Conscious Company Magazine | Fall 2018 by Conscious Company

UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME & BLOCKCHAIN DEMYSTIFIED

CONSCIOUS COM PAN Y

53 PREDICTIONS FROM BUSINESS LEADERS

WHATâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S E THE FUTUR OF WORK?

SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURS TO WATCH

VAVA ANGWENYI, FOUNDER OF VAVA COFFEE

LEADERSHIP | WORKPLACE | SUSTAINABILITY | ENTREPRENEURSHIP

TABLE OF CONTENTS Q4 / FALL2018 | ISSUE 20

CASE STUDIES NEW MODELS SPECIAL SECTION: THE FUTURE OF WORK

6 A TOOLBOX FOR FUTURE-READY LEADERS

CONSCIOUS LEADERS’ ROUNDTABLE: 50 LEADERS PREDICT THE FUTURE OF WORK

HOW EVRNU’S STACY FLYNN IS REINVENTING THE FASHION INDUSTRY BY MARY MAZZONI & RACHEL ZURER

UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME 101 WITH ANDREW YANG

30 BLOCKCHAIN FOR BUSINESS LEADERS

BIG IDEA

74 WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF CONSCIOUS LEADERSHIP?

BY MURIEL CLAUSON

BY JIM DETHMER

THE LIST

39 31 SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURS TO WATCH IN 2018

company

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CONSCIOUS COMPANY EDITORIAL TEAM

CONSCIOUS COMPANY MEDIA

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Rachel Zurer

CEO & CO-FOUNDER Meghan French Dunbar

ART DIRECTOR Cia Lindgren

COMMUNITY MEMBERSHIP MANAGER Kate Hermann

COPY EDITORS Robin Dickerhoof Shane Gassaway

PODCAST MANAGER & OPERATIONS ASSOCIATE Nina Bernardin

DIGITAL EDITOR Mary Mazzoni

WEBSITE GURU Rolando Garcia

TRANSCRIPTIONIST Carla Faraldo

CO-FOUNDER Maren Keeley

NEWSSTAND CONSULTANT Curtis Circulation Company PRINTING Publication Printers COVER PHOTO Michael B. Maine michaelbmaine.com

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INTENTIONAL MEDIA EXECUTIVE TEAM CHAIRMAN Robert Caruso MANAGING PARTNER John Morris PRESIDENT Lindsay Zizumbo CHIEF OPERATIONS OFFICER Luc Fagerberg CEO, SOCAP Lindsay Smalling MANAGING DIRECTOR, GOOD CAPITAL PROJECT Sharadiya Dasgupta CEO, WHAT WILL IT TAKE MOVEMENTS Marianne Schnall

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EDITOR’S NOTE: HERE COMES THE FUTURE

Rachel Zurer

As a smart business leader in our community told me recently, the business world is moving fast — but it will also never be this slow again. What do we do about that as we think about the future of work, both for ourselves individually and for our society? How do we come together to create a system of production and wealth-creation that works on behalf of a socially just, environmentally sound, and spiritually fulfilling existence for all? What do we need more of, and just as importantly, what do we need to let go of? As Albert Einstein says, we can’t solve a problem using the same level of thinking that created it. This issue is full of business leaders and thinkers trying on new ideas that they hope will help us become the society we need to be to navigate this fast-paced world. And this moment also marks a powerful and related transition in my personal life. You see, I’m writing this essay on my final day as editor-in-chief of this magazine, before I pack my car and head off — tomorrow! — towards the desert canyons of southern Utah to spend 11 days on a wilderness quest with the Animas Valley Insti-

Photo by William Rochfort / Two Millstones

tute. After that, I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ll be off the map I once thought I had of my life, stepping, one breath at a time, towards the blank space of unknown possibilities waiting to unfold. It’s ironic: it’s only because of all the cutting-edge examples of conscious leaders, thinkers, and entrepreneurs whom I’ve had the privilege of witnessing as I’ve been the editor here that I’m feeling brave enough to leave this amazing team and this incredible position. I’ve spent more than two years drinking from the firehose of stories and lessons that we create and share, and it has profoundly changed me. Those changes include questioning the old ideas I once had about what it means to be a “good employee,” or to lead a “successful” life. I don’t have a new answer yet, but I have a whole new set of questions I want to ask. As Jim Dethmer writes on page 63, the future of conscious leadership involves less doing and much more silence and listening. That’s what I’m leaning into. It feels scary and a little crazy walking away from this work I love so much. But as I’ve heard again and again from leaders in our commu-

nity, surprising magic happens when we take a big leap. I’m immensely grateful for the reaction I got from our company leadership when I told them I wanted to make this transition: “We’re sad. We’ll miss you. We’re proud of you. Now go.” I imagine that more and more leaders will face these kinds of conversations with team members as we, as a society, orient towards a future of work more focused on human thriving, purpose, meaning, and — I’m going there — on love. These kinds of transitions are the result of practicing radical trust — which is, uncoincidentally, a CCM company value. Personally, I’m trusting that our company and mission will continue to thrive without me. I’m trusting that my own leaps of faith will bear nourishing fruit I can’t yet imagine. And I’m trusting that this community of leaders can, together, discover a path towards a future of work that creates the world we want to see. Thanks to everyone for an incredible few years. I hope to see you out there in the mystery. —Rachel Zurer, editor-in-chief

A TOOLBOX FOR FUTURE-READY LEADERS Are you prepared for the future of work? If you make sure these five tools are in your repertoire you can help shape what comes next for humanity. BY MURIEL CLAUSON

LEADERSHIP

hen Oxford researchers Frey & Osborne identified in a 2013 paper that 47 percent of jobs in the United States may be susceptible to automation within the next two decades, an international debate on the future of work was ignited. That conversation has included a mix of positive and negative predictions about the kind of world that awaits us in the wake of rapid technological advancement. While no one knows exactly what the future of work will look like, it is sure to be radically different as technology is advancing like never before. Now, it is time for a mental shift on the future of work. All of the predictions about the future of work can make it feel like we are on the sidelines waiting to see what happens. However, the future of work, like all futures, has yet to be determined — meaning we can proactively endeavor to create a future that is positive. The work experience today isn’t perfect; the technological changes that are coming represent an immense opportunity to proactively create a future of work that is better for humans. This human-centric perspective can start with our own careers and the careers of the people we lead. There are tangible steps we can take today to become future-ready individuals. First, it is important to understand the changes that are happening.

WHAT IS DRIVING THIS CHANGE? We often think of technologies as isolated inventions, and this is true for many modern items — the toaster, for example. Yet today there is a special category of technologies, including robotics and artificial intelligence, that

is advancing uniquely based upon two major underlying forces — computing power and information.

COMPUTING POWER The advances we are seeing with cutting-edge technology today rely on ever-expanding computing processing power. Moore’s Law describes this process of amplified computing power. The number of transistors per integrated circuit is doubling roughly every year; this doubling adds up quickly. This pattern of exponential increases in computing power is the reason technological advances are projected to come rapidly and potentially surprise us with their scope.

INFORMATION Yet computing capacity alone cannot drive the kind of technology innovations that we are seeing today. The other big force is information. When it comes to technologies like robotics and artificial intelligence, information is the fuel. These technologies learn through iterative processes that require information, according to Ray Kurzweil in “The Singularity is Near.” We live in a time of abundant humanity-created data, meaning these technologies have an extensive fuel supply. Taken together, we have more computing capacity to utilize more information — not just incrementally more, but exponentially more, year over year. These trends are driving rapid, mind-boggling technological change.

HOW CAN YOU BECOME FUTURE-READY?

In a rapidly changing world of work, with ever-expanding technological capability, what can we do today to be future-ready? While there are vast

political, organizational, and entrepreneurial opportunities for innovation around the future of work, there are also practical steps that we can implement in our own careers and organizations today. Here are five ways to become future-ready.

1 // SET BRAIN-BOOSTING BOUNDARIES While the prospect of a future workplace inundated with technology may make us think we need to lean into technology more, we actually benefit from smart boundaries with technology. This is largely because our brains work best with a mix of focused and diffuse thinking. Technology is an excellent tool for our focused thinking, but can impede our diffuse (creative, mind-wandering) thinking. In short, our brains need breaks from reactive or focused states in order to function best, encode information, and think creatively. Check in on your current work habits. If you are constantly checking email throughout the day, look for ways to limit this to two to four blocks of time instead. If you are in a leadership position, encourage this kind of time-blocking for your team and even permit time for employees to work technology-free. These diffuse-thinking breaks help us work with our brains and bring the best of our human skillsets to the table, like creativity.

2 // UNDERSTAND THE DNA OF SKILLS Most studies focusing on the future of work have profiled occupations or skills against the capabilities of technologies to identify how replaceable a specific role may be in the future. Researchers use job analysis to identify what knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics a specific job requires — in other words, to identify

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LEADERSHIP

the DNA of those jobs. We can learn from this analysis mindset to think about our own competencies and those of the people we lead. If we pigeon-hole people into specific roles, or present ourselves that way, we’re only looking at the current form those roles are taking, not the underlying blueprint of them, and we can miss the opportunity to evolve our careers alongside technologies. In a rapidly changing work landscape, the skills that your organization needs will vary and roles will vary. Make sure you know your own and your team’s full DNA of skills (and passions) — even

prepare your skillset for the future and is more likely to lead to engaging, rewarding work. Technology can be the complementary colleague who picks up the tasks less meaningful to you.

4 // CULTIVATE POWER SKILLS It’s time we upgrade “soft skills” by giving them a new name — power skills. Power skills are the most human and often the least automatable — the skills to cultivate in order to be futureready. There have been numerous reviews of the skills that will be most relevant in the future, and those that

The same pattern holds true for how we view the future of work. Even viewing the potential of technologies as augmenting, meaning a tool to support humans, rather than automating, meaning a replacement of humans, can positively impact our subjective wellbeing. Consider the narratives around change and the future that you and your team believe. If you see the future as something that we must predict to prepare for, challenge yourself and your team to think instead about what kind of future you could actively help create.

“Technology can be the complementary colleague who picks up the tasks less meaningful to you.” those outside of a current job description — so that you see technological advances as means of being freed for other opportunities, rather than a replacement of your own or another worker’s value in the organization.

3 // SEE TECHNOLOGY AS A COLLEAGUE Gallup performs an annual study looking at engagement data across scores of organizations. This year, they found that — yet again — only about a third of us are actually engaged at work; the rest are either disengaged or actively disengaged. Too many of us are bored at work and too often working on tasks that aren’t core to who we are as a person or professional. This is where technology can be a tool to explore more meaningful work in our lives. Identify areas of your current role or that of your team that are precise and repetitive, and which have been deemed the most automatable tasks, and make sure you’re targeting your human development elsewhere. Routine tasks may be a reality today, but investing in the parts of our jobs that are more complex and meaningful is a way to proactively

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most often come out on top are things like communication, critical thinking, sensemaking, agility, and creativity. Fortunately, these skills can be coached. Seek out opportunities to grow your own power skills. For example, to improve your critical thinking, look for complicated projects, challenge your first assumption when faced with a problem, and try an approach outside of the status quo. Work is changing due to technology, and it has never been more important for employees to be what they innately are — human.

The future of work isn’t the domain of governments or think-tanks alone; we all play a role in shaping what that future will look like. Understanding the wave of technological change and how to become future-ready is the foundational step. As future-ready leaders, we can proactively innovate for a positive, human-centric future of work. This starts with the decisions made in workplaces today. This starts with future-ready leaders like you.

5 // PRACTICE AN ADAPTIVE MINDSET In light of the pace of technological change, we are likely to experience frequent shifts in our working lives that will require agility and evolution on our part. The foundation for navigating such change is an adaptive mindset. Our thinking can be a powerful tool to help us navigate change. For example, those who perceive constructive (negative) feedback as developmental rather than punitive experience very different wellbeing and career outcomes.

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Muriel Clauson is a researcher, speaker, and entrepreneur focused on creating a better future of work. She is completing her PhD in industrial-organizational psychology at the University of Georgia. She founded Oppticity, a data science company building “the skills map” to spark innovation around skill evolution for the workforce. She speaks on the future of work globally.

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The Predictions

50 leaders predict the

future of work We asked our network: “What does the ‘future of work’ mean to you? What are you doing in your business to prepare for or address that future?” We got responses from dozens of top conscious business leaders. While we could have filled the whole issue with their insights, we decided to bring you just a sample of their predictions, questions, and best practices.

“The rising generation of leaders will insist on doing work that is in line with their values. Given that there is no such thing as a perfect company, we need to continue to challenge ourselves along every dimension of the business to do better. The interesting challenge will be for companies that offer values-neutral work as they struggle to remain relevant.” —Seth Goldman, Co-Founder and TeaEO Emeritus of Honest Tea

“The ‘future of work’ means a workforce, including leadership teams and boards, that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive, and that all stakeholders, from investors to farmers, suppliers to retailers, consumers to the Earth itself, will be valued and treated with respect and benefit from all of our interconnected relationships. With inclusion and equity, we will have the diversity of voices needed to solve the greatest, most complex challenges. As businesses, this will lead to next-level innovation and growth.” —Sheryl O’Loughlin, CEO of REBBL Photo by Sarah Marcella Photography

All images courtesy of the subject unless noted

“It’s an opportunity to invite the voices that have historically been shut out into a much-overdue dialogue on how work shapes our communities and all the people who live within them.” —Kaiton Williams, Cultural Technologist of Impact America Fund

“Contrary to popular belief, rather than eliminating jobs, cognitive technologies will serve to create new jobs that are service-oriented, interpretive, social, and use essential human skills such as empathy, creative thinking, and innovation. This means organizations must be strategic in developing their talent and consider how they will re-skill and retain the workforce as technology evolves.” —Steve Hatfield, Principal of Deloitte Consulting

“The future of work is inclusive, equitable companies led by talented, creative, and dynamic people who are truly representative of our broader society. This includes individuals from all genders, races, and economic backgrounds. Leadership teams, in particular, will be representative of their customers, employees, and environment.” —Anya Cherneff, Co-founder and Executive Director of Empower Generation

“To me the future of work really means the rise of the individual entrepreneur; people taking individual responsibility for their own careers through lifelong learning, global work platforms, and distributed work practices. Geography, race, gender, and educational background will no longer trump talent. Longer term, it also has the potential to reduce the environmental footprint of work significantly.” —Patrick Llewellyn, CEO of 99designs

“Artificial intelligence and increased automation; the elimination of low-skill manual jobs in several industries but the creation of new jobs requiring different skillsets; nationalism/populism tampering unrestrained globalization; equal pay for equal work regardless of race or gender; and more cross-functional/ cross-industry collaboration: seamless communication in teams.” —Shelley Saxena, CEO of Sevamob

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The Predictions

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“Two very long-term but inevitable trends are coming at us. The first is, the current demand for greater flexibility continues to evolve from flextime to work from home to independent planning and execution. The second trend is technology. Artificial intelligence is coming at us quickly and serious studies indicate that large numbers of current jobs will be automated. As these two forces progress, I believe that we, as a planetary society, will need to begin discussing issues like far shorter working hours per person and minimum income whether a person is working or not.” —Amy Domini, Founder and Chair of Domini Impact Investments

“So much of the future is going into AI and other technologies, which are not areas where training and knowledge are adequately dispersed among all people and groups. We need to look at ways to build skillsbased pipelines in underrepresented populations to fill those gaps and give all people the opportunity to succeed.” —Kristy Wallace, CEO of Ellevate Network

“1. Using iterative practices that use collective knowledge to problem-solve, innovate, and improve on how our organization functions. 2. Cultivating collective leadership models by ‘passing the mic.’ In other words, working to make sure that the voices of people who are most impacted by our work are also involved in decision-making processes. This is key to keeping the work relevant and successful. 3. Taking time for mindfulness in order to more consciously shape business practices that are sustainable, smart, and accountable.” —Aisha Fukushima, Founder, Speaker, and Vocalist of RAPtivism

Future-Ready Workplace Practices

“Creating meaningful change in the world is the future of work.” —Nova Covington, CEO and Founder of Goddess Garden Organics

“I look for passionate folks who are comfortable with being uncomfortable.” —Troy Pearley, EVP General Manager of Divine Chocolate US

Kathryn Sheridan, CEO and Founder of Sustainability Consult

“The future of work will require all of us to realize our strengths, our talents, and our unique gifts so we can differentiate ourselves from the other 7 billion people on the planet.” —Vicki Saunders, Founder of SheEO

“It’s where the most common human capital models are based on radical trust and inclusion, and the dignity of work for all is recognized as an essential element of an engaged and happy society.” —Mike Brady, President and CEO of Greyston Bakery

“The Monday-to-Friday, 9-to-5 model is a throwback to factory work, a broken legacy of our industrial age. The 9-to5 model does not take into account the fluctuations we all experience in energy and creativity and it fails to provide sufficient recovery time after an intensive period of work. This leads to employees wasting vast swathes of time staring at the screen or chatting to colleagues, time which could be better spent on more restorative activities like rest and personal development. “We are currently experimenting with having a majority of the team on three or four days a week. As a result, we are no longer hiring on five-days-a-week contracts. I want to make sure the team has sufficient recovery time. “As CEO, I tend to roam, but I make sure I’m in the office a couple of times a week to support the team face to face. I’m building our network of talented freelancers so we can be more flexible and still have access to top-notch people. “I am exploring the future-of-work questions with fellow entrepreneurs and also writing about it. I spend lots of time in nature to stay grounded and open to possibility. With the team, I discuss their needs in the workplace using an approach from Non-Violent Communication. And in our monthly Woos and Boos (review) meetings, I bring a question around how we work for discussion in the group.

“The future of work is inspired, purpose-driven, decentralized, and highly agile. Transparency, both internal and external, will become the norm.” —Alejandro Velez and Nikhil Arora, Co-founders/Co-CEOs of Back to the Roots

“The future of work revolves around continuous feedback and growth.” —Jim Barnett, CEO and Co-founder of Glint

“I am doing a deep dive into the future of consulting, with its fixation on billable hours and timesheets taking precedence over results and happy clients. I would like to develop and test a new model for independent consultancies. “If a more free-range work model is the antidote to the 9-to5 model, then it is not without its own challenges. Luckily trailblazers and researchers are on the case and it is becoming easier to experiment with different models.” Photo by Kat Tan

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“The 9-to-5 is dying, if not dead. Employees aren’t just looking for ‘jobs’ anymore — they’re looking for missionbased careers they are passionate about and that add meaning to their lives.” —Michael “Kipp” Baratoff, Co-founder of Fishpeople Seafood

“With five generations in the workplace for the first time, the future of work is all about intergenerational collaboration.” —Chip Conley, Airbnb Strategic Advisor, author of “Wisdom@Work: The Making of a Modern Elder”

The Predictions

“It’s not enough to be a pioneer or even a leader. You’ve got to be a convener, too. We seek out and collaborate with kindred spirits to bolster results, amplify voice, and make things happen for the greater good.” —Melissa Hughes, Chief Mission Officer of Organic Valley

“In all industries, innovation will be the driving force for success. We do this by having the freedom to pursue the big idea. I like to empower my employees to ‘go for it’ without fear of failure.” —Tom Szaky, CEO and Founder of TerraCycle

“Education is the new currency. Organizations that create an environment where learning is at the heart of the company culture will outperform.” —Meghan Messenger and Charlie Kim, Co-CEOs of Next Jump Inc.

“More and more people will become self-employed micro-entrepreneurs.” —Aneri Pradhan, CEO of ENVision mobile

“I envision a ‘future of work’ where time and skills are not merely exchanged for money. … Work becomes an avenue for people to manifest their highest selves, regardless of the specific content and/or roles they play in the organizations they form and belong to.” —Ivo Grossi, CEO of SportsArt

Future-Ready Workplace Practices

Jasper J. van Brakel, CEO of RSF Social Finance “If we want to tap into people’s deeper and much more powerful and life-enhancing motives, we have to stop thinking that people are motivated primarily by money. At RSF, we see a paycheck not as a business expense, but as the income that our co-workers need. Because of that, RSF pays prospectively: you receive your pay on day one, which enables you to show up for work until the next paycheck arrives. This de-commodifies labor and emphasizes human dignity.” “We don’t have any bonus or incentive structures and we pay according to the level of responsibility carried for the organization rather than for individual performance. Performance is discussed and recognized in a different context. And yet, our team is as fully and undividedly devoted to their work as any I’ve seen.

“Work will become a more broadly engaging experience where people have a strong sense of identity with their work community both on and off the clock; a natural blurring of the lines between ‘work’ and ‘life.’” —Ryan Lewis, Founder and CEO of EarthHero

“Work is best achieved with others, which requires spending time together, rubbing elbows, figuring things out, holding each other accountable, and so on. We cherish our time together, sometimes maybe to a fault. At the same time, some of our staff work remotely, and we allow for flexibility in working hours so that work and life are integrated in a healthy and productive way. We’re actively in discussion about how to marry individual team members’ desire for flexibility with the need for overlapping hours and time together for the entire team.” “We need to decommodify labor and see it as a meaningful way to develop ourselves as we work on something that is bigger than ourselves.” —Jasper J. van Brakel, CEO of RSF Social Finance Photo by Dyana Van Campen

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The Predictions

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“If each person gets to focus on their zone of genius, work will improve drastically and people will be happier.” —Miki Agrawal, Founder of TUSHY

“The future of work will be a question of the future of organizing people. My organization is working to push decision-making to the edges by developing structures that allow the people closest to the issues — our customers and field agents — to have the highest weighting in informing decisions.” —Samir Ibrahim, CEO and Co-founder of SunCulture

“More work will be done from remote locations and collaborations will be worldwide. Newer technologies will allow broader participation and more perspectives. Work will be done with more flexibility. Workers will have to set boundaries for their time away from work.” —Deborah Jackson, CEO and Founder of Plum Alley Investments

“Employees will demand more social impact from their employers and will want to contribute to causes they believe in. Consumers will continue to demand more from the brands they purchase and will want their purchases to have meaning.” —Gavin Armstrong, Founder and CEO of Lucky Iron Fish Enterprise

“The future of work is AI and machine learning — and more inclusion, differing perspectives, and empathy. … Societally, as we move toward greater automation across industries, our call to action is to look honestly at the gaps and which populations are falling through.” —Olivia Khalili, VP of Global Social Impact and Philanthropy of PagerDuty

Future-Ready Workplace Practices Lisa Curtis, Founder and CEO of Kuli Kuli

“The future of work has to be cross-sector collaboration over competition. Work is an intricate dance across countries, time zones, cultures, languages, and new technologies — finding creative ways to connect and work towards a common goal.” —Alexie Seller, CEO of Pollinate Energy

“To me, the real question isn’t about ‘the future of work,’ it’s about ‘the future of how we spend our time’ — there isn’t a separation of work and non-work. We all have to take accountability for our actions, we must do the best we can — be it at work, our time with our kids, grocery shopping — all of it.” —Bradley Black, Co-CEO of EO Products

“The future of work revolves around two criteria: flexibility and purpose. At Kuli Kuli, one of the ways we’re exploring flexibility is through what we call ‘responsible time off.’ We encourage everyone on our team to take paid time off when they need to, and to work from where they need to, provided that it doesn’t negatively impact other team members. We’re asking ourselves how we can better support all our team members, and particularly new parents as they balance the demands of a startup with demands at home. One of the ways we’re exploring purpose is to have monthly checkins on our core values and at least annual team retreats to evaluate if we’re living up to those values. We’re asking ourselves how we can ensure that everyone on our team is constantly learning and growing. I want every person on our team to wake up every morning excited to go to work.”

“Rather than being viewed as something to extract value from, workers must be seen as integral partners in an organization’s long-term success.” —Paul Rice, President and CEO of Fair Trade USA

“Like nature, the economic systems of the future will be place-based and decentralized. While many people see the future of work being about technology, it will also be about jobs with direct personal relationships that build strong communities.” —Judy Wicks, Co-founder of BALLE and Founder of White Dog Cafe (retired)

“Think digital first. Lead with empathy. Work globally. Seek talent and collaborators based on skill and fit rather than location. Be authentic and transparent as a company. Engage with your communities.” —Fabian Geyrhalter, Founder and Principal of FINIEN

“The future of work will be led by the servant leaders, the CEOs who listen and adapt their workplaces based on their employees’ feedback.” —Lisa Curtis, Founder and CEO of Kuli Kuli

“I’m a fan of Helen and Scott Nearing. They tell us that when you find work that you love, you will never work again. So, the future of work is love.” —Lyle Estill, Ring Master and Lion Tamer of Fair Game Beverage Company

“People want to get up every day and know they’re doing something to contribute to the world. … I think that only businesses that do great things for the world will survive and thrive into the next few decades.” —Audette Exel, Founder of Adara Group Photo by heroshotphotography.com

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KEY questions “How can we ensure that our most precious resource — time — is spent in a way that creates a positive dent in the universe?” —Mike Baker, Founder and CEO of SOLE and ReCORK

“What if people were allowed to experience periods of inquiry and creativity, periods of relentless productivity, and periods of quiet contemplation, release, and recovery, just like grasses need time to recover after they are grazed and trampled to grow new leaves and deepen their roots?” —Daniela Ibarra-Howell, CEO of Savory Institute

“How can we rework capitalism to be more accountable for the impact we are having on planet Earth? How do we create a system of complete sustainability for my great-grandchildren’s generation and their kids?”

—Nova Covington, CEO and Founder of Goddess Garden Organics

“What does ownership mean in the next economy? How can we live nourishing lives while committing deeply to our purpose, without the curse of feeling like we are never enough?” —Berry Liberman, Creative Director/Founder of Small Giants

“How can we best equip younger generations, Millennials and Gen Z, to succeed and lead? A recent survey from Deloitte highlights that Millennials want careers that benefit the world — and struggle to learn the ‘soft’ skills necessary to thrive in a chaotic, fast-paced workplace.” —Cory Smith, CEO of Wisdom Labs

“Does this ‘future of work’ apply exclusively to the privileged? What does it mean if you’re working two or three jobs just to keep your head above water?” —Jasper J. van Brakel, CEO of RSF Social Finance

“Is our team engaged in our mission? Do they live it? Does every employee feel their work is making a difference?” —Kevin Rutherford, CEO of nuun

“What issues do the planet and its inhabitants need resolved and what are the paths of least resistance to get there?” —Miki Agrawal, Founder of TUSHY

“What motivates me? What energizes me? What could I do all day without ever getting tired?” —Vicki Saunders, Founder of SheEO

KEY questions

“How do we ignite the power of affection in business?” —Caroline Duell, CEO of All Good

“What conditions can we create so that our people operate within an environment conducive to their best work? We are growing an organism here, not meticulously tuning a machine.”

“Why do we work?” —Julien Brandt, Founder and CEO of Organik SEO

—Daniel Kurzrock and Jordan Schwartz, CoFounders of ReGrained

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A PRIMER FOR CEOs

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UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME

Andrew Yang is a serial entrepreneur running for president in 2020 on a platform supporting universal basic income. We asked him to explain what that is, how it works, and why it might be the key to positive evolution in capitalism.

hen the Washington Post acquired Andrew Yang’s GMAT test preparation company in 2009, the former corporate attorney saw an opportunity to shift his career towards more meaning and purpose. He started by making a list of the problems he saw in the world. The one that animated him most: so much human talent heading to investment banks, management consulting firms, law firms, and big tech companies, rather than taking the lead in improving the human condition. He asked himself, “What would I want a young, ambitious, energetic person to take on instead?” His answer: helping a business grow or founding a company in a struggling city like

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Detroit, Baltimore, or New Orleans. Starting in 2011, he channeled his dream into a nonprofit, Venture for America, that helps young people found or lead businesses in challenged communities. The organization thrived, and helped create thousands of jobs. “But as much as I loved everything I was doing,” Yang says, “I came to realize that my efforts were like pouring water into a bathtub that has a giant hole at the bottom. We’re automating away millions of jobs, much faster than urban entrepreneurs can create them.” Yang points to the automation of 4 million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Wisconsin — key swing states — as the reason Donald Trump won the election in 2016. “AI and automation are about to do the same thing to

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workers in retail, customer service, truck driving and transportation, fast food, and on and on throughout the economy,” he says. Facing the reality that, as he puts it, “we’re going through the greatest economic [and] technological transition in human history,” he once again asked himself what his role should be. His answer: a run for president in the 2020 election, as a Democrat with a platform promoting universal basic income and other measures that could help ease the

A PRIMER FOR CEOs

inevitable pain of such a fundamental economic transformation. “I realized that our political establishment was not actually trying to address this central challenge,” he says. “They can barely talk about it. Most of them don’t understand it.”

He launched his campaign in February, and in April published a book, his second, called “The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future.” According

to the Federal Election Commission, by June 30 his campaign had raised just over $355,000. We caught up with Yang to discuss his predictions for the future of work, why he thinks universal basic income (UBI) is the right solution, and his advice for conscious CEOs. “We need to rethink the way we distribute value and work in our society,” he says, “and we need to move as fast as possible, because we have perhaps five to ten years before the truck drivers are sent home.” What kind of reactions do you get when you say, “We’re shedding millions of jobs and we need to do something about it”? Do people think you’re being apocalyptic? Andrew Yang: There’s been a massive shift in the last six months. The consensus has reached a point where a lot of institutions and organizations agree that this time the change coming to our economy is different than any previous shifts we’ve experienced. McKinsey released a report saying that 30 percent of American jobs will be subject to automation by 2030. Bain & Company had a similar report calling it “The Great Transformation,” and predicted [losing] 20 percent to 25 percent of jobs in the same timeframe, and that we would need to absorb labor at four times the rate of the industrial revolution in order to successfully manage the transition. The president of MIT came out and said, “The purpose of MIT now is to help society prepare.” And it’s not just truck-driving jobs and retail jobs that are going to be automated. Software makes it very,

Serial entrepreneur Andrew Yang is running for president in 2020 on a platform endorsing universal basic income.

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very possible to automate many jobs that have previously been considered white collar. We’re already seeing this with the reduction of the number of bookkeepers in the workforce. Accountants, lawyers, radiologists, pharmacists — many of these roles can be automated. There are massive problems coming down the pike. And if you look at the numbers, it’s no longer speculative. You actually see all the dystopian tropes coming true. We’re in the middle of them. I just met with a CEO of an advertising company who said that 80 percent of advertising jobs are being moved into algorithms and

Age” by a couple of MIT professors, “Rise of the Robots” by Martin Ford — they all end up mentioning universal basic income, because they feel that the disruption is going to be massive. But the book that really pushed me over the top was a book by Andy Stern, who used to run one of the largest labor unions in the country, the SEIU [Service Employees International Union]. He wrote a book called “Raising the Floor,” where he said that the future of labor is no labor, and that we are screwed and we must move to a new way of people receiving value, and he advocated for a universal basic income of $1,000 per adult

$1,000 a month. There are so many good things about it for businesses and CEOs. Everyone who runs a business knows that capitalism and markets function much, much better when consumers have money to spend. If we were to give everyone $1,000 a month, then the consumer economy would be much more robust and vital, and businesses would have significantly more customers to serve. The Roosevelt Institute found that giving everyone $1,000 a month would increase buying power by more than $2 trillion per year and grow the economy by 12 percent while creating 2.5 million new jobs.

“We have to be honest about the way that the capital markets work. The capital markets are going to concentrate the rewards in fewer and fewer hands.” software. US labor force participation rates are already down to 62.7 percent, the same level as El Salvador and the Dominican Republic. Seven Americans die of drugs every hour. Our suicide rates have spiked, contributing to an overall decline in life expectancy, which is unheard of in a developed country. More Americans are on disability [payments from Social Security] right now than working construction. All you have to do is dig into the numbers. One of the struggles is that people are daunted by what this means because the solutions tend to be very big and dramatic, and so people are reluctant to directly confront them. Right; it’s one thing to believe there’s a problem, but then the next question is, “Okay, what do we do about it?” Tell us more about how you got from noticing this “giant hole in the bathtub” to the platform you’re running on and your solution. AY: When you read books about the future of work — “The Second Machine 26

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per month. I found his argument very powerful because it was no longer technologists saying, “We’re going to automate the jobs away.” Of course a technologist might think that. But then we have someone who is the biggest labor union leader of our time saying, “Yes, we’re going to automate jobs away.” Someone who literally argued for decades about the central role of labor. When someone like that comes around and says, “We need to move towards universal basic income,” I find that very compelling. He is now an advisor and supporter to my campaign. So what is universal basic income? How does it work? Why is it a good idea? And particularly from the point of view of a CEO or a business leader, what does it mean for businesses? AY: Universal basic income is a policy where every citizen receives a certain amount of money, free and clear, no questions asked, to meet basic needs. My plan is the Freedom Dividend, where every American adult gets

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It’s that Henry Ford idea of people being able to afford the product you’re making, right? That’s the consumer side. But what does it mean as an employer if your employees are already getting $12,000 a year? AY: It will free people up to do the work they want to do to, at a higher level. Their discretion will empower them to make better decisions about where to work. Anyone who’s in some sort of exploitative or abusive role will be more empowered to leave. I have a feeling that the CEOs who are reading this would end up being the

“Universal basic income will empower people to make better decisions about where to work — like for a company that’s trying to do things the right way,” says Yang.

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beneficiaries of that, because more people would want to work for a company that’s trying to do things the right way. It’s also a de facto raise for all your employees. And it relieves some pressure, because you’re trying to do the right thing by your workers, stakeholders, and community members, but at the same time, you have the constant pressure of maximizing the bottom line and operating as efficiently as possible. That is really the struggle. You have this system that’s designed to optimize for one variable: corporate profitability. Stock market prices, capital incentives, investment returns — it’s all geared towards this one variable. I know. I’ve been a CEO. I ran a company. We had our values. We tried to be wholesome at every turn, and it was great. But we have to be

honest about the way that the capital markets work. The capital markets are going to concentrate the rewards in fewer and fewer hands over time, and it’s going to make it so that the natural incentives of companies are to serve people who have more buying power — unfortunately, it’s not going to be a majority of Americans. If you imagine a smoothed-out economy where more Americans had buying power, then that enables companies to behave the way that, in my opinion, most of them would prefer to behave: trying to serve a broader group of people and not have everyone catering to just a small slice of buying power. So how does UBI work? Where does this money come from?

AY: There are different ways to pay for it; my plan is to pay for it out of four mechanisms. The first is that we currently spend $500 to $600 billion a year on welfare programs, food stamps, disability and the like. I would not touch those programs in terms of taking money away from them. If someone was already receiving benefits, then they wouldn’t get an additional set of benefits. This does end up reducing the cost of the Freedom Dividend significantly because millions of Americans are already receiving benefits and we’re not necessarily just stacking them on top. It’s about 25 percent paid for before you do anything. The second big move is that we need to join the rest of the industrialized world and implement a value-added tax. Value-added tax is a consumptive tax that also applies to

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different stages of production. Anybody who’s been to Europe has seen it on their receipt. It’s something like a revved-up sales tax that isn’t just on the final sale. The reason this is so important is that the current income-based system will not capture the gains of automation, artificially intelligent software and machines. The beneficiaries of those changes tend to be very big tech companies that move all their earnings through Ireland or someplace where they don’t have to pay a lot of taxes. The reason why every other industrialized country has a value-added tax is because it’s much more effective at harvesting revenue for the public. The American GDP is now up to a record $19 trillion, up $4 trillion in the last 10 years. So a value-added tax of half the European level would generate about $800 billion. The third thing is we would get

country, it would add $700 billion to GDP per year because you’d have higher graduation rates, higher mental health, higher productivity, and fewer health problems among children and young adults. That’s how you pay for it. The great thing — and many, many CEOs who are reading this know this — is that if you invest in people, it ends up paying off in many, many ways. That’s what we need to do throughout our society. $12,000 a year is not that much. That’s not a middle-class standard of life. AY: It’s not intended to be a middleclass standard of life or a job replacement. The current poverty line in the United States is $12,770. It’s not even going to get you to the poverty line. It’s a balance — or a cushion, a

much more dynamic — people will be able to move for opportunities and perhaps seek new training more realistically. But it’s not so much that people will significantly change their labor force participation. It’s not supposed to be a replacement for a job and yet we need to replace a lot of jobs, right? So how does universal basic income solve the thing we first were talking about, this technological revolution? Why is it what we need in the face of this coming change? AY: Well, the goal is to build a new kind of economy. If you imagine the extreme where everyone has buying power, then you end up reorganizing to a more community-based, human-centered economy that would be, in many ways, supplemental to the large-scale automation of jobs

“About 44 percent of American jobs could conceivably be automated over the next 15 to 20 years.” another $500 billion or so in new revenue because of economic growth, because if you grow the consumer economy by $2 trillion, the government would get back about $500 billion. And then the fourth thing is that we currently spend over $1 trillion in healthcare, incarceration, homelessness services, and other costs that would go down significantly if you were to give everyone $1,000 a month. It gets very, very expensive for society when people rely on our institutions. If you can keep people functional, that would reduce our costs. One study found that if we were to alleviate child poverty in this 28

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supplement, a transition fund. Right now, if you’re a server in a restaurant and you make $18,000 a year, and I give you an additional $12,000 a year, you’re unlikely to quit your job. If you keep your job, then you’re getting the equivalent of a 66 percent raise, and you’ll be able to take your kid out to a movie, repair your car, perhaps even save a bit of money. You don’t want a universal basic income to be at such a high level that it completely transforms the labor market. So $1,000 a month is enough to make a huge difference in the lives of tens of millions of Americans, and make our labor market

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that’s happening on the other end. This is the first big transitional step. We’re on this path now where about 44 percent of American jobs could conceivably be automated over the next 15 to 20 years. What we need to do is help the economy transition in a direction where people will be able to do work that they care about and are excited about and passionate about in ways that add value to the community. The goal is to transition towards what I call something of an “artisanal-plus economy.” Imagine a town of 50,000 people where a factory may close over the coming years. If you start giving

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everyone $12,000 a year right now, then that town would have an additional $60 million in consumer power per year, which would result in a proliferation of consumer-facing businesses like bakeries, restaurants, or tutoring services, that sort of thing. Those stores are never going to become globally competitive with Amazon or Walmart, but they could still serve very vital purposes in their communities. What common objections do you hear when you present this idea of universal basic income? AY: One is we can’t afford it. It’s ridiculous. Our economy is enormous; GDP is $19 trillion. This is very, very affordable. Another is that it would cause inflation. There’s no reason to think it would. We printed $4 trillion for the banks with no meaningful inflation, as one example. And to the extent there is inflation in our economy right now, it tends to revolve around healthcare, education, and housing, all of which have distinct factors that are driving up costs. And then the “people are going to do bad things” argument. The data just doesn’t show that. Those are the objections that people tend to have. But as a neuroscientist once told me, the real main obstacle to universal basic income is the human mind. We’re programmed to see resources as scarce. This seems too good to be true, so we start searching for objections and obstacles. In a democracy, there’s absolutely nothing stopping us from giving ourselves the dividend. This passed the House of Representatives in 1971 under Richard Nixon. Martin Luther King was for it. A thousand economists signed a letter saying it’s great for the economy and society, and a version of it has been active in Alaska for 36 years and it’s wildly popular. If we just woke up to the possi-

bility that we could totally make this happen, then we could make it real. We could alleviate untold human misery that’s totally pointless and easily addressed. We would improve children’s nutrition, graduation rates, mental health. We would reduce domestic violence and depression and hospital visits. We would end up just creating so much value. The whole thing is, really, that we just need to start believing it’s possible. I know where we’re heading if we don’t do universal basic income. To me, it’s something we must do if we want to stay whole and functional and prosperous as a society. What’s your call to action to this community of business leaders? What can they do if they agree with you, or they want to learn more? AY: I want CEOs of conscience to come clean and say, “The economy is changing, and we need to think much bigger about what possible solutions are, because saying that companies should tweak training programs and try and maintain staffing levels is not a genuine solution.” It’s not intrinsically your responsibility to, for example, employ and train lots and lots of people who don’t currently work for your company. That’s one of the pressures that sometimes people put on these CEOs. If you can get the job done with fewer people, somehow there’s this idea that you should still find something for those people to do. I want CEOs to admit publicly, “Within the current construction of capitalism, there are real limits to what even a very, very conscientious CEO can do,” because it always comes back to the numbers. What we need to do, together, is make the case that we need to evolve to the next form of capitalism. What I mean, aside from universal basic income, is that we need new measurements that will reward

companies for taking actions that help improve society. Instead of just GDP, which we made up during the Great Depression, we should be measuring societal progress through things like childhood success rates, mental health and freedom from substance abuse, median income and wealth, environmental quality, the proportion of elderly in quality care, quality-adjusted life expectancy. Then, if any companies made an investment that drove results in a positive direction on one of those metrics, it would actually count on their bottom line. There would actually be a dollar value that gets associated with it. So if a company were to do something phenomenal that lowers obesity in the community or increases graduation rates or improves environmental quality, they get full credit for that. If they make an investment in worker training or in future product development, they get credit for that too. We have to free corporate CEOs from the tyranny of having one set of numbers that they optimize for, and then everything else is just window dressing. We need CEOs to make that case. We need CEOs to stop pretending that you can optimize for profits and then do everything else too. If conscious CEOs get together, we really ought to be able to change this thing. What’s giving you hope? AY: This is going to sound selfserving, but what’s giving me hope are the people who come in and support my candidacy every day. I get small-dollar contributions from truck drivers in Alabama and retail workers in Montana and unemployed people in Georgia every day. It’s sort of incredible where they see hope in me and in this campaign, and that gives me hope.

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FALL 2018

OPERATIONS

HOW BLOCKCHAIN WILL FACILITATE A

NEW KIND OF COMPANY

DAOstack communications specialist Josh Zemel explains how his company is using the technology underlying cryptocurrency to help reinvent the way organizations operate.

DAOSTACK AT A GLANCE • Location: Israel, US, and other countries • Founded: 2017 • Team Members: 20 • Traction: Rapidly sold out its ICO in May 2018 at $30 million. • Impact: Several blockchain organizations are already building or planning integrations with DAOstack’s technology, including Gnosis, DutchX, and Sapien. • Structure: LTD that functions as a non-profit. • Mission Statement: “To catalyze the future of collaboration.”

Getting a handle on what the tech company DAOstack is up to almost requires learning a new language. First, there are all the names for the future the team is working to manifest: “the collaborative economy,” “the new economic paradigm,” “civilization 2.0,” “an anti-rivalrous economy.” Then there are the terms for what the company’s various tools help create: “decentralized governance,” “coherence,” “self-organizing collectives,” “decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).” And of course there’s all the techspeak related to the platform itself: “blockchain,” “ICOs,” “cryptotokens,” “stacks,” etc. Luckily, Josh Zemel, DAOstack’s communications specialist, has a lot of practice explaining it all in simple terms. “DAOstack is designed to catalyze the future of collaboration,” he writes in a Medium post about what the organization does. “It’s a platform for decentralized governance that enables collectives to selforganize around shared goals or values, easily and efficiently. DAOstack is sometimes called an operating system for collective intelligence, or a Wordpress for DAOs.” While DAOstack’s alpha-phase software platform is a long way from

mainstream, its potential to help reinvent corporate governance is already gaining traction: its initial coin offering — a fundraising mechanism using crypto-currency — sold out in 66 seconds and raised $30 million in May 2018. Understanding the company’s vision and the concepts behind it is worthwhile for any business leader who values looking ahead toward the evolving potential of what a company can be — in other words, anyone dissatisfied with how today’s traditional corporations operate. “The power of blockchain really lies in its ability to facilitate coordination, collaboration, and coherence,” Zemel explains. CCM editor-in-chief Rachel Zurer recently sat down with Zemel for an accessible, beginner-friendly conversation demystifying blockchain, DAOs, decentralized economies, and more. Read on for the basics, and for a deeper dive on how DAOstack works, head to consciouscompanymedia.com/ daostack. How would you explain blockchain to someone who really doesn’t know what it is about? I feel like we’re in 1992 and trying to understand the Internet, this huge thing that’s about to affect everyone but is really hard to picture. Josh Zemel: Blockchain is a distributed ledger, which is basically to say a database — a list; except unlike a list you would store on your hard drive or that the government or a bank or a tech giant might store on their servers, the blockchain is a list that’s basically smeared and duplicated across lots of computers, what are called nodes — which could be people’s personal computers or otherwise. That’s what helps it be secure and trustable. It’s similar, in a lot of ways, to torrenting technology. Let’s say you’re wanting a file of a blockbuster film. Instead of you downloading it from Amazon or iTunes, where it’s hosted on their servers, torrenting means you’re downloading it from thousands or potentially millions of people’s computers, people just like you, running torrenting software. It’s sort of

fragmented and smeared across the internet, if you will. Then, in addition to being fragmented and smeared, blockchain data is also layered with oodles of cryptography. Every instance, every actual piece of data that’s listed in the blockchain is piled upon by essentially meaningless calculations that computers are doing just to create these layers of undoable cryptography. So, essentially, to maliciously manipulate a record that’s already been inscribed in the blockchain and agreed to by the various nodes or hosts, you would need to crack virtually immutable cryptography and do it thousands or millions of times over, across all the different places where this information is being hosted. So blockchain is a solution for creating a shareable database that is secure and highly trustable without needing to presume trust in any particular person or institution. It essentially allows you to trust everybody, or, more accurately, it eliminates the need to trust anybody. How does that change the economy and relate to collaboration? JZ: The blockchain was originally created for the purpose of securely storing information about financial transactions, namely Bitcoin transactions. It was envisioned by this anonymous Bitcoin creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, who may or may not even be only one person. The idea was, if you say you are giving me $100, what does that actually mean, to give me $100? Well, one thing it means is that my account needs to go up by $100 and yours needs to go down by $100. Right now, we have ways of letting our third-party institutions know that you are choosing to give me $100: either you give me a green piece of paper that the government has said represents $100 and when I put it in my bank, my number goes up, whereas your number has gone down, or you tell your bank to authorize the transaction on a special piece of paper called a check, or mainly these days you use your credit card or some application to authorize the

transfer. All of these are mechanisms by which our accounts are adjusted, trustably. Of course, in all those cases, we’re trusting other people to adjust those accounts and to verify the authenticity of that transaction. Satoshi envisioned a world in which we could basically eliminate that need yet still have my account go up and yours go down accurately and trustably. In this transparent list that’s smeared all over the world? JZ: Yes. Tracking transactions was the original purpose of blockchain, and it remains one of the most powerful applications of blockchain. Some other folks, though, came along a few years after the blockchain was invented, mainly the guys who invented Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin and friends, and they thought, “What if we could use the blockchain ledger to say not only that you gave me money, but to say that anything happened? We could write anything into the blockchain.” Like giving me a house. JZ: Yes, exactly. And let’s take it a step further. What if we could actually program functions into the blockchain that we agree will

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OPERATIONS

happen upon certain conditions? Basically, simple programs. For example, not just you gave me your house, but you will give me your house. You will give me your house once the inspector digitally signs a report. You could actually have the blockchain not only keep a record of any type of agreement or event, but you could actually have the blockchain execute certain types of agreements or events. Once certain conditions are met. JZ: Right. So this was the rise of what’s called the “smart contract” and the Ethereum network. The Ethereum network is basically a decentralized world computer. If the Bitcoin blockchain is a decentralized financial ledger, then the Ethereum network is a decentralized world computer. You can actually program it to do anything, which is to say it’s what’s called “Turing complete.” Now, you wouldn’t want to program the Ethereum network to send your email or edit your Photoshop files or really do anything common that you use your personal computer for. It’s something like a billion times

slower than a personal computer because it’s distributed and duplicated, which means you need many, many different node-holders to agree on any given thing that happens. It’s really useful, not for Photoshop, but for simple functions that require low speed but very high security and trustability. Like an inspector signs a document and then I give you my house. JZ: Sure, like the transfer of a home, or the transfer of large amounts of funds, or the transfer of voting power or reputation points, — these sorts of things. People started envisioning all sorts of different ways to take advantage of smart contracts, code written on the Ethereum network to execute on certain conditions. They started envisioning different ways to use this technology to build this decentralized economy that people have been dreaming of for a long time. Can we pick apart that phrase “decentralized economy?” When I hear the term “centralized economy,” I think of the Soviet Union. That’s the most extreme version of a centralized economy I know of, where the government is planning who’s planting what in every farm. Isn’t our economy, compared to that, already a decentralized economy? I assume you mean there are significant steps further. Can you explain what that means? JZ: Sure. A better word for the way our economy works might be “democratized” in some way. When we say “decentralized,” we mean not just decentralized away from government or authoritarian control. We mean that organizations are themselves owned and operated in some kind of cooperative fashion. In a traditional organization, who decides what happens? It’s basically a hierarchical decision-making structure. Different people have dif-

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CONSCIOUS COMPANY MAGAZINE

ferent decision-making power, but they’re generally answering to other people who have hire–fire authority over them, on and on and on. One pitfall of this kind of system is that the incentives that drive the decision-making of the senior decision-makers are often different than the incentives of the users of their products, as well as often different from those of the vast majority of people who work at the company. What we’re wanting to see more and more, and what the decentralization movement promises, boils down, in some sense, to greater incentive alignment among all the stakeholders in a given decision — owners, users, workers, etc. Facebook is maybe an easy example to illustrate with, because Facebook is just software, so the decisions that Facebook makes are right there on the screen for us to see. Who decides what appears in our Facebook newsfeed? Facebook does. And what incentives are they beholden to? Not really incentives that are aligned with the interests of the users. They need to pay enough respect to the desires and needs of the users so we don’t go away. But according to the way their incentives are structured, that’s as much attention as they should pay to our desires. If they’re being maximally efficient, they’re doing just what they need to keep us around. The traditional economic incentive is that they want to make as much money as possible. I think Facebook might argue that it has a different goal: connecting people or helping humanity work together or something. And most of our readers have a company that does have a goal beyond just making money. But I guess it’s still that company’s goal. JZ: That’s exactly fair, and no knock on Facebook, per se. And really, no knock on centralization, in general. There’s a good reason that hierar-

chical decision-making trees exist. It’s because they’re relatively efficient, and until now or recently, maybe the only reasonably efficient way to point a ship that has a huge number of people on it. It’s easy to steer a cruise ship when you have a single captain or a small team of navigators. It would be very hard to decide where a ship is going if you were trying to incorporate the will of all the crew and passengers into every matter of navigation. Yeah; to switch metaphors, even just deciding where to go to dinner is hard once you get to 20 people, much less 20,000. JZ: Exactly. Depending on your objective, you might be able to build coherence in a social fashion if your organization or your project is roughly up to the size of a Dunbar tribe, 100 to 150 people, which is basically small organizations. Once you get to a larger project size, you need to build

JZ: Exactly. Which is not inherently a bad thing, and in a way, that’s capitalism. But the idea of a decentralized economy is that, to use the example of Facebook, you’d have a social network where it’s by the people and for the people. Where decisions are either made by the wisdom of the crowd through some sort of governance protocol that incorporates a lot of voices, or, if there is some sort of delegation, which often there would be, at least that decision-maker is incentivized to act in accordance with the common good. They’re not going to hold on to their decision-making power if they don’t act in accordance with the common good. That’s different from how it is today in a traditional capital environment. You often hold on to your decision-making power despite acting against the common good directly.If you’re the CEO of an oil company, for example, you have a direct incentive to misinform the public about the

Who decides what the right thing is? JZ: We could probably set some parameters that define what’s a good outcome and what’s a bad outcome, but that’s not even that important. What’s more important is that you just have more voices included in determining what is and what isn’t a

“What sorts of protocols would we need to set up in order for a crowd to make good decisions together?” coherence asocially. When you’re trying to achieve something at the scale that Facebook or an oil company or a government does, you risk devolving very rapidly into massive inefficiency if you try to incorporate the interests and voices of too many people. Hence owner–operators, CEOs, bosses, or inventor–owners of a thing basically get to continue running the thing. You know, Google continues to run Google Search and say what search results show up. Google gets to tell people what it means to optimize for search results. They decide what makes a good webpage.

value of alternative energies and the danger of fossil fuels. You’re doing a good job if you effectively create a ruse that causes people to turn the other way around climate change or deforestation. That’s the way the incentives are set up, and in a way, it’s almost forgivable from that standpoint. Our friends, futurists like Daniel Schmachtenberger, might say something like, “It’s actually not his or her fault. It’s just the way the incentive structures are set up.” Well, we want a situation where everybody is actually incentivized to do the right thing.

good or bad outcome. Are we going to have a better or a worse newsfeed if the nature of the newsfeed is answering to the interests of all the users, as well as all the owners, as well as all the developers — especially if all of the above are financial stakeholders in the organization, so that they can all consider all aspects of the situation? We’re probably going to have a better newsfeed. Probably. Yet we do have this mythology about the visionary leader. I didn’t know I wanted an iPod until Steve Jobs envisioned it. Would I have voted for a thing that maybe I didn’t totally understand?

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OPERATIONS

I’m having the thought, “This sounds like it could be a mess if we’re trying to have an economy run on this.” Help me understand how we’re going to make sure all the messes don’t happen. JZ: This is a good point. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that all decisions get massively democratized. We’re not going to see a vote among all Apple customers on whether Apple innovates some new particular product or not. What we might see, in a decentralized version of Apple, is a different degree of accountability where the so-called leaders of an organization might be beholden to a broader set of interests, such that if they act out of alignment with those interests, they might see their influence go down. And perhaps also that more people are able to participate in proposal-creating and decisionmaking, but decision-making would still be limited to those individuals who have some credibility in the particular domain the proposal is related to. It’s a meritocratic system that we’re describing. And you’re absolutely right that it’s a very complex challenge. What sorts of protocols would we need to set up in order for a crowd to make good decisions together? Is that, essentially, one of the questions DAOstack is going to answer? JZ: Yeah. Matan Field, the architect and co-founder of DAOstack, is fond of making this distinction: in decentralized governance, by which we mean decision-making protocols for groups of people in the absence of

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centralized leadership, you have this tradeoff between efficiency and resilience/incorruptibility. Basically, the more you try to distribute decisionmaking throughout an organization — and the more you thereby make it resilient, which is to say unable to be corrupted by bad acting among a few power-holders — the less efficient your process is likely to become. A good example might be a noisy neighborhood association that can easily devolve into massive inefficiency. On the other hand, as you favor efficiency — which is equivalent to scalability, measured in terms of the number of decisions an organization is capable of processing in a given period of time — you are exposed to greater corruptibility. And to be clear, “corruption” is not just bad influence or bad acting. It can also just be bad judgment or decision-makers having incomplete information. When I hear the word “corruption” it feels like this James Bond-y thing. But you’re saying corruption can just be a lack of knowing. I’m thinking about how our magazine gets made. It’s mostly me, with our CEO Meghan French Dunbar, deciding what goes in. That’s not very resilient. I know I have unconscious bias, I have knowledge gaps, I lack information. With a lot more people deciding what goes in, there would be a lot more insight about what’s going to truly serve our community. But I don’t know how to do that in any efficient way. JZ: That’s right. The more you can decentralize your organization, the more it’s resilient to bad acting or the

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bad judgment of a few centralized points of failure, but the more inefficient that can easily become. What you need in practice are some fairly elegant solutions to solve that problem, governance protocols that allow an organization to make really efficient decisions while also incentivizing everyone to favor really good decisions, ones that are aligned with the whole of the organization and even with the greater common good. Ok, to summarize: We’ve got the blockchain, all the information smeared all over. We’ve got Ethereum, where we can create actionable, smart contracts — things can happen with the blockchain; we’re not just keeping a list. We have this concept of a decentralized economy, meaning that decisionmaking is not so hierarchical, even within companies or organizations or projects. Those are the pieces we just put on the table. Bring them together, please. JZ: Let’s do that by adding in the concept of a DAO. A DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization, and it’s basically a blockchain-based smart organization. It’s a very popular idea, although DAOs don’t really exist yet, except in some very prototypical forms. But there’s a belief within a lot of the blockchain community that we’re going to see the rise of the DAO. The DAO is essentially an organization that is entrusting into smart contracts some of the functions that an executive might typically perform. For example, you would have your smart contracts in the DAO tallying the will of the people, however the will of the people is

measured, which is TBD on a DAOby-DAO basis. “Who has influence?” and “What do the people who have influence think we should do?” are central questions in any organization. In a centralized organization, you have a person or a group of people who say who the influencers are, tally the will of the influencers internally, and then carry out a decision accordingly. But in a DAO, you have agreed-upon protocols for collecting human input and outputting decisions that do not require centralized

told to do so, taking into account who has what amount of reputation to actually weigh in on this matter. Then, if the proposal passes, the smart contracts are actually going to transfer the money to you, or to whoever you’ve said is actually going to order the party hats you proposed. A DAO is kind of like a smart contract made multi-dimensional, so that it’s a whole smart company: a collection of protocols along with the actual humans who are participating in the system they define. But of course I just raised way

DAOstack offers tools to begin answering. The platform includes sets of protocols for actual group decision-making at scale. Yet DAOstack also offers, essentially, a very modular protocol-building environment. We’re aware that we don’t know how decentralized decision-making is actually going to work at scale for all different kinds of organizations. We have very little idea, actually. So we’ve built not so much the LEGO spaceship, but the LEGO building blocks to build spaceships of varying shapes and sizes.

“What you need in practice are elegant governance protocols that allow an organization to make efficient decisions while also incentivizing everyone to favor good decisions, ones that are aligned with the whole of the organization and even with the greater common good.” arbiters. You also, by the way, need protocols to change the protocols. Governance protocols are just ways of turning human input and opinions into decisions. In a DAO, the smart contracts do that — not an executive, not a boss. Furthermore, the smart contracts can actually execute some of those decisions. For example, if you raise a proposal to the DAO that we get a budget for a Christmas party, then whoever has influence is going to give their input, and that input is going to be turned into output in the form of a decision on whether to authorize budget for the party. It’s going to be the smart contracts that arbitrate that process, that tally the votes according to how they’ve been

more questions than I answered. Who has influence to make decisions? How does that change over time? And just as importantly is a question that many people who have been thinking about DAOs and decentralization have perhaps overlooked until recently: how do we even decide what proposals are worthy of the attention of the voters? It turns out you need systems not only for determining who gets to vote on what, but also for what proposals even deserve to be voted on. It’s those types of questions which

We’ve created this modular library of bits and pieces of governance infrastructure — different types of voting machinery, different ways of easily creating constraints over a whole system, and so on. Basically, we’ve created a way of building your own governance templates, and we’ve also provided some pretty advanced starting templates. All of that put together is what we call Arc, the first layer of the DAO stack. It’s written in Solidity, which is a coding language for writing smart contracts. In practice, it’s a

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OPERATIONS

fairly small fraction of people who are going to interact with the DAO stack at that level. So we also built a JavaScript library that allows any developer to build a custom application without needing to be familiar with Solidity or blockchain coding. That’s layer two. Then, another layer, let’s call it layer three, is the collection of front-end applications that are going to be built on those first two layers, user interfaces that allow anybody to be part of an organization or even to create an organization without a technical background. On which you can drag and drop the conditions for a contract to execute? JZ: Yes, and let’s even take it a step beyond: to participate in the organization. How are you going to propose your Christmas party? You’re going to propose it through application interfaces. You don’t even need to know that there’s blockchain involved, per se. You can create your task in the queue, you can propose funding, you can get funding, people can vote. People are going to assign reputation currency to one another, or set up rules by which reputation transfers automatically. If people say after the fact that they think your Christmas party was good, you might get more reputation. We’ve built a stack of technologies that provide accessibility for everybody, from the most technical blockchain governance geek all the way to the most non-technical participant in a decentralized organization, to be able to present and vote on ideas. That’s the DAOstack in a nutshell. In practice, how far along is it? JZ: We’re in alpha release, and we’ve deployed the first DAO built on the DAO stack. Oh, and all those applications that will be built on the stack, by anyone who chooses to? We have already built one of them.

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You built the first. JZ: Right. It’s an application for participants in a decentralized organization to share ideas with one another and make good decisions together, with a specific focus on budgeting and allocating resources. Because that’s a huge decentralized governance use-case, if you think about it: deciding what to do with resources. That application is called Alchemy, and it is also in alpha release. Basically, the whole stack has been deployed, in alpha form, along with a DAO that is also in alpha form. That DAO is called the Genesis DAO, which is ultimately going to be responsible for most of the funds we raised in our token sale, which at the time was $30 million. The Genesis DAO will assume actual control of the funds gradually, as it demonstrates greater and greater stability and security. We asked the questions, “How is this money going to be deployed in service of extending the DAOstack ecosystem, extending the utility of the technology, and bringing about the collaborative economy? Who’s going to decide how it’s going to be deployed?” Well, it’s going to be decided by the community of reputation-holders in the Genesis DAO, with literally anyone, reputationholder or not, able to submit proposals to the Genesis DAO. And this is already happening, in small form at first. It’s actually very, very innovative: taking a significant amount of funds and determining their best use in a truly decentralized fashion, using scalable, resilient, blockchain-based decision-making protocols. I have a big question that keeps coming up for me. Underlying the technology, there still are humans wanting to achieve something, even in working together to create the protocols. And the DAO and blockchain helps make it much more efficient. But where’s the love?

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JZ: My view is that if there isn’t any, then there’s probably going to be failure. Practically speaking, a DAO is going to be a collection of human relationships. Not between everyone and everyone else within the organization — that’s exactly what’s not possible at scale, and why DAO technologies become necessary if you’re going to provide viable alternatives to your telcoms, your social networks, your oil giants, your governments. But if you look under the hood, there’s undoubtedly going to be pods, little smart cells, agencies. There’s going to be me and you going out to dinner and talking about what we could do to make our social network’s newsfeed better, or how this certain climate solution could gain market traction. There’s going to be socialization events that occur, even if those roll up to an asocial coordination system. It’s both, it’s absolutely both, and at that level of human relating, there’s just no substitute for coherence with one another. And there’s even no substitute, in my view, for coherence with oneself, no substitute for self-development, for self-awareness, for right relationship to one’s values. That’s all really, really important. It’s the values that we cultivate on the human level that will roll up to the values that get expressed at the emergent level by a DAO. What’s giving you hope? JZ: The number of people who are excited about doing things differently. And that we have technologies coming online that are able to help with that. The combination of those two things — human intentions and technological solutions — that gives me hope.

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SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURS TO WATCH IN 2018

These brave business leaders are pioneering new models that blend purpose and profit to create meaningful, lasting change in their communities, for the environment, and beyond.

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Vava Coffee Kenya and Gente Del Futuro Vava Angwenyi, 37; Founder and Chief “Coffaholic”

Kenya, Tanzania, Colombia // Vava Coffee founded 2009; 5 employees // Gente Del Futuro founded 2017; 8 employees

vava coffee's mission

“To cause positive social and economic disruption within the coffee industry and create sustainable livelihoods for smallholder farmers as well as integrate more women and youth within the entire supply chain.”

GENTE DEL FUTURO's mission

“To develop a generation that will secure the future of coffee production in Africa and Latin America through a sustainable coffee education program.”

Growing up in Kenya, coffee entrepreneur Vava Angwenyi didn’t actually drink the beverage she now lives and breathes. While she was fascinated by the coffee maker her parents had received as a wedding present, she perceived coffee as being a “white” thing, inaccessible to ordinary Africans. Then she headed off to university in Canada, where she found herself studying at coffee bars — and her curiosity about the industry was piqued. After graduating in the Netherlands with a master’s in international finance and management, she returned to Africa and began investigating the on-the-ground reality of coffee farming there. She’d always wanted to own her own business, and began that process by launching a small coffee bar in her town. Soon, she was working with farmers from the ground up, helping them improve the quality of their coffee, finding buyers for that coffee locally and internationally, creating a brand, roasting coffee, packaging it, and selling it. Today, Vava Coffee exports, roasts, and consults on coffee value-chains, with its main aim being contributing to better prospects for coffee communities and the industry as a whole. The enterprise works with a network of more than 30,000 smallholder farmers who earn 18 per-

cent more than they used to, on average, by working with the company. One part of the work that’s important to her is the idea of “decolonizing empowerment.” “Something coffee farmers ask is why I’m not white,” she recently told Barista Magazine. “They’re so used to seeing white people come to producing countries. This thought that has really affected the minds of coffee farmers — and this is why I talk about decolonizing empowerment — is the idea of the white savior. The rationale behind my company was to let Kenyan farmers save themselves.” To that end, her most recent venture is Gente Del Futuro, a cross-cultural training program in Tanzania, Kenya, and Colombia that seeks to help more youth successfully stay in the coffee industry.

Leadership Philosophy

“Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says, ‘Stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower and to humanize.’ It’s important for us, especially in positions of influence, to own our stories and share them. You never know the life you could be impacting or influencing.”

READ MORE: For a longer conversation with our cover model Angwenyi, go to consciouscompanymedia.com/vava

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Vava Angwenyi is on a mission to make the African coffee industry more equitable and inclusive.

Photo by Michael B. Maine Q4

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tentree Derrick Emsley, 28; CEO David Luba, 29; Director of Sales and Merchandising Kalen Emsley, 29; Director of Content Stephen Emsley, 30; Director of Digital Arthur Kononuk, 30; Creative Director Vancouver, BC // Founded 2012 // 45 Employees

company mission

“To become the most environmentally progressive brand on the planet.”

Like its name suggests, tentree exists to plant trees — 23 million of them so far, ten for every item of sustainable apparel the company sells. “That’s what we knew,” says CEO Derrick Emsley, who founded the company with his brother Kalen, cousin Stephen, and friends Dave and Arthur after seeing the power of one-for-one model companies like TOMS shoes. “We knew the impact tree-planting could have on the environment, the jobs it could create globally, the food security it could provide to those in need,” Emsley explains. “We wanted to cre-

ate something that could allow us to bring that impact to people all across the globe. Apparel is how we do it. We try to make environmental change fun and relatable.” By partnering with nonprofits in Madagascar, Nepal, Haiti, Cambodia, Senegal, Canada, and the US, tentree tailors its planting projects to the needs of the local community, providing social, economic, and environment benefits that vary by location. In Madagascar, for example, planting mangroves helps provide jobs, fight desertification, and counteract climate change, while avocado and orange trees planted in Haiti provide extra income that has helped double the number of girls attending school. Notably, the business hasn’t taken any outside funding since it started. “We wanted to create a sustainable business that would be around for generations and have an impact long into the future,” Emsley explains, “and we didn’t want to be tied to unrealistic growth expectations that ultimately dilute the brand and cause.”

Advice for Entrepreneurs

“The company should be built around the impact and the change you hope to create, not the other way around. Find what matters to you and focus on that.”

From left: Kalen Emsley, Arthur Kononuk, Stephen Emsley, Derrick Emsley, David Luba

Photo by Tom Miller

Powerhouse Emily Kirsch, 33; Founder and CEO Oakland, CA // Founded 2013 // 5 Employees

company mission

“Powerhouse’s mission is to change the way we power our lives by backing the world’s most innovative clean-energy entrepreneurs.”

Powerhouse began with some big-name backers: the idea first sprouted when the singer Prince asked activist Van Jones what he should do with $250,000. Jones’ answer (actually, his wife’s): get solar panels on the rooftops all over Oakland. With a grant from Prince given to the solar startup Mosaic, Jones brought in Kirsch to work on their pilot in Oakland. Working with Mosaic inspired Kirsch to start Powerhouse, a co-working space and venture fund to back clean-energy entrepreneurs. Since 2013, Powerhouse has housed 58 clean-energy startups and organizations which have collectively raised hundreds of millions in capital, generated hundreds of millions in revenue, and created hundreds of jobs across the country and around the world. The company plans to invest in dozens of clean-energy startups over the next five years. “Powerhouse works at the intersection of energy, software, and venture capital, all of which are majority male,” Kirsch says. “At Powerhouse, we’re an all-women team and know the power of investing in diverse founders.”

Surprising Business Lesson

“This year, Powerhouse launched a new initiative to financially back clean-energy startups. I was so afraid that we would fail that I didn’t start fundraising until our director of strategy, Emily Fritze said, ‘Just start raising and see what happens.’ Within a few months, we had over a dozen partners, including some of the most successful clean-energy executives in the country. Fear of failure, especially for women, is real, but the reward that comes with achieving something seemingly impossible is what entrepreneurship is all about.”

Everytable Sam Polk, 38; Founder and CEO Los Angeles, CA // Founded 2015 // 50 Employees

company “To make nutritious, fresh food mission affordable and accessible to all.”

Sam Polk was a successful hedge-fund trader in a former life. While on Wall Street, experiencing the greed and negativity there, he started to read about the civil rights movement and realized he wanted to be part of the solution, not the problem. “I didn’t want to spend my life accumulating money for myself,” he says. “I wanted to create a better, more equitable world for all.” His first social venture, launched in 2013, was the nonprofit Groceryships, which helps families make healthy choices by offering nutrition education, cooking classes, free produce, and support groups. Polk soon began hearing from Groceryships participants that they often had to buy food on the go because they were juggling multiple jobs and large families. And in south LA, their only options were fast food. Polk founded Everytable to help address that problem by selling nutritious, fresh, made-from-scratch food at fast-food prices. The company has locations in food deserts and in affluent areas. To ensure that everyone can afford its meals, Everytable prices them according to the neighborhoods — the same meal that costs $8 in an affluent community costs $5 in an underserved one. As of press time, the business has raised more than $10 million in capital and has five locations in Los Angeles, with more to come by the end of the year. The long-term goal is to expand the model nationally and lead the movement to incorporate similar conscious pricing models in a consortium of brands.

Favorite Leadership Tip

“There are no bad teams, just bad leaders. At the end of the day, if my team does not execute successfully, it’s because I did not do my job.”

Advice for Entrepreneurs “Conserve your cash.”

All images courtesy of the subject unless noted

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SOCIAL E NT R E PRENEURS Sona Shah (left) and Teresa Cauvel are working to save infants’ lives.

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Photos by Greg Rothstein

Neopenda Sona Shah, 28; Co-founder and CEO Teresa Cauvel, 26; Co-founder and CTO

company mission

“Creating and implementing usercentric technology solutions for where they are needed most.”

Chicago, IL // Founded 2015 // 4 Employees Neopenda co-founders Teresa Cauvel and Sona Shah met in a master’s-level biodesign course at Columbia University and then traveled to Uganda together as part of their education. There, they found a huge scarcity of functional medical equipment in many of the hospital wards, primarily because the commercially available products didn’t meet the design constraints of low-resource hospitals. After the trip, the pair decided to start Neopenda to engineer medical devices for where they’re needed most, collaborating closely with stakeholders in low-resource settings. The company’s first product, a neonatal vital signs monitor, is built to make it easier for overwhelmed health workers to give each newborn infant the attention they need when they need it. The device is currently in development and expected to launch commercially in late 2019. Throughout the ongoing iterative design process, the Neopenda team has worked to engage the local communities in Uganda, gathering feedback and insights from their two Ugandan team members and over 150 nurses and clinicians from 43 hospitals. Once deployed, Cauvel and Shah anticipate the newborn

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vital signs monitor has the potential to improve care for the 600,000 babies in need in Uganda each year and 45 million newborn patients in emerging markets worldwide. “We prioritize inclusive decision-making and design processes, security of our vulnerable patients, and compassion for families during an extremely overwhelming time,” says Shah.

Advice for Entrepreneurs

“Be resilient, and stay true to your vision and values. If it were easy, someone would have done it before. But if you have made the decision to take your idea and transition to the overwhelming and exhilarating path of social entrepreneurship, your idea is likely worth pursuing and you will find ways to overcome hurdles.” —Sona Shah

What’s Giving You Hope?

“We are constantly inspired by the amazing nurses we know in Uganda. Even without all the tools and resources they need, they do the best that they can and try to find a way.”

734 Coffee Manyang Reath Kher, 30; Founder and Director Washington, DC // Founded 2016 // 7 Employees

company mission

“Provide college education opportunities to refugees from South Sudan.”

As a child, 734 Coffee founder Manyang Reath Kher lived for 13 years in refugee camps in the Gambela region of Ethiopia — a “Lost Boy of Sudan.” He came to the US at age 17 and later formed a nonprofit, the Humanity Helping Sudan Project, which helps provide sustainable aid and scholarships for the more than 200,000 displaced South Sudanese citizens now living in the Gambela region having fled war, atrocities, drought, and famine. He founded 734 Coffee to help fund that nonprofit. The company’s name comes from the geographical coordinates for Gambela (7˚N, 34˚E); its fair-trade, naturally grown specialty coffee is harvested by growers right in the Gambela region. “As a former refugee,” says Kher, “I understand the feeling of hopelessness; the thought that no one cares about your plight and living condition. I understand being labeled as a number and feeling the pity of others. I believe refugees have great potential, just like other peaceful people. I am always comforted by the fact that figures like Madeleine Albright and Albert Einstein were refugees who made immense contributions to humanity.”

Favorite Leadership Tip

“A good leader surrounds themselves with a team that will push them out of their comfort zone.”

EarthHero Ryan Lewis, 42; Founder and CEO Boulder, CO // Founded 2016 // 6 Employees

company mission

“To make sustainable shopping so easy, everyone does it.”

Shopping sustainably and supporting the most conscious consumer brands should be easy. That’s the idea behind EarthHero, an online community and shopping portal that features close to 100 (and growing) sustainable, best-in-class brands. “Every product on EarthHero is hand-selected for its positive impact,” says founder Ryan Lewis. “We have a five-stage vetting process that all brands and products must go through before being accepted, to ensure authentic impact.” With an extensive background in e-commerce and distribution, his aha moment was realizing that he could combine his passion for sustainability and his business background to create a platform for everybody who loves the planet. “At EarthHero, we do the work so you don’t have to,” he says.

Surprising Business Lesson?

“The dance between being persistent and patient. I’m learning that with any project, strategy, initiative, or plan, I must either use one or the other. If I mix them up, nothing good happens!”

Favorite Leadership Tip

“I was once told, ‘You are going to have really good days and really bad ones. Don’t make decisions on either of those days.’ This advice has served me well.” CONSCIOUS COMPANY MAGAZINE

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Photo by Laura Metzler Photography

Mission: Launch and R3 Score Technologies Laurin Leonard, 33; Executive Director, Mission: Launch Inc. Teresa Hodge, 55; President of R3 Score Technologies

Baltimore, MD // M:L founded 2012; R3 founded 2017 // 5 Employees

Shared “To improve the economic health of entrepreneurs with criminal records by increasing company their skills and capacity and unlocking their access to capital.” missions In 2006, businesswoman Teresa Hodge was sentenced in Maryland to serve an 87-month federal prison term for a first-time, nonviolent, white-collar offense. She and her daughter, Laurin Leonard, quickly discovered, as Leonard says, that “People do not go to prison, families do.” The two women spent their seven years apart studying the prison system from inside and out, working to understand the needs of the more than 2.3 million families in America who have a member incarcerated. Their clear understanding of what it would take for Teresa, as an individual, and the Hodges, as a family, to rebuild their lives and leverage Teresa’s human capital inspired them to seek innovative and scalable solutions to help other families facing the same challenges. While Teresa remained in prison, Laurin enrolled in business school at Johns Hopkins University and, in 2010, came 46

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up with a business plan addressing prisoner reentry into the workforce and submitted it to a universitywide competition. Two years later, the plan became Mission: Launch (M:L), a nonprofit that advocates for inclusive entrepreneurship as a path to self-sufficiency for individuals living with criminal records. Through their signature program, Launchpad, they operate a capacity-building business accelerator that prioritizes financial resilience and preparation for mainstream banking products and services. While determining the readiness of returning citizens for various opportunities, M:L realized existing assessment tools were woefully inadequate for evaluating the myriad indicators that facilitate successful and meaningful transition for returning citizens. As a natural extension of its work, M:L began developing and testing a process and tool to do just that. In 2017,

Mother-daughter entrepreneurs Teresa Hodge (left) and Laurin Leonard the duo formed R3 Score Technologies as a for-profit Fintech company to prototype an algorithm for background screening that demonstrates the strengths and capacities of individuals living with criminal records, and expands access to entrepreneurship, financial products, and other opportunities. Together, the nonprofit and tech company will provide a program and a product that both help entrepreneurs with records build their capacity for capital and connect them to lenders.

Surprising Business Lesson

“It has been a journey in releasing ourselves from solving all of the problems we see in reentry and focusing solely on unlocking access to capital for entrepreneurs with records. Today we find comfort in a famous quote: ‘Do not try to do everything. Do one thing well.’”

Advice for Entrepreneurs

“We have learned the urgency of execution. There is always a reason to wait, but sometimes you totally miss an opportunity in waiting. General Patton’s famous saying, ‘A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week,’ is written on a Post-it in plain sight these days. Just get stuff done.”

One Degree Organic Foods Stan Smith, 54; Co-founder and President

Abbotsford, BC // Founded 2011 // 12 Employees

company mission

“To provide people with delicious food they can trust through 100 percent transparent, nutrient-rich ingredients from organic farmers.”

This family-owned and operated food company is all about transparency and traceability: each of their bread and cereal products carries a unique code that customers can use to identify the producers of every ingredient in every package. The idea came to co-founder Stan Smith one day as he was walking through the organic bakery the family has owned since 1989 and saw a pallet of applesauce from South America. “I wondered, ‘Why would we bring in apples from so far away? We have pristine apple-growing regions of our own nearby,” he says. “The reality is that no matter how good a farmer is at caring for his soil and crops, his harvest is usually just treated like a commodity.” One Degree Organic Foods was born to change that. In addition to the unique codes on all packages, One Degree personally visits every supplier, and is a pioneer in supporting agricultural practices that go way beyond organic, including certification that their products are free of glyphosate residue (a carcinogen that comes from pesticides and herbicides), and that all farming inputs are plant-based (vegan).

Leadership Tip

“Pursue the truth no matter how painful. Keep your promises no matter how difficult. You succeed when you make others successful.”

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Photo by Alicia Tunkey

LegWorks Emily Mochizuki Lutyens, 35; Co-founder and CEO Brandon Burke, 27; Co-founder and Chief Product Officer Buffalo, NY // Founded 2014 // 7 Employees

company “To enable amputees globally purpose to walk with confidence.”

For well-to-do amputees in the developed world, options for fancy, niche prosthetics abound, including ones with electronic stabilization and computer microprocessors. But, says Emily Mochizuki Lutyens, CEO of LegWorks, “there’s no point in having an innovative technology if people cannot afford it,” as 90 percent of the millions of amputees in the developing world can’t access any artificial limbs at all. “If you’re a kid, you’re not going to school,” she says. “If you’re an adult, it’s hard to get a job. Amputees face incredible stigma.” To help solve that problem, LegWorks has designed and launched a collection of four patented prosthetic limb products that it sells to amputees in 30 countries, including 19 developing countries. “We do not believe poor people deserve poor-quality products,” Lutyens explains. “We sell the same high-quality products whether we’re in Cambodia, the US, or Australia,” with pricing adjusted to match local conditions. “Every amputee deserves to walk with confidence on a high-quality prosthetic leg,” she says. “And while we believe in our technology and our mission, we also believe our social business model can be applied beyond prosthetics to tackle any number of inequalities around the world.”

Surprising Business Lesson

“As much as we want to keep pushing and moving and growing, we have learned that for our business to succeed, we need to own the work that is ours to do and not [go] beyond that. Quite simply, when we as co-founders burn out, it hurts the business. We unfortunately do not have superpowers. It is a discipline to stay balanced as an entrepreneur, but it’s the best thing for the business. Focus on staying present, not on ‘productivity.’” —Emily Mochizuki Lutyens

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Peak Design Peter Dering, 35; Founder and CEO

San Francisco, CA // Founded 2010 // 35 Employees

company PURPOSE

“To create happy, meaningful lives for the people who work for Peak Design.”

In 2008, Peter Dering took leave from his engineering job to travel in Asia. The photography buff was inspired by the sights, but the camera he was carrying felt like as much of an encumbrance as a necessary tool. His experiencing a tangible problem combined with the time the trip afforded him to think and dream fostered the invention of the Capture Camera Clip, a camera holster that became the seminal product of Peak Design. He launched it on Kickstarter with a goal of raising $10,000. He raised more than $360,000. Today, the design company is a market leader in camera bags, camera straps, and camera clips, and has raised more money for its products via Kickstarter than any other active company. What makes Peak Design a conscious company, though, is how it has pursued this success. Its mission is articulated by

Priyanka Bakaya (left) and Hannah Trimble

Renewlogy Priyanka Bakaya, 35; CEO and Founder Hannah Trimble, 29; Head of Renewlogy Oceans Salt Lake City, UT // Founded 2011 // 12 Employees

As an MIT student, Priyanka Bakaya spent a summer in India working in e-waste, and realized that plastics were often burned or dumped in the environment. She went back to MIT with a mission to find a solution. Thus began Renewlogy, which uses a proprietary chemical recycling process to reverse plastic back to its basic molecular structure, then incorporate it into new products such as high-value fuels. Renewlogy now has two commercial-scale facilities in the US and Canada for chemically recycling plastics. After meeting Hannah Trimble and discovering a shared passion for sustainability, design, and women’s empowerment, the duo is now launching a new Renewlogy Oceans initiative which aims to set up 100 biofences in major polluted rivers across the world to prevent plastics from entering the oceans. The material collected will be processed in the company’s off-grid mobile systems, and revenues will go directly to the female waste-pickers who collect the waste. Their first project will be launched along the Ganges in India in 2019.

Favorite Leadership Tip

company mission

“To renew plastic waste globally, on land and in oceans. (Less than 10% of plastic is recycled each year.)”

six rules: 1) make the best things; 2) succeed at the expense of nobody; 3) treat our customers as peers; 4) offset our environmental impact; 5) use our voice to inspire positive change; and 6) prioritize happiness over growth. No fulltime employees have ever quit; the company’s product return rate is less than 1 percent; it has given over $500,000 to environmental nonprofits, including initiatives to offset its carbon emissions; and Dering has never taken a dollar from equity investors, while the company has been profitable since the first year. “The other significant input that my travels infused was a desire to be free,” says Dering. “To not have rules about when or from where one has to work. Personal freedom and the right to feel like you are your own person was something that I valued, and is a value I extend to my employees.”

Favorite Leadership Tip

“Empower your employees to risk making mistakes by admitting your own.”

Advice for Entrepreneurs

“Green-washing is counterproductive. So is talking down to ‘the other side,’ whether intentionally or otherwise. Solutions come from pragmatic ideas that are set up to succeed on both sides of aisles. Change happens slowly, so it’s better to try to nudge than it is to force. Let’s make friends and show respect for alternate perspectives first, and convince later.”

“Leaders become great not because of their power, but because of their ability to empower others.” —Priyanka Bakaya

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Good Nature Agro Sunday Silungwe, 28; Co-founder and Director of Talent Carl Jensen, 31; Co-founder and CEO Kellan Hayes, 36; Co-founder and Chairperson of the Board of Advisers Chipata, Zambia // Founded 2014 // 26 Employees

company “Increasing African mission smallholder-farmer incomes.”

Good Nature Agro co-founder Sunday Silungwe was born and raised around small-scale agriculture in the Eastern Province of Zambia, and became interested in helping solve the problems that farmers around him faced. He met co-founder Carl Jensen at a design summit in Zambia organized by MIT’s D-Lab. Shortly thereafter, Jensen met Kellan Hayes through UC Davis’ D-Lab, where they were both finishing graduate degrees. Together, the trio created an organization whose priority is to generate lasting income with small-scale farmers. The strategy is multipronged. First, they train local community leaders to become qualified Private Extension Agents (PEAs) who oversee and train farmers throughout the growing season (reducing the ratio of experts to farmers from 1:5,000 down to 1:40). Through the PEAs, the organization also delivers a farmer-friendly loan of seeds and other necessary inputs. At harvest, Good Nature provides a guaranteed market for the legume seed that growers produce. Choosing to produce these high-value crops over traditional cash crops — like maize and cotton — more than doubles farmer income. In the past four years, Good Nature Agro has increased farmer incomes from $115 to $382 per hectare of production. Through its seed business, Good Nature is supplying over 10 legume varieties to Zambia and regional neighbors. The company now sources from 5,000 small-scale farming families.

Surprising Business Lesson

“In the past year, I have learned to fail and accept failure. My culture groomed me to despise failure; when you

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CONSCIOUS COMPANY MAGAZINE

From left: Kellan Hayes, Sunday Silungwe, and Carl Jensen failed, you were the talk of the family or town. So, the natural inclination was either to hold back on good ideas and never try or to watch others take the risk. At the stage that the company has reached, risk is inevitable. We have failed so much that it’s part of the culture to try. The failures have made us stronger, and this lesson has given me hope and the zeal to keep going and growing.” —Sunday Silungwe

Favorite Leadership Tip

“Listen to everyone. Every time I humble myself to listen, I learn something new.” —Sunday Silungwe

Creative Action Network Max Slavkin, 31; Co-founder and CEO Aaron Perry-Zucker, 31; Co-founder and CCO

San Francisco, CA // Founded 2013 // 5 Employees

company mission

“To put artists to work telling stories that matter.”

“We believe that art is the most powerful tool to make change,” say Max Slavkin and Aaron PerryZucker, and their company helps mobilize that power. The two have been friends since preschool, and grew up participating together in creative communities including high school musicals and a ska band. In 2008, Perry-Zucker launched Design For Obama from his dorm room, inviting artists to create posters for the campaign. A few years later, the pair crystalized that idea into a business that runs ongoing crowdsourced social impact campaigns, inviting anyone and everyone to contribute their own meaningful designs on a topic. The company then develops those designs into a range of physical goods, from posters to apparel to home goods, which it sells online and in retailers all over the country, supporting artists and causes with every purchase. Thus far, the team has built a community of over 10,000 people, paid out over $100,000 to independent artists, and raised more than $50,000 for nonprofit partners including the National Parks Conservation Association, the Boys & Girls Clubs, and the Anti-Defamation League. In 2018, Creative Action Network finished the process of raising capital for the first time. “We did it in a new, alternative, mission-driven way we’re super proud of,” says Slavkin. Read more about it at consciouscompanymedia.com/creativeaction.

Aaron Perry-Zucker

Favorite Leadership Tip

“Decisions are made by those who show up.” —President Josiah Bartlet, “The West Wing”

Advice for Entrepreneurs

“Make sure that the way you make impact and the way you make money are the same. Neither should distract from the other; they should be part of the same single good/service you’re providing.” —Max Slavkin

Max Slavkin

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Ecosia Christian Kroll, 34; CEO and Founder

Berlin, Germany // Founded 2009 // 36 Employees

company mission

“To restore the planet and to cultivate a world where all humans live together compassionately and in accordance with nature.”

There’s plenty of money in search advertising, but only one search engine that uses its profits to help restore the environment. While studying business administration, Ecosia founder Christian Kroll already knew he wanted to come up with an enterprise model that could help the world. Traveling to South America and seeing the destruction of the rainforests in Brazil and Argentina left a deep impression on him, and he subsequently read a lot about deforestation and climate change and how beneficial planting trees can be for humans, animals, the environment, and the global

climate. He saw a lot of potential profit in the area of search, and created Ecosia, a search engine that exists to fund tree planting. Since 2009, the company has planted more than 35 million trees and helped close to 35,000 community members benefit from the projects. Meanwhile, the company’s user base quadrupled over the course of the last 18 months. Ecosia also recently became the first search engine legally bound to restore the planet. “This means that Ecosia shares can’t be sold at a profit, decisions can only be made by people involved with the company and in line with our values and in favor of our mission of protecting the environment, and it means profits can’t be taken out of the company or used for anything else but protecting the planet,” says Kroll. “This is not reversible and means that I basically intentionally gave up my chance to be a very rich man.”

Advice for Entrepreneurs

“Find mentors and talk to people who are already a few steps ahead of you. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel and solve everything by yourself. There are people who can help you avoid mistakes by sharing their experiences with you.”

Ecosia’s founder Christian Kroll visiting one of the company’s tree-planting sites in Borneo.

Chandan From left: Wolverton, Fairchild, and Lai

Green Canopy Aaron Fairchild, 48; Co-founder and CEO Sam Lai, 41; Co-founder and Chief Acquisitions Officer Andy Wolverton, 29; Co-founder and CFO

Aceleron Ltd Amrit Chandan, 29; Co-founder and CEO Carlton Cummins, 30; Co-founder and CTO London // Founded 2016 // 21 Employees

Seattle, WA // Founded 2009 // 42 Employees

company mission

“To build homes, relationships, and businesses that help regenerate communities and environments.”

This homebuilding company based in Portland and Seattle is all about a future where net-zero energy homes become the norm, good homes are affordable, communities are resilient and inclusive, impact investors earn profits, and wildlands are preserved. They help make this happen in several ways. First, they build infill homes, replacing underused single-family residences with four or five homes in urban areas. They also run a real estate investment fund that builds these certified green, energy-efficient, and healthy homes for the homebuyer — with some operating on renewable solar power. Finally, they continually educate real estate agents on the importance and value of green building and sustainable housing and engage with the local homebuilding communities and policymakers. Since 2009, Green Canopy has raised $25 million in three funds and is working on its fourth. They’ve sold 140 deep-green homes while recycling about 95 percent of their construction waste.

Favorite Leadership Tip

“A quote from the great Albus Dumbledore: ‘Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.’ It speaks to me about the importance of perspective in doing the deep work of our business and leaning into our mission.” —Andy Wolverton

Cummins

company mission

“To accelerate the global transition to cleaner, more renewable energy usage by creating storage technology that is more accessible to all, thereby enabling more people to participate more affordably in the global economy.”

Lithium batteries don’t just die, they degrade. And when, say, an electric car battery is no longer powerful enough for that application, the current tendency is to throw it away. UK-based engineers Amrit Chandan and Carlton Cummins have a different idea. They’ve developed a technology and a company that can quickly test a tired battery and see how much life it still has in it — and match it to a new application in a second-life battery pack. “We liberate them,” says Cummins. The car battery can help power a house, for example, or an old laptop battery could power a clock. The goal is to introduce lithium batteries to the circular economy, reducing waste by reusing these batteries to produce low-cost energy storage. The two-year-old company currently designs and manufactures advanced lithium batteries that are completely reusable and serviceable. They’re also piloting a build-anywhere philosophy: in April 2018, they stood up a lithium battery-pack production operation in Nairobi, Kenya, that produced 124 functional advanced lithium batteries within one week using minimal equipment and zero specialist training.

Advice for Entrepreneurs

“Value and develop relationships. Think big even when you are small.” —Amrit Chandan

CONSCIOUS COMPANY MAGAZINE

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GLOBAL IMPACT

HOW TO

REINVENT AN INDUSTRY

Evrnu co-founder and CEO Stacy Flynn is on a mission to reinvent the fashion industry using the technique of targeted innovation. Her results so far: technology that turns garment waste into new raw materials.

EVRNU AT A GLANCE Location: Seattle, WA Founded: 2014 Employees: 6 employees, 7 contractors Impact: Evrnu’s process uses 98% less water than virgin cotton, generates 90% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than virgin polyester, and has the potential to divert up to 33% of garment waste from landfills or incineration. Key Recognition: 2018 Fast Company World Changing Ideas Awards finalist; Flynn named a Woman in Innovation at the 2018 World Economic Forum Structure: Social purpose corporation Memberships: Canopy Planet; Ellen MacArthur Foundation Circular Economy 100 (CE100) Mission statement: “We transform textile waste into high-quality new raw materials.”

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BY MARY MAZZONI AND RACHEL ZURER

When Evrnu CEO Stacy Flynn completed her undergrad studies at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology in 1998, the US apparel industry was losing about 100,000 jobs per month. A growing percentage of garment and textile manufacturing was moving overseas, mostly to China, and outsourcing was fast becoming the name of the game. “It was a pretty scary time,” Flynn recalls, “but I put my head down and focused on my career.” After graduation, she landed a job as the North American fabric-sourcing and testing manager for DuPont. She moved on to Target three years later, where she helped the billiondollar retailer start a raw-materials team and begin designing and developing garments in-house. In 2007, she joined Eddie Bauer’s denim development team and found a home in Seattle, where she lived on a houseboat and traveled the world with her denim designers. “I had so much fun,” Flynn remembers, but she soon grew restless and craved a greater purpose in her work. In 2010, a chance assignment

brought her up close and personal with the Chinese garment manufacturing regions that had rocked the industry when she was in college. The horrendous air quality and poor working conditions shocked her, and she began to think about her role in the insatiable cycle of fashion design, production, and disposal. Then a 15year veteran of the textile industry, she took a hiatus in pursuit of a new idea that would turn the system on its head. Her passion ultimately became Evrnu, a startup technology company that breaks garment waste down to the molecular level and turns it into new raw materials. We talked with Flynn to learn more about her story, why she decided to go into business for herself, and her vision for a fashion industry that doesn’t cause harm. You focused on fabric sourcing and development for over 15 years and worked with brands like Target and Eddie Bauer. What made you begin to think differently about the textile industry you’d grown to love?

Stacy Flynn: I came to a point in my career where I wanted to do something more meaningful. In 2010, I connected with a startup called Rethink Fabrics, where I became more focused on the materials we use in textiles. They sent me to China to look for manufacturing sources. Although I’d been to China many times before, this was my first visit to a textile manufacturing region powered mostly by subcontracting. When my colleague and I got out of the car, we stood side by side, but we couldn’t see each other clearly because the air was so thick with pollution. Inside the meeting room, a literal black cloud hung over the heads of the company’s corporate team as we discussed ways to do business together. It shocked me. I traveled through manufacturing regions in China for a month after that, and I began adding up how many billions of yards of fabric I personally created in my career. I was linked to the cause of the problem, and I wondered: if one person can do so much damage unintentionally, what can the same person do to turn it around? That’s when I decided to go back to grad school to get my MBA in sustainable systems. How did your decision to pursue a sustainable MBA influence Evrnu? What problem were you trying to solve? SF: That’s where it all started. When I entered the MBA program at Bainbridge Graduate Institute (now Presidio Graduate School), I was looking to figure out my next move. I started researching the systems implications of how we make textiles and apparel, and I discovered two major things.

First, 90 percent of all clothing is made from either polyester or cotton. Both of these sources require tremendous amounts of natural resources. A T-shirt, for example, requires about 700 gallons of water to produce. Subject-matter experts — people like me — take those fibers and spin them into yarn. We knit, weave, dye, print, finish, and cut them, and we ship the garments all around the world. In the end, global consumers throw away about 15 million tons of clothing every year. The bookends are the problem — the resources needed for fiber, and the waste in the form of a garment. The design challenge was clear. The lynchpin of impact for the textile and fashion system is making new, high-quality fiber from old garments. I thought, “If we can figure that out, we can offer a wide-sweeping, systemic benefit.” How did people respond to your idea for Evrnu? SF: I ran the research by everybody I knew, and everyone called me crazy. “No one’s ever done it.” “It’s going to be really hard.” “It can’t be done.” “If it could be done, someone would be doing it by now.” Then I called my now-business partner, Christo Stanev. He knew the risks, but in the end he said, “We have to try.” In 2014, we took a T-shirt from a solid to a liquid and back to a solid using a syringe. That was our first prototype. Christo joined me fulltime that year, and when we got our first funding in 2015, we were off. How would you describe Evrnu’s business model today?

SF: Christo and I have been working in the textile industry for 20 to 25 years, and we want to be as helpful as possible for the 20 to 25 years we have left in our careers. We committed ourselves to developing sustainable solutions that are powerful enough to render destructive methods of manufacturing obsolete. As we bring these large systems down — with a great deal of empathy — we’re looking to sell fashion and textile companies on new ways of working that are safer, cleaner, and more effective. With that in mind, we started with the process of developing products for brands and retailers that outperform what virgin materials can do naturally. We take cotton garment waste, turn it into a liquid, and create a new fiber. As we use this new textile in garments for a brand, we’re constantly looking for ways to outperform virgin materials. Levi’s, for example, gave us their 511 jean and asked us to duplicate it exactly. They wanted it to look like cotton, feel like cotton, and perform like cotton. We were able to do that, along with some additional performance attributes. That’s our goal. The consumer will gravitate toward a product that looks good, feels good, and performs well. The fact that we’re cutting water by 98 percent compared to cotton or cutting CO2 by 90 percent compared to polyester is in the background. That’s not how we lead. We lead with innovation. What does an apparel brand get by partnering with Evrnu? If you’re not selling textiles, what are you selling? SF: Brands pay us non-recurring engineering fees to develop garment

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programs. Once we have the concept built for a brand, we take the R&D from our development lines and transfer it to a scaling partner who can produce on behalf of the brand. We see ourselves as working on the demand side and the supply side. Although we own the technology to break down this garment waste, we don’t actually produce the product. We are being helpful to existing producers so that they can work with safer, cleaner, and more effective technologies. Some of our brands are hoping to get to retail by the end of next year, so we’re moving as quickly as we can to meet those deadlines. You managed to find a key pressure point on a problem within the textile and fashion industry. How did you develop a business concept that pushes on it? SF: At Evrnu, we’re all about targeted innovation, which is working on systems innovation from within a

wanted to give our industry peers more options to create better products for consumers. No designer I’ve ever met intentionally creates harm. The fashion and textile industry is unfortunately a poorly designed business model, and we wanted to change that. Many people may hear an idea like this and echo your colleagues in saying, “If this could be done, someone would be doing it already.” What motivated you to keep going? SF: Christo moved forward incrementally with the technology. We started with a syringe full. Then we ramped up to a few grams, then a few pounds. Today, three years after we started, we make about 50 pounds of fiber per week. We’re moving very quickly compared to the normal pace of innovation or invention. But still, it’s tough. You’re faced with a lot of rejection from everybody. It’s uncomfortable for people to watch others do things that haven’t

right intention. That’s where we are today. How do you go about tackling these big, bold challenges, and what have you learned along the way? SF: While attending FIT, I discovered I was an extremely kinesthetic learner — I learn best by doing. At Evrnu, we put this into practice with what we call challenge-based learning: we, or one of our partner brands, issues a challenge, and then we take it on. We get people who are not only qualified, but who also have the ability to move quickly, accept failure, and keep going. When you’re building something new, failure is part of the game. We always say that if we try 20 new things in a day and one thing works out, it’s a great day. It’s different from working in a large corporation where the concept of human resources is, in my opinion, an extractive methodology of working with people. We’re experimenting

“IF ONE PERSON CAN DO SO MUCH DAMAGE UNINTENTIONALLY, WHAT CAN THE SAME PERSON DO TO TURN IT AROUND?” system. When I was in China, I could have resigned [myself] to a problem so much bigger than myself or shrugged it off as “just the way the world works,” but I knew I wouldn’t be satisfied with living that. Though I thought about switching industries, I couldn’t imagine finding another job I loved as much. The only option was to try to fix the system from within. Christo and I had so much expertise, and we also influenced the problems we saw in the industry. When we looked at targeted innovation, it came down to addressing the problems that we as industry professionals helped to create. We wanted to take responsibility for the work we did, and we 56

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been done before. Even my dad wasn’t convinced about this technology, and he was not happy when I liquidated my personal retirement fund and turned it into what he said looked like dental floss. I had to say, “Dad, if you saw what I saw, you’d do the same damn thing. You’ve got to support me on this.” Overall, our path is riddled with challenges, but we would have it no other way. Christo and I, along with our team, are a challenge-based organization. We issue big, bold challenges, and then we get the right people who want to take those challenges on. It’s pretty incredible what you can do if you’ve got the right team and the

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with how things work — and how the work we ask of our team can energize them and give them life. Christo and I are in the trenches every day with our team, and we’re all on the same page and pursuing the same mission. How do you rally your team behind your shared vision, even when times are tough? SF: There’s a lot of rejection in this process, but the key is to just keep going — no matter what. Our team knows that if we’re aligned on the vision, our work will scale to the benefit of humanity. The alternative, for us, is not an

STACY FLYNN’S TIPS FOR ENTREPRENEURS

1 Be bold. Don’t be afraid to say and do things you know are right. There’s so much negativity around what can or cannot be done. A lot of people can’t see what you see, and we’ve got so much work to do in the world, this is no time to be timid or afraid. As business leaders, we need to have the collective confidence to do the work that the world needs.

2 Support each other. Generally there’s not a lot of support for CEOs. Very few people can understand what a CEO is up against, because CEOs see everything. They see the fragility of it all, and they also know that if they don’t come across as confident, they can’t inspire confidence from their team or from external sources. It takes a community of people who come together to support each other.

3 Have a mission. Doing good work in the world is a tough game, but it’s a noble pursuit. I hope more CEOs will begin to pick up the mission of doing better.

“There is a direct relationship between my ability to grow myself and my ability to grow my company,” says Stacy Flynn. CONSCIOUS COMPANY MAGAZINE

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option, and that’s really what we hold on to. The sooner this technology scales, the sooner we’ll start to see the impact on global air, water, soil, and ecosystems. That’s the endgame goal, and we recalibrate the vision daily with our team in order to keep people moving on the work. We’ve got this precious new material, but if we put it into the supply chain as it exists today, the system is going to trash it. That reality requires us to not only innovate, but also change our entire supply chain. It sounds like boiling the ocean, but we work in a very formulaic way. We have a formula, and we cycle off that — getting crisper and crisper with each trial. Then, all of a sudden, we have an entirely new

the fastest time from city to city wins. Our quarterly meetings are the same way: we ask the team what they need, get in, think about it, set a budget, and let them keep their foot on the gas for 90 days. We invite subject-matter experts, investors, or whoever can help us think about the problems we want to tackle. It started out as an experiment, and it turned into an incredibly powerful tool to get shit done. For two years in a row, my team finished our annual objectives by about mid-year. Every year I write a 24-month plan, and they blow it out of the water. They move so fast — faster than I could have ever predicted. Allowing people to be in charge of the company’s destiny is really the

How do you show up as a leader in pursuit of your vision? SF: There is a direct relationship between my ability to grow myself and my ability to grow my company. Some days, I’m not so graceful, but I spend a lot of time taking care of myself. I’m diligent about making sure I get enough sleep, eat healthy food, exercise, have down time, and find the right inspiration. I go out to my cabin on the Olympic Peninsula at least once a month, and I hang out with the trees and the water to remind myself why I’m doing this work. I also work with a coach every week who holds me accountable for getting things done for myself and my com-

“WHEN YOU’RE BUILDING SOMETHING NEW, FAILURE IS PART OF THE GAME. WE ALWAYS SAY THAT IF WE TRY 20 NEW THINGS IN A DAY AND ONE THING WORKS OUT, IT’S A GREAT DAY.” system we can demonstrate to the industry. What is your office like? Do you work on laptops or wear lab coats? SF: All of it! Most of our team works remotely. I’m in Seattle, and we have a lab here. Christo has his own lab in New Jersey. We also have a mini production line in the Carolinas, which is an end-to-end demo plant where we build and pull fiber for our partner brands. So, you’re not only building something new and creating a company from scratch, but you’re also coordinating a remote team. How do you make it work? SF: Our entire team spends a week in Seattle once per quarter for what we call our Cannonball meetings. They’re modeled off the Cannonball road race, an illegal road race that runs from Los Angeles to New York. The driver with

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secret sauce. It is very effective in getting us from where we are to where we need to go. We’re doing hard work, but we’re also having a really good time. What has been the biggest key to your success so far? SF: By far, I’m most proud of the relationships I’ve been able to cultivate — not only with my business partner, but also with my team. I’ve worked with some of our team members for over 20 years, and I leaned heavily on my network in terms of building the team and making key connections for the business. When it comes down to it, if you’re aligned around your intention as a group — you create meaningful relationships, and those relationships are solid — you can move the world. Heart and soul will get us from where we are to where we need to go — not money, power, fear, or greed. The only way it gets done is if people are deeply committed to seeing the changes that we intend to create.

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pany. Sometimes that means working through things I don’t exactly want to do, so it helps to have someone who can keep me on track. I’ve got to constantly focus on evolving myself so I can create the kind of company and the kind of technology the world needs to see. What gives you hope? SF: Every day, in some small way, I prove to myself that change is possible — and I hope it will inspire the next generation. If even one child is inspired to use his or her talents for good in the world, I hope I can provide an example that it can be done. It is possible. We need to align our business practices with the natural world, and I hope that future generations are inspired by watching strong leaders take on these challenges and achieve them.

LEADERSHIP

WHAT IS THE

FUTURE OF CONSCIOUS LEADERSHIP? Today’s conscious leaders are evolving past blame, scarcity, and zero-sum-game mindsets. But that’s just the start of the powerful mindset shifts available. BY JIM DETHMER

The world of conscious leadership has changed dramatically in the last 25 years. In 1995, when I first started doing executive coaching and cultural transformation in organizations, hardly anyone was talking about conscious leadership, consciousness, mindfulness, presence, or compassion in the workplace. Rarely did you find an organizational leader or team meditating, practicing yoga or gratitude, or talking about emotional intelligence. Now it seems like every few days a major publication has an article on some aspect of conscious leadership. The top business schools in the US offer classes on the touchy-feely aspects of leadership that are packed and praised. Cutting-edge companies have yoga and meditation rooms and talk openly about mindfulness and being present. Many believe that the secret sauce of their success is relating openly, honestly, compassionately, and consciously. Fearbased forms of motivation are being replaced by a deep understanding that people want to actualize, grow, and develop, including in consciousness and relationship. Old paradigms of leadership are being replaced by new ways of

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leading and living that are proving to be more sustainable on an individual and collective level. We’ve come a long way in the past 25 years. What might the next 25 years bring?

THE TERRAIN OF CONSCIOUS LEADERSHIP At The Conscious Leadership Group, we adapted the following model (originally created by Michael Bernard Beckwith) that maps the terrain of conscious leadership from the past to the present and from this moment to the emerging future. It consists of exploring four states of leadership: to me, by me, through me, and as me. TO ME describes a state of leadership in which people believe that they are victims of people and circumstances around them. They place the locus of control outside of themselves

VICTIMHOOD

RESPONSIBILITY

SURRENDER

TO ME

BY ME

THROUGH ME

Posture: Victim Experience: Blaming and complaining Beliefs: There is a problem. Someone is at fault. Someone should fix it. Key Questions: Why me? Whose fault is this? Benefits: Experience separateness, drama as entertainment, and adrenaline high. Supports empathy towards others.

Posture: Creator Experience: Curiosity, appreciation Beliefs: Problems are here for me to learn from. I created the problem, I can solve it. Key Questions: What can I learn? What do I want to create? Benefits: Personal empowerment. Define your wants and desires.

Posture: Co-creator Experience: Allowing, flow, wonder, and awe Beliefs: I am the source of all meaning I experience. Things are perfect, whole and complete. Life handles all apparent “problems.” Key Question: What wants to happen through me? Benefits: Non-attachment. Unlimited possibility, plenty of everything.

Life happens to me

I make life happen

and think that something “out there” is the cause of their suffering. From this threatened state, they blame, feel helpless, or try to fix the problem temporarily. You know you are in this state if you are dealing with the same issues over and over again or prioritize being right over being curious. BY ME describes a state of leadership where people recognize that they are the creator of their experience. While conditions and circumstances can be difficult to navigate, By Me leaders are not at the mercy of them. They stay open and curious, and learn and find ways to permanently resolve the challenges they face. By Me leaders take 100 percent responsibility

for the results around them. They ask, “How did I contribute to creating this result?” THROUGH ME is a state where leaders surrender their own personal agenda and begin to collaborate with an awareness greater than themselves. They ask the question, “What is life’s greatest expression that can come through me?” In this state, leaders listen for guidance

I cooperate with life happening

unified with everything else. There is no separate “I” in this state. Reliably, one feels in concert with the way the world is and can see the equality of all perspectives. This state is difficult to describe because as soon as you speak about it, you limit what it is. Most people practicing conscious leadership are just beginning to be able to shift from To Me leadership to By Me leadership. To Me leader-

“The conscious leader of the future will be devoted to spending more time cultivating stillness and silence.” and are open to new possibilities life offers. They become devoted to serving the whole world. Curiosity deepens even more in this state and leaders get comfortable questioning all of their beliefs about how their lives and the world need to be. AS ME (which we won’t discuss much here) is a state where the ego has a direct experience with being

ship describes a state where people believe that they are at the effect of conditions. The shift to By Me requires the choice to take radical responsibility for one’s life. Leaders and organizations moving from To Me to By Me choose to end blame and criticism, value learning and curiosity over defending the ego and being right, and speak openly and honestly in a way that invites deep

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LEADERSHIP

AM I READY FOR THROUGH ME LEADERSHIP? It’s important to have mastery over being the creator of your life (By Me leadership) before you decide to surrender to Through Me leadership. We’ve seen clients create unnecessary upset in their lives by skipping over the needed explorations, growth, and integration that By Me provides. You’ll know you’re developing mastery of By Me when: Blaming, criticizing, and complaining about others, circumstances, and yourself have largely dropped out of your life. You are far more interested in learning from any and all people and circumstances than you are in continuing to prove you’re right about your position, your view of a situation, and your beliefs about reality. You challenge all your stories and beliefs and are willing to see that the opposite of your beliefs and stories could be as true. You don’t have much withheld or left unsaid in your important relationships. You are fully revealed, with all your meaningful thoughts, feelings, and wants. You don’t gossip. You live a life of integrity: you make clear agreements with yourself and others, and keep them or clean them up when you don’t. You have replaced entitlement and resentment with appreciation, and have experienced a significant positive shift in your ability to give and receive appreciation. You are comfortable feeling your anger, fear, and grief, and comfortable when others feel their feelings too.

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dialogue and ends gossip. These leaders look for win-for-all solutions and no longer play a scarcity-based, zero-sum game. Fear, in all of its forms, ceases to be the underlying motivator driving individuals and groups. Some key tools for creating By Me cultures are mindfulness, candor, taking responsibility, feeling authentic feelings, and striving for impeccable integrity (to name a few). Collectively, we have work to do to continue the shift from To Me to By Me. It’s no small task to transition from living in victim consciousness to living in empowered creator consciousness. This requires taking responsibility for all the results we create so that we’re no longer passively living at the mercy of people, circumstances, and conditions. Instead, we commit to curiosity and openness, working and living from a spirit of play, and aligning with our zones of genius. We think it is very important to continue to build mastery and transition from To Me to By Me. But as we look to the future of conscious leadership, we expect to see some teams master By Me and thus be ready for a movement to Through Me leadership. The movement from being a To Me leader to a By Me leader is the shift from victim consciousness to creator consciousness, from being passively affected to embracing agency and choice. It is about being a more aligned, free, and empowered self. But it is still from the perspective of self; it’s about me and us: my/our family, my/our company, my/ our community, my/our world. As consciousness expands in individuals and groups in the coming decades, we’ll ready ourselves to focus on Through Me leadership — at least at the leading edge. We’ll shift our

attention from me/us to something bigger. It’s at this point that words let us down and often divide us, so I’ve chosen as innocuous a word as I can imagine: “It.” It simply means there is something beyond the self, something larger and more expansive than me/us. People on this path use words like “the universe,” “god,” “reality,” “awareness,” “love,” and countless others. What they all have in common is that they are not me (though they all include me because I am not separate from It). For the By Me leader, the ego is still very much in the game. We could say that when one moves from To Me to By Me, the self is becoming more mature, evolved, cooperative, and conscious. As one begins to explore Through Me, one gets less and less interested in me and more and more interested in It. The gateway from By Me to Through Me is surrender, letting go. In my experience, most people have to develop a mature self before they can surrender to something bigger. By Me is the development of a healthier me/us. But once a leader experiences a more evolved and empowered sense of self, they often ask, “Is that all there is? Is it just about me/us getting better? Is it just about learning to be a creator who takes responsibility and manifests the reality they want?” I believe that the future of conscious leadership looks like mature, healthy, individuated, and liberated selves aligning in powerful teams, and then taking the terrifying and enlivening risk of surrendering to something bigger than the self (or selves). Surrendering to It — or, dare we say, to love. The conscious leader of the future will be devoted to spending more time cultivating

stillness and silence in order to deeply listen to the wisdom that It has to share. Meditation in some form will not be optional. The conscious leader of the future will surrender to what It wants to do in the world through the leader and her team. For the conscious leader of the future, this is not a weak acquiescence from fear of a higher power, but rather a transformational partnership with something infinitely greater than her biggest idea of what is possible. The conscious leaders of the future will spend time listening, surrendering, and allowing. They will experience themselves less and less as doers, getting things done in the

ly experience wonder and even awe at what is happening around them, and have seemingly limitless energy to play at life and work.

world (and therefore living at an everincreasingly frenetic pace) and more and more as the ones through whom doing gets done. They will experience life not as a victim (To Me), and not so much as a creator (By Me), but more and more as a channel (Through Me). The future of conscious leadership is not for the faint of heart. It will threaten our sense of who we think we are. It will be terrifying at times. And yet it lets us move beyond what we know to create solutions by accessing wisdom beyond our experience. Through Me leaders, the leaders of the future, will see possibilities previously unseen, create aligned teams and organizations that regular-

Jim Dethmer is a coach, speaker, author, and co-founder of The Conscious Leadership Group. He has personally worked with over 150 CEOs to integrate conscious leadership into their organizations. Jim also leads forums for select leaders in Chicago and New York. He has spoken at Conscious Capitalism, the Mindful Leadership Summit, and many other venues. He is coauthor of “High Performing Investment Teams” and “The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership.”

5 PRACTICAL FIRST STEPS TO EXPLORE THROUGH ME LEADERSHIP 1

Examine and explore your relationship to It (the universe, spirit, awareness, oneness, love, god, etc.). Through Me leadership presupposes that there is something going on other than and bigger than you. What is that for you? Do you have a reliable connection with that?

When you think about the word surrender, what comes up for you? What feelings, thoughts and body sensations? Surrender involves letting go, and for many of us letting go is terrifying. A simple practice for experiencing surrender is the practice of consciously surrendering to sleep

each night. Do this by turning off all screens, darkening your room, breathing consciously and deeply, and noticing as you let go and let sleep take you.

Cultivate stillness and silence as a lifestyle. Turn off the TV, music, podcasts, and everything else that fills your life with sound. Sit or walk in silence. Cultivate being still, both on the outside and on the inside. The fertile soil of Through Me is stillness and silence.

Clear up any and all integrity breaches in your life. In Through Me leadership, you are the chan-

nel or vessel, and it is important that the channel be clear and clean. Begin by simply asking, “Is there anything I said I would do but haven’t done?” or “Is there anything I’ve said I wouldn’t do, but did?”

At the end of your meditation practice, ask the simple question, “What does It (love, god, spirit, the universe, awareness, etc.) want to do through me today?” Then sit and listen. Learning to live in Through Me presence involves cultivating the ability to listen to that small voice, those whispers, that intuitive knowing that we can so easily skip over.

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parting thought...

“Nature does not hurry, but everything is accomplished.” — Lao Tzu