Conscious Capitalism. John Mackey

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      CHAPTER 2

      Conscious Capitalism and the Heroic Spirit of Business

      What does it mean to become more conscious as individuals and as businesses? Consider one of nature’s many small miracles: a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly through the seemingly magical process of metamorphosis. For its brief existence, a caterpillar does little more than eat; that is seemingly its only purpose. Some caterpillars eat so much that they grow to one hundred times their original size. However, eventually the amazing process of metamorphosis begins. When the time is right, certain cells become activated in the caterpillar and it enters the cocoon phase, from which it emerges a few weeks later unrecognizably transformed into a creature of enchanting beauty, one that also serves an invaluable function in nature through its role in the pollination of plants and thus the production of food for others to live by.

      This analogy can be applied to human beings as well as to the institutions that we have created in our own image—corporations. We humans can choose to exist at a caterpillar level, consuming all we can, taking as much as possible from the world and giving little back. We are also capable of evolving to a degree that is no less dramatic than what happens to a caterpillar, transforming ourselves into beings who create value for others and help make the world more beautiful. The same is true for corporations. They too can exist at a caterpillar level, where they strive only to maximize their own profits, extracting resources from nature and from human beings to do so. Or they can reinvent themselves as agents of creation and collaboration, magnificent entities capable of cross-pollinating human potentials in ways that nothing else can, creating multiple kinds of value for everyone they touch.

      The difference is intent. Unlike caterpillars, we cannot wait for nature to trigger our evolution to higher consciousness. Instead, we must work to raise our own consciousness and make deliberate choices that further our personal and organizational growth and development.

      A New Chapter in Human History

      We human beings did not stop evolving when we became Homo sapiens; our evolution continued, but became more culturally and internally driven. The changes are most manifest in an increase in different types of intelligence and a rise in consciousness.

      It may not seem obvious at first glance, but we are becoming smarter as a species. The Flynn effect shows that overall human analytical intelligence has been rising at an average rate of about 4 percent every decade for the past several decades.¹ In other words, a person testing at an average IQ of 100 today would have tested at close to 130 sixty years ago.

      People are also far better educated worldwide. Literacy rates have risen rapidly, but the larger story is access to higher education. In the year 1910, only 9 percent of Americans had a high school diploma; today, about 85 percent do, and over 40 percent of Americans over the age of twenty-five have college degrees. Coupled with our overall higher collective intelligence, this means that many more of us are capable of comprehending and acting on greater complexity than ever before.

      We will discuss the rise in consciousness momentarily, but first, let’s take a look at a significant recent turning point in our history.

      1989: The World Changes

      An extraordinary historical coincidence occurred when Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, the same year that the United States issued its Declaration of Independence. The world soon witnessed the incredible power of free people and free markets coming together, especially in the United States. This was unprecedented in human history; for the first time, ordinary people were masters of their own destiny as a matter of law, and could through diligence and enterprise rise from nothing to great heights of material prosperity and social esteem.

      Another almost equally historic year occurred more recently in 1989, which marked several epochal changes in society and technology. Consider three momentous events that took place that year.

      The Fall of the Wall

      Preceded by the dramatic but failed Chinese uprising in Tiananmen Square in June, the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, triggered the collapse of communist regimes all over Europe, something that was unthinkable just a few years before. Without a shot being fired, the defining ideological debate of the twentieth century between competing systems for organizing human society was suddenly over. Capitalism and democracy decidedly won that epic battle, and the debates that remained were about the types of democracy and the degree of economic freedom that worked best.

      The Birth of the Web

      Working in Switzerland at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), British physicist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989.² His creation has rapidly transformed the world in myriad ways. You could argue that Berners-Lee did more to transform the world than any single individual in the past hundred years, including Churchill, Roosevelt, Gandhi, and Einstein. His invention is at least as dramatically culture changing as Guttenberg’s printing press was over five hundred years ago. In an extraordinarily short time, the Web has evolved into a shared nervous system that links much of humanity. We now enjoy an unprecedented level of information egalitarianism; ordinary people today have access to virtually limitless information on any subject, anytime, anyplace, instantly at almost zero cost.³ The richest billionaire in the world did not have such access twenty years ago. We have entered an era of extraordinary transparency, in which most corporate and governmental actions and policies can easily become public knowledge, particularly if they are controversial. We are far more connected, through the Web (especially through social media such as Facebook, which will soon have over one billion members worldwide) and through mobile technologies. There are now more phone connections in the world than there are people; we have zoomed from two billion phone connections in the world in 2001 to over seven billion now.⁴

      The United States Enters Midlife

      The median age of adults is rising rapidly in most countries as birth rates fall and life expectancies increase. For the United States, the year 1989 marked a major turning point: for the first time, there were more adults over the age of forty than below.⁵ The “psychological center of gravity” for society as a whole shifted into midlife and beyond.⁶ This silent passage marked a gradual but significant transformation of the zeitgeist toward midlife values such as caring and compassion, a greater desire for meaning and purpose, and concern for one’s community and legacy. Even young people started to exhibit these characteristics; by many accounts, СКАЧАТЬ