Putting my money where my mouth is • It’s a paradox: the most successful businesses don’t actually put profit first

– They have a higher purpose– They have a clear idea of ‘why’ they exist and not simply ‘what’ they do

• As has been said (see this video in the Resources section of my website) we may need red blood cells to live but we don’t live to make red blood cells. Similarly, businesses need to make profits but the best ones don’t exist just to do that.

• In a study carried out by Raj Sisodia, co-author with David Wolfe and Jag Sheth of Firms of Endearment, he examined the performance of 18 publicly traded companies that he considered to be exemplars of conscious capitalism – their stated purpose being one of the key characteristics he was looking for in making his selection

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Putting my money where my mouth is

• What did he find? That over the period 1996 to 2011, they all performed 10 times better than the S&P 500 index

• As an advocate of conscious capitalism:– I’m a strong believer in the importance of businesses having a higher

purpose– I’m also a business owner. So it’s time to put my money where my mouth is– What is my business’s higher purpose? Put simply, it’s a desire to create a

better world through conscious leadership

• Question: What do you think is the single most important feature of an effective mission statement?

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Electric car’s success driven by Conscious Leadership• Not many people, even from within the automotive industry, would have the

confidence to set up a business from scratch – design, manufacture and marketing of a brand new car

• They almost certainly wouldn’t select the USA as manufacturing base

• Elon Musk, the founder of PayPal, a Silicon Valley man, decided to take on the might of the US automotive industry with an electric car

• Was he mad? Well, his company, Tesla, launched its first car in 2009. Contrary to almost all expectations, it moved into profit within just four years, reporting earnings in May 2013 of $11.2 million for the first quarter. The company’s stock surged to the point where Tesla is now worth more than the 113 year-old Fiat.

• Not mad, then. Just clever, bold and enlightened, like all great innovators and leaders

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Electric car’s success driven by Conscious Leadership• Now it seems to me that Elon Musk has embraced at least one of the key principles

of conscious leadership: that is, a higher purpose. There are easier ways to make money than launching a new and relatively untried product in an established and highly competitive marketplace with which you are unfamiliar. A case, perhaps, of a passion for something beyond profit proving itself to be the key to making a profit.

• Musk is, of course, a highly charismatic and highly successful business leader. His commitment to Tesla could be viewed as a rich man’s indulgence

• There are plenty of examples of less well-known entrepreneurs – including in the UK – pursuing a higher purpose in the form of a vision of environmentally-friendly personal transport – GEM Cars, Stevens Vehicles and Greencarsite.co.uk to name just a few

• The key point is that conscious business leaders, whether famous or not, succeed because they are driven by something more than a desire for success. The most enduring type of commercial success tends to be a by-product of this higher purpose, that captures the imagination of customers, workers and wider society.

• Question: Do you think Elon Musk will succeed in making electric cars sexy?

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Five questions that could help you define your higher purpose

• Every company these days seems to have a mission statement – an attempt to define the purpose of the business; why it exists

• How many of these statements really do that?

• How many are vague, incomprehensible or so bland as to be little more than a statement of the obvious?

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Five questions that could help you define your higher purpose

• In an article posted on Fast Company’s Co.Design site, Warren Berger posed a set of five questions that every company should continually ask itself to ensure that it really does understand the ‘why’ and not just the ‘what’ of its existence:

1. Why are we here in the first place?2. What does the world need most that we are uniquely able to provide?3. What are we willing to sacrifice?4. What matters more than money?5. Are we all on this mission together?

• Having a genuine higher purpose is a key step – often the first step – towards conscious capitalism and a step that everyone who aspires to conscious leadership needs to take. Asking the five questions above would be a great start

• Question: Do you know what your company’s mission statement is?

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Conscious Leadership can reinvent the American Dream

• We’ve all heard of the American Dream – that much cherished US belief that hard work mixed with gumption and a pinch of luck will enable you to rise from rags to riches

• In an article posted on Truthout, Cliff DuRand argues that there is not just one American Dream but three, reflecting the economic, political and social realities of US history going back several decades, if not longer

– The dream of the business elite for an unregulated yet government-subsidised capitalism

– The dream of the political elite for a dominant global position– The dream of the mass of the population for a steadily rising income

• The harsh reality, he argues, is that none of them is sustainable

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Conscious Leadership can reinvent the American Dream

• According to Global Footprint Network, we are already consuming as though the planet is one and a half times bigger than it actually is

• In the case of the US specifically, most informed commentators would agree that current consumption levels are running at something like a three, four or even five-planet lifestyle

• If ever there was a case for conscious leadership then here it is

• Without mindful leaders, aware of themselves, of everyone they interact with, and of the world around them, there may be no new American Dream to replace the one (or the ones) that are now so seriously threatened.

• Question: How can you keep the American Dream alive when the planet’s resources are under pressure?

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Conscious Leadership: a way out of poverty

• Developing countries have around three-quarters of the world’s population, but only 16% of its wealth. For decades, debate has raged over the best way to overcome such stark inequalities

• Yet most of the proposals put forward have been structural, rather than about leadership, and have come from the west. Maybe it is time for some radical and new thinking

• Abraham Inosezilo Obode accurately summarized the two main schools of thought in an article posted recently on the Nigerian Observer website

• The Modernisation school believes that emerging economies need to mirror the developed world politically, economically and socially if they want their fair share of Western prosperity

• The Dependency school, on the other hand, views this as a form of neo-colonialism, arguing that developing nations have to do it in their own way

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Conscious Leadership: a way out of poverty• My take is that this ‘Modernisation versus Dependency’ divide just mirrors the

right/left western political system. Perhaps the developing world needs to transcend this way of thinking

• Better to develop conscious leadership – an approach to leadership that embraces ambiguity and difference of opinion, which builds rather than attempts to impose consensus. An approach which is not just mindful of others but mindful of the environment, of the ecosystems and natural resources on which all of us depend

• Bitter, seemingly irreconcilable conflict, environmental degradation and corruption have all too often been the characteristics of development whether based on a Modernisation or Dependency model

• Truly conscious leadership offers a real alternative

• Question: How do you think emerging nations can best control their economic development?

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Hero Leaders. Do we still need them?

• Beyond any personal reactions, the resignation of Sir Alex Ferguson, manager of Manchester United, and the death of Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple, should give all of us pause for thought; thought about the nature of ‘hero’ leadership as opposed to more collective approaches such as conscious leadership in particular

• A more recent example is perhaps the heightened expectation at Chelsea Football Club of the returning hero Jose Mourinho, the ‘special one’, as manager from Real Madrid

• I’m a passionate advocate of conscious leadership but it would absurd of me to argue that Ferguson or Jobs somehow failed to deliver impressive results for their respective organisations. And there will always be charismatic leaders who inspire the highest performance in others

• However outstanding the achievements of an individual organisation, it remains just that – one organisation – and the extent and the depth of the challenges that the world faces calls for a much broader response than hero leadership can provide

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Hero Leaders. Do we still need them?

• There is a particular problem when we learn about hero leaders through the media, without having worked with them. Their style can be over-simplified via a few anecdotes, and become a caricature

• For example, Sir Alex is known for his ‘hair-dryer’ scoldings of players who make mistakes, but this hides the fact that he can also be very supportive of his players when subject to unfair criticism. No single ‘way of being’ defines a leader

• And within a hero-led organisation, there can be problems. As Nicky Little, writing for HR Magazine, pointed out –what happens after the hero has gone? Almost by their very nature, hero leaders create serious succession problems. But going beyond that, the economic, social and environmental issues that we collectively face will need a more collective solution

• Above all, we need mindful leaders, leaders who are aware of themselves and of the way they are perceived, leaders who value differences of opinion, leaders who appreciate that ambiguity, even conflict, needs to be understood not quashed, leaders who understand how people and the planet are interconnected.

• Question: Can a strong leader be both forceful and thoughtful?

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A generational shift that favours aspiring women leaders?

• The baby boomers, those born in the first two decades after the Second World War, are now retiring

• While it is dangerous to generalise, there is a case for arguing that this generation and its values has had profound impact on the leadership of organisations

• So what, or who, will follow it? What are the characteristics of Generation X, the baby boomers’ successors who were born in the 1960s and 70s?

• A report produced by Odgers Berndtson and the Cass Business School, After the Baby Boomers, suggests a significant shift in certain values

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A generational shift that favours aspiring women leaders?

• Generation X attaches far greater importance than the baby boomers to qualities such as emotional intelligence, cultural awareness and flexibility

• Without going so far as to say that these qualities are more characteristic of women than men, they are certainly to be found on the feminine side of the masculine/feminine continuum

• Could this demographic shift result in a more benign environment in the years to come for women aspiring to leadership roles?

• Question: Will more women leaders come to the fore as the baby boomers retire?

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Over to you, Warren Buffet -

• There is a very great deal I could say about the whole subject of women in leadership

• On this occasion I’m going to hand over to Warren Buffet, one of the world’s most renowned investors:

– “For most of our history, women - whatever their abilities - have been relegated to the sidelines … We've seen what can be accomplished when we use 50% of our human capacity. If you visualize what 100% can do, you'll join me as an unbridled optimist about America's future”.

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Over to you, Warren Buffet -

• Apart from the fact that it’s good to have such a high profile endorsement, Buffet’s recent article, from which the above quotations are taken, was addressed primarily to men

• That’s a key point. Working to achieve a more equitable position for women at the top of organisations is not in any way an anti-male activity.

• Question: Do you think men are becoming more supportive of promoting more women to senior roles?

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Join the debate on Women in Leadership

• There are statistics. Only 5.8% of FTSE 100 executive board members are women; there are only four women in the UK cabinet. Yet data doesn’t tell you very much

• To understand this issue, we need to delve in to the reasons why women are so under-represented in senior, decision-making roles

• Then there’s the debate about how the balance can be remedied. The women in leadership agenda is both broad and, at times, controversial

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Join the debate on Women in Leadership

• It needs to be. If the situation could be changed by well-meaning articles and the setting of targets, it would have been transformed decades ago.

• What I also welcome is the engagement of more people right across the agenda – which is why I congratulate The Guardian on the recent launch of its Women in Leadership website section and the Telegraph for the Business feature within its Women section

• Raising the profile of the debate can only be to the good for everyone

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Maternity coaching – a process, not an event

• As a provider of maternity coaching, I know that it works

• It works for the woman who wants to return to work, preparing her for all the practical and emotional issues around re-integrating to the workplace

• It works for the organisation, ensuring that the returning employee is ready to make a full contribution as quickly as possible

• To be truly effective, it has to be a process, a process that covers the pre-maternity, during maternity and post-maternity stages. The fact is there is no single point at which all the issues can be ‘fixed’

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Maternity coaching – a process, not an event

• Writing recently for The Guardian, Melanie Richards, a corporate finance partner at KPMG and head of its Women's Network, drew attention to this important insight

• Indeed, at KPMG they recognise that another critical stage in the process can arise some two years after the initial return to work – at the point when an employee may feel that her career is not progressing as it should or is considering having a second child

• The simple fact is that it is in everyone’s interest – the woman’s, the organisation’s and society’s – to prepare women for their return to work and to continue to support them once they have done so

• Question: If you have taken a break to look after a baby or child, what is the single best thing your employer can do to help you maintain your career?

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