Conscious Capitalism. John Mackey

capitalism. Yunus likes to say, “Someday poverty will be something that’s only seen in museums.” Yunus’s heroic dedication to ending poverty in Bangladesh and throughout the world resulted in his winning the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. His book Banker to the Poor is an inspiring tale of heroic enterprise.⁴

      Over time, our higher purposes at Whole Foods Market have evolved toward the heroic category. As the company has grown, our purpose also has grown in both meaning and complexity. Every three years, approximately eight hundred store team leaders, coordinators, and star performers from all over the company come together in a “Tribal Gathering” for a long weekend dedicated to networking, education, and inspiration. At our 2011 meeting, the executive leadership articulated several higher purposes we wish to realize:

      1 We want to help evolve the world’s agricultural system to be both efficient and sustainable. This includes a much higher level of livestock animal welfare, seafood sustainability, and upgraded efficiency and productivity of organic agriculture.

      2 We want to raise the public’s collective awareness about the principles of healthy eating: a diet that is centered on whole foods, is primarily plant based, is nutrient dense, and includes mainly healthy fats (minimal animal fats and vegetable oils). We believe this diet will radically improve the health of millions of people by helping prevent and reverse the lifestyle diseases that are killing so many of us—heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and obesity.5

      3 Through the Whole Planet Foundation, we want to help end poverty around the world by making microcredit working-capital loans to millions of impoverished people to help them create and improve their businesses.

      4 We want to help make Conscious Capitalism the dominant economic and business paradigm in the world to spread human flourishing.

      The purpose of a business does not have to be confined to only one of the four great ideals. Many businesses straddle multiple purposes. In some ways, Whole Foods Market is pursuing the Good, the True, the Beautiful, and the Heroic simultaneously. Ultimately, all four of these ideals are connected. When something is Good, it is also True, Beautiful, and Heroic in its own specific ways. Similarly, when something is Beautiful, it can also be seen as Good, True, and Heroic. There is always unity within the diversity if our minds are able to see the integration.

      Searching for Purpose

      Purpose usually exists when a company is first created. The entrepreneurs who create the company may not always make it explicit, but there is generally a tacit purpose that animates the entrepreneur. As a company grows, the founding entrepreneurs sometimes make the purpose explicit and articulate the company’s core values. That is part of becoming a more conscious business, a business that gradually becomes aware of its reason for being.

      REI went through this a few years ago. CEO Sally Jewell describes the process the company used:

      We spent time as a large leadership group, 150 people, asking, “Why does REI exist?” Then we asked ourselves five times, “Why is that important?” And two more questions: “What would happen if REI went away?” and then, “Why do I devote my creative energies to this organization?” We took those couple hundred sheets and came up with our core purpose: to inspire, educate, and outfit for a lifetime of outdoor adventure and stewardship. While we make money by being an outfitter, what we really do is inspire people to do things they aspire to do—educate them so they can try something that they’ve been uncomfortable trying before. And if we do that well, it works its way into their everyday lives and they begin to give back, and that’s the stewardship component.⁶

      Unfortunately, many businesses over time become so preoccupied with surviving, growing, reacting to marketplace changes, or just making money that they forget their purpose. The leadership of such an older business may need to go back and rediscover the company’s purpose, much as an archaeologist seeks to discover what brought about a city or a civilization.

      At some point in their evolution, companies that started as opportunistic, money-making enterprises need to discover or create their higher purpose beyond profit maximization in order to realize their full potential. They can do this through a process we call purpose search. The process includes representatives of all the stakeholder groups: the senior leadership of the company and some board members, team members, customers, investors, suppliers, and members of the community. All have a stake in the flourishing of the business, and all have a vision of what the purpose of that enterprise could be. When we bring these major stakeholders together to discover or create a higher purpose, some amazing things can happen. The exchange of information, values, and unique perspectives about the business can result in the rediscovery or creation of the company’s higher purpose in a fairly short time—usually within a few days, and sometimes even in a single day if it is a really engaged process and is facilitated by a skilled consultant.

      Once the purpose is articulated, it must live and breathe in the organization. This does not happen automatically; it requires strong determination by the senior leadership of the organization, especially the CEO. Conscious leaders have to embody the purpose in their own lives and lead by example. They must talk about the purpose at every opportunity when they engage with different stakeholder groups such as team members, investors, and customers.

      Another key is perseverance. Some stakeholders are naturally skeptical; they may view the search for a purpose as just another management fad. To succeed, the business must work on the implementation of purpose on an ongoing basis. The work must involve all levels of the organization, so that the entire company feels invested and energized. The purpose must be integrated into orientation processes and new team member training programs. It also needs to be explained to customers and to the media. Leaders must take purpose into account in making all important decisions. For example, purpose should be integrated into performance evaluations, R&D, and strategic planning.

      The Hero’s Journey

      Many conscious businesses start out with a definition of purpose that aligns with one of Plato’s ideals: the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. But in some ways, the Heroic purpose is the ultimate destination for all conscious businesses.

      As a company starts to fulfill its purpose more completely along the lines of the good, the true, and the beautiful and becomes a successful business, it finds that its impact on the world becomes larger and ultimately transformational. Southwest Airlines sought to deliver great service at affordable prices; in the process, it transformed the airline business and helped bring the benefits of air travel within the reach of hundreds of millions of people on the planet. Google pursued its truth-seeking purpose of organizing and making easily accessible the world’s information with such single-minded devotion and achieved such enormous success that the company has transformed and enriched our daily lives. Apple has created products as objets d’art that are beautiful to behold but also incredibly useful and functional. In doing so, it has had a transformational impact on the lives of hundreds of millions of people and on not one but six industries: computing, music, telephony, retail, publishing, and entertainment.

      As a company grows and evolves, its purpose, too, deepens and expands. All worthy purposes eventually take on a heroic character, because at some point, vision combines with scale to transform the world. In many cases, the purpose, too, becomes explicitly heroic, far grander in its scope and ambition than anything that could have been imagined at the company’s birth.

      In the next part of the book, we turn our attention to the centerpiece of the conscious business philosophy: taking care of all the stakeholders and treating them as an integrated whole rather than as competing claimants on a fixed pool of value.