#AzulTEC | Conferencia de Raj Sisodia: "Capitalismo consciente"

Raj Sisodia presents Conscious Capitalism, exploring how businesses can evolve beyond profit to create positive societal impact.

Key Takeaways

Businesses should operate with a higher purpose beyond profit maximization.
Capitalism has historically enabled unprecedented human progress but needs evolution.
Trust in business is low due to past practices focused narrowly on profit.
Modern challenges require new business models that embrace consciousness and stakeholder value.
Conscious Capitalism can transform corporations into positive forces for society and the environment.

What the video covers

Raj Sisodia, a leading professor and author, introduces the concept of Conscious Capitalism.
He compares the evolution of corporations to a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly, symbolizing higher consciousness and value creation.
The historical context of capitalism is discussed, highlighting the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith's ideas, and the founding principles of the United States.
Sisodia explains how capitalism has lifted humanity out of poverty and driven exponential growth over the last 200 years.
He emphasizes the importance of purpose beyond profit in business, advocating for a more conscious approach.
The talk addresses the decline in trust in business due to traditional profit-maximization models.
Sisodia notes societal changes such as demographic shifts, rising IQ levels, and evolving gender roles impacting business and leadership.
He critiques outdated business models and calls for new operating systems suited to modern realities.
The ultimate goal of business is framed as creating value for all stakeholders, not just shareholders.
Sisodia concludes with a call to rethink business as a serious endeavor that can benefit humanity and the planet.

Chapters

What is Conscious Capitalism according to Raj Sisodia?

Conscious Capitalism is a business philosophy that emphasizes operating with a higher purpose beyond profit, creating value for all stakeholders and positively impacting society.

How does Raj Sisodia describe the evolution of corporations?

He compares corporations to a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly, symbolizing their potential to evolve from profit-only entities into organizations that create beauty and value in the world.

What historical factors contributed to the rise of capitalism?

The Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith's economic theories, and the founding principles of freedom in the United States combined to enable exponential economic growth and prosperity.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

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Conscious Capitalism is the title of the conference that Raj Sisodia shares with us. Distinguished Professor of Global Business Franklin Olin and President of the Hall Foods Markets Department on Conscious Capitalism at Babson College in the United States. Doctor in Marketing and Business Policy at the University of Columbia. Author of Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business, and more than 100 articles in publications such as the Harvard Business Review. His work has been highlighted by the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, The Washington Post, and Financial Times, and has been cited in hundreds of books and academic articles.

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Frequently he is called as a speaker, having in his presence more than 500 presentations in universities and corporations around the world. With us, the founder and president of Conscious Capitalism, Raj Agarwal. Buenos días. I think my Spanish might

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be worse than Jack's, so I'll just say namaste. It's wonderful to be with you in this amazing hall. It's a great honor, of course, to be part of the celebration of such a great institution.

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I used to be an engineer a long time ago. I think I've forgotten most of what I knew then. But I've been focused on the world of business now for the last 30-35 years, 28 as a professor. And I've learned some things about

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business which are actually very different than what I was taught as a PhD student and as an MBA student. And I want to share with you some of the learnings that we have had and this movement, this idea now that we have that

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the world of business and capitalism, I think Jack Dorsey gave you an example of a company that reflects a different mindset and a philosophy about what business can be, starting with the idea of purpose and so forth. So in a way that will

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be very much a good example of what I'm going to be talking about here today, the idea of conscious capitalism. What does it mean to take capitalism to a higher level of being? And to use a simple metaphor for that, I like to

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start with the idea of a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. Remember when you were a child and you see that for the first time, it seems like a miracle. It seems like magic, right? But it's actually the same DNA, it's the same creature, but

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nature brings about an amazing transformation. Now think about the difference between a caterpillar and a butterfly. The caterpillar exists only to consume. That's all a caterpillar does. It eats everything in front of it. Its higher purpose in life is to eat. But

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then nature turns on a switch and it emerges as another creature of light and beauty. A creature that not only brings beauty but also creates value in the world through the process of cross-pollination. So that's an example of a species that is

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rising above a level of consciousness to a higher level of consciousness and creating good in the world. And I think the same is true of us as human beings. We are sort of born in a caterpillar stage. But we can evolve in our own

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lifetimes to a far greater degree even than the butterfly. We can achieve extraordinary levels of consciousness and therefore impact on the world. And the same is also true of corporations. We create corporations in our image and we give them this identity which is

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sort of like a caterpillar. We say that you are all about profit maximization for your owners. But actually that is not the real richness and impact that corporations can have. They too can be creatures of great beauty and positive impact and value creation

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in the world. And that's what I'm going to try to share with you this morning. But before I talk about conscious capitalism, I do think it's worth spending a few minutes just to talk about this institution of capitalism, which is something that many

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of us have been part of for much of our lives, but we also take it for granted. We think that this is the way things have always been, and we also take some of the benefits of the system for granted. But if you

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look at what human history has been on this planet, for thousands of years. So this data looks at the last 2000 years of per capita income on a worldwide basis, estimated in today's dollars. And you can see that for almost all of that

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time, human beings lived on about $500 a day per person per year. So that means that most people, in fact 90%, lived on less than $1 per day. 90% of human beings lived at a level of extreme poverty that we define today as

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the lowest level of poverty. That was the average condition of humanity. Life expectancy was only 28 to 30 years for almost all of human history. And there were very few people, only a few hundred million. And then there would be plagues and disasters

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and population would go down by 50%. That was the human condition. So what changed really was around the 18th century. We had a few events that occurred. In 1750, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, so now we had suddenly a great increase in

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productivity. We could produce a lot more goods, and those countries that had access to this technology, starting in the UK, really started to prosper. China and India, which were the dominant economies at that time, started to decline, relatively speaking, because they did not

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have access to this technology. But soon after that, in 1776, we had two things that happened. Adam Smith, a Scottish philosopher, wrote a book called "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations," asking the simple question, "Why is it

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that some societies are more prosperous than others?" And he found that it did not have to do with the national character or the culture or other factors like that, that it really had to do with the degree to which human beings were free

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in those societies to focus on what they did well and then to trade with each other. Just as Jack said, human beings are genetically predisposed to create value and to exchange value with each other. That is something that comes very naturally. We're the

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only species that does that. And if you can create a society in which everybody is encouraged and able to do that, and rather than having a government decide everything, what should be produced, how much, what price, that doesn't work. So this was the

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theory of the invisible hand of the market, efficiently allocating resources and aligning all the forces to create much more prosperity than you see in other places. Now that same year, it's an amazing historic coincidence, the United States had the Declaration of Independence. And

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it may not be so much of a coincidence in terms of the ideas that are in there because Benjamin Franklin met Adam Smith in England a couple of years before. Actually, he read out portions of Wealth of Nations to him. So the idea

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of this country, United States, was created on the basis of the idea of freedom.

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This is the only country in the history of the world to be created on the basis of ideas. Every other country has existed for other reasons. But this country was based on the idea of individual freedom, religious freedom, political freedom, and economic freedom.

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The average person was in charge of their own destiny by right of law. This had not been the case anywhere else in the world. If you were not born into the aristocracy or the landed gentry, your circumstances in life were pretty much determined

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for the rest of your life. You could not rise up. In the United States, you could rise from nothing to great heights. That was the genius of that country and those ideas which then spread, of course, around the world. Now you can see

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the combination of those three things, the technological revolution of the industrial revolution and then the intellectual breakthrough of Adam Smith and then the oxygen of freedom provided by the idea behind the founding of the United States came together and after that humanity has

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taken off on an incredible trajectory. For thousands of years, we had a flat line, and now for the last 200 years, we have had exponential growth in just about everything.

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the combination of those three things, the technological revolution of the industrial revolution and then the intellectual breakthrough of Adam Smith and then the oxygen of freedom provided by the idea behind the founding of the United States came together and after that humanity has

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taken off on an incredible trajectory. For thousands of years, we had flat line, and now for the last 200 years, we have had exponential growth in just about everything.

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Per capita incomes have risen 15 times in real terms worldwide. In many countries, they've risen 50 to 100 times. Life expectancy has gone from 28 to 70 now on a worldwide basis. Our human population has gone from 1 billion in 1820 to over

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7 billion now. Literacy has gone from 10% to almost 90% on a worldwide basis.

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And every other indicator of human well-being has gone up dramatically. And it coincides with the advent of this idea of free markets and free people on a broad scale, what we also call capitalism. There's a great myth that this system is really about making a few people rich and everybody else

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miserable. I mean, that was sort of the Marxist criticism of this. The reality is actually very different than that. Because of the advent of free markets and free people, we have dramatically reduced the incidence of poverty. So 90% of people used to live

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on less than $1.25 a day. Now we're down to about 12% or 13%. And within 20-30 years we could actually eliminate extreme poverty on this planet. That's part of the UN Millennium Goals and we are ahead of target on that. The real issue

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in the world is not the unequal distribution of income, it's the unequal distribution of freedom. And when we spread freedom and with that opportunity, human beings are able to lift themselves up. That's what we do. So it's been an extraordinary journey the last

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couple of hundred years. And If you look at what that suggests about business, it's that business has been a very powerful force for good in the world. And yet if you look at the narrative in the popular culture, you know, any country in

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the world you go, if you look at movies and literature, you will never find a business person to be the hero. Business is always seen as selfish, greedy and exploitative. I think that's a very damaging and a very negative and a very inaccurate

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way to characterize business. We believe fundamentally in the four principles, part of our conscious capitalism credo. Business is fundamentally good because it's based on the creation of value. A business that does not create value will go out of business. It has to create

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value for customers, for employees, for communities, suppliers. This is not true of other institutions in society. Governments and many other organizations can exist for a long time without creating value and in fact while inflicting harm on the world. Secondly, business is fundamentally ethical

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because it is based on the idea of voluntary exchange. Most businesses in this world do not have the ability to force you to buy from them, to force you to work for them, to supply to them, etc. If you believe it's in your

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best interest, you will do it. Both sides have to benefit. If it's a legal product that we are trading in, there's nothing unethical about that. Governments have coercive power.

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Businesses do not. Governments can put you in jail or put you to death if you don't do what they believe is right. But businesses only operate on... Now the big danger is when business and government comes together, when some businesses use the power

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of government and coercive power that government has to further their own interests. That is what we call crony capitalism. That is a cancer on society. It's also now we're calling it "crapitalism." That is not capitalism, okay? So we don't have to defend that.

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What we're talking about here is free markets, free people. Business is also noble because it elevates our existence. Think about all those people living all those thousands of years at a subsistence level of existence where they're working day and night just to stay

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alive. That is almost an animalistic existence. Those people had no opportunity to really explore what it means to be human, to explore the arts and literature and music. There's an expression that says, "This planet used to be molten lava, and today it sings

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opera. Where does that come from? Where does the human drive to create art and beauty come from? Those capacities are inside us, but unless we have the time and unless we have the resources to do that, we cannot ever reach that. Business has

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provided that opportunity to billions of people on this planet. And finally, business is heroic because it has lifted people out of poverty. In the last two decades, a billion people in China and India have been lifted out of extreme poverty because those two

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countries have chosen to embrace The ideas of free markets and free people even not to a full degree but partially. Governments cannot lift people out of poverty. Non-profits, religious organizations cannot. They can help in the short term but they cannot provide a sustainable

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means for people to earn a livelihood without external help. Businesses do that. So business people, entrepreneurs, these are the heroes of our age and yet we not only do not celebrate but we greatly criticize them. Now the fact is that the

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way in which you've created all this prosperity has had some negative consequences. We have dramatic challenges with the environment. We have tremendous amounts of stress and other negative factors on people's lives. We have unhealthy lifestyle habits and consumers developing all kinds of problems.

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So yes, there's a way in which we have run business that has caused some problems to happen as well. And partly that's why perhaps the level of trust in business today, despite all the accomplishments, is extremely low. Most people in the world are

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very cynical and very negative about business. This is in the United States, which is the home of global capitalism in many ways. And yet the attitudes towards big business, publicly traded companies especially, is dramatically negative there. And you can see it's been going

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down for the last 40 plus years. In 2009, it was at 16% of Americans having confidence in big business, lower than the US Congress. For the first time ever, US Congress was not at the bottom. Okay, this is something really shocking. And the

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question is why has this happened and does it matter? I think having that much cynicism and distrust out there in the world of work is extremely important because if people do not care about what they're doing, if they're not engaged in their work,

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they cannot be creative, they cannot be innovative, they cannot come up with the breakthrough ideas that we will need in the future if we are to continue to bring prosperity and modernity to all the billions of people who don't have it. There are

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three billion people still living on less than three dollars a day. but we cannot meet their needs in the same way that we met in the past we're going to need innovation innovation comes from people it's not going to come from god and

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people are only innovative and creative if they believe in what they're doing if they have a sense of purpose if they have a passion and most businesses are simply not creating that so we need to look at what's happening and why so the

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question we want to ask is why has this happened this growing gap and secondly we're going to look at the two factors that contribute to that one is the world has changed dramatically It's almost unrecognizable today compared to even 20 years ago. I'll

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talk about how the world has changed and because we are inside it, we don't see some of the changes that have happened. We human beings are changing at a very rapid rate. You know, when we got up on our two legs, that was

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not the end of evolution. We have continued to evolve but the evolution has gone inward and we are changing faster than we ever have in our history. The fact is that businesses for the most part haven't adapted to these new realities. It's like

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businesses using an operating system to use a computer metaphor that was developed in the industrial age based upon a military as the organizing metaphor. That's how businesses were created.

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Organizations were structured with a general and foot soldiers and command and control hierarchies. Today's world is very different. You cannot use an operating system that was designed for that world. So I want to take you back to a year 1989. This is when

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a lot of fundamental changes happened. This was a turning point almost as significant as 1776 in our history. What was the big event of that year, some of you may remember, was the collapse or the bringing down of the Berlin Wall. The Berlin

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Wall was a symbol of the defining debate of the 20th century between competing ideologies: communism, socialism, state control of everything, democracy, capitalism, freedom. And the whole world was divided into two camps. We had a Cold War, we had mutually assured destruction, we had

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the threat of nuclear holocaust. That's what we grew up with. And then suddenly without a single gunshot being fired, that debate was over. And one after the other, like dominoes, countries started to shift over to freedom. And we started all kinds of experimentation.

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What kind of democracy? What kind of free market? It was a fundamental turning point in our history. It was preceded a few months before that by the events in China in Tiananmen Square, if you remember, on June 1st of that year. Very inspiring,

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even though it was crushed. That year we also had the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, which was an environmental awareness that was raised way above what it had been in the past. So now we had the birth of environmental consciousness on a

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mass scale. It was also the year there was a death sentence fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie. by the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran for writing a book that was critical of Islam, supposedly. And this was the re-emergence of religious fundamentalism as a force on

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the planet. So some big changes happening at that time. But also, below the headlines in 1989, we had a demographic revolution that happened as well. It's a much more subtle thing. For the first time in the United States, we had more adults over

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the age of 40 than below. So 40 marks the passage into midlife. You all may have heard of the midlife crisis. We make a lot of jokes and funny movies about it. But the fact is that there is something that happens to us

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when we reach roughly that time period in our life. We start to question our value system. We start to think, reorder our priorities. People start to be much more focused on meaning and purpose and less upon material possessions and traditional definitions of success.

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They're much more concerned with their legacy. In the kind of world we're leaving behind for our children and much more focused on the well-being of others, interconnectedness, interdependence. People start volunteering for non-profits that have nothing to do with their self-interest. They start setting

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up foundations, etc. So there's a value shift that occurs. Now why does the median age go up? Because birth rates have been falling worldwide and life expectancies have been increasing. So now there are over 100 countries in the world where the birth rate

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is below 2.1, which is replacement, and life expectancy has been increasing. The US now The median age is 45 for adults. It has already reached 45. For Caucasian white Americans, it's over 50. Western Europe is even older, and Japan is older than that.

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Japan median age is well into the mid-50s now. So this is a worldwide phenomenon where we're going to have this hunger for meaning and purpose in various populations all over the world in their role as employees, in their roles as customers, as citizens, as community

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members. They all are going to be looking for something more than just material types of things. Another thing happened in 1989.

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If the clicker will cooperate or we may just get stuck here. Oops. Okay. In 1989, a guy named Tim Berners-Lee invented a technology that has changed all of our lives completely. He invented the World Wide Web. And many

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of you are young in this room, you don't remember a world before there was Google and before there was a web. When you had a question, you could get it answered immediately. That wasn't always the case. So this has brought about an information

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egalitarian system. world or information democracy where the average person has access to more information today instantly at their fingertips anytime anyplace for free than the richest billionaire in the world did 20 years ago. This is a huge huge change. It's a world of

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almost total transparency. Anything that's happening anywhere can and will be known around the world.

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So we are far better informed than ever before. We are also incredibly more connected.

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Not that long ago in the mid 90s, 1995, half of the people on this planet had never made a single phone call in their life. Think about that. Forget about text messaging. Half the people had never made a single phone call and today

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we have more phone numbers than we have people on this planet. Facebook has 1.2 billion members, so we've created an extraordinary amount of connectivity across the human species. We're all connected together now almost in a shared central nervous system. We're also becoming more

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intelligent. Our human IQ has been rising by 3 to 4 percent every decade for the last 8 or 9 decades, according to the Flynn effect. What that means in practical terms, if you take somebody with an average IQ today of 100, which is

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always the average in a population, and you transport them back to the year 1918, they would be in the top 2% of intelligence. You would be smarter than 98% of the people. This is an extraordinary change in a very short amount of time.

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We used to say you can fool some of the people all the time and you can fool all of the people some of the time. Sorry, you cannot fool anybody any of the time anymore. People are smart and they are connected and they

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know what's going on. They can see through, they can understand complexity. And this has a lot of implications for business and for government in terms of how informed people are. We are also much better educated. So it's one thing to have raw intelligence,

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but if you don't have access to education, all of that remains locked up. You never realize the potential of it. 100 years ago, only 9% of Americans finished high school. Today, 85-90% do, 45% go to college. South Korea, 75% go to college now.

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And now with massively online courses that will be available, access to higher education is going to become very democratic worldwide. And the impact of this trend is much greater on women than on men. Because women are now 60% of college students in the

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US, and even more at the master's and PhD level. And they're getting higher grades.

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They're doing much better in college. So that means that white collar professions in the coming decades will be dominated by women, medical profession, legal profession, education, even disciplines of engineering. When I went to engineering school in India, we had eight women out of

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400. Now in that same institution, there are 40% women. It's an extraordinary shift that is happening and is going to fundamentally change the character of society because now for the first time in human history, women are finally being given the opportunity to realize

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their potential in this world. And we're going to see the feminization of the culture and the rise of feminine values in a dramatic way. And we will see it in every sphere of society. Twenty years ago, we only saw a few women in

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the world of business who were leaders. One Fortune 500 CEO was a woman. Today, there are 21. IBM and DuPont and Kraft and many others. You saw a few women in politics. Margaret Thatcher, but she was the Iron Lady. We had Indira Gandhi

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in India, but she was called the only man in her cabinet. We had Golda Meir in Israel. So the only way women could succeed was by being more like the men than the men were by playing the men's game even better, by being

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tougher and more aggressive and more ruthless. The fact is that in today's world, those so-called masculine values are no longer working. And women today are showing up in leadership based on their own real strengths. Nurturing, caring, compassion, relationships, win-win kind of a mindset,

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this is what the world is moving towards. And this comes naturally to women, but men have to learn it. So it's a fundamental shift, the rise of feminine values in society and the feminization of the culture Lastly, we are becoming more conscious. What does this mean, to become more conscious? It

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means that we are becoming more and more awake and mindful. We are starting to see reality as it is. For most of our history, we've been so focused on survival and just what's in front of us. Now we are actually zooming back and

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looking at the bigger picture and seeing all of the interconnections, interdependencies, all of the consequences of our actions. And when you do that, you start to take responsibility for the consequences of your actions as well. And you have a better sense of right

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and wrong. So 150 years ago, we had slavery. not only in the United States, but many countries and all throughout human history and every civilization, there's been slavery. Today, there's no more. 100 years ago, no women had the right to vote. 1920 in

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the US, when women got the right to vote. 75 years ago, we still had colonial powers, and that's another kind of slavery. 50 years ago, there was still Segregation in the United States, 30 years ago we had animal abuse and child labor and

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environmental abuse that was acceptable. 20 years ago there was apartheid. In South Africa, two years ago there was "don't ask, don't tell" in the US military. These are all barriers that are falling one after the other and this journey will continue. There's no

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end to how conscious we're going to become as human beings. We're also becoming much more peaceful. Steven Pinker has a book called "The Better Angels of Our Nature" that shows that we are living in the most peaceful time in human history. And we

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don't realize that. Because of all the media and the headlines. But the fact is there are fewer people being impacted by murder and by dying in wars and terrorism and even accidental death than ever before. 90, 95, 99% less than historical norms. When

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I lived in New York in the 80s, there were 4,000 murders a year. Now it's less than 400. This too is an indicator of rising consciousness because resorting to violence is an animalistic response. So we are evolving as human beings. We are moving

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very fast. So when you add up all of these changes, how the world has changed, how we human beings have grown and evolved, the fact is we cannot think about doing things the same way. As Abraham Lincoln said, "The dogmas of the quiet

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past are inadequate to the stormy present. As our case is new, we must think anew and act anew." And no way is this true. This is true in every sector of society, but no way more so than in business. We have to rethink

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what does it mean What is the role and purpose and impact of business in society? What will it take for companies to truly flourish, not just succeed, but flourish in the future? Let me give you a quick example. A company in the US,

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the world's largest natural and organic retailer, Whole Foods Market, about a 13 billion dollar company, 75,000 employees, started in 1978 with the name Safer Way. Why Safer Way? Because there's a company called Safeway. And they said, no, there's a Safer Way. This is

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about Not having all those artificial ingredients and pesticides and insecticides. There's a better way to eat. That it matters what you put into your body. It matters to your health, the health of the food system, and the health of the planet. So this

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is their purpose. To educate people about that and to improve people's health and longevity and well-being. And it's as important today as it ever was. In the US in 1960 we had 5.7% of GDP on health care, 16% on food. Today 20% of

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our GDP is on health care. and 8% on food. So clearly we are impacting our health by the way we are eating. So that's their purpose. You'll also find a very powerful document on their website called the Declaration of Interdependence, not independence, recognizing

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that we are part of an interconnected system in which the well-being of each customers, employees, suppliers, communities, farmers, investors, et cetera. We're all connected together, and we have to recognize that, that our well-being is going to go together. So the system has to

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be managed in a way that everybody prospers. Everyone must win. With every decision we have to create, win, win, win, win. It is possible in a business to do that, to reject the idea of trade-offs. And you'll see there are other things about

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them that you can see. CEOs, leaders are modestly paid, frontline employees are better paid, there's lots of transparency. Some of the kinds of things that Jack also talked about.

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So they represent the four principles or tenets of conscious capitalism. Every business must start with a higher purpose, a reason for existing that goes beyond making money. Money cannot be the purpose. Profits are essential and they're important, but they cannot be the purpose.

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Profits are the outcome of running a business the right way. It's like saying that I need red blood cells in order to survive, but the purpose of my life is not to produce as many red blood cells as possible. Likewise, for a business,

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the profit is necessary to survive and grow, but it enables them to achieve their purpose in a bigger way if they're profitable and they grow. Integrating the interests of all stakeholders, not seeing them as competitors, not seeing some as means, others as an

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end. Looking at the well-being of each of them is inherently important. Leadership that is about The purpose and about service to people and the planet is not about power and it's not about personal enrichment. It's not command and control. It's not carrots and

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sticks. It's mentoring, motivating, developing, inspiring and truly caring for people as human beings and a culture that is based upon trust and openness and authenticity and transparency and empowerment and love and care. So these are some of the elements of cultures, but I

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just want to focus on this idea of caring or love and care. What role does love and care have in the world of business? Ten years ago, this would have been seen as a ridiculous question. There's nothing to do with love and care

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in the world of business. Business is tough. Business is about the survival of the fittest, right? It's a dog-eat-dog world, etc. But the fact is that it doesn't have to be that way. So when the founders of Whole Foods started that company, they

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said, can we build a business on love instead of fear? Most companies have a tremendous amount of fear and stress in them. That's how we motivate people. That's why we have a restaurant chain called Thank God It's Friday. Why do people live for

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the weekend? They live for the... because that's when they feel they can enjoy life.

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Everything else is work, is stressful and meaningless for most people. Does it have to be that way? So people get drunk. I asked my American friends when I first saw this, when I came here, I said, I thought you go to church on

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Sunday. Why are you thanking God on Friday? But of course, you know, this is when they enjoy. That means get drunk and have a party and then Saturday do it again and then Sunday comes around and then what?

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I was at a conference where the Dalai Lama said heart attacks are highest on Monday morning. You think that's true? It is true. 20% heart attacks go up on Monday morning. So the irony is that our lives today are such that we're not

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getting killed in wars and murders and terrorism. We are getting killed by our jobs.

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This is the reality that we've created in the world. This is Gallup's data on employee engagement. You can see the right side. Only 26 to 30 percent of Americans in the last 13 years were engaged in their work. They cared about their work.

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70 to 74 percent either didn't care or they hated it. They were hostile. If they could do harm to their company, they would do it. And this is not, I don't think that we have bad people in the world. It's that we haven't

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created the conditions. I call this the shame of management and leadership. This is the responsibility of leaders to create that kind of a So as Sigmund Freud said, "Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness." If we can combine the two, these

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are the two most powerful human drives: self-interest, reflected in work, and then caring. The need to care is as powerful. If we can combine those two in our work lives, that would make an extraordinary difference in the world. So in my research some

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years ago, we looked at a bunch of companies that had these characteristics that were built on these ideas of love and care and so forth and all the other principles we talked about. And now we have a new edition coming out with 28

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American companies in it and a number of non-US companies as well. You can see that the financial performance of these companies over the long term is dramatically better. So this does not come at the penalty of financial performance. In fact, this is the

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way to be more successful financially because you're harnessing the energies and the extraordinary abilities of all the human beings that are part of that system. When they truly care about what they do, when they're passionate about what they do, you create extraordinary value

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in the world, as you can see here. We've also looked at a bunch of private companies in the US. We also have a number of non-US companies in our research as well. We do have a Mexican company here, FEMSA. with our CEO,

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Jose Antonio, who you heard from earlier. So there's some wonderful companies around the world that are showing that this way of being does work. So the financial performance you can see holds up over different time periods, not just 15, 20 years, 10 years, five years, et

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cetera. So to conclude, it is important that businesses be profitable and successful. There's no denying that. That's important. But it matters how you make the money. It's an extremely important question. You can be profitable and make money in one way that harms people and harms the planet and harms everybody, or you

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can do it in a way that benefits everybody. And we have to rethink what we think business is about. Business is not a game. I was with a CEO who said, "You take all this too seriously. Business is just a game. Money is

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a way of keeping score." I said, "I'm sorry. This is not a game." Business is not a machine. Some people think of it, you put inputs, you put physical inputs and financial inputs and labor and so forth, and you get profits coming out.

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It's not a machine. Many economists would have you think that business is a math problem. They reduce business to maximize profits subject to all these constraints. Many finance people just tend to look at the numbers. They don't look at the people behind the numbers. Business is not a math

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problem. And finally, business is not war. A lot of businesses act as though their competitors are their bitter enemies who need to be destroyed. That's not what business is about. You can learn from your competitors. You can admire your competitors. Business is

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actually about the real lives of real people. Every action we take has consequences on real lives. It is about the most human thing that we can do in this world is run a business. And therefore we must define our success and measure our

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success by the way we impact the lives of human beings. Not just directly through our employees, customers, etc. But even beyond that to their families, their communities, etc. All of those are consequences of our actions. The fact is that businesses create but

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can also destroy many kinds of value in this world. It's not just financial value, but it's also intellectual capital, social capital, emotional well-being of people, the spiritual well-being, sense of meaning and purpose, impact on the popular culture, impact on people's bodies, and impact

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on the environment. These are all consequences of our actions. And we can choose to rule a business in which we create positive value in all these dimensions for all stakeholders. Or we can choose just to make money and then have negative effects on

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all those other areas. And say, well, those are just side effects, or those are negative externalities and we don't have to worry about them. No, those matter actually even more than the financial outcomes in many cases. So we have to start thinking in

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this broader way. And we have to get away from this mindset of complacency, of thinking that this is not my problem. We have the fortunate few and then the miserable millions. We have the CEOs and the frontline workers, we have the developed countries

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and the developing countries, etc. That mindset is simply wrong. We are all connected. We are all in the same boat. We share our destinies. We're all sharing the same planet. It's all one system. We have to start acting in that way. The fact

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is that humanity is one spirit. We are recognizing that. We know that our natural resources are finite, but what will save us? I worked with this Korean company called POSCO, which is a steel company. At the entrance to their steel plant, it

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says, "Resources are limited, creativity is unlimited." That's the one unlimited resource on this planet is human creativity. Human ingenuity is really the answer forward. Our inner resources are infinite.

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That's going to be the answer. Instead of treating human beings as a physical resource, you know, like if you take coal, for example, you use it, it's gone. Human beings are not a resource. Human beings in the right setting are a source. A

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source is like the sun that continuously generates light and warmth and energy and caring and creativity and compassion. Human beings are the most powerful form of renewable energy ever discovered on this planet. But just like the energy inside the atom remained locked up

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for almost all of history until we figured out how to liberate it. the capacities of most human beings remain locked up for all of their existence and they die without ever expressing them unless we create the conditions in which that can happen but

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we must do it right away we don't have time to wait as martin luther king says there's a fierce urgency of now we are on the brink of so many disasters if we don't change So those of us who are alive today have

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an extraordinary opportunity. We have the opportunity to lead the most meaningful lives human beings have ever led on this planet because our challenges are greater than ever. We have crisis on every front there, 7 billion of us, but so is our consciousness of

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those challenges and so is our ability to do something about them. All we have to do is liberate the extraordinary human capacities on those challenges and we will solve every problem that exists in this world. But we won't do it if we use

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traditional ways of thinking about organizations and corporations and business, command and control, profit centered, etc. We need to build organizations that are driven by purpose, that are built on love and care, that create value for all stakeholders and that empower all of their

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people to achieve the extraordinary potential that they have. Thank you very much. This is the book, the new book on this and...

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This is our website. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. I get to hug this. Thank you.

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Thank you very much.

Topics:Conscious CapitalismRaj SisodiaBusiness PurposeCorporate ResponsibilityCapitalism HistoryIndustrial RevolutionAdam SmithStakeholder ValueBusiness EthicsSustainable Business

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