Contrary to the views of its critics, capitalism, in the long run, is not a zero sum game of greed at the expense of others. "Without consistent customer satisfaction, team member happiness and commitment and community support, the short-term profits will prove to be unsustainable over the long term," as John Mackey and Raj Sisodia point out in their book, "Conscious Capitalism."
Instead, capitalism can be a powerful system of exchange for mutual benefit. The new business paradigm is rooted in four key pillars: higher purpose, stakeholder integration, conscious culture and management, and conscious leadership.
What are some companies that practice conscious capitalism?
Whole Foods does so by focusing on the health and well-being of people who can afford to pay higher prices for food products. The Container Store strives to make people with adult attention deficit (A.D.D.) feel happier by becoming better organized. SouthWest Airlines has brought the freedom to fly to ordinary people through lower priced airfares and efficient operations.
Conscious leaders are dynamic and evolving. A number of theorists and researchers have produced strong evidence that human beings tend to evolve upward to higher levels of consciousness and complexity.
People have great difficulty fully comprehending or appreciating stages of development that are higher or more complex than their current level. The higher levels just don't make much sense from the perspective of a lower level and therefore are usually ignored, dismissed, or disparaged. Conscious leaders avoid becoming stuck in any kind of rigid ideological orthodoxy. Rather, they strive to evolve their consciousness upward in a variety of ways.
Here is an example of distinct stages or waves of development: The research of Clare Graves and his students Don Beck and Christopher Cowan demonstrate how both individuals and cultures tend to evolve upward in terms of a hierarchy of values-based worldviews. Their theory postulates eight distinct stages or waves of values development. These stages can be applied to individuals and to cultures as a whole. Their work is especially important in distinguishing between traditional, modernist, postmodernist, and second-tier or integral levels of consciousness. The vision and values of conscious capitalism expressed in this book is intended to be consistent with their articulation of second-tier memes in Spiral Dynamics, as well as Ken Wilber's work on integral consciousness.
Examples of how this conscious capitalism plays out:
Whole Foods Market has found that it is far more important for leaders to have high EQ (Emotional Intelligence) than high IQ. Stores are organized into self-managing teams that focus intently on delivering high levels of customer service. Whole Foods can't afford to have analytically brilliant people if they are also arrogrant, insensitive, or tactless. The company culture therefore tends to look for hgh EQ in leadership promotions.
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz said, "From the very beginning we always believed that the only way we could exceed the expectations of our customers was to exceed the expectations of our people. So given the external pressures, the cataclysmic financial crisis, it was time to return to the intimacy of communicating directly with our people, galvanizing our organization against a core purpose, and asking our people to understand what was at stake." Starbucks core purpose is to focus on those customers addicted to its higher priced coffee products.
Sources: John Mackey: Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business
Don Edward Beck: Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership and Change