Last Friday Rao and I attended a workshop led by Dr. Ralph Z. Sorenson on the topic of Conscious Capitalism. Ralph is an uber accomplished businessman with professorships at Babson, Univ. of Colorado and Harvard Business School under his belt, as well as working for several multinationals, serving as President of Babson College, managing a private investment firm, and a board member on over 30 boards both public and private. One board he currently sits on is that of Whole Foods.

So as you can imagine, Whole foods was a focal point of discussion for the day. Whole Foods is really an amazing organization, I always knew the company stood for good business, and that CEO and Founder John Mackey was a good guy, I just didn’t ever analyze the company the way you can when a discussion is being led by a long time board member of the company!

The best part of the day however was the small break-out group discussions we had. I was fortunate enough to be in a group comprised of two business school professors, a high-tech entrepreneur, a warehouse business owner, a former market researcher from big grocery, and a web entrepreneur.  Quite a group when you plop me in along with these folks. Our discussion touched on several points, but the big takeaway for me was on how responsible organizations need to organize. Here is a scan of a diagram I sketched in my notebook on how we have organized Common Soles. Note: Not all that different from Whole Foods, which is not all that different from any socially conscious business or organization.

 

Key is how CS is in the middle of the business ecosystem. We are surrounded by our: Suppliers, Partners, Investors, Customers & Environment. Or SPICE as Raj Sisodia of Bentley University puts it. The arrows indicate the flow of value, energy, and communication throughout the ecosystem.  It’s a nice way of illustrating the fact that no part of the value chain is an island. All components must interact to form “win-win” scenarios as opposed to some more traditional models which net a zero-sum game.

Also key is the phrase I jotted below the diagram. “Profits created through voluntary exchange and not the exploitation of people or destruction of resource or value (environment).” What a nice phrase huh?? Every business should organize in this manner!

Conscious Capitalism is the name of the game.  CS is working to be a conscious organization and practice this form of capitalism. We’ve got a lot going on and a lot more to share.

Stay tuned!
-Dave