Conscious Company Magazine | Issue 11 Jan/Feb 2017

THE WORKPLACE WELLNESS REVOLUTION

CONSCIOUS CO MPANY

FEAR LESS INSERT W

ORD

HERE

23 LEADERS

WILL USE

MORE

HOW

SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS

TO SHAPE THE FUTURE

FOOD | STRATEGY | FINANCE | INNOVATION & DESIGN | LEADERSHIP

TABLE OF CONTENTS

SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS

SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP

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WHAT IS CONSCIOUS BUSINESS?

BY NATHAN HAVEY

10

STOP BEING SCARED OF YOUR LEGAL DOCUMENTS

BY J. KIM WRIGHT

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PIONEERING AN UPCYCLED SUPPLY CHAIN

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

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AVOID MISSION-DRIVEN BURNOUT

BY JESSICA G. HARTUNG

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SECRETS OF A CEO SABBATICAL

BY ERIN WADE

*Cover Story

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STAY SANE IN THE FAST LANE

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THE POWERFUL QUESTIONS I ASKED BEFORE LAUNCHING ZICO

BY MARK RAMPOLLA

WORKPLACE CULTURE

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SPECIAL SECTION: RETHINKING WELLNESS AT WORK*

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7 STEPS TO WELLNESS PROGRAMS THAT WORK

BY NATE KLEMP

46

HOW TO MAKE OFFICE BUILDINGS HEALTHIER

BY KRISTIN MAGNUSON

52

CREATE A HEALING WORKPLACE CULTURE

BY LORI HANAU, WITH JODI CLARK AND LAINIE LOVE DALBY

56

HIRE BETTER CONSCIOUS JOB CANDIDATES

BY MAX HANSEN

THE NEW ECONOMY

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FEAR LESS, ____ MORE: 23 LEADERS WEIGH IN*

68

IT’S TIME FOR IMPACT INVESTORS TO RETHINK RISK

BY KATHERINE PEASE

72

BANQU: A HIGH-TECH SOLUTION TO EXTREME POVERTY

BY RACHEL ZURER

MEET OUR CORE TEAM How would you fill in the blank for 2017?

FEAR LESS, _____ MORE

ACT COURAGEOUSLY

CHIEF EXPANSION OFFICER Aaron P. Kahlow

LISTEN

CREATE

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Rachel Zurer

ART DIRECTOR Cia Lindgren BE OF SERVICE AND TAKE THE LEAP

LOVE CHIEF CULTURE OFFICER Amber Lee Eckert

SAY “YES”

CO-FOUNDER & CHIEF INSTIGATOR Meghan French Dunbar

Issue 11 January / February 2017

COPY EDITORS Robin Dickerhoof Shane Gassaway

WEBSITE GURU Chad Kelsey Bunsun Designs

TAKE YOUR LESSONS TO HEART CHIEF COMMUNITY OFFICER Kate Herrmann

LOVE MORE; ACT MORE; LEAVE IT BLANK!

CO-FOUNDER, STRATEGY, OPERATIONS Maren Keeley TRANSCRIPTIONIST Carla Faraldo

BELIEVE (WE ARE STRONGER THAN WE THINK)

NEWSSTAND CONSULTANT Curtis Circulation Company

BREATHE, LISTEN TO YOUR INTUITION, PURSUE YOUR DREAMS, AND HELP OTHERS

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MEET A TEAM MEMBER

CIA LINDGREN What do you actually do here?

I am the art director and graphic designer for Conscious Company Media. This includes making the page layouts, designing the cover, and creating any promotional material related to the company.

Basically, I set the tone for the ‘looks’ of the magazine and the company as a whole. I love my job here! I get to have a lot of creative freedom, and I enjoy the cycle of a print magazine. It’s very satisfying (and also terrifying!) sending an issue off to press and seeing it on the shelves later in the month.

What’s inspiring you these days?

People who stay true to their values and don’t give up after being defeated. Choosing to stay positive, and not feeding negativity. As far as design: florals, copper and gold, handlettering and geometric shapes!

Favorite quote?

“The earth has music for those who listen.”

— George Santayana.

COMMUNITY SPOTLIGHT

LORI HANAU In almost every issue to date, Lori and her team have written about the shared leadership principles she teaches. As much as we appreciate the wisdom she’s shared with our dear readers, it’s our own real-world interactions with her that leave us wanting to stand on rooftops and sing her praises.

Her warmth, honesty, and commitment to living the ideals she teaches are an inspiration to us all. Turn to page 52 to read her latest, or find her online at globalroundtableleadership.com.

What’s the most game-changing advice you’ve ever given or received?

My dad, Kenneth J. Hanau, always reminded me to never forget that the quality of life begins with building quality relationships.

What resolutions are you committing to for 2017?

To become even healthier in my physical body, reclaiming myself in my martial arts. To read more texts from my heroes, starting with Vincent Harding and Angeles Arrien.

To get myself to Spain and Portugal. Spain has been calling to me for three years at least. I don’t know whether it is the land that is calling me, a person, or something else. But it’s time to go find out!

EDITOR’S NOTE There’s a common idea in our culture today that our jobs are like parasites on our wellness. Think Dilbert cartoons, stereotypes about the evil of Mondays, etc. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, the idea that meaningful work can be a path toward health and fulfillment is at least as old as its converse. Think of the positive connotations of the phrase “life’s work,” or all the ancient tales of heroes who find redemption and glory through some kind of arduous quest.

The opportunity to create a positive connection between work and true wellbeing is one that more and more companies are embracing and exploring, as you’ll see in our feature on Rethinking Wellness at Work starting on page 40. This idea can take some getting used to, and a serious reframing of our expectations from a job. What better time to embark on that journey than the start of a new year, a time of resolutions and renewal?

Perhaps take a moment this month to consider what it would mean if you treated your daily work as an integral part of your health and wellbeing practice, just like eating right, exercising, sleep, or meditation. What would change? What would stay the same? If you find that your current work is supportive of your overall health, celebrate that. And if not, perhaps it’s time to seek something else. Because as we learn again and again with each issue we put together, there’s an inspiring world of companies out there making a profit while leaving the world — including their employees — better than they found it. And that’s something we can all celebrate, every day of the week.

STRATEGY AND MODELS

WHAT IS

CONSCIOUS BUSINESS? Conscious business is different from business as usual in its relationship to purpose, stakeholders, leadership, and culture. Here’s how.

BY NATHAN HAVEY If you are generally interested in socially positive business, then you’ve probably heard at least one of these terms: corporate social responsibility, social enterprises, benefit corporations, Conscious Capitalism, positive business, and more. Whatever the nomenclature, conscious business practices are picking up steam around the world. But what is conscious business and what, specifically, are conscious business practices?

Let’s get one thing clear up front: Conscious business is business. But rather than holding profit to be the supreme purpose of business, conscious business leaders correctly identify the purpose that business serves in society as advancing human thriving. Profit, then, is the fuel that helps companies achieve some piece of this larger puzzle.

“Hold on,” you might say. “Is it really the role of business to advance human thriving? That sounds more like the role of the nonprofit sector, or even religion or government.” Here’s the thing: Business is the single greatest organizer of human effort on the planet — by far. We spend about half our waking adult lives in our places of work. That is way more than school, church, and just about anything else. The sheer number of people-hours business commands makes it the only human institution with the scale required to tackle some of the great obstacles to long-term human thriving. The irony is that many of those obstacles were created by doing business unconsciously.

Does all of this mean conscious businesses make less money? Not at all. In fact, empirical research has demonstrated that conscious businesses end up making more money than their profit-only competitors (check out firmsofendearment.com). It turns out that conscious business is better business all around.

SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS

DEFINING CONSCIOUS BUSINESS Let’s get back to our original question of “what is conscious business?” Conscious business practices fall into four mutually reinforcing disciplines (thank you to Conscious Capitalism Inc. for providing the foundation for this framework):

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PURPOSE

In terms of purpose, the bar for conscious business is much higher than just offsetting negative impacts or “giving back.” Conscious businesses focus on and demonstrate a profound commitment to a specific — usually measurable — purpose beyond profit. This purpose animates the workplace and is meaningful to all who work there. Purpose is not a superlative (becoming the biggest, or the leading) and it is not a growth target. In fact, the purpose is usually far bigger than the company that seeks to achieve it. Conscious businesses are out there solving recidivism, fixing the food system, creating environmentally sound energy, and much, much more.

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STAKEHOLDERS

All organizations have a diverse set of stakeholders without whom they could not function. Rather than holding the interests of one kind of stakeholder to be supreme — shareholders, for example — conscious businesses reject zero-sum thinking and create alignment between the interests of employees, customers, suppliers, communities, the environment, and yes, shareholders.

This demand often spurs gamechanging innovation for the benefit of all. Many specific practices apply to each of these (and other) stakeholder groups, but I want to call out two things in particular: First, the required commitment to environmental sustainability in conscious business is tremendous.

If we screw that up, not much else matters — and the most recent climate science data suggests we are screwing it up in a way that will threaten the survival of future generations. Second, there is also implied in conscious business a real commitment to proactive inclusiveness and diversity. Your stakeholders are not just the people who look and think like you do. We are all in this together, and the relative weaknesses of homogeneous teams are well-documented.

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CULTURE

For conscious business, workplace culture goes way beyond adding a Ping-Pong table in the break room.

Conscious business leaders recognize the profound duty they have to care for their employees like family, and make it their goal to send people home at the end of the day happy and fulfilled. Further, they build their cultures to support the growth of all of their people, professionally and personally. In doing so, they create self-improving teams that

can grow beyond their own personal and organizational limitations.

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LEADERSHIP

Conscious business leaders know that their own personal development sets a cap for that of their organization. Unless they proactively seek out opportunities to develop their intelligence in the emotional (mindfulness), spiritual (meaning-making) and systems (dealing with complexity) realms, and continually raise that cap, their people will be constrained by it and either leave or, worse, settle and stay. Either way, the organization will stagnate.

At this point you may already do some of these things, but not all of them. Does that mean that you aren’t a conscious business leader?

Not at all. There is no right way to do this and there is no official certification for “business consciousness.” Conscious business is a journey without an end, and if your business is willing to work on these four disciplines and improve your embodiment of them day after day, and if your leaders can remain committed to the process as you continually discover where there is more work to do, then yours is a conscious business. If you are on the journey, then thank you for your work. If you are not yet on the journey, today is a fine day to begin.

Nathan Havey is the founder of Thrive Consulting Group, where he has created and facilitates a 52-week online training program to help company leadership teams implement conscious business practices. Learn more at ccmworkshop.com.

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SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS

LEGAL CORNER

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SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS

As business becomes more conscious, so should the fine print. Learn how an integrative law approach can create better legal documents.

BY J. KIM WRIGHT

A few years ago, a friend of mine and her business partner were considering parting ways, and they wanted my help as an attorney. I asked her if they had an agreement that defined their relationship and responsibilities. She admitted that while another lawyer had drafted some documents a couple of years before, she and her partner couldn’t understand the legal jargon and boilerplate language. One document alone had more than 30 pages of fine print. They were embarrassed to admit that they’d been afraid to sign on the dotted line. Now that they were at a crossroads where they needed an agreement, they didn’t know what to do or where to start.

The problem was that the original document hadn’t captured the love and hope inherent in the women’s partnership. It didn’t mention why the two of them had created their business. It didn’t even mention the partners’ valued relationship, except in reference to ways they might be protected if one tried to take advantage of the other. It was a scary document, not one full of possibility.

These women are not alone. Too often, businesses either avoid lawyers or cede their power to them.

In fact, policies, procedures, operating agreements, shareholder agreements, contracts, and organizing documents are all legal documents that should help a business work, but too often, the real agreements and relationships are lost in the legalese.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Just as businesses are evolving to take a more conscious approach, so are many lawyers. Instead of being the obfuscators of information, these “integrative lawyers” are facilitators and problem-solvers who help make businesses work better. They’re the bridge between the legal system and the conscious business.

A conscious approach to law isn’t just about filing some standard papers; rather, it’s about developing legal documents which reflect, support, and honor the conscious culture and relationships among the stakeholders.

In this case, the partners and I backtracked and looked at their agreements from the beginning — those they remembered and honored, which were not even in the documents they’d been afraid to sign. Then, we looked to see how we could handle the current challenges in light of those agreements.

When we finished, their roles were clear. They had a

plan that worked for both of them. Their friendship was preserved. Eventually, ownership of the business transferred to one of the partners. The other went on a long-term international trip. When she returned, she went to work as an employee of the company. It was a happy ending, though with no thanks to the lawyer with the 30 pages of boilerplate fine print.

IF WE’RE FRIENDS, WHY DO WE NEED A CONTRACT AT ALL? Why do you need contracts, even with friends? The short answer is: The unexpected happens.

I once had a business partnership with my best friend in the world. We were planning to work everything out. If anyone had told me that we would get to the point where we didn’t speak, I would have said they were crazy — but that’s what happened. Another friend’s business partner became like a different person upon marrying a man who wasn’t formally involved in the business. It was as though my friend was suddenly in business with the husband, who was proof that opposites attract. And a third friend of mine was managing a business when the owner died unexpectedly at age 52.

Writing down our agreements helps memorialize our understandings — and sometimes what is unsaid but assumed — for the parties involved, plus any others who might enter the picture later (such as heirs or new spouses). Sometimes even the best communicators need to clarify what they really mean. The written words can help with that.

INTEGRATIVE LAWYERS USE PLAIN LANGUAGE My clients’ initial embarrassment about not understanding or signing the original confusing agreement was misplaced. It was the document’s fault — not theirs. In its attempt to cover everything, its boilerplate language didn’t fit anyone. Even with more than 25 years’ experience as a lawyer, I couldn’t understand it, so how could they expect to?

Traditional lawyers insert legal jargon to help a judge interpret an agreement, but integrative lawyers use plain language that puts the power of the agreement back in the hands of the users.

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SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS INTEGRATIVE LAWYERS CAN HELP CREATE A STRUCTURE FOR ENGAGING WITH CONFLICTS AND ADDRESSING CHANGE Contracts become long and unwieldy because lawyers think they have to plan for every possible problem.

Instead, why not create a recipe for how to engage with conflicts and address changes that come up long before they become deal-breakers?

I recently heard a story about the breakup of a business: One co-founder walked into her office and found a letter from a lawyer indicating that the business was dissolving. She had

help restore the relationship (or at least get the problems aired to begin resolving them). The questions will vary by company, but a C-suite might get together and ask: • What has been working well for us? Can we do more of that?

• What do we appreciate about each other and our work here?

• Is there something that is no longer working for one or more of us?

• Is there something we are afraid to talk about?

• Has any recent action or decision surprised or disturbed you?

• Is something outside the company getting our attention?

• Is it time to re-evaluate or redefine our work together?

“Discovering Agreement: Contracts that Turn Conflict into Creativity.”

FIND A LAWYER WHO SHARES YOUR CONSCIOUS APPROACH … OR AT LEAST UNDERSTANDS IT A lot of conscious businesses get frustrated with their lawyers. Many attorneys don’t understand the underlying values and commitments of a conscious business. If that’s the case in your business, it’s probably time to look for another lawyer — because there is a more conscious approach to law. The integrative law movement’s holistic, system-based approach is preventive and oriented

“A conscious approach to law isn’t just about filing some standard papers; rather, it’s about developing legal documents which reflect, support, and honor the conscious culture and conscious relationships among the stakeholders.” no clue that the other co-founder was dissatisfied! Those partners had no structure in place for having hard conversations. There was no plan for addressing problems before they reached the crisis stage.

The purpose of a conflict-andchange process is to set out a system to interrupt a situation before it escalates. Too much focus on legal documents, policies, and procedures can be a sign that something isn’t working with the relationships in your business. Sometimes businesses pass more rules to try to control behavior rather than exploring the underlying motivations for it. Don’t lean on your legal documents and create new rules when a face-to-face conversation is what’s needed.

One good practice to prevent such a fate is to set up weekly or monthly check-in meetings for key staff.

Kristin Scheel, a lawyer in Austin, TX, refers to these as “Conversations for Connection.” When the parties feel like they’ve lost connection or when the relationship is stressed, she has a series of questions that 12

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In many ways, being in business together is like being married. The process can trigger deep hopes and fears. Conflicts are inevitable, so you need a foundation for resolving them, something short of dissolving the company or heading to court in the business equivalent of divorce.

An integrative lawyer can and should help create that process.

CONSIDER A CONSCIOUS CONTRACT Conscious contracts, also known as values-based contracts, integrate conscious business values with legal provisions. They’re living, breathing documents. If two parties work together every day, changes to their agreements can be constant and responsive to the changes that will happen in any business. At the same time, the agreements help provide safety and predictability. A good resource for learning more about conscious contracts is an American Bar Association book by Linda Alvarez:

CONSCIOUS COMPANY MAGAZINE

toward meeting your needs from a broader perspective. Integrative lawyers can help you avoid pitfalls and legal traps while bringing clarity and workability to your relationships.

Many integrative lawyers are trained in conscious business (and may even be running their own firms from a conscious framework). Interview your lawyer to make sure they have a holistic, preventive, and coaching approach to law practice. If they don’t, find one who does.

J. Kim Wright is a pioneer and leader in the integrative law movement. A digital nomad since 2008, she trains integrative lawyers around the world. She is the author of two American Bar Association books: “Lawyers as Peacemakers” and “Lawyers as Changemakers.” Find her at jkimwright.com, and learn more about conscious contracts at consciouscontracts.com.

SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS

RESPONSIBLE SOURCING

Photo: Meredith Jenks

PIONEERS OF AN UPCYCLED SUPPLY CHAIN

Co-founders Mark Ramadan (left) and Scott Norton.

Scott Norton, co-founder of Sir Kensington’s condiments, discusses the tricks and rewards of transforming outputs to inputs.

SIR KENSINGTON’S AT A GLANCE Location: New York, NY Founded: 2010 Employees: 33 Impact: Over 100,000 pounds of aquafaba diverted and upcycled in 2016

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ntil 2014 or so, the liquid by-product from cooking chickpeas was a waste product like any other. But then a French chef discovered that the humble liquid had amazing properties that helped it act like eggs when whipped. Aquafaba, as it came to be known, turned into an internet sensation among vegan foodies, and now, less than two years later, it has a Facebook group and a cookbook dedicated to it, and even a commercial product made from it. That’s the story behind Fabanaise, a new egg-free mayo from New York-based condiment maker Sir Kensington’s. What was once waste is now a resource in the commercial supply chain. We talked with the business’s co-founder and CMO Scott Norton about the challenges and rewards of pioneering a new supply chain from another company’s leftovers.

Fabanaise is the first commercial product to use aquafaba, the waste liquid from cooking chickpeas.

SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS Does Sir Kensington’s have a mission?

Scott Norton: Our mission is to bring integrity and charm to ordinary and overlooked foods. Every word in that statement has meaning. By “integrity,” we mean the way our ingredients are sourced. As any chef will tell you, you can’t make great food without great ingredients. That’s absolutely true for what shows up in grocery stores, too. Big food companies don’t necessarily think like that; they’ve spent the last 70 years trying to

an environment that, if we don’t treat it well, won’t be around anymore.

We really try to think long-term as a company.

From an intentionality standpoint, our focus on sustainability is more on thinking about how food is so crucial to human health and nutrition and how it can be medicine or poison. Our products mainly provide flavor, but we believe that anything we can do to bring attention and excitement to real food and allow people to have intimate experiences with nature through food is something we’re proud of.

SN: The first challenge was knowing who we could even talk to. We knew that aquafaba was being poured down the drain by different companies, specifically hummus makers, but we didn’t know where they were, we didn’t know who they were. And there are many ways to make hummus, some of which create aquafaba and some of which don’t.

We went to Elly Truesdell, who is the local forager for Whole Foods in the Northeast, our home region, and she put us in touch with Chris Kirby, the founder of Ithaca Hummus. His

“YOU HAVE TO BE SURE THAT PEOPLE AREN’T GOING TO BE GROSSED OUT THAT A WASTE PRODUCT IS GOING INTO FOOD. THAT’S WHERE WORDS LIKE ‘UPCYCLING’ COME IN.” reduce the costs and, ultimately, reduce the quality of the products they’re selling in order to maintain a certain profitability margin. Luckily, American food is changing for the better right now. There’s an opportunity to bring integrity to it, and a market and an audience that’s really excited about that.

When we talk about “charm,” we mean that food is nourishment, yes, but it’s also entertainment. The charm that we bring is the flavor, the sensory experience, and the fun and the whimsy that come with our brand — the fact that our boss is a cartoon character.

“Ordinary and overlooked foods” are ones that haven’t yet changed or that haven’t had any inspiration breathed into them, ones that have gone forgotten over time. Our flagship products like ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise are part of that overlooked group of food.

What about sustainability? Is that explicit in what you do?

SN: I wouldn’t say it’s so much explicit as it is implicit. We are, first and foremost, makers of food. We certainly have a value of stewardship and an understanding that we exist in 16

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How did you first get the idea to use aquafaba in a Sir Kensington’s product?

SN: Our innovation started with the question, “Can we deliver classic mayo flavor without the use of eggs?”

After trying a bunch of recipes, two of our summer interns in 2015 came across an article by Food52 about this new ingredient aquafaba that was being used to make meringues and icing.

We wondered, “Could we use this as an emulsifier to create mayonnaise?”

That was the first spark that compelled us to go into the kitchen.

After many, many trials and a lot of work, we were able to get the texture perfect. In order to add the savory flavor that egg yolks carry and aquafaba does not, we ended up adding kombu seaweed to create something that was wholly up to our standards. Though, of course creating a benchtop sample is different from creating a commercial recipe for grocery stores. That really began our quest to learn about how we could discover and generate a supply chain for aquafaba.

What was the first challenge you faced in getting this supply chain set up?

CONSCIOUS COMPANY MAGAZINE

company was young, nimble, on board with what we were trying to do, and also really liked the concept of upcycling waste products. They were keen on the concept and game for the idea.

When you hear that something you’re pouring down the drain could not only be used to make real food but you also have the potential to sell it and make revenue from it, it’s a win-win.

From there, we were able to work in partnership with him to understand the food safety issues, the education issues, the ingredient issues, the logistical issues — all the things that need to come into play to actually secure the supply chain.

You found a partner. What happened next? What did you need to do from there?

SN: First, when you think about any supply chain, in food or in other categories, you need to consider three big things: dependability, scalability, and consistency. A traditional product will be manufactured to a spec [specification]. Waste products that come out of that process aren’t being managed to spec. When a waste output is becoming an ingredient — an input — it absolutely has to be up to spec. Likewise, it’s got to be scalable

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OTHER “FOUND FOODS” COMPANIES TO KEEP AN EYE ON + their founders’ tips for spinning gold out of straw

REGRAINED

>> San Francisco, CA >> Founded 2013 >> 4 employees

The US beer industry uses more than 6 billion pounds of grain every year, but only a small fraction of those ingredients end up in the beer itself. ReGrained’s mission is to help urban craft breweries make better use of that brewing process by-product.

The company “harvests” used grain from breweries to create energy bars — but that’s just the start of its vision. The company is also partnering with the US Department of Agriculture to conduct research on how best to scale their operations to find other productive uses for that grain. “There have been local examples of brewpubs and bakeries using grain left behind from beer production to enrich breads, crusts, cookies, and those types of things, but this has all been at a small scale,” says co-founder Dan Kurzrock. “We’re trying to build a platform between the urban brewing industry and local food systems.”

FOUNDER’S TIPS: “For your food to be successful beyond the novelty of a

great idea, it actually needs to taste great,” Kurzrock says. “We need to make the right thing the easy thing for people.”

BARNANA

>> Santa Monica, CA >> Founded 2012 >> 25 employees

Bananas are the most wasted food product in the world, and organic banana farmers lose up to 20 percent of their yield simply because it cannot be sold when the fruit is, to be blunt, ugly. Organic snack-maker Barnana buys bruised, scuffed, or overripe bananas from farmers in Latin America and turns them into high-energy dehydrated snacks. The company upcycled 11.7 million bananas in 2016.

FOUNDERS’ TIPS:

“One of the hardest things for us was to find partners that not only share in our vision to end food waste on banana farms but also possess the capabilities to scale with our rapid growth,” says Barnana co-founder and CEO Caue Suplicy.

Co-founder and CMO Nik Ingersoll’s advice to future supply chain pioneers: “Diversify, diversify, diversify your sources, and do it early.”

COFFEE FLOUR >> Seattle, WA >> Founded 2014 >> 20 employees

Every coffee bean that goes into brewing every cup of coffee in the world grows surrounded by an outer layer of fruity pulp called a “coffee cherry.” Until recently, producers left coffee cherries to rot in piles as they processed and exported the beans. But since 2014, Coffee Flour has been turning the pulp from cherries into a high-protein, high-fiber, gluten-free flour that can be used in baked goods, chocolates, energy bars, hot cereals, and more. To date, the company has removed 38 million pounds of coffee pulp waste from farms in 8 countries via its 23 mills, creating a new revenue steam for farming communities.

FOUNDER’S TIPS:

“The hardest part of creating a new supply, for us, was convincing the coffee mill operators to treat the pulp waste with the same regard given to the green beans,” says Coffee Flour founder Dan Belliveau. “Don’t assume you figured it all out at the start, and know that you will need to be flexible and patient and adjust accordingly. Also, make sure you take the time to consult and listen to those who are in the field every day. They will be your best allies and will be key to any successful supply chain.”

SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS over time. Before, if all you were doing was creating hummus or creating one final product, maybe you weren’t focusing so much on your output of the waste. Now it’s much more of a balance. There has to be a plan in the future for the growth of this ingredient. You’re looking at selling multiple products, and thinking of these by-products as an input, so that has to be scaled and managed.

A second area, and this is incredibly important in food, is safety: good manufacturing practices and hygiene all the way from start to finish. We worked with Chris to design a system, looking at FDA guidelines and everything like that, to make sure that, even though this was a waste product, it was never treated as something that could be contaminated.

That’s a conceptual shift, but it’s also very matter-of-factly a physical shift in how the ingredients are treated.

A third element is knowing how to tell the story. You have to be sure that people aren’t going to be grossed out that a waste product is going into food. That’s where words like “upcycling” come in, which can be universally lauded as a good thing. You have

to understand, from a communications standpoint, who is your audience, and what is the best way to convey this message so that it’s received in a positive light that’s inspiring and that builds people’s curiosity? Also, very importantly, the message needs to be in line with what the hummus brand is all about and what the Sir Kensington’s brand is about.

In our case, what could be more ordinary and overlooked than the water from a can of chickpeas that gets poured down the drain? Making sure that you have a really considered way of sharing the story is the final element of that supply chain.

Has this new product using the aquafaba evolved how you think about sustainability in your business?

SN: Definitely. Creating great products that are enjoyed by the market, that’s downstream innovation. What this allowed us to do was think about upstream innovation. For the first time, we’re now looking at our company as having the potential to rescue more waste ingredients, to build

supply chains from scratch, and to do more of that upstream innovation.

What I don’t want to do is overpromise and under-deliver. I can’t say that we’re going to become a company overnight that is repurposing waste ingredients. But now it’s one more color in our palette.

Do you have any other specific lessons that you’ve taken away from closing this leak in the cosmic supply chain? Any other advice for someone who either is setting out to do this or, like you guys, discovers that there’s an opportunity for it?

SN: In supply chains in particular, tenacity is key. There’s no catalogue that you can page through to find useful waste products. You’re going to have to be flipping stones looking for these little gems. With the first couple of stones you flip over, you’re not going to find what you want. It really requires the inner geek and also the inner socialite to get to know people who are doing interesting things, to learn about their process, and to just keep experimenting.

Images: Sir Kensington’s

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CONSCIOUS COMPANY MAGAZINE

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

SELF CARE

HOW TO RECOGNIZE AND PREVENT MISSION-DRIVEN

It’s easy for mission-driven professionals to push themselves so hard that they become exhausted. Here’s how to recognize the signs of burnout — and keep it at bay.

BY JESSICA G. HARTUNG

We’ve all been there: That feeling you get when you’re so overwhelmed, all you want to do is… nothing. That feeling has a technical name — burnout — and it occurs when we’re over-worked, overtired, and generally over it. Mission-driven leaders, who tend to be highly motivated, passionate, and over-committed, are even more at risk of burnout than the average person. They push their limits and exhaust themselves precisely because they care so much.

isolation, and a diminished sense of personal accomplishment, including a loss of finding meaning in your work. Burnout can be short-term, meaning temporary and situational, or long-term; it can even become a life pattern.

“Mission-driven” burnout occurs when an admirable personal commitment to making a difference in a specific area results in chronic over-doing because inadequate resources are available to match the individual’s vision.

WHAT IS BURNOUT?

THE PHASES OF BURNOUT

Burnout depletes our emotional, physical, and mental capacity and, over time, our durability.

It’s a psychological term describing the cumulative negative results of chronic stress, being overwhelmed, lack of rest, and perceived pressures beyond one’s ability to manage. Consequences of burnout include emotional and physical exhaustion, reduced performance, cynicism, loss of interest and energy for activities you once enjoyed,

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For us mission-driven leaders and professionals, preserving one’s ability to serve effectively is an issue of sustainability, health, and long-term impact on the causes we care about. Many of us find our identity is closely tied to our productivity, which causes an even deeper upset within the cycle of burnout. You may recognize the phases leading up to burnout described here.

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

Everything’s a top priority. You’re overextended, overdoing it, and feeling trapped.

You feel like you’re “going through the motions” to get through the day. You may feel detached and critical. Others notice.

Energy is diminishing, physical fatigue is increasing, and shame and doubt arise because you can’t do it all.

You feel joyless, spent, hopeless, and powerless to change your state, as well as empty inside and too exhausted to think about anything but escape.

How does this progression of burnout impact your work? The passion and drive that have led you forward in your mission-driven business will be overshadowed by tension and being overwhelmed. Your communication with others may become short-tempered, unclear, and inconsistent. The consequences for you, the mission, and your co-workers aren’t pretty.

HOW TO PREVENT BURNOUT Here are specific steps you can take to keep burnout at bay and give you a chance to renew your drive, energy, and focus so you can better support your team and give positive energy to the mission that matters most.

SCALE BACK TO MOVE FORWARD

STOKE YOUR NATURAL ENERGY

NARROW AND MODERATE YOUR TASKS

CELEBRATE YOUR TRIUMPHS, NO MATTER HOW SMALL

The first step in avoiding burnout involves balancing your deep commitment to a mission with a sense of realism for what you can actually accomplish in a given timeframe. Scale back work so that the volume of high-priority items isn’t draining your effectiveness. Be nicer to your future self, and stop overcommitting! What would happen if suddenly you were only able to work half of your current hours?

Use this thought experiment to explore what’s essential and what’s optional. Renegotiate and release non-essential commitments to create a set of priorities you can succeed with.

Of the remaining priorities, how can you narrow the scope and moderate the level of effort each one requires? Setting resource-appropriate intentions can remove a lot of pressure and set you and your team up for success. Identify the highest-leverage aspects of each priority so the effort you put forth really has meaning. Accomplishing multiple objectives with one move is a strategic way to condense the effort required to achieve progress. Use the impetus for self-preservation to focus on the few items that will have the biggest impact. Your projects will also benefit from streamlining. Reset team expectations and collaborate as you explore multiple options in order to find a sweet spot of impact within a doable scope.

Some activities fuel you by increasing your energy and motivation at work. What brings you joy in your professional life?

Adding a daily dose of joyful activity is critical for reducing the impact of burnout.

A 2009 study by Tait D. Shanafelt, et al., from the Mayo Clinic finds that clinical professionals who spend just one day a week focusing on the type of work they most enjoy reduce burnout by half. Where’s the joy in your work? How can you spend more time doing that — starting this week?

Appreciating your progress thus far gives you a boost to continue the journey. List three to four accomplishments you’ve achieved in the past month. How can you acknowledge that progress? Gratitude and appreciation are powerful allies for mission-driven leaders at all levels.

Use these tools the next time you’re feeling over-worked and stressed so you can preserve your ability to serve.

Jessica G. Hartung is the founder and CEO of Integrated Work, a company that partners with mission-driven organizations to apply leadership development in everyday work experiences, accelerating impact and achieving measurable results. Building customized, real-time, applied leadership development systems for executive teams is their passion. They help clarify focus, co-design strategic options, provide tools and mentorship, and build leadership capacity to accelerate positive impact. For more resources for renewing yourself and avoiding burnout, visit integratedwork.com/resources and its sister site, workthatmatters.com.

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PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

LEADERSHIP

Secrets

of a Successful C.E.O. Sabbatical

I discovered a surprising truth about taking three months off: It actually improved my company.

BY ERIN WADE

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CONSCIOUS COMPANY MAGAZINE

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT When flight attendants run through their pre-departure safety spiel, they emphasize that parents should always put their own oxygen masks on before placing them on their children. The point: As tempting as it is to take care of the people you love first, if you don’t take care of yourself, you’ll ultimately end up useless to those around you. About a year ago, I felt like I was on a spiraling plane with my business when it occurred to me that I had been trying to put the mask on everyone around me while simultaneously lacking enough oxygen to breathe myself. My co-founder Allison Arevalo and I had been going hard for six straight years with our busy macand-cheese restaurant, Homeroom — opening first a sit-down restaurant, then a take-out location; writing a best-selling cookbook; growing from a staff of 15 to nearly 100; and having two kids each in the process. I was exhausted.

With the business’s success its demands grew, and I couldn’t imagine taking time away. I was the CEO, and yet I was enjoying work less and less with each passing day, and everything in my life was suffering as a result.

I tried throwing money at the problem by seeing a therapist to help me manage the stress, an executive coach to help me better manage my team, and a marriage counselor to soften the

impact my anxiety was having on my family life. Ultimately, on a weeklong vacation to Mexico, it hit me: The problem wasn’t that I needed to work harder on solving these challenges; it was that I needed to work less.

No matter how many professionals I paid, what I really needed was a break. A big one.

I came back from that trip and told Allison that I wanted to take a threemonth sabbatical. She started to cry. I had touched a chord somewhere deep inside her. She was exhausted as well, but had never given herself permission to think about taking that kind of time away from work. The more people I have spoken to about this, the more I’ve found that her reaction is not unique. So many of us love what we do so much that it consumes us to the point where we feel like it’s strangling us. We can’t breathe. We need an oxygen mask.

Allison and I talked it through some more and soon agreed that I’d take a break first and then she’d take one after me. My team and I spent the next few months developing a set of incredibly thorough plans and tracking mechanisms for each key leader and department. The goal was to keep everyone proactive and on track, and have an easy way for me to see everyone’s progress and hop back in when I returned in a few months.

Despite our best efforts, an unanticipated legal change arose right before it was time for me to depart, requiring us to rapidly rework a lot of our systems in order to comply. I worried about leaving the team, and felt guilty going off to recharge while they were left to pick up the pieces.

Despite numerous sleepless nights and my first full-blown panic attack, I went anyway.

In my first week away, I suffered from bouts of insomnia and would let unfinished business haunt me somewhere between the hours of 2:00 and 4:00 in the morning. I began to grow concerned that I would spend the next three months in an uncomfortable abyss somewhere between being at work and being away — reaping the full benefits of neither. Then one day I was walking down the sidewalk in Oakland when an employee spotted me from across the street. She ran over and gave me a huge bear hug.

The first words out of her mouth were, “Erin, I am so proud of you!”

She told me how much she admired me as a leader, and thought it was so inspirational that I was taking this kind of time for myself. In all my fear that my employees would view my sabbatical as a form of abandonment, I had never contemplated that they might actually view it as inspirational or as the mark of a true leader, one

WADE’S TOP TIPS FOR TAKING A SABBATICAL

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Treat personal wellness as your business’s most valuable renewable resource.

Don’t wait for the right time — there will never be one.

We often view sabbaticals or vacations as time that we aren’t working, without considering that when we don’t recharge we lose our energy, creativity, and ability to give our best to our business.

As with having children, there is never a great time to take a sabbatical from work. Do it anyway.

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You are not as important as you think you are.

If you have built a company of lasting value, it should involve a robust team of people who can operate for an extended period in your absence. If you haven’t developed that team, planning for a sabbatical is a great excuse to start. If you do have this team, taking one is a great way to empower them.

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4 Push yourself.

When my kids were born, I only took one month off work. For my sabbatical, I took three.

Use this opportunity to challenge yourself to better define what a truly meaningful break would look like.

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It’s funny I carried so much guilt over leaving everyone alone for so long, because it turned out to be one of the most empowering things I’ve ever done as a leader.

who is willing to trust her team. I was showing that I was willing to live the values of a company dedicated to the wellbeing of all the people who work there.

After that conversation on the sidewalk, I felt a weight lift and finally gave myself permission to fully embrace this opportunity. I pledged not to check my email and set it to a three-month away message. It felt freeing to not be connected to my phone or computer. I split my time between travel and staycation — making time for all the activities that my busy life usually doesn’t allow.

For the first time in years, I was sleeping like a baby every night. I rekindled friendships and made new ones. I devoured books. I surfed in the middle of the week. I felt like a new person.

The only problem was, I didn’t want to go back to work. I felt like I could keep going like this for a year before feeling truly recharged. In the week leading up to my return, I felt a rising sense of panic, and my insomnia returned. I was so distraught that the night before I was set to go back, I went out on a bender with a friend and did not return home until 2:00 in the morning. I am a mother of two young children who averages one drink a week and is often in bed by 9:00 p.m. This was not exactly what I would call normal behavior.

Exhausted and slightly hung over, I dragged myself out of bed the next morning and stumbled into the office.

What I found when I got back surprised and energized me in a way that I had never imagined. My team was working in a way that was profoundly better than it had been

at any other time in the company’s history. The first meeting I had was with my right-hand team member, and one of the first things she told me was that she had patently ignored one of the things I’d told her to do before I left — however, she’d ultimately accomplished the same objective using a completely different approach. I was elated. It became clear in that moment that my absence had empowered her to become an even better leader — one capable of accomplishing clear objectives we shared, but on her own terms. As I walked around the office, I saw this theme play out not only in her work, but in that of many others.

With me taking a step back and putting my trust in my team members, they were finally able to shine and show what they were capable of. I returned to a well-oiled machine that was able to do a lot more operationally without my input, freeing me to do more of the big-picture growth work that I thrive on and that is of greatest value to the company, but which I had previously found minimal time for.

It’s funny that I carried so much guilt over leaving everyone alone for so long, because it turned out to be one of the most empowering things I’ve ever done as a leader. It strengthened my team, and it sent a strong message about important leadership attributes — the value of self-care, balance, and how to retain long-term commitment to a job that you love.

Not only was work a different place, but I made the conscious decision to change my relationship with the time I spent there. I found that the thing that brought me the

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greatest joy on sabbatical was surfing multiple times a week. I brought this practice back with me and blocked off my schedule three mornings a week to hit the ocean before work.

This means that I work less, but I’m more productive and happy during the hours I’m there.

In a matter of weeks, I was feeling energized by work in a way that I hadn’t in years. I stopped attending a lot of the meetings that had eaten up my time because I realized they could be handled without me. I stopped being involved in a lot of the details that had consumed me before so that I could focus more on the big-picture growth work that I love. In less than a month I secured a new location for a future restaurant — throwing myself fully into something that only a few weeks earlier I hadn’t even been sure I wanted to return to.

Even though while I was on sabbatical I didn’t feel like I was getting clarity on anything, when I returned to work it was like everything in my life just clicked. I wish that I had realized earlier in my career how life-changing taking a few months off could be. But all I can do now is make it a permanent part of my life moving forward and try to make it something available to those in my company as well.

I am now a full-fledged sabbatical zealot, preaching the gospel to everyone I meet. As a positive side-effect, now every time I’m on a plane and see the flight attendant going through the motions about the importance of putting on an oxygen mask, I’m the one person on the plane nodding in full agreement.

Erin Wade is the co-founder and CEO of Homeroom, a restaurant dedicated to the best food on earth: macaroni and cheese.

Homeroom has been featured on the Cooking Channel and the Travel Channel and in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and more. Erin co-authored the best-seller “The Mac and Cheese Cookbook.” Her tips on people-centered leadership appeared in CONSCIOUS COMPANY Issue 10. Reach her at ewadewriting@gmail.com.

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CONSCIOUS COMPANY MAGAZINE

BANG W E ’ RE S TA RT ING 2017 O FF WITH A

THE NEW YEAR BRINGS FRESH AND EXCITING INITIATIVES FOR THE CONSCIOUS COMPANY MEDIA TEAM. JOIN US FOR ONE (OR ALL!) OF OUR LIVE FIRST QUARTER OFFERINGS: Free Webinar: Storytelling Around Purpose - January 25, 2017 Free Webinar: Finding Work with Meaning - February 8, 2017 Free Virtual Event: The Essentials of Building a Conscious Business // For more information, visit consciouscompanymagazine.com //

LESSONS FROM FAILURE

Starting a company can unleash our worst demons — even kill us. So we need to shift the culture of entrepreneurship and create a new definition of success.

SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP

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n some ways, Sheryl O’Loughlin is the classic social-entrepreneurial hero. Her resume is beyond impressive: She was CEO of Clif Bar and Company where she helped launched the Luna bar, was co-founder and CEO of Plum Organics, spent several years as executive director of Stanford’s Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, and is now CEO and president of fast-growing functional beverage brand REBBL. Yet despite all her apparent triumphs, the demands of the high-pressure world of entrepreneurship had a terrifying dark side, as her need for control internalized into a serious eating disorder. She was only able to recognize and acknowledge the depth of her illness after she stepped away from the business world for a while — a break she thought would be permanent.

Now, in her new book, “Killing It: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Keeping Your Head Without Losing Your Heart,” she shares an intimate chronicle of the most challenging period of her journey, a time when she and her family lost all their savings and more on one failed business even as she wrestled with the enormous challenges of getting her startup, Plum Organics, off the ground. More than a confessional tell-all, her book is a call to arms for entrepreneurs everywhere, a rousing plea to shed the harmful myths and illusions that leave so many entrepreneurs feeling isolated and broken. “The entrepreneurial world is a vibrant one, holding incredible promise and light,” she writes. “But at the same time, it has a dark side, too, just as the courageous people who populate that world do. The key is knowing how to keep the dark at bay while letting the light lead.”

We talked with O’Loughlin about why she wrote the book and what she thinks needs to change about the sometimes-toxic culture of entrepreneurship in order to allow a new, healthier definition of success.

Tell us the story of how you decided to write this book.

Sheryl O’Loughlin: When I was teaching at Stanford, I saw all these students — young entrepreneurs, some of the brightest people out there — with stars in their eyes. But the reality is that 99 percent of businesses fail. What I began to realize is they’re not seeing the dark side.

There’s so much money there, right in the middle of Silicon Valley. There are investors walking the halls every day, billionaires walking into the dorms, billionaires teaching classes.

The media likes to talk about the success stories. What you don’t hear are the ramifications when things go wrong. And you don’t even hear the ramifications when things go right, as they did with me, by the traditional “success” letter of the law. But there’s a lot of backstory behind that, and I wanted to get that story out to entrepreneurs all over the world.

In my day, it was consulting that everyone went into. Now it’s entrepreneurship. This story has got to get

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out. People have got to understand, women and men, that there is a lot of dark behind the light, and I want them to understand so they can hopefully follow a different path, or at least be conscious of the path as they’re going through it.

I think about this like a pregnancy book. There’s no way somebody can describe to you exactly what it’s like being pregnant and having a child.

But pregnancy books are so needed, because they help prepare you to know what’s potentially coming.

They let you say, “I’ve heard this before. This is not something that’s wrong with me. This is what every woman goes through.”

You talk about “shifting the cultural norms of entrepreneurship.”

What does that mean?

SO: I want us to support each other as a tribe of entrepreneurs, to be able to share what we’re going through and know how important that tribe is, right from the beginning. Not after the fact, not when we’re in

CONSCIOUS COMPANY MAGAZINE

recovery from being entrepreneurs, but before the fact. The funny, dirty little secret in the background is that among everyone who’s been through entrepreneurship, there’s this talk like, “Oh, I went through that.” “Oh, I went through that, too.” We call ourselves Recovering Entrepreneurs, because we’re able to reveal to each other, after the fact, what the dirty little secrets are.

Granted, you can’t tell your struggles to everybody, but my God, there’s a huge tribe of entrepreneurs; we can tell them to each other. The great tribe test is, can you cry in front of these people? I want entrepreneurs knowing that it’s okay to cry and that we need that kind of support. That support makes us stronger, not weaker. It makes us stronger as entrepreneurs, stronger as CEOs for our companies.

Taking it one step further, I want investors and boards knowing this [openness] is not something you have to fear. You should walk in and say, “One of the first things we need to help our entrepreneurs with is

CEO and entrepreneur Sheryl O’Loughlin suffered from an eating disorder in part due to the pressures of startup culture.

“We forget that it’s biology. It’s not a machine, it’s people. It’s human. We need to bring humanity to entrepreneurship.”

Photo: Sarah Marcella

SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP

O’LOUGHLIN’S TOP THREE PIECES OF ADVICE FOR MISSION-DRIVEN ENTREPRENEURS

1 // Know your purpose and vision, and make the right choices to support them.

It’s so easy, when the money is out there, to just take the money when you desperately need it. I know how much pressure there is to do it, but the choices that you make in the beginning have a ripple effect in what happens with the company in the long run. Be very vigilant and conscious as to what the next steps are, especially in regards to money.

2 // But be willing to pivot.

As founders, sometimes we get so bull-headed on our vision that we don’t see that things in the environment are telling us that we need to adjust it. We think that the first vision is the vision. It’s important for entrepreneurs, especially in mission-driven companies, to listen to the signals, whether from our employees or from the market. What Steve Blank says so beautifully is that a startup is not a company; a startup is an experiment in order to find a sustainable, valuable business model. And so we need to remember in our startups, we’re just trying to find our proof of concept to make a company. Adjust your vision over time as you ebb and flow and learn, without walking away from your core principles and purpose.

3 // Be conscious of your role in building a culture right from day one.

As soon as you hire your first employee, you have an impact on culture. A lot of times as you’re in the beginning of a startup, you’re pushing so hard to make it happen, just to get a proof of concept, culture kind of goes by the wayside. But it can’t, because it’s happening whether or not you’re conscious of it.

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getting them a third-party person they can talk to — like a business therapist — who can help them through the hard times. It’s not a frivolous spend. It’s an essential spend for the strength of our company.”

We talk about how essential it is to the survival of our companies for our entrepreneurs to be thriving, yet we do exactly the opposite of helping them thrive. We berate them. We say that it’s all about making the money. We push them to the point that they absolutely have nothing left in them. We push the companies to the point that they’re breaking before we put enough money into them to hire people, because we want to keep costs down.

It’s ludicrous. We do everything the opposite of what companies need to do to thrive. Yeah, I want to change the goddamn culture around it. It is not healthy.

SO: It wasn’t a difficult choice. It’s hard knowing that I’m going to welcome people judging it and judging me because of it. But my point is not the eating disorder itself. The demons could be divorce. The demons could be drug addiction. The demons could be depression. The demon has been suicide for many people.

I knew that I needed to share my own demon to help people be able to recognize potential demons in themselves. The point is to watch for the demons.

In the book, I talk about Dr. Michael Freeman, who’s done this groundbreaking study, “Are Entrepreneurs Touched with Fire?,” where he’s the first to find that there’s a correlation between entrepreneurship and things like ADHD, depression, drug abuse.

Entrepreneurs — we’re bull-headed. We’ll push through

“‘Help’ is the most powerful, empowering word we have.”

What would it be like if companies had this kind of [investing in mental health] philosophy going in?

It doesn’t say, “Be frivolous with our money.” That is not what we’re saying. I couldn’t be more conscious of how important cash is. I’ve started companies, I’ve run companies, I know how important it is.

But that doesn’t mean that you take everything away from the living, breathing people and biology of this organization that’s being started.

We forget that it’s biology. It’s not a machine, it’s people. It’s human. We need to bring humanity to entrepreneurship.

Why was telling your own story about your eating disorder important, and was that a difficult choice to make?

CONSCIOUS COMPANY MAGAZINE

anything to make things happen.

But we get so focused that it could be at the expense of life itself. The thing that pushes us a lot of times to be great — the other end of the spectrum is that dark side that can so easily come out if we’re not really conscious of what we’re going through in the ride. It’s this combination of genetics, put together with personality, put together with an extreme situation that causes the explosion to the dark side. Entrepreneurship in and of itself, with the extreme ups and downs that happen on a day-to-day basis, and all the people who are counting on you to make it a success, is the perfect place for that explosion to happen.

The culture has to change to make it so that explosion doesn’t happen.

SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP What scared you the most about this project?

SO: When I started writing this book, I had not found REBBL yet.

I had moved up to Santa Rosa, in wine country, and I was going to teach entrepreneurship at Sonoma State and just work on boards of companies. I was done with the dayto-day. When I started writing this book, I wasn’t running a company, and so there was a low fear about it.

But I discovered REBBL. I started to take over as CEO, having the time of my life because now I know how to do this right, especially being in the right headspace for it, not having my self-worth wrapped up in it. I was fundraising, and as I started taking on investors, I started thinking about the day that I would have to tell them about the content of this book. That day just came two weeks ago.

I still had some fear, like “What are they going to think knowing this about the CEO running their company?” I’m recovered, but still, it’s part of my story. Would that scare them?

It didn’t scare one of them. It just reinforced to me how incredible my board and my investors are. In fact, they said, “Listen, Sheryl. We all are here knowing we’re building a very different kind of company, and these are stories that happened and we support this kind of story coming out. We think it’s really important.

Other entrepreneurs need to know about it, and again, this is all part of our story of building a different kind of company together.”

Mark Rampolla — who founded ZICO Coconut Water and runs the fund Powerplant that was the lead investor in our last round (see page 36) — said to me, “I don’t care if for some reason this causes our return on investment to be a little bit less. This story is a real story, it’s important, and we’re doing something different with this company.

We said if we have a commitment to doing better for the world, who

knows what that’s going to mean in the long run, but this is our commitment. It’s all part of our story.”

That’s the response I got on this.

But it scared the bejesus out of me when I was getting on the phone to tell them.

What are the most harmful norms or myths that you’ve seen in the entrepreneurial community that you would love to banish?

SO: As entrepreneurs, we’re constantly selling. We’re selling investors on this vision of something that doesn’t exist. We’re selling our employees to come work for our companies when we have virtually nothing to pay them. In the food and beverage world, we’re selling co-packers to manufacture our products when it’s not worth their time at all to do so because our runs are so small.

We sell a dream. That’s an important part of what we do. But the myth that comes along with it is that entrepreneurs are all this masculine energy of, “We will make anything happen. Nothing goes wrong. Everything is perfect.” We can’t let anyone see a crack. That’s impossible. That’s inhuman, and we’re human beings. Under the surface, there are cracks. I want to blow that hard exterior away, to the extent that we can have some realness in this world.

I’m not condoning that you go out and you tell everyone, “Here’s everything that’s going wrong with me. Wow, I don’t even know if this shit’s going to work. I have no idea!” We do need to sell. You’ve got to believe in yourself. No one’s going to believe in you if you don’t believe in yourself as the visionary of the company. But there needs to be another way to support each other

Photo: San Francisco Business Times

O’Loughlin near her lowest weight.

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O’Loughlin with her husband, Patrick, and her sons Connor and Gavin (pictured at ages 5 and 8).

and we need to support the emotional, physical, and mental health of our entrepreneurs through the process.

It’s about finding a way to bring that support on the back end, knowing that we’re dealing with humanity.

By the way, for us as entrepreneurs, growing a business is knowing that our people are experiencing an extreme amount of pressure every day, too, and they need our support. One of the biggest things I talk about in my company now, REBBL, is help. The word “help” is seen as a scary word; it’s seen as a sign of weakness. I want to get rid of the weakness around that word. “Help” is the most powerful, empowering word we have. I say to my teams, “When you need help, you better tell us you need help. And we’re 34

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going to honor that and everyone will step in to help you.” The problem is when you don’t say you need help, and then there are huge ramifications for you and the company.

What do you think is better or worse about these challenges and mental health issues in the social entrepreneur community, as opposed to the entrepreneur community at large?

Is it better or worse for people on a mission, from what you’ve seen?

SO: Wow, that’s a very interesting question. There are goods and bads.

Mission-based companies like [Clif, Plum, or REBBL] attract people that are a little bit more emotionally and spiritually connected, because we

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believe so much in the purpose behind what we’re doing. I don’t have any scientific evidence behind this, but I think there’s probably more ability to open up and connect with each other, and, especially as we’re starting the companies from the ground up, more of the ability to build it in from the start.

At REBBL, we were started by a nonprofit, Not For Sale, to fight human trafficking. I’ve been so attracted to this company and so passionate about it, it’s almost as if I started it, because it’s been so steeped in that [culture of connection] from the beginning.

REBBL is such an essential part of this story because of the joy that it’s giving me, in terms of realizing again

SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP how there can be a better model for creating the foundation of a company out of pure purpose, how there can be a better way to have investors in your company, how there can be better ways to run a company with employees that really believe in the meaning behind their work, where we honor each other and help each other, and we can still create a killer company in terms of the growth we’re experiencing right now, but doing it in a way that doesn’t at all walk away from our principles.

It’s a story that now is ending in terms of really understanding what it means to have found my self-worth and still [be] building a freaking amazing company. Not just in spite of it, but because of it.

The hard thing is that there are

about you. Here’s the evidence I have which is making me worried about you. How can I help?” Even if your founder can’t hear it, hopefully if more people are willing to come forward, they’re going to hear it over time. It probably took seven people to tell me that I had anorexia for me to accept it, but it did sink in.

If the founder is completely falling apart, at the end of the day you owe it to the company to tell someone else, maybe a board member that you trust, somebody who’s going to be able to help make the message clear.

Everybody goes down if the founder goes down. And the founder could lose everything. In some ways, you need to take a long-term perspective going in. But it’s hard.

One other thing: I start conver-

all-in. But, my God, understand who you are as a person, what’s important in your life.

If that company goes down — because 99 percent of them are going to; we all think we can beat the odds, but those are some pretty big odds against us — not to be negative. At the end of the day, you can come out the other side knowing that you’re still a very good person, and that your self-worth is about who you are and the gifts you bring to the world and the gifts in your life.

It’s not about one company and one situation.

Hold on to your self-worth. And if you don’t have the self-worth to begin with, don’t start a company.

Find your self-worth first, then start a company.

“Hold on to your self-worth. And if you don’t have the self-worth to begin with, don’t start a company.

Find your self-worth first, then start a company.” probably still a lot of skeptical people who would say these mission-based philosophies are not generating strong businesses. Obviously, we’re starting to prove that wrong, with more and more companies doing exceptionally well in any kind of bottom line you look at — some of the highest performing companies out there. But there’s still skepticism, and there are investors who might be going into these kinds of businesses because they see the financial results but aren’t really willing to understand what it takes to be with an emotionally and spiritually connected company.

sations by trying to take someone’s defenses down by saying, “I want to share with you something that is very hard for me to share, and might be hard for you to hear. Do you give me permission to say something in a very transparent way?” Have the founder accept the responsibility that they have allowed it to come in.

Then they’re mentally prepared that something is coming that they really need to hear.

What about employees in the startup? A lot of your message is, very rightly, towards founders and entrepreneurs who have the whole weight on their shoulders, but what would you say the rest of the small team can do, for example, if they’re worried about their founder?

SO: The company can’t be your self-worth. My self-worth was so wrapped up in Plum that I almost lost everything as a result. “Everything” being, if it went too far, my life. And it ain’t worth it. There are so many more things that are so important.

I want to rewrite the definition of success. I know it’s very hard for new entrepreneurs because you want to be all-in, and I agree that there’s an importance of being

SO: What’s important is to be able to sit down with the founder and — this is really hard — say, “I’m worried

What is the number one message you would love to get across to founders or potential founders and entrepreneurs?

What’s giving you hope?

SO: About five months ago, I said to my two boys — they’re 16 and 13 — “Guys, do you think that woman entrepreneurs could be as strong leaders as men?” And they looked at me kind of stunned. They both said, “I don’t understand the question.”

For them, now, there is no difference between women and men in terms of leadership. Both are just as capable. They have more women role models as leaders than men. That’s a beautiful thing. They don’t see all the barriers that we’ve seen.

So, finally, maybe we can move to a place where our companies have the true diversity that has been proven statistically [to be beneficial]. Especially when women are running companies or are part of a management team, the companies are more profitable as a result of it.

We have results on this shit, excuse my language. Our kids now are actually believing that in their core. That gives me huge hope in terms of what this world could be like.

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GETTING STARTED

THE POWERFUL QUESTIONS I ASKED BEFORE LAUNCHING ZICO MARK RAMPOLLA

How do you know if your conscious startup idea is a winner?

Try asking these powerful questions BEFORE you dive in.

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TURNING ON THE IDEA MACHINE

EVALUATING THE OPTIONS

In the winter of 2003, I was a young mid-level executive with International Paper and so bored [at a conference] that I wondered what I was doing with my life. The truth was that I had thought a good deal about joining a startup, probably as the general manager or CEO who took over from an entrepreneur with a brilliant idea.

Over the last 10 years, I had become confident in my business skills. I was the guy who could build and lead teams, develop strategies, execute plans, reach goals, get things done.

I could see myself taking a company from $1 million to $10 million, or $10 million to $100 million, or maybe even $100 million to $1 billion. But in those dreams, I never cast myself as the founder, the person who had come up with the new idea.

Then a good friend said something simple that hit me like a lightning bolt: “The only difference between you and an entrepreneur is an idea, and you are as capable as anyone of coming up with one.” Why had I been telling myself that I wasn’t creative or smart enough to come up with an idea? With my friend’s simple observation, a switch flipped in my brain, and I couldn’t turn it off even if I wanted to. I suddenly couldn’t stop thinking of new business ideas. I was an idea machine.

My wife Maura was happy that I was feeling so energized and excited. Of course, I knew that whatever business I pursued, I needed and wanted full buy-in from her. So one evening, a couple of weeks into my manic brainstorming, I brought out my ideas notebook. She read aloud idea after idea: consolidating the dairy industry in Central America, shopping malls in Honduras, clothing manufacturing in Colombia, ecotourism in Costa Rica, exporting chocolate from Belize, trucking. “I don’t want to squash your excitement for becoming an entrepreneur,” she said, “and I have no doubt if you decided to launch one of these businesses you could succeed. But if we’re going to mortgage our lives to launch a business, it needs to be something we can both be passionate about. What about having fun, traveling to great places, making a positive impact on the world? Where does that fit into any of these ideas?”

I looked back at my list, scanning it for ideas by which I could redeem myself. As moneymaking business ventures, I could make the case for all of them, but I could now see that they were hollow — and might lead me and us to the same exact unfulfilled spot I was in now. Maura was reminding me

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that the right idea had to have a motivation deeper and higher than just typical business success and money.

BRAINSTORM BETTER

BY ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS After a few weeks of dreaming and reflecting together, I was ready to revisit business ideation from quite a different starting point. Instead of brainstorming potential gaps in different industries, I made a list of screens, worded as questions, by which I could filter out business ideas that would not have a chance of passing what I started to call the “Maura test.”

Adapted from “High-Hanging Fruit: Build Something Great by Going Where No One Else Will” in agreement with Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Mark Rampolla, 2016.

SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP

PERSONAL SCREENS First were personal screens, questions that rose out of the conversations we had had on our walks together — our individual values, histories, and interests. These screens wouldn’t apply to everyone but they were critical to us, informed by what we had reflected on and determined as most important to us. We were now taking ideation way beyond dairy and trucking.

Was a business idea consistent with our values and lifestyle, and did it contribute to our personal goals and dreams?

YES

Would it directly and positively affect lives beyond ours?

YES Keep Thinking!

NO If we were successful (or not), would our daughters be proud that we had started it? Would they be interested in working there someday?

YES

Would the world be better off if we succeeded?

Could I commit to this for the long term?

YES

Would we think the project was worth it even if we failed?

YES

YES

NO Would it keep us tied to the region we loved; in our case, Latin America?

Would it have a positive (or at least neutral) environmental impact?

YES

YES

MARKET SCREENS

The second set of screens were classic MBA-style ways to evaluate the potential and viability of a business.

Is it audacious?

Is it a big idea that captures our hearts and those of others?

YES

YES

YES Time for a New idea

NO Is it new TO the worlD or at least different from what’s out there today?

Could we attract top talent and rally employees, investors, and customers around it?

Could we differentiate?

YES

Is it something we were excited to talk about?

YES

YES

NO Would it have strong growth potential?

Does it have high gross and profit margins?

YES

YES This could be a winner!

With these two sets of screens, we now had a framework to evaluate the many ideas I was generating, which only stimulated more. I compiled all of my ideas in a spreadsheet, and then evaluated them individually against the screens, which gave us context and common ground to discuss them. These screens also helped me avoid suggesting ideas that would never pass the Maura test. Coconut water was on the list from the beginning, but only by developing and using these screens did it eventually rise to the top.

Mark Rampolla is the cofounder and managing partner of Powerplant Ventures, which invests in emerging growth companies that intend to remake our global food system to deliver better nutrition in more sustainable and ethical ways. He was the CEO of ZICO Beverages from 2004 until 2013, when it was purchased by the Coca-Cola Company.

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@

it’s gone way beyond FitBits

WORKPLACE CULTURE

RETHINKING

WELLNESS WORK @

W

ellness at work is big business. The Global Wellness Institute (GWI) estimates that the global workplace wellness sector represented $43 billion in revenue in 2015, up more than 6 percent since 2011, despite the fact that only 9 percent of global workers have access to some type of workplace wellness program at their jobs. According to IBISWorld, the US share of that corporate wellness market was $2.9 billion in 2016 and will hit $9 billion by 2018. Meanwhile, from 2010 to 2015, 72 percent of US employers purchased screening services to identify employees’ health risks, and intervention services to promote healthy lifestyle choices. Most employers, especially large corporations, see investing in employee

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health as a strategic choice that can yield a substantial return on investment.

Yet despite the encouraging facts and trends, as a rule, wellness is not a strategic focus or a core value of most organizations. Instead, wellness initiatives — usually targeted toward mitigating risk of physical disease and disability — tend to launch as tacked-on HR initiatives in isolation from the day-to-day operations of a company. As the 2016 GWI report puts it, “They are merely a ‘Band-Aid solution’ and do not address the root of the problems.” Only 27 percent of respondents to a GWI and Everyday Health Inc. (EDH) survey believed that their employer offers workplace wellness services because it actually cares about their personal wellness. Other studies have shown participation rates ranging from 5 to 46 percent for specific wellness program components, and very limited employee use of Employee Assistance Programs (5 percent) to help cope with stress, substance abuse, and mental illness. Yet 71 percent of respondents to the GWI-EDH survey said they have a “somewhat or very high” level of stress at their jobs.

Luckily, a growing number of experts and companies have begun to redefine what wellness at work can and should mean. The process often starts with a key change of terminology from using the word “wellness,” which tends to evoke mostly the state of one’s physical health, to the word “wellbeing,” which implies a dynamic and active state of flourishing across multiple domains.

“Physical wellbeing is really important,” says Eileen McNeely, a researcher at Harvard’s Center for Health and the Global Environment, “but there’s a whole other piece that has to do with the emotional and spiritual aspects of wellbeing. We’re seeing a mind shift to focus as much on the other aspects as on physical health.” According to the GWI-EDH survey, for example, companies that employees do perceive as caring are five times more likely to encourage taking time for self, pursuing hobbies, and socializing, and three times more likely to encourage or offer meditation.

McNeely is the co-director of the Sustainability and Health Initiative for NetPositive Enterprise (SHINE), a Harvard school of public health program that helps corporations measure and accelerate the ways in which they help the world become a healthier, more sustainable place. She and her team have identified three major ways companies are rethinking what “wellness at work” means.

WORKPLACE CULTURE

WORK AS A PLATFORM FOR WELLBEING

“A new question employers are asking,” says McNeely, “is, ‘How does your work and workplace enhance your overall quality of life?’ This is not just at an individual level, but involves understanding what organizations can do to support a more meaningful, humane, respectful world.” Examples of acting on this new perspective include the practices — common in conscious business — of infusing purpose and meaning into work, understanding and addressing employees’ key basic needs, and deliberately building in company cultural practices that enhance the social connectedness of team members.

THE IMPORTANCE OF METRICS

“You manage what you measure,” McNeely says, “so it’s really important to understand how to move the needle.

We already know from research that worker wellbeing influences family wellbeing and has community impact.

We need good metrics to connect dots between what employees do at work, their quality of family life, and the wellbeing of the region.”

In 2013, SHINE and McNeely worked

HEALTH IS A FORM OF SUSTAINABILITY

Another change McNeely is seeing is that enlightened companies are thinking of employee wellbeing not as an isolated risk-mitigation or HR responsibility, but as part of a larger commitment to sustainability. One of the SHINE member companies, industrial manufacturing giant Owens Corning, recently moved its 16,500-person employee wellness program into its sustainability department, for example. “Sustainability as a movement has grown up focused around the environment,” McNeely says. “We suggest putting health and people at the center of

that. We need people to be filled up and nurtured and flourishing to care about the environment, and human capital is as important to sustain and regenerate as environmental resources are.” When companies see employee wellness and environmental sustainability as two sides of the same coin, they can begin to see how a commitment to keeping both sets of stakeholders healthy and productive in a holistic sense is vital to long-term business success.

As the GWI 2016 Future of Wellness report so eloquently puts it: “In the future, more employers will treat wellness [or wellbeing] as a top strategic concern at the highest levels of leadership. Businesses will focus on creating a culture of wellness — an environment in which employees are valued, all their different dimensions of wellness are recognized, and they are supported to develop healthy habits and lifestyles.

In fact, more organizations — whether for-profit or mission-driven — will link their business objectives explicitly to human capital and creating a culture of wellness.”

The following articles offer a variety of examples, perspectives, and lessons on how experts are rethinking wellness at work.

The 5 Pillars of Wellbeing FINANCIAL

4

Are you effectively managing your economic life?

5 COMMUNITY

Do you have love and strong relationships?

3

PHYSICAL

Do you like what you do and how you occupy your time?

2

SOCIAL

Career

1

with Johnson & Johnson to build a survey to measure this new kind of wellbeing at work, which SHINE is now deploying in partnership with other companies, including through the whole supply chain of Levi Strauss and Co. One of SHINE’s key lessons so far is that combining metrics that measure mental, physical, and psychosocial wellbeing of workers with business metrics such as retention, absenteeism, productivity, and performance is essential to successful management of a holistic wellness program.

Do you have enough health and energy to get things done every day?

Are you engaged with the area in which you live?

Adapted from “The Five Essential Elements of Wellbeing,” by Tom Rath and Jim Harter, Ph.D., Gallup Business Journal, May 4, 2010

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WELLNESS @ WORK

7 STEPS TO CREATING A SUCCESSFUL CORPORATE WELLNESS PROGRAM You know you need one. But how can you make sure it’s really a success?

BY NATE KLEMP

If you look at many of the most innovative and exciting new companies, you will see a common thread — they all have programs designed to cultivate employee wellbeing.

This is well-known about tech companies like Google, Airbnb, Facebook, and LinkedIn. But it’s also increasingly true of more conventional employers like Target, General Mills, and Aetna.

WHY INVEST IN EMPLOYEE WELLBEING What all of these companies understand is that beyond simply being the right thing to do, investing in employee wellbeing results in a wide array of benefits.

• Decreased healthcare spending: Healthier employees have fewer physical and mental complications that may require medical attention.

• Increased productivity: When employees are more focused, less stressed, and more engaged in their work, productivity rises.

• Increased retention: In a competitive recruiting environment, investing in employee wellbeing helps bring in top talent and ensure that top-performing employees stay.

In my work with major law firms and consulting firms, for example, I have seen changes such as the following take place in as little as four months:

• A shift in the company net promoter score from −41 to 28 • A shift from 28 percent to 62 percent of employees saying they are committed to staying at the organization • Increases in life satisfaction, work engagement, work performance, and overall wellbeing The ROI of employee wellness programs has also been demonstrated through a number of larger-scale studies. In a 2010 Harvard study on 36 workplace wellness programs, researchers found that for every $1 spent on wellness programs, employers saved $3.27 on healthcare and $2.73 on costs related to lost productivity and absenteeism.

So the question is no longer whether your company should invest in these programs, but how. In particular, how can you create an employee wellness program that takes full advantage of these benefits?

WORKPLACE CULTURE While each industry has a unique set of needs, there are seven core principles we at LIFE Cross Training have identified for how to maximize the effectiveness of your corporate wellness program.

1 // COMMUNICATION This one sounds obvious, but it’s the reason many wellintentioned programs fail. Design an internal marketing campaign to give your employees information on the logistics of the program. Clear communication about the benefits of the program (see below) can go a long way toward ensuring that you achieve high turnout and enthusiasm.

5 // CREATE COMPANY-WIDE HABITS We have found that the most powerful way to promote wellbeing across an organization is to create daily habits that offer all employees a chance to experience these benefits.

For example, you might share things you’re grateful for at the end of company meetings or institute a five-minute daily pause or some other habit. Creating these kinds of company-wide rituals serves two purposes. First, it gives employees permission and encouragement to focus on training the skill of wellbeing. Second, it gives everyone in the organization a reminder to turn these practices into regular habits. After all, if the goal is lasting change, it’s essential that the practices of wellbeing aren’t just experienced during a one-day offsite event or a workshop. To really offer lasting impact, they need to become daily habits.

2 // LEAD WITH BENEFITS Rather than pitching your program in terms of practices — learning to meditate, do yoga, or cultivate mindfulness — lead with the benefits: increasing productivity, becoming more resilient to stress, or achieving peak performance. The fact is that most people aren’t all that interested in sitting on a chair with a straight spine and following their breath for 10 minutes. But almost everyone is interested in achieving greater levels of focus, productivity, and resiliency. So it’s important to highlight the benefits of engaging in these programs at every step of the way.

6 // IDENTIFY A GROUP OF EVANGELISTS Find the people in your organization who are most excited about setting up a program like this and ask them to lead the work of spreading the word about the program and promoting its benefits. These evangelists can help with marketing efforts and even with facilitating events and workshops. They will also create an internal “buzz” about the program that can go a long way toward motivating others to participate.

3 // CREATE A PHYSICAL SPACE

7 // MAKE IT OPT-IN

Designate a room in your office for wellbeing. This could be a yoga, meditation, or wellness room, for example. By creating a physical space for wellbeing, you give employees a place — free from the distractions of their desk — where they can take a short break from work to move, breathe, or meditate. This separate space can serve a number of different functions. If you hold regular meditation or yoga classes, it can serve as a meeting place for the group. But it’s also the ideal place for your employees to go to experience just a few moments of rest and relaxation in the midst of their day, which will in turn allow them to come back to work feeling more focused, engaged, and energized.

Perhaps the most important thing you can do in setting up a wellness program is give your employees a choice. Forcing wellbeing on your organization is a recipe for disaster.

If your employees feel that they have to do this, they will likely begin to feel resentful and will become disengaged in the program. The fact is that creating new, more productive habits requires that employees enter the program with an intrinsic desire to change. We have found that giving them the power to choose is the best way to spark this kind of inner motivation.

4 // BUILD IN PERMISSION The implicit norms of most organizations preclude taking time out of the workday for individual wellbeing. We live and work in a culture where constant “doing” is rewarded by approval and status and where taking a moment to simply “be” feels like slacking or being lazy. Because these norms are strong, it’s important for leaders and managers to affirm their own willingness to invest in wellbeing, model that behavior by taking time themselves, and offer explicit permission to their employees to take this time. If this kind of formal and informal permission is not clearly communicated, you will likely find that employees feel reluctant to take advantage of wellbeing programs or even feel timid about using a meditation or yoga room.

Work for yourself? Find the “Top 3 Health Hacks for Freelancers” on the CONSCIOUS COMPANY website.

Nate Klemp, Ph.D., is a writer, philosopher, and entrepreneur.

Along with Eric Langshur, he is the co-author of the New York Times bestselling book “Start Here: Master the Lifelong Habit of Wellbeing.” He is also the cofounder of LIFE Cross Training (LIFE XT), a program designed to give individuals and organizations the tools to train the skill of wellbeing. It’s based on the idea that just as we can train the body for increased fitness, we can train the mind in the habits necessary for experiencing increased productivity, focus, and resilience to stress.

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WELLNESS @ WORK HOW TO MAKE OFFICE BUILDINGS

HEALTHIER

BY KRISTEN MAGNUSON

Office buildings can and do affect our health — after all, we spend a third of our lives at work. Here are some techniques companies are using to build healthier work spaces.

Photo: Perkins+Will

WORKPLACE CULTURE

A

mericans spend, on average, 90 percent of their time indoors. We work, learn, eat, play, sleep, heal, shop, exercise, and rest inside. So it shouldn’t be surprising that a growing body of scientific research makes it clear that the way buildings are designed, constructed, and operated matters to our health. The air inside a building, the water and light it provides, the materials it’s made from, and the overall impression it gives can affect the physical and mental health of its occupants. No company looking to support the wellness and wellbeing of its employees can ignore the challenges and opportunities that the physical workspace offers to positively impact the health of the people inside.

THE TREND TOWARD HEALTH AND WELLNESS IN BUILDINGS Thankfully, the mainstream real estate industry — including the architecture, design, and construction sectors — is embracing health and wellness in a meaningful and unprecedented way. Building owners and design teams can now use rating systems, including the International WELL Building Institute’s WELL Building Standard and the Center for Active Design’s Fitwel certification, that are informed by medical research in order to guide the design, construction, and operation of buildings toward promoting occupant health and wellness. Furthermore, the most popular green building standards are updating materials section requirements to focus on human health impacts in addition to environmental impacts. The International Living Future Institute — which runs the Living Building Challenge, the world’s strictest green building standard — maintains a popular Red List of carcinogenic and otherwise harmful chemicals that should be avoided in building products and materials. And the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark (GRESB) recently added a Health and Well-being Module to

its annual assessment tool.

While green or sustainable buildings are related to healthy buildings, they are not synonymous. Instead, the trend toward health and wellness in the real estate industry is a complementary counterpart to the green building sector, which emphasizes the environmental impact of buildings instead of their effect on occupants. Yet by pushing the envelope for sustainability in the built environment, the green building industry has opened people’s minds to what a building is capable of and conditioned us all to expect more out of our buildings, which in turn has paved the way for the healthy building movement. Now, in just a few years, the healthy building movement has seen a higher adoption rate than green building did at the same early stage.

HOW TO MAKE WORKPLACE BUILDINGS HEALTHIER These specific strategies to promote health and wellness can work in both new and existing office buildings.

1

PRIORITIZE NATURAL LIGHT

Lighting, both natural and artificial, is a great place to start improving a building’s influence on health for occupants. Lighting is critical for facilitating vision, but also influences our bodies. Humans evolved outdoors, under natural cycles of light and dark, exposed to everchanging light quantity and color spectrum throughout the day. This exposure turns out to be intergral to the body’s regulation of hormones that keep key processes related to alertness, digestion, and sleep functioning properly on a 24-hour cycle known as the circadian rhythm.

Unfortunately, most indoor electric lighting typically provides one light level at a constant light temperature (color). Typical fluorescents, ubiquitous in office buildings, have

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WELLNESS @ WORK particularly poor color distribution and do not render colors accurately.

Lighting is especially important because of its relationship to facilitating or hampering healthy sleep.

Somewhere between 50 and 70 million US adults have a chronic sleep or wakefulness disorder, which is associated with increased risk of diabetes, obesity, depression, heart attack, hypertension, and stroke. Better lighting in workplaces could help.

Start by doing what you can to bring in natural light, which will benefit the entire human body. Be careful to ensure, however, that daylight will not cause discomfort to the visual system in areas with computer screens or where critical visual tasks are performed. To diffuse lighting, use light or medium-toned mesh shades that will let light in even when shades are down, and move them up and down as the light changes. You can also install special blinds that throw light onto the ceiling, or install standard curved blinds upside down. For taller glazed windows, consider using a light shelf at about 7 feet 6 inches to redirect light onto the ceiling. There are also several new dynamic film technologies that can be applied to existing windows that change to allow different amounts of light in. Ensure computer screens and writing surfaces close to windows are properly angled; 20 degrees away from the vertical plane of the nearest window is a good rule of thumb. In new buildings, make sure architects are considering the relationship between window sizing, depth of the building, and building orientation to get the perfect balance of comfortable natural light.

Living walls help indoor air quality.

2

IMPROVE ELECTRIC LIGHTING

Photos: FME Architecture + Design

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Although electric lighting is no substitute for daylight, there are several design choices that will result in a superior electric lighting system that minimally disrupts our biology. Select bulbs and lamps that have high color rendering index (CRI) values and high R9 values; the latter number indicates how well the lamp will display warmer tones, including skin. Consider using tunable LED lighting capable of varying in color temperature throughout the day to mimic the changing color of outdoor light and a system that automatically dims electric light in response to available daylight. If changing the whole lighting system isn’t possible, start by improving task lights at work stations. If possible, involve a lighting professional in selecting lamps and fixtures, as not all bulbs are created equal.

Make sure to properly shield electric light fixtures — no bright, bare bulbs — to prevent eye strain and blinding; have you ever looked directly at a light and then seen dark splotches for minutes after looking away? Avoid fixture placement that could cause direct

WORKPLACE CULTURE

glare on computer screens. And select finishes for the ceilings, walls, and floors with high reflective values to contribute to even lighting distribution.

Employees can also protect their eyes from their computer screens using glasses that block harmful blue light or by installing programs like f.lux that automatically adjust light intensity and screen color temperature based on time of day and year.

3

TAKE STEPS TO IMPROVE INDOOR AIR QUALITY The air inside buildings has a tremendous impact on human health. It’s not unusual for indoor air quality (IAQ) to be worse than outdoor air quality.

Think about it: Outdoor air, which often contains pollutants, gets brought in and further contaminated by one or more sources of indoor air pollutants, including off-gassing building materials, indoor combustion (e.g., gas stoves), water leaks, particles brought in on people’s shoes, chemicals used for cleaning, the accumulation of germs on high-touch surfaces, and more.

Studies show that certain aspects of IAQ, namely volatile organic compound (VOC) and carbon dioxide concentrations, directly and significantly affect cognitive function capabilities — including strategic ability, crisis response time, and activity performance: in other words, the key measures of productivity. Poor IAQ can also lead to acute health effects, including the various nonspecific symptoms of sick building syndrome such as eye, skin, and airway irritation and headache and fatigue.

Because indoor air quality

depends on myriad factors, there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution for improving it. But the following best practices apply to nearly every building; notice that they involve both design choices and operational practices.

A LITTLE HEALTHY BUILDING HISTORY

3.1

VENTILATE!

One easy way to ensure indoor air quality is healthy is to dilute it by bringing in ample filtered outside air, which keeps carbon dioxide levels low. In other words, ventilate properly.

When spaces are densely occupied, ensure that ventilation levels increase automatically to keep carbon dioxide down, which will keep employees alert and act to flush out other indoor pollutants — and keep in mind that carbon dioxide concentration is a proxy indicator for other indoor pollutants.

Some places and spaces should also use advanced filtration techniques; the type needed will depend on climate and outdoor air quality, among other factors.

3.2

TAKE A LOOK AT YOUR CLEANING PROGRAM

A green cleaning program should include regulation of cleaning products, vacuum filtration requirements, and specific instructions for care of high-touch surfaces and special training on chemical safety, equipment service, and product purchasing for cleaning staff.

There are several resources to consult for guidance on developing a holistic, well-rounded program. For instance, EcoLogo, Green Seal, and the EPA’s Design for the Environment (DfE)

There are endless reasons to be excited about the healthy building revolution that we’re in the midst of. But it’s important to remember that this is not just a fad; rather, the industry has come this far thanks to the research and relentless hard work of seemingly disparate professionals such as toxicologists, green chemists, architects, urban planners, behaviorists, researchers, physicians, and even average citizens who have taken action after their lives were negatively affected by environmental pollutants.

Additionally, this movement is a response to a dire healthcare need. Americans’ lifestyles are harming and even killing them.

The leading causes of death over the last century have shifted from infectious diseases to preventable diseases. According to Dr. Michael Roizen, chief Wellness Officer at the Cleveland Clinic, 75 percent of chronic disease in the US today is attributed to stress, physical inactivity, food choices and portion size, or tobacco use. In fact, much of what is contained in the building standards mentioned has been incorporated specifically to help address these health statistics.

Further, environmental pollutants linked to cancer and other diseases are still commonly found in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and objects we interact with daily. Studies show that average Americans, as well as those who go out of their way to avoid toxic substances, have measurable and often shocking levels of chemicals in their bodies. Thankfully, it’s these studies, in addition to ever-growing public awareness of the inextricable link between environmental pollutants and human health, that have brought us to this exciting time.

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WELLNESS @ WORK are all eco-label certifiers. Products like hard-surface cleaners or odor-control additives that have one of these labels have chemical ingredients that have been approved from the standpoint of human health, ecological toxicity, and end-of-life impact. Choosing products with these labels means you are prioritizing ingredients that pose the least concern among chemicals in their class, thereby reducing potential hazards associated with the use of cleaning products.

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SELECT PAINT, CARPETS, FURNITURE, AND OTHER MATERIALS THAT DON’T OFF-GAS

Careful selection of materials prone to off-gassing is critical to ensuring materials installed indoors don’t contribute to indoor air pollution.

There are myriad standards that limit the VOC emissions and VOC content of these different families of products.

Contractors and furniture, fixture, and equipment vendors should meet these standards. There are also ways that IAQ can become interactive for the users. RESET is a simple building certification standard dedicated entirely to indoor air quality and involves modeling all materials being used that emit VOCs to ensure the space will not exceed safe VOC levels over time. Additionally, RESET requires the ongoing monitoring and public display of the common indoor air quality indicators, including carbon dioxide and VOCs.

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ENCOURAGE HEALTHY DIETS AND EXERCISE

Buildings can directly influence diet and activity. Stairs in a highly visible area with an alluring design that plays with elements like lighting, art, sound, or music can encourage occupants to use them more, for example.

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Employers can also encourage exercise by providing fitness equipment in an onsite gym or subsidizing gym memberships, incorporating active furniture such as standing or treadmill desks into workplace design, and encouraging biking to work by offering rewards or convenient services like showers and bike parking. The physical work environment can also influence diet: Employers can easily provide free fruit and vegetables and healthy snacks while limiting sugar and saturated fats in snacks and beverages available, for example, in vending machines.

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IMPROVE OVERALL LOOK AND FEEL

Design choices determine the general feeling an occupant gets from a space, which in turn relates to that person’s stress level. Owners, employers, and design teams should carefully consider overall layout and flow; scale of rooms or spaces, including ceiling height compared to room width and depth; color and pattern of walls, floors, and ceilings; visual cues like signage to promote comfortable navigability; access to windows with views; and incorporating elements that evoke nature. There are some consultants and architects who specialize in what is called biophilia, the idea that humans possess an innate tendency to seek connections with nature and other forms of life. One resource on incorporating biophilic design elements is the report “14 Patterns of Biophilic Design” by Terrapin Bright Green.

An interested company should seek a consultant or an architect who has an explicit focus on biophilic design, or engage in talks early in the design phase so it can be incorporated in a meaningful way.

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ADOPT OTHER POLICIES THAT PROMOTE HEALTH In addition to promoting better health through the physical elements of the building, employers can do so through company policies. For instance, a healthy sleep policy might limit how late people can work, allow napping at work (coupled with providing dedicated nap spaces), and subsidize technology that helps monitor daytime behaviors related to sleep, such as caffeine intake, eating habits, and activity levels. Adopting policies that limit aspects of business travel is another way of promoting overall health; for example, such policies might set limits on the ratio of total travel time to trip duration, include a certain number of days of personal time in business trips, and ensure employees have access to fitness opportunities at their destination, among other things.

THE BOTTOM LINE People are a company’s greatest asset — which is also to say that people are a company’s greatest cost. For every dollar an organization spends on design and construction, it spends $1,000 on employees. So anything that prevents employees from doing their jobs — illness, lack of focus, fatigue, etc. — is costly to the employer. Investing in employee health and wellbeing through building features and operational practices can help attract and retain talent and help the bottom line.

Kristen Magnuson works at stōk, a comprehensive real estate services firm for impactoriented organizations. She’s a member of stōk’s Performance Design team, which uses building science and human health research to inform a data-driven, systems-thinking approach to creating high-performing, lifeenhancing spaces. Connect with her at kristen@stok.com.

WORKPLACE CULTURE

WELLNESS @ WORK

CREATE A HEALING WORKPLACE CULTURE Workplaces, like our bodies, can be in a state of frenzied high-alert or productive calm.

Here’s how to lead your company’s nervous system toward healing.

Hanau, with Jodi Clark { By Lori { and Lainie Love Dalby

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magine your workplace as a passionate yet peaceful place. The mood is playfully competitive, while people are grounded in collaboration and support. Creativity abounds, with new ideas and solutions arising from all areas of the company. Warmth, genuine curiosity, and kindness lead the way, day in and day out. You know that, most days, everyone within your company is enthusiastically getting out of bed to come to work, because everyone knows that the challenges they’ll inevitably face there are a normal part of human existence. People consistently love working together, and the daily ethic is to leave better off for having been together.

This scenario is not an impossible fantasy: My dad built a workplace culture like this at the corrugated box manufacturing company he ran for 45 years. It was my great fortune to work within it through the 90s. Over the years, and even more consciously since his death in 2000, I’ve walked with the question: “Why is this way of being together in groups and within companies so rare?” His model had a huge impact on me and helped me create the Shared Leadership Framework I now teach all over the country, a practice of bringing out the greatest capacity in everyone by empowering us all to be responsible for and engaged in the vibrancy and high-functioning of the whole.

As I have walked through the years with this question about my dad’s accomplishments, I’m also aware that as “on fire” and passionate as he often was, there was a grounded quality and calmness that his presence exuded, causing others to feel both safe and uplifted.

He led not from an attitude of scarcity but from one of generosity, creating true brotherhood and sisterhood, without ever having to speak to it in this way. He never fed fear and drama but was steadfast in genuine curiosity, trustworthiness, and a grand love for the daily adventure. Somehow, this seemed to suck the intensity of fear and drama right out of any room he was in.

As I have observed and reflected upon leadership styles and company cultures over the years at the societal level, I’ve noticed that we often talk about the spirit of companies. We certainly talk about the heart of companies. We even talk about the soul of companies. Yet in this modern world, with increasing levels of free-floating anxiety and consistent high speed in which the habit of urgency becomes more of a daily norm, I don’t hear us talking about the nervous system of a company. That’s a mistake. If you think of companies as living systems with hearts and souls and spirits, as I do, then a helpful way I’ve come to experience the culture of a company is as its nervous system.

As I think about my dad’s company culture, I now understand that he demonstrated healing ways of being that affected his company’s nervous system in a

positive way. He was a natural nurturer, and he built a nourishing, nurturing culture. We worked hard, and a high standard of excellence was never a question. Yet nine days out of ten, I would pull into my driveway at the end of the day feeling refreshed.

THE NERVOUS SYSTEM’S DUAL MODES

We know that within our physical bodies, our nervous system is responsible for controlling and coordinating bodily functions. Within the brilliant overall system reside two complementary subsystems, the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems.

With sympathetic nervous responses, known as “fight or flight,” the body tenses up and becomes more alert for emergency situations. The parasympathetic nervous system counterbalances the sympathetic nervous system by restoring the body to a state of calm: a healing act.

The genius of our system is that our bodies know both how to react and how to heal. In the modern world, though, our high-alert systems tend to be overactive, while our calming systems don’t get the attention they deserve. I could say the same is true for most company cultures. Science shows us that along with our organs being connected within our own bodies by the superhighways of our individual nervous systems, as whole organisms we are also impacting each other’s energy and moods all the time. We certainly know that none of us are operating in isolation. If you pluck one string of a web, the rest of it vibrates. We are inextricably connected to everyone else around us as the impact of our actions ripples out into the nervous system of the group.

Therefore, we have a vested interest in and direct impact on each other’s success and wellbeing as we take care to build healing, nourishing cultures and environments in the workplace.

With the nervous system metaphor in mind, ask yourself: What is the state of calm, or tension, within the body of your organization? What is your

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STEPS TO HAVING A POSITIVE IMPACT ON YOUR COMPANY’S NERVOUS SYSTEM

DO A BODY SCAN

Begin by slowing down your breath to activate your parasympathetic (calming) nervous system. Breathe in through the nose to the count of four and out again to four. After a minute of this deep breathing, gently run your attention up and down your body, from the top of your head down to the bottoms of your feet. Notice where you feel physically expanded or contracted. Breathe deeply into and relax those areas that feel tight. Focus on your breath moving up and down your spine, and how your breath cleanses your brain. Next, practice breathing naturally without pushing. Notice the ease with which your body functions.

NOTICE THE COMPANY’S CURRENT STATE This is an essential act. Once you experience more openness and calm, ask yourself: Is our company in a reactive state of “high alert,” swirling energy, and continual high speed? Is there a responsive state of calm, joy, and groundedness in the company? What is my own state of being most of the time within my work day? Am I aware of the impact I have on the people around me, on my team, and on the overall vibrancy of our company? What is the impact of our company’s mood on me? Are we embodied in the mood of our mission? In this way, am I — and are we all together — living our mission? If not, why not? If so, how?

KEEP A JOURNAL

For three months, ask these questions and observe yourself, your team, and your company. Do your best to observe with curiosity, not shame or blame. What do you see, hear, and feel about your own behavior and your company’s behavior? Are you contributing more to a nourished, nurturing state of organizational being or more to a state of fight or flight, fear, and drama? Are you a safe harbor in the storm or a part of the tempest? What is your ability to be present, light, open, and calm to support the wellbeing of your team? Based on your reflections, identify one to three new actions you would like to weave into your day to shift into a greater state of calm. Consider inviting your team to practice those actions with you.

ENGAGE IN PARTNER INQUIRY

Pick a “dynamic duo” partner. Check in with each other daily and discuss how you’re doing with integrating your new commitments. Practice asking each other with no judgement, only curiosity and willingness to learn and to provide a supportive mirror for each other’s learning.

Schedule 25 minutes to do this daily for 21 days. Holding each other compassionately accountable by listening and reflecting is extremely powerful for setting strong intentions, putting them into action, and understanding your connection to and impact on others and vice versa.

For more healing organizational practices, please visit globalroundtableleadership.com/c/blog.

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organization’s current healing state? With a commitment to creating a more healing environment at work, you can incrementally build new capacity for leading together in a nurturing state, building up the overall vibrancy and high-functioning of your organization.

The benefits of incorporating nervous-system calming philosophies and practices into your workplace [see left] are limitless. Shifting into the consciousness of building healing environments taps into our innate gifts, talents, body wisdom, and deep cross-cultural wisdom. It will not only lead to healthier, more productive employees, but to cultivating a flourishing environment overall. Imagine your workplace as a healing environment. What steps are you taking, no matter where you are in the system, to make this a stronger reality?

Lori Hanau is dedicated to supporting shifts in consciousness, communication, and community in the workplace through experiential learning. She founded Global Round Table Leadership, where she works co-creatively to coach, guide, facilitate and steward individuals and teams in opening to their innate brilliance, cultivating the soul of their organizations and their work. She is faculty and co-chair at Marlboro College Graduate and Professional Studies and on the board of Social Venture Network.

Jodi Clark is an experiential educator and facilitator who stewards joyful, rigorous learning spaces for organizations and teams from diverse sectors to rise into and embody their collective excellence together. She is a team member with Global Round Table Leadership and currently serves as a faculty partner at Marlboro College Graduate and Professional Studies and is a Core Consultant with their Center for New Leadership.

Lainie Love Dalby is a visionary artist, transformational catalyst, and soul midwife on a mission to free human spirits that have been oppressed and devalued, especially women and the LGBTQIA community. With her own brand of multimedia ministry, and as a team member of Global Round Table Leadership, she is dismantling old systems, ideas and ways of being that promote separateness and limit our full evolutionary potential.

HOW TO

HIRE BETTER CONSCIOUS JOB CANDIDATES Hiring the right people is essential to helping your conscious business thrive. Here are 4 expert tips for getting it right, from the start.

BY MAX HANSEN The saying, “If you build it, they will come” does not apply to finding conscious candidates. You have to put the work in during the hiring process, or you’ll struggle to find the right people.

Here are my four best tips for getting conscious candidates in the door.

1 // CULTURAL ALIGNMENT COMES FIRST Before you consider professional skills, focus on culture and purpose in your job descriptions. This will help attract like-minded people and repel those who don’t fit in. At the interview, look for cultural, purpose, and values alignment by talking about the uniqueness of your organization. Then, listen and watch for cues to see if the candidate relates. Caveat: Be aware of how your job advertising terms might appeal to different populations, and make sure to switch them up to attract values-aligned candidates with varied backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives.

2 // HIRE PEOPLE WHO WANT TO LEARN

Let’s be real: No one likes a know-itall. And if you’re a conscious company, everyone around you is always learning.

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Seek out relentless learners by asking questions like, “What are you learning right now?” or “When was the last time you did something for the first time?” Candidates’ answers (or the lack thereof) will tell you right away if they love learning or think they know it all already.

3 // SLOW DOWN THE HIRING PROCESS

Speed kills during the hiring process.

The challenge is that you’re itching to check it off the to-do list, so you end up dealing with the pain later. Making a bad hire means you’ll not only have to undo the mistake and redo the recruitment, you’ll also have to repair the cultural damage from a mis-hire. Slow, thoughtful hiring ensures that you find the best possible candidate.

who would I hire?” Chances are it’s not the best resumé you received from your online posting.

Instead, create a target list of potential candidates or companies where they might be found and pursue them proactively. When you’ve identified someone as a possible fit and started the conversation, you control the initial dialogue and get to dig in on the cultural and mission-fit topics that matter to you. Proactively talking with a potential candidate before they know the needs of the role and company also allows you to better match up professional competencies. If you focus on what the best possible outcome looks like both in terms of culture and ability to perform, you should reap the benefits of a diverse, high-performing team.

4 // DON’T RELY ON ADVERTISING ALONE

Hiring the best of the applicants is different from hiring the best possible person. In today’s market, the best talent is already employed. Relying solely on job postings and the candidates who apply is risky. Ask yourself, “If I could hire the best possible person for the role,

CONSCIOUS COMPANY MAGAZINE

Max Hansen is CEO at Y Scouts, which is in the business of finding purpose-aligned and performance-proven leaders who help organizations achieve their missions faster.

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ll around the country, at water coolers and across dinner tables, in airports and on Facebook, fiery words and strong emotions are flying. While we respect and acknowledge the many things that many groups are rightfully afraid of these days — violence, poverty, hard-won rights that seem threatened — we here at CONSCIOUS COMPANY believe in the enormous power of facing threats not by tightening into fear, but by easing our way toward something else, something better.

This is the lesson handed to us by humanity’s bravest heroes and wisest sages: Jesus, the Buddha, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Malala Yousafzai, to name a few.

Letting go of fear, even — especially — in the face of real threats is no easy task.

It’s not something you do once and put behind you. It’s a practice; a discipline.

It’s something that happens one action, one conversation, and one deep breath at a time. But of all the choices we can make this year, facing our fear, seeing it, acknowledging it, then setting it aside and picking up something more hopeful might very well be the most important one we commit to. Because in a country divided by anger, in a world wracked

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with complex challenges, in a business landscape that often still does more harm than good, we need to do better than cower, better than react reflexively, better than lash out. We need to model a way to move forward, towards the world we want to see, even through pain and uncertainty.

The CONSCIOUS COMPANY team obviously has some strong ideas about what we hope to do instead of feeding fear.

Our individual answers to the prompt “Fear less, ___ more” are on page 4, and our collective vision rings through these pages in every article we publish. But please don’t just take our word for it.

We’d be nowhere if not for the support and hard work of the conscious business community, so we invited an assortment of leaders and thinkers to share their thoughts as well. The following pages include a selection of our favorite responses, but this is by no means the final word on the subject; you’ll find more ideas on our website, and we’d love for you to join the conversation by emailing your response to info@consciouscomag.com or sharing it on social media with the hashtag #FearLess_More.

We’re ready for you, 2017. Let’s do this thing.

We asked 23 conscious CEOs, entrepreneurs, coaches, and other business leaders to fill in the blank for 2017. Here’s their best advice.

THE NEW ECONOMY

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“I believe Donald Trump exploited a very serious gap in the conscious business movement, and in progressive politics. We have failed to adequately collaborate; sometimes with the very people we want to help. Working class whites and many people of color see us as out-of-touch elitists who don’t understand or care about their day-to-day plight.

The high level of intellect within the conscious business community is one of my favorite things about the movement. It’s a stimulating group, full of vibrant ideas. At the same time, we must learn to use our intellect to climb down out of our idealist ivory towers, and to create broader alliances. We also need to create broader alliances with each other. We tend to stay within our individual ‘swim lanes’ within the conscious movement (i.e., social justice, environmental justice, green energy, gender empowerment, etc.) rather than understanding ways to create broader alliances across our various segments.

In order to move forward, we will need to do a much better job of creating broad-based alliances than we ever have before. The average Jane/Joe needs to believe we understand them. Trump managed to do a much better job of creating broad collaborative coalitions than we ever have. We ignore that at our own peril.” // Gerry Valentine, president and founder of Vision Executive Coaching

“COLLABORATE” “As a culture right now, most of us are reacting from a scarcity mindset. We think we are in competition with each other for a few diminishing resources. This is why diversity is so scary! While it’s true that we do need to conserve, we are missing out on the abundance of ideas that come from working together. When it comes to workable solutions, we all have a small piece of the puzzle. Coming together in a spirit of collaboration helps us remember how much we need each other — especially when we hold diverse perspectives — and how much more powerful we are when we act together with respect for the common good.” // Gracy Obuchowicz, owner of Beautiful Life Self Care

“ENVISION” “Before anything of value can ever be accomplished, we must first envision the future we want to see. All things that are visible now were once invisible. If the people who start, build, or run companies today don’t take hold of great visions, then they will not achieve great things. The more conscious companies wield their influence, envisioning a better world, the better our world will become.”

// Michael Jones, co-founder and CEO of THRIVE Farmers Coffee

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“MOVE” “THERE WILL ALWAYS BE OBSTACLES AND SETBACKS. THE KEY IS TO GO OVER, UNDER, OR AROUND ALL OF THESE HURDLES. DON’T LET THEM STOP YOU. KEEP MOVING FORWARD.” // Kevin Rutherford, president and CEO of nuun and company

“FEED”

[PEOPLE AND CHANGE]

“COOPERATE”

// Thierry Ollivier, founder and CEO of Natierra Superfoods

// George Siemon, CEO of Organic Valley farmer’s cooperative

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FEAR

// Brook Eddy, founder and CEO of Bhakti Chai

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“Before the presidential election, I was distracted by the stress of my business, the strain of nonstop teenagers storming through my kitchen, and my social calendar in the distance offering a cool compress of relief. I thought I could comfortably watch from the sidelines, a spectator sport unfolding before my eyes. I thought founding a mission-driven company was enough, as I focused on the three P’s in the right order: People, Planet, and Profits.

But that isn’t even scratching the surface of the revolution we need. There’s a fourth P that’s missing – Politics!

After November, a fire boiled in my belly as I watched the white billionaire boys’ club parade into Trump’s cabinet, smirking with greed. I began collecting donations for Standing Rock; orchestrated my friends to participate in the Million Women March in Washington, DC; donated to environmental and reproductive justice groups; signed petitions and wrote letters of dissent; supported real news sources (with real journalists); made lists of how to get involved with city council, mid-term elections, and organizations needing volunteers — engaging in the civic process like it was my part-time job.

When I think of the happy hours, road trips, leisurely Sunday mornings that turned into all-day rest-fests, I realize I wasn’t truly engaged and sacrificing for our country. I was satiated and comfortable, but not devoting my time to true civic engagement. Sure, I had the excuse of work and kids, but that’s not good enough. We can all find five hours a week to fight for our republic.

I’m thankful to be reminded of my duty to participate and engage. If Hillary Clinton were president, I would still be in a light slumber, my inner fire still unlit. Trump’s election is our wake-up alarm, a constant harsh whine in our souls to stand up for social justice, protect our immigrant neighbors, stand for gay rights, protect our Muslim and Native American brethren and our women and girls. May we all take that fourth P — Politics — and incorporate it into our free time, ventures, and vision.

It’s our civic responsibility to help preserve our country with the highest principles of honor and justice — for all.”

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Photo: Allison Salvati

“ENGAGE”

[AS SHAREHOLDER ADVOCATES]

“MAKE EVERYONE AROUND YOU THRIVE”

// Matthew Patsky, CEO of Trillium Asset Management

// Kip Tindell, chairman and co-founder of The Container Store

Photo: Hortense Mulliez

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“BELONG”

FEAR

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“Belonging is vital to health and happiness. Focusing more on community-building and developing authentic relationships will result in a more successful long-term business, too.

Businesses often think of community building as an after thought. They hire ‘community managers’ straight out of college to ‘do social media,’ when community architecture is the backbone of any company’s success and should be taken more seriously.”

// Radha Agrawal, co-founder and CEO of Daybreaker

“DO” “If we are to protect and promote the values we care about, we must commit to small and large actions each day that manifest those values and help to bring us closer together.

That means aligning our personal and professional values, ensuring our work has a positive impact, and collaborating purposefully with like-minded peers and partners to scale and compound our impact.” // Simon Mainwaring, CEO of We First brand consultancy

“Gandhi taught us to be the change we seek in the world. As businesses, we have the chance every single day ― through our actions, our team members, and our products ― to build the world we want to see. We don’t have to wait in fear for someone to create it for us ― it’s in our hands. Let’s do more to build that world today.” // Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez, co-founders and co-CEOs of Back to the Roots

“INNOVATE” “WHERE SOME SEE PROBLEMS, ENTREPRENEURS SEE OPPORTUNITIES FOR INNOVATION. IT’S THAT VISION AND OPTIMISM THAT DRIVES FORWARD SOLUTIONS TO THE WORLD’S BIGGEST CHALLENGES.” // Jill Sims, co-founder of Energy Excelerator

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“LEAD” // Tyler Reagin, executive director of Catalyst Conference

“INVEST” “In some ways, it’s now or never, and to us, that’s a good thing. If business is now the default answer to everything — fixing our prisons, our schools, our military, our food supply, our environment — then so be it. There has been enough conversation, enough measurement, enough discussion of how and why and with what methods investors should put capital to work in mission-driven companies.

That hand-wringing could go on for another generation, yet we may not have that luxury of time.

“Whether you see opportunity or doom in the shifting way government may or may not help in fixing social or environmental issues, now will be the time to do something about it or sit on the sidelines for good. We’d rather be proving that business can and should achieve results.”

“ADVOCATE”

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“I have heard and continue to believe that we should lead how we want to be led. 2017 will bring plenty of uncertainty. We can’t pull away in these times. For Catalyst, this requires courage and bravery. To lead in these uncertain times, where the culture is dividing at a rapid pace, we have to trust in our faith and choose to be judged on how we care for others. If our team doesn’t [demonstrate that we] believe the messages we are sharing by implementing them, our message will be all for nothing.”

“Change is what voters want and it’s what the country needs.

But we cannot let it be change that turns back the clock on the progress we’ve made. With the excuse of making policy changes that are ‘business-friendly,’ policymakers are poised to move the country in the wrong direction. Responsible business leaders need to speak up, step up, and show up. There are many ways to do this, from leading their companies to engage in visible, public ways to lobbying their elected representatives and speaking out in the press. We cannot stand by with so much at stake. We need to be in public and with policymakers, saying clearly what we stand for — and even more clearly what we will not stand for.” // David Levine, co-founder and CEO of the American Sustainable Business Council

// Peter D. Henig, managing partner of Greenhouse Capital Partners

“COACH” “LEARNING TO COACH YOURSELF — WHAT WE CALL ‘BETTER ME’ — SO THAT YOU CAN COACH OTHERS — ‘BETTER YOU’ — WILL LEAD TO A BETTER WORLD — ‘BETTER US.’”

“WORK HARDER TO CREATE SUSTAINABLE ENERGY INDEPENDENCE” // Ryan Creamer, CEO of sPower

// Meghan Messenger, co-CEO of Next Jump Inc. CONSCIOUS COMPANY MAGAZINE

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Photo: KIND Snacks

“LISTEN”

Daniel Lubetzky

“We must learn to listen to the ‘other,’ even if we respectfully disagree, and to work hard to remember the values of humanity that bring us together. We have to step back and collectively reflect on how to protect and elevate the values we share ― respect for one another, kindness, empathy, humility, warmth, and the conviction that we can make a positive difference for our children and for each other, to name a few.

Empathy and kindness are often confused with weakness.

Actually, it takes strength to be kind, particularly when we feel most vulnerable. Empathizing with and listening to ‘the other,’ to feel comfortable putting yourself in the shoes of someone with whom you deeply disagree, requires enormous amounts of self-confidence. Now, more than ever, it’s important to listen and seek to understand, both in business and life.”

“My cofounder Rory Eakin and I met almost 15 years ago, and one of the first things that attracted us to each other was that we had opposite views on many things, but we could debate on merits ― not emotions ― and listen to each other. I worry our country has lost much of that in recent times. Civil discourse has often been replaced by anger and distrust. But civil discourse is integral to building thriving businesses and crosscultural understanding and advancing humanity.

No matter what your political views are, I hope 2017 gives everyone the beautiful opportunity to try to rebuild that civil discourse, to respect other people’s opinions and to share yours in a constructive way. That all starts with listening.” // Ryan Caldbeck, CEO and co-founder of

// Daniel Lubetzky, founder and CEO of KIND Healthy Snacks

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CircleUp equity crowdfunding platform

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THE NEW ECONOMY

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// Kim Graham-Nye, co-founder of gDiapers

“THIS, NOW, IS OUR MOMENT AS CONSCIOUS COMPANIES. AS BUSINESSES, OUR EXPERTISE IS CREATIVE PROBLEM-SOLVING, WHETHER IT BE CONSUMER OR RETAILER NEEDS, OPERATIONAL CHALLENGES, OR MARKETING OPPORTUNITIES. WE CAN LEAD THE CHARGE OF MAKING THIS WORLD A BETTER PLACE AND CONTINUE TO GROW THE TRIBE OF COMPANIES THAT ARE MAKING A COMMITMENT TO SOLVE MORE. EVERY SINGLE DAY, WE SHOULD ASK OURSELVES, HOW CAN WE SOLVE MORE, HOW CAN WE BE BETTER?”

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“There’s a collective sense amongst our company’s community that we are tired of feeling powerless in the world. That sitting on the sidelines feeling bad about the destruction in Syria, the human suffering in war-torn areas, the discrimination and inequality across the globe isn’t ok, and we are tired of just ‘feeling bad’ about it and want to DO SOMETHING. We are harnessing the strong desire for each of us to feel we can make a difference by joining forces with Carry the Future and donating our old baby carriers (and/ or funds!) to connect with parents of the Syrian crisis on the most personal of levels: carrying and caring for our babies.”

“SOLVE”

LESS

“ACT”

// Sheryl O’Loughlin, CEO of REBBL functional beverages (see page 28)

Photo: gDiapers

“HEAL” “We live in a world of tremendous pain and suffering. That is why I believe the ultimate meta-purpose for all of us needs to be about healing. Healing is about becoming whole and complete. We need to heal ourselves, each other, our families, and our communities. We need to heal our companies and our countries. We need to heal the planet and all the life forms that it teems with. We need to heal the past, present and future.

The great thing is that nature has programmed us with the intelligence to heal ourselves — if only we can stop inflicting pain and suffering on ourselves and each other. We simply need to get out of the way and let nature’s infinite wisdom operate through us.

If we are not part of the healing, we are part of the hurting.” // Raj Sisodia, co-founder and co-chairman of Conscious Capitalism Inc.; professor at Babson College CONSCIOUS COMPANY MAGAZINE

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BECOME AN ADVERTISING PARTNER!

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-Kristin Westberg, Round Table Companies EMAIL ADVERTISE@CONSCIOUSCOMAG.COM FOR DETAILS

IMPACT INVESTING

THE NEW ECONOMY

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IT’S TIME FOR IMPACT INVESTORS TO RETHINK

RISK If we want to create a deep social impact with our capital, then we need to realize that avoiding risk shifts it onto the very people we’re trying to help.

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BY KATHERINE PEASE

t’s a well-worn maxim that if investors want higher financial returns, then they need to take higher risks. Balancing risk and return is, in fact, one of the most fundamental elements of investment management. But there’s another way to look at risk-taking in the investment arena, especially if investors want to make deep social impacts with their capital, which is increasingly the case, especially among younger investors. Investing that seeks to achieve socially equitable outcomes must disrupt the current risk/return paradigm that drives so much of the investment field, because strictly correlating risk with financial returns can undermine the purported goals of impact investing, which is also interested in social returns.

To better support entrepreneurs and community groups seeking to achieve both social and financial returns, we need to structure investments differently. Here are four changes impact investors need to consider to truly bring about the social effects they want.

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EXTEND OUR TIME HORIZON

The investment field is notoriously impatient. Investors often expect new businesses, community programs, or public policies to be developed and implemented in record time. Startup businesses are expected to operate at breakneck speed to prove themselves, and often make ill-advised business decisions because of the pressure that investors put on them to realize profits quickly. These expectations are at odds with the realities of how social and economic change happen. Economic inequality, racial injustice, environmental challenges — these are problems that have been with us for millennia, and they aren’t going to be solved overnight.

Let’s look at an example that many people are talking about these days: the lack of opportunity facing lowincome neighborhoods in America’s cities. While we’re encouraged to see the development of individual social enterprises that provide jobs to workers in low-income neighborhoods, solving for economic inequality is much more complex. It requires affordable, healthy homes; transit that connects people to good jobs; local grocery stores that provide healthy, affordable food to residents — the list goes on. So addressing these factors requires aligning government policies and funding with private capital, mobilizing local communities and engaging them in the problem-solving process, building businesses that create income and wealth for local residents, etc. But the investment community is reticent to get involved in complex deals that are designed to address multi-faceted challenges because they perceive them to

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INVEST EARLY IN BUILDING CAPACITY

Most low- to moderate-income communities in the US do not have sufficient access to investment capital, and that means that they are often ignored as potential investment opportunities and chronically under-invested in. To address this reality and lessen the real or perceived risks of investing in these communities, investors need to become a lot more sophisticated in understanding the potential that investment in underserved communities can have for the investors and the investees, including creating viable, long-term economic opportunity in communities that have often been systematically denied it. It also means that investors may need to invest in building the capacity of businesses and community organizations that do not traditionally have access to capital. Through rigorous, early investment in management training and other forms of capacity-building, there is real potential for increasing the social and financial returns resulting from investment in lower- to moderate-income communities.

Worker-owned Radix Media printers in New York received investment from The Working World.

Photo: The Working World

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be risky and lengthy. Yet, by extending the timeframe of their investments and getting engaged in community-level solutions — for example, partnering with foundations and government organizations who can buy-down risk through loan guarantees, etc. — investors might find that their long-term investment could be very beneficial to the financial bottom line and the community — and not nearly as risky as they might imagine.

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“Who is more likely to be able to absorb the loss — a wealthy investor or a group of low-income entrepreneurs who risk their shirts?”

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4

RETHINK RISKSHARING

In the case of a failed investment in a set of social enterprises in a low-income community, who is more likely to be able to absorb the loss — a wealthy investor or a group of low-income entrepreneurs who risk their shirts in order to try to boost their chances for economic mobility? Clearly, the entrepreneurs stand to lose far more, relatively speaking.

Yet many investments are structured around the need to minimize investors’ risk, which often means that the investees bear the burden of protecting the investors’ assets.

The Working World is a relatively new investment group that imagines an investment paradigm in which risk can be shared more equitably among investors and investees.

Among other things, they’ve developed funds that support worker-owned factories in Argentina, Nicaragua, and now New York. The funds only get repaid when the employeeowned factories are profitable, and the level of financial return is determined in partnership with representatives from the projects. This novel idea of sharing risk and determining success with investees is paying off: Since 2004, The Working World has supported more than 800 projects with over 200 businesses, lending more than $4 million and creating hundreds of jobs in the process. Moreover, they have a 98 percent repayment rate and, due to investor demand, they are now offering a fixed-rate loan product as well as a floating-rate equity product. Their success and the interest from investors clearly demonstrates that there are new and different ways to go about investing where the investor can still make profits while limiting risk to investees and achieving positive social outcomes.

BRIDGE THE GAP BETWEEN INVESTORS AND INVESTEES

There is a powerful belief in the venture capital world that apart from a good idea, the thing that matters most in investing is the quality of an enterprise’s leadership team.

What this often translates into is investors’ comfort with specific leaders. Human beings tend to feel most comfortable with people who look like them. Thus, investors tend to assess the potential for new enterprises to succeed based in part on their own implicit biases. As 78 percent of investment professionals are white and 65 percent are male, this means that it is more likely that investments will be directed to businesses run by white men than to women or people of color.

We see this bias confirmed in the data. Venture capital firms with women partners are three times more likely to invest in companies with women CEOs (58 percent of firms with women partners versus 15 percent of firms without women partners). Moreover, according to Project Diane, out of more than 10,000 venture deals that were funded from 2012 to 2014, just 24 of the startups were led by black women. These data clearly demonstrate a lack of comfort felt by many investors making them unwilling to invest in enterprises not run by white men. Yet, the data show that businesses with women executives perform better than those without women executives. It’s time for investors to take more “risks” on enterprises led by women and people of color and to recognize and celebrate the financial and other successes those investments can bring to communities.

There’s an abundance of innovative work happening in the US and other countries that can make a significant positive impact in the lives of people and the environment. While the investment community is actively exploring new ways to mobilize capital through impact investing, for the most part it’s trying to do so within the old paradigm of minimizing risk and maximizing immediate financial returns. Let’s keep working on rebalancing these variables so investors can achieve profits — but with a bit more risk-sharing and within a timeframe that reflects the realities of how social change really happens.

Katherine Pease is the principal of KP Advisors. She has worked with foundations, investors, and nonprofit organizations for more than 20 years. This article is based on a paper she co-authored with Sarah L. Thomas, “In Pursuit of Deeper Impact: Mobilizing Capital for Social Equity.” Find her at katherinepease.com or on Twitter @katherinepease.

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SOCIAL CHANGE

EXTREME POVERTY A HIGH-TECH SOLUTION TO

Financial tech startup BanQu is using cutting-edge blockchain technology to create a portable economic identity for the world’s poorest people. Here’s how.

BY RACHEL ZURER

Worldwide, about 2 billion adults have no bank account. Nearly 800 million people live on less than $2 a day.

And the population of refugees and displaced people has soared to more than 65 million globally. What do these groups have in common? They all lack formal economic identities.

That means they’re shut out of the types of financial and governmental services many of us take for granted, like access to credit and loans, and often lack credentials about previous accomplishments, including birth records, educational achievements, and property ownership.

Minneapolis-based tech startup BanQu’s mission is to change all that and solve persistent poverty by providing a portable, democratic economic identity to the world’s poorest people. To do so, the company has built a patent-pending app platform and network based on cutting-edge computing technology called blockchain (see page 75). In 2016, the company was piloting its app in multiple countries, and expects 2 million users by the end of 2017. We spoke with BanQu founder and CEO Ashish Gadnis about what BanQu does, how it works, and the long road ahead toward ending global poverty.

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What’s the background behind how you started this company?

Ashish Gadnis: I grew up in poverty in India and was very lucky to get out because of education. Guys like me are the outcome of a vision that India’s first prime minister had, which was, “Hey, we may not be able to give everybody food, water, and a toilet, but we’ll find a way to give these kids education.” I was part of that. I learned how to code at an early age, got hired

by Tata Group [one of India’s largest multinational companies], traveled all over the world, moved to the US, and the rest is history.

I built and sold three tech startups, and in 2012, I sold my last startup and started working as a volunteer in East Africa, helping build supply chains for extreme poverty populations with a focus on women. In the Congo, as I was building social enterprises as a volunteer, I uncovered a significant gap that seemed to exist in all INGOs [international non-governmental organizations] as well as social enterprises. The gap was, in my opinion, the fundamental root cause of extreme poverty in the world: While our customers — we never looked at them as beneficiaries — were

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making money and doing better as the social enterprises were doing well, the local financial institutions wouldn’t recognize them because they could not triangulate what was happening.

The female farmers I was working with in the Congo had a lot of things that people were “giving them.” Education, mobile phones, microfinance, and so on. Or when people come to refugee camps, they get a lot of different aid packets from different agencies.

They have a loan from the Refugee Council, they’re in some sort of a program with the UN, somebody is giving them an immunization. The problem is, all of these events are “things that happen to you.” They don’t become a part of who you are.

In the US, you can walk in with a utility bill, a driver’s license, or a pay stub and a financier will easily give you a loan or you can buy a car. In places like the Congo or Myanmar or Somalia, or for refugees on the move, none of that becomes part of your identity.

People continue to stay poor because they’re not connected to a local, national, global supply chain.

We looked at the problem and said, “What is out there that allows the consumer, which is that mother in the Photo: HaloVeg

BanQu’s app platform helps the world’s poorest people, like this child in East Africa.

Economic identity (noun): The digital or electronic credentials defining a person and his or her history of financial interactions in the world economy.

BANQU AT A GLANCE Locations: Minneapolis, MN; Austin, TX; Miami, FL; and Hargeisa, Somaliland Founded: 2016 Employees: 15 Impact: On track to register 2 million users by the end of 2017 Awards and recognition: • Cashless World 2016 Innovation Award • MIT Enterprise Forum Innovate for Refugees grant 2016 • FinovateSpring 2016 Best of Show

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Congo or refugee in Somalia, to own her transaction data?” That’s where I decided that the blockchain was a great way to solve the problem. In some ways, it’s a very simple problem, yet there wasn’t the technology to get around it until the blockchain came along.

You can actually create an identity on the blockchain, and that identity is less about, “Hey, this is my name and address” — it’s more about who you are in terms of your education records, microfinance loans, any transaction history. In the refugee and people-in-extreme-poverty zones, if you have that base identity, then you become monetizable or bankable. If you start creating these economic identities, then you can start creating stable homes, so they’re not going from loan to loan or aid to aid, and you can start fostering education.

That’s the basic construct of BanQu. I’m an evangelist because I grew up poor myself, and I hated standing in the ration line three hours every other day, without even

Institutions Records

any record of that time or transaction.

Can you talk about blockchain and how that’s game changing?

AG: Blockchain is the technology that Bitcoin was built on, but people have realized that while Bitcoin continues to be unstable, the blockchain is extremely stable. Blockchain is really a distributed ledger.

In traditional systems, there are closed databases. We’re used to our banks holding all our information. If you try to pull your house records and credit profile and utility bills together, you have to ask a bunch of different institutions. Your house has a title that is held by a title company, and then all the paperwork and bureaucracy and brokers are in the middle.

The blockchain decentralizes that information. It breaks that notion of a database or a system. If you have a title for your house, instead of that title sitting in five different databases, it sits on the blockchain and then the world subscribes to that title.

The best way to look at blockchain is that if I owed you something, say, 5,000 years ago — let’s just say I owed you a couple of cows — the entire village would know about it; it’s a public database. People can see it. Because of that public knowledge, I couldn’t cheat you.

Today, if I gave you a check, it takes four to six days to clear, because there are a massive number of databases.

Citibank has 800 databases. Barclays has 800 databases. All of these people are touching that check over a five- to six-day period before it clears. Whereas in the blockchain, that settlement of me giving you a check happens in less than five seconds because the check is now on the blockchain, and I don’t have to rely on six layers of brokers.

A title company is one of the great examples. If you were to buy a house, look at the amount of paperwork you waste in just getting the title.

Imagine a world where your house had its title on the blockchain, the entire village — going back to that example — agreed that that was the

THE BLOCKCHAIN DIFFERENCE

Blockchain creates a network that records ownership through a shared ledger.

Clearing House

Traditional Central authorities certify ownership and clear transactions between banks or other parties.

VS

Distributed

Multiple copies of the shared ledger live in multiple places.

Members of the network verify transactions without a central authority.

THE MAGIC OF BLOCKCHAIN Blockchain encryption is not only the key technological innovation powering BanQu’s economic identity solution — some enthusiasts claim it’s one of the most important computing innovations since the invention of the internet, and it promises to radically transform how we share information about value and transactions. So what is it, how does it work, and why is it so revolutionary?

WHAT IS THE BLOCKCHAIN?

In the simplest terms, blockchain is a distributed ledger, a public record that allows trustworthy anonymous transactions between two people who don’t know each other. It’s a secure, public, and transparent way of recording digital information about ownership and deals of any kind.

WHERE DID IT COME FROM?

Blockchain encryption was first conceptualized in 2008 by a mysterious person or persons who go by the name Satoshi Nakamoto. Nakamoto described the idea behind blockchain as the underpinning of the digital currency Bitcoin.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

This is where things get complicated. Leaving the details to the engineers and math whizzes, the key points for us ordinary folks to understand are:

1.

Information about transactions is grouped together into “blocks.”

Then some fancy math happens on the 1s and 0s that make up those blocks, which generates a unique identifier for that block.

The way the math works, if you change anything about the data in a block, you end up with a totally different identifier — so it’s really obvious that you tampered with the block.

2.

Blocks of transactions get chained together in chronological order, with each block getting linked up with the unique ID of the one before it — think of a stack of Legos. Now changing anything about any of the blocks in the whole stack is immediately noticeable because of the way each block incorporates the preceding block’s unique ID.

3.

Copies of that chain get stored on thousands of different computers throughout the world, so there’s no one central spot where the chain lives.

4.

When someone wants to add transactions to the end of the block chain, the majority of the participants in the network have to agree that the new block looks valid before it gets approved and everyone’s copies are updated.

WHY IS BLOCKCHAIN IMPORTANT? By removing the need for powerful central intermediaries to authenticate exchanges of value, blockchain promises to provide a decentralized, peer-to-peer way to record all kinds of transactions. The transparency and lack of any middleman on public blockchain transactions could save the banking industry up to $20 billion a year in transaction costs, for example. But its potential goes way beyond banking. Voting, land registries, marriages, smart contracts that execute themselves when certain conditions are met, music payment and licensing, transparent supply chains — these are all domains where blockchain’s core information power could be transformative.

BanQu’s founder Ashish Gadnis believes that blockchain will change the world in the next 10 years. But he’s not the only one who’s bullish about its potential. In an interview with McKinsey & Company, Don Tapscott, co-author of

“Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business, and the World,” calls its implications “staggering … right across virtually every aspect of society.”

The financial services industry is, so far, taking the lead in exploring blockchain’s potential. The World Economic Forum predicts that by 2025, 10 percent of global GDP will be stored on blockchain technology. One survey expected financial and technology markets to invest $1 billion in blockchain in 2016. Blythe Masters, a former JPMorgan Chase executive who is now CEO of a blockchain startup, was quoted in the Financial Times saying, “You should be taking this technology as seriously as you should have been taking the development of the internet in the early 1990s. It’s analogous to email for money.”

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title, agreed to the validity of the house, all you’d have to do is transfer ownership from you to me and you cut through all of this paperwork and bureaucracy.

Blockchain will change the world in the next ten years. The massive transformational shift is you basically bring a level of transparency and accuracy that cuts through all the middle layers. If you think about what happened in the internet from 1994 to 2014, that level of change will happen in half the time because of the blockchain. Every industry — print, financial, health care, real estate — will be touched

poverty and for refugees to gain back their status in society and grow.”

One thing that’s important: everybody talks about financial inclusion for the poor. I think that’s a misnomer. Financial inclusion [as it’s practiced today] really means, “You’re poor. I will give you some money but you will stay poor.” If you’ve ever been to Africa or East Asia, the average microloan is at 30 percent. You’re lending out $100 at 30 percent, yet in the US you can raise $2 million at 4 percent. The reason why somebody is lending $100 at 30 percent is because nobody knows who these people are because nobody wants to take

mother is very bankable, that mother is very creditworthy.

In partnership with UN Women, we took a very simple approach and said, “What if we created an economic identity for that farmer where you could collect five or six key data points that build her identity?” We’re not talking about name, address. I’m talking about transaction stuff.

Number one, we register the farmer on our platform. That farmer has a piece of land; we digitize the land by taking a GPS picture of it. The minute you take a GPS picture of that land, it generates a forecast. If I have one acre of land [in this region], I should

The reason why somebody is lending $100 at 30 percent is because nobody knows who these people are because nobody wants to take the time to bring them into a trust network.

by blockchain. Anybody who uses a database will change. About $2 billion of new startup dollars went into financial tech or insurance tech companies last year, startups that are all basically using blockchain to make more money. The banking industry will save $15 billion annually just because of reducing the time of settlement because of the blockchain.

It sounds like there are really two big leaps happening here at once.

You’ve got this new way of exchanging data via the blockchain that’s very powerful. Then second, your company is the first to take that new way of exchanging data and bring that in service of all these unbanked people.

AG: Exactly. Everybody in the world is desperately trying to make more money from blockchain. We were the first ones who said, “We don’t want to touch the money side. We believe that the blockchain offers a true path for people who live in extreme

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the time to bring them into a trust network.

We believe that if you have an economic identity, you have every right for that identity to be portable. So, Rachel has a birth certificate. Rachel has a cell phone and a piece of land.

Those should be monetizable so she can now go and get credit, she can get banking facilities.

One of the early successes we’re seeing is with very, very poor farmers in Rwanda. If you’re a poor female farmer in the middle of nowhere, on the Tanzania-Rwanda border, you basically are feeding a family of eight or ten on $300 a year, so we’re talking about even less than $2 a day.

Any harvest she can raise, typically it’s maize and beans, the broker says to her, “I will buy your corn at this price, otherwise it’s going to go bad.”

The mother is forced to sell the corn because she has no access to information. She has no identity. But if she has a piece of land and has been harvesting crops for thirty years, common sense demands that that

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be able to produce 100 kilos of corn.

Then the UN has orchestrated buyer contracts for that 100 kilos of corn.

Now this mother/farmer has three things which she never had before.

One, on her text-message phone, through the blockchain and our application, she gets to know, “I own one acre of land and it’s going to generate 100 kilos. I have a buyer for those 100 kilos, even though I’m four months away from harvesting.”

Next step: If you dry the corn to 13 percent moisture content, the price of corn doubles [because it keeps longer]. With our technology, the mother has an identity: “I own a piece of land. I have a forecast. That forecast has a buyer.” And that buyer is now going to allow her to get collateral to get a dryer so she can dry her corn.

All that becomes part of her history.

Third, that mother, who now has these transactions that are part of her identity — the blockchain allows her then to take that identity and, depending on her phone, she can go to [the local version of] Walmart and

THE NEW ECONOMY

say, “You can see I have a piece of land. I have a microloan. I have a harvest. I have a dryer and I’m selling it at market price.” And now she can buy things. If that Rwandan woman farmer has her identity in the blockchain and she has gone through three farming cycles, you would not charge her 30 percent on $100, you would charge her 4 percent on $100 because she has history.

You’ve gotten rid of all this NGO bullshit and all this middleman and bureaucracy. You’re giving people an economic identity where they have a standing in the world, whereas in the traditional systems all this information would be on a spreadsheet, it would be sitting on a computer somewhere, at the UN, at the Grameen Bank, and the mother is left out.

How does that farmer access these records? Is it via her cell phone?

AG: One of the things I learned over the last four years spending time in Africa and refugee camps: If you’re in Somalia or if you’re in the Congo, you get cell phone service. The way we built our app, we kept it extremely lightweight because we knew not everybody is going to have a smartphone.

The way we register people, like when we did initial pilots with the Somali community, we drive it at the consumer level. We go in and we create a trust network. For example, if we sign up a young man in Minneapolis, within the day, five or ten of his family members in Mogadishu, in Jubaland, in Somaliland will sign up because they are part of a trust network. I create my identity here in the US and then the app pings my mom via text message. If my mom has access to a smartphone, then it’s very simple. She can take a picture, create her identity, and now I accept her because I can see her.

If she doesn’t have a smartphone, she can go to an M-Pesa [mobile phone-based payments]

kiosk or a UN camp and they help her create an account. The key is that once you’re in the trust relationship, it’s more than remittance. When my mom goes and gets her $100 I sent her, that $100 becomes part of her history.

If I enroll her, for example, in a World Food Programme, where they’re going to give her a food packet, that becomes part of her transaction history. If she loses her phone or something happens, there’s a war and she has to move to Ethiopia or Kenya, all she has to do is either enter a thumbprint, if they have a thumbprint scanner, or do a passphrase, and all that information is available to her on the blockchain.

This portability is so important.

If you look at the refugee situation today in Dadaab, on the SomaliaKenya border, where I was about a month ago, that is one of the largest refugee camps in the world. About 600,000 people have been there, some for 25 years.

We met with a lot of people, and particularly shop-owners who are now third-generation refugee families: their parents came, these kids were born there, now they’re in their mid-20s, they have kids. Family after family said, “We want to go back to Somalia,” because they’re stateless and the Kenyan government is starting to shut down the camp. But they cannot go back to Somalia because they will not be recognized. Even by the UN. The UN doesn’t recognize you and you have to start all over again.

We are in the initial stages of rollout within the camps. If you can start collecting “the data” that happens to you as a part of your blockchain identity, if I now go from one camp to another or if I’m on the move from Syria to Jordan to Greece to Turkey, every time I get to an agency, if the agency is willing to recognize that identity — and that’s where we’re in a little bit of an uphill battle, but we’re fighting it — they will be able to see, “Oh, this is Ashish.

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GADNIS’ TOP 3 PIECES OF ADVICE FOR MISSION-DRIVEN ENTREPRENEURS

1 Be very clear about what you’re trying to solve.

Don’t be enamored of the technology. For example, if the whole blockchain thing collapsed, it wouldn’t change my perspective on how we can solve poverty. I would just find another way. You can’t start with the technology and then add a passion to it.

You’ve got to have the passion, period.

2 Don’t put all your bets on one client or partner.

Especially working with governments and NGOs, you need to take a bit of a shotgun approach because the bureaucracy is so deep in some of these organizations. In many cases, what we’re trying to do would disintermediate a lot of these NGOs. My advice would be to play five or six sets. Just make sure you don’t fall into the trap of, “We picked up [a big client],” and two years go by and you do nothing else.

3 Be on the ground.

You cannot be a mission-driven entrepreneur [trying to solve global poverty] and sit in the US. You have to be on the ground. I walked for four days in a refugee camp, sat with the families, went into the container camp. A lot of times I’ve seen social entrepreneurs do the helicopter run. They’ll fly in, stay at a fancy hotel, make a drive and then they’re back after a photo op. It doesn’t work that way.

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He had a family in Syria. He owned a shop. Here is his education record.

This is the kind of aid package he got in the camp,” and so on. And that makes them not just a number anymore. That’s one of the most fundamental things we are changing when it comes to refugees. There’s a lot of conversation in the UN and the NGO community around identity, but nobody actually has done anything, other than us, who have an actual product.

Tell me about the big problems you still need to solve for this to work as you envision it.

AG: We’re in for the long haul. This is a 15-, 20-, 30-year journey. The near-term problems are getting people to recognize that it’s a person in extreme poverty’s or a refugee’s right to have an identity. I think a lot of times, NGOs look at these people as beneficiaries. In my personal opin-

BanQu founder Ashish Gadnis (center) with farmers in East Africa.

ion, you’re taking away somebody’s dignity [by thinking that way].

The other obstacle is a lot of these large NGOs tend to be very much driven by getting more donor funding. “I’m going to get more donor money if there are more refugees.”

It’s a very sad way of looking at the world. We’re trying to change the conversation and say, “You want to look at the refugees and people living in extreme poverty as communities you’re investing into; peer-to-peer.”

The other barriers are the political situations. The Kenyan government right now is in turmoil. The Somalis have a failed state. The Jordanians have an issue with the Syrians. It’s constant conversations, meetings, a lot of travel.

Nothing is impossible. We’ve made a ton of progress in the last year.

Over the next couple of years, our goal is to have about two million identities on the platform.

What is your eventual business model? Are you guys going to be a nonprofit the whole way or are you hoping to be a social enterprise?

AG: We’re very clear with our business model that we’re a for-profit social enterprise, because that’s the way we’re going to scale the business. We’ve never been a nonprofit.

I built and sold three startups. I’m not a big fan of nonprofit for the sake of nonprofit, because I’ve seen the dark side.

We have three lines of business.

One is for the banks and financial institutions that are desperately trying to bank the unbanked. For example, we are having conversations in places like Colombia, where there are a couple million people who were displaced because of the FARC rebels; you can’t integrate somebody into society if you’re not willing to include them in the banking realm. There’s a bank that wants to leverage our

THE NEW ECONOMY

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If she has a piece of land and has been harvesting crops for thirty years, common sense demands that that mother is very bankable, that mother is very creditworthy.

platform. That business model is very straightforward. We charge an annual license fee.

The second model is tied to the INGOs and social enterprises that are trying to provide better services to the refugees and people in poverty. If you go to a camp it’ll shock you that there are at least 15 to 20 INGOs, and none of them talk to each other and every refugee’s information is duplicated over a bunch of spreadsheets. In that case, again, it’s a standard annual licensing fee.

The third line of business is governments that we are right now in conversations and have done some pilot testing with. Governments are looking to establish an identity that allows them to do more for their citizens.

Obviously, the major reaction we get is, “Are we going to have a Big Brother scenario?” That’s where the blockchain becomes relevant. The blockchain is not a centralized database. It’s distributed on a network so that you own your data, not the government.

Do you ever imagine a time where a government could decide to use this for voting or some other forms of citizen engagement?

AG: We stay out of the political arena.

But think about it: If your utility bill was on the blockchain, and I can now have a thumbprint, I wouldn’t need another form of identity for voter registration. The applications are huge. I tell people I’d love to see more competition, because right now we’re the only ones who are working on this [social enterprise] side of the blockchain world.

We’re very focused on the 65 million refugees in the world, and the 2 billion people under $2 a day; we have a lot of work to do. We’ve had a couple of

offers to get bought out by big banks who want to leverage our platform because we already have a product. But I don’t want to sell to a bank because then I would break my own promise [to solve this problem].

What have you done about funding?

AG: We’re blessed. I resurrected my old teams. We invested our own money.

And then we just recently closed a pretty significant seed round, because we want to expand the number of countries in which we can start deploying. Somewhere late in 2017 we’ll open a Series A to really scale it up big time.

How do you make sure that you’re screening investors to be really clear that they’re mission-aligned and are not going to pressure you to sell to a big bank?

AG: The simple answer is I’m old. That helps. Pretty much everybody who we work with, we know, and everybody has the same moral compass.

In fact, for our Series A, our shortlist is focused on impact investors I have known 10 years.

To be honest, everybody who has a dime wants to invest in blockchain to make more money. There is literally nobody on this [for-benefit] side of the ledger. We find ourselves in a sweet spot where people are like, “Hey, finally somebody is looking at the blockchain for good and yet they’re a for-profit enterprise.” It’s not like we’re abandoning a healthy balance sheet. We’re saying, “Hey, look, we don’t need another blockchain company trying to make more money on Wall Street.”

What’s next?

AG: One of the things we’re trying to do is to start up a conversation with the refugee centers here in the US. When the refugees come into the US, they get a packet. If you’ve ever been to the Detroit airport or Atlanta airport, it’ll break your heart. They get a white plastic bag with a sticker that has a number on it. That’s it. There’s nothing recorded beyond that packet.

All this history that they had, their education history back home, it’s just lost or it sits on a piece of paper. What we’re trying to say is that that family in Rwanda, if there was a civil war and if their data was part of the blockchain identity, then now they are universally acceptable as not just refugees but people who are working hard, making a living, with kids going to school.

The key is to really understand the value of the trusted network. The traditional systems are based on mistrust.

That’s why banks have their own title company and your mortgage company has its own title company. Blockchain demonstrates a more democratic way of dealing with trust issues. That becomes extremely valuable for somebody who lives in poverty.

What’s giving you hope?

AG: Good question. I think what gives me hope is that there is a fair amount of movement right now towards people recognizing that we’re getting to a tipping point in terms of refugees and extreme poverty and violence and crazy rhetoric on the political side. You will completely feel hopeless if you’re standing in the refugee camp, I’ll tell you that. Because time stops. If you’re a refugee in a camp for 25 years, time actually stops for you. It’s a balance.

Photos: BanQu

CONSCIOUS COMPANY MAGAZINE

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JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2017

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parting thought...

“We did not come to fear the future.

We came here to shape it.”

— Barack Obama

An Open Letter to Conscious Leaders

Our fellow conscious leaders and purpose-driven professionals, WE HAVE WORK TO DO. In this post-election world, 2017 has become a pivotal year for the continuation and acceleration of the greater Conscious Business Movement. Sustainable business, conscious and mindful leadership, impact investing, social entrepreneurship, and the entire stewardship of our planet (energy, climate, poverty) are at stake.

As leaders, we must do more, together.

Can we unite as a unified voice to tackle the worthy causes? Can we use our time, money, and energy to collectively accelerate human consciousness and the good we want to see in the world? As Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez said to a group of us over lunch, “If you don’t unite and find a common voice, your message will get lost. It already is.”

Are you willing to collaborate?

This is a call to all conscious leaders, sustainable business advocates, and purposedriven professionals.

As the independent media company covering the conscious business movement, we are answering the call by committing our editorial and partnership teams to make collaboration and coalition-building priority #1. We are using our full energies to steward these critical efforts.

Our call to action is simple: raise your hand to contribute your resources to work with other like-minded leaders and professionals and we will facilitate the efforts (read: do the work) to create meaningful outcomes beyond simple conjecture.

Currently, coalitions are being formed around the aforementioned causes. If you are willing to give your voice (written articles), your expertise (shared time for quarterly calls), and your resources (minor corporate donations to support initiatives), simply let us know by emailing our Chief Expansion Officer, Aaron Kahlow, at Aaron@ConsciousCoMag.com with the subject line “I’m In.” Will you do your part for the greater good of this wonderful conscious business movement?

What say you?

– The Conscious Company Media team