Conscious Company Magazine | Issue 16 | November/December 2017

HOW IMPACT IS GOING MAINSTREAM

CONSCIOUS COM PA N Y

AUTHENTIC LEADERSHIP

WORKS INSIDE SILICON VALLEY’S BEST CULTURE

3

MINDFUL WAYS TO

RETHINK HIRING

THE FUTURE OF FOOD WHAT IS REGENERATIVE BUSINESS? SUSTAINABLE HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE

ASANA CO-FOUNDER JUSTIN ROSENSTEIN

LEADERSHIP | WORKPLACE | SUSTAINABILITY | ENTREPRENEURSHIP

TABLE OF CONTENTS CONSCIOUS LEADERSHIP

6

DIAGNOSE YOUR COMPANY’S TROUBLE SPOTS

BY NATHAN HAVEY

SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS

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44

WORKPLACE CULTURE

51

INTERVIEW: HOW TAMI SIMON BUILT SOUNDS TRUE

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ROUNDTABLE: CONSCIOUS CULTURE WITHOUT HIRING FILTERS?*

BY JEFF CHERRY

SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP: SILICON VALLEY EDITION

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INTERVIEW: STEPHANIE LAMPKIN’S BLENDOOR IS ELIMINATING BIAS IN HIRING*

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HOW ASANA IS SETTING A NEW BAR FOR MINDFUL WORKPLACE CULTURE*

BY RACHEL ZURER

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TECH CEOS ON WHAT MAKES A GREAT LEADER

*Cover Story

A REGENERATIVE BUSINESS CASE STUDY*

BY CAROL SANFORD

SUSTAINABLE HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE* SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION

GLOBAL IMPACT

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HOW CHURCH AND STATE WILL HELP IMPACT INVESTING GO MAINSTREAM*

BY WAYNE WATCHELL

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IS CLEAN MEAT THE FUTURE OF FOOD?*

BY KENNY TORRELLA

November / December 2017 | Issue 16

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Rachel Zurer

ART DIRECTOR Cia Lindgren

CO-FOUNDER Meghan French Dunbar

CO-FOUNDER Maren Keeley

CHIEF EXPANSION OFFICER Aaron P. Kahlow

CHIEF COMMUNITY OFFICER Kate Herrmann

WEBSITE GURU Rolando Garcia

TRANSCRIPTIONIST Carla Faraldo

COPY EDITORS Robin Dickerhoof Shane Gassaway

EDITORIAL INTERN Christina Bernardin

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CONSCIOUS LEADERSHIP

HOW TO

DIAGNOSE YOUR BUSINESS’S UNCONSCIOUS TROUBLE SPOTS Not sure what is holding your business back? Use this guide to figure out your next steps in becoming a conscious company.

BY NATHAN HAVEY By examining workplace symptoms such as gossip, conflict, and dumb mistakes, it’s possible to diagnose an area of unconsciousness within a company and its leadership team. The following four real-life examples will show you a few common mistakes business leaders make and help you become savvier in your diagnoses.

SYMPTOM: BURNED GRILLED CHEESE The owner of a bowling alley watched as an employee walked out of the kitchen with a badly burned grilled cheese sandwich and, apparently without a second thought, served it to a customer who took one look at it and asked for it to be remade. While your company may not serve grilled cheese, there may be other mistakes that seem like they would be easily avoidable if employees showed even an inkling of common sense, attention, or care.

COMMON MISDIAGNOSIS

Employee doesn’t care or is an idiot

BETTER DIAGNOSIS

Unclear purpose beyond profit

Tempting though it might be to bemoan the lack of care displayed by the employee, that’s unproductive because a lack of care is a symptom, not a root problem. You can get to the root problem by asking yourself, “Why should the employee care?” If your answer is a general mix of work ethic, professionalism, and customer service, consider that you may be partially unconscious in your business. This was the case with the owner of the bowling alley. His business had no purpose beyond making him money.

Companies that have a clear purpose beyond profit and that connect all of the work within the company to that higher purpose earn the care of their employees.

A bowling alley that existed to fund ending breast cancer in its community (for example) would create a much more compelling reason for employees to get orders right, minimize waste, and delight customers so the business could channel more resources toward achieving its purpose.

CHECKUP

One easy way you can check the strength and clarity of your purpose is by asking employees what they do. If they tell you about menial tasks and say nothing about the broader mission of the company, you likely need to clarify your purpose or help employees see how their role contributes to it.

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SYMPTOM: MUTINY IN THE FACTORY

SYMPTOM: TALENT DROUGHT At a statewide small-business development conference, hundreds of attending business leaders agreed that the number one challenge facing businesses in the state was a shortage of “good people” to hire. As evidence for this assessment, many business leaders cited high rates of turnover, low rates of engagement, and a litany of “burned grilled cheese” examples.

The executive team of a manufacturing company that prides itself on treating workers like family felt that they had built a great culture and had been very generous with their compensation package. That’s why they were shocked when a group of workers initiated the process to form a labor union. While you might not be in that precise situation, do you feel at times that your team underappreciates what you do for them?

COMMON MISDIAGNOSIS

Employees are entitled and selfish

BETTER DIAGNOSIS

Restricted communication

COMMON MISDIAGNOSES

There is something wrong with this entire generation, or “someone” needs to do something to attract “good” people to this community.

BETTER DIAGNOSIS

Misunderstanding employee engagement Culture is very much en vogue, but many business leaders falsely equate culture with perks like Ping-Pong tables, stocked refrigerators, and paid company outings. Most companies genuinely try to make employees happy, but fail to pay sufficient attention to the needs those human beings have in their lives outside of work. What would matter more for an individual employee, concert tickets or snow tires? The potential for a holiday bonus or childcare near the office? There isn’t one right answer to these questions, but getting to know individuals and demonstrating that they matter as people, and not just as their job functions, is the essence of conscious culture.

The fundamental assumption in a conscious culture is that people are doing their best to navigate life successfully, and the mark of great culture is helping people grow into ever more capable iterations of themselves. This is far more difficult and complex than decrying there being a lack of “good people” to hire, but companies that do it effectively do not struggle to find and retain talent. They grow the talent they need in the medium term by doing their best to provide for the needs of the talent they have in the short term and, in this way, they become the employer of first choice in the community — and in their industry — in the long term.

CHECKUP

Check for culture misunderstanding by reflecting on how well you know your team personally. Do you know what keeps them up at night? Do you know their hopes and dreams? If not, go find out, and be ready to offer assistance however you can.

While employees’ actions may indeed be entitled and selfish from your perspective, what matters in this case is what is true from their perspective. Often employees are not privy to the full financial picture of a company. To them, it can seem like management is getting rich off their hard work. This was exactly what was happening at the manufacturing company. The executive team was great about holding “ask me anything” meetings and keeping employees in the loop on big decisions, but they held most of the financials close to the vest. Employees did not know that executives were not being paid exorbitantly, and they had no concept of the complicated financing deal the company was using to fund its rapid growth and the intense requirements the company faced to remain in good standing on its loans and lines of credit. The executive team thought this information was too complicated, not necessary, or even dangerous for employees to understand, so they inadvertently allowed employees’ inaccurate perceptions to go unchecked.

Stakeholder management leads companies to be extremely inclusive and transparent with employees (and their labor unions) and other key stakeholders such as suppliers, customers, shareholders, and key community members. Rather than just keeping these stakeholders “in the loop,” leading conscious companies actually involve stakeholders in decision-making. In these companies, even junior employees have access to and are trained to understand company finances, and as a result can participate fully in helping to refine and innovate their job to maximize efficiency and productivity because they see the alignment between their own advancement and that of the company.

CHECKUP

A simple way to check for weak stakeholder management is by asking employees and other stakeholders if they feel like they have a say in the decision-making process for the company. If they respond with anything less than an unequivocal yes, then ask why not, and get to work on stakeholder management.

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SYMPTOM: TRUTH IN THE BATHROOM The director of a department in a financial services company observed that most people on her team did not say what they thought during meetings in the boardroom — but they definitely said what they thought in the bathroom after those meetings adjourned. Often, she heard people say how stupid a decision was when they had personally voted to approve it just moments before.

Whether in the bathroom after a meeting, the barroom after work, or in private email conversations all the time, does your company have this symptom?

COMMON MISDIAGNOSIS

These people are immature, unprofessional, or disingenuous.

BETTER DIAGNOSIS

Leadership blind spots Nearly everyone would acknowledge that the more diverse perspectives there are at work on solving a problem, the better the solution. But understanding that idea and setting up the conditions to make it work are very different things. Many leaders experience disagreement as a personal challenge and get defensive or grill people with differing opinions; others have little patience for hearing from people who have failed to consider an important piece of information; and others see even amicable disagreement as a threat to team cohesion and go through the motions of a discussion while the decision has already been made privately. Each of these blind spots was present at the financial services company and they created two unspoken understandings: first, that it was not safe to tell the truth (for fear of getting grilled or made to look stupid), and second, that it didn’t matter if you did tell the truth, because the decision had already been made.

Conscious leaders hate pretense. They know that authenticity is the bedrock of trust, and they know that no matter how smart they are, the results born of the full team’s intelligence are better than their own or those of any subset of the team’s. Therefore, setting up meetings as venues for real discussion and debate — even passionate, challenging disagreements — is among the most important skills for them to hone.

The foundation for this kind of leadership is making it safe to tell the truth, and that boils down to three components: 1) Being genuinely interested in the limitations of a proposal or idea in order to make it better (not just seeking affirmation or defending it).

2) Using any error in thinking as a valuable teaching opportunity for everyone, with plenty of acknowledgement for the person who provided the opportunity.

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CONSCIOUS COMPANY MAGAZINE

3) Making decisions in real time, together. That doesn’t mean insisting on consensus, it means demonstrating that the debate is the real venue for decision-making.

CHECKUP

You can check for leadership blind spots by asking people how safe they think their colleagues feel to say what they think. The obvious problem with this checkup is that people may not tell you the truth.

That’s why this question is about “colleagues” and not about the personal feelings of the employee questioned. It doesn’t totally solve the problem, but it will help. If you hear that people don’t feel safe, or even if they have reservations, it’s time to get leaders to take a hard look in the mirror. It only takes one person to make a meeting feel unsafe.

A NOTE ON SYMPTOM OVERLAP

You’ve probably already noted that these symptoms and diagnoses are related. Could the “misunderstanding culture” diagnosis also apply to the “burned grilled cheese” symptom? Yes. Could the “mutiny in the factory” symptom be diagnosed as a result of leadership blind spots? Yes again. These are simplified examples to provide an introduction to how conscious business leaders diagnose problems. It takes great expertise to correctly diagnose a medical issue (the systems and organs in our bodies have complex relationships), and the same is true for business issues (the disciplines of conscious business are similarly intertwined).

Yet, one theme is that most of the common mistakes place blame on others, whereas the correct diagnoses create opportunities for action and growth for you.

Barry-Wehmiller, a company that has a lot to teach us on this topic, follows this piece of wisdom: “If you are looking for the source of the problem, you will find it in concentric circles around your desk.”

Nathan Havey is the founding partner at Thrive, a training company working to advance the adoption of conscious business practices. Get started with free tools at thriveconsultinggroup.com.

LEARN MORE

To deepen your perspective on this topic and get more practical tools to keep your company in good health, check out our Foundations of Conscious Business on-demand course — taught by Nathan Havey — at courses.consciouscompanymedia.com.

SECRETS OF AN

ANCIENT-WISDOM

EMPIRE Tami Simon built Sounds True from a basement experiment into an empire of spirituality publishing. Here are some of the lessons she’s learned along the way.

Tami Simon was a mission-driven entrepreneur before the term even existed. In 1985, at age 22, she launched her multimedia publishing company, Sounds True, to share audio recordings about the world’s wisdom traditions. More than 30 years later, the operation she started with just a cassette dubber in her house now reaches 5 million people every year. Its offerings include books, music, courses, DVDs, and more from some of the best-known names in wisdom and spirituality, including Thich Nhat Hanh, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Eckhart Tolle.

Conscious Company co-founder Meghan French Dunbar recently sat down with Simon at Sounds True’s Colorado headquarters to learn more about her journey as an entrepreneur and her secrets to running a successful conscious business.

What was your inspiration behind founding the company? Where did you find the confidence to believe you could do something like this at such a young age?

Tami Simon: I don’t think I had some great amount of confidence. I saw it as an experiment. I had a small inheritance upon my father’s death, about $50,000. I thought to myself, “I’m basically unemployable right now. This money came to me as a gift. I feel comfortable risking it for an experiment that I’m turned on by.

And if it doesn’t work out, then I’ll be out there looking for a job just like I’d be now.” So it wasn’t really confidence. It was more of a measured experiment.

Now, the inspiration behind Sounds True came from a place of desperation and angst. I had quite a lot of existential despair after having dropped out of college. I still cared deeply about learning and wanted to learn more than anything, but I had a deep heart passion and saw that that wouldn’t be realized within an academic setting, because what I was interested in learning about was the spiritual journey through direct experience. You have to know it in your bones, in your body. You can’t analyze what other people’s discoveries

are. So I couldn’t follow an academic path. At the time, even writing from a subjective voice wasn’t particularly welcome in academia. So I left Swarthmore College and I traveled around India and Sri Lanka and Nepal and I discovered the practice of meditation.

When I started meditating I felt like I had found a gateway, I’d found a method, and it was what I needed. I made a commitment at that point to introduce as many people as possible to the practice of meditation, and more widely, to any method that helped people tune in to their own inner knowing and the process of — you could call it “direct revelation,” or direct contact with a sense of aliveness and purpose and inspiration.

I decided, “This is what I’m going to do. I’m going to turn people on, and there are so many different methods that have been taught throughout the great wisdom traditions; they’re all there, they just need to be made readily accessible.”

So I came back to the United States

Tami Simon launched Sounds True when she was 22 and has grown it into a multimillion-dollar business.

SOUNDS TRUE AT A GLANCE after my travels, my father died and I received this relatively small inheritance, and I didn’t quite know how to go about it. But I talked to a very successful entrepreneur in Colorado, someone I was interviewing for a volunteer radio show I was hosting at a Boulder public radio station. I said, “I’ve received this small amount of money; I’m not quite sure what to do with it.”

And he said, “Why don’t you put that money into yourself?” I said, “That’s a great idea, but I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know what I would do.” And he said, “Why don’t you reflect on it and come back in a few days and we’ll talk.”

When I left his office, I had a strange experience: I felt like I was walking slightly off the ground. It was like, “Oh, my God. I’m not exactly in my body. I’m walking on air. This is so weird.” I’m telling you this because it happened.

There have been media outlets, believe it or not, that have made fun of me; “Tami shares her out-of-body experience where she hears a

• Location: Boulder, CO • Founded: 1985 • Employees: 120 • Structure: For-profit • Conscious practice highlights: the newly formed Sounds True Foundation distributes programs to people who would otherwise not have access; the business is 100% wind-powered; the company offers employees a 2:1 match for donations to nonprofits, plus a half day paid per month for volunteering, paid time off for carpooling, and considers birthdays a paid holiday.

• Mission statement: “To inspire, support, and serve personal transformation and spiritual awakening.”

Photo by Andrew Young

CONSCIOUS LEADERSHIP

voice.” Because I did hear a voice. And the voice said, “Disseminate spiritual wisdom.”

It was more real than real. Nobody could take it away. I knew it wasn’t some idea that my mind had fabricated of what I should do in the world because someone would approve of it. In my own inner experience, it was like, “Yes, I will do this. It’s been given to me as my operating instructions. It’s known.”

At the time, I was reading a book by Eugene Gendlin on focusing, and this book has you tune into the sensations of your body. It’s called the “felt sense.” And once you know the felt sense in any situation, it gives you an operating compass for inner investigation. I knew I was having a strong felt sense of the rightness of disseminating spiritual wisdom.

My feet hit the ground again and I kept walking and I started thinking about it: “How am I going to disseminate spiritual wisdom?” I already had a radio show, my volunteer interview program. I also had discovered at college that I liked listening to lectures more than I liked reading. I loved

viewing spiritual teachers because I wanted to continue my own learning that had been interrupted through leaving academia. People wanted copies of my radio show. So I already had a very small cottage business where I made copies of my interview show on a cassette-dubbing player and sold them for $10 each. Maybe I’d sell three copies in a week, maybe I’d sell ten copies in a really good week. I thought, “Sounds True will be the outgrowth of this radio show and cassette duplication and that’s how I’ll disseminate spiritual wisdom.”

The first podcast! That’s fantastic.

The night we had the idea for Conscious Company Magazine was the same night I got fired from my job and I woke up the next morning and I had a similar experience. It was a wisdom that was handed to me, and I looked at my partner and I said, “The universe just told me that I’m supposed to do this. I have to do it and I know how to do it and I know exactly what I’m going to do.” It was like something felt downloaded to me. I saw it all within a minute.

And I had a prayer: “God, I’m willing to do your work. Please show me what it is.” And I said that prayer over and over again. I had been immersed in that field of repeating that prayer over and over. It was also a sense that I was being given an answer to something that I had been asking for, as a cry.

I want to go back to this concept of starting something new as an experiment. One of the traps a lot of us fall into when we think about starting our own venture is the weight of it and the fear of failure. But it sounds to me as though you removed the fear of failure by looking at it with a bit of levity, more as, “I just want to see if I can do this.” Does that feel true?

TS: Quite honestly, at that age and at that time in my life, I felt I had nothing to lose. I was a college dropout. I didn’t know what to do. Do you know what I mean? That’s different than somebody who has several kids and a mortgage.

Also, I was fortunate in that it was

“DON’T SETTLE IN WITH A BAD BUSINESS MODEL. KEEP EXPERIMENTING AND TRYING UNTIL YOU GET A MODEL THAT WORKS AND FITS WITH YOUR PASSION.” going and hearing a great talk.

I compared disseminating spiritual wisdom through audio, which was something that seemed natural to me, to books, which was already an established industry, or doing it through video. I hated television at the time.

My parents watched a lot of television and I thought that it dumbed down a lot of the conversation. I thought, “I’ll start by disseminating spiritual wisdom with audio. That’s a good medium for me. I love listening. I love the radio. I already have a radio show.”

It was a program where I was inter-

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TS: I don’t know what state of mind you were in in the months leading up to waking up to that download, but for me, as I mentioned, I had had a lot of despair. The despair I had was that I’d been given so many opportunities in my life for a fantastic education, to travel to different places in the world, and I didn’t know how I was going to give back. I felt this burden of, “You’ve been given so much, how are you going to give? How are you going to contribute? How are you going to serve, Tami? You’ve got to do something.”

CONSCIOUS COMPANY MAGAZINE

an inheritance, and I know everybody doesn’t have that. I recognized that, and the privileged situation I was in.

It’s not like I went to a bank and borrowed money that I would have to pay back. I was lucky.

Do you feel as though it’s wiser for people to start ventures at a younger age because they have less to lose?

TS: No. But I think it’s smart to come up with a situation where you’ve mitigated your risk in a certain way.

So maybe there’s some bridge from

Sounds True publishes books, courses, and lectures from a variety of well-known spiritual teachers.

what you’re currently doing, and you do your new venture ten hours a week while you still have a job. Then you don’t have to feel like, “Oh, my God, I’m risking everything to do this.”

I think there are lots of ways you can start a new venture where you feel like, “This is the level of risk I can handle and stay grounded and open and have an adventurous spirit about it. I’m not going to go into some long-term debt that I’ll never be able to get out of.” I would never want to put that kind of pressure on myself. There are many creative ways, no matter the stage of life, to test your ideas slowly and gradually and be in a relative comfort zone while you do it, not “bet the farm,” if you will.

Part of that is because I don’t want to be in a fear state. I don’t want to approach my day that way. I want to approach my day with more of a sense of dialoguing with life. So I’m putting out, “Hey, what about this?” And life says, “Terrible idea, Tami. Don’t do it.” Okay. Or life says, “It’s a cool

idea. Wow. You’re off to a great start.

Let’s do more of that. Oh, look who you just met. That person can really help you.”

For me, it was having this dialogue with life and seeing what doors open, and when the doors shut, not going there. Being able to be more like a bloodhound who’s smelling the next part of the trail, having all my senses intact, and not having my senses offline because I’m in a fear state.

I’m using the word “smelling” as a metaphor because it’s so instinctive, so close to the body, so close to what we know before we overanalyze. You just “smell” it.

I’m curious about the journey you’ve been on since selling the cassette tapes. What has accounted for your ability to scale and grow? Has it really been following the senses?

TS: Someone who works with me recently said, “What’s different about you, Tami, is that you’ve hired a bunch of people who are smarter than

you.” I think he meant it as a compliment. [Laughter] I go for the magic. By magic, I mean there’s a spark. There’s life.

There’s excitement. And for me, a lot of the magic happens between people. It’s interpersonal. I’m always looking for the magic in a new situation or opportunity. That feeling like, “God, I want to do that with this person. I want to try it with this person. Just in talking, we came up with three new possibilities that I wouldn’t have thought of.” It’s also about how I feel. There’s this sense of expansion and possibility. It’s almost like the future is starting to be dreamed, and you can see the dream pathway forward while you’re with the person.

So I ask, “Where’s the magic?” And when I find people and I have that interaction with them, I want to work with them. My heart is also way open at that point so I can share that, and when you share that, people also love that. “I want to work with you, too.

We’re falling in love.”

It’s hard to use that language

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because if you use that language people are like, “What are you talking about? The HR department is going to come in and shut you down.” But we don’t have enough vocabulary; it’s a certain kind of love and it’s the love of co-creative, mission-based people who are here to do something together.

In Judaism, they have this idea that people actually incarnate in tribes to accomplish certain missions. A lot of what has happened over 32 years of running Sounds True is that I’ve found people who are so gifted in so many ways that

you’re doing because you’re going to end up doing it for thousands and thousands of hours. And it won’t be fulfilling if it’s not something you just actually love to do.

The second thing is, of course: finding the right business model is critical. Because even if you love it, if you don’t have the right model, you won’t be successful. To have the right model, you need to be able to think strategically and understand pricing and some other things. You can learn from people even if you don’t know that. But don’t settle in with a bad business model. Keep

loving, and I want to be successful at it.” They’re not separate to begin with, so let’s not try to “reintegrate” them. Let’s find the place in us where it’s one movement of contribution, success, service, and human values.

What is giving you hope for the future?

TS: Quite honestly, sitting here with you gives me hope for the future.

I meet a lot of loving and sincere people who are what I would call “young leaders.” I see in a lot of

“THERE ARE MANY CREATIVE WAYS, NO MATTER THE STAGE OF LIFE, TO TEST YOUR IDEAS SLOWLY AND GRADUALLY AND BE IN A RELATIVE COMFORT ZONE WHILE YOU DO IT.” I’m not, but what I can do is identify them and then I can love them and I can give them a bunch of autonomy and creativity and an opportunity for them to actualize themselves working with me. It’s not all Tami’s dream and Tami’s vision. No. Just like in any partnership, both people have to feel actualized.

What are your top pieces of advice for social entrepreneurs or mission-driven business leaders?

TS: You have to love the work you’re doing, and — this is a strong statement — know you would do it even if you weren’t getting paid. Because, at least in my experience, I did so much work at Sounds True, interviewing people, producing audio programs, editing the programs, going to events and retreats — but that’s what I wanted to do. That was my learning. I wasn’t demanding that the business pay me for every hour of my time, because I wanted to do it anyway. There has to be a great love of the actual work

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experimenting and trying until you get a model that works and fits with your passion.

Is there anything that I didn’t ask you about that you wish I would have?

TS: One thing that occurs to me is that I think often people make this strange false distinction between what will make their business successful and how they can achieve their financial goals [on the one hand] and what their spiritual values are and how they need to have balance in their life [on the other].

Then there’s this idea that now I need to integrate these two things that are separate.

The way I think, the core of who you are as a human being wants to both achieve a level of business and financial success, and do so according to a strong inherent human value system. They’re already wedded together. It’s only our culture that separated them. “I want to contribute, I want to do it in a way that’s

CONSCIOUS COMPANY MAGAZINE

them a natural openness. I’ve done thousands of hours of meditation; maybe they won’t need quite as much formal practice. Maybe there’s a certain field that’s been opened, just like how the feminist movement [opened a field for me]. I know this may not be true for other women, but being a woman in business when I came of age, I didn’t feel like there were that many obstacles for me; women before me paved the way.

And I’m continuing that for other generations.

Now, when it comes to the path of spiritual discovery and matching that spiritual intensity with entrepreneurship, that path is also being paved. New people are coming in and they can take advantage of the work that has been done by previous generations and they can start with a higher spiritual IQ and just get to work. That gives me hope.

GET MORE

Find an extended version of this interview, with Simon’s advice on workplace culture and conscious leadership, at consciouscompanymedia.com/tamisimon.

WORKPLACE CULTURE

CAN YOU CREATE

CONSCIOUS CULTURE WITHOUT USING

HIRING FILTERS? In this special roundtable conversation, experts on conscious culture contrast two radically different methods for creating a strong workplace culture.

BY JEFF CHERRY Earlier this year, my companies, the Porter Group and the Conscious Venture Lab, formed a new partnership with an amazing consulting company from Baltimore. Since its founding 16 years ago, SHIFT, along with CEO Joe Mechlinski, have focused on helping organizations big and small shift the purpose of business away from a myopic focus on profit and towards a force for good in society.

One of the things that made the business combination attractive to Joe and me was our collective focus on culture as a driver of organizational performance. In our work together advising established companies and

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startups, we often pose three related questions: 1) What does it mean to build a conscious, high-performing culture?

2) How do you hire people into an organization who are likely to fit well and operate with the right mindset?

3) How do you train executives of early-stage organizations to think about and implement culture in a mindful way?

As Mechlinski often puts it, “We spend a lot of time thinking about how to create a shared experience

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that’s deep. We think about looking at the whole self. How does someone’s head, heart, and gut show up at work?” In his work with companies, Mechlinski also puts a lot of emphasis on creating routines. “You don’t have to think about your anniversary or your birthday; you know what you’re going to do — you’re going to celebrate these moments,” he explains. To harness that same instinct for celebration and excitement at work, “We look at scheduling culture almost as a calendar. That goes for everything from how we start and end every meeting to how we think about the Friday before a holiday.”

When it comes to hiring, the question Mechlinski and I are asking is, how do you find people who are really willing to take their lives a little bit more seriously, to look at work as a tool to find their best selves? “We’re looking for organizations that believe that the single greatest lever of human potential is a more engaged workforce,” Mechlinski says. “And then we’re looking for people who see work as a place for them to make themselves better on a daily basis. Those are niche players, both companies and people, but that’s how we think about it at a high level.” We assumed that vetting highly engaged employees who would clearly be a good fit was indispensable to creating the sort of culture we wanted.

Then along comes my friend Mike Brady. Brady is the CEO of Greyston Bakery, a New York-based social enterprise that for more than 30 years has been operating using an open-hiring model. When positions on the bakery floor become available, they go to the next person on the waiting list, without interviews, background checks, or any of the traditional filtering that’s normally part of the hiring process. I visited Greyston in Yonkers a few weeks ago, and the positive culture of the place was palpable. It made me wonder: how do they do that? How do they create a strong culture without spending all that time and effort up front that we do to figure out whether people are going to fit?

In the interest of exploring those two different ways to think about how to build a culture — by handselecting team members, or by accepting anyone who walks through the door — I recently convened a conversation between Mechlinksi, Brady, and Conscious Company editorial director Rachel Zurer. Here are the highlights of what we discussed.

Rachel Zurer: Let’s start with the basics. Mike, how would you describe the culture at Greyston?

Mike Brady: If I had to choose one word, it’s passionate. There is a culture on the production floor, which is 100 percent teamed by open-hiring employees, that is about ownership. They now have a job and they want to do everything in their power to be successful on the job and to allow their colleagues to be successful on the job.

But on the flip side, if new team members come on board and they don’t buy into that concept, they’re not going to feel comfortable working at Greyston. You need to carry your weight, not only in making brownies every day, but also in the way you’re trying to help and support one another on the line.

We think a lot about worker readiness and those skills that perhaps people new to the workforce aren’t as familiar with; responding to your colleagues, showing up to work on

time, how to communicate with your senior managers, that kind of thing.

Also, the culture at Greyston has really benefited from a huge focus on quality, and on clear expectations that make it easy for people to understand, “Am I doing a good job or not?” We talk about this concept of “loving action.” If we see someone who isn’t delivering on the expected goals, quality targets, whatever it might be, it’s our responsibility to tell them. If we’re not doing that, we’re not really delivering the best we can to our team members.

Joe Mechlinksi: When people get there, is it a sense of amazing gratitude because they know that you’re one of the few organizations that have the principles to hire in this way? How does that contribute to the culture?

MB: It’s not a no-brainer.

Greyston is a hard place to work. You’re given an opportunity and people are grateful for that, but you quickly lose a little of that luster when you have to make a certain number of cases every day and you have to work hard. Then it’s just the dayto-day grind of getting through your job. People can reflect on, “Hey, this is a job I might not otherwise have,” but it’s still a difficult job.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people in low-wage environments or those that haven’t worked before

ROUNDTABLE CONVERSATION PARTICIPANTS

Jeff Cherry Founder, Conscious Venture Lab

Joe Mechlinksi CEO, SHIFT

Mike Brady CEO, Greyston Bakery

Rachel Zurer Editorial director, Conscious Company Media

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who don’t have confidence they can actually be successful. And so it’s their other team members who help them with that.

The other part of it is that not everyone comes to Greyston ready to change their lives. Some people come to just kick the tires. Some people come because their partner told them to. Some people come because their parole officer asked them to. They’re not fully committed. There are different elements at play all the time, so it’s not whistling and singing songs on the factory floor every day.

Jeff Cherry: Can you talk about the intersection between regular hiring and open hiring?

JC: That’s a really interesting thing to think about, how instituting an open-hiring model will in and of itself have an impact on your culture. Because it speaks to the way you think about the world. The open-hiring model, your commitment to it as an organization, has the ability to impact your culture because of what it says about your beliefs.

JM: I think Mike is the cool guy on this call, seriously.

What I love about the premise, not even knowing the whole story about open hiring, is it fundamentally assumes that everyone is employable. As I’ve worked with companies over the last 16 years, I’ve seen see the old generic

decision-making around hiring people when you could just say, “Hey, let’s do this differently.”

MB: Literally billions of dollars are spent on filtering people out of the workforce. If we could just take a basis point of that and move it towards bringing people in … changing the model so that the challenges we have in “finding fit” aren’t done across the table from someone who doesn’t know how to smile, or doesn’t understand the importance of eye contact, but heck, they would be great at running a piece of equipment or showing up on time.

Rather than having that dialogue across an interview table that’s completely uncomfortable, you have

“You start with the assumption that everybody is employable, therefore every organization can make a person profitable.”

MB: Greyston is unique in that our entire [production] workforce is an open-hiring workforce. I want to believe that every business in the country can think about open hiring, integrated into their existing team. A shared experience around helping a team member who might not have had the same background or upbringing or opportunities that you’ve had be successful in the workplace — can that influence a culture in a positive way?

I want to believe it can, and I want to believe that I can inspire other business leaders to look across their workforce to find where they can put an open-hiring model in jobs that might have been inconsequential in the past but can now be the basis of a culture shift around communities, social justice, social innovation. And at the same time get a great team member on board.

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thinking of, “This person can’t work for me,” or “This person was the wrong fit or the wrong hire,” all the way down to “They’re lazy, they’re not willing to work hard.”

I’m not suggesting that some of those things don’t potentially play out, but I love the idea that you start with the assumption that everybody is employable, therefore every organization can make a person profitable. I think that’s amazing.

The second piece I love about the philosophy of open hiring is that it already assumes that we’re crappy judges of character. It helps acknowledge what poor decisionmakers we are — biases come out, whether it’s racial, sexist, personal experience, confirmation bias. At the end of the day, there are probably lots of opportunities within our economy for this philosophy to negate the arduous bureaucratic bullcrap of trying to de-risk your

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it at your workplace, and you’re investing in that person every day to try to be successful. If the fit doesn’t work out, you need to have the mechanisms to address it, but at least you know you’re giving that person an honest opportunity. That, Joe and Jeff, is where I think there’s amazing work to be done still. How do you work within the organization to give people those opportunities?

Because now at Greyston, of course, we’ve developed a whole model that’s very elaborate and successful at onboarding people who come from every background. We spend time thinking, “If someone walked in the door who speaks German, how do we give them an equal opportunity to everybody else?” Or people who don’t read. How does everyone get the same chance to be successful when obviously there are jobs that require people to read?

The other part is, I want my team

The culture at Greyston Bakery involves what CEO Mike Brady calls “loving accountability.”

members to be successful on the job.

But if they’re living in a car or worried about the welfare of their children, are they really going to be present and mindful so that I can get product out the door? How can I continue to refine the mechanisms around what we’re doing to ensure that my team members, when they’re on the floor, are productive? There’s more work to be done there to make it understandable to other business leaders that this isn’t a huge expense. It’s just good business to ensure your team members are cared for so that they come to work and they’re present on the job.

Who wants to say, “All right, Employee #25, see you tomorrow,” and know that they’re going home to issues of homelessness and hunger, when we might have the resources literally at our fingertips at work to help them be more thriving members in their own community? That’s where we’re going with open hiring. We’ve got a good number of years behind us, but I think we can still do better around that.

JM: I’m a believer. I believe that there is value in every human being and potential

to be profitable. I’m a believer that equality and equity are important.

What I love about the model, too, is it puts some shared responsibility on both parties. It’s not all roses and unicorns as someone gets going, but so often there is blame-shifting that happens in the traditional hiring model. You have someone who joins an organization, and 90 days in, says, “This isn’t what I thought it would be.

It’s all their fault.” Or, “I was sold a bill of goods.”

Or conversely, the company says, “Gosh, after 90 days this person isn’t being productive.” Whatever the case may be, there tends to be a pointing of fingers on both ends because of the work on the front end.

Because there isn’t the same traditional rigor on the front end, what happens next? What’s interesting about the open-hiring process in the first 90 days?

MB: That’s where the greatest amount of transition happens, in those first 90 days. You’ve used great language around shared accountability there. On day one — this is

an awesome meeting — we bring a cohort or pupil in and we tell them, “You have a job now and these are the expectations for you to keep that job.

These expectations align with what it means to be a world-class facility.”

We’re delivering product every day to Unilever; their requirements are harder than industry-level requirements, and we make that very clear.

“It’s not a handout. It’s a hand up, for an opportunity. If you don’t accept that hand up, then you need to go find another opportunity.”

That’s made extremely clear throughout the entire process, every day that you’re on the job. It’s that shared accountability that if you don’t show up to work, I’m not going to feel bad. I asked you to be here at 7 a.m., and that was very clear.

That clear communication from day one is for every job, all of us. The board has it with me; I need to know what my expectations are every year and deliver. If I’m unclear about it, I can complain about it.

We work very diligently to make sure there is clarity. Not everyone is ready to work. But without giving the person the opportunity, you wouldn’t

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necessarily know that. And so through that first 60, 90 days is where people don’t show up on time and they don’t return from breaks on time. We explain what’s going to happen, and then we let people go. But those who show up on time and commit to making world-class products are able to change their lives.

other team members say, “Yeah, go tell them. Tell them the bus doesn’t arrive on time. Because if you show up late, you’re definitely not going to make it.” Certain things we can’t change, obviously — the shift starts when it starts.

But there are opportunities. As long as I’m getting brownies out the door and I’m running a profit-

model? I believe we could demonstrate incredible cultural value, incredible ROI that comes from that shift. Much like the way, years back, environmental sustainability had naysayers around, “I’ll do this but it’s not going to bring value to my organization.” I want to say, “This is a great business value for your organization. So look at all

“I want my team members to be successful on the job.

But if they’re living in a car or worried about the welfare of their children, are they really going to be present and mindful so that I can get product out the door? ” RZ: What if I want to be on time but the bus isn’t running or something?

Do you have explicit channels or routines that help people ask for help around, “I want to make the commitment but I see an obstacle”?

MB: Yup. So [Greyston founder] Bernie Glassman’s philosophy all along was around a concept that we want to help people who want to help themselves. So we don’t put in place all these artificial crutches as much as a model we call path-making. We’re all on a path to ensure our own success.

To get there, we need to be able to voice what’s preventing us from being successful.

We have a person responsible for the activity of path-making, and then it’s also a philosophy within the organization. If I go to the board and tell them I have a problem, their responsibility is to help me overcome it. That’s a trust mechanism. A lot of people come to Greyston without having trust in many established organizations.

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able business, we can help people, but they do have to come to the table with asking for help.

JC: I think there has still got to be room for traditional hiring. You probably don’t have the same patience in the organization for making sure people are ready to work at executive levels. Do you disagree, Mike?

MB: I think there’s a lot of applications for open hiring beyond entry-level jobs, that’s for sure.

JM: Traditional hiring, let’s keep chipping away at it. Whether we’re talking executive hiring or plant hiring, is there one thing that you would start to do to unhinge the traditional hiring model, a step in the direction of open hiring that would be both good for the world and good for business?

MB: Look at your recruiting process to see how much you spend on filtering people out. Would you be willing to move any of those dollars into a more progressive

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the money you’re wasting in these areas. Spend it on something else.”

JM: That’s great. We all have limited time and limited resources. We can devote this to weeding out or weeding in. There’s a good value proposition there. Especially as I think about the idea that tenure has dropped so significantly within organizations. The mobility in the workforce has never been greater than it is today, and so if all the work you’re doing is trying to select people out because you have this old-school thinking that people are going to be here for 15 years or ten years or even seven years, it’s just old thinking. It doesn’t add up. It doesn’t follow any of the research. The math is severely on your side, and it just helps that it’s amazing for the world.

Photo courtesy of Greyston Bakery

Jeff Cherry is the founder and executive director of the Conscious Venture Lab and SHIFT Ventures, an accelerator and venture capital fund for conscious entrepreneurship. He is an evangelist for the transformation of capitalism, attempting to bring whole-brain thinking into the realm of business creation and a more human-centered form of investing.

MERIT

OF

SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Blendoor founder Stephanie Lampkin is helping big companies put merit at the center of their hiring processes — and increasing diversity as a result.

We got the inside scoop on her entrepreneurship journey.

BLENDOOR AT A GLANCE • Location: San Francisco, CA • Founded: 2015 • Employees: 5 • Impact: 25,000 candidates and 62 companies using the platform • Structure: Private for-profit • Major funders: Elevate Capital, Pipeline Angels, Backstage Capital, Reshma Saujani (founder of Girls Who Code), Laszlo Bock (former SVP of People Operations at Google) • Mission statement: “To drive better decisions about people based on merit, not molds.”

Tell us about Blendoor. What does it do?

Stephanie Lampkin: Blendoor is artificial intelligence and people analytics that mitigate unconscious bias, starting with hiring — which basically means that, understanding that people suck at judging other people, we are building technology that enables companies to see the true hireability of a diverse set of candidates, and we use analytics to help them identify where there may be bias happening throughout the hiring process.

We have a B2B revenue model. Companies pay an annual subscription to access the platform, which gives them the ability to integrate it with their applicant tracking systems so they can Blendoorize all the candidates who come into their pipeline. Then they can also access the diverse talent that we have in our database. They pay for different tiers based on the size of the company and the level of analytics they want.

she moved up there and in with her sister who, at the time, was a computer scientist at the University of Maryland in College Park. I always tell people my first image of a programmer was somebody who looked like me, and not a white guy with a hoodie and flip flops.

That was really influential in my trajectory. I started coding at 13, was a full-stack developer by 15, got an engineering degree from Stanford, and then went to Microsoft for five and a half years, working with enterprise software.

I quit Microsoft to get an MBA from MIT. I started my first tech company there. That didn’t pan out, so I interviewed for an analytical lead role at Google in New York. I made it to the final round and thought it went really well, but the recruiter came back and basically said they didn’t think I was technical enough, but that they’d hang onto my resume in case some more sales- or marketing-oriented position opened up.

That was quite a wake-up call. I politely declined, and went back to the entrepreneurship drawing board. About six months later, Google and several other Silicon Valley companies released their diversity numbers, which were abysmal — 2 percent black, 2 percent Latino, 30 percent female. The response was, “Oh, it’s a pipeline problem. We just can’t find qualified women and people of color getting engineering degrees, learning to code,” etc., etc. Obviously, I knew that not to be the case.

I came up with the idea for Blendoor at a hackathon, and got such a positive response from it that I locked myself in my mom’s basement for two months and built the first version of the app.

Was there a specific “This is it!” moment when you had the idea?

How did you end up where you are today, and why is this specifically the business that you decided to spend all your time on?

SL: At a hackathon, you’re supposed to come up with an idea and build it on the spot. It’s not supposed to be something you’ve been working on in the past, so I genuinely went in with a clean slate. It was a competition between two ideas that I was equally excited about, and of course, hindsight is 20/20. Someone told me, “Blendoor is a much better idea.” I took their advice. People came up to me after the hackathon and said, “I don’t know what you’re doing with your life, but if you build this, you could have something really special.” I’d never experienced that level of external validation with any of my other ideas before.

SL: My background is a little unique for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. I’m originally from the Washington, DC, area. My mom was homeless for a brief period while pregnant with me, so

Tell me more about how you got the company off the ground. What were your next steps?

You had an MBA at that point. Were you looking for funding as you figured out the code?

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SL: I’d looked for funding with my previous startup, and I was burned out.

For the most part, I just tried to live as lean as possible. I took odd jobs to eat, and my family was super supportive in letting me live without paying rent.

I was literally just paying for gas and food, and focusing on learning all the frameworks I needed to build the app.

I’ve been coding since I was 13, so I knew the overall practice, but I had to

real elevator pitch, like 60 seconds.

She said, “Wait, you sure you don’t want to come work for Intel?” I was like, “Girl, no. You’re missing the point.” “Okay, okay. Well, shoot me an email.”

At the time, I was trying to figure out where I wanted to go. There was a female accelerator in Boulder, CO, called MergeLane, so I thought, “Maybe I need to move to Boulder.” I

SL: I try not to use the “D” word too often, because people want me in that bucket of, “Oh, yeah, you’re just trying to get people like you hired.”

It’s frustrating because they associate D&I [diversity and inclusion] with lowering the bar, like, “Oh, we have to put these measures in place because women don’t have the qualifications otherwise.”

We mask race, gender, name, photo,

“There hasn’t been a black woman engineer who has created a highgrowth technology company. Investors can see me building a nonprofit, or they can see me building a social enterprise, but not something that can generate a 10x return.” learn a lot of new frameworks and syntax. I was using free resources online like Lynda.com and YouTube. I built the platform in two months.

How did you go from your basement, basically surviving on ramen, to running a company?

SL: I entered a pitch competition in New York that was hosted by the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition. He’s the one that got all these Silicon Valley companies to start publishing their numbers. He was riding that wave, and had a conference in New York that was featuring a lot of executives in tech, with a focus on diversity.

One of the people there was Rosalind Hudnell, who at the time was the chief diversity officer of Intel. The reason that’s so important is that just a couple of weeks before, Intel’s CEO announced that they were committing $300,000 to improving diversity and inclusion over the next five years.

They were really the first tech company to come out with such a huge pledge.

Ros had a part guiding that, and so I came up to her after her panel and said, “Hey, I have this idea …” — a 24

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literally packed up my car and drove from New York to Colorado, and then Ros said she’d take the meeting with me, so I just kept on trucking to San Francisco, and haven’t looked back since.

So they funded you?

SL: They didn’t fund, but Rosalind introduced me to a ton of her other constituents. I met Facebook folks and Twitter folks, etc. Then I entered a pitch competition and won five grand.

I had friends who said, “I support what you’re doing. I don’t have any money to invest, but you can crash on our couch as long as you need to.”

Basically, I just had to stretch that five grand as long as I could. I finished coding the platform in January of 2015. I didn’t get my first real investment until November of that year. I was just piecing together different pitch-competition winnings and crowdfunding-type stuff so I could eat.

Fortunately, again, I didn’t have to pay rent, which was awesome.

What’s the most frustrating thing that people misunderstand about what you do — meaning diversity in hiring, tech, entrepreneurship, etc.?

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and age. So, if a recruiter wants to move forward with one of our candidates, it’s more meritocratic than any other process; you don’t know the demographics of the person you like.

In our branding, we’ve evolved to just emphasizing that we’re driving better hiring decisions based on merit and not mold, not that we’re driving D&I. D&I is a byproduct, not the product.

That’s probably the biggest frustration I have.

I’ll never forget, I went to a women’s event in San Francisco around the time we first got started, and [angel investor and 500 Startups founder] Dave McClure was there. Again, I ran up to him, I gave him my little pitch.

I could tell that he felt like I was just building a black and brown LinkedIn. He sort of gave me a pat on the head like, “Oh, you should go talk to the Kapors” [investors known to have a deep commitment to diversity]. He wasn’t taking us seriously as a real technology company.

That’s been one of the biggest hurdles that I’ve had to overcome; there hasn’t been a black woman engineer who has created a high-growth technology company, and so when investors see me, there really is no precedent. There’s no frame of reference to

say, “Oh, yeah, I can see how you could build a data-science company focused on meritocratic hiring.”

No, that’s the furthest from their head. If anything, they can see me building a nonprofit, or they can see me building a social enterprise, but not something that can generate a 10x return. That’s the battle I face.

What do you do about that? How do you change it, and how do you keep from getting discouraged?

SL: We’ve buckled down on focusing on the numbers and less on all the other folly. That has helped.

In terms of how do I change it, it’s this Jackie Robinson mentality of going into a domain where you are completely underrepresented, underestimated. Being 4’11” and black, and female, I’m so used to being underestimated and exceeding people’s expectations that, in some ways, it gives me an advantage. Like if you don’t expect a lot out of me and I do anything remotely great, it’s going to be perceived as that much greater. So I just want to try to keep that mentality to get through the trenches.

What are your highest values personally, and how do you act on those in your workplace and in the company you’re creating?

SL: Given the work we’re doing around bias, a lot of my principles are around equity, giving people and things a fair shake, not taking things at face value. That’s a lazy way of using our human brains, to just allow pattern-matching to make decisions for us. That’s great for certain things, but people and opportunities deserve a little bit more brainpower. I’m heavily principled on that. In terms of how that affects my day-to-day, when I’m looking at people to hire, for example, I’m super eager to source from places where folks wouldn’t traditionally look. One of my

engineers is based in St. Martin.

The Caribbean actually has a lot of great talent that’s overlooked; we think about India, we think about Eastern Europe, we think about South America.

Because of what I know, and the nature of the business and our thesis, I’ve been more empowered to find the diamonds in the rough, and see things that others can’t see.

You must learn and think a lot about bias, especially in hiring.

Besides the obvious answer of using your service, do you have any advice for people or companies who are aware of that problem and want to work on being less biased in their hiring?

SL: It’s all about the way you perceive bias and understanding the context of when it’s okay and when it’s potentially destructive to what your goals are. I tell people, “You really have to think of it like a natural human blind spot, like you have in your car. You have mirrors in your car because you have blind spots. It’s natural. Everyone has it.

No one is exempt from it. It’s just the way we’re built.”

If you think of it like that, it puts you in a different frame of mind.

You don’t have to guilt anyone into trying to solve it. Then you’re more open to using tools and putting measures in place to remediate those blind spots.

The biggest advice I give to companies intent on changing is to track and measure and create more accountability for where bias may be happening throughout the organization. So many people are so confident in their ability to judge other people’s characters or qualifications that they don’t realize where and how bias happens. If you don’t have any way of tracking or measuring it, then there’s really no way to fix it. I’m big on data and accountability.

THE SORRY STATE OF DIVERSITY IN TECH U.S. Population by gender

50%

Male

50% Female tech workforce by gender

82% Male 18% Female U.S. Population by Ethnicity 61% white 18% hispanic 13% black 6% asian 2% other

tech workforce by Ethnicity

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50% white 4% hispanic 2% black 43% asian

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You’re an engineer so that answer makes sense [laughter]. What’s your touchstone piece of advice right now as you’re growing as a leader?

Lampkin’s trick for thriving in startup life: “habitual napping.”

SL: “Always be listening.” There are so many things said and unsaid when you’re managing people and making key decisions for the direction of the company. Sometimes it’s hard to see that as a leader, and sometimes it’s hard to pay attention to things that will counter your tightly held beliefs.

If you want to be successful, you have to put yourself in a frame of mind where you can see the faces around you, the people around you, things that are happening, that are guiding you. It’s a very lonely job.

Sometimes you feel like you’re the only one who knows all things, but in many cases, you have people who come in and provide a much more experienced perspective, and you have to be receptive to that.

What’s keeping you up at night lately?

SL: Like most startup founders, stuff like, “Are we going to meet our sales goals and milestones?” and “Who am I going to hire for this?”

On a personal level, what keeps me up is whether [solving] the problem we’re solving [is something] I can really do in my lifetime, because it’s so deeply rooted in social tensions, racial tensions, economic history. To see things happening now, in 2017, that happened in the 1950s and 1960s is scary, just the idea that we’re regressing in some ways. I had this optimistic view as a kid that the human race is evolving, and we’re only becoming more knowledgeable about the role that women can play in the workplace and why equality is important, and why immigrants add so much value and richness to a culture. Now we see all those

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things brought back into question.

I wonder, “Gosh, how do we really move forward when the pendulum keeps swinging, and what impact can I make with the body that I was born into?”

I draw inspiration from other folks who had to face way more challenges than I did in the past.

Just keep swimming. Dory [from “Finding Nemo”] is my inspiration; just keep swimming [laughs].

What’s giving you hope?

SL: There’s a lot that’s happened in

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the past year that has taken away hope. What’s giving me hope?

Probably just seeing the way the American people have stepped up to make their voices heard about supporting immigrants, or supporting women, or Black Lives Matter, etc.

In my 32 years, I don’t think I’ve seen that happen at such a great scale. It gives me hope. It gives me hope that there still are people in my generation, not like those in Charlottesville, but those who really, really want us to move towards a more fair and equitable society.

Photos by MadameNoire

CULTURE Dustin Moskovitz, a Facebook co-founder, is CEO and co-founder of Asana.

BY DESIGN WHAT HAPPENS WHEN TWO SILICON VALLEY DARLINGS SET THEIR MINDS TO CREATING THE WORLD’S MOST HIGHPERFORMING TEAM?

BY RACHEL ZURER

Asana co-founder and head of product Justin Rosenstein

ASANA AT A GLANCE Location: San Francisco, CA Founded: 2008 Employees: 297 Structure: Private for-profit Impact: 25,000+ paying customers Major funders: Andreessen Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Founders Fund, Peter Thiel; latest round was Series C led Sam Altman.

Mission statement: “To help humanity thrive by enabling all teams to work together effortlessly”

SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP

A

t age 34, Justin Rosenstein has already had more cultural impact than most of us can hope for in a lifetime. In his first job out of Stanford as a product manager at Google, he invented and wrote the original prototype for Gchat in a single overnight coding push. After getting recruited to Facebook by its co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, Rosenstein and a few buddies invented the Like button. Those two inventions alone subtly affect the lives of perhaps a billion people every day. But if all goes his way, his previous accomplishments will be minor compared to the impact his current job will have on humanity’s wellbeing. His end goal: universal love. His tool of choice: enterprise software.

Follow his logic from its source, and it makes a certain kind of sense.

At both Facebook and Google, despite being so obviously productive, Rosenstein was still frustrated by how much time he spent doing work about work — endless meetings and status updates. In response, he created an internal software tool to help facilitate collaboration. By the time he left Google in 2006, about 1,000 people were using the barebones product he’d hacked up in a few weekends. At Facebook, he got Moskovitz involved in a similar internal project, and they soon watched the number of status meetings plummet and productivity soar. The tool was so effective that Moskovitz stepped out of his role as VP of engineering to focus on the software full-time.

Eventually, Rosenstein and Moskovitz decided to share with the world what they were creating: a tool that helps teams simply track, manage, and complete their work with clarity. Their grand plan was to create a product that would improve the results of any team trying to accomplish lofty goals across any field, from healthcare to clean energy to social justice and beyond. “If you could get the people in organizations to coordinate as effortlessly and effectively as the limbs of my body,”

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“We’re doing extremely well as a business, and it’s because of, not in spite of, all the emphasis we’ve put on mindfully building a great culture.”

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explains Rosenstein, “the power of those emergent selves would be mind-blowing — capable of things I don’t even think we can conceive of today. And then if you could get all of humanity to collaborate toward commons ends …” He trails off at the enormity of it.

And so Asana was born.

The pair launched their startup in 2008, naming it after the Sanskrit word for postures from yoga, a practice important to both cofounders. The name also captures the sense of flow and focus that they hoped their software (also called Asana) would help workers achieve. In an unusual enterprise sales strategy, they decided to make the product free, with premium features and support available to paying customers. They attracted $1.2 million in funding from 14 angel investors, including from big names like Peter Thiel, Mitch Kapor, and Marc Andreessen.

In 2011, they launched their browser-based and mobile apps.

As the team expanded, they settled in a historic former brewery in San Francisco’s Mission District and watched their market share grow, along with their funding — in total, they’ve raised more than $88 million in three rounds.

Though the company doesn’t reveal revenue figures, as of late 2017 it boasts 25,000+ paying clients (up from 20,000 earlier in the year), including big names like Zappos, HBO, AB-InBev, and Airbnb. According to a listing on the Great Place to Work website, the company plans to hire 94 positions in the next year to add to its team of almost 300.

Yet the success of the software and the company’s fast growth are not why I’m dedicating two and a half days to interviewing employees and sitting in on meetings at the company’s offices. I’m here trying capture what makes Asana tick because of the first-class workplace culture Rosenstein and Moskovitz have created. The

One way Asana cultivates a low-drama workplace is by encouraging employees to bring their full selves to work.

company’s Glassdoor rating is a 4.9 out of 5. According to Great Place to Work, 99 percent of its employees say their workplace is great, and Asana recently was among the top 10 tech companies on Fortune’s Best Workplaces for Women 2017 list.

Fast Company recently called it “the best company culture in tech.”

This human-level success is no accident. The founders articulated the basic principles for the culture they wanted to create during the company’s first week, when it was just the two of them, and early employees report that the atmosphere has felt deliberate from the start. Both Rosenstein and Moskovitz often talk about how they treat their culture as a product, just like their software — one that deserves intention, attention, design, and upgrading just as much as any app feature they might ship to customers. Experimenting with how corporate structures, mindsets, and rituals can facilitate teamwork is just as important to their mission to “help humanity

thrive by enabling all teams to work together effortlessly” as improving the usability and success of their app. While they don’t explicitly sell or export elements of their culture (yet), they do devote significant staff time and resources to sharing their findings on a popular blog and a web publication called Wavelength. Some of the app’s design also represents their philosophy about effective teamwork — the fact that tasks can only be assigned to one person is an extension of the company’s position on the importance of clarity of responsibility, for example.

Meanwhile, as Rosenstein puts it, “We’re doing extremely well as a business, and it’s because of, not in spite of, all the emphasis we’ve put on mindfully building a great culture. It allows us to move more quickly because we’re not wasting time on infighting and drama. We have the processes we need to learn more quickly, so we make fewer mistakes over time and get more successes. And it’s the thing that al-

lows us to retain and attract some of the top talent in the world, because that’s an environment that great people want to work in.”

So what really makes Asana’s culture special? And are there lessons here for other visionary organizations? That’s what I’ve come here to discover. And the answers seem to start at the source.

ASANA’S MINDFUL FOUNDERS There’s a lot about Rosenstein that makes him an unusual, or at least distinctive, C-suite leader. He’s brilliant, of course — he graduated from Stanford with a math major in two and half years, which he humblebrags might be the fastest ever — but I don’t mean that. I mean his way of being. How he often walks around the office without shoes.

The way he usually sits in meetings — legs drawn in close, pretzeled into his seat. His unabashed obses-

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sion with cats (he and his team of assistants call their corner of the office “the Meownge,” short for Meow Lounge, and it’s decorated accordingly). His vegan diet. His t-shirt-and-jeans wardrobe. The fact that he lives with 14 roommates in a cooperative he founded in a big Victorian house in the Mission District, and the fact that it’s named Agape, after the Greek word for unconditional love. His deep commitment to Buddhist-inspired self-development practices; he spends several weeks a year on silent meditation retreats.

The list goes on, but these are mere effects of the core traits that make JR (as his team and friends call him) an unusual leader. The firstprinciple qualities, which make up the ether from which the constellation of his quirks emerge, are that he’s unusually authentic, humble, and self-aware. And in embodying

Asana invests heavily in employee wellbeing, including hosting frequent in-house yoga classes.

those qualities in himself, and by choosing a co-founder who is equally dedicated to them, he’s manifested (his word) a corporate reality that embodies them too.

The difference really clicked for me as we sat discussing what his role at the company has become lately.

It was the start of Roadmap Week, a ritual Asana has been doing since its early days, in which normal operations stop so that the teams can take stock of what they’ve accomplished in the latest “episode” (a six-month period between Roadmap Weeks) and look to where they want to go in the next one. Rosenstein talks about it as a form of corporate mindfulness, like organizational meditation — a time to pause and grow awareness of what is. He wasn’t leading any meetings that week, but he was sitting in on a ton of them so that he could glean a sense of the big-picture challenges

facing the company’s various arms, and perhaps see solutions across departments that others might not.

“Often my role is just that I can be more daring,” he explained. “When you join a company, it’s so easy to just take things for granted — that things will always be the way they are; whereas a lot of the decisions that people think are set in stone are decisions I personally made, and therefore it’s very easy for me to question them.

“I have a very sophisticated operating model about how the world works, how companies should work, what product we’re building, what features it should have, different cultural practices we should adopt.

But I don’t believe any of it. And so, if, at any moment, the argument comes along that would demonstrate that part of my operating model is wrong, I just drop it.

Having that kind of total intellectual humility makes it a lot easier to work with people. It’s hard to get into fights.”

Moskovitz, the company’s co-founder who has been CEO since almost the start (he and Rosenstein switched at one point early on), also professed a similar position. “Strong opinions weakly held,” he called it.

“I’m always trying to question, ‘What do I think I’m right about? And how might the opposite of that story be true?’ It’s just a common way we have of looking at things.”

At one point I asked Rosenstein if he’d always been this way, or if it had taken work to get so light with his beliefs.

“It’s an ongoing practice,” he said.

“What do you do if you notice you’re clinging?”

“Mindfulness: Notice the clinging.

Equanimity: be ok with the clinging.

Observe it as a phenomenon of, ‘I am a human, I cling to things. That is a thing that humans do. That’s ok too.’

Then as much as possible, just trying to relax. Breathe.” Then we both did.

EMPOWERMENT About a month after Roadmap Week, the regular Friday Product Forum is starting in a conference room decorated like a cozy den or therapist’s office, all warm grays and soft curves. As usual, Rosenstein embodies the lithe self-containment of a cat, his legs curled under him as he sits in a corner of the couch, dressed in a black t-shirt, black jeans, and black socks. Rosenstein’s official title is head of product, and the goal of today’s gathering is to offer feedback and guidance to various product development teams about the design of the software. But Rosenstein is not in charge of the agenda, nor of the timekeeping. Neither is the number two executive in the room, head of project management Jackie Bavaro.

This regular meeting, which was originally known as Product Review, has recently been renamed to make it clearer, especially to new employees, that this isn’t an arena in which

Very Important People in Power are going to rule from on high about the work of subordinates. Instead, it’s an opportunity for informed and experienced coaches to help teams make the best decisions possible about how to proceed.

The first group to enter has been working on a new version of the Asana iPad app. The project lead projects a version of the app on a large screen in the corner of the room and hands an iPad to Rosenstein, who immediately starts exploring.

Rosenstein begins by just pointing out what he’s noticing. “As always, take these things for what you will,” he says. “I’ll note if I see anything that definitely has to be addressed; otherwise take it as input.” As he investigates the functionality of the app, he frames his notes from the seat of his own experience, or as clarifying questions: “I would expect the ‘My Tasks’ bar to go all the way over to the right.” “This is pretty surprising to me …” “When I see this with a beginner’s mind …” “I hear you saying …”

After about 15 minutes of back and forth, he concludes: “I think it’s safe to say this is a strict improvement.

Approved!” And it’s time for a new team to move in.

It’s worth noting that as hands-off and non-directive as Rosenstein’s feedback is, this moment of granting approval — as the gatekeeper and final decider of the fate of someone else’s work — is a glaring exception to the bulk of operations within the company, one that only occurs about what gets shipped live in the app. In general, Asana structures its work around “areas of responsibility,” or AORs. The idea is that every possible task required — from logo design to compensation to customer support for Europe, and from app stability to making the sauces for the three daily meals the culinary team serves in the cafeteria — is documented as a clear area of responsibility with one specific person who is its DRI: directly responsible individual. The trick is that unlike in most organizations, the DRI, otherwise known as the AOR

“I don’t particularly want to make decisions.

I just want the right call to be made.”

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THE GOOD LIFE Of course working at Asana comes with all the perks you’d expect from a San Francisco tech firm.

Here are some highlights.

Meals: Healthy breakfasts, lunches, and dinners made from scratch with local and seasonal ingredients are served for free in the company cafeteria.

Snacks: Beverage coolers, snack stations, beer fridges, and more are spread throughout the office, and there is a free in-house cafe. Highlights include local kombucha on tap, rotating daily flavors of spa water, and homemade chips.

Wellness: Offerings include daily yoga, nap rooms, in-house massage and reiki, free gym membership, an up to $10,000 allowance for setting up your workstation, and 100 percent company-paid health insurance that covers mental health, fertility treatments, and alternative treatments Time off: Employees get flexible schedules, unlimited paid time off and unlimited paid sick leave, a six-week paid sabbatical after every three years of employment, and four months of paid parental leave.

Coaching: Executive coaching is available to all employees, and all staff receives training from the Conscious Leadership Group.

Retirement: There is an Employee stock ownership plan (ESOP).

Transit: Transit, parking, or bike-commuting costs are subsidized and $50/month Uber or Lyft credits are offered.

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holder, is genuinely responsible and empowered to make the final decisions regarding their AORs. Managers are there to coach and support AOR holders, not to approve, reject, or direct their decisions.

Rosenstein calls this model “a distributed dictatorship.”

Bavaro, for example, is the AOR holder for the company’s annual software work plan, deciding what features they’re going to add and what improvements they’re going to focus on. While she has a duty to make sure she understands the requests, desires, and points of view of all relevant parties — including Rosenstein, who is her direct manager, and Moskovitz, the CEO — it’s truly Bavaro’s responsibility to make the decision: “What are we going to build this year?” In the lead-up to that decision, she collects feedback, not with the goal of building consensus, but with the goal of mutual deep understanding.

“It’s much more important to feel heard than to get your way,” Rosenstein explains.

“If I feel like someone didn’t understand my perspective and they decide differently than I would, that’s really frustrating. If I feel like they understood and they just had a different intuition or made a different judgement call, that’s a lot easier.”

Anna Binder, head of people operations, explains AORs with a story about a meeting she attended early in her time at the company. “It was a pretty large meeting about strategic planning,” she says. “There were a lot of different opinions in the room. Moskovitz looked around and said, ‘Listen guys.

I have such strong opinions about what the outcome here should be, I’m worried that once I start talking, I’m just going to spend the whole time

trying to convince everyone of my point of view, and that because I’m the CEO, we’re going to go with my way because it’s my way. But that’s not what I want, because I’m not the AOR holder. So, if you would allow me to state my opinion, I’m then going to leave the room.

Leaving the room is not a statement of “I don’t believe in you” or “I don’t care;” I just don’t want to disrupt the process.’

“I’ve worked for a lot of different CEOs before,” says Binder, who has held similar roles at several other tech companies. “I’ve worked for CEOs who really are the smartest person in the room, but could never have taken such a long view.” Witnessing that humility and self-awareness was “an amazing experience,” she says, but what happened next was “even more amazing.” Before Moskovitz left, several people, including the AOR holder, asked him some clarifying questions. Once he was gone, the conversation turned to, “I think we understand what his priorities are. Do we agree with those priorities?” In the end, the group came up with a better solution that completely solved his problem. “I hadn’t been in an environment like that before,” Binder says. “It was incredible.”

AORs started early in Asana’s history, well before there was even a product to launch. In part, they stem from that value of deep intellectual humility that both Rosenstein and Moskowitz share. “I don’t particularly want to make decisions,” Rosenstein says. “I think a lot of leaders have the personality trait of wanting to make the call. I just want the right call to be made. And given that we’ve gone to the trouble of hiring talented, smart people with good judgement, of course you want to distribute the respon-

sibility to the person who can make the best decisions.”

“It almost feels like a failure if I’m doing something directly or making a decision directly,” adds Moskowitz.

Another reason for AORs goes back to a difficult experience Rosenstein had while at Google. He’d been leading development of Google Drive, and brought what he thought was a viable product to Larry Page, the company’s founder and CEO, who decided it couldn’t launch until it integrated with a bunch of other Google apps. Rosenstein explained the major political obstacles to getting that done, and thought that launching Drive right away and integrating later would make more sense. Page overruled him.

When he built his own company, Rosenstein vowed to do his best to eliminate such situations, in which one person is the subject-matter expert and a different person is the decision-maker. “When I’m in conversation with designers and we disagree,” he says, “unless I really disagree, we try to get to what at Amazon they call ‘disagree and com-

mit.’ ‘I disagree with you. But you’re thinking about this 100 times more than I’m thinking about it. You’ve heard my advice; if that’s what you want to do, I’ll stand behind you. If it turns out you learn something else [would have been better], then you learn.’”

MENTORING Bella Kazwell kept telling herself she wasn’t ready to manage an intern. Though she’d graduated with a degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon, sailed through internships with Nortel and IBM, and spent six years as an engineer at Google right out of college, she arrived at Asana in 2011, as the company’s 19th employee, convinced she wasn’t good enough to mentor anyone. She held on to that belief even as she thrived at Asana and, as the first one to take advantage of it, helped the company create its parental leave policy. When she returned, her manager helped her craft a flexible schedule, and they also decided that enough was enough

with this “not ready for an intern” talk. She took one on.

It turned out that Kazwell loved the coaching involved, and she soon asked to move into more leadership roles. Today, she’s the web engineering lead, and manages a team of 16 people in that department.

Kazwell is both a beneficiary of the company’s focus on mentoring and is in a role explicitly providing it, so she considers it a lot. “When we think of staffing,” she says, “we think of how we’re enabling this person to grow. How can we give this person a challenge, and how can we support them in this challenge?”

Most fundamentally, the culture of mentoring stems from the way Rosenstein and Moskovitz look at roles within the organization. “The primary function of managers at Asana is to support the individual contributors to manifest their potential,” Rosenstein says. “We talk about the manager as coach. As a manager, when someone brings you a problem, there’s a strong instinct to want to solve it for them. And sometimes that’s the appropriate

Asana’s in-house culinary team prepares three meals from scratch each day for their teammates.

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response. But it’s astounding how often that does a disservice to your organization. Often all I need to do is patiently hold space. I ask, ‘What do you think you should do?’ By the end of 10 minutes, they’re often like, ‘Oh … I guess I should do this,’ and I’m like ‘Yeah, that seems reasonable,’ and they can go forward. But now they’ve developed a skill, rather than just me handing them an answer.”

In practice, this coaching work emerges mostly through regular one-on-ones between reports and managers. “At a lot of companies, those meetings get devoted to talking about what you’re working on — status, deadlines,” Rosenstein explains. “Because that’s all tracked in the Asana app, it opens the one-on-one to a broader conversation. What are you feeling?

What’s holding you back from being able to blossom and do your best work? What would you like to learn and develop skills around? What are your long-term career aspirations?

What are your long-term human

aspirations?”

The commitment to mentorship and helping employees grow starts on an employee’s first day when they’re assigned an on-boarding buddy who is expected to spend significant time helping them get up to speed. Meanwhile, the company also offers peer mentoring, both informal and formal; executive coaching to all employees; communication coaches; and more — services rarely available to every employee in an organization.

CLARITY “Something that feels really special here is that there’s been this huge investment over time in connecting the dots from the work one person is doing to the mission,” explains Bavaro, the head of product management. Employees use their internalized understanding of a framework Moskovitz calls “The Pyramid of Clarity” (see below) to examine the consequences of decisions from a high-level point of view.

ASANA’S PYRAMID OF CLARITY The company uses this framework to get everyone aligned on the high-level purpose of the work and the concrete results they expect the work to produce. It shows how longer-term aspirations are built on top of shorterterm goals.

MISSION: MISSION

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“Help humanity thrive by enabling all teams to work together effortlessly.”

STRATEGY:

1. Make a product that makes teamwork effortless 2. Get that product to all teams COMPANY-WIDE OBJECTIVES 3. Make Asana the best company at doing 1 & 2 BUSINESS PRODUCT INTERNAL

OBJECTIVES

OBJECTIVES

OBJECTIVES

OBJECTIVES: KEY RESULTS

PROJECTS

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“Any time you’re working on a task at Asana, you can know that this task is part of this project, which is in service of this key result, which is in service of this objective, which is part of this strategy sub-bullet, which is part of this strategy main bullet, which goes up to the mission. At a Roadmap Week meeting I was just at, a team was saying ‘We’re trying to make a decision about what we work on.’

We were able to have the conversation at that high level, rather at the level of ‘Do we build this feature or that one?’ The question became, ‘Between Objective 10 and Objective 12, which do we think is most going to help us with our strategy?’”

The first key to achieving this level of clarity, not just among executives but among a fast-growing web of empowered employees, is the mission. As research on mission-driven business has shown, having a purpose beyond profit is a strong tool for driving better performance on a constellation of business metrics.

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Year-long goals. In 2017, Asana had 14 objectives, including 4 companywide ones (e.g., growing revenue), and 4 product ones (e.g., making the product fast).

And that research also makes it clear that said mission must be alive and active in all decisions all employees make, not just a nice platitude on the website.

At Asana, Rosenstein is a secret weapon in helping that mission come alive. It helps that Asana’s mission fuels his personal priorities, but it’s not just that he thinks the work he’s doing helping teams be more effective has the power to change the world in a big way — he also communicates it often and effectively. “I think he can see 10 years in the future as clearly as I can envision tomorrow,” says Bavaro. One of his AORs is “toastmaster.”

Yet Asana doesn’t just depend on a visionary and articulate leader to keep its teams aiming toward the same goal; the company also invests in clarity through some dayto-day norms in the culture. Roadmap Week (RMW) itself is perhaps the best example — a twice-yearly chance to reflect on what went well in the last episode since the previous RMW, and to zoom out to make big-picture decisions about the next episode. The company also holds all-hands show-and-tells every few weeks where individual contributors share what they’ve been working on. And it uses its own app, with its task assignment and communication tools, to focus on turning ideas into action items with a clear owner and timeline and keeping everyone easily up-todate on progress.

FEEDBACK AND CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT It’s Tuesday morning, the start of the second day of Roadmap Week, and a group of about 15 Asana employees is gathered around a large glass table to discuss … Roadmap Week. Well, not just RMW, special weeks in general. Besides the biannual RMWs, the company also

has several other special times built into the annual schedule: Grease Week, for cleaning up internal systems and processes; Polish Week, for making similar improvements to customer-facing elements of the business; and a few hackathons scattered here and there for fun, fast prototyping of new ideas. The purpose of today’s meeting is to make sure the special weeks are still working well, that the company still wants them, and to improve them if possible.

As usual, the relevant AOR holder, in this case Matt Bramlage from the developer relations team, leads the meeting, and has come prepared with a Google Docs agenda, questions for the group, and goals for the conversation. Those around the table represent a variety of departments and the remote offices.

The conversation centers around how not everyone really understands the nuances of the various weeks, and how challenging it can be for non-product teams, like customer success or marketing, to really participate in them. Someone suggests that maybe Grease and Polish weeks should just be for product teams.

“I think we’re getting the wrong signal from it being challenging,” says a woman on the customer operations team. “Because it’s harder to include everyone, it’s information to me that it’s even more important.”

“If widespread participation is important to us — maybe it isn’t — but if it is, we need people to realize it is. We need to incentivize it,” points out a purple-haired woman on the marketing team. “Maybe a t-shirt? A sticker or laptop badge?”

“The hypothesis is that there’s not enough incentive to participate, but I don’t know if we’re getting at exactly why it’s hard to participate.

I want to make sure we feel like the solution is matching the problem here,” a product manager reminds the team.

“One thing we do particularly well is being comfortable talking about where we’re not succeeding.”

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“Can I make a proposal for some action items?” asks a representative from people operations as the meeting draws to a close. In the end, the group decides that all the weeks do still have value for now.

They’ll create a liaison within each department to spearhead participation in each special week, circulate templates for week launches with longer lead times to help communicate the goals and get people clear on opportunities, and improve communication about the weeks in general.

This meeting is a relatively lowstakes but real example of another set of values that, in the end, are probably the most important for

many of these reflections. “‘Why?’ ‘Because we didn’t test it.’ ‘Why?’ And it keeps going. It’s not about blame, it’s about process. Things go wrong, people make mistakes.

You want to put in processes so people won’t make mistakes, or at least protect people from their mistakes. It’s important to have the people who were involved in the room, because otherwise you end up hypothesizing and come out of the meeting with no decisions.

And it’s important to come out with action items. It’s tempting to just make this a venting meeting, but the goal of this meeting is to figure out what went wrong and how we’re going to fix it.”

success. It helps that all employees go through training with the Conscious Leadership Group to learn skills like holding their beliefs lightly, saying things in a way that is inarguable (with statements like “I feel” or “I’m having the thought” that are routed in the speaker’s direct experience), conscious listening, and more.

Bavaro offers a concrete example of how this works in practice: “On the project manager side, part of the culture is when giving feedback on a document, rather than saying ‘Do this another way,’ we frame things as, ‘I wonder.’ When you have to reframe your thought into ‘I wonder,’ it gets you think-

“It’s much more important to feel heard than to get your way.” explaining Asana’s success and the ones most adoptable by any company: candor and continuous improvement.

“A lot of what makes the culture as good as it is is that we notice bugs,” says Rosenstein. “There’s bugs everywhere, there’s problems everywhere; as the company grows, there’s always challenges.

The key thing is just to keep noticing those challenges and trying to improve them. It’s permanently a work in progress.”

Another mechanism the company commonly uses, called “5 Whys,” is one it adopted from Toyota. Teams exercise it any time something goes wrong. “The process is, you say, ‘This thing went wrong: we pushed a bug to production,’” explains Kazwell, a 5 Whys veteran who now helps facilitate 38

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As part of the emphasis on always improving, the company also has a deep commitment to ongoing feedback. “We have lots of forums for it and we’re always looking for the best ways to help people give and receive that feedback in a non-defensive manner,” says Bavaro. For individuals, this takes the form of annual self-reviews, frequent one-on-ones with managers, and regular peer reviews.

Asana also works with a third party to conduct an annual employee survey, shares even the harsh feedback publicly, and commits to making changes quickly.

And, in general, there’s a “see something, say something” attitude — a value that seeing what is will help the mission, and that learning to take and give feedback well is a key prerequisite for

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ing about ‘What’s the assumption I have that’s different than what you have that’s leading me to a different solution?’ We find that when people hear things that way, they’re much more open to engaging with the question.”

Binder, the head of people operations, thinks about the culture of feedback from a recruiting standpoint. “Our employees say wonderful things about us on Glassdoor,” she says. “That doesn’t mean that we’re perfect, or pristine. What it means, what I believe that it means, is that we’ve created channels internally for people who have unhappiness to speak about those unhappinesses in a direct way. My story is, companies with bad Glassdoor ratings don’t have a safe place for people to come internally. If you looked at some of the conver-

The Asana offices provide a variety of work spaces for collaboration or a change of scenery.

sations we have, there are plenty of people who are aggrieved about lots of different stuff. They just have places they can speak up internally, and we have tons of vehicles for them to do that.”

All is not paradise within the company, however. For example, the company is still trying to figure out how to preserve the AOR system and make sure those internal feedback channels don’t get buried as it scales beyond 300 employees. Another clear challenge Asana faces is one common to its industry: the lack of diversity in its workforce, especially in technical positions. While its numbers of women and people of color in leadership and tech positions are mostly better than industry averages (see page 25), they’re still low.

Yet Sonja Gittens-Ottley, who heads the company’s diversity and inclusion initiatives, is optimistic.

“One thing we do particularly well is being comfortable talking about where we’re not succeeding,” she says — even in the challenging arenas of inequality and race.

I know I haven’t gotten a full picture of the company in just a few

days, but in other ways I feel like something’s clicked, like I get what working here both asks and allows you to be. Asana’s employees, processes, workplace, and product aren’t perfect, but in the end, I realize, perfect isn’t a very useful metric for success. Who knows if Rosenstein’s vision of creating a “team brain” or enabling universal human progress will ever come true? But I’m glad people this smart are trying something so different.

As I contemplate returning home to my own job, I wonder if it’s possible for mere mortals, ones without Silicon Valley pedigrees or Facebooksized reputations (and funding) to replicate a culture remotely as inspiring to be a part of as this one is.

Two bits of wisdom keep my answer leaning towards yes. The first is something Moskovitz pointed out: the power of intention. “One of the things unique about Asana, which has made us successful building this culture, is just that we tried,” he said. Trying doesn’t take special skills or a huge budget — just commitment.

The other encouraging nugget is

something Rosenstein said, when, as he gave me the tour of Agape, I fumbled with a camera on the rooftop deck while trying to hold a microphone in his face. I apologized for the awkwardness, and he shushed me. “I consider tolerance for awkwardness one of my competitive advantages,” he said. “A lot of both personal and professional relationships are impeded by people being scared of being truthful in a way that will lead to this feeling in the room of ‘Ohhhh, this is awkward to talk about.’ But if you can just stay present with the awkwardness and see it through to the other side, and remember that everyone’s on the same team, you can get to the truth. And the truth can let you go faster in whatever you’re trying to do.”

Special thanks to Jenny Sauer-Klein and The Culture Conference for introducing us to the Asana team. Learn more about this invitationonly, two-day event at thecultureconference.com.

Get more: Find our interviews with Asana’s CEO Dustin Moskovitz and with head of diversity and inclusion Sonja Gittens-Ottley online, plus behind-the-scenes extras, at consciouscompanymedia.com/asana.

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SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP

WHAT MAKES A

GOOD LEADER? TWO MORE TECH CEOs WEIGH IN

In our reporting on Asana, we found that strong conscious leadership is key to creating a thriving culture. We wanted more perspective from others in the industry, so we asked the heads of two more tech companies to tell us their thoughts on what makes a good leader.

ROB CASTANEDA,

DAVID MANDELBROT,

CEO AND FOUNDER OF SERVICEROCKET

CEO OF INDIEGOGO

• Founded in 2008 • Based in San Francisco, CA • 150 Employees • Mission: “To empower people to unite around ideas that matter to them and together make those ideas come to life.”

• Founded in 2001 • Based in Palo Alto, CA • 250+ Employees • Mission: “Helping enterprises get the most out of their software and transforming the way they do business.”

“It’s not a fixed formula that makes a good leader; it’s a balance of contradictions and competing absolutes. It’s someone who is realistic and present, yet an aspirational dreamer. Someone who is flexible enough to deal with the unknown and unexpected, yet consistent and stable enough to give their team the foundation they need.

“A good leader acknowledges their faults but seeks to make the most of what they have been blessed with. Their achievements in and of themselves don’t mean much, yet what they enable is cherished. A good leader is knowledgeable but always learning.

They believe in common sense, against the common tide. They are patient and reflective but responsive, knowing that the small details that many tell them they shouldn’t worry about can mean the world to those around them. Those who are ‘below’ them are held above them.

“A good leader doesn’t accept that they are a good leader. They are forever striving to be one.”

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“The thing that most makes a good leader is the ability to inspire people to do something greater than they may think they’re capable of.

“The first step is providing a vision that people can get excited about, a picture of a future place they can go together.

Something that really moves or motivates them. You need a certain amount of empathy, because to provide a vision that’s exciting to people, you need to understand what motivates them. You also need the self-awareness to appreciate that what motivates other people is not necessarily what motivates you.

“The second step to inspiring people is to clear the path; to get in front of the obstacles and clear them so that the team has the ability to actually accomplish that vision you’ve provided for them.”

Photo by Mathew Scott

BUILDING A CONSCIOUS COMPANY:

A LIVING SYSTEMS PERSPECTIVE

BY CAROL SANFORD

True consciousness in business means more than just chasing the latest hot certification. It’s a way of thinking — a capacity we need to develop. But as this case study of textile maker Merida shows, the hard work has its rewards.

Carpet-maker Merida began offering customized options to its customers after rethinking its business from a consciousness mindset.

“If you want to build a conscious company, you have to start with developing conscious humans in it.”

— Jeffrey Hollender, co-founder of Seventh Generation Those who wish to do business consciously often overlook a fundamental element of doing so: the human capacity to develop greater consciousness.

This oversight is understandable, given our tendency to be mechanical in our work. Yet human consciousness is the foundation of conscious, responsible, and innovative business practice.

Developing a conscious company will mean challenging widely accepted beliefs and long-held practices for the sake of greater responsibility to the planet, the customer, and all people affected during the production of the product. Only a person who herself is conscious — meaning actively self-managing — can act as a pattern-generator, working toward goals and generating new behaviors relevant to her life, work, and intentions.

Without this ability, a person will not change patterns, even when his survival depends on it; instead, he will automatically repeat past behavior.

Meanwhile, a collective of unconscious people — like a company — will repeat sets of behavior.

Generating good-for-the-world products or services with thoughtful production does not constitute consciousness. Consciousness is a capacity to use the observing mind to watch the spiraling and rippling effects of our thinking and choices in every situation: with every supplier or customer and every stakeholder who counts on us. It enables us to consider our effects on the interwoven social and ecological systems that span the globe.

Consciousness requires letting go of mind-dulling practices that are based on sets of uniform standards and procedures embedded in programs and certifications. When a company develops conscious, pattern-generating thinking skills in all its people, it gains the capacity to go beyond best-practices — pattern following — and redesign every aspect of the business to work in the same ways that living systems work: with each player uniquely con-

tributing to an interdependent whole.

The consciousness process isn’t product or production improvement based on externally mandated criteria. It’s product and production creation based on connecting to customers and other stakeholders and making their lives work better.

The good news is that it’s possible to develop this self-management of mind and behavior in any and every person within a business. Unlike other primates, humans have the potential to go beyond the pattern-following tendency and both mentally conceive of a new future and start taking action toward it immediately. In fact, I have witnessed and participated in the journeys of more than 100 businesses as they progressed on such a path. When a company commits to developing the consciousness of the people within it, not only does the business itself benefit through greater innovation, impact, satisfaction, and success, but the benefits also diffuse as systemic effects on all related communities and stakeholders.

SHIFTING FROM RESPONSIBLE BUSINESS TO TRUE CONSCIOUSNESS AT MERIDA The story of Merida Inc., a Bostonbased company that produces woven natural-fiber rugs using nontoxic methods, provides a compelling example of the power true consciousness has to make a difference in the world while simultaneously supporting a financially successful business. When I met with Merida in 2009, the company’s margins were falling short of its leaders’ goals. They thought of themselves as a sustainability-driven brand with a focus on meeting specific supply-chain standards and certifications — mainly Fair Trade and sustainability criteria for resource use. Those commitments were rare in the fiber and rug industry, and the company was looking to tell its story in a public way.

After talking with Merida’s leaders for only an hour, I knew that most people would consider it to be the epitome of a conscious company: great alternative products and exacting supplier standards. But it was far from being a conscious organization by my definition.

SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS PRACTICES

4 IDEAS FOR CULTIVATING CONSCIOUSNESS Consciousness requires building a different mindset. To get started, forget trying to learn what to do from others. Instead, consider these foundational practices.

1 2 3

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Start with education from a living systems perspective. Apply what you are discovering to anything so that you can change how you think; initially focus less on what you do.

Form a book club to leverage community to change how you think. One free option: MIT’s online U Lab couse. I’ve also created three books with workbooks for just this purpose; learn more at carolsanfordinstitute.com.

Avoid certifications and “best practices” which reinforce the fragmenting, mechanical, “pattern follower” mind. Examine every practice in your business to see what it does to human self-determination, caring for others on a grand scale, and personal agency. Replace any practices that work against these core human higher abilities.

Ask a lot of questions, such as: • What do our standards and procedures cause us to ignore, resulting in externalities?

• What are the effects of any certifications we pursue on our innovation and on communities we touch? Note: Be careful not to get caught up in justifying existing practices.

After pattern-following, the urge to justify the status quo is the second enemy to consciousness.

• How much courage do we have to examine what we think is “doing good” in the world and find its shortfalls? How can we take this sort of risk more often and not follow others — including consultants or costly programs?

These rarely increase consciousness at work or in life.

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Pitfall 1: Disconnection from customers. Conversations revealed that Merida’s employees were not strongly connected to its customers — in fact, no one knew much about them.

The company sold its products through big retail chains like Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware, and information on customers’ use or esteem of the product came to employees, if at all, from information presented by a supervisor, having already been filtered through the company’s salespeople.

Customers were treated as numbers, not real people with lives who counted on Merida’s products.

Pitfall #2: Disconnection from suppliers. On the supplier side, Merida adhered to Fair Trade and sustainability standards without fail, but they were missing the living-systems thinking and framework essential for a company that is intentional in all its activities and conscious of its inevitable systemic effects.

For example, Merida’s Brazilian supplier was delivering beautifully dyed yarns produced with fair wages and working conditions. But a simple exercise — imagining the business’s effects on the supplier’s whole village — exposed the fact that important stakeholders were being left out of the benefits, including elders who, although “retired,” held the tribe’s craft wisdom.

The horizon of Merida’s leaders stopped at a set of certifying standards which they believed made them a “good business.”

With just a little probing, they were now noticing the gaps in that thinking.

Pitfall #3: Lack of clarity and employee empowerment. Even within company headquarters itself, they started to see a myriad of examples of unconscious behavior. The US workshop was home to many highly skilled

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employees — including master craftspeople who had immigrated from Southeast Asia — working with managers who knew the business and understood its operating methods.

Yet, as with the Brazilian suppliers, a living-systems assessment of Merida’s work methods revealed that the work system was not fostering team members’ critical thinking, selfdetermination, and selfmastery — skills important to a conscious company and even a democratic society. The work design involved predetermined practices that the workers were supposed to adhere to — no thinking required, just follow the procedures. Consequently, people were not contributing to the business or growing personally as much as they could have been.

For Merida’s leaders, that first meeting was disturbing and exhilarating at the same time.

In recognizing their blind spots, they saw opportunities to develop their thinking and business practices to become truly regenerative. They also recognized that they would need to do this before they told their story, to make it even grander and create a powerful edge within their industry. Merida was already ahead of many businesses; but now its leaders saw more that they could do.

PHASE ONE: DISRUPTION The work of becoming a conscious company is rooted in an employee developmental education process, and this change process begins with disruption.

You can’t simply introduce a new idea, mission, or program.

You must wake people up.

The first few months of this process at Merida started with a newly formed core team of people from all levels and functions. The team’s charter was

A craftsman sewing and finishing a rug in Merida’s Fall River, MA, workshop. Every rug is hand-finished to order.

“Generating good-for-the-world products or services with thoughtful production does not constitute consciousness.” to shift the intention and capability of the business to work with conscious practices and develop in all their employees the ability to bring greater consciousness to their behavior and current patterns of thinking.

We met monthly to develop the core team members’ capacity to think more systemically about business and to lead from a new, holistic perspective. The sessions taught them to observe themselves as they were thinking and acting, bringing greater mindfulness to their actions. The work wasn’t about doing different things or having better intentions, but about being able to watch their own minds. We used the business itself as the material of the learning. No hypothetical situations allowed — only the real business working in real markets.

With each session, the team learned more systemic, conscious ways to consider something about the business they had previously done mechanically and had there-

fore not seen as an opportunity for innovation. But this work wasn’t about “improving” or “doing better.” When the focus is on doing better, you start with what exists already. To move beyond that tendency, our sessions introduced a new perspective-shifting, systems-thinking framework and asked the team to apply it to current business changes. In other words, they were learning and designing execution simultaneously.

Initially, it was unsettling for the team to challenge deeply engrained thinking patterns, create a plan, and immediately put it into practice across the company.

Despite the initial challenge, the core team quickly developed the capacity to be pattern creators and apply what they discovered to the business. They were learning to examine which mind was at work: the limited “product” mind or the expansive “ecosystem” mind; the primate mind or the human mind; the segmented mind that sees separate activities or the system

mind that sees how it all works together and produces impacts interactively.

The core team then began including others in the organization in similar sessions where they too experienced personal and business development coupled with rapid execution. This produced intentional, ongoing destabilization throughout the company, disrupting old patterns that had been slowing down innovative change at all levels. This destabilization built the whole team’s capacity for flexibility, nonattachment, and resilience — sources of real power for the business.

PHASE TWO: CONNECTING TO CUSTOMERS’ LIVES As this consciousness work unfolded over many months, the core team also developed the capacity to see how their markets worked and to consider the everyday lives of customers — not with Merida’s

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Merida’s Abaca rugs are hand-braided by partners in the Philippines out of yarn sourced from small, family-owned organic farms.

product as the focus, but within the context of the whole person pursuing aspirations and telling their own stories.

Through extensive dialogue, the team conceived of their customers as falling into sets of buyer experiences — an idea very different from the niches or segments based on demographics that market professionals tend to design. The new classifications emerged from looking at what buyers were valuing and how they described themselves. They included trendsetters — those who see themselves as ushering in new ideas; the bespoke group, who create unique products for each client; and the eclectics, who tell stories through integrating disparate styles and materials.

PHASE 3: CLARIFYING MERIDA’S DIRECTION The core team also learned to develop a corporate direction — not a mission, but a way forward that

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would make Merida nondisplaceable in its market and shift the whole industry in positive ways. A corporate direction is a much bigger aspiration than most good-deed businesses pursue. The team worked with ideas they had never considered, including the following.

• Company essence: looking back to Merida’s founders and origins to identify its singular, foundational characteristics.

• Social and planetary imperatives: exploring the ways that society and Earth work when they are whole and complete and considering what a whole living system does to be healthy when it’s unimpeded by unconscious interference.

• Market intersections: envisioning where market-wide changes in values, capabilities, and other moving factors like

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science and technology are beginning to intersect and form new opportunities that fit the unique essence of the business.

With the team’s new ways of seeing and thinking, Merida could identify a new intersection at the emerging demand for ecosystem health, craftsmanship, and bespoke design, and that’s where the company found its compelling, nondisplaceable corporate direction. Merida built on its strengths to generate something new: it shifted from selling to unsophisticated buyers through chain stores to matching teams of craftspeople with leading interior designers of homes, offices, and hospitality venues whose customers wanted custom choices. The result was craftspeople from developing regions around the world working as co-creators with designers’ brands to make custom products in a US factory. In moving away from selling easily commodified, generic

products, Merida redirected its efforts toward transforming the lives of its customers and their businesses, all while preserving its commitment to other stakeholders, such as its suppliers.

The team even developed some new success metrics which considered the ecosystem of which the

innovative buyers sent Merida’s own innovation through the roof — and tripled their margins. Merida found that people pay for things that fit their lives perfectly, especially if they are uniquely customized for them. As the Merida story makes clear, in business practice, products, and standards, the

erated this program of learning and reflection to become a business working consciously in its management of its ecosystem by enabling customers and all other stakeholders — suppliers, communities, ecosystems, and investors — to contribute more of themselves within a world of healthy living

“You can’t simply introduce a new idea, mission, or program.

You must wake people up.” company is a part. The new targets went from being internal (what Merida counted for its own success) to being external (what metrics customers and other stakeholders used to measure success). For example, one interior designer who partners with Merida to create rugs for her customers measured annual referrals to other bespoke customers for her co-created brand.

The new direction benefitted everyone, from the new interior design customers to the Brazilian villagers — and everyone else in the supply system.

It’s worth noting that nothing about the discovery process was linear or led sequentially from one step to the next. As we moved along, the Merida core team organically developed capacity to recognize and make the shifts the company needed, not only to do good but because their new direction called for it. They tapped the well of their own internal creativity by way of the new direction, the fresh understanding of their customers and the adoption of a broad living-systems perspective.

The new ability to serve very

generic is the enemy of consciousness.

CONCLUSION: A TRULY CONSCIOUS COMPANY Today, Merida no longer rewards and incentivizes routinized, machine-like behaviors. At the company, business development education is intricately embedded with evolving business processes, including strategic planning, leadership, and management. It includes personal reflection and personal development in every session and company meeting, and it’s based on living-systems thinking, frameworks, and language. Toward the end of the three-year process, we began to redesign work systems themselves to make people more self-directed in their efforts to serve customers using the corporate direction as their guide and including contributions from everyone. Merida is still changing and is seen as highly differentiated by its loyal customers — not just for the clean product, but also for the continuous innovation for each of the buyer nodes.

Over time, Merida rapidly accel-

systems.

Through this work, Merida not only tripled its margins, but shifted industry standards around acceptable practices with stakeholders.

They changed buyers’ expectations about what is beautiful, innovative, and healthy for the ecosystem. They gained a new voice. Now they have an extraordinary story that can make them truly proud — and a way of thinking that will keep them deserving that esteem, far into the future.

Photos courtesy of Merida

Carol Sanford has been a regenerative business educator since 1975. She’s a senior fellow for social innovation and executive in residence at Babson College, and hosts an annual Regenerative Business Summit. You can find a more detailed presentation of the developmental phases of a conscious business in her latest book, “The Regenerative Business: Redesign Work, Cultivate Human Potential, Achieve Extraordinary Outcomes.”

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HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE

Your stakeholders deserve conscious gifts from companies as thoughtful as you are.

Here are a few great ideas for the workplace and at home.

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1. GLOBEIN

GlobeIn’s Artisan Box is the only Fair Trade subscription that empowers artisans around the world through job creation and fair wages. Each box is filled with unique, handmade home goods, kitchenware, and fashion accessories. Subscribe, choose your monthly theme, and support Fair Trade.

Cozy Artisan Box starting at $40/month; globein.com/box

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2. PACKED WITH PURPOSE

Packed with Purpose is a specialty gifting company with a social mission. Their curated gifts are filled with handcrafted artisanal products such as honey, granola, chocolate, and household goods. Each product contributes to women’s empowerment, youth development, and more. This holiday season, gift with impact.

Extra Special Thanks gift box, $125 (additional boxes/ prices vary); packedwithpurpose.gifts

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HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE 3

3. ALASKA HOME PACK

Get the freshest seafood shipped directly to your door — direct from Alaska. The state’s wild and abundant fisheries have long been recognized as the global gold standard in sustainable, responsible fisheries management. The company’s family of fishermen bring home the premium portion of their catch — their home pack. Now you can enjoy yours.

Monthly Subscription Pack starting at $199/month (includes shipping); akhomepack.com

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4. WHITE LEAF PROVISIONS

This family-focused brand debuts with its Demeter-certified Biodynamic fruit sauces. The individually packaged fourpack consists only of US-grown organic biodynamic apples and pears with no added sugars. Focused on regenerative farming practices, the company brings to market a missionforward and quality-made pure option.

Apple & Pear Sauce, $8.49; whiteleafprovisions.com

Check out the recipe for their Flourless Apple & Pear Spice Cake here: whiteleafprovisions.com/recipes/flourless-spice-cake

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5. INDABA WINES

Mosaic (pictured) is a Bordeaux blend crafted by family farmers who strive to continuously improve critical conservation practices. Part of Indaba’s global sales support the Indaba Education Fund, which provides earlychildhood Montessori teacher training, learning materials, and educational infrastructure in service of at-risk children in the South African Winelands.

Indaba Mosaic, $11.99; indabawines.com

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6. DIVINE CHOCOLATE

Divine Chocolate is a social enterprise known for the exceptional taste of its Fair Trade chocolate and its unique business model — it’s co-owned by cocoa farmers. Tie a ribbon around a bundle of bars to make the perfect gift for every chocolate-lover on your list.

70% Dark Chocolate with Mint; Milk Chocolate with Toffee & Sea Salt; DivineChocolate.com

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7. BLACKBIRD UNDERPINNINGS

For lounging, dancing, reading, or play, this sensuous silk charmeuse romper is the essence of comfort and luxury.

Blackbird Underpinnings garments are made ethically in the San Francisco Bay Area, with every stitch infused with a positive message of inclusivity and self-expression.

Coco Romper, $165; blackbirdunderpinnings.com

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8. THINK.EAT.LIVE.

Think.Eat.Live. provides high-protein, gluten-free baking mixes made from sunflower-seed flour. Their mixes are nutritious and delicious.

Grain-free Brownie mix, $8.99; thinkeatlive.com

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HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE 9

9. BEYOND THE SHORELINE

Kelp Jerky is a plant-based snack made from sustainably harvested ocean seagreens.

Kelp Jerky in High Thai’d, BBQ, and Sea Salt flavors $3.99; beyondtheshoreline.co

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10. FREY ORGANIC WINE

Share a glass of vegan-friendly wine this holiday season from Frey Vineyards, America’s first organic winery. Or give a gift of Organic Wine Club membership: wine selections delivered to their doorstep three times a year, including biodynamic varieties. freywine.com

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11. ZUE BEAUTY

Try the Exfoliating Facial Scrub with quinoa and apricot seeds, formulated to gently exfoliate as it cleanses, leaving skin feeling soft and smooth. All Zue products are organic, gluten-free, non-GMO, vegan, cruelty-free, and support more than 1,130 indigenous farmers in South America who harvest the ingredients.

Exfoliating Facial Scrub, $21.99; zuebeauty.com

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12. PLUM ORGANICS

Plum’s Baby Bowls marry style and substance with culinary-inspired blends of organic ingredients like avocado, turmeric, cauliflower, and chia. Each bowl has a domed lid for easy stacking, spoon rest, freshness marker, and is made from recyclable, non-BPA plastic to lessen environmental impact. $1.29 per bowl; plumorganics.com/babybowls

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13. BADGER BALM

This soothing blend of essential oils will help ease you into a relaxed state of mind so sleep can come naturally.

Apply to pulse points, lips, and chest and breathe deeply for a beautiful night’s sleep. Badger Balm only uses ingredients that fit rigorous natural standards for healthy agriculture, minimal processing, sustainable supply chain, and health-giving properties. Check out their entire line of skin care products.

Sleep Balm, $5.99; badgerbalm.com

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14. DHANA

Made using 100% Fair Trade and 100% GOTS-certified organic cotton, this unisex playsuit reminds us what a joy babies are to us with unique indigenous Aboriginal artwork. Featuring shoulder and diaper-line snaps, these playsuits are best for play time during cooler weather.

Made in India in a Fair Trade–certified factory.

Organic Long Sleeved Red Stripe “Joy” Playsuit, $32; dhana.com

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GLOBAL IMPACT

How church and state are paving the way for

If past Divest-Invest movements are any indicator, a mass movement toward impact investing is on its way soon.

BY WAYNE WACHELL The mantra of the Divest-Invest movement is simple: get your money out of the bad stuff (tobacco, arms, fossil fuels, businesses invested in conflict) and put it to work in the good stuff (renewable energy, healthcare innovation, social enterprises). History tells us that divestments happen in three waves. First, churches and environmental organizations become early champions, then universities and public institutions gradually follow suit. Finally, the broader public begins to embrace the new way of doing things. This is what happened with the divestment from tobacco and from arms companies connected to Apartheid-era South Africa, and now it’s happening with fossil fuels.

THE CURRENT LANDSCAPE If yesterday’s divestment target was tobacco, today’s is fossil fuels.

Fossil-free portfolios made up just a small percentage of my wealth management firm’s business when we introduced them four years ago.

Now, they make up the fastestgrowing segment of the company, and we have the data to back up our assertion that a low-carbon portfolio can outperform its high-carbon counterpart. As happened with tobacco and Apartheid, churches and environmental organizations began divesting from fossil fuels first, starting with the United Church in 2013. In late 2016, 303 faith leaders from 58 countries signed an agreement to divest. Over the same period, green organizations that aren’t transparent about energy investments have been under increasing scrutiny.

Meanwhile, recent divestment pledges from several universities — Hampshire College and Laval University are two examples — and widespread pro-divestment demonstrations by student groups

all over North America announced the arrival of the second wave of fossil-fuel divestment. Organizations in this wave — foundations, municipalities, and other universities — are assessing whether divesting is financially viable and discovering not only that it is, but that it’s prudent from a risk and reward perspective.

The third and final wave will be made up of pension plans, banks, and global investors. While slower to change (because of their fiduciary duty, pensions tend to divest only once the financial advantages have been widely accepted by the investment community), even these groups will be persuaded to adopt fossil-free investing as awareness grows and products become widely available. Five years from now, we may not need to differentiate our fossil-free portfolio because it will be the standard rather than the exception.

LOOKING AHEAD While one movement gradually approaches its peak, another is just beginning to gain momentum; I predict that tomorrow’s divestment target will be companies that prioritize profit at the expense of people and the planet. The Roman Catholic Church recently announced it would earmark $1 billion of its funds for impact investments, a subfield

private, are setting institutional impact-investing standards.

Though impact investing’s third wave, mainstream adoption, is a long way off yet, wealthy families are already setting the stage for it now. Millennials in this group will be the beneficiaries of a massive wealth transfer from their Boomer parents, and their concerns are greater (and more grave) than simple wealth management. They want their money to go to work im-

“Tomorrow’s divestment target will be companies that prioritize profit at the expense of people and the planet.” of the Divest-Invest movement that concerns itself not just with removing money from what’s bad, but proactively seeks to invest in more of the good stuff: companies that are contributing to a better world, or at least having a net-positive impact while also providing lucrative returns for shareholders. The church’s move is said to be inspired by the pope but driven by humanitarian organizations within, and a cash influx of this magnitude has the potential to transform the impact investment space. With universities being the birthplace of so many innovations, and students being an engaged and vocal population, it won’t be long before universities, both state and

proving some of the world’s most pressing social and environmental issues.

The challenge for their wealth managers is to identify the top companies in this space and know the standard by which to measure them. Sustainalytics, a research firm, provides a tool for benchmarking a company’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) rankings. Other organizations provide valuable insights to impact investors, including the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN); networks that connect social innovators with capital, like MaRS; and advisory firms like Purpose Capital that connect would-be impact investors with advisors. We

work with organizations like this to develop investment solutions for a changing world.

OUR HOPE Climate change is becoming an ever more present and pressing issue.

Extreme weather events such as the 2017 hurricanes are a harsh reminder of the challenges facing us.

As the second wave of divestment movements gathers momentum and the growth of impact investing accelerates, I’m encouraged to think how investors can drive change and contribute to a more sustainable world. A simple first step: talk to your financial advisor about aligning your personal or business investments with your values. As demand increases, so will the number of impact investing options.

Wayne Wachell, “the father of fossil-free investing,” is the co-founder, CEO, and chief investment officer of Vancouver-based Genus Capital, the investment management firm behind Genus Fossil Free, Canada’s first suite of fossil-free funds.

Photo courtesy of Memphis Meats

HOW STARTUPS AND NONPROFITS ARE COLLABORATING TO BUILD THE

CLEAN MEAT INDUSTRY

BY KENNY TORRELLA

High-tech startups could be selling meat grown in cell culture — also known as “clean meat” — as early as fall of 2018. In an attempt to transform agriculture, they’re getting big help from two small nonprofits.

In March 2017, Silicon Valley startup Memphis Meats introduced this “clean” chicken, which was grown in a lab.

GLOBAL IMPACT

I

n the heart of barbecue country, Marie Gibbons is reinventing meat.

“I guess you want to see the nugget?” she asks me, opening a test-tube-filled refrigerator in her lab in North Carolina. Before I can answer, she pulls one out and holds it up to the light. I’d call it more of a morsel than a nugget — definitely nothing impressive to the eye — but Gibbons holds the world’s first turkey meat grown outside of an animal, also known as “clean meat.”

“What will turn that into something I could eat?” I ask.

“Pouring it into a pan with some oil.”

Gibbons explained that the production process is a lot like brewing beer, but with animal cells instead of yeast cultures. In a clean environment, free from potential salmonella or campylobacter contamination, she isolated turkey cells and kept them at a

AN UNLIKELY FUNDER

Founded in 2004, New York Citybased New Harvest ran on volunteer support until 2013, when Isha Datar, who holds a master’s in biotechnology, was hired as CEO and president. Datar’s mission is to establish the academic field of “cellular agriculture,” which New Harvest defines as “the production of agricultural products from cell cultures.” Cellular agriculture encompasses not just the production of meat but also eggs and milk. The group sometimes even promotes the work of companies developing other agricultural products grown by cell culture, such as gelatin and coffee.

While for-profits often help nonprofits by doling out grants, sponsoring festivals, or endorsing policy, there’s an unusual reciprocity in the cellular agriculture space. As for-profits in the field protect their intellectual property, nonprofits take on the task of

Bill Nye than Bobby Flay, but Datar insists that cellular agriculture is nothing new. She rattles off examples of everyday cellular agriculture products: rennet for cheese, insulin, and vitamin B12.

“What we’re doing is novel,” she says, “but it’s also a continuation.”

WHY REINVENT MEAT?

Americans each eat about 265 pounds of meat a year — more per capita than in any other country.

American farmers have optimized the meat production process, too: through selective breeding, meat producers have managed to grow animals faster and fatter. For example, in 1996 turkeys weighed 67 percent more at 18 weeks old than they did 30 years prior. That optimization has given us cheap meat, but it’s come at a steep cost.

For one thing, animal farming is

“CLEAN MEAT COULD BE A SILVER BULLET IN THE FIGHT TO END FACTORY FARMING.” temperature and pH level to match the physiology of a turkey. She fed them nutrients for a few weeks, and when she stopped they formed into turkey muscle. And there you have it: a clean turkey nugget.

“And how much did it cost to make?” I ask.

“About $300 per pound.”

It’s a far cry from $1.99, the US national average cost for producing a pound of turkey meat. Plus, as pure muscle, it lacks the connective tissue and fat that even out the flavor of a typical nugget. But Gibbons, a 26-year-old master’s student at North Carolina State University, has made a breakthrough in the effort to reinvent the $198 billion meat industry.

And New Harvest, a small nonprofit, is funding her work.

advancing the field as a whole.

Meanwhile, both sides work to ameliorate the environmental, animal welfare, and human health ramifications of industrialized factory farming.

In Datar’s early days at New Harvest she helped found Bay Area startups Clara Foods and Perfect Day Foods, which make clean egg whites and dairy products, respectively. Since then, New Harvest has zeroed in on funding open-source university research that for-profit ventures and other scientists can build on. The group currently funds four scientists, and their latest fellow, who aims to develop clean pork, recently began research at Kent State University in Ohio.

Growing meat may seem more

often cited as a top contributor to climate change. According to the United Nations report “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” “Globally [the livestock sector] is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gases and one of the leading causal factors in the loss of biodiversity.” Leading environmental organizations such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace have called on their members to eat less meat.

Cheap meat could also be driving antibiotic resistance. To speed up growth or prevent bacterial infections, farmed animals are fed the majority of antibiotics used in the US. But routine use of antibiotics has led to the rise of antibioticresistant “superbugs.” These new bacteria strains can spread from

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the farm to humans, potentially rendering reliable antibiotics ineffective. Writing for Scientific American, Melinda Wenner Moyer says, “Antibiotics seem to be transforming innocent farm animals into disease factories.”

Gibbons worries about the many problems resulting from our high meat consumption, but she’s primarily motivated to prevent cruelty to farmed animals. By bringing clean meat to market, she says, we could remove animals from the food supply altogether.

FOR THE ANIMALS

Gibbons grew up among chickens and turkeys raised as pets on her parents’ farm in Cary, North Carolina. She remembers that some of the turkeys even imprinted on her. Her childhood affinity for animals inspired her to become a vegetarian, and in college she enrolled in pre-veterinary

den in windowless warehouses? Her head spun.

She quit that week. After researching clean meat online, she called New Harvest to ask how she could help. Soon thereafter the group awarded her a grant to study turkey cell culturing, and a few months later she became the first scientist to grow poultry meat from cells.

MEET THE INDUSTRY INCUBATOR TAKING ETHICS OFF THE TABLE

For decades, animal advocates have deployed ethics arguments asking the public to eat less meat and vote for better laws because farmed animals feel pain and can suffer.

They’ve asked Fortune 500 businesses to phase out the cruelest practices as consumers become more aware.

As a result, they’ve made significant progress.

ers make their food decisions almost totally based on taste, price, and convenience. We’re laser-focused on creating plant-based and clean alternatives to animal agriculture that compete exclusively on those three factors.”

GFI has already secured funding for 30 staffers to engage with policymakers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, scientific foundations, and food businesses. Some animal advocates are swapping their protest signs for lab coats. Friedrich, who spent the past two decades campaigning for animals, is their leader.

While New Harvest aims to establish cellular agriculture as an academic field, GFI aims to establish an industry. As a startup incubator, GFI connects entrepreneurs and scientists in order to launch new startups while supporting existing startups on branding, venture capital funding, and media strategy. The organization

“THE MARCH TOWARD A CLEAN-MEAT FUTURE IS PROOF THAT WHEN FOR-PROFIT AND NONPROFIT VENTURES WORK IN TANDEM TO FIND SOLUTIONS TO SERIOUS SOCIAL ISSUES, PROGRESS CAN BE FASTER THAN PREDICTED.” courses. She figured she could reform animal farming by becoming a veterinarian. But as she gained experience as a veterinary assistant, she became even more alarmed by standard farm practices, such as castrating pigs without anesthesia.

Her alarm turned to horror when a veterinarian she was working for treated a cow with a severe case of pinkeye by administering a few shots of numbing agent before slicing the eye down the center and removing each half — a cost-cutting alternative to proper anesthesia. The cow screamed throughout the two-hour procedure.

If this grisly operation could occur at one small family farm, she thought, what must be happening to the 30 million cows at industrial factory farms? Or the over 8 billion chickens raised for meat who are hid60

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Since the early 2000s, 11 states have passed laws to phase out some of the cruelest factory-farming practices, such as confining egg-laying hens in cages so small that the birds are unable to fully spread their wings.

Additionally, hundreds of food-industry giants, including McDonald’s and Walmart, have pledged to ban cages for the hens in their supply chains in addition to making other animal welfare commitments. Plus, the market for vegetarian products is growing.

But even taking ethics arguments off the table, clean meat could be a silver bullet in the fight to end factory farming. Bruce Friedrich, co-founder and executive director of The Good Food Institute (GFI), says the cellular agriculture nonprofit is “working to remove ethics from the equation altogether for consumers.”

He explains: “[Mainstream] consum-

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has worked with many companies, including Memphis Meats, a Silicon Valley startup claiming its clean meat will be commercially available by 2019. “GFI has been available to Memphis Meats for strategic brainstorming, communications support, and more from the time of our launch,” says Uma Valeti, CEO and co-founder of Memphis Meats. “We are pleased to have GFI with us on this remarkable journey.”

Memphis Meats just completed its Series A funding round, boasting investments from Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and Cargill, the third-largest US meat processor, among others.

GFI has also promoted the work of Hampton Creek, the producer of egg-free mayo, cookies, and salad dressings that in June announced its clean-meat division aims to get prod-

Memphis Meats’ co-founders Uma Valeti (center) and Nicholas Genovese (right) unveil the world’s first-ever clean chicken for a taste test with celebrity chef Derek Sarno (left).

Photo courtesy of Memphis Meats

uct into the marketplace as early as fall 2018. The company is already in talks with 10 global meat processors interested in licensing its technology.

Liz Specht, Ph.D., senior scientist at GFI, says their relationship with for-profits is unusual but needed, noting that this model “is novel but so urgent. We could wait for all this to develop organically, but to have organizations facilitating conversations among relevant players early on makes endeavors more likely to succeed.”

Plotting the most efficient advancement of the industry, GFI recently published “Mapping Emerging Industries: Opportunities in Clean Meat,” an eight-page report outlining current technology, gaps in technological development, and opportunities for entrepreneurs to fill those gaps.

“We’re trying to find the most

impactful ways to move forward,” says Christie Lagally, also a senior scientist at GFI. “What kind of companies would be best to launch? What research should we try to find money for? We need to have a good understanding of the field and what research affects other research. We need to identify the right first, second, and third projects well ahead of time so we can inform entrepreneurs about what areas they should get into first.”

In coming months, GFI will release a more comprehensive report, or “technology readiness assessment.”

GFI is also responsible for branding meat grown from cell culture as “clean meat,” akin to “clean energy.” Making the product’s benefits its namesake, rather than the laboratory it grows in, could be a smart move. And the clean-energy comparison is appropriate: a study from Oxford and the

University of Amsterdam concluded that clean pork, sheep, or beef could emit up to 96 percent less greenhouse gas and use 45 percent less energy, 99 percent less land, and 96 percent less water than conventionally produced meat.

THE NEXT FRONTIER

After I first spoke with Gibbons about her turkey nugget, two New Harvest fellows taught her how to “decellularize” fruits and vegetables by removing plant cells until only connective tissue remains.

With this new knowledge, Gibbons used the connective tissue of a jackfruit — a meaty-textured plant from Southeast Asia — as her scaffold the next time she grew turkey meat. The result?

A meat–plant hybrid nugget that Gibbons says “tastes just like turkey.”

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Just as the price of solar energy has plummeted over the past two decades, in part thanks to environmentalists, the price of clean meat could quickly drop, thanks in part to nonprofit advocates. And when clean meat becomes cheaper than conventionally produced meat, we’ll be able to have our nuggets — and chickens, too.

Researcher Marie Gibbons with a clean-meat incubator.

And recently, Hampton Creek grabbed headlines when it released a video with a chicken named Ian strutting around a picnic table while staffers ate nuggets derived from his cells. With its breading and plantbased filler, one of Hampton Creek’s early clean-meat prototypes is similar

Photo by Cory Nobles

to Gibbons’ turkey nugget, and one staffer said it tastes just like meat, too.

The march toward a clean-meat future is proof that when for-profit and nonprofit ventures work in tandem to find solutions to serious social issues, progress can be faster than predicted.

Kenny Torrella is a writer in Washington, DC. He’s worked on legislative and educational animal protection campaigns and has spoken at national conferences on the topic. His writing on animal protection has been published in Triple Pundit, The Nonprofit Quarterly, Common Dreams, and elsewhere. As of June 2017, he is also the public relations manager at Mercy For Animals.

Parting thought...

"One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.”

— André Gide