional, and spiritual intelligence, leaders of conscious businesses have a finely developed systems intelligence that understands the relationships between all of the interdependent stakeholders. Their fundamentally more sophisticated and complex way of thinking about business transcends the limitations of the analytical mind that focuses on differences, conflicts, and trade-offs.

      Conscious Culture and Management

      The culture of a conscious business is a source of great strength and stability for the firm, ensuring that its purpose and core values endure over time and through leadership transitions. Conscious cultures naturally evolve from the enterprise’s commitments to higher purpose, stakeholder interdependence, and conscious leadership. While such cultures can vary quite a bit, they usually share many traits, such as trust, accountability, transparency, integrity, loyalty,