Imagine a new corporate world. Not the one that brought us continuous growth, caveat emptor, and externalities. Imagine a version based on smaller modules of bursting creativity, the free exchange of ideas, and an ecological ethos that is rooted in a visceral connection to the living Mother Earth.
When an idea has become accepted as the prevailing wisdom it is hard to deviate from it. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we find it hard to accept that there could be a different course, and that it could in fact be a better one.
When everyone we know in business understands that business works a particular way it becomes self-fulfilling. When we believe that business exists fundamentally to deliver profits, then it does. When we believe that the path to profits is to minimize costs and increase sales, then that becomes our culture—even if that may not be the best course.
Simon Sinek wrote, “Most companies have no clue why their customers are their customers.” Implying that since most everything is commoditized in today’s world, and businesses assume their customers purchase their products because of superior features or low prices, the truth is that it has little to do with features and price, and more to do with the intangible.
Culture is the intangible. Culture is the life’s blood of an organization. It is more than its personality. It is its integrity, the connecting tissue that binds its people together, and in the vision held in common.
Imagine a new corporate world in which people come first, in equal measure to our Mother Earth. The profit culture is about serving a select few people. And yet all our spiritual traditions on Earth, the mystics, the visionaries and change makers tell us over and over, the greatest path to take is the one in which we all work for the greater good of all.
Imagine a new corporate world in which we celebrate the individual, the weird ones and the common ones, the spotted owl and the giant sequoia, the technologist and the disarrayed creative genius, the elder and the youth, the men and the women, the night and the day.
Imagine a new corporate world in which vision and risk are embraced, resistance to change is met with compassion and understanding, and yet the walls are broken down.
Imagine a world…
