Innovate for Impact & Profit will Follow: 10 Lessons from the Social Innovation Summit

  What do the captain of the gold medal US Olympic women’s gymnastics team Aly Raisman and polar explorer Robert Swan have in common? On an afternoon in Palo Alto this week, their shared mission was to inspire. Not nascent gymnasts nor endorphin junkies, but venture capitalists, social entrepreneurs, corporate executives and foundation heads gathered for […]

A Primer in Company Culture from a Fool, a Soap Maker, and a Grocer

When corporate culture junkies gather around the fire, we tell stories and recount legendary figures in our mythos like Herb Kelleher, the former CEO of Southwest Airlines, who offered to competitors all details of his business knowing that without Southwest’s culture–the focal point of its business–competitors would never gain traction. Drawing us around the fire […]

Conscious Capitalism Conference: Life Altering? It Was for Me

I flew up to Boston for the Conscious Capitalism® Conference last year out of curiosity, not with the expectation that two days of speakers and conference hobnobbing would shift my work and life. But it did. It offered up a community, framework, and lexicon that were both inherently natural and alluringly new. This year’s conference, […]

Atypical Partnerships Lead to Breakthroughs in Global Health–with Barbara Bush

Global Health Corps was born from frustration alchemized into opportunity. It was the gripping frustration that despite sufficient knowledge and treatment, millions of people continued without care, which left Barbara Bush looking for solutions–solutions she found, in part, in a growing cohort of educated graduates and young professionals keen to confront the problems they saw. […]

Understanding Conscious Business–with Richi Gil

Perhaps you’ve noticed a slight twist in topic, unfamiliar terms and different companies referenced in recent posts. I’ve become  enthralled by the concept of conscious business, which I view as an extension of cause capitalism to include organizational culture and structure, leadership, and communication. I’ve always explained cause capitalism as the merger of business and […]

To Go from “Good to Great,” Be Endearing

.. . .  Do you– 1. Operate from a higher purpose and make decisions from this place? 2. Act on behalf of all stakeholder groups (society, partners, investors, consumers, employees and the environment)? 3. Lead from a place of consciousness? 4. Create a culture, management team, and systems that maximize the values and purpose of […]

What They Know About Business is Wrong

Mainstream business leaders don’t understand the revolution that’s going on in business. The more progressive of them are still oriented toward CSR, which is independent of purpose and often cobbled onto core business objectives. Here are a few big ideas from the Conscious Capitalism Conference that are core to a handful of businesses now, and of […]

‘Love needs to come out of the closet’: 10 Takeaways from the Conscious Capitalism Conference

With support from Axialent and the Conscious Capitalism Institute, I attended the Conscious Capitalism Conference last month. For two days, I immersed myself in learning and in true, unabashed conversations on topics I had felt, but hadn’t yet developed the vocabulary for or a real awareness of. The teachers ranged from CEOs of publicly traded […]

Mission is the New Marketing

As I said in this The Washington Post article by Olga Khazan, people want to feel the products they buy are more than just products. The article tells the story of how Holstee’s founders, while launching their business, declared what they stood for in a manifesto. The manifesto reads like something out of a self-help book: […]

Do We Need to Change What We Call Ourselves?

If you’re helping to build a business with a social mission, maybe you can identify with this excerpt from an article I co-wrote in The Guardian. Suggesting you are a social entrepreneur or work for a social enterprise often sounds a bit silly to first-time listeners. “Is that a fancy way of saying you’re a party […]