088: Rajendra Sisodia - Conscious Capitalism

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing? But you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done? I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have talent. Talk to Doxatalant and you won't be disappointed. Go to doxatalent.com Bill G. Again, that's doxatalent.com Bill g. One more time. Doxatalent.com Bill G. Check it out today. How do you get better business returns like 5, 10 times industry results and get great employee engagement, great employee satisfaction? So the common way of thinking is that those two things are at odds, but a great way to achieve both is with conscious Capitalism. Today's guest, Today's show is Raj Sisodia. Talking about conscious capitalism and the difference that can make, how we access and how we transform an organization to a purpose centered organization with servant leadership, engaging all the stakeholders in the community. And you're going to hear all about the what, why and how of conscious capitalism on today's show. Listen in. It'll change your business. It'll change your life. Hello and welcome. Welcome again to the Scaling Up Business podcast. I'm your host and growth coach, Bill Gallagher. On the show with me today is Raj Sisodia. Raj is going to be telling us all about conscious capitalism. Welcome to the show, Raj.

Thank you, Bill. Happy to be with you.

Awesome. And so you're in Wellesley outside of Boston at Babson, right?

Yes, that's right.

You guys should know that Raj is a founding member of conscious capitalism movement. He's professor all around groovy guy, co author of the book, co founder and chairman emeritus of conscious capitalism itself. So I'm so glad to have you on the show to talk about this really important topic that really has the possibility of transforming business. And before we get into the why, what and how of conscious capitalism, tell us a little bit of your story of how this became important to you, how you arrived at it, how you helped to found it.

Well, I've been a business professor now for 33 years. It's kind of hard to believe actually teaching for that long. And before that I was a student of business for about five years. So that adds up to 38 years of exposure to the World of business and business education, business thinking, philosophies, etc. For a long time, as I did my MBA and then subsequently my PhD and then started teaching, I had certain misgivings about the narrative around business that it's depersonalized, it's dehumanized, it's all about shareholders, it's all about profits. People are seen as a means to other ends. The well being of people is not inherently seem to matter. As I started teaching marketing, I started to also realize that there are many things that we do in marketing that also are not necessarily serving people. And we're spending a lot of money, trillion dollars a year in 2007, equal to the GDP of India. We're spending on ads, coupons and direct mail. And my question always was, what are we getting for all the money that we spend? Customer loyalty and trust had been declining steadily even while spending had risen. And the question was, what are we doing for companies, for customers and for society with a trillion dollars and can we do better? That quest led me to a lot of academic research that basically showed that yes, in marketing we do have a productivity cr, as we called it, lack of efficiency and effectiveness. We also have ethical problems and that fundamentally something is wrong with the way we think about marketing. That led to a book called Does Marketing Need Reform? And then a subsequent book that I started which was now starting to look at the other side. How do we do it right? So we called it In Search of Marketing Excellence. And we were simply looking for companies that were the opposite of what seemed to be the prevailing pattern, which is spending a lot and getting poor outcomes, which are the companies that don't spend a lot and yet get terrific outcomes, much higher customer loyalty and trust. And as we found companies that fit those criteria, we found that it was a bigger story there. Companies like Whole Foods that were spending 90% below the industry average on marketing, customer loyalty and trust, or Starbucks, or Jordan's Furniture here locally or Patagonia. We found that the story was deeper than that. It's not just customers who love them, but employees love them, communities embrace them, suppliers were loyal to them. So these companies existed in a stakeholder kind of a universe where they were literally creating value for all of their stakeholders the way we should create value for customers, understand their needs and meet those needs in a mutually beneficial way. So they were stakeholder oriented. They were not shareholder centric. Second, we found they had a reason for being. They were not just another grocery store, just another airline, just another whatever. There was a passion that was Driving what they were doing. There was a sense of purpose. They were trying to change the way we think about their particular industry. So purpose became the second common element in these companies along with stakeholder orientation. And then we also discovered the leaders were different. They were people who cared about the purpose of the organization and cared about the people. And they weren't just there to improve the numbers. They're not hired guns. They invested in the business. And lastly, the cultures were different. They were filled with trust and caring and not fear and stress, which is what you tend to find. So that journey really awakened me to a different operating system, if you will, for business. Which answers the question, why do we exist in a different way? What do we do in a different way? Who are we and how do we operate? All of those have different answers compared to the typical traditional business. And then when we found, at the end of our research, having found a bunch of companies like that, we had 28 of them in the book and we did the financial analysis at the end and we fully expected that maybe their financial performance from a shareholder perspective is, is good, but nothing exceptional because they don't focus on that, that's not their driving objective. They're focused on their purpose and on their values and their culture and they're paying their people well and they're providing good benefits and they're investing in their communities and in the environment and paying taxes at a higher rate, paying their suppliers well and all of that. So we thought maybe financial returns would be good, but that they're creating other kinds of value. But actually what we found was that these companies actually outperformed the market 9 to 1 over a 10 year period. And subsequently we've extended that to 15 years and 20 years. And we find the longer term perspective is that these companies actually generate more financial wealth while they're also generating many other kinds of well being. That book ended up being called Firms of Endearment, came out in 2007 and fundamentally awakened me to my own purpose in life and try to spread this alternative view of business, that there's a way to do it that doesn't have to be dog eat dog and cutthroat and only the paranoid can survive. And it's not personal, it's business. All of those things never sat well with me at a human level and now. But I'd always been led to believe that if you showed any signs of caring or compassion, et cetera, in business, that would be a sign of weakness and you can't compete. But actually what we find is these companies are stronger and more resilient and more successful, and they are built on love and care and not fear and stress. So that became foundation for that book, but also subsequently connected me with John Mackey, the Whole Foods founder and CEO, who loved that book and invited me to come and spend a day with him. And at the end of that, we discovered a shared passion, what I was calling the Institute for New Capitalism. I said, we need to change the narrative here. And he looked at that and he said, well, this is exactly my vision, but I call it conscious capitalism. So that was almost exactly 10 years ago. We started the movement in February of 2008, and it's been really gratifying to see the acceptance and the growth over time. We're in 34 countries now, 34 cities in the US and in 14 other countries where we have chapters now, physical chapters. We've got the book, we've got big annual conferences that we do. We've got more and more understanding and awareness of these ideas. And we're not alone. There are other movements out there that are also using different language but basically pointing to the same issues.

Well, so I was working with a group of CEOs just yesterday, working on scaling their leadership. And in their case, we spent a lot of time getting a crisp, clear expression of purpose for the company. And I think a lot of the Gazelles coaches purpose and work in that area is something that's really common among us, not universal, but really common. It's part of our core framework. But it's a special passion of mine, not only to have a clear articulation of person, purpose at the center of the strategy of the company and to help people rapidly find it, but also that the leader begins to have an expression of their life's purpose and they see the connection between the two, whether they're a hired CEO or the owner founder of the business. And people, I think, have a lot of block. When I talk to groups and I ask how many of you know your life purpose? It's a maybe in a really great room, 20% raise their hand, right? That means 80% have no clue, even accomplished, successful people. And of the 10 to 20% that more often raise their hand, they're usually religious people who have a sort of handed to them expression from their religion that's not truly their own. And then business people are like, well, I don't know, we exist to make money that perhaps stuff doesn't quite matter to me. But time and time again, I worked with one team and I had A CEO. And he said, oh, the purpose. We always come up short of this. I don't quite get it. We started the thing to support me, and I bought in the business. So I said, look, trust me, we're going to do some work. You'll be moved and surprised by what your team comes up with. We spent maybe 30, 40 minutes on this. The team went out in pairs. They did a walking exercise that I do often with people. They came back, they threw up their ideas, we pulled them together. They came up with, we keep the world working. And it went thunk in the room. People were moved by it. In a moment, there was like a. Oh, right. A surprise. But like a soul touching surprise. And they're a staffing business, and for them it was just like, oh, it's just staffing. Like, what is it? We keep the world working was like the heart of it. Right. And so many businesses that you talk to are transformed by this purpose centric thing. Why don't you talk a little bit about. So what else is it? Is there anything more to conscious capitalism? We hear it's purpose centered, but what else?

Well, so it starts with purpose, of course, starts with why. And recognizing that this is what gets you out of bed. This is what gives you the sense, I've got work to do, not just, I have a job I need to go to. You know, there's a sense of energy and intellectual enthusiasm and creativity and all of that that comes with having a purpose personally as well as being aligned with the organization that you have. And there's a hunger for that.

Yes.

And it actually, it exists both in, you know, people. You know, there's a midlife crisis that we talk about around the age of 40, and that's a crisis of meaning and purpose. And that's when people start to ask these questions.

Yes, what's my life all about?

Right, right. And young people, the millennial generation, from an early age, they have a much deeper sense of purpose than we had at that age, I think. Yes. So that's the first step. But then also, we have to think about all of the stakeholders. It's not just shareholders, but employees, their families, customers, buyers, communities, the environment, future and society as a whole are all impacted by the business, and they all impact the business. And how do we not only create value? So we look at each of them not as a resource or as something that we can use or exploit, which is what the traditional business tends to do. We use them in order to make money, but actually as entities that we seek to serve. This business exists to serve all of its stakeholders, but not just serve. Because when you actually have a sense of shared purpose with all of your stakeholders, then literally you are not operating at cross purposes. Think about it. When you have a business that is only about profit maximization and they make no bones about it, and that's what they keep talking about. Well, the message that comes through to all of the other participants in that system is we need to also maximize our profits. If this company is going to maximize shareholder returns, then employees say, I need.

To maximize my income and I need to maximize my discount, work as little.

And get paid as much as possible. Customers want the highest, the lowest price on every transaction. There's no relationship, there's no loyalty. Suppliers want to cut their costs and squeeze as much margin out of you as possible. Society wants to tax you as much as possible. Because everybody says I need to take as much as I can.

Because everybody's trying to get some, right?

So they're trying to. Everybody becomes a taker from that system. Now any system in which everybody is just trying to extract from it will soon die. It will bleed to death. Right? What we really in order to win, win, win, win, win, you need to give, give, give, give. Everybody is aligned with a sense of shared purpose and shared values, right? So your employees care about what you're all about, your customers care about what you're all about, investors do, community members and citizens do, suppliers do, etc. So then you're all actually adding to that. You're contributing to the flourishing of that system. And as it turns out, the more you give, the more you actually receive back. So if you're just about taking, you're only going to get so much. If you're about giving, you're actually going to receive back so much more. And that's what we find, that there's so much greater value creation that happens.

So we start with the purpose of the leadership and the ownership and then we move through all the stakeholders, employees, suppliers, community, customers, right?

So the purpose is not the leadership and the organization. Those two have to be aligned. Ideally, it's the personal purpose and the organizational purpose. Match for leaders and also then subsequently for the people we hire to be as part of that. If I'm a foodie and I care about health, going to work at Whole Foods is just an extension of who I am.

Yes.

If I'm a nature enthusiast, going to work at Patagonia or rei, it's a.

Place of passion, it's a self expression.

If I'm super Organized and want everything to be in its place. Well, Container Store is who I am, right? So there can be a beautiful fit. It's not about good people, bad people. Take the Whole Foods employee and put them in Patagonia, they may not be as happy and vice versa. So we need to have a good fit between your passions and what drives you and your purpose and what the work is all about. Then you want to think about all of your stakeholders and how do we understand their needs at a deep level? How do we meet those needs at a deep level, but also how do we think of them as a system, not just individually, but understand that everything we do for any one of them impacts the others. You make a change with your employees, that's going to affect your customers. You do something with your supplier, that's going to affect your employees and your customers. It's all interconnected interdependence. So again, understanding the dynamics of that, every decision that we make, sure, even though ostensibly it looks like a customer focused decision, what does that mean for all the other stakeholders? At the very least, we should not be causing harm and ideally there should be some positive impact. Think about again the synergistic potential that exists and breaking the trade off mentality. Most business decisions tend to be made with trade offs in mind. If I pay my people more than cost is going to go up and customers will have to pay more, that kind of thing, there's a trade off there. Well, you can reject the idea of trade offs because if you look for synergies and win win outcomes, human creativity is such that most times you will find them. Human ingenuity is unlimited, but if you never look for it, you will never find it. So if you accept trade offs right from the beginning, you will make every decision with the trade off. Somebody wins, but somebody loses. If you reject that idea and look for the win, win, as I said, most times, 90 times out of 100, you will find that immediately or sometimes you might in the short term have to make a trade off. But then you can say, okay, in the long term, how do we align these two things together?

I want to anchor and underscore something you said that if you ask most folks, well, if we took out all the people problems that you have, how hard would your business be? Most everybody goes, oh, way, way, way easier, if not infinitely easy. Right. And the hardest thing that we deal with often are the people issues. But when you engage in aligned purpose, your employee engagement, the quality of the work, everything's transformed as a result of that. And it's really simple if you think about it. What's it like for you and, and the people around you. Have you noticed how much more passion, energy and effort people will put, how they work for free for some volunteer cause than they do working at their day, their 9 to 5 job where they spend the majority of their time? They do it in an almost prostitute fashion in many companies, selling their souls and their time, their precious commodity of time for the pay that makes their life go. And then they go devote themselves to their passion in the evenings and weekends. Or maybe they steal their lunch break and work on things. But if you could engage this purpose with your people, your engagement of your people and the alignment of their life's work, their life purpose with your business purpose is totally transformed. And the whole business changes. As you were saying, the multiples, the valuation and the returns on those companies, companies has improved greatly.

Yes, and that's beautifully said. I could not say it any better when people are engaged deeply. I mean 13% of people are engaged worldwide, 1, 3, the US is about 32%. But that still leaves 70% out, right?

Yes.

So most people are there physically, but you said their mind and their soul are elsewhere. In these companies we have passionate commitment by the vast majority of people, 90, 95%. It makes all the difference in these companies. It's interesting, you don't find a lot of managers, you don't need a lot of managers because people are self organizing, self managing and self motivating. You don't need somebody to tell you what to do and how to do it. People know exactly what to do and how to do it even better than any manager can. And so in these situations, human beings become a source. We tend to treat people as a resource and we have to use that resource in an efficient way and we're to manage it and all of that. What happens to a resource? You use it, it depletes and it's gone, it runs. And that can happen in a traditional organizational setting. But when you treat people as the source, this is where everything emanates from all the ingenuity, the caring, the creativity, the innovation, all of that comes. So how do we create conditions where people become a source? And you do that by putting them into a work environment where it's fully, they're in flow, they are in harmony with what they're trying to do. The work is an extension of who are they? They are, you give them lots of empowerment and responsible freedom. Freedom is such a huge thing in businesses. The more freedom you can Create freedom from bureaucracy and freedom to create. If you can create those conditions. And that only happens if there's fundamental alignment on values. A handful of shared values is far more powerful than a thousand rules. Yes, we don't need rules. We just need shared values and a sense of purpose. And where are we going to underscore again?

Another thing that comes up is people are like, oh, God, I have no time to work on anything. I'm deluged all day long with helping, especially as your team grows with helping people understand how to do things, answering questions of resolving problems. If you've got a clear set of compelling values that are really well understood throughout the team, they're alive in the organization versus just printed on a wall on your website. But the values are alive, the code with which you operate, then you don't have to spend so much time helping people solve everything, because you can just point to the value and say, okay, which values apply here? How would you solve this in light of that value? All right, get back to work.

Yeah. No. No way. True.

Save time as a manager. And this is true of companies large and small. I mean, like at every size. The, the management, leadership, problem solving. Time is reduced when we have values ingrained in the organization.

That's right. And like I said, management, you need to manage processes and manage operations and so forth. But people don't really want to be or like to be managed. You can't manage your children and you can't manage your spouse. People don't want to be bossed and people don't want to be supervised. People do want leadership, which means create a vision, an inspiring vision, and we figure out how do we get there. That's what leadership is. But managing is basically getting you to do something. That's for me, what I want you to do, as opposed to saying, here's something that we're going to do collectively for all of us, through leadership and vision. So we need more leadership and less management. We need a certain amount of management to make sure things run, but we want to minimize that when it comes to people.

So think about leadership for a second. Our workshop yesterday was on scaling your leadership, right? And as you scale the organization, you have to lead more and more people more and more remotely. So I'm carrying the torch. In the beginning, I've got two people following me, and then I've got 20, and then I've got 200, and then I've got 2,000 and 20,000. Pretty soon you've created a movement. If you've done a Good job. The movement is still a faithful representation of your original vision and values. So the way that you do that, right, that torch that you carry and that you pass is purpose, values, bhag, things like that that you've articulated, captured clearly and repeated ad nauseam. And at the heart of it is the powerful purpose and the code for operating the values. And then perhaps a goal, a vision for the future, which might include the big hairy, audacious goal or something like that. And that one I think a lot of companies miss. They'll say, okay, our goal is $100 million or a billion, and I love to hear that, except nobody cares about that except you and maybe the other people who have equity in the company. If you'll translate that hundred million billion dollar goal into a multiple of purpose fulfilled. So if you solve problems and now you say we're out to solve a million problems in the next 10 years, then everybody's interested. Your employees, your suppliers, the community, your customers, they love for you to fulfill on that bhag. Along the way, you'll get your $100 million or a billion or whatever it is. But there's a transformation there of expressing it in a way that everyone can engage it, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I think that is, again, beautifully expressed. Profits serve the purpose. Whole foods is a $15 billion company today because it can achieve its purpose at scale. It couldn't do that with just a few stores. So they grow. It's almost like spreading a ministry. Why do you want to grow? A lot of companies put these artificial numbers up and there's ego and there's personal financial goals and so forth. Those don't, as you said, inspire. But if we say we want to touch lives, we measure success by the way we touch the lives of people, as they say. And we touch the lives of people in this way through food or through organization or through. Through transportation or whatever it is that we do. How can we measure in human terms the impact that we're having? And that then becomes a powerful motivator. So we think about leadership as conscious leadership. We have an acronym for all of these things for purpose. It's healing. Because we do live in a world where there's still a lot of suffering and a lot of unnecessary suffering. And can we alleviate that suffering and bring more joy through whatever it is that we have chosen to focus on that aspect of life? Right. So every great purpose is a healing purpose. If you're not consciously healing, we're probably hurting. And there's a lot of that. Heart attacks are Highest on Monday morning and people are disengaged. There's all kinds of stress related health problems that people have and there's psychological pressure, all kinds of things. For the stakeholders, we use spice, society partners, investors, customers, employees and then environment. So it's really spicy. For leadership we use selfless. True leader is selfless. They have transcended the self or personal, narrow personal agendas. A leader who is there to use people to achieve their personal goals, that's not a leader, that's a tyrant. A leader is there to take people to a better place, to create a compelling vision of what is possible, that people may not have even dreamt that this is possible. And then a strategy and approach as to how do we use our collective capacities in order to get there. Then it stands for the qualities which you have to have strength, you have to have energy and enthusiasm. It will be coming from a long term orientation and also flexibility. But also you need to have a kernel or core of love and care for people. So you need combination of strength and caring. We cannot have just leaders who are all about strength and they don't care about people. Or if you just care about people, but you don't have that strength, resilience, you will not be effective. So we need what Martin Luther King said, tough minded and tender hearted at the same time. It's also the coming together of the masculine and feminine sides of human beings. We need both of those, the toughness and the love together. And then we need emotional, spiritual and systems intelligence for leaders. They need to understand what motivates people, what gives them a sense of meaning and fulfillment and joy and happiness. They'll also understand how the system works together. So that requires a certain way of thinking. So those are the qualities of conscious leaders. And again, some things are inborn, but for the most part these can be cultivated. That's what consciousness is all about. Recognizing, you know, sort of the understanding yourself at a deep level and then also being on a journey to develop yourself, become more conscious, become more awakened, become more flexible and develop those capacities that you may not have naturally had up to this point. And then the last element is culture. And I think we've touched upon that a little bit. But it's really the acronym is tactile, which is something you can touch and feel. You know, culture is invisible and intangible, but actually you walk into a conscious business, you will feel it. You know, you go into a Patagonia or a Wegmans or REI or a Whole Foods or a Container Store or Southwest Airlines you will feel the positive energy, you will feel the caring, you will feel the passion. And it stands for qualities, trust, authenticity, caring, transparency, integrity, empowerment, etc. And that's what conscious companies consciously pay attention to, the culture. Every company has a culture. Most companies don't pay attention to it, or they have words on the wall, as you said earlier, that these are our values and so forth. Those are not reflected in the lived experience of people. So we have to make sure that we have the right elements in our culture and make sure that they are, in fact, the way we operate.

So culture, right? A set of traditions, common values handed down. These are the things that keep certain peoples alive and recognize as groups of peoples across thousands of years and around the world as they scatter. I think there was a. Was it Kotkin, who wrote a book, Tribes, who talks a little bit about creating cultures. But you can create a culture in your business, which a lot of us work on, creating purpose and values rooted. A culture rooted in that. And sometimes people will say to me, oh, it feels a little like a cult around here. And I'll say, yes, exactly. And the root word there in culture and cult. Right, it does, because what is that? Well, it's distinct. It feels like we're serving a common purpose. Exactly. Not a bad one, like in the do weird stuff, shave your heads and give up your worldly possessions, but in the positive sense of a cult of passion and. And purpose like that.

Right, Absolutely. So, again, you do all these things together, they're all connected with each other, these four pillars. And each of them, if you just do that, it's going to make a difference to your business.

Yes.

You just have purpose and don't think about the other, or if you work on stakeholders or if you change your leadership approach, et cetera. But when you put them all together, the synergistic impact is just dramatic.

Yes.

And hence we see these numbers not outperforming by 5, 10%, but outperforming by multiples.

Yes.

Again, in the long term, this is all about. It's not looking at the next quarter or the next year. It's looking at least three to five years and then beyond. It's like a flywheel. I mean, once you get it going, there's a virtuous cycle that happens. You've got your purpose and values. You hire people who have congruent values and purpose. Right. And then you give them lots of freedom and flexibility to operate and take care of them with pay and benefits. And then you do the same thing with Your suppliers and you get great products and services and delighted customers and then higher sales growth and profits and so forth, and therefore happy investors. And then you also have resources that you can then use to do things in your community and for the environment and for society. And those are not added on costs or like a version of a tax. Those are actually things that are, again, synergistic when you do things that are aligned with your core business. So Whole Foods has the Whole Planet foundation, which lends in 69 countries micro loans mostly to women, 88% to women, to convert from traditional to organic and natural ways of producing food that helps those families. There are 12 million lives that have been touched by that. But it also helps Whole Food because it creates fresh supplies and new suppliers. They do the same thing with the Whole Kids foundation, where they'll put in salad bars and vegetable gardens in any school that wants one. And they will educate teachers, parents and children about food and about nutrition. Again, very beneficial to those schools and those children and those families, but also creates further demand for the kinds of things that Whole Foods does. So always there's a win win way to think about all of these things. It all mutually reinforces. The key thing is clocks only run clockwise. So you can't say we're going to focus on making money and then we're going to give bonuses to employees and we're going to donate a bunch of money to the local symphony hall and do this and that. No, you have to do the things that create value first, which means start with your purpose values and then your people.

I think sometimes for people it can feel like, well, that's all fine and good for Whole Foods because it's obvious and they started that way and so on, but we're not really that kind of a company. And it's also a little overwhelming. I think the example I like to use, I want to, if you have any others or can add to it. Waste Management is a good example. Just another garbage company. But as they transform to an environmental solutions company, they start to change the range of things that they provide, from composting to recycling to energy production and so on. And then that changes the engagement with the employees, the engagement with communities, and the return starts to happen. But there's something completely transformed with infusing a purpose.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's a very. I mean, there's a documentary on conscious capitalism produced by CuriosityStream, which was started by John Hendricks, the founder of Discovery, and they feature Waste Management and Whole Foods. And yeah, that story is told because the new CEO came in with a different consciousness. Their market valuation was entirely used to be based upon their 230 or whatever landfills. That's a big asset that you have and you just dump stuff in there and forget about it. And he came in and he said, first of all, we get 12 million in revenues that people pay us to take away their stuff. But if you really analyze that stuff, he estimated $13 billion worth of value in that waste stream. That if we were able to separate it and then reuse it, it's financially beneficial. Of course, environmentally, there's huge consequences. And then all the landfills that they have from before are producing methane gas just as a natural outcome. And they've started to capture that and use it to create liquefied natural gas. And it's powering their trucks and other things. So they're investing heavily in that. But they are becoming. So they've gone from filling up landfills to actually working with companies like Walmart to get to zero landfill. Nothing should go to the landfill. And at some level you can say, wow, you're shooting yourself in the foot because your value is based on landfills. And no, we are now an environmental services and consulting company. And you can bet now people want to go work for the garbage company. Whereas in the past it may have been a job of last resort. Now you've got people who are actually excited about being part of this. Same thing happened at Interface Carpet, by the way, when Ray Anderson had his awakening and he said, my God, I'm a plunderer. I'm producing these carpets using petroleum inputs. And then I'm dumping them in landfills. After some years, I'm stealing the future from my kids. He started to say there was real justice in the world. People like me would be in jail. I mean, he literally would say that. He would make speeches to CEOs and he would start out by saying, my fellow plunderers. Yes.

Well, there's an American activist, an authority, Julia Butterfly Hill, who has a great question that she asks when speaking. She says, where is away? When you throw something away, where is away? There is no way. Right. And you'll find yourself on a remote beach and you see a funny little washed up plastic bottle from somewhere and you realize, oh.

You heard about the island of plastic floating in the Pacific? That's double the size of Texas, I believe.

Yeah. So that's a little bit misleading. There's a large volume of it and areas where it collects and pools, but there's not actually an island.

Oh, I thought it's all there is.

A gyre. Yeah, that's a little misleading. But there is an area where there's a larger proportion of it and there's quite a bit scattered and it does wash up places and you can go to the far corners of the earth and find little traces of humanity there. And that can be a disturbing thing, right?

Yeah. No, no, it's, you know, we act like and we live like there's no future. The future is a stakeholder. Okay.

Yes.

And, you know, it's high time we just awake. We're waking. We need to wake up, we need to grow up and we need to show up as businesses, wake up to the reality of what's actually happening, to take responsibility for our part in it and then show up as part of the solution.

So you start. I think a personal transformation is also pretty helpful in this for me a little bit. Before I turned 40, I looked at my life and I was in a moment of crisis and transition and I was struggling. And I had, in my world, if you ask me at that time, it's like, okay, I'm smart and I'm articulate and that's what I've got to do. And yet every. Every time and everywhere I'd go around, I could always find somebody who was smarter or more articulate. And ultimately somebody was more successful than me. So even though I had a certain number of business successes, I realized I was never going to be smart enough or articulate enough or successful enough to truly be happy. But against all the struggles of life, what is it that I really wanted? And one of the, the most powerful exercise that somebody gave me is to imagine my funeral, my memorial service, who's there? And what do they have to say about me if it turned out like, what would I really wish for? And at the end of the day, all I came up with was that I just wanted the people around to say I was someone who made a difference for people.

Right.

That that's what my life was about, making a difference. And that's sort of a high level thing. And I think a lot of times people are like, there's a misinterpretation of Maslow. Everybody knows about Abraham Maslow, especially in American business and in Western business. This idea of we keep working up after we get our basic needs met, then eventually. But that notion of the pyramid is really not Maslow's thing. He talked about two level of needs. And what I notice more and more is if you'll actually go for the thing that most fulfills you an awful lot of your basic circumstances will get taken care of. And you can think about some of our most powerful leaders on the global and long term scale. They're people who gave their life over to something much bigger than themselves. And then the communities and the people around them took care of their basic needs. If you'll go for Maslow's top of the pyramid, the self actualization, your life purpose, people will volunteer to do your laundry or clean your office or, you.

Know, and your, your expectations and your needs at that level also become less significant. Right. You don't need the same kind of house and the same kind of those things don't fulfill you or give you satisfaction the way you thought it might. So you start to simplify. Yeah, I think a lot of people discover that at some point it's great.

To be lit up yourself. And if you could lead a for profit organization with everybody lip around you, it would truly be a different kind of an organization. It would be like some of those cool companies. Right?

Yeah, yeah.

I'm sure are very familiar with the Shaw quote. This is the true joy in life, right? The being used for a purpose, recognized by yourself as a mighty one. The being a force of nature instead of a feverish little clod of aliens and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

Right, Yeah, I love that. And I love Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, which to me is the most significant impactful book that I ever read. And you could change the name of that book to the Corporation Search for Meaning and the lessons would be exactly the same. He said, happiness cannot be pursued, Happiness ensues. It is the outcome of living a life of meaning and purpose. And that comes from three things. Doing work that matters. Loving without condition. Human beings have a need to care, need to love without regard to what you get back and finding meaning in your suffering. Bad things happen to all of us. Question is, can we make something positive from that? Can we grow from it, learn from it, do something positive, turn that tragedy into a triumph? Now you can, as I said, make that book the Corporation Search for Meaning. Companies search for profits the way human beings strive for happiness. But I would say profits cannot be pursued. Profits ensue. They're the outcome. They're the outcome of the same three things. Doing work that matters, or having a higher purpose in your business. Building your business on love and care, which is the need to care. And growing from adversity. Tough times come for these kinds of conscious companies. Tough Times actually make them even better. They make them more conscious, they reconnect them to what really matters. Stuff gets shed in that process and they emerge from these crises even stronger with a deeper sense of connectedness and values binding them together.

Oh, it's totally possible. Right. And before you know it, we'll have a downturn in the economy again. And just because what goes up comes down. Right. There's a cycle to things and the companies that embrace these things, that reimagine themselves, that double down on purpose will come up stronger on the other side of that. There may often be a shock initially in the transition, but there's a huge amount of growth and profit on the other side of it. People interested in what you're saying will also probably enjoy are past podcast. Go look for our show with Lynn Twist on the soul of money. And Lynn's outstanding and a dear personal friend here and, and a great show and she talks about letting money represent your highest values and be used for the things that you most care about. Right. Letting it flow through you and not being, you know, worrying about hanging on to all of it.

Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, this has been super provocative. I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. I'll put all this in the show notes as well when we wrap this up and put this show on. But Conscious Capitalism is the book with John Mackey. You'll find the other books as well and you can see a list of all of his other books@rajsasodia.com and Conscious California Capitalism.org, some of the resources. So we'll put all that if you want to start to look at how to embrace more of this and get those kinds of returns and engagement of your stakeholders in your business. Thanks again so much for being on the show with us today.

Sure thing. There's a new book in March coming out called the Conscious Capitalism Field Guide.

Oh, very good.

Which is basically how do you implement all these ideas?

Oh perfect. A whole field guide. So coming soon, I'm guessing that if they go and support subscribe to updates on your website, they'll get information on that book as it comes out. Yeah. All right. And as always, you'll find us every week here with another thought provoking author business leader on the world of scaling your business@scalingupbusiness.com you'll find all our past shows and things like that in the links and in the show right there we have loads of free tools, tips and tricks on on getting your business going to help you deal with just about every problem that you could imagine. And thanks again for joining us. Well, I hope after today's show you're at least curious, if not ready and propelled into action to start to transform your organization and your leadership into a conscious capitalism organization. Make money, but do so in a fulfilling way that's sustainable and fully in balance with your communities, the planet, the people, people, the whole thing. Something that adds more than it takes away. Not extracting every value, but adding and creating value. That's the world of conscious capitalism. And I'm so grateful to have had Raj Sisodia on. As we mentioned before, you can go to roger.com you can find the book Conscious Capitalism and his other books on Amazon. And of course you can go to consciousness is capitalism.org you'll of course also find all of our shows every week plus free tools and tips and things like that@scalingupbusiness.com Special thanks to our show producer Niobaid, our original growth guru Vern Harnish and audio production is by Podfly Productions, Audio editing by Albert Burge, show notes are done by Ayn Kodina and proofreading by two Tim McGowan. If you got some value out of today's show, please share it with somebody else and let us know what you loved. Thanks for listening and keep Scaling Up.

Foreign.

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