AlexanderMcCobin041018.mp3
Broadcasting live from a business radio studios in Atlanta Georgia. It's time for Sego exclusive brought to you by Kanowna enterprises.
Good morning and welcome. The CEO This is where we get emerging trends from CEOs and their most trusted advisers. I'm your host so unique Coke.
So remember at the end of 2017 I shared with you my big aha. Like as I was summarizing the year for you. I walked you through a bunch of different interviews that I had done where I was like you know I'm hearing this thing that CEOs you guys keep talking about about how you're using your businesses as a platform to do great things like Dana Spinola at Fat Greek and gas south and Chris Karmiel with booster Thon Sunrun and all these different CEOs amongst you who are using your businesses to create great things in the world and make the world a better place to use that cliche. Well I learned at the end of last year as I said in that recap show that there's a word for that. It's called conscious capitalism and then they're just being a word for it. They're people like they're really real people were working on this thing called conscious capitalism. And what I'm learning is called The Heroic Spirit of Business. So I went out. I've been busy. I went to work. And on today's show with that long introduction on today's show I actually have the CEO of Qantas capitalism on my show Alexander McCord. I am so happy to have him here and Alexander welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.
So it feels like this is the journey for this exclusive over the course of three years right. So seeing this thing that so many of you were listening are so familiar with it how passionate you are about the things that you're doing and how you're using your businesses to to do great things.
So I don't want to kind of co-opt and talk about conscious capitalism in a way that's like not what it is. So for our listeners our CEOs were listening. Alexander What is contest capitalism. Why do you think that this is such an important emerging trend and what does it do for the business owners that are have this ethos of trying to use their business to elevate humanity.
So the simple idea of conscious capitalism is that it is a way of thinking about business and capitalism that emphasizes the human nature of these endeavors and similar to what you just said that this has been the evolution or the progress of the show. This is kind of the evolution and progress of business itself in a way where in the 20th century the emphasis was on the idea of making a profit checking in checking out this being separate from your regular life. And nowadays it's about emphasizing and understanding how business really is a way for us to express our humanity and its real nature by helping other people out making people's lives better and using this as a tool in order to elevate everything that we're doing.
And when I've mentioned the idea of conscious capitalism some people have said oh yes that's like corporate social responsibility or. That's like philanthropy or that's like my community service project. How would you distinguish conscious capitalism and what it is from some of those other really great things that businesses do. But I don't really I don't think it's conscious capitalism but as I said I'm learning this language myself.
So you're right and there is nothing wrong with philanthropy or community services or great things CSR was a good step in the right direction but it's different from conscious capitalism and you can think of conscious capitalism as a step further beyond those efforts because it's not about adding something onto what a corporation normally does. It's not about what a business does with the money after it's made that money. It's about how the business and the people in it make money in the first place. And what the business is about. What are its products services the ways that it operates. So we actually want businesses to get to a point where they don't think they need to ultimately give something back after they finish their normal workday in order to make up for the wrongs of the productive process. We want them to create so much value for everyone that they touch to have this higher purpose beyond just maximizing net income that they think they have already created tremendous value for people that they're proud of everything that they've already done instead of business people feeling ashamed for being in business really saying I am proud. I'm willing to speak out and say I'm a business person and hear all the great things that I've done because of that.
For listeners are CEOs who are listening. My understanding is that Conscious Capitalism has four pillars. Hopefully I can get them right. There's purpose. There is conscious leadership. There is conscious culture and then there are stakeholder engagement that I get those right. That's right. OK so let's break those down and walk the who are listening to the show who may never have heard of this or read John Mackey and right. But what are those four things.
So these are all ways of thinking about how a business should operate. That I should say don't encompass everything a business needs to do of course you need to have a revenue model the right operations strategic plan things like that. But these are all principles to guide the operations of a business in order to fully lean into a truly conscious operation. The first tenet has a higher purpose which means thinking beyond just maximizing profit to the underlying value that the business is creating for society. So it's not that profit isn't important it's incredibly important but that's not a reason that a business exists in the same way that as human beings we need red blood cells to survive red blood cells are great. That doesn't mean we live to create red blood cells. Businesses need profit to survive and to fulfill their higher purpose but they shouldn't treat it as an end in itself.
I know I thrive on examples and people love stories so I would love for you to give us an example of what higher purpose looks like in real life when it's done well and then without naming names. Maybe one that it's not gone so well.
Well for the ones that have not drawn so well we don't need to call it any particular examples but I think we can all imagine companies that have these broad mission statements that say they want to do good in the world without actually being specific about it and without actually living out those principles whatsoever. And that was a trend really in the 90s and early 2000s that we're trying to rectify this point. We want businesses to really own what their purposes and use that purpose to inform every decision they make and every action they undertake. So for example Southwest Airlines purpose is to liberate the skies it wants to make flying accessible to everyone and that informs all of its judgments going forward so that it's able to lower costs help people get from point A to point B as quickly as possible and have fun in the process.
And for me Southwest is a good example of being true to their purpose but okay.
God forgive me. I don't like flying Southwest because I like what my assigned seat.
So it doesn't necessarily have a higher purpose doesn't necessarily mean that like you're perfect or gray it just means that you're true to what you say that you're going to do.
Absolutely. And you're going to see conches capitals companies differ from one another in pretty significant ways so there's another business in or what are called Greyston Bakery. They create brownies not the healthiest product in the world but they create brownies to hire people in their area and to give them second chances so in order to lean into that they've created what they call an open hiring process where they don't have interviews they don't do background checks all you all they do to hire people is go down a list of individuals who have said that they want to work for Greyston and they bring them on give them a second chance no matter what their background is and that's what they're dedicated to creating those kinds of opportunities and that drives everything they do as a company. So then there's conscious leadership so conscious leadership is about understanding how leaders need to not only have analytic and emotional intelligence which is getting a lot more attention nowadays. But even beyond that lean into systemic intelligence applying emotional intelligence to not just one on one interactions but interactions with 10 people 100 people a thousand people on the. How does that come there and even spiritual intelligence leaders need to embody the values of a company and model how people should act within that organization.
And so let's do the go well not go Al example again.
There are plenty of examples out there I think where leaders are really just checking and checking out themselves. They want to make a paycheck and go home rather than really represent what the organization is about. And I think there are more and more positive examples out there of leaders that really are trying to represent what companies should be. So a good example would be John Mackey of Whole Foods who is dedicated to the success of the organization and really living out its principles of a healthy lifestyle creating opportunities for people. Transparency and things like that. He sold tofu hopes its Yeah.
Ok. I just want to make sure I say he's now the CEO both within him. But yeah I get his even though is a division of Amazon. He works for him blockheaded.
Ok so then we got conscious culture conscious culture is recognizing that no matter how end up your strategic plan is no matter what your revenue model is like. And all of the explicit ways that you say people are supposed to make decisions. There are a lot of implicit understanding for how people interact with one another. A lot of values that really drive the ways that people make decisions and encouraging companies to really reflect on not just what they're doing but the way they get it done and how people are treating one another within that organization so that you can create a culture where people can bring their whole selves into work and really take advantage of all of their knowledge and and wholeness to bear on the organization and culture is one of the things that we talk about a lot on CLX of as listeners now pretty much the second half of the show has evolved to being almost entirely about culture.
What differentiates what she would call a conscious culture from just a really good culture like you know people nurture their culture. And they're very effective. But what is it that makes a culture conscious versus not conscious.
So at one level I think that you can have a really good culture without being very intentional about it. It just sprung up on its own but. A conscious culture. First off should be conscious intentional. You should have a sense of what you want the culture to be like in actively work to bring that about but are related to that. That is a dynamic structure so that the people within the company are able to influence what that culture is like and provide the right feedback to drive the organization forward.
And we've had plenty of examples in conversations of where when culture works on culture doesn't work so we'll save that time for data for talking about stakeholder engagement.
What does that mean. So stakeholders were a company are really any person or group that the company is touching whether that is your shareholders your investors your employees your customers your vendors your community. And oftentimes in business we think that these different groups are at odds with one another that if you're going to benefit your employees you must be taking money away from your investors or you're going to help your vendors out. You're taking something away from your employees stakeholder engagement is about moving past that finite mindset that fixed pie concept to the idea that we can actually create win win win solutions where you benefit your shareholders by benefiting your clients and your employees at the same time. It's a very different mindset than what we typically go into business with. But it's one that can create much greater long term value for everyone involved.
Yeah. I would observe that at least in the conversations that I've had with with the CEOs on my show a lot of them think very much. It's a big part of the reason why they're so successful. They think about their customers and they think about their employees.
I don't necessarily know that they take a conscious approach to some of those bigger broader kind of all the stakeholders all at once. So what does a holistic plan for stakeholder engagement look like that really does consider every single constituency that touches the business. But what does how does someone do that. That sounds overwhelming I think for a lot of the CEOs maybe listening.
It can be especially if you want to go really end up here. The great starting point is just to develop a stakeholder map. Sit down with either your executive team or yourself and give yourself that whether it's 30 minutes or 4 hours to just ask Who are all the different people that we touch as a company and get as granular with it as you want or group different people together according to how you really understand them and start to ask yourself what do they really need. What are their core interests. How do we impact them and what are the ways that we may typically think that they conflict with each other but might actually be able to support one another and develop strategies based around those win win win solutions instead of the trade offs between them.
And so give us an example of Dunwell not Saddam.
So there's a company in our network called Studio Movie Grill based out of Studio Movie Grill. That's right. OK great movie movie theater that also has restaurants and just a great culture within there's studios and what they did at one point in order to support the community was actually provide free tickets for community groups to go and watch movies on I believe Tuesday nights because it was not a night they were really selling of tickets they wanted to support local groups and they thought it was great they're giving back. But the CEO Brian Schultz started to hear rumblings from staff that they weren't very appreciative because they weren't making much money on those nights. It just wasn't very productive for them and it took a little while but eventually he started to realize that he could actually provide more value for his employees if he also in buys the sale of food and drinks along with those free tickets. So that going to make more off of those sales of food and beverages at the same time by incentivizing people to purchase there. And it's really just thinking about those creative intersections that we might not recognize a first glance when considering difficult situations.
So those are the tenants of comps Conscious Capitalism. One question that may be coming opposite this sounds really great. Now so we're kind of good to everybody. You have that culture and a conscious leader. You know I have a higher purpose. But but but I'm in business to make money. And like all of this is really great what's the underlying thesis or how does this intersect with the day to day business operations. Why does that matter for somebody who may be a little bit more cynical and hard just like you know I'm I'm running a profitable business this is all great. Why should I care.
So this matters just as much for the people who want to make as much money as possible as those people who are just dedicated to doing the right thing. You could have either justification for running a business in a conscious capitalist way because this does make more money in the long run. One of conscious capitalism founders Raj Sisodia a professor at Babson College wrote a book about a decade ago called firms of endearment where he actually studied companies that are run on conscious principles and compared their performance to both the S&P 500 and even those same companies that were tracked in Jim Collins book Good to Great to see how they perform and discovered that conscious capitalist companies outperform the market by several fold actually it's creating more profitable companies by taking into consideration a more nuanced perspective of how people bring themselves into the business and how they're able to actually be more productive serve people in a better way. So for someone who says I just want to make as much money as possible this is actually a really good strategy for doing that. So even if you're profitable right now at a certain level would you like to make more money. This is the way to go about doing that and it's better for everyone it treats people the right way. This is just how business should be run.
So one of the things that I know comes up thank you. It's one of the things that I know comes up as we have this conversation has a lot of people say but I'm already pretty conscious. You know like I have I'm like that leader I really am like you know I try hard. I go to church you know in Atlanta.
So what is this laughing cracking up. Is it the court or they are laughing. Or you know I treat my pretty people pretty good. I'm a good leader. I have we have a good culture. How do you answer like that concern you know. Like pretty good. You know I'm a good business person. Really I am.
And I believe that to be honest I think there are a lot of people who are practicing Conscious Capitalism who don't call it that and who may have never heard of this term before. It's like exercise and diet though no matter how much you've done it already. There's always more free to do and there's always a way for you to make sure you're committed to it. So at one level it's about you having a terminology to understand what you've been doing for a while and deepening your understanding of that going forward. But let's say that you as a CEO are already a conscious leader you have these down rates. How difficult is it to introduce these concepts to other people in your business if specially if you're trying to grow. What kind of support do you have to make sure that your executive team and your employees understand these principles too and that you're aligned with one another on how you implement them. That's where her conscious capitalism as an organization can come in and actually provide assistance or provide a community to work through challenges because that's another component here even if you've got it down there are going to be hard times. There are going to be moments where you feel really stressed and find it difficult to live out your principles or you're just facing a challenging situation. And we have a community of people who have been through those kinds of situations before and other business leaders who want to help you out and getting through that.
So listeners were talking to Alexander Corbin CEO of Qantas capitalism today. Really excited following this thread of conversation that we've been having over the past few months on CEO exclusive.
I want to turn the conversation now Alexander to contest capitalism beat organization and I would love for you to explain to listeners and then also for me as somebody who's curious and very interested in and engaged in this conversation where you're working what is your organization and where does it sit in the broader movement for conscious business because I know that there are other organizations that are working on this like there are as you said there's a slight movement in business now towards this conscious way of thinking conscious way of doing business because it makes so much more money. It's not just a B. Being business people being good at actually makes more money. So there's this movement in this direction and your organization sits inside of that ecosystem.
If you wouldn't mind describing what you do and the ecosystem and where you sit and how you fit so we talked before about how our first tenant as a higher purpose Conscious Capitalism links higher purpose is to elevate humanity through business and the way we do that is by supporting businesses and business leaders in their understanding and practice of conscious capitalism which really comes down to three services. The first is providing the community I was just talking about of like minded business leaders. So you convene and you get people who think this way together. Exactly so they know they're not alone. Whether you go to business school or you read Mede media articles or listen to pundits a lot of time they're talking about what's the stock price how much profit as a company making they're not talking about these tenants like Conscious Capitalism. So knowing that there are other business people out there who are actually running their businesses on a day to day basis this way is really important so people know they're actually supported. They're not crazy. The second thing that we do is provide learning and development opportunities both for individual business leaders and their teams and companies whether that site visits to companies like raced and bakery which were doing in June or workshops that we can run for businesses or case studies we want to make sure that they have the opportunity to learn more about each of these four tenants and integrate them into their businesses operations. And the third thing we do then is really help communicate the story of individual businesses that are doing good in the world and how business can be this tremendous force for good. We as business people really haven't done a great job all the time of actually sharing that story widely especially putting the human face on business and we want to help do that.
So that's Conscious Capitalism and which is a nonprofit yes. All right. And then there's the bigger ecosystem of karma conscious business and Qantas business. The Qantas business movement so where where what is the Qantas business movement and where do you sit inside and outside of it.
There are a lot of organisations working in the space like you said. Whether it's individual businesses you know you mentioned before that this is just more profitable. The letter from Larry thank the CEO of BlackRock few months ago really highlights how this really is becoming commonplace in business and is the future of businesses. There are other nonprofits out there like inclusive capitalism that we partner with and great companies like the lab which runs the corporations and so on. Where conscious capitalism that's and I think really is in that space of supporting individual business leaders and helping develop their understanding their community their stories that we want to get out there so we don't certify businesses for doing certain things we don't have checklists or anything like that. Yeah it really is about helping the understanding of individuals around Conscious Capitalism and their particular practice and where we in the end the adoption of contest capitalism.
There's a part of me that's maybe a little bit afraid or concerned that this is a passing trend and that this is you know a fad and people get all excited about it and then it'll die off. Where do you think we are in the adoption of if there is such a thing that adoption of Qantas capitalism. And what do you think or hope that the future will be.
So if we think about it like a technological adoption curve where you have the early adopters then the early mainstream than the mainstream I think we're somewhere in the early mainstream right now about enter the mainstream. A decade ago you talked about conscious capitalism with business leaders. There was a good chance you get laughed Pete or at least get a sceptical eye. No one took this very seriously except for a handful of vigils. Nowadays you have major investors like Larry think you've got companies at all levels talking about conscious capitalism and we're seeing interest in what we're doing and the broader purpose driven business movement Conscious Capitalist movement increasing significantly because so many people see this as a trend that's not a passing fad but it's going to be around for a long time. I think that's due to a few reasons. One is that more businesses understand that there is actually a deeper reason for their existence. Entrepreneurs have understood this for a long time few people start businesses just to make a lot of money. They do it because they see some challenge in the world they want to overcome or there's something that I'm just passionate about they want to bring to people's lives and they develop a revenue model around it and more people in business are starting to understand that another reason why is that whether you're talking about the millennial or Gen Z generations coming up.
This is just what they expect business to be like they expect of their employers they expected from the companies that they purchase things from. And I don't we're seeing that trend continuing rather than that changing as they get older. So this is here to stay and more companies I think are starting to become interested and conscious capitalism and purpose driven business because they know they either need to get on board or they're not going to survive over the next few decades. And what do you hope for the future. Like what are your your hopes. My hope is that every business every business leader starts running on conscious principles and that they do it as soon as possible to a certain extent. I do think this is what the future is going to look like. It's just a question of when. And we're here to help bring that about a lot more quickly. But it is also a question of just how deeply people are going to lean into these principles and we want to support them in their understanding of practice as much as we can.
So for those CEOs listening we're like wow I am so excited.
Unlike me like oh my God there's a word and there's people who are doing this.
How can people find out more like what's the roadmap. What do we. What do they do. Like ok want more like give me more. What's the what's the more that people can get if they're excited about this.
The easy first step is to go to our website W WW dot Conscious Capitalism dot org. From there you'll be able to learn about events that we have coming up like our annual conference in Dallas Texas from April 30th to May 2nd going to be the largest gathering of conchs couples in the world as well as resources that we have available local chapters handbooks worst case studies and able to reach out to us to see if there is something more specific. We're able to do tailored for their business and their stage in this journey.
Yet you have 42 chapters I think all over the world 15 countries. Very good exciting.
And then you read the book et cetera in Atlanta. For those of you listening Atlanta there is an event that's coming up with John Mackey who was the gentleman who wrote the book right it's happening on April 11th. So you know it's going to be at the Center for Ethics at Emory. And so Alexander you mentioned the Web site. You know we talked about the event and Dallas and the event in Atlanta. Anything else you want to share before we let our Arsenios get back to work.
There's just so much potential for every business to elevate humanity no matter what you're doing. There is a way for it to make people's lives better. That I think most business people intuitively understand we want to help them really understand that at a deeper level and help them live it out in a in a much greater ways so we'd love to hear from everyone who's listening to the show and help them do that.
Wonderful listeners you know you've been listening to a CEO exclusive. I'm your host so Coke. I hope you have a prosperous productive and very profitable week.
Thanks. This show is brought to you by donor enterprises where strategy is your access to money and performance. Learn more at the enterprises dot com.
