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Business

I’ve never understood business. What do business people do besides take meetings and try to sell something? There’s that corporate-speak jargon I’ve been told they use at strategic-trans-sector, peer-to-peer, co-creating, brainstorm meetings, meaning nothing to me and probably most of the people who use it – you’ve heard them talking, saying stuff like: ‘Open the kimono’, ‘Drink the Kool-Aid’, ‘Re-evaluate the matrix’. Here’s a funny one: ‘corporate values’ – what would a value be besides making as much as you can, as fast as you can? I am sometimes asked to give out prizes at company award ceremonies where the HR team all whoop as one of their colleagues weeps and wobbles her way to the stage to accept the trophy (a shard of Perspex) for the ‘best sanitation department in Woolcock’. So for me to be writing about business is, at least, amusing.

Where We Are Now

Let’s all agree that the world of business doesn’t rap at this moment in time. We are no longer impressed by the success of the rich as it is shoved in our faces; it now inflames our sense of injustice. Here are some of the facts that should empty your bowels:

Bad News About Business

Okay, sorry, here’s a little bad news just so you know where we are now: our work is killing us faster than wars, murderers and terrorists.

My Story

My father was the quintessential, first-generation American businessman; he knew how to sell high, through charm and razor-sharp savvy, and buy low by ripping you off while you were sleeping. I assumed this was just business as normal: ruthless, cut-throat and may the biggest shyster in the trough win. I’d listen in on my dad as he pimped his sheep bladders. (That’s what sausage casings are made of and that’s what he unashamedly sold.) I once heard him say (he never conquered Americanisms), ‘Well, dat’s the vey the chicken crumbles.’ Pretending to be light-hearted and jokey with a customer, I heard him say, ‘Hey, Barbara, how many abortions have you had this week?’ It seemed to work (maybe the buyers were as crass as he was). My father was known as the Casing King of the animal bladder and intestine world. (I was so mortified, I told everyone he was a fashion designer for hot dogs, it sounded less coarse.)

So, I was raised in the belief that the most conniving wins. My dad was a killer who took no prisoners in either his private or business life. If you ever ripped him off or tried to take advantage, he would hunt you down and make you squeal like a pig. He lovingly passed his wisdom on to me, telling me to screw people before they screwed me, so I just assumed this was how humans roll. If you ripped him off, he would leave the kind of greeting card someone did when they put a horse’s head in bed with the guy who did the mob wrong in The Godfather.

It’s ironic that both democracy and capitalism were actually designed to generate the highest possible opportunity for all. And it’s true that when the capitalist system is motivated by generosity and kindness, the result is inclusiveness and creativity. However, when it’s motivated by fear and greed, the result is the oppression of minorities, the condemnation of immigrants, greed, exploitation and a big, wide chasm between winners and losers.

Over the last twenty-five years, the gap between rich and poor has widened and the effect of this inequality isn’t just the cranking up of the have-nots’ envy, it’s also affecting the haves. Once they make their pile they become obsessed with keeping it and building on it and so they hunker down into their egotistical ‘it’s all about me’ state. These narcissists are the very people who cause the most harm in the world; fighting imagined enemies, kicking the underdog and believing that while their view is reality, the rest of us are deluded. These Hulk-like powermongers don’t waste any energy caring about others and so are now the masters of global enterprises and presidents of nations. You can usually spot them: they’re not only humourless but humanless and they don’t mind being hated, they feed on it.

I’m not knocking making money, far from it. (I’m not writing this book for nothing.) The free market of capitalism has made it possible to live longer, be better educated, live healthier, with more medical breakthroughs, less starvation, etc. … so what’s the problem? With all these goodies, life should be a bowl of cherries. So what’s with all the loneliness, opioid addiction, alcoholism, depression, suicide and a dying planet?

The reason I’m discussing business is because it’s becoming far more powerful than most political systems. While most government piggy banks are empty, business is rolling in it. Corporations run the politicians, who obey their beck and call. If an oil company wants more oil, the government will declare a war to get more. The enemy is only the enemy because they’re sitting on the gold that you want. While I’m on the topic of gold, I thought you might like to know where we even got the idea of money in the first place. Even if you don’t, I’ll tell you anyway.

A Little Interlude – The History of Money

In days of way back, in olde yore times, we could use anything to pay for stuff: bullocks for big purchases and for the equivalent of small change, there were guinea pigs. People found these animals were too heavy to carry about so coins made of gold and silver replaced them.

Coins were being used all the way back in 2000 BC in the Middle East. We know this from ancient stories, like that a man was fined half a kilo of silver for biting off someone’s nose (I did not make this up). A few hundred centuries later the Romans had the idea of minting coins and their first minting press in Rome was by the Temple of Juno Moneta – hence the word ‘money’.

No one wanted to travel with gold or silver coins for fear of being mugged so you gave your money to a man in the market who would keep it safe for a small fee. (Why no one mugged these guys I do not know.) The moneymen did their business from benches in the marketplace and these were known as banks (bench in Latin is bancus). If one of these bankers robbed you (and when didn’t they?), you would smash and rupture their bank (bench) – hence the word ‘bankrupt’.

Enter the Jews

In medieval times, Christian theology proclaimed that charging interest was sinful, so very few went into the finance biz. Guess who stepped in? You guessed it – the Jews.

For centuries, Jews ran the money market for the European aristocracy’s projects. In the 1760s, the savviest one, Mayer Amschel Rothschild, made a killing. Jews have not made a great name for themselves throughout history, except for the name Rothschild. To this day, everyone wants to be a Rothschild or marry one. The rest of the money-lending Jews were not as lucky with their stereotyping (see Shylock in The Merchant of Venice).

Next came the Industrial Revolution where all the rage was capitalism and the world changed for evermore. In the US you had the creation of railroads, steam engines and fleets of ships run by the industrial giants – Vanderbilt, Carnegie and Rockefeller (known as ‘robber barons’ back then; it does what it says on the tin) – who exploited the teeming poor as cheap labour to build their empires. They also built hospitals, universities and libraries, but in my opinion it was to appease their guilt so they wouldn’t go to hell for exploiting the have-nots all in the name of free enterprise (free for whom, do you think?).

In 1891, Pope Leo summed up what was going on: ‘Hence, by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition.’

Twentieth Century

Obviously after two world wars there were limited resources and when that happens guess who doesn’t get dinner? You guessed it. The workers. In some places they revolted and everywhere socialism grew in popularity; in the twentieth century, unions were created to protect the workers’ rights. So capitalism was reined in for a moment … but that lasted ten minutes because business couldn’t do business as usual what with the strikes and the continuous moaning of workers about their measly pay and appalling work conditions. Enter Reagan and Thatcher, who put their capitalist feet down and said a unified ‘Fuck off’ to the workers.

Okay, it really got down and dirty here when Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning economist and father of what’s known as modern capitalism, declared in 1970: ‘The social responsibility of business is to increase its profit. Businessmen who take seriously their responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution … are preaching pure and unadulterated socialism.’ It wasn’t until ‘Milton the mad’ came along that capitalism took a new path. He advocated that bosses charge the highest price for their products while paying their workers the least to make a maximum killing. The Oxford Dictionary definition of capitalism (and what Milton shouts from the rooftops) is: ‘An economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit.’ Eventually, what became law was that those who invest in the company (the shareholders) could legally demand more profit each year or else they could sue the company. The law would protect the shareholder in case the company went bankrupt or was involved in fraud. The CEO’s job was to do whatever it took to raise the stock prices no matter what the consequences were on stakeholders (employees and customers, society and the environment).

The 1980s was the time of Neoliberalism when everything was about ‘money, money, money’, as Abba knew. Banks began to become big businesses, lending money at a fixed rate of interest (they stole this idea from the Jews). The word ‘credit’ comes from the word for belief so you had to believe that the bank would give you back your money when you asked for it and the bankers had to believe that you would pay the interest. Everyone crossed their fingers and said, like in Peter Pan, ‘I do believe in fairies’ to make Tinker Bell come back from the dead. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Like when you’d show up but the bank had loaned your money to someone else, so you got nothing. It was as if, even with all your wishing, Tinker Bell had died. As soon as we stopped believing in banks and fairies, there was a big bad crash.

This is why we had heroes like Gordon Gekko, who proudly says in the film Wall Street, ‘Greed is good … it’s right … it works … It cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.’ And everyone just loved Gordon. (The present President of the United States won because he’s the brute of all brutes; he’s Gekko, squared. If people think he is the fittest, we’re fucked.)

Hubris finally brought us down in 1987 when we could suck no more out of an ignorant public, which led to the downfall of companies like General Motors, Sears and Enron, to name a few. But it was a skirmish compared with the 2008 financial disaster. Lehman Brothers, Citigroup, Fannie Mae and others who had been swindling the shareholders by ‘over-leveraging’ (announcing, due to an arrogance and narcissism the size of Texas, that they were loaded with money when in fact they had emptied the piggy bank with their failed short-term gambles) finally crashed and burnt.

Richard Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, known as ‘The Gorilla’, charmingly said, ‘If anyone gets in my way, what I really want to do is reach in and rip out their heart and eat it before they die.’ It’s chilling that, unlike the fictitious character of Gekko, Richard Fuld actually exists in real life.

Status

In the name of status, as in working for a hot-shit brand, people are willing to work day, night and weekends to be able to say casually, ‘Yeah, I work for Google.’ Even if they’re cleaning the toilets. They may try to dazzle you by saying they’re the CEO of sanitation but really they’re toilet cleaners. Status and money mean everything here in the twenty-first century, though they both can seriously damage your health.

Ask people if status or money makes them happy and chances are they’ll shrug their shoulders and look a little sad about not having a home or social life, as if that’s the inevitable result of the natural state of the world. But they would never complain about having no life, for fear that if they don’t answer the call at four in the morning they’ll be replaced by someone who will. I know so many people who admit they’re unhappy and complain they have no ‘me’ time. Well, guess what? In the future you’ll have all the ‘me’ time you want. And before you blow your top panicking about how you’ll make a living, I have a suggestion. What if jobs that we think are menial now, such as caring for the old, sick or ill, were rewarded with a nice salary so that these roles became as cool as wearing £700 sneakers or driving a Porsche? Working in the service of others could become a status symbol that carries high prestige like being a head of a sexy start-up or a celebrity. There could be a kind of Love Island where people compete for who’s done the kindest thing for another human being. As we are addicted to ranking, we could have a version of the Forbes rich list for those of us who give the most.

Some of the jobs that net the highest salaries don’t add much value to our lives. Teachers (except in Finland), nurses and care workers make hardly anything and we need them more than corporate consultants (whatever the fuck they do). New York got it right with paying garbage collectors; they can take home $70,000 a year plus overtime and perks because they’re the ones who keep the city running and everyone really needs them. On the other hand, if the corporate consultant stopped working no one would notice or care.

Why Did We Get So Greedy?

Sixty years ago, economist Victor Lebow said:

Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life. That we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions and our ego satisfactions, in consumption. We need things consumed, burnt up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever-increasing pace.

Relentless consumption is needed, so the argument goes, just to maintain economic stability. Our identity becomes ‘I am what I’ve got’.

For the last 150 years, we’ve been able to justify our greed by bringing out that old Darwinian catchphrase ‘survival of the fittest’. This is the one that people trot out to justify their savage hunger for money and power.

In fact, the phrase only appeared in the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species to mean, ‘better designed to fit with the local environment’. What Darwin actually meant by it was that those who cooperate best, survive longest. Teamwork is the winning strategy, not competition. So the fittest are the ones who bring people together and are the best liked.

Are We Really Natural Warmongers?

Another misconception we’ve all bought into is that war and aggression are also in our human DNA. Even Winston Churchill pumped up the idea: ‘The story of the human race is War. Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world: even before history began murderous strife was universal and unending.’ We cling to this myth that humanity will be waging war forever and always has done.

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, we took care of everyone in our tribe; I mean everyone – the old, infirm, stupid, uninteresting and overweight. There was peace on earth because there was enough space to not bump into anyone else and plenty to eat; the land was our buffet and we could help ourselves (no having to fight for a buffalo wing). There was enough to feed the entire population of about 238.

It was when land and food got scarce that we began to declare war on each other because once we accumulated wealth we got a taste for all the stuff we could buy with it and we’d attack other groups for more. Ever since, what has motivated war, more than a blood-thirsty taste for killing, has been the desire for what the other tribe has.

Animals

Darwin assumed that if two closely related species showed the same behaviours under the same circumstances, the psychology behind it was similar so, under the skin, animals and humans are in sync. When a chimp is injured other chimps will help to calm him or her down by kissing or grooming them. And once a chimp makes a friend, once it picks a single nit off another ape, they are locked into an everlasting friendship. Of course, we don’t lick or pick nits off each other but we, like them, have the proclivity to care. (I have eaten nits occasionally and they are delicious.) When competitors do fight for status or power, they often just posture by beating their chests (just like rugby players doing the hakahukka) and avoid bloodshed, unless it’s a life-or-death scenario.

You want to see animals with feelings? Go watch Attenborough’s last series, Dynasties, where a lioness goes back into enemy territory to lick the wounds of a lion who was injured in battle when trying to defend her. You’ll weep like a baby when you see elephants mourn their dead and sometimes carry the bones of the deceased for months, unable to part with them.

They chose the wrong animal when they came up with the Wolf of Wall Street, because wolves live in packs and care for their young and the sick. They fight over territory and food but really it’s for the sake of the pack. A violent nature doesn’t mean they don’t have the possibility of having empathy. It turns out that it’s not a dog-eat-dog world, even if you’re a dog.

It was primatologist Jane Goodall who said that you have to live with animals in nature to see what actually happens. After years of close observation, she discovered, contrary to popular perception, that female apes aren’t turned on by the alphas. Turns out they sneak to the edge of their tribe’s territory and secretly mate with a beta. They’re not aware of the reason but nature favours genetic diversity … and nature rules. If everyone mated with the alpha, everyone in the tribe would be cousins and all would have anger issues. Meanwhile, the alpha, thinking it’s his baby, protects it with his life. I don’t know the ape word for ‘sucker’ but that’s what he is.

So as I said, Darwin found that animals are basically highly cooperative, believe in fairness and are mostly peace loving. And if animals hunt in packs and share the goods, why shouldn’t it be natural for us to do that too?

Even though the title of Richard Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene seems to indicate that genes are selfish, he didn’t mean they spend their days hunting each other down. Genes are described by scientists today as ‘social in nature’: ‘Organisms get information from the environment and from each other on how to change. The conditions, the culture and connectivity are as important as the actual code.’

By the way, the person who coined ‘survival of the fittest’ was Herbert Spencer, a nineteenth-century philosopher. He and the following generations of libertarians (Hayek, Friedman, Thatcher) used it to justify their views on ‘society’ being meaningless and that all freedom should be granted to individuals to do whatever came naturally to them; fairness and social ethics were out the window. The slogan was adopted by him to convince people that human beings are naturally warlike and that we were built to compete and fight. It was poverty that stopped progress and, inevitably, if you have a winner, there has to be a loser. It was convenient for the powerful to believe this myth because they didn’t have to feel responsible for something that they convinced themselves was just a biological fact.

Most people who are powerful and unimaginably wealthy have been trained to react and think like a reptile even though they are delightful to meet and probably generous and kind to their friends. Most City bankers admit they’re overpaid and that teachers and nurses are underpaid but they are institutionalized and can no longer imagine a life outside their bubble.

And speaking of bubbles, in the 1980s around the time the bubble burst, I remember meeting someone working at a hedge fund who told me that every month there would be a performance review and if they weren’t pulling their weight (meaning that for whatever reason they were in the bottom 10 per cent), they would be told to clear their desk and take a hike. During the crash, the streets were littered with the newly fired, bemused and bewildered like zombies banging into each other, carrying their desks in boxes. Those who kept their jobs began to work ungodly hours and weekends, never off the phone, terrified their heads were the next to roll, so they became even more cut-throat. This was the time, through the 1990s, when salaries of bosses went off the scale and, to add a little cream, they were getting huge bonuses. In order to keep their corporate structure working they needed a workforce which was frightened of being ousted and therefore uncomplaining and at the same time was being motivated to join in the party by having the carrot of success dangled in front of them. ‘You too can have what I have’ was the subliminal message, ‘as long as you work like a dog and suck up all the shit I’m throwing at you.’ It was a culture of cruelty that was prevalent in a lot of financial institutions at the time and even though there are remaining vestiges of this corporate culture, I am happy to notice that we are moving away from that paradigm.

So Here Come the Green Shoots

Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, stated that, ‘Indifference to other human beings is deeply embedded in the framework of economics but a true human being can be selfless, caring, sharing and community-building.’ He goes on to ask the question I will answer in this chapter, ‘How do we create companies that help to promote our good sides?’ Hard to believe but it appears that caring about the employees has lately become the house style of a few evolved corporations, making the workers feel they matter and that their welfare is crucial to their companies; these are now being referred to as ‘healing organizations’. I like what Ian McCallum, a South African physician and naturalist, says: ‘We have to stop speaking about the Earth being in need of healing. The Earth doesn’t need healing, we do.’

This care for each other at work is a far step from the old ‘control and command’ model which focused only on hitting performance targets. The cynical side of me thinks, ‘Yeah, they’re keeping their employees sweet so they can drive them even harder and longer.’ It appears I’m wrong, which is so rare for me. Frederic Laloux ranked different styles of corporate behaviour in his book Reinventing Organizations, from greedy self-interest to caring collaboration.

  1. The greed-based version of capitalism states, ‘Here’s an opportunity to make money regardless of whether it involves exploiting a need or gap in the marketplace and regardless of the human consequence.’ PS This is the model that has been prevalent in banking for about forty years.
  2. A slightly more evolved mindset says, ‘Here is an opportunity to make money by exploiting a need or gap in the market but we will initiate some corporate social-responsibility initiatives and employee wellness programmes to help the struggling.’
  3. A better system in business would say, ‘Here’s an opportunity to make a profit while serving the stakeholders’ (customers, communities, workers) needs.’
  4. A healing organization says, ‘In a quest to alleviate suffering and elevate joy, we serve the needs of all stakeholders; our employees, customers, communities and environment. We seek to continually improve the lives of stakeholders while making a profit so we can continue to grow and heal.’

I don’t know whether this last model exists outside of Paradise but maybe I’ll find an example.

Why is Change Suddenly Happening?

The millennials are the first generation to grow up with social media so they can communicate globally faster than the speed of sound and create a new meme in moments, in contrast to older generations who took two hundred years going from plough to automobile. They could have dumped the ox in a few hours because they can adapt and reinvent so quickly.

So having had it with the boomer generation, whose credo is of the ‘rape and loot’ school of business, they’ve come up with their own blueprint almost overnight.

Millennials or Generation Y believe sharing and contributing to the common good is the way to go to have a good life. TrendWatching.com said of them and the following Generation Z: ‘They are accelerating a cultural shift where “giving is already the new taking”.’ Here are the statistics:

Nowadays it’s starting to seem as if it’s all about the fittest being the kindest.

My own generation began with the belief in equality and fairness but now, as grown-ups, we’ve done exactly the same as the ‘establishment’ were doing back then … you know, the one which we were rebelling against. In other words, since the 1960s, we, the Boomers, have looted the planet blind, using the earth as an ashtray; it’s not surprising our kids are disgusted by what we’ve done.

I know some big businesses are trying to patch things up by ‘going green’. Maybe installing a wind machine in the men’s loo to replace a hand dryer or telling the employees that if they don’t flush the toilet, they’ll get a bonus at Christmas. Now we have carbon ‘offsets’ like, when you fly, you promise to plant a few trees. There’s probably a desk at the airport where they give you a packet of seed on arrival. This is known as ‘greenwashing’ and while it is a nod to a shared responsibility for the planet, it really just soothes the corporate guilty pang, like sucking an antacid.

Decades ago, most people got work once they left school, stayed with a company for life or nearly life and when they left they were handed a retirement cheque and a gold watch. Oh, by the way, they didn’t burn out because they worked from 9 a.m to 6 p.m., had weekends (phone free because there were no mobiles) and had holidays three times a year. (Those were the good old days.) You can see why the younger generation are quaking in their pants. After the 1980s’ debacle they felt frightened that whatever job they got was precarious. Jobs in the old sense have become scarce since then. Even if you go to university, you will struggle to find that kind of job for life. I read in the papers that a third of 20–34-year-olds, mostly men, still live in their childhood bedrooms. So, for some reason the millennials don’t seem to approve of what the older generations have done to the earth. It upsets them that nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizer is in our water supply, carbon dioxide is at its highest level in 600,000 years and still increasing, causing floods, devastating storms, extreme temperatures, the drying-up of rivers, deforestation, acidified oceans, pollution and the culling of species at a rate of 200 a day. What’s their problem? Millennials are aware of these facts while most of the old dinosaurs choose to turn their fat cheeks the other way, thinking, ‘I’m going to be dead by the time the shit hits the fan so why stop shopping?’

My Story

During my student days, I partook in many a riot, trying to shut down the big corporations who supported the Vietnam War or were polluting the air or just being greedmongers. We wanted everyone in the world to be equal and for everyone to get a fair share. We were eco before eco became chic, saving the planet before we trashed it. Many lived in communes, growing their own vegetables and making the smallest ever footprint because no one worked and they were all sharing a stained mattress smoking organic pot. At university, I shouted with the best of them, ‘Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh,’ waving a red book. I wasn’t sure what was in it but it looked good with my outfit (Chinese military). My whole generation spent its youth fighting the anti-establishment cause. And now look what’s happened? We are the establishment.

Conscious Capitalism

Having been burnt by us elders, the millennials have seen what unleashed greed leads to and have learnt the lesson of what not to do, so they’re motivated by mission and purpose rather than money. It’s all about saving the planet, giving aid to people in dire need and working to live rather than living to work.

While researching this book I’ve seen in the flesh with my own eyes what’s happening in business and I know a phoenix is rising out of the ashes of the dying old economic model and being born as a whole new paradigm called ‘conscious capitalism’. Remember, I’m talking about tiny green shoots so don’t give me, ‘Well, it’s not happening at HSBC. They still need to make profits.’ I’m not an idiot and nor are they, people need to pay taxes on profits otherwise the economy skids to a halt.

But work should also give people something that would improve their lives and it’s not just money. This new model of business is number 4 (see above) from the book Reinventing Organizations, where it reads, ‘Caring for the well-being of the employees, customers and everyone on the supply chain, helping the local community and protecting nature.’ Employees want ‘purpose’ now, not just profit, and this new sensibility began because of a widespread awareness of the environmental crisis. The idea that your children’s children may not have a planet to walk on makes slaving your lifetime for money seem pointless. It’s not brand new – over a century ago Bernard Shaw said:

This is the joy in life: being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, being a force of Nature instead of a feverish, selfish clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, and Raj Sisodia PhD coined the phrase and wrote the book Conscious Capitalism. In it they say that business should focus more on purpose than on pure profit, cooperation rather than competition. When I say conscious capitalism, don’t picture some old hippy giving away pickles at the side of the road, what’s new is that it’s going mainstream; as far back as 2013, the Harvard Business Review showed that ‘Companies that practice “conscious capitalism” perform ten times better than their peers.’

Younger people want to have a better work life than we did and since most of our lives are spent at work, why not use that time too to help us find meaning and even happiness? I hear people saying they’ll find meaning when they have time, maybe on the weekend, on holiday or when they retire. But there is a growing sense that we have to find it right now, otherwise we’re wasting our breathing time on earth. These conscious companies aim to do just that and some even focus on creating a feeling of happiness which, because emotions are infectious, can spread like a contagion. If the team has a mission to make the world better, it feels good (all acts of generosity do) and then that feeling ripples from person to person throughout the organization.

All the books about this reimagined capitalism talk about finding a meaningful purpose. I had no idea what purpose meant in a business context, I thought it was like the word ‘value’ that they bandy about – some more junk jargon. I looked it up: ‘A compelling purpose reduces the friction within an organization because it gets everybody pointing in the same direction.’ When everyone gets passionate about the same mission, they become part of a ‘team human’ community and that’s when people start being driven by their hearts rather than their wallets.

So here we have the hierarchy of principles of a conscious-capitalist company:

  1. Purpose refers to the difference you try to make in the world
  2. Mission is the way in which you will achieve that purpose
  3. Vision is the picture your company shares of what the world will look like once your purpose has been achieved

I would never have dreamt that these principles could be found in a list of what matters in the office. If I had known when I was in school that this change was coming, I would have cooled it on the rioting. I would have told everyone that someday capitalism (which was our sworn enemy) is going to change its feathers. They wouldn’t have believed me though so I could have saved my breath.

Another Thing About Conscious Capitalism

In his book, Raj says:

Think of a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly. In the early stages it just eats and nothing much changes except it grows one hundred times its original size. When the time is right, it enters a cocoon phase and then emerges as a butterfly, not only beautiful but useful, it pollinates plants, producing food for others to live off, playing its part in Nature.

This can be applied to humans and corporations; we can just stay like grubbing caterpillars, consuming all we can with no price to pay. But we can also transform and create value for others while making the world more beautiful. Needless to say, I was confused by this metaphor, not knowing what it feels like to be a caterpillar, especially a conscious one. Raj goes on:

Unlike caterpillars we can’t wait for nature to trigger our evolution to a higher consciousness, we have to raise our own consciousness and make deliberate choices that make us more caring.

Where do you find a butterfly in business, I wanted to know? He pointed me to one and it is called Patagonia – not the region in South America, the sportswear clothing company. For a moment, I thought I’d have to fly to Argentina but it’s in Ventura, California, still twelve hours away but I had to see it; it’s the movie star who just won the Oscar of conscious capitalism.

Patagonia: A Star is Born

It’s been called the coolest company on the planet. The story of it is in a book called Let My People Go Surfing. I said before, part of my mission in writing this book was to be inspired to change my life, maybe I would live in an ecovillage or teach kids in Finland, but now I thought, maybe I’ll get a job at Patagonia. Also, it was winter in the UK while I was writing this part so it was doubly crucial I go to California.

Having arrived, I had to drive for two hours from LA to Ventura in a desert landscape, passing a series of oases full of nail bars and fast-food outlets, separated by continents of parking lots, but when I got out, there was the ocean, smooth, gold-tinged, sunsetting, surfer dudes riding the pipeline (like I know what that is). I was happy already. The next day I met Vincent Stanley, a co-founding employee who’s been with the company since the beginning, more than forty-five years ago. Patagonia is not like the Google headquarters in the UK, all showy-offy. Google’s interiors are eclectic with varying environments. Some decorator must be on Ayahuasca. One area is based on a Miami hotel lobby, that leads to a Brazilian jungle, then your grandmother’s house (flowered wallpaper and rocking chairs), next a womb room where the chairs are big round balls, with a slot you enter to work in a padded birth sack. No one working there would notice any of this because their foreheads are glued to keyboards. Anyway, the Patagonia buildings are two-storeyed and made of old wood like a Southwestern ranch. Surrounding the buildings are natural landscapes (no fountains or manicured lawns, looking like they’ve just had a bikini wax like most business campuses I’ve seen). No tree has been cut down to make room for any building so some grow in the buildings. Between them are spaces where they have created playing areas and schools. They bring their kids into work, starting from babies age three months (I’m sure there’s also a place where the womenfolk can birth their babies straight into a sandbox) up to age ten. Day care and school are subsidized for the employees’ kids and you can hear them laughing and playing wherever you are. I was told the presence of kids makes adults more conscious of who they’re changing the world for. I noticed surfboards leaning against some of the walls. I guess when someone shouts, ‘Surf’s Up!’, people grab them and head for the beach to ride a windpipe (no idea).

And people here are very loyal. Out of the 300 at the Ventura premises, most are in their twenties to early forties, thirty people are over sixty and have been here over twenty years and five are still here from 1972.

I met Vincent in the cafeteria; wood walls and photos of people (probably the employees) in various dangerous sports positions: falling down a cliff in skis, riding the crest of a forty-foot wave, steering a sailboat through a tsunami. We sat at one of the many picnic tables where everyone mingles. People are dressed casually, looking happy and relaxed; the women are beautiful in a Joni Mitchell, flowing-long-hair kind of way. (No dye. Whoever sees anyone without dyed hair? Not me.) And get this. No make-up. The men are bronzed and blond, and here was Vincent looking like Sam Shepard (google him), the real, just-off-the-range, rugged-faced American cowboy, slow talkin’ but razor mind, so I was in love. While he told me the story of Patagonia, I was trying not to dribble the alfalfa I was eating down my front.

I heard (entranced) how Yvon Chouinard (Vincent’s uncle) fifty years ago was a climber scaling sheer vertical cliffs sometimes made of ice. He wasn’t thinking about starting a clothing business. (Well, you wouldn’t think of anything if dangling from a wall of ice.) At the time, he had no money so he and a friend lived in an abandoned incinerator, sometimes having to eat cat food, and was eventually jailed for having no place of residence. Incinerators didn’t count. Anyway, in 1972 he went from selling climbing gear into clothing, mainly selling rugby shirts which were the only thing that wouldn’t shred when scaling a peak. (Good to know because I’m always tearing my shirts when up Everest.) Eventually word went out about his mission to drop the wasteful and polluting model of doing business and ‘build a new roof over the economy before the old decrepit one collapsed’.

So the people (‘nonconformists and misfits’) came from all over to work at Patagonia. Today they get 10,000 applicants for eighteen internships. Sixty per cent of vice presidents are women throughout the many outlets. Vincent said (and everything he says I agree with) that ‘This generation has more in common with the hippy boomers than with any other generation.’

Here they walk the talk, believing they owe the earth a tax for the industrial impact of business, so each year since 1985 they have given away 10 per cent of all profits and since 2016 have given 100 per cent of Black Friday sales to local and global grassroot organizations, not big corporate charities. So far they’ve also given away $100 million since 1985 to about 2,500 grassroot environmental groups. When Trump said all businesses could have a tax cut, Patagonia gave theirs away, which was about $10 million.

And if you’re running a big corporate organization and wondering how these guys make a profit, Patagonia’s sales have quadrupled over the past decade. So rotate on that fact, Big Boys.

Patagonia is privately owned so they don’t have to pay any return to the shareholder. Profits are shared with employees in a bonus pool. They work in groups where they can make independent decisions without always having to get approval from a higher being who might not know what’s happening on the ground.

In their foreign-based supplier factories around the world – Vietnam, for example – auditors check to see if people are paid legally, work normal hours, have proper lighting, ventilation and medical aid.

Patagonia’s other maxim is transparency not only to the workers but to their competition. The theory goes that if everyone came clean about how they’re doing business, they wouldn’t be able to cut so many corners. For example, some companies would have to stop using Chinese children working by candlelight next to their arthritically damaged, overworked grandmothers because they’d have to report the conditions; there’ll be blogs that will spread the word on who’s abusing whom and, if your company is an offender, the customers will dry up. Fairly soon there will be an app (see chapter 4 on Technology) which you will use to check the provenance of the fabric, the carbon footprint and the amount of stress levels of the people who sewed it together. Transparency will be demanded by the public, it’s the only way to build up trust. If companies come clean about their problems, everyone will be able to nip mistakes in the bud before they rot the tree. This was the case when, in the past, Patagonia found one of their products wasn’t as harmless as they thought; they quickly admitted it and changed to a sustainable alternative and the result was that their fan base quadrupled.

Vincent walked me through the buildings, originally built in the 1980s with paintings of outdoor scenes on the walls. It’s all cosy and piney and smells of Alpines, like an old-fashioned, homey ski resort. Everything seems organic and made of hemp. Ninety-five per cent of what was in that office is made of recycled materials, except me. He introduced me to very attractive, unstressed, smiling, white-teethed people, many working at waist-high desks where you stand to work. (This is why so many people have back pain because we [I] sit for a living and at some point in life can’t get out of the chair.) I was nearly run over several times by giant dogs, I mean the size of horses, because no one has a Chihuahua like you’d see in Beverly Hills, they all have humongous canines running like the Pamplona bulls through the offices.

Vincent told me that people who grew up in 2000 or later want a higher mission and to use their intelligence and creativity for more than just the highest pay. No one wants to feel ashamed any more to name the company they work for. All the employees here are on the same mission: to help both the local community and global community … oh, and to make clothes. They all have an allocated time off to volunteer for things like saving salmon, irrigating land, breeding endangered species, cleaning rivers, teaching kids in third-world countries, saving whales, back-combing buffalos.

Yvon’s decision to stick to his guns about keeping his company kosher was on the button. According to a recent survey of 40,000 shoppers in the US, 59 per cent are ‘belief driven’, meaning they want their money to make the world a better place. When they choose a brand they are starting to ask themselves if it’s worth the social and environmental cost.

This could be because they’ve been made aware that if they don’t stop the problem, they will have to swim to the malls through the flooding, burnt to a crisp from the now-menopausal climate while battling through hurricanes.

Vincent (my fiancé, in my mind) walked me to a 10,000-square-foot building containing the archives of Patagonia. Ellen and her assistant almost wept as they raved about the history, showing me photos of a topless Yvon in the 1960s forging those pitons or crampons (I thought they were related to sani-towels), you know, those steel spikes they use to pick their way up mountains. The other early employees looked like refugees from Woodstock, bell-bottoms and flowers in their hair.

They’ve had to become very conscientious about what products they use because the textile industry is one of the most chemically intensive industries on earth, second only to agriculture. Nearly 20 per cent of water pollution comes from dyeing and treatment. Some rivers in China, seen from the air, run indigo into the ocean because of the jeans I’m wearing.

They used to use conventionally grown cotton until they found out how harmful the chemicals are. (The cotton crop alone accounts for 10 per cent of the world’s use of pesticides.) Organophosphates, linked to central nervous system damage in humans, is used as fertilizer, originally developed as nerve gas for the First World War. (So remember not to eat your hoodie.)

Each time Patagonia became aware of how much harm a garment made, they dumped it and started again. They switched entirely to organic cotton in 1996. But then they found that oil-based polyester could be made less harmful by using recycled sources rather than fresh oil so they made fleece jackets from twenty-five quart-sized plastic soda bottles melted down and extruded into fibre. (In the early days you got water from the tap straight into your mouth [some of you might remember] so you didn’t have to worry about leftover plastic bottles.)

Now they’re working on ‘biomimicry regenerative practices’. (I have no idea what that means?) Maybe now sweaters are growing on trees and when you’re done with them, you eat them. They also said (this isn’t a joke) that they’re converting abandoned fishing nets into sunglasses.

The main thing is not to waste, so Patagonia took out an ad in the New York Times that said, next to a picture of one of their jackets, ‘Don’t buy this jacket,’ to discourage overconsumption. If something needs repairing, you send it back and it’s repaired in one of the seventy-two repair centres, and if it really does reach the end, which is rare, they recycle it and make something else out of it. If they can’t repair it, they send you a new one. I was told of one woman who called in to say her fleece was peed on by a cat and could it be replaced. The guy at the call centre said, ‘Sure, what kind of cat would you like?’

Needless to say, Vincent didn’t propose but he gave me one of my happiest days, where I realized that at least one company was doing what I dreamt about when I was eighteen. I wanted a world where you could trust that people weren’t trying to screw you (I thank my father for instilling that one). I still don’t trust any government, but as I said before, business is what’s going to change the world; politicians are too busy running for office and then worrying about getting in again or not being impeached (no names). So hurrah, Patagonia, for giving me faith, it’s not the whole world yet but I’m not looking for that, just a gold nugget in the mud, and you are it. I love you, Vincent, if you’re reading this.

B Corp

I think I’ve made it clear that customers, employees and everyone down the supply chain to the little guy sewing in Hanoi stay faithful to Patagonia because they trust it. So the question is, are there other companies out there singing from the same hymn sheet? Well, again thanks to the millennials and boomers with a conscience, the tide has turned and now people want companies that benefit the world and don’t just suck out the resources, ‘Wham bam, thank you, ma’am’.

I had heard the name B Corp mentioned in hushed tones. I got in touch and went to their offices in New York on Wall Street – the powerhouse of the financial industry. You’re squeezed from both sides of the street by gargantuan concrete and steel buildings where you can smell the feeding frenzy of business. You know those Attenborough films where a zillion tightly packed minnows are eaten by circling dolphins, who are eaten by circling sharks, who end up being gulped in one mouthful by monstrous blue whales? That’s what this place is like. Sitting peacefully in the midst is B Corp. I met Bart Houlahan. We found out we went to the same high school: Evanston Township High School. I asked if we’d dated, as I have very little memory of my early years.

Not only did we not but we hung in diametrically opposite gangs. He was a jock – smart, handsome, football hero – and I was from the buck-toothed loser team, so our paths never crossed. Then we competed over which coffee shops we worked in. I was a waitress at The Huddle where we served omelettes with hair in them. (Most of it mine.) He was a waiter in a really cool place where everyone hung out. (Of course.)

He told me his story. When he left college, he went straight to a financial job in the city. It dawned on him that in order to be in that world, you had to be a touch immoral. He worked a seventy-hour week and had no relationships with colleagues or clients; everything was transactional. The employees screwed anyone in the name of hitting targets, nearly scratching each other’s eyes out, fighting for their yearly bonuses. Bart quit and was about to go to Harvard Business School but his friend from school was running an honest-but-small start-up selling basketball footwear. He decided to not go to Harvard but to join his friend, so that he could have a nice life, do good, have healthy relationships and, most importantly, have community. No slouch, he helped make that company a success, growing sales to $250 million in the next eleven years, and the employees shared the profits and all got bonuses. They made their shoes in China but paid workers there a fair wage and made sure they were in a safe environment. They gave 5 per cent of their profits to local charities and urban education. (He is so Patagonia.)

In 2005, he had to sell the firm and found to his horror that, ‘when you get to the point where you are ready to sell a company … legally, the only thing you are allowed to consider … is maximizing shareholder value … it felt like I lost a limb to watch all of our commitments to employees, to the environment and to the community be stripped from the company within six weeks of the sale’. His new project became to find a way a company ‘could scale up, raise capital, have a liquidity event and still hold on to a mission’. So he co-founded B Lab, a non-profit that sets standards and gives a ‘B Corp certificate’ that endorses companies that ‘want to do good’.

I hadn’t realized that, until recently, shareholders could sue a company if it didn’t maximize profit; B Lab has created a new law state-by-state across the US and in some countries in Europe and Latin America. Now companies are allowed to have a social or environmental mission written into their charter. So businesses who care about the community and global issues and also are fair to their workers can get a B Corp certificate.

At first no one wanted to be B Corp because it sounded too touchy-feely and they were afraid they’d lose their edge and their money. Now there’s an enormous waiting list to get B Corp certified. ‘We are at the early stages of one of the most important trends of our lifetime: the growing global movement of people using business as a force for good,’ says Bart.

At this point there are 3,260 B Corp businesses around the world, in seventy-one countries and growing steadily. A few examples are:

Each business applying for B Corp certification has to fill in an online assessment regarding their policies: gender and diversity equality, environment and social responsibility. To pass, they have to achieve a certain amount of points and are recertified every three years. Their assessment is made public.

I’m just going to give you the remit of B Corp direct from the horse’s mouth because it’s so much better than what my mouth can deliver. Here’s why the future is getting rosier and kosher-er:

Certified B Corporations are businesses that meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose. B Corps are accelerating a global culture shift to redefine success in business and build a more inclusive and sustainable economy.

Society’s most challenging problems cannot be solved by government and non-profits alone. By harnessing the power of business, B Corps use profits and growth as a means to a greater end: positive impact for their employees, communities, and the environment. The B Corp community works toward reduced inequality, lower levels of poverty, a healthier environment, stronger communities, and the creation of more high quality jobs with dignity and purpose.

B Corps form a community of leaders and drive a global movement of people using business as a force for good. The values and aspirations of the B Corp community are embedded in the B Corp Declaration of Interdependence.

Unilever

So far, I have been visiting small companies of about 3,000 employees. Some of you more cynical types might be saying to yourselves, ‘The small companies can afford to be generous, they only have 3,000 people to worry about.’ So just for you guys, I went out to see if there was a corporation that practised this conscious capitalism in the Big-Boy league with more than 100,000 employees. I had heard that Unilever, with 136,000, were doing just that. They’re known as the most sustainable company on the map.

Paul Poleman is the ex-CEO of Unilever and famously said: ‘Business has to take over where global governments have let us down and now is the moment to do it.’ The reason big businesses are more effective at changing things than governments is that they don’t have to elect a leader every four years. This means there is no wastage of time and money while your President is only focused on winning the next election. Also, these corporations have far more power and money at their disposal than most governments. Unilever has 2.5 billion consumers a day, present in 98 per cent of households in over 190 countries, generating sales of €52 billion in 2019. They have over 400 brands that include Ben & Jerry’s, Dove, Domestos, Omo, Lipton, Breyers, Sunsilk, Surf, Lux, Knorr, etc.

Paul co-founded SDG (Sustainable Development Goals commission) and is co-vice chair of the UN Global Board. I want to quote what he said at a recent SDG meeting because you’ll understand why I’d vote for him in any old election.

‘Two of the biggest challenges that need to be addressed are climate change and inequality … I don’t want to be responsible for those. Anytime you know that you’re polluting and putting carbon in the air, someone else is going to die. Anytime you’re wasting food, someone else is going to die … We don’t need more PhDs, we don’t need more people to go to Pluto or Mars to find the answer … In the course of history there comes a time when humanity is called upon to shift to a new level of consciousness; it clearly is the moment to do this. You can actually do something to make a difference for generations to come, you can be a real leader by simply bringing humanity back to business. My simple request to you is to live life with purpose.’

We’ve talked about purpose already but here at Unilever they go in for it in a big way. I was told by the vice president at Unilever that people with a purpose are healthier, can deal with pressure better and, because they have a point to their lives, which is far greater than working at a job, they have a clearer idea of how they want to live and work. To help them find their way they have workshops called ‘discover your purpose’. So far 50,000 people who work there have done it and they plan to roll it out to the rest of the 136,000 employees.

If you were going for a job at a certain ‘Gordon Gekko’ investment bank (I won’t mention the name but initials are GS), I heard (maybe it’s a rumour) that they give applicants a test that they use for mental patients to find out if they’re psychopaths. If the applicant passes the psychopath test, he gets the job. If you want to apply for a job at Unilever, you need skills but they also ask ‘What do you want to do in the world?’ You may not know but they’re looking for people who’ve thought about it. They said they only want to grow humans there. Paul has put his mouth where his money is.

Day 1 at Four Acres

I was invited to go for a weekend of training at their retreat centre, Four Acres, where I met Tim Munden, Chief Learning Officer, Vice President of HR globally, responsible for well-being. He gave me the history of Unilever (with Power-Point). It was created in 1885 by William Lever (I love this story) who made soap to promote cleanliness and make less work for women. (I don’t know what they were doing before – maybe beating clothes against rocks?) He called his product Sunlight Soap and sold over 40 million bars. In 1888 Lever built a village for his employees in the north called Port Sunlight on 150 acres of parkland with more than 900 (now Grade-II listed) buildings, including sports facilities, restaurants, a museum, a gym, art galleries, a theatre, craft activity centres, allotment gardens, football and cricket grounds, swimming pool and community hubs where they could mingle. I keep picturing The Prisoner, but there’s no big ball chasing anyone and it seems to be a whole village’s happy place. When everyone works, plays and cares about each other, we humans are at our best (see my chapter on Communities, I said the same thing). I would have made soap there without any complaints.

In their sustainable living plan these are a list of bullet points; if you read them out and asked people to guess whose plan this was, they might think it was some branch of the UN, not a global corporation.

Then we have their subsidiary companies’ track record …

What Happens at the ‘Discover Your Purpose’ Workshop?

Rather than the old business retreats where the suits would hunker down talking ‘targets’ with squiggly red and green lines on whiteboards (meaning nothing), at the purpose workshop they ask the participants what in their lives had a profound impact, what lights their inner lamps and what do they want to learn about? Also the hardest of all questions, ‘Who am I?’ I was told that once they figure out their purpose, they can pursue it at work, so life and work become aligned. I asked what their purpose was other than making money? (The elephant in the room.)

Tim invited a few Unilever employees in and asked them to tell me if they’d found their purpose and if so what was it?

One example was a woman from communications who said she’d had problems with overeating since she was young so she wanted to help people with the same issues. She works for Dove but decided part of her job was going into schools to teach girls self-esteem. ‘Dove #MyBeautyMySay’, her project, has been in existence for years. Since 2004 the self-esteem project has reached more than 35 million. She had found her purpose.

Day 2 at Four Acres

Their other plan is to integrate mindfulness throughout the organization, globally. Bit by bit, it’s giving their employees insight. If you can’t help yourself, you can’t help anyone else and that means understanding and being able to calm your rapid-firing mind.

So today, my friend and a great teacher, Louise Chester (who’s worked with over 200 organizations) led a group of about thirty people on how to be more mindful, calling it ‘the inner game retreat’. When I first met everyone they were like a cluster of job titles. They’d introduce themselves by their role in the company. (Like I’d know what a supply chain manager of Southwest Asia does.) By the end, they were my best friends. The workshop is all about unlearning management and relearning how to be human. Every exercise Louise took us through was punctuated by what she called a ‘mindful moment’, when we’d stop, become aware of whether our minds had wandered and bring our focus back to the breath. This is how you’re able to focus your attention where you want it to be without distraction jerking you around. (This is almost the whole idea of mindfulness.) The point of learning to do these ‘moments’ is to learn to take these mini breaks to refresh our brains at work.

Daniel Goleman says:

Top performance requires full focus and sustaining focused attention consumes energy – more technically, your brain exhausts its fuel, glucose. Without rest, our brains grow more depleted. The signs of a brain running on empty include, for example, distractedness, irritability, fatigue, and finding yourself checking Facebook …

As humans we need to refresh the machine or it will break.

Louise’s Lessons for the Survival of the Focused

When the thirty participants arrived, without them knowing what mindfulness is, she had them sit and come into their bodies. Most of us aren’t aware we even have one (dragging our brain around all day on this shopping cart made of skin).

She had us pair up with someone nearby and tell them ‘who you are’. We had two minutes each. Afterwards, we had to find another partner and again tell them who we were but without repeating the same information we used with the last partner. This kept going with new partners and, running out of our usual schtick, rather than freezing up, people later reported they became more relaxed and connected once they dropped the autopilot banter.

She then gave us all a ‘tool for mental effectiveness’. There was a square with quadrants taped on the floor and a title on each section: Mindful, Unmindful, Flow and Creative. We had to stand in the square that defined where we spent most of our time. The Unmindful square was heaving, like peak time on a tube. She then asked which quadrant did we want to spend more time in? What’s holding us back from going there? And, finally, what could we do to move into where we wanted to go? I started in the Mindful box because I thought that would prove I was a pro at it but then I realized I had become distracted from the game (my ego had taken over the wheel), so I moved to the Unmindful square.

Louise asked if anyone wanted to share their personal challenges. Many of them ‘spilled their beans’ emotionally. It may have been the first time they’d spoken from the heart in a safe space and it gave an opportunity to realize that we’re all in the same boat, which is usually in some stage of sinking.

At the end of the day, we moved from self-awareness to social awareness. You’re no good to anyone if your mind is a mess. Louise punctuated each exercise with a mindfulness practice to reset our inner states. You can only connect to others if your mind is decluttered, non-ruminating and steady, otherwise it’s like trying to stand up in that rocking boat. You’re no good to anyone and you may just pull everyone on board into the water.

The exercises became about learning to listen (under the words) with compassion and genuine curiosity. Strengthening our ability to discern when to speak and when to shut up; pushing ‘pause’ to reflect rather than react. Basically, it was about how to be real and how to be human. When you can do all those, you hold the keys to the Kingdom.

If you’re leading other people at work, you learn that if you can give someone your full attention, talk to them, human-to-human, they’ll trust you, feel safe around you and do the best they can.

What We Learnt Over the Two Days

Mindful Moments

We were reminded that our days could be dotted with mindful moments. The idea of the exercise is to see a thought arise and not grab for it. And just by not trying to dissect it or churn it over, watching it begin to dissolve.

Sample Mindful Moments

And another …

Eventually, these small mindful moments become a habit. The more moments you take, the more the mind muscles strengthen, to cope with pressure, high emotions, distraction, auto pilot, and become present. There’s a useful saying: ‘Observe your thoughts as they become actions. Observe your actions as they become habits. Observe your habits, they become who you are and shape your life.’ We’re the sculptors of our own minds; just by becoming aware of thoughts, without analysing or punishing ourselves for them, they lose their hold and then we begin to reshape our lives.

‘If we fail to transform our style of capitalism we will crush humanity out of shape and it will twist itself into tortured forms’

– Charles Dickens