Ideas
Conscious Capitalism

STORY OF CONSCIOUS CAPITALISM CURRICULUM BY JOHN MACKEY

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Narrator Conscious Capitalism Conference 2013 san Francisco

The exact origin of conscious capitalism nobody will ever know but we believe Muhammad Yunus was first to speak on this then around 2006 John Mackey said he wanted to do something on this and in parallel Patricia Aberdene - authors megatrends of 2010s - the rise of Conscious Capitalism

STORY OF CONSCIOUS CAPITALISM CURRICULUM BY JOHN MACKEY

We are going to hear a lot about purpose today so I thought a good way to strike this out and frame Conscious Capitalism would be tell a little bit about my personal story - how I came in to business and created whole foods and how that led to my own personal awakenings in CC

I went back and forth between 2 universities studying philosophy and religion (one was the trendy san antonio, the other was UT- University of Texas in austin ) - 3 times each

I am studying philosophy about 20 years of age and I am reading jean paul sartre book Being and Nothingness - a book I don't actually recommend .I am having trouble getting into it though previously I liked his novels but this tome is really difficult for me to read. I am working it and I am not having any fun. Then this idea comes into my head: I don't like this book, and I am not going to read it any more. I threw the book down, and said to myself I am never going to read another book I dont like. The very next day I dropped that course. Which led me to deciding that I am never going to take another course that I dont want to take. And this led me to having 120 hours of electives but no college degree!. Then I said to myself I am never going to do anything in the rest of my life that I really dont really want to do

So I began this path of basically following my heart- what I care about, my passions are. I dropped out of college. Then I moved into a vegetarian coop. I wasnt a vegetarian at the time but I was interested in it and I met some interesting people. That woke up my food consciousness, i became a vegetarian, a buyer for the coop, i learnt how to cook, I got interested in food politics, I became awake in the area of food consciousness

Next I belonged to 3 food coops in Austin in next few years. All I knew was this is something I cared about - I wanted to get into food- i had made connection that what I ate affected how healthy i felt I went to work for a small natural foods store for about 6 months, and then I thought I am going to do my own store. I can do a store better than these guys and all the food coops which had become politicised - food for people not for profit - all about who they were going to boycott not improving services for customers

So we started this business not knowing what we were doing businesswise - my resume read something like : dishwasher, busboy, boyscamp counsellor, CEO of While Foods Market. We managed to lose half the money in the first year but that was OK because all my philosophy about philosophy about business got turned upside down. Oh my goodness all my ideas were wrong: business isnt selfish, greedy, exploitative - its basically hard, very hard to start up a business . So I started to read hundreds of business books -i devoured them then I read about history of capitalism and that was amazing.

NOW I enjoyed a whole new world view of what business is about and I began to understand business is the greatest value creator in the world. Business has raised humanity out of the dirt. 200 years ago -85% of people lived on less than a dollar a day. there was a great equality of income - every one was equally poor except for the aristocracy that owned all the land. Today about 15% live on a dollar a day which is still 15% too much but if you look at the trajectory we can end poverty in next 50 years if we continue to embrace economic freedom. Consider the fact that 200 years ago over 90% of people were illiterate, today about 14% are. 200 years ago the average lifespan was the same as it had been the last 40000 years about 30. Today its 68 across the world as high as 82 in Japan. There were no democracies 200 years ago, women didnt have the right to vote, slavery existed.

Humanity has made tremendous progress primarily due to business and capitalism. And business doesnt get credit for it - the narrative about business is its exploitive and people are only in it for the money, the bottom line. And that isnt my experience of entrepreneurs I have known - very few started their business primarily to make money. They were on fire with some kind of passion to realise in the world.

So the narrative explained about business is inadequate., we know that Gallup shows that the approval ratings for corporations and big business in America is only 19% Think about that here is the greatest value creator in the world, it creates values for customers, employees, suppliers, investors, communities -has helped lift humanity out of the dirt. It only has 19% approval rating - congress is at 17% that shows how far business has fallen

For most of history of america we had the most economic freedom =- 200 years ago we were very poor but because we embraced economic freedom and we had a culture of entrepreneurship in business we made great progress in 19th century until usa became the richest and most successful nation in the history of the world.

As recently as 13 years ago usa ranked number 3 in world in economic freedom behind singapore and hong kong; today we have fallen down to number 18 and as our economic freedom has declined so has our prosperity, unemployment has risen - we are moving away from economic freedom because corporations are seen as a bunch of sociopaths - dumping waste, exploiting their workers, defrauding their customers. This narrative has got to be reversed by thinking about business differently both internally as business people, and externally the narrative we tell the world. That's what we are going to talk about as Conscious Capitalism , This can be the solution - the higher purpose beyond just making money

Business can be the greatest value creator in the world - its so odd to me that people think the purpose of a business is to make money instead of value creation. The Curriculum of Business has the potential to create value ethically for all its stakeholders.

Find your higher purpose as an individual, then find our purposes for the business we create, and we need to tell this story to the larger society that we are part of if- and if we do that we can turn this baby around - the entrepreneurial creativity of americans is astounding -we are so creative, we have so much potential and business can be the vehicle