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The New Answers and the Purpose of Business
Dawna Jones
According to the new paradigm in Laszlo’s books, the new bottom-line answer to the question Why are we here? is clear and even evident. We are here to transmit more and higher consciousness into the universe. The question raised in this contribution to the clarification of the meaning of the new answers concerns the world of business. What is the real purpose of business? Could it be that it is to contribute to the transmission of more and higher consciousness into the world?
Google the purpose of business and you’ll see economist Milton Friedman’s 1970s definition, “to maximize profit for shareholders.” Reference.com states that the primary purpose is “to make money.” Business visionary Peter Drucker’s version, “to create and keep a customer,” adds a wider focus with more beneficiaries. All three hold limited aspiration and restrict human potential from achieving what it is truly capable of achieving. Each purpose focuses on a part of the larger whole, while being employed as a decision-making principle, consciously or unconsciously. Because purpose provides compelling reason to exist, anchoring decision making at every level to the deeper purpose could inspire the evolution of business.
Maximizing profit for shareholders has been coined the “dumbest idea in the world” by Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, echoed by Forbes contributor Steve Denning, and for good reason. When executive compensation is tied to maximizing shareholder returns unethical behavior is the result. Wells Fargo is the most recent company to demonstrate how a focus on maximizing shareholder return created metrics resulting in consumer fraud.
Even without that effect, the beneficiaries of the company’s purpose, defined narrowly, are restricted to a small part of the whole system. The health of employees, suppliers, and customers is willingly sacrificed, weakening the coherence and health of society and the environment. By focusing on a limiting purpose without wider benefit, incoherence on the inside of the company spreads to negatively impact the health of humanity and the ecological systems needed to sustain life. Through a limited consciousness, holding a limiting aspiration up as a purpose creates disengagement, causes stress-related illness, and breaches trust between business and society.
The trouble is that, viewed through limited consciousness, these dynamics are invisible, and so they continue to operate despite waving the signals. For workers in traditional companies operating under the “maximizing shareholder profit” definition, there is little sense of accomplishment. A 2009 study revealed that 60 percent of executives play video games for thirty minutes a day just to feel alive.
As game designer and futurist Jane McGonigal put it, reality is broken. Thankfully, this is the perfect time to create a different version.
How Can Business Live Up to Its Real Purpose?
Purpose guides the focus for decision making both consciously and unconsciously. It is also the inspirational beacon guiding expression of creativity and holds the key for engaging true talent. Transcending adversity, as expressed by the massive problems humanity is now facing, is where the beacon is located. Getting from where we are today to attaining the goal that business can be of benefit to the world on multiple levels—ecologically, societally, and economically, for instance—requires the evolution of consciousness in the world of business.
The choice to step forward into a higher level of leadership is nearing the place of no choice. All sizes of companies are failing fast, with longevity down to ten years and continuing to drop. Upstart startups and innovators are developing products and services that are disrupting and replacing business models, leaving large traditionally managed companies under pressure. The suffocating notion of business’s purpose as “to make money” is being replaced by more ambitious reasons for business’s existence.
Ervin Laszlo describes the process of bifurcation where the linear trajectory of evolution reaches a pivotal choice: transform or collapse. He writes there are laws of complexity, including laws of the evolution of complexity, that apply to all systems. A nonlinear system-level transformation called a bifurcation is one such law. It occurs in the evolutionary trajectory of nearly all complex systems, and it spells the end of some systems and the transformation of others. In business terms, the collapse of the linear system places business leadership in the crux of choice: transform or collapse. Companies grasping for familiar linear strategies to control the effect of disruptive exponential technologies choose the latter, unwittingly.
Writer, inventor, and designer Buckminster Fuller said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” The new models are replacing the existing models at warp speed. In the energy sector, Tony Seba, Silicon Valley entrepreneur and lecturer at Stanford University, forecasts that unsubsidized solar power will replace all fossil fuels by 2030. IKEA is already using 100 percent solar. Electric motors, for example, are five times more efficient than the internal combustion engine, converting 85 to 95 percent of energy into kinetic motion. Operating costs are significantly lower. Battery range is increasing and prices are dropping to bring the electric car to the same price range as the gasoline-powered vehicle by 2023 or earlier. These and other changes render linear business thinking useless as the systemic effects ripple throughout all relationships in the interconnected system. With a focus on the parts, rather than seeing the integrated whole, companies resort to running faster in the hope that complexity is a cycle on the linear runway of conventional business thinking. Companies can use a higher purpose to rise above well-worn patterns. However, this will take a higher level of leadership’s consciousness.
On the evolutionary path are companies that focus on Drucker’s definition: to create and keep customers. It is goal of wider benefit, but is it big enough to lead to further evolution?
As costs drop hastened by reducing waste, efficiency increases. New technologies like robotics and smart machines are already replacing humans and are triggering fear. Can a creative response consistent with an evolutionary mind-set replace fear? Can trust in one’s talent replace seeking security found in job certainty? Transforming dormant human potential into revitalized coherence activates the evolutionary leap to redesign or reinvent before crisis leaves no other option. Thinking big is the catalyst.
Evolving human consciousness is about tapping into the creative adaptive spirit biologically wired into each human being. “We actually contain a built-in ability to rise above restriction, incapacity, or limitation and, as a result of this ability, possess a vital adaptive spirit that we have not yet fully accessed. While this ability can lead us to transcendence, paradoxically it can lead also to violence, our longing for transcendence arises from our intuitive sensing of this adaptive potential and our violence arises from our failure to develop it.”*20 Adversity and massive problems turn into opportunities for business.
The bigger the challenge, the better. Each seemingly insurmountable problem is an invitation to expand consciousness and evolve: personally, organizationally, societally, and globally. Co-creating a new version of reality is the challenge we collectively face as a species.
Moonshot 10X goals, goals that reach beyond the capability of any one person or company, are the kinds of goals that activate intuitively creative responses. Google’s mind-set and Peter Diamandis’s XPrize Foundation demonstrate the value of thinking big. In contrast, “Achieve quarterly targets” is uninspiring.
Can business go beyond profit as its purpose? It must or it will abjectly fail. Is the current purpose of business in alignment with transmitting higher consciousness into the world? And if it were, what would business then look like?
Novo Nordisk is one of several large, global, publicly traded companies over a hundred years old that have embedded life’s principles into their cultural DNA.*21 Their deeper purpose (or goal) is to achieve systemic health. Systemic health is a unifying value and so it serves as an organizing principle for decision making at all levels in the company. Because achieving systemic health benefits all life, beyond humanity, the entire workforce is inspired to contribute love for their work, which is more than their intellectual and creative talent.
Applying the New Map of Consciousness Going Forward
Consciousness is a word that is too frequently tucked away in the “new age” file, thereby bypassing the chance to make sense of the critical point now facing humanity. Ervin Laszlo’s practical definition describes consciousness as “the determining factor of how we see the world, of who we are, what the world is, and what we can do in the world. It is the mindset—the totality of preassumptions, assumptions, intuitions, and information about the world, each other, the possibilities, dangers, and opportunities.”*22 To bridge linear thinking and limited consciousness with an up-to-date worldview means accessing more than one way of thinking and perceiving. “If we try to pick out any thing by itself, we find it hitched to every thing else in the universe” (John Muir, 1911).
The new map of consciousness provides insights and a photosensitive lens to guide the evolution of consciousness in business. Three areas converge to show the way.
From the limited consciousness residing in approximately 85 percent of U.S. leaders, it is not possible to see the natural networks of performance or the impact of decisions on customers, employees, and societal and ecological health. Nor is it possible to observe the interaction of the formal structure with the informal social and emotional networks that connect and form a coherent field. Fear is undetectable but fully operational. For business to evolve to a higher purpose, the entire worldview must widen and deepen to reveal what makes the system coherent and stable even while transforming. Trust and confidence must replace fear.
The three lenses below offer ways for business decision makers to appreciate what lies beyond the boundary of existing knowledge and prevailing assumptions about how the world works. Pivoting world-view enables actions that support coherent relationships and ripple throughout the entire dynamic: inside, as well as beyond the boundaries of the company. Not to be confused with systems thinking—a mental track—the three lenses offered here provide a means to sense and see the vibration of energy-driving performance, reputation, compassion, and care. In physics, the definition of energy is “ability to perform work.” The energy that is expressed or repressed signals the given consciousness of the company and may become the dynamic platform for its growth.
Lens 1: Understanding How Adaptive Systems Work—The Lens of Networks
Viewed from the dominant business consciousness, most of what drives performance in companies remains unseen. To achieve coherence inside a company between the informal interactions necessitates observing the emotional and social networks that power performance. Networks exist in all organizations, in hierarchies with centralized decision-making authority, as well as in self-managed or matrix structures where leadership and power are distributed.
Performance runs on networks no matter whether it is in a matrix organization, networked by design, or in a traditional hierarchy. High-performance networks are coherently organized around a shared aspiration. Ego-driven networks operate in companies at a limited level of consciousness where there is a greater need for psychological safety and where the focus is on self-preservation or gain. The first is driven by “We”; the second by “Me.”
Companies that manage by applying the principles of a living system are aware of the importance of the networks to shorten response time between issue identification and response. On the other hand, companies and management that still rely on authority for control cannot perceive interpersonal network dynamics. The narrow mental focus blinds depth perception pivotal for discerning what is powering and sustaining performance.
In 2005, Hewlett Packard mapped who was involved in accomplishing a goal that mattered to the team. They were seeking to understand what sustained phenomenal performance in the ink-jet division. The answer was Joy.
The research found
that the people involved in the accomplishment were rarely identified by the organizational chart. While the formal organization chart was designed to control, performance was driven by networks of people and employees (including managers that transcended the formal organization chart) . . . when we looked at some of the networks we studied in Hewlett Packard and the U.S. government, we discovered that there were people from almost every activity in the company at almost every level working on a particular objective . . . including customers, competitors, suppliers, and just about anybody you could think of, who needed to be a part of that accomplishment.*23
Understanding networks gives managers a more meaningful role to play and a more powerful contribution, but it takes a desire to become more self-aware at the emotional level in order to let go of the intent to control others.
After Nick Zeniuk, a former Ford executive and mentor, described networks to a manager in a large European company, the manager responded with: “Wow, so this is the way we get things done. I didn’t realize that this was the way we were doing things. Now we can improve it, redesign it, and make it better.” Her response marks the microsecond where mindfulness, the ability to self-regulate and manage your response, is the door to knowing whether to act on habit or wait and watch.
Zeniuk explained, “The moment you decide to redesign the informal networks is the moment that the network goes underground and disappears. These networks are self-organizing. You cannot design them; they emerge around shared inspiring goals.” Functioning effectively in complex systems requires being able to maintain a high level of conscious oversight. Otherwise, managers and executives exercising authority are tempted to interfere by formalizing what works better as an informal way of getting things done.
Networks follow a sociobiological pathway and so are not detectable through surveys and conventional intellectually familiar tools for isolating performance qualities. To observe networks, to see patterns, to detect the deep dynamics, sense of joy, belonging, and connection requires depth perception. Being a compassionate observer of the currents of energy, of focus, of care, of whatever matters, illuminates the hidden leverage points where a small effort creates a system-wide effect. As the networks inside a company become visible, the capacity to see into societal and ecological interrelationships is a natural extension. With a wider view of the landscape, there are fewer surprises. When surprises do happen, everyone in the company is better prepared.
Lens 2: The Lens of Emotion and the Human Spirit
Lens 2 shines the light on why organizations only get incremental change when the intention was for something more ambitious. To evolve leadership consciousness, concurrent with economic restructuring and ecological debt repayment, a more thoughtful and responsible response is required. Anyone who has ever orchestrated organizational change initiatives will have sensed what is most often attributed to “resistance to change” and human fear—a psychological view.
Obviously, there is more to it than that. After observing what felt like an energetic holding pattern in team and organizational dynamics, I was looking for insight and preferably some science to make sense of my intuition. In 2009, Rollin McCraty, Ph.D., research scientist from the HeartMath Institute, and I were talking about energetic sensitivity and intuition. It was a logical extension to ask about organizational energetic patterns (blueprints). McCraty referenced the work of Raymond Bradley, Ph.D., who studied the emotional relationships in several organizations.
Two important factors emerged:
McCraty explained, “Then he [Bradley] created energetic maps based on these two main factors: affect, positive or negative emotional relationship, and who it was agreed had more power or structure. These maps were very telling about the organization. He used the word coherent to describe very beautiful coherent relationships. He could predict the long-term survivability or success, even academic success, based on this network of relationship.” Eventually Bradley produced a literal quantum holographic model to explain the data. But what is the practical value and relevance of this?
Paying attention to the quality of trust in workplace relationships, how conflict is utilized, how diversity is employed, and the emotional tone in communication, are critical success factors. When negative or toxic relations are considered acceptable, an incoherent field is generated. Once it is set in place at the energetic level, it is difficult to change.
These fields are intuitively observable in company dynamics and are revealed in the way failure is handled. A high-level trust environment uses failure to build something better the next time. A low-trust environment creates depression and stress-related illness. McCraty explained that what I was detecting is a real energetic field. “We can’t measure the field directly. But we can’t say these organizational fields are not real because we can’t measure them. Even a well-established concept like an electrical field has never been measured. No one has ever measured a field of any kind directly, but we can measure the effects of the field.”
When a company tries to reinvent itself and the energetic fields are not taken into account, incremental results are the only possible outcome. The company brain, like the human brain, will revert back to what is known and comfortable.
In business, the effects of the field show up in results: in the health of employees, degree of workplace trust, financial health, in valued relationships with customers, and in ethical decision making. The critical importance of high-quality conversations, capable of sustaining trust by tackling the difficult conversations, is both a vehicle and a metric for progress. If you want to navigate complex organizational interactions, follow the emotional energy—its frequency and its vibration.
The energetic fields McCraty describes express the consciousness embodied in the organizational mind-set. Emotional energy vibrates at different frequencies. Anger has a perceptively different vibration than joy, for instance. Whether or not you are aware of how you are feeling, the workspace indiscriminately holds the mix of energies. The overall emotional vibe has a direct influence on decision making, risk taking, health, and the kind of customers and shareholders a company attracts. For instance, companies holding a profit-driven mind-set attract short-term investors in for the quick turnaround between investment and return. A company evolving toward a higher consciousness, guided by a higher purpose and worldview, balances long with short term. It also attracts shareholders who see the value of being patient for considerably higher returns.
To illustrate, the CEO of Unilever, Paul Polman, has made it clear to shareholders and prospective investors where the company stands. He sees Unilever as an agent for tackling child poverty, climate change, and other societal issues. When asked by an investor seeking short-term results, he took a clear stand: “Unilever has been around for 100-plus years. We want to be around for several hundred more years. So if you buy into this long-term value creation model, which is equitable, which is shared, which is sustainable, then come and invest with us. If you don’t buy into this, I respect you as a human being but don’t put your money in our company.”*24 The integrity and principled leadership that goes with a company confident in its focus on higher purpose and talent diffuses throughout the product line and is a source of pride for employees. Unilever is a global company steadily evolving its state of consciousness.
The point for business is that meaning supersedes metrics. Rather than capital assets, high-quality, trustworthy relationships between every point on the constellation, from employee to customer to society, create value. Quantity is replaced by the quality of the relationship and the capacity to work with diversity in a fluid, natural way. Restoring coherence to the role of business in society requires that business accept responsibility for the impact of its decisions on the natural world, on society, and on the well-being of employees and customers. Companies operating with this worldview far outperform their peers financially, not because they aim for profit, but because they aim for a higher purpose.
Epigenetics and Workplace Health
Epigenetics literally means “over or above genes.” For evolutionary purposes, awareness of epigenetics provides business leaders with a critical insight into creating healthy decision making and ethical environments. The purpose of including epigenetics and emotional awareness in a discussion around consciousness is to shake up the assumption that business decision making is rational. If it were, businesses would have evolved their place in society much sooner. Business decisions are made based on beliefs. Rigidly held beliefs block agility, impede innovation, and lead a company to extinction by default. A brief discussion of emotion and epigenetics sheds light on the fallacy of rationality as the right means for decision making with the intent to open the door to a more holistic worldview.
The sea of data in and around us is saturated with emotions emanating from our thinking, from the subconscious, from interpersonal communication, or held as energetic blueprints in the workplace environment. Without conscious awareness, the data tells our brain whether we are safe or at risk. When fear, anger, or other discordant emotions typify the environment, biologically we go into protection mode and the need for safety dominates unconscious decision making. Risk taking shrinks and decisions are motivated by self-preservation. Ethics are compromised. But where trust and a sense of support and belonging provide stability, creativity flourishes. Collectively, we can co-create new solutions while navigating chaos.
The emotional mood in the environment is an expression of how we are connected to one another. Progressively becoming more aware of the coherence or de-coherence in the emotional and social environment allows intentional choice regarding the quality of life. Feeling a sense of control over our life (personal power) is a determinant of health on its own, but it is also essential for leading life in a healthy and positive direction, particularly in climates of uncertainty.
Toxic workplaces or relationships compromise physical and organizational health. Mental stamina decreases; creativity is inaccessible given the high-alert protective stance needed to get through the day. Ultimately a de-coherent energetic field is established and can become entrenched. De-coherent energy is often palpable to energy-sensitive persons entering the building. Even customers are aware that something is not right. At a personal level, simply being more aware of the impact of personal behavior can serve to improve relationships.
In toxic work environments the body goes into protection mode. Apart from being unhealthy, fear transmitted through communication or management style shrinks decision options down to one, even though more are available. Fear-based decisions motivated by protecting reputation or social status lead to unethical decisions. At the limited end of consciousness, these decisions are unconsciously motivated by the desire for personal gain or to restore fairness in what is perceived to be an unfair relationship. Management styles and the application of the wrong metrics in many large command-and-control environments create unethical behavior. In contrast, trust-based environments, characterized by non-judgmental awareness, provide access to diverse thinking and creative solutions. Adding understanding through neuroscience, biology, and physics provides individuals and teams valid tools for improving the quotient of trust and of quality communication. At the leadership level, contextual awareness and the understanding of epigenetics is pivotal to gaining insight, developing multiple options, and holding a system-wide overview.
The energetic fields, consciously imperceptible but perceived by employees and customers at minimum, are set through emotional patterns. Fear and stress in the workplace create stress-related illness costing business in the United States an estimated $190 billion per year—and a needless cost in quality of life. Though companies might stigmatize stress-related illness, the blame avoids paying attention to the health of the workplace as a distributed and shared responsibility.
Over three years following the 9/11 attacks, University of California–Irvine research found acute stress responses to the attacks on the World Trade Center. Individuals worried about terrorism were three to four times more likely to report a doctor-diagnosed heart problem two to three years after the attacks. If fear is entrenched in the workplace, or in the social or communicational environment, stress-related illness results. Similarly, if management tells or directs talent how to contribute, removing a sense of control and autonomy, biologically, depression or aggression results. The upshot is that business is costing itself money and a high cost in quality of life by resisting evolution.
When it comes to evolving consciousness, fear presents the contrast to joy and a choice to restore trust in human ingenuity. Great workplace cultures are created when there is diligent attention given to creating positive connection even when facing conflict, rather than watching it spiral down to a win-lose dynamic.
At a personal level the sense of control to regulate emotions, to be aware of the impact of feelings and interactions on personal and working relationships, is part of our self-leadership. The more elevated our consciousness, the more we can detect and adjust the spirit and emotional tenor in the workplace environment and adopt inventive ways to reset emotional patterns. Attending to health in relationships has noticeable effects on risk taking, psychological safety, and behavior; on what we choose and what we believe is possible.
Lens 3: Evolving through Transcendence—The Lens of Tapping In to Deep Adaptive Spirit
Failure to rise above systemic ruts is rationalized by the belief that it takes time, and since business professionals are too busy for that, routine patterns run daily life. When companies do try to change, there is a tendency to select from linear processes ineffective in complex nonlinear systems. Consequently more effort is expended and results are incremental at best. In nonlinear systems, small emotional and spiritual disturbances, novel and creative, can quickly ripple throughout the larger system. An entire city has been transformed by applying the principles of complex adaptive systems. Two visionary mayors, Antanas Mockus and Enrique Peñalosa, transformed Bogota, Columbia, from near anarchy to a revitalized city over a ten-year period. Employing mime artists and other creative methods, even traffic patterns have changed. Documentary filmmaker Andreas Dalsgaard explains the success of Mockus and Peñalosa as leaders:
The real secret behind Mockus and Peñalosa’s success is that they are two people characterized by extreme honesty and integrity in everything they do. They are two leaders who have the necessary courage to stay true to their visions, even when the opinion polls go against them. Unlike other politicians who are controlled by strategies and tactics, they have not been driven by a lust for power, only by their ideas and philosophies. And if there is a lesson to be learned by their story, it must be that the change they have managed to bring about could never have come from the traditional political system. It could only have come from the outside.
Bogota’s population in 2005 was between six and seven million. If a company of less than five hundred thousand employees is bold enough to tackle a large global issue that inspires people and matters, then transforms itself through the vehicle of intelligent play, whole-scale change will take far less time. Employing methods that engage creative curiosity is a clear opening for transformation and evolution.
Polarity is another opening for transcendence, for rising above duality and gaining collective strength. On the other hand, without emotional awareness polarity results in feeling emotionally victimized when outcomes do not match expectations. Brexit, where Brits voted to leave the European Union, and the election of Donald Trump have triggered more fear than hope and catalyzed political activism by people eager to design more inclusive alternatives.
Rising above polarity to build compassion and empathy includes actions such as not judging people who shaped the outcome as right or wrong, as smart or stupid, but remaining curious about the why of the decision, detaching from drama and blaming others. At the meta-skill level the capacity to self-observe, self-reflect, and self-correct in the present moment sums up what conscious leaders do better than those who are unknowingly driven by systemic beliefs. And if the polarizing event instigates the bigger questions, then this book, dedicated to exploring who we are and why we are here, has more than served its purpose.
We are in the period of the sixth mass extinction—and the first to be caused by human activity. “Our global society has started to destroy species of other organisms at an accelerating rate, initiating a mass extinction episode unparalleled for 65 million years.”*25 We are connected from the far reaches of the cosmos to the center of the planet. It is no accident that business is being called to evolve, not just to keep pace but to lead the way. Institutional reform—political, health, and educational—will take longer.
The Need to Evolve
What could happen should business leaders make the leap to the new paradigm of purpose in business? How might business reconnect to being a responsible global citizen? How might business regain coherence with the planet and the people it serves?
New organizational designs are emerging from startups and companies reinventing themselves. The new designs share similar organizing principles such as transparency, autonomy, and leaders in every person. For those in the company, self-realization is the path to achieve personal coherence and, ultimately, organizational coherence. To be fluently and fluidly responsive to emergent external conditions is the aim.
Can companies reach enough flexibility to mimic the fluid coordinated movement of a flock of birds, responding as a single intelligent cloud? Change is detected through a signal, instantaneously communicated; the entire flock moves as one.
Italian business innovation company Cocoon Projects has designed itself around fluid dynamics, calling their governance LiquidO (O = organization). Embedded in the company’s design is stigmergy—indirect coordination arising from modifying and sensing the local environment where one signal builds on another—the same communication pathway employed by anthills, beehives, and in chess. Stigmergy is an enabler for self-organization in complex multicellular organisms employing both signals and cues to communicate. Other nature-inspired organizational designs provide an organizing structure; higher purpose inspires the work.
After the 2008 banking crisis it became clear that the banks were guilty of fraudulent activity. Not only did the banks not hold themselves accountable for their actions, government did not either. Author Eugene Linden asked: “If you are overextended who do you turn to? Your broker or a vampire bat?” Until the financial sector progresses, choose the bat. Vampire bats store extra blood (a liquid asset) for a sick bat to call on when needed. Inspiration comes in many forms.
What if banks contributed to the health of society? By restoring economic health to neighborhoods, for instance? Rising above multiple layers of systemic resistance, there are better solutions with benefit to all.
The question is how we can live up to the purpose of our existence. My answer is that it is up to each person, each reader of this book. For the world of business, the answer is sourced in the aspiration of the company: either to be a business of human benefit or to add to humanity’s ecological and societal overdraft.
Though the challenges seem insuperable, complex challenges call forth the deepest in human potential. Achieving seemingly unsolvable, impossible challenges builds strength, character, and empathy by accessing the creative, adaptive spirit that is wired into each person. Without that challenge the innate, adaptive spirit would lie dormant. Aggression and violence reveal failure. Yet, those dark moments exist to provide contrast to experience the lightheartedness of pure joy—doing work that regenerates and restores vitality in humanity and the planet. The invitation is to evolve toward embracing a unifying view of life both at work and at home, living with multicultural perspectives, compassion, and oneness. Socrates said that the secret of change is to focus all our energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new. Bringing awareness to where energy is focused and developing subtle sensitivity serves as the compass for finding the way, as indigenous navigators knew when traversing the open ocean. Navigating the new map of consciousness to actively participate in the unifying purpose of life calls for achieving individual coherence; coherence within a company, societally, and globally, while bringing hope to the possibility that biosphere consciousness is attainable.
Technology is a tool and not a replacement for the choice to manifest the innate intelligence that connects us to each other and is the ultimate goal of evolution. Designing alternatives to worn-out institutions and developing entrepreneurial initiatives can replace fear of job loss and renew a sense of control. The challenge before us is not for the great minds of the world to resolve, but for the great hearts in each person to do so.
You may ask: “Why me? Why should I accept responsibility for activating the deeper purpose of business?” Consider that a beam of sunlight splits into red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. If each person represented one of those colors, all the colors could form light. Each person would bring a unique spark to the conversation, to the ultimate goal of bringing humanity into alignment with the intelligence of the cosmos. You are a unique human being, with all its innate potentials. Why not you?