Conscious Company Magazine | Summer 2018 by Conscious Company

TOP CONSCIOUS BUSINESS LEADERS 2018

CONSCIOUS COM PA N Y THE

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FUTURE OF FINANCE

TAKE CHARGE OF YOUR FUNDING, NEGOTIATIONS & INVESTMENTS PIPELINE ANGELS FOUNDER NATALIA OBERTI NOGUERA

LEADERSHIP | WORKPLACE | SUSTAINABILITY | ENTREPRENEURSHIP

TABLE OF CONTENTS Q3 / SUMMER 2018 | ISSUE 19

THE LIST

10 TOP CONSCIOUS BUSINESS LEADERS 2018*

BEST PRACTICES

NEW MODELS

46 PIPELINE ANGELS IS CHANGING THE FACE OF ANGEL INVESTING*

TAKE CHARGE OF YOUR INVESTMENT TERM SHEETS* BY JENNY KASSAN

CLOSED LOOP PARTNERS HELPS MULTINATIONALS COOPERATE TO FUND SOCIAL GOOD

HOW TO NEGOTIATE A WIN FOR ALL*

JUST COMMUNITY IS REIMAGINING MICROFINANCE

CASE STUDIES

66 HOW TRADITIONAL MEDICINALS FOUND ALIGNED INVESTORS* BY JENNIFER KONGS AND ELIZABETH FREEBURG

70 HOW FORMER WALL STREET EXEC GAYLE JENNINGS Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;BYRNE MADE AN IMPACTFUL CAREER CHANGE

BY DIANA CHAPMAN

BIG IDEA

THE FIVE TENETS OF CREATING A CONSCIOUS MONEY CULTURE

BY JOETTA JOHNSON

A CALL FOR LONG-TERM CAPITALISM BY RAND STAGEN

*Cover Story

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CONSCIOUS COMPANY EDITORIAL TEAM

CONSCIOUS COMPANY MEDIA

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Rachel Zurer

CEO & CO-FOUNDER Meghan French Dunbar

ART DIRECTOR Cia Lindgren

COMMUNITY MEMBERSHIP MANAGER Kate Hermann

COPY EDITORS Robin Dickerhoof Shane Gassaway

EVENTS & OPERATIONS ASSOCIATE Nina Bernardin

DIGITAL EDITOR Mary Mazzoni TRANSCRIPTIONIST Carla Faraldo

WEBSITE GURU Rolando Garcia CO-FOUNDER Maren Keeley

NEWSSTAND CONSULTANT Curtis Circulation Company PRINTING Publication Printers COVER PHOTO Paola Kudacki Behind the Cover Image Our cover photo was originally shot as part of The Limited’s #LeadingLooksLike campaign, which invited women leaders from various walks of life to share their unique stories. “I decided to take part when I realized how many women were in leadership positions behind the scenes for the campaign itself, including the casting agent, tailor, stylist, and photographer,” says Natalia Oberti Noguera. “I also felt like I didn’t have to change who I was to be part of the campaign. I could be me and that’s exactly who they wanted.”

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

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CEO’S LETTER: LET’S TALK MONEY One of my favorite parts of this job is the sheer number of entrepreneurs, business owners, and executives I have the privilege of talking to on a regular basis. I get to meet some of the most impressive, heart-centered, change-making, badass business leaders in the world. I’m always impressed with the innumerable ways people are making the world a better place through business. Yet, when I truly dive deep with most of these leaders, I find that almost all of them have a common struggle: money. Whether their current challenge is bootstrapping to get off the ground, raising that next round, searching for a truly sustainable revenue stream, finding the right capital to fuel expansion, or just digging deep to make the next payroll — all issues I can relate to — finances seem to be a primary source of the stress for most, if not all, purpose-driven business leaders. It makes sense: we can’t have truly sustainable conscious companies if they aren’t financially viable. Those are some of the reasons we’ve dedicated this issue to money. We’ve talked to experts and business owners from all over to shed some light on the almighty dollar. The topics in these pages range from changing your company’s money culture (page 40) and finding mission-aligned investors (page 66) to taking charge of your term sheet (page 32) and figuring out how to negotiate better (page 36) — plus stories of leaders creating businesses driven by innovative perspectives on finance. You’ll find even more money-related content on our website over the coming months. It feels very apropos that this is also the issue in which we get to announce the next step on our own company’s money journey. Beginning on July 1, 2018,

Conscious Company Media will be launching Conscious Company Membership. Upon joining our community of purpose-driven leaders, members will get access to this wonderful magazine, plus a suite of membership perks including event discounts, members-only content, partner discounts, exclusive videos, live interviews with business leaders, and more. For more information and to let us know what benefits you want us to consider next, visit consciouscompanymedia.com/join. In full transparency, one of the reasons we’re making this change is, you guessed it, money. Bringing stories, experiences, and education about conscious business to as many people as possible is our team’s passion. We love this work. We love our mission. We love this community. And after more than three years and 19 print issues, we continue to search for sustainable revenue streams that can fuel it all. We’ve also heard this community loud and clear that you want more ways to connect, more ways to learn, and more ways to engage with each other. Fortunately, our new membership program offers those benefits while also helping us achieve the financial sustainability we need to thrive. We think it’s a tremendous win–win, and hope you will too. Please join us on this step of our journey and become an even deeper part of our community. And know that as you do, you are an integral part of helping Conscious Company — and this movement — thrive. With gratitude, as always, Meghan French Dunbar Conscious Company Media Co-founder and CEO

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BY RACHEL ZURER

hat is success? That’s the essential question of conscious business. Is it success to run a profitable enterprise and feel empty and depressed at the end of each day? Is it success to grow a company with low employee morale that offers an attractive return to investors? Is it success to expand market share of a product that slowly sickens people and ecosystems? These questions don’t, in fact, have objective right answers. There’s no inarguable instruction book to leading a good life. Yet, increasingly, a community of leaders is coalescing around a vision of success that is quite different from the messages embedded in our contemporary mainstream. Much like early advocates for the abolition of slavery or for women’s right to vote, they’re a diverse group of individuals who, for whatever reason, have come to see through and beyond the ideas that hold sway in our society’s traditional centers of power and influence. They’re saying no to profit at all costs. They’re saying no to sacrificing their personal and communal wellbeing on the altar of unquestioning growth. They’re saying no to myopic, short-term thinking. And, just as importantly, they’re saying a big, heartfelt yes to using the creative power of business to envision and invoke a more socially just, environmentally sustainable, and spiritually fulfilling world. This new vision of success is rapidly gaining momentum. Yet despite the progress of the past several years, those of us practicing and standing for doing business differently still often find ourselves swimming upstream, reaching deep for the courage to honor our convictions in the face of a “normal” that hasn’t caught up. In times of challenge, it’s easy to slip into the trap of feeling that you are alone or unsupported. We’re here to remind you: that’s not so. Depending on where you live, you might be the only one in your local chamber of commerce who’s committed to paying a living wage, or the lone voice of “win-for-all” in a room of “eat-or-be-eaten.” But rest assured, your kindred spirits are out there. And in the interest of advancing a new definition of success in business — which happens to be Conscious Company’s purpose — it’s our honor bring you this list of 21 role models on the journey toward a new way to be.

OUR METHODS Please know that making a list like this is hard work. We started by recruiting a panel of nine top-notch judges, each a leading expert in one of the three domains of influence we wanted to acknowledge and celebrate (personal journey, a.k.a. the inner work; conscious workplace, a.k.a. the “we space”; and global impact, a.k.a. effects on society). We sent out a call for nominations, and nudged people into taking time to tell us the stories of those deserving recognition. We sorted through nearly 100 detailed applications and passed the most qualified to our judges. Each three-person judging panel convened at least once to agree on criteria and on whom to showcase. Then we gathered all the images, facts, and references we needed to share the honor-

ees’ accomplishments. In the end, easily hundreds of hours of thought and effort went into this story, from both our staff and our community. We say this not to pat ourselves on the back, but to underscore how important such a list is. For each of the honorees, we hope this small token of recognition helps cheer them along and helps confirm that their hard work has not gone unseen. For the rest of us, may their stories inspire and enable us to keep going, to take our own next brave step, to remember there are others floating along beside us in the river of uncertainty and change. As the oft-quoted African proverb reminds us, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” This is us. Let’s stick together and go far.

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LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT

This first category, chosen by Conscious Company Staff, is awarded to one person a year.

GARY HIRSHBERG, 64

CO-FOUNDER & CHIEF ORGANIC OPTIMIST OF STONYFIELD FARM, LONDONDERRY, NH In 1983, Gary Hirshberg and Stonyfield co-founder Samuel Kaymen were running a nonprofit organic farming school on a mission to help family farms survive and help protect the environment. When the school needed funding, they put its seven cows to work and began selling yogurt. Thirty-five years and several multinational parent companies later, Stonyfield is a $400 million business still making organic yogurt, while the organic food market it helped launch is a $50 billion sector — and growing fast. “But none of that is enough,” says Hirshberg. “If our air and our water and our topsoil are contaminated, then we have to go further.”

All photos by courtesy unless otherwise noted

Going above and beyond a narrow, short-term view of his own business’s interests is something Hirshberg has been modeling for decades as Stonyfield’s CEO, as an advisor to countless other organic food businesses, and as a tireless environmental activist. In 1993, Stonyfield was the country’s first dairy processor to pay farmers not to treat cows with the synthetic growth hormone RBST. In 2007, the company helped fund a new nonprofit, “Climate Counts,” to show consumers how to fight climate change with their purchases and investments. From 1998 to 2013, Hirshberg ran an annual Stonyfield Entrepreneurship Institute where he offered problem-solving workshops to representatives from 100 to 200 companies at a time; he’s now reviving the program as the Hirshberg Entrepreneurship Institute. In 2012, he was instrumental in launching the Just Label It campaign to require that companies identify genetically modified ingredients. And now, after a couple years absent from Stonyfield, he’s returned to the company with a new fervor for using the business as a platform for creating the world he wants to see. “In 2018, what that means is changing Congress,” he says. Stonyfield has launched a “Make Earth Cool Again” campaign to encourage consumers to vote for the environment in the mid-term elections, and is also recruiting 35 communities around the country to convert to using organic, non-toxic methods in managing all their playing fields and parks. “This isn’t just socially responsible,” Hirshberg emphasizes. “This is good business. This is how you are more successful.” And through his decades of commitment, he’s paved the way for others to follow that path.

LESSONS FROM HIRSHBERG “The most essential attribute for success is not education, knowledge, intelligence, connections, or money — it’s determination. Judge yourself and others not by how well you are doing when things are going great, but on how quickly you get back up on your feet after you’ve inevitably been knocked down.”

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PERSONAL JOURNEY

THE JUDGES

PERSONAL JOURNEY

This category recognizes leaders who have demonstrated an exceptional commitment to cultivating the practice of conscious leadership on an individual level through self-development and who serve as an example for others. Our judges especially considered evidence of significant inner work.

Diana Chapman, co-founder of the Conscious Leadership Group and a co-author of “The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership”

Konda Mason, Rand Stagen, longtime CEO of the managing director of Impact Hub in the Stagen LeaderOakland and ship Academy in co-founder of Dallas and a ConJubilee scious Capitalism Inc. board member

HALEY ROBISON, 32

CEO OF KAMMOK, AUSTIN, TX Robison is one of the youngest and one of the few female CEOs in the outdoor industry, and head of a B Corp whose mission is “to equip and inspire others for life-changing adventure.” After three years as a consultant at Bain & Co., she went on to add more meaning to her career by completing a year-long theology program, a semester with the National Outdoor Leadership School, and a joint MBA and master’s in education from Stanford. She joined Kammok as COO in 2015, and became CEO in 2016. She has created a culture that walks the talk when it comes to making room for adventure.

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“A conscious and unselfish leader, Haley shows love in her servitude and humility,” writes her nominator. “She is always jumping in to help when timelines are tight, is never the first in line, and constantly builds up our team members. We’re lucky to learn from her example.”

LESSONS FROM ROBISON

1. “People can handle bad news. They cannot handle bad behavior. If you are forging new paths, mistakes and failures are inevitable. People will rally to problem-solve with you if they are treated with respect and compassion. There is no substitute for integrity and humility.” 2. Each week at their team hustle, Robison kicks off the meeting with a question meant to provoke reflection, such as “What inspired you this weekend?” “How do you see Kammok carrying out its mission?” “Why are you excited to be here?” 3. The company’s required in-office hours are 10 a.m.–3 p.m. to allow for flexible scheduling and time outside with family and friends.

JUDGES’ TAKE “The nomination talked about how she’s really good at inspiring unity among people. That speaks to her inner work. I also like that she’s very involved in her local community.” — DC

Photo by Weston Carls

“She has an internal practice, and her work is informed by that. I love hearing that a meeting with Robison usually looks like a walk around the East Austin neighborhood where Kammok is headquartered.” — KM

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PERSONAL JOURNEY

CHIP CONLEY, 57

STRATEGIC ADVISOR FOR HOSPITALITY & LEADERSHIP AT AIRBNB, SAN FRANCISCO, CA We put him on the cover of our second issue in 2015, and this author, entrepreneur, and thought-leader’s story, including his founding of Joie de Vivre Hospitality at age 26 and writing several best-selling books, is well-known. But our judges agreed not to let the fact that he’s already famous stop us from once again recognizing this “quintessential conscious leader” as a role model in the field. Conley’s fifth book, “Wisdom@Work: The Making of a Modern Elder” comes out in September.

LESSONS FROM CONLEY

1. “The most neglected fact in business is that we’re all human. If we use this as a guide, each interaction — regardless of the relationship or situation — becomes an empathetic exchange based on respect for self and for others.”

2. “As leaders, we have the opportunity to be both wisdom keepers and wisdom seekers. For me, this means that I stay curious, first and foremost, in any given situation.” 3. “Spending quiet time, preferably in nature if you can, is essential. It’s in that space — where time and mind expand — that I get my inspiration and energy for the day ahead.”

JUDGES’ TAKE “He’s at the center of really integrating spirituality with business.” — KM “He has a groundedness, gravitas, and presence that I appreciate whenever I’m in same room as he is.” — RS “I particularly like his devotion to both being the best businessman he can be and also growing consciousness. He’s been role-modeling that since graduating from Stanford’s MBA program and going right off to the Esalen Institute while everybody else jumped straight into business.” — DC

CONSCIOUS LEADER CRED “Chip was one of the first CEOs to incorporate psychology and transformative work into the fabric of his company,” writes his nominator. “His books have been the doorway through which many of today’s top leaders have developed their own enlightened business practices.”

Photo by Lisa Keating

KATHRYN SHERIDAN, 42

FOUNDER & CEO OF SUSTAINABILITY CONSULT, BRUSSELS After a career first as an environmental journalist, then as a media consultant, Sheridan left a director’s job in another consultancy to set up her own firm, a communications agency that specializes in the bioeconomy and biomaterials. Since 2008, the company has emphasized the importance of credible communications and stakeholder engagement to building a sustainable bioeconomy sector. In 2017, she stepped away from her business for a 12-month sabbatical to let her creativity come through again and to recover from a grueling travel schedule.

CONSCIOUS LEADER CRED

“She practices facilitation techniques from the Art of Hosting, asks good questions that encourage us to think about things differently, meditates, and has a daily mindfulness practice which she talks about openly,” writes the employee who nominated her. “She shares her highs and lows and shows that vulnerability is a powerful practice for honesty and connection.”

LESSONS FROM SHERIDAN

1. “Manage your energy, not your time. I’m not working just for the sake of it, I want to have a positive impact. So instead of forcing through when I’m tired or distracted, I only work when I feel it. When I’m not working, my favorite guide is ‘Read. Rest. Write.’ This helps me stay inspired and balanced.” 2. “Do one good thing. When I’m inspired and in the zone to work, I focus on doing one good thing rather than drowning in the email swamp or the never-ending to-do list.”

3. “Do everything you can to stay true to what really matters to you. Figure out what’s non-negotiable, then set boundaries. If you don’t respect your boundaries, no one else will.”

JUDGES’ TAKE “It takes a lot of courage to step away from your business and trust your team to take care of the organization while you’re on sabbatical. Most leaders burn out before they self-eject.” — RS “I love that she stopped and really dove deep, then came back up with a newly and internally informed approach. Such a good role model.” — KM

SUBHANU SAXENA, 53

REGIONAL DIRECTOR OF THE BILL & MELINDA GATES FOUNDATION, LONDON Saxena, who is now working on partnerships with pharmaceutical companies at the Gates Foundation, was managing director and global CEO of Cipla, a major pharmaceuticals company in India, and also on the global management team of Novartis. After completing his MBA at INSEAD, he went to India to learn not just written Sanskrit but spoken as well, which included memorizing the Vedas, ancient sacred Sanskrit texts. He emphasizes leading from purpose and brings this into everything he does.

CONSCIOUS LEADER CRED

JUDGES’ TAKE “It’s one thing for a leader to do their own inner work, but to be able to stand for having their colleagues do it is such an important step.” — DC “So much of the time, people want to get healthy or become more conscious, but they don’t want to do the deep inner work. He has been very disciplined in putting in the time and focus.” — RS

“Subhanu is a top business leader who is committed to leadership from the inside out; to deep personal practice that manifests in results in the world,” writes his nominator. “He is working at a global level where such leadership is so needed. He is perceptive, honest, articulate, and hard-working.”

LESSONS FROM SAXENA

1. “Speak to five people before making a decision. Too often we are trained to be seen as decisive, which means we react to the last thing we heard or judge situations or people without all the facts. Get a 360-degree view of any issue before deciding on a course of action.” 2. “Live a life of purpose so you can lead organizations that have a purpose beyond profit. Your purpose will be found in your passion.” CONSCIOUS COMPANY MAGAZINE

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TARA-NICHOLLE NELSON, 42 FOUNDER & CEO OF SOULTOUR, OAKLAND, CA

Nelson became pregnant with her first child at 16. Rather than let that hold her back, she went to college; got a master’s in psychology and a law degree; became a realtor; wrote an influential marketing book, “The Transformational Consumer”; became a TV personality; became VP of marketing at MyFitnessPal; and is now the woman you want to have on your board. Her personal story is not about one single transformation, it’s about one after another. Nelson recently came off a “soul” tour where she interviewed people across the country about the role of soul in the workplace. Her company, SoulTour, is a personal-growth school and spiritual community that supports conscious leaders in bringing their gifts to the world. She’s especially focused on helping people grow through writing.

LESSONS FROM NELSON

1. “As Henry Cloud says, make necessary endings the same way a champion rose-gardener might: put an end to anything that is dead, diseased, or diverting resources from the things that matter the most.” 2. “Invest in a daily writing practice and morning ritual that allows you to manage your own emotions and start the day grounded, eager, and in flow. Leaders’ anxiety is contagious. If you build a daily writing or other contemplative practice, you’ll find that it’s an emotional windshield wiper you can access any time you need. It’s a massive flow trigger, and also a major blessing you can bestow on your team.”

JUDGES’ TAKE “She has had a remarkable, incredible life journey. She’s done some amazing things. I was impressed with how she connects to something greater than herself.” — DC

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CONSCIOUS LEADER CRED “Tara is aligned to higher power and uses her ‘flow writing process’ to stay aligned,” says her nominator. “Her accessible approach to writing rekindled my love of writing and I am closer than I’ve ever been to finishing my own book.”

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Photo by Sabrina Luppi

CONSCIOUS WORKPLACE

This category recognizes leaders who have created exceptional workplace environments where others can thrive. Our judges considered especially leaders’ investment in culture-building as evidenced through deliberate practices that help articulate and foster a strong, intentional company culture.

THE JUDGES

Moe Carrick, founder of Moementum Inc. and co-author of “Fit Matters: How to Love Your Job”

Jeff Cherry, CEO of Conscious Venture Lab and CEO of SHIFT Ventures

Simon D’Arcy, a partner at Evolution and creator of Culture-Builder.com

ROBERT CRAVEN, 49

CEO OF FOODSTATE, MANCHESTER, NH Since 2011, Craven has been CEO of B Corp-certified nutritional supplement company FoodState, which markets under two brands, including MegaFood. In addition to the company’s commitments to buying 100 percent pesticide- and herbicidefree fruits, grains, and vegetables directly from the farm for use in their products, Craven has dedicated himself to a practice of daily meditation, coaching, and self-work.

CONSCIOUS LEADER CRED

“He is a passionate leader who is vulnerable, who embodies a dedication to awareness and growth, and who trusts the world so fully that it renders it impossible not to get swept up by his drive and excitement for our company vision,” writes his nominator. “We are using the principles of Holacracy to flatten the organization and empower leaders. We have an open-books system and share goals and revenue with everyone in the company. We share our new product pipeline publicly and have live cams on our manufacturing facilities; most dietary supplement companies won’t let you take pictures of their facilities. We also empower everyone in the organization to participate in Flight School, our leadership training program.”

LESSONS FROM CRAVEN

1. “Practice meditation. It has had a profound impact on me to put the space between stimulus and response. Try an app like Headspace — it has worked wonders for me.” 2. Be vulnerable. During one conscious leadership training exercise with his whole team, Craven really let it rip. “There was a mix of fear and joy in the room,” says an employee. “It’s scary to see the CEO, who is ‘supposed’ to have it all together, really reveal where he is. And also, he was beautifully modeling that it’s okay to be messy and to trust the process and grow through it. It was a beautiful, scary, exquisite moment, and the observable results are that people are embracing the model. He has not just nodded and given permission, he is in it with us while we learn to grow our awareness.”

JUDGES’ TAKE “He is clearly walking the talk, with a wider investment in culture-building. The company has really embedded it.” — SD

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DAN PRICE, 34

FOUNDER & CEO OF GRAVITY PAYMENTS, SEATTLE, WA Price made global headlines in 2015 when he announced he was cutting his own salary from $1 million to $70,000 to set a $70,000 minimum wage at his (then-) 130-person payment processing company. Business has thrived since then: the company’s headcount has grown to nearly 200 and revenue has skyrocketed.

CONSCIOUS LEADER CRED

“One of the company’s core mottos is ‘everyone’s a CEO,’” writes his nominator. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a mid-career member of leadership or a fresh-out-of-college new hire, everyone is charged with thinking independently and critically. The headquarters has zero private offices. No one’s desk is bigger than anyone else’s. Many of us don’t have official job titles. Anyone can drop in on any meeting. Price has often called impromptu all-hands meetings where he’ll break down opportunities or threats with incredible candor.”

LESSONS FROM PRICE

1. “If you’re not listening to the people who are performing the core functions of your business, you’ll never have the right information to make strategic decisions. I will often ask a front-line employee outright what they’re working on and what their concerns and priorities are for the company.” 2. “Don’t wait for people to come to you. We have a system in place in which we interview every single employee at least once a year to get their feedback on things like how leadership is doing, where they see opportunity for their department, and what they’d like to see improved. Frequently, we’ll spot patterns we may not have noticed before, and we also get amazing, singular ideas.” 3. “Don’t [blindly] take advice. Seek out experiences and information from others, but at the end of that, do what you believe is right. I’ve had moments in my career where I went against what I thought was the right thing because someone wiser, smarter, or more experienced gave me advice to take a JUDGES’ TAKE different path. Most of the time it “A lot of courage is required for what Dan has would have worked out better if done. Although he has received a lot of press for I had done what I believed was it, a lot of that press has been pushback. If you’re right. The rest of the time, I trying to build a conscious company, the torque of missed the opportunity to fail regular culture can pull you off the path, and he and learn on my own terms.” hasn’t let that happen.” — JC 18

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THIERRY OLLIVIER, 45

FOUNDER & CEO OF BRANDSTORM INC./ NATIERRA, LOS ANGELES, CA In 2001 Ollivier founded BrandStorm, which imports and sells superfoods, salts, and snacks, now under the Natierra brand. In 2013, BrandStorm became Fair for Life–certified. After his daughter passed away in early 2017, Ollivier knew he was not emotionally in a position to be running a company effectively and turned the leadership over to his management team for the next six months, demonstrating the vital role that trust plays in his leadership. “Thierry’s mission and sense of soul convinced me that joining his team was the right fit for me,” says his nominator. “I can honestly say that because of Thierry, I aspire to be a better human being.”

CONSCIOUS LEADER CRED

LESSONS FROM OLLIVIER “Do business with soul. Using your soul as a guide to apply what you believe in to the way you interact with all stakeholders will undoubtedly put you on a path to mutually beneficial relationships at all levels, where nobody gains to the detriment of others.”

BrandStorm has a Culture Committee, which celebrates all employees on holidays. The Philanthropic Committee provides monthly opportunities to participate in team-based charitable programs. Employees are also encouraged to share their personal philanthropic causes with the team via a monthly newsletter. When Ollivier travels to source products, if he sees a need in the communities he visits (often in areas far from urban civilization), he takes action, such as creating a program to provide school supplies in the South American community where the company sources pink salt, and partnering in another program that offers meals to Haitian children in need.

JUDGES’ TAKE “I admire the emphasis on love and how that translates into the workplace.” —MC

SUSAN GRIFFIN-BLACK, 62

CO-FOUNDER & CO-CEO OF EO PRODUCTS, SAN RAFAEL, CA Griffin-Black started her organic cosmetics company in a garage in 1995 with a dream of working in a way that honored the planet and allowed her to also live her life as a woman, a mother, a partner, and a friend. Even though she and her co-founder and co-CEO, Brad Black, divorced in 2007, they’ve continued to work together to grow the company to more than 150 people, reporting 25 percent fiscal growth each year since 2012. Some of the company’s key workplace practices: benefits that are the same across job titles and skill levels, including access to subsidized continued education; in-house yoga classes; a company fridge stocked with healthy snacks; and a benefits package that includes chiropractor visits and acupuncture. She has been a practicing student of Zen Buddhism for over 30 years, and the foundational practice of non-attachment is a tool she uses daily.

CONSCIOUS LEADER CRED

“She models the importance of letting go, which can be a vital part of success,” writes her nominator. “The idea of doing your best possible work and then releasing it without attachment to an outcome has guided everything in our company from submitting new products to juggling cash flow. She truly embodies her favorite saying —‘Work is love made visible.’”

LESSONS FROM GRIFFIN-BLACK

1. “In order to bring mindfulness to the workplace, we have to be mindful ourselves. Sounds simple, but in my experience, it’s not at all easy. I have made my personal inner work an integral part of my life: knowing myself, knowing what is important and acting accordingly, taking time for meditation/contemplation, asking for help/being vulnerable, listening.” 2. “Kindness is greatly underrated.”

JUDGES’ TAKE “She’s solid in her leadership example. I can tell she’s committed to investment with all the examples of both intent and action around the culture.” —SD

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TINA YOUNG, 48

FOUNDER & CEO OF MARKETWAVE, DALLAS, TX The agency Young founded in 1998 now has a mission of “making connections that move people.” As a founding member and board chair of the Dallas Conscious Capitalism chapter, she’s been creating a conscious workplace culture since before there was a name for the movement. “A feeling of camaraderie; a safe environment to make mistakes; a chance to grow as a person and a professional: these things don’t just happen,” writes her nominator. “They’re thoughtfully created with every decision, hire, and goal that Tina makes.”

CONSCIOUS LEADER CRED

Her nomination included a long list of specific cultural practices Young has initiated at Marketwave. Among them: “At our weekly staff meeting, we each mention a fellow staffer whom we’d like to thank. We also have ‘Values Passports’ — small booklets that we can stamp when we notice a colleague demonstrating one of our values. Our open office space plays a big role in our collaborative culture. And Tina has implemented a coaching framework in which managers meet offsite with their direct reports once a month.”

LESSONS FROM YOUNG

1. “Leaders set the tone. And just as enthusiasm and positivity can be contagious, so is stress and fear and worry. It’s not 20

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about pretending to never be stressed, but rather channeling it to solve problems and engage your team in both the ups and downs of business.” 2. “Lead with care and compassion, even in the tough situations and conversations. Think of how you would treat someone if they were your best friend’s son or daughter.” 3. “I recently sat in on a workshop that used the tools from unstuckminds.com, and I walked away with a number of new ways to ask the right questions before jumping into problemsolving. So often as leaders we’re in solutions mode, but stepping back and having a framework for defining the problem can unleash more creative and viable actions.”

JUDGES’ TAKE “In addition to her strong leadership style, it’s also clear that there’s a lot of investment going on around culture. It felt multi-dimensional and comprehensive.” — SD “I liked the way that employee development and coaching as a framework showed up, as well as the articulation of the values being behaviorally descriptive (like ‘employees first’).” — MC

GLOBAL IMPACT

GLOBAL IMPACT ENTREPRENEURS

After reviewing the nominations we received for this popular category, our judges decided to split it into two subcategories, honoring both the entrepreneurs making a difference on the ground and the thinkers who have advanced the conscious business movement over the years.

THE JUDGES

Kim Coupounas, director of B Lab, the nonprofit that certifies B Corps

Rodney Foxworth, Nathan Havey, foundexecutive director of ing partner at Thrive BALLE (Business AlliConsulting Group ance for Local Living Economies)

The Global Impact Entrepreneurs subcategory recognizes founders and CEOs whose innovative businesses have each had an exceptional positive impact on solving a particular societal and/or environmental challenge. Our judges paid special attention to entrepreneurs with a strong theory of change and a scalable, global vision.

CELESTE MERGENS, 56

FOUNDER & CEO OF DAYS FOR GIRLS INTERNATIONAL, BELLINGHAM, WA There are 1.5 billion women of reproductive age in the world, and 500 million of them lack access to safe, affordable menstrual health resources. When a girl lacks menstrual health supplies and education she is more likely to leave school and otherwise falter in life. Days for Girls, the nonprofit Mergens founded in 2008 after becoming aware of the problem while she was assisting in an orphanage in Kenya, has invented an eco-friendly, brightly patterned, washable menstrual pad sewn from locally sourced materials, and a network for distributing and selling them. Just as important as providing dignified solutions, Mergens’ organization is shattering stigma around menstruation by including conversations about positive body image with every kit distributed.

CONSCIOUS LEADER CRED

Days for Girls (DfG) has reached 1 million women and girls in 124 countries with its patented DfG Kits and education outreach. In addition, DfG has started 70 microbusinesses in 15 countries and more than 800 volunteer chapters, teams, and clubs. “Through Mergens’ leadership style of collaboration and humility, Days for Girls now has a US-patented design that works well across climates, cultures, and supply chains — the genius of collaborative, responsive design,” writes her nominator.

LESSONS FROM MERGENS

1. “Trust the power of team process. We can make many good decisions alone, but adding the perspective of team members is like borrowing insight that would otherwise require personal investment of time and research. Even better, people support what they create.” 2. “Honor the wisdom of those you serve. Seek their advice and perspective as a primary consideration. Though working with diverse cultures can be challenging, the diversity can bring depth and strength to products, processes, and programs.” 3. “DfG pads are an example of the genius of being tenaciously flexible for the sake of excellence. We listened and went back to the design drawing board 28 times to get to where we are today.” 4. “Gratitude is more than a platitude; it’s a management method that empowers genius and unlocks team energy.”

Photo by Ashley Christensen

JUDGES’ TAKE “It’s a huge opportunity to solve a root problem that holds women back. The solution is sustainable, with economic empowerment built in. I think it’s incredible.” — NH

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LISA CURTIS, 30

FOUNDER & CEO OF KULI KULI, OAKLAND, CA “Give a Nigerian woman a sack of American-grown corn, and she will eat for a day. Teach her how to grow and sell nutritious food, and she will feed her entire community.” That’s the philosophy behind Kuli Kuli, the first company to introduce moringa, one of the most nutrient-dense plants on the planet, to the US food market. After learning about moringa as a Peace Corps volunteer, Curtis launched Kuli Kuli Foods in 2014. The B Corp sells superfood bars, energy shots, and smoothie mixes in the US made with moringa sourced directly from women’s cooperatives and small family farmers in West Africa and other countries around the world. To ensure that Kuli Kuli’s supply chain helps to improve nutrition and livelihoods for the farmers, the company partners with nonprofits in Africa, the Caribbean, and South America to pay fair wages and educate locals on the nutritional value of moringa.

CONSCIOUS LEADER CRED

To date, Kuli Kuli has planted more than 1 million moringa trees and partnered with over 1,000 farmers, providing more than $1.5 million in income to women-led farming cooperatives and family farms. The company has doubled its size each year and raised a $4.25 million Series A led by the venture arm of Kellogg’s, eighteen94 Capital.

LESSONS FROM CURTIS

1. “The only real failure in life is the failure to try.” 2. “As an impact entrepreneur, you have to be scrappy and show

traction before anyone will write you a check. Focus on all the ways that you can show proof of concept without raising any money. For us that meant surveying 400 customers at farmers’ markets about our Moringa Superfood Bars. We used those survey results to improve the product, and in initial retailer presentations.” 3. “I’m totally obsessed with a book called ‘Traction,’ by Gino Wickman. I love the way it helps systematize and streamline entrepreneurship. I asked everyone on my leadership team to read it and then we implemented the majority of the systems it describes.”

JUDGES’ TAKE “It’s a powerful story of lifting up people in the markets where they’re sourcing the main ingredient.” — KC

SAMIR IBRAHIM, 29

CO-FOUNDER & CEO OF SUNCULTURE, NAIROBI, KENYA SunCulture designs, manufactures, and sells efficient solar-powered drip irrigation solutions that make it cheaper and easier for farmers across Africa to grow high-value fruits and vegetables. Since 2013, the company has reached thousands farmers, helping them increase their incomes by tenfold. Ibrahim spends a significant amount of time in the field getting to know his customers firsthand, and he considers that one of the most important things he does.

CONSCIOUS LEADER CRED

JUDGES’ TAKE “SunCulture is a significant enterprise-level company that has a scalable business model which helps a community of need, and also has global environmental impact.” — RF 22

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“Ibrahim has always retained a strong focus on people — both his team and the farmers his business serves — even when others advised him to focus on selling his products instead,” his nominator writes. “He’s also made hard decisions to decline money from donors and investors because they didn’t align with SunCulture’s values. Keeping the customer in focus, he created a one-stopshop model which meant that he chose to grow a little slower. But now that the business model has been proven and the infrastructure has been built, it’s scaling faster than others and able to foster an even larger impact.”

LESSONS FROM IBRAHIM

1. “Lead with vulnerability and say ‘I don’t know’ more often.” 2. “We’re all in the service industry: we serve our customers. If you keep the customer at the center, you’re on your way to building a meaningful company.” 3. “Sleep more. It’s game-changing.”

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Photo by Iris Piers

MAURITS GROEN, 64

CO-FOUNDER & CO-CEO OF WAKAWAKA, HAARLEM, THE NETHERLANDS Groen has been an author, publisher, and sustainability expert for over 30 years. In the 1980s, he advised the Dutch government on its environmental policy plan. Later, he translated and published Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” book into Dutch. One of the serial entrepreneur’s current ventures, WakaWaka (which means “shine bright” in Swahili), is a B Corp on a mission to end energy poverty by providing access to reliable, clean, and affordable energy to those who lack it — more than one-third of the world’s population. The company develops, manufactures, and markets premium solar-powered flashlights and chargers distributed in over 40 countries. For every purchase, WakaWaka holds promise to light up a life of a person living off-grid through its Share the Sun program, particularly in remote regions and disaster-struck or war-torn areas.

CONSCIOUS LEADER CRED To date, WakaWaka has provided sustainable light and power to more than 1.3 million people in more than 60 countries. “Maurits has a holistic view of sustainability with a pragmatic approach,” writes his nominator. “I’ve been blown away by his true passion for [WakaWaka] being a good business making a real impact. He inspires other companies and individuals to act on sustainability.”

LESSONS FROM GROEN

1. “Never give up. Ever.” 2. “A good and spirited team is crucial for success. So look not only for the best and the brightest, but foremost for a combination of diverse and dedicated team players.”

JUDGES’ TAKE “I like that he’s a thought leader, and I like his model of combining retail sales, donations, and reduced-priced sales in partnership with nonprofits.” — NH

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YVE-CAR MOMPEROUSSE, 35

FOUNDER & CEO OF KREYOL ESSENCE, MIAMI & HAITI Growing up in the US, Momperousse always knew she could turn to her mother’s stash of Haitian black castor oil to solve any hair or beauty disaster. But when a hair catastrophe hit away from home and her hair fell out, she couldn’t find the product in any stores, even natural or West Indian ones. Momperousse decided to make sure that she, and anyone else who needed it, could have access to the healing oil known to promote hair growth by creating Kreyol Essence (KE) to import the product from Haiti. Her social enterprise now sources castor oil (and moringa) directly from rural, Haitian small-holder farmers and helps provide them with technical and financial assistance. The enterprise is tackling soil erosion, deforestation, and greenhouse-gas emissions while creating sustainable jobs and empowering women.

LESSONS FROM MOMPEROUSSE 1. “Stay connected to a global community so that you are always in tune with global culture, challenges, and innovations.” 2. “Just start. Perfect is the enemy of good.”

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CONSCIOUS LEADER CRED

“Kreyol Essence is a disruptor,” writes one of her multiple nominators, a fellow Haitian entrepreneur. “The more prevalent way to do business in Haiti has been to buy and resell, which does little for the country’s GDP. Our needle wasn’t really moving until more businesses became focused on production here.”

JUDGES’ TAKE “She is creating economic opportunity for a population that’s routinely overlooked, and bringing real attention to Haiti as a destination for innovation and entrepreneurship. Plus, her product is for a market, [black women,] that is growing and getting more attention. That’s compelling and unusual in the broader community of folks who identify as conscious capitalists.” — RF

GLOBAL IMPACT THINKERS

Our judges added the Global Impact Thinkers subcategory to recognize individuals who have a long history of influential work on global systems change. “They are changing the narrative around what’s possible with business, how business can change society, and how business can be a solution to get the species through the next 100 years,” says Kim Coupounas.

CAROL SANFORD, 75

CEO & LEAD EDUCATION DESIGNER OF THE CAROL SANFORD INSTITUTE, EDMONDS, WA Sanford is an educator who has been collaboratively leading major change efforts with businesses for more than 40 years. Her client list includes long-term relationships with Colgate Europe and Africa and DuPont Canada, US, Asia and Europe. She also works with new-economy companies like Google and Intel and social enterprises like Seventh Generation, Numi, and REBBL. She’s the author of four books, including “The Regenerative Business,” which was a Gold winner in the 2017 Nautilus Book Awards. Sanford’s work is rooted in her belief that all people can develop and grow to be increasingly entrepreneurial, innovative, and responsible in their business and personal actions. Through a Socratic and contrarian approach backed by research and case stories, she challenges leaders to rethink everything they currently know about leadership, management, and work design.

CONSCIOUS LEADER CRED

“Through her writings, videos, and the businesses she has worked with, it’s undeniable that Carol is one of the most evolved and articulate thinkers and practitioners in what it means to be a conscious leader in business,” writes one of her nominators. “Across multiple business segments and in many countries, Carol’s work has literally transformed the business world.” Another writes, “She has pushed people to think beyond sustainability to regeneration. She pushes people — calling them out when they are falling into traditional thinking.”

LESSONS FROM SANFORD

1. “Avoid advice and be discerning to figure it out for yourself. My way of development is working with education and educators (ancient and modern) who make me figure things out with reflection using living-systems frameworks. Advice tends to diminish deep examinations and [encourage us to] adopt the thinking of others.” 2. “Self-development requires developing skills in livingsystems thinking and personal self-understanding so you can make sense of the world and develop others’ capability to think with a regenerative mind and paradigm.” 3. “I go to spiritual and philosophical resources to breathe in — be inspired. I draw from different spiritual and philosophical schools: Mahayana Buddhism, Sri Aurobindo, Sufi, esoteric and Socratic methods. I translate them into modern business practice.”

Photo by Deontá Arnold

JUDGES’ TAKE “She is a tireless warrior for this work, and brilliant.” — KC “Sanford has greatly impacted entrepreneurial leaders and innovators I’ve worked with over the years, who attest to her supporting them directly and also inspiring them.” — RF

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CHRISTA GYORI, 55

CO-FOUNDER & CEO OF LEADERS ON PURPOSE, WINCHESTER, UK After working in leadership roles in multinational, nonprofit, and academic organizations, Gyori co-founded Leaders on Purpose in 2016 with colleagues from Harvard, the World Bank, and the London School of Economics. This multi-sector enterprise links experts from the corporate world, government, nonprofits, and academia in support of unleashing organizational potential through purpose-driven leadership. In 2018, Leaders on Purpose published its Global CEO Study, in which CEOs from some of the world’s most forward-thinking large corporations (including IKEA, Siemens, Mastercard, Novo Nordisk, Haier, WPP, and Cummins) were challenged to define the future of leadership. By studying their sustainability mindsets, Gyori is uncovering powerful insights for the movement as a whole.

CONSCIOUS LEADER CRED

Having formed trusting relationships with some of the top CEOs in the world, Gyori is distilling patterns and themes that could help mobilize leaders of all levels and sectors. “Christa embodies the very values and qualities that we are seeing emerge in top sustainability leaders,” writes one of her nominators. “She is agile, leads from the middle, and understands that tapping into the highest potential of both the individual and the collective is the key for mobilizing in the direction of a better, healthier future. She’s an expert at convening around purpose and inspiring others to see a positive emerging future.”

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LESSONS FROM GYORI

1. “There are times I’ve had an idea but wasn’t sure I was ready, and I’ve asked myself the question, ‘If not you, then who?’ In every case, it has led to something remarkable. We live in a time when we need to have the courage of our convictions, and we can’t wait for someone else to take action.” 2. “Great leaders throughout history have excelled through having a high level of self-mastery. This has never been more important than it is now. In an era when there is so much uncertainty and so much at stake, and the demands for our time have never been greater, one thing we can control is ourselves. The leaders who master this will have the energy, creativity, and capacity to thrive in this new climate. Some of the CEOs we talked with schedule their time in increments of 5 minutes!”

JUDGES’ TAKE “The CEO Study is incredibly informative about what is getting in the way of CEOs adopting more deep, sustainable practices, how they are embedding purpose throughout their organizations, how they are mapping against the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and the thinking that goes into building a large multinational with legitimate focus on positive impacts on stakeholders. We can’t achieve any of the things we’re talking about if we don’t get companies to start making that shift. This study, and her work elevating those ways of thinking, is landmark.” — KC

DANIELA IBARRA-HOWELL, 52 CO-FOUNDER & CEO OF THE SAVORY INSTITUTE, BOULDER, CO

Ibarra-Howell is an agronomist with more than 25 years of experience in the management and regeneration of grasslands ecosystems. In 2009 she co-founded the Savory Institute with Allan Savory, among others, and became its CEO in 2011. Since then she has led the organization’s charge to tackle global food, water, and climate-change issues through the framework of Holistic Management and a network of partners worldwide, which the Institute describes as “an entrepreneurial, self-sustaining global impact strategy for large-scale restoration of grasslands.” Land managers in the Savory global network implement Holistic Planned Grazing to restore grasslands by mimicking the predator/prey relationships in which those environments evolved.

JUDGES’ TAKE

LESSONS FROM IBARRA-HOWELL

1. “To design context-fit solutions to the needs you are tackling, think holistically. Go from the bottom up, embrace and honor complexity rather than simplifying in the name of efficiency, understand the unique holistic (socio-cultural, ecological, economic, political, etc.) contexts you are trying to influence, start with people, and receive inspiration from the natural world and its powerful structures and processes.” 2. “Businesses need to become masters at designing and operationalizing regenerative strategies to achieve regenerative outcomes and abundance, from the viewpoints of business performance, planetary health, and people’s wellbeing, as they are all so intrinsically interrelated.”

“The work Savory is doing to rethink agriculture is mind-bending. Savory Institute is tip-of-the-spear in terms of thinking about ways we can restore biodiversity and natural ways of growing our food and, in the same breath, address climate change. They’re driving the debate around regenerative agriculture. They are pulling together farmers and [brands like] Patagonia to ask not only how we understand the science, but how we institutionalize this at a much more systemic level. Some of the things they’re talking about are speciessavior-level work.” — KC

PAUL RICE, 57

PRESIDENT AND CEO OF FAIR TRADE USA, OAKLAND, CA Rice launched what is now the leading third-party certifier of Fair Trade products in the US from a warehouse in Oakland in 1998, after more than a decade working with farmers and cooperative enterprises in the mountains of Nicaragua. Over the years, he has pushed to mainstream the Fair Trade movement and expand its impact on farmers and workers by innovating the model, partnering with over 1,300 leading companies, expanding certification across new product categories such as apparel, and activating conscious consumers.

CONSCIOUS LEADER CRED

JUDGES’ TAKE “So much of the challenge in conscious business is helping people understand what the difference is. One of the greatest ‘brands’ out there that helps with that is Fair Trade, and it was one of the first. That’s a hell of an achievement for it to be as broadly recognized and used as it is. It’s something that continues to be valuable, but also, in a number of ways, got this whole thing started.” — NH

Fair Trade USA has directly certified 1.6 million farmers and workers in 70 countries who are audited annually against its rigorous standards. In return, these communities have earned over $503 million in increased income and community development funds, enabling them to improve their livelihoods and protect the environment. Consumer recognition of the “Fair Trade Certified” seal has grown to 67 percent and products displaying the seal can be found in every major retailer in the country.

LESSONS FROM RICE

“I’ve been a social justice activist since I was 16. But I believe the old approaches to tackling social and environmental challenges — such as government regulation and charity — simply aren’t working fast enough. It’s essential that we harness the power of markets, companies, and consumers to create scalable, sustainable solutions. I believe the pace of our evolution to Conscious Capitalism will depend on our ability to build innovative ‘shared value’ business models that generate social and environmental good without sacrificing financial returns. I am thrilled to support so many companies who are pioneering this new frontier, and deeply inspired by all the conscious consumers who are voting with their dollars for a better world. The survival of our planet depends on them.” CONSCIOUS COMPANY MAGAZINE

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HUNTER LOVINS, 68

CO-FOUNDER & CEO OF NATURAL CAPITALISM SOLUTIONS, LONGMONT, CO For decades, Lovins has been one of the world’s foremost promoters of sustainable development. The best-known of the 15 books she’s co-authored, 1999’s “Natural Capitalism,” was an early seminal work on the transition away from our current unsustainable economic system. She has consulted for heads of state, departments of defense, energy agencies, and hundreds of other state and local agencies. Lovins believes that citizens, communities, and companies, working together within the market context, are the most dynamic problem-solving force on the planet. She has devoted herself to building teams that can create and implement practical and affordable solutions to the problems facing us in creating a sustainable future.

CONSCIOUS LEADER CRED

“Hunter is a force of nature,” writes her nominator. “She is charismatic, powerful, fearless, seemingly tireless, wicked smart, globally respected, and a gorgeous human being. I believe her to be one of the most important thinkers, doers, and leading-light women of the 21st century.”

LESSONS FROM LOVINS

1. “The best leadership quote I know is from Lao Tzu, who reportedly said: Leaders are best when people barely know they exist, Not so good when people obey and acclaim them, Worst when people despise them. But of good leaders, when their work is done, their task fulfilled The people will all say, ‘We did this ourselves.’” 2. “Be unreasonable. Conventional wisdom will not solve the challenges facing humanity today. We need new, bold ideas, and the unreasonable courage to bring them into being.”

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JUDGES’ TAKE “Her work is decades-long and focused on changing the narrative around what the true role of business is, and she does that in so many different, layered ways — controversially, in some cases. She’s gotten big thinkers to rethink some fundamental misconceptions about what capitalism is, and on a global scale.” — KC

OPERATIONS

TAKE CHARGE OF THE INVESTMENTS IN YOUR BUSINESS

You can raise capital from investors without sacrificing your mission, goals, or values. Hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s how to take control of the process. BY JENNY KASSAN

any business owners raise funding using the following strategy:

1. Identify potential investors. 2. Get meetings with potential investors. 3. Pitch to potential investors. 4. Provide lots of information to the potential investors so they can do due diligence. 5. Receive a term sheet from investors who are interested. 6. Say yes or no to the term sheet. Has it ever occurred to you how silly this is? You put a ton of time and energy into courting investors and responding to their due-diligence requests without knowing, until the very end of the process, on what

with whatever the legal documents dictate. Sadly, there are many examples of business owners who learned this too late — founders of companies like Odwalla and Ben & Jerry’s who were pushed by investors whose goals they didn’t share to sell their companies to buyers they didn’t want to sell to. One reason so many business owners raise funding on terms that don’t fit their goals, values, and vision is that venture capitalists and their attorneys have developed standardized investment terms that are used in all their deals. It’s much less work for investors and their lawyers to keep investing on the same terms over and over again. The same old term sheets get used (with minor tweaks) regardless of whether they’re really a good

2. what you want your day-to-day life to be like (for example, are you up for 80-hour work weeks and investors who dictate your decisions?); 3. how you want your business to grow; and 4. how you see yourself and your investors someday exiting from the business. The truth is that you can be just as creative with the terms of your investments as you are with every other aspect of your business. Businesses that are strongly committed to mission and want to avoid being pushed by their investors to “sell out” have been designing creative term sheets for decades. These businesses are attracting supportive investors who trust the business

“Your vision should inform the terms on which you accept investment.” terms the investment will be made. What if the terms are completely wrong for your business? At that point, you’ve already invested so much time that you may decide to accept the money and try to ignore the fact that you’ve just set yourself up for a lot of unpleasantness down the road. No one is more knowledgeable about your business than you. You live and breathe your business and you have a vision of what the business will look like when it has reached its ideal size and level of impact. This vision is what should inform the terms on which you accept investment. If you accept terms that are dictated by an investor, you risk sacrificing your vision, goals, and values in the name of complying

fit for the business being invested in. Every business and business owner is unique — ideally, investment terms should be tailored to each situation. Unfortunately, most lawyers and finance professionals are unwilling or unable to be creative. This situation leaves entrepreneurs with two equally unattractive options: raise money in a way that requires you to give up control and put your investors’ interests ahead of everything else, or don’t raise money. Fortunately, there is a third option: set your own terms to reflect what you care about most, including

founders and inside stakeholders to design investment terms that have the greatest likelihood of

1. how you want to treat your employees, community, and other stakeholders;

One of my favorite examples of a business that has been successfully raising capital on its own terms

1. allowing the business to fulfill its founding mission and values; 2. supporting the well-being of all the business stakeholders (and not elevating the interests of investors above other stakeholders); and 3. providing a relatively low-risk reasonable return to investors.

AN EXAMPLE: HOW EQUAL EXCHANGE SETS ITS OWN TERMS

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DESIGN THE RIGHT INVESTMENT Here are the five steps to designing an investment offering that is right for you and your business.

1 UNDERSTAND HOW YOUR BUSINESS’S TAX STATUS AFFECTS WHAT YOU CAN OFFER The first step in designing your capitalraising strategy is to make sure you understand the implications of your legal structure and tax status and consider changing them if necessary. When entrepreneurs start a business, they usually form some kind of legal entity — often an LLC or corporation — and select a tax status. But the structure and tax status of your business may or may not be consistent with the capital-raising strategy that is best for you.

2 DECIDE BETWEEN EQUITY AND DEBT Accounting and tax rules require that every investment offering is classified as either equity or debt. Debt entails a binding promise to pay back the investment with interest. Equity grants an ownership interest in your company to the investor. Within those two categories, it is possible to be very creative. There are debt instruments that have many equity-like characteristics and vice versa. There are even instruments that convert from one to the other based on a certain trigger. But you

4 do need to decide on equity versus debt — or your accountant will be very frustrated with you! Equity and debt have very different implications for investor rights, business ownership, and tax treatment (for both the business and the investors), so carefully weigh the pros and cons of equity versus debt before choosing.

3 DECIDE WHAT ECONOMIC RIGHTS YOU’LL OFFER YOUR INVESTORS There are numerous ways that investors can be compensated, so choose wisely. In the world of high-tech startups, investors usually make money by buying equity at a low price and then multiplying their original investment when, if all goes according to plan, you sell your business to a larger company for a much higher price. Many people, including attorneys and advisors, think this is the only way for investors to be compensated. It isn’t. Among the many alternative ways that investors can be paid are interest payments to debt investors (the payments can vary based on your company’s revenues using a tool called Revenue-Based Debt), profit-sharing payments to equity investors, or repurchasing equity from your investors at a pre-agreed price.

CHOOSE WHAT VOTING RIGHTS YOU’LL OFFER TO YOUR INVESTORS Debt investors typically do not have decision-making rights with respect to the company they are investing in. Holders of equity may have some voting rights. But this is completely up to you. You can offer equity with very limited or no voting rights.

5 ADD PERKS Once you know the economic rights and voting rights that you want to offer your investors, get creative and add in some great perks. These can include an investors-only discount, a special seat at your restaurant, a bottomless mug of coffee at your café, their name on your wall, investorsonly events, and more.

for decades is Equal Exchange, a for-profit worker-owned Fair Trade cooperative. Equal Exchange offers nonvoting preferred stock to investors with a five-year minimum holding period and a target annual 5 percent dividend. If the company is ever sold, all net proceeds must be donated to a nonprofit Fair Trade organization. This ensures that the investors will not have an incentive to pressure the company to sell. Using this

ists, private equity funds, family offices, private foundations, wealth managers, and so on. These are the kinds of investors who pushed Ben & Jerry’s to sell to the highest bidder. The good news is that the investors who don’t want you to set your own terms make up a tiny percentage of the total potential investors out there. Just because you’re unwilling to accept investments that don’t

Of all of the investors in the United States, only about 0.3 percent are professional investors. In my experience, the 99.7 percent of the investor population who are not professional investors are quite open-minded about investment terms and are willing, often even excited, to invest on creative terms that are designed to serve the company’s mission. So, before you start raising money for your business, take

“The truth is that you can be just as creative with the terms of your investments as you are with every other aspect of your business.” unusual model, Equal Exchange has raised almost $20 million dollars, has about 500 investors, and actually has to turn investors away because demand for the nonvoting preferred stock outstrips supply.

WHO WILL INVEST IF I SET THE TERMS? Some investors will not invest in your business if you set the terms. In fact, when pitching to venture capitalists, entrepreneurs are often advised that if they bring a term sheet they risk getting kicked out. These investors insist upon setting the terms on which they invest. I call these folks professional investors. These are wealthy individuals and organizations, sometimes investing their own money and sometimes investing on behalf of others. They come in many flavors: angel investors, venture capital-

allow you to set your own terms doesn’t mean that you cannot raise hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars from investors. There are investors who will be happy to support you on your own terms and not push you to sacrifice your goals and values. A majority of the US adult population is made up of investors. These are people who have investments in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and so on: 60 percent of households have retirement investments, 44 percent of households invest in mutual funds, and 52 percent of Americans invest in the stock market. And, of course, many more have funds invested in depository accounts at banks. If we were to estimate conservatively that half of the adult population has investments, that would mean that there are more than 120 million investors in the United States.

some time to design an investment offering that creates the highest possible likelihood of alignment between your goals and values and those of your investors.

Jenny Kassan has over 20 years of experience as an attorney and advisor for mission-driven enterprises. She has helped her clients raise millions of dollars from values-aligned investors and raised over $1 million for her own businesses. For more great insights, check out her book “Raise Capital on Your Own Terms: How to Fund Your Business without Selling Your Soul.”

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| Q3

/ SUMMER 2018

LEADERSHIP

HOW TO

NEGOTIATE A WIN FOR ALL

Let go of the idea that negotiations, especially about money, need to be competitive or positional. Here’s how to structure the conversation to create a win for all parties. BY DIANA CHAPMAN

A commitment to conscious business and conscious leadership involves learning new ways to engage across the board. This includes negotiations, an area that’s typically as far from “conscious” as it gets. Whether the issue is salary and compensation, supplier contracts, investment terms, or even where to order lunch, it absolutely is possible to negotiate clear agreements without resorting to a positional bargaining or zero-sum mentality. The key is to learn the art of creating win-for-all agreements.

WHAT IS A “WIN FOR ALL”?

People often misunderstand a “win for all” as “I stand for what I want, you stand for what you want, and we figure out where to go from there.” That’s not the win for all we talk about at Conscious Leadership Group. We mean that we all stand for everyone walking away with a full-body, unqualified “Yes!” (More on that later.) Anything other than this simply isn’t a win for all. Achieving this outcome requires that the solution be big enough to include everybody’s wins. At first, it might seem hard to create a vision

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that’s big enough to be that inclusive, but the commitment to do so allows us to leave limited thinking behind and embrace unforeseen imaginative solutions. I’ve never seen a situation where everyone is devoted to a winfor-all solution but together aren’t able to create one. Never. Here’s how to practice negotiating this way.

1. GET CLEAR ON WHAT YOU WANT

Creating a win for all requires that everybody articulate what a win means for them. Have all parties answer the question “What does a win look like for me?” Be as specific and clear as you can. This step may challenge you, especially if you’re negotiating on your own behalf. If you try to articulate your win and you’re not able to, that’s a sign that you’re not yet willing to know what you really want. Some part of you is probably afraid of the truth. One trick to help your ego let go of its fears is to ask if you would be willing to know what’s true — but not necessarily to execute on it. Just blurt

CONSCIOUS COMPANY MAGAZINE

it out. Write down the most selfish version of how you would like this situation to go. Make it as ideal as you can; not because you’re trying to force the other side to negotiate from a different set point, but because it’s what’s true for you. Give yourself permission to be selfish and unreasonable. Being selfish is important at this stage. “Unreasonable” just means you’re making a request before you’ve heard what the other side’s needs are. If later you get feedback that what you’re asking for feels unreasonable, it’s an opportunity to learn more about the other side and how they see the situation. Be more interested in learning from them than trying to get the right version out. Start with putting everything down on paper. The learning lies in putting it all on the table. Remember two things: 1) Wanting something doesn’t mean that you’re entitled to it, just that you want it. Not allowing yourself to want something or admit that you want it robs everyone of learning and is a set-up for walking away resentful. And 2) You won’t ever get what you don’t ask for.

2. INVITE EVERYONE TO THE TABLE — AND SET IT THOUGHTFULLY

The best way to eliminate drama is to create shared commitments and clear agreements with the others about how you want to negotiate. Taking the time to define these specifics can eliminate unproductive debating, hard feelings, and disappointing results. Ask each person to commit to the following: • I commit to get clear about what a win for me looks like. • I commit to stand for your win as much as I stand for mine. • I commit to keep the conversation going (now or at a later time) until we’ve each found our own whole-body yes. Agreeing to these commitments doesn’t mean you’ll execute them perfectly; it just means you can count on everyone to recommit over and over when you fall off of them. If these factors aren’t agreed upon, then you’re back to the old way. Make sure that you create plenty of time to allow for creative solutions. The more complex the issue and the more people involved, the more time you will likely need.

3. EDUCATE AS NECESSARY

If your bargaining partners are skeptical of this method or unfamiliar with the conscious leadership framework, you may need to educate them. See that as taking responsibility for getting the negotiation process you really want. Consider asking them to watch our short video that illustrates the conscious leadership concept of locating yourself (bit.ly/clg_locate). You might say, “We want to practice being open and curious together. Here’s an example of what it would look like. Does that interest you?” Explain that you’ll all work to notice yourselves (or others) getting reactive or defensive, and that when it happens, you’ll practice outing and owning it so you can create a sustainable and effective agreement together. You might share the 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership handout (conscious. is/15-commitments), and highlight a few of the key commitments that apply: Appreciation; Seeing All People and Situations as Allies; Candor; and, of course, Win-for-All Solutions.

WHAT IF THEY’RE NOT WILLING?

It’s important to make sure everyone is committed to creating a winfor-all solution. Anything other than a whole-hearted yes is a no. If your negotiating partners say things like: I’ll try. I’ll do my best. This seems weird. I don’t know this language very well. Or any version of “We’ll see,” they are giving you feedback that they are not fully committed. “Try” means wanting credit for something you have no intention of doing. Be mindful about making sure you’re

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LEADERSHIP

really listening to the others. There’s nothing worse than going to the table hoping they’re willing to play and they’re not, then realizing you skipped over listening before you got there in the first place. It’s worth addressing any concerns you have about the sincerity of the others’ commitments before getting started. If they’re not willing to say yes, you have to recognize that you’ll be negotiating with someone who doesn’t want to stand for a win for all. You’re at a choice point: You can acknowledge that you’re not interested in collaborating with people who aren’t willing to stand for a win for all, and then walk away from the negotiating table altogether (if it’s possible). Your other option is to choose to negotiate knowing that you’re playing a zero-sum game. One of you will win and one will lose, or both will lose in the case of a compromise. It’s common for zero-sum games to eventually lead to resentment and drama somewhere down the line.

4. COME TOGETHER AND GET CREATIVE

Once you’ve confirmed that your partners are ready to engage in this way, start the conversation with everyone saying, “Here’s what my win looks like. I don’t know if this is unreasonable or not, but it’s what looks exquisite to me. I’m more interested in learning than I am in trying to do it right.” Once everyone has named what they want and expressed their reactions to hearing the other parties’ desires, it’s time for the fun part: creatively finding a win-for-all solution. Don’t worry if you can’t see what the solution is going to look like yet. You can’t know before you start this process. You simply start exploring. I love “wonder questions” at this stage. Frame a question that’s bigger than any one party. For example: “I wonder what it would look like for me to work x number of hours, and for us to get all the work done without hiring anyone else.” You might start to feel stupid asking the question when

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you have no idea what the answer is. Sit with it; let yourself get curious. The more curious you get, the more likely you are to innovate and disrupt patterned thinking so you can come up with something you haven’t considered before. Another question to ask at this stage: what if the answer is easy? What if it could just as easily be simple as it could be complicated? What if the solution is simple, fast, and quick? And if there is complexity, could we find ease in the complexity? If there are a lot of different perspectives, you may not come to a solution during your first discussion. You may need to go away and be with the question, then come back to the table. Sometimes complication can be easily addressed by just giving it some time and space to breathe.

TIPS FOR EXPLORATION

Get up and move your body in new and different ways as you think, or take on a posture that is radically different than usual. Toss a ball quickly from person to person as you blurt out any and all possible solutions (all ideas are welcome, even the ones you think are stupid). Question your beliefs about how the issue has to be solved. Take on a toddler’s try-anything mindset. The answer will not often come from your past experience or from how you know how to solve issues. Otherwise you would have figured it out by now.

5. FIND THE WHOLEBODY YES

You’ll know when you’re done when everyone at the bargaining table has a whole-body yes to the solution. This process only works if you keep working until you’ve found something to which all parties can say, “Ah, that feels good.” Then check: is there any place in your body where you notice any constriction about the proposed solution? Is there any part of the proposal that doesn’t feel like a win for all inside yourself? If so, keep going.

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WHAT ABOUT COMPROMISE?

Compromise is lose–lose, and it causes resentment. The costs over the long run are high. It’s not a strategy that will get you where you want to go. Compromise is a mindset, not a specific result. You could end up with a solution that from the outside looks similar to a compromise, but the key difference is how it feels to the people involved. Are you giving something up? Do you feel constriction in your body? Or are you choosing to offer something because it’s part of a bigger win you’re standing for? The sensations in your body and ease of your breath will guide you here. During negotiations you may discover that people are not as willing as they thought they were. Then the question becomes: am I still willing to stand for my win? If the other parties don’t want to stand for a win for all, you have to identify what you have control over and what you don’t and negotiate from there. Or you might choose to leave the negotiation or the relationship. It’s not always easy, but it’s always worth it. Practicing negotiating this way may take some courage on your part, and it requires going into the unknown to discover a solution. It’s often a vulnerable position; no one knows what a win for all looks like until you sit down and find out. But this is the work of changing business as usual. I encourage you not to forget to ask if the negotiation also supports a win for Earth, for all beings, for the community at large, and for your teams and their families. Moving beyond zero-sum thinking in business supports a sustainable world where we collectively win.

Diana Chapman is the co-founder of The Conscious Leadership Group and co-author of “The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership.” Find her online at conscious.is.

THE FIVE TENETS OF CREATING A

CONSCIOUS MONEY

CULTURE

How you and your colleagues think about money has a huge effect on your productivity, creativity, and potential. Unleash more financial success by paying attention to this aspect of workplace culture. BY JOETTA JOHNSON

Early in my career as an accountant, I mostly experienced what I call unconscious money cultures. Most people inside the organizations I was a part of — myself included — were playing out unconscious patterns with money, both personally and professionally. I never heard much about people saving, for example. If the topic of money did come up, it was usually in the context of complaining that there wasn’t enough of it. The professional environment stressed a single-minded focus on the bottom line that felt like being in a pressure cooker, with a lot of worry about how much the company was profiting (or not). On an individual level, even though I oversaw multimillion-dollar budgets, my personal financial life was a mess.

I was struggling to make ends meet despite my degree in accounting. I eventually had to file for bankruptcy. Humbling as it was, that painful process sent me on a quest to face my challenges with money. Along the way, I discovered a connection between my personal struggles and the attitudes toward money in the larger culture around me, including professional environments. In understanding that connection, I also began to see a powerful opportunity for businesses to thrive by deliberately creating a conscious money culture. In my work with business owners, I’ve identified five tenets of conscious money culture. When an organization is operating in accordance with these tenets, its leaders take responsibility

for consistently embodying them in the management of the company and operating accordingly with their own personal finances. It’s also important to provide opportunities for employees to have access to money wisdom that will optimize their personal financial success and contribute to the overall financial health of the organization. Supporting employees’ efforts to get out of debt, increase their savings, buy a home, or achieve other financial and life goals can free these employees to be much more productive at work. I’ve been implementing these tenets with one of my clients, a law firm, for the past two years. They have continued to increase their revenue goals every three months — and hit them 95 percent of the time. The company is

WORKPLACE CULTURE

profiting so much more than before that it has the happy problem of needing to change its tax structure. When we first started this financial immersion process, the firm’s owner had significant personal debt and no savings. Now she has accumulated a large nest egg and has no debt personally or in her business. She has implemented a bonus structure for her employees, is contributing to their retirement accounts, and increases their benefits every year. The employees talk about money with more confidence and less stress, have accumulated more savings, and have many more tools and techniques to use with money. It’s exciting to witness what’s possible when money is discussed openly and honestly within an organization and to be a part of changing how we relate to money in business. To start creating a conscious money culture in your organization, follow these five tenets.

1 // You must invest in the education of the whole. To have a conscious money culture, everyone in an organization must have access to education on personal finance. More and more companies are recognizing the value of offering meditation and yoga to their employees, but personal financial training is equally crucial to equipping employees with greater confidence, empowerment, and stability. The most effective program is to hire a financial coach to offer a personal-finance training program. While not everyone may initially be motivated to learn about money, as people gain access to tools and techniques, they begin to have a stronger sense of what their future with money can look like. Employees’ emotional wellbeing increases as they become more in charge of their financial life, going from feelings of financial stress and struggle to accessing new levels of hope and inspiration. As greater ease sets in, internal space and resources free up for creativity and innovation.

2 // Mindset is what matters most. I meet a lot of people who believe that simply having more money will contribute to a greater sense of wealth. There are others who think that if they just had a budget, it would solve all their problems. But unless you also address your mindset, neither a budget nor an increase in resources will

make much difference. This is one of the most profound lessons I learned in my personal journey with money. As an accountant, I had the practical tools, but it wasn’t until my mindset shifted that I started to be able to implement all of the knowledge I had about budgeting and accounting. The mindset of the owners and top management in a business is essential, since they are influencing the money culture of the organization. But for the whole organization to implement practical financial tools in the most successful way possible, money mindset-shifting also needs to happen at the employee level. There are a multitude of practices out there for starting to dig into the rich territory of how the mind relates to money. One question I ask clients is “Where do you notice the most fear with money?” In other words, what keeps you up at night? Is it the fear of not having enough to pay all the bills, fear of making the monthly payroll, fear of not having enough set aside for retirement, fear of owing more tax than you thought you would, fear of not hitting your income goals? These fears indicate where the mind has created a pattern, like a record groove that plays over and over again. These kinds of fears tell the story of “not enough.” Until that story is consciously addressed, it will continue to play out repetitively in a person’s financial life.

3 // Generosity unlocks prosperity. To increase financial success, give some away. This is important because it creates an attitude of trust — trust that there will be more money, trust that there is enough money to go around, and trust that generosity creates a deeper sense of fulfillment. If we are hanging on to money out of fear there will not be enough, that’s called survival consciousness. No matter how much money we accumulate, if we are only operating from survival consciousness we will never feel wealthy. Instead, we need to cultivate a sense of abundance in order to thrive. At an organizational level, more and more companies are starting to donate a portion of their profits to nonprofits, through foundations, programs like One Percent for the Planet, or just by giving to local charities. Those commitments are an important start because it helps us as humans learn the value of sharing resources

EXERCISE: WRITE YOUR MONEY STORY Starting to address your money fears takes courage. One of the tools I use with clients to understand their mindset and patterns with money is asking them to write out their money story. Start by recalling the first experience with money that you can remember. This could be receiving money from a family member, asking your parents for something and being told there was not enough money, or maybe the experience of getting anything you asked for. Write what you remember about the events, and then how you felt about them. Next, chronologically write about the major money events in your life and the feelings they evoked. Ask yourself how your parents talked about money: positively and optimistically, or negatively and based in fear? What messages about money were they communicating to you? This process will begin to bring into your awareness the past events that are influencing your current money mindset.

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WORKPLACE CULTURE

instead of hoarding them. Practicing generosity within an organization can’t stay limited to just giving away one percent and calling it good. First, if we are talking about powerful generosity that creates a deeper sense of contribution and fulfillment, the amount should be closer to 10 percent. Second, to enhance this practice, employees need to be included in the sharing of generosity, perhaps by being involved in deciding where money is donated. Owners demonstrating generosity to employees through profitsharing and other employee benefits that contribute to creating a better life for everyone in the company can also be a way to model this way of life. An easy way to start practicing greater financial generosity on a personal level is by opening a checking account just

usually requires reflection from other people because we have hidden it away from ourselves in the deep, dark crevices of the unconscious mind. It also takes courage to face your own money fears by seeking out and facing your money shadow and shining a light on those darker corners. It is very wise for the owners of a company to be looking at their own money beliefs and to seek training in the art of financial literacy and financial management. It demonstrates leadership in having a healthy relationship to money. There are a multitude of books out there to help start this process. My favorites include “The Energy of Money,” written by Maria Nemeth, and “The Art of Money,” written by my previous business partner, Bari Tessler. An even smaller first step is to simply

is incredibly uplifting and generates a lot of hope and possibility with money, along with building self-esteem. Whether the culture around money is intentional or not, the money consciousness of an organization affects everyone who interacts with it. Because money usually isn’t discussed beyond a superficial level, many people have a sense of shame about their financial life. And where there is shame, isolation follows — hardly good conditions for change or progress. But it doesn’t take a lot for change to happen within a company’s money culture; it just takes valuing and investing in money as a topic worth talking about. With clear intention, proper training, and leadership starting at the ownership level, worry, fear, and concern about the future subside and

“Supporting employees’ efforts to get out of debt, increase their savings, buy a home, or achieve other financial and life goals can free these employees to be much more productive at work.” for philanthropy and putting a percentage of your income in to give to the people and places that are most important to you. That is what I have been doing for the past 12 years. As you try this in your personal financial life, strive for the 10 percent mark — 10 percent has been used in many spiritual traditions as the reference point for healthy giving.

4 // It takes help to see your own money shadow. The money shadow is what we believe about and do with money unconsciously without even knowing it. It’s difficult to see on our own, like trying to look at your eye without a mirror. It’s what we have been programmed to believe and do without question. For example, if a parent who raised us worried there was not enough money for food and it was too expensive, it could cause our adult self to rebel against that and spend far too much on food, or be overly and unnecessarily cheap with food and end up getting sick as a result. Starting to face your money shadow 42

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write out an intention to get help with improving the money patterns you can see in yourself that you don’t like. However, it is most effective to hire a financial coach or financial therapist to address these “little devils,” as I call them, because they are insidious and sometimes subtle.

5 // Conscious money culture is an ongoing practice. Having a money practice is similar to having a yoga or meditation practice that cultivates a conscious state of mind and state of being: consistency matters. You don’t just do it once and then you’re done. When I work with my clients, we include regular money check-ins within the organization. These check-ins can happen monthly or quarterly. Hearing about how others also deal with financial challenges helps create a supportive environment that releases the shame and promotes confidence and empowerment with money, and that has a positive effect on the organization. Having somewhere to share financial successes

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more inspiration and creativity become available to fuel our work. Because of the interconnected nature of consciousness, the more people in an organization who are in a mindset of success, the more financial success the organization can generate. Individual consciousness begins to move from a focus on “I” (how do I get my own needs met?) to “we” (how do we create collective success where everyone benefits?). Unleash this power in your own organization, and watch the benefits unfold.

Joetta Marie Johnson, The Priestess of Finance, helps entrepreneurs create a money system where clarity, strategy, and fluidity all coexist. She increases their ability to attract, manage, and grow money while having fun. Find her online at priestessoffinance.com.

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(& FEMMES)

WOMEN + MONEY =

POWER Natalia Oberti Noguera and her Pipeline Angels bootcamp are changing the face of impact investing by training a new generation of sharks.

Some of the entrepreneurs Pipeline Angels has funded. See page 53 for their names.

WOMEN (& FEMMES) + MONEY = POWER

“W

ho do you want to make money for?” That’s the central question Natalia Oberti Noguera wants to make sure everyone is thinking about — from the social entrepreneurs she advises to the impact investors she trains, and everyone else who buys things (which means, well, all of us). In her speeches and writing, Oberti Noguera is a bountiful source of insightful one-liners and provocative straight talk. She’s constantly challenging those around her to notice their unconscious biases. Case in point: while working on this article, we asked Oberti Noguera to share her height and age. She, in turn, pushed us to reconsider our framing of her size (petite and 5'2'') and age (35 this August) as surprising markers of a leader. She mentioned AARP’s campaign to #DisruptAging, and AllGo, a Pipeline Angels portfolio company (more on that later) that’s working to create a more accessible world for fat people. “Why do we think that conscious leadership is going to look the same as traditional leadership?” she asked. “We’re still seeking legitimacy by the signals out there, the status quo, what we’ve been told. Several sources state that the average height of Fortune 500 CEOs is 6'2''. I’m sure that what keeps it there is a selfperpetuating cycle of people hiring based on what they think a leader looks like. This is why we need to actively work to expand that perception.” Point taken. Her company, Pipeline Angels, aims to do just that type of perception expanding. Its story begins in 2008, when Oberti Noguera used an email list and Eventbrite (woman-led; she checked) to launch a network of female social entrepreneurs in New

York City. Within two years, as the community grew from six women to over 1,200, Oberti Noguera began noticing a common struggle: it was seriously hard for these business leaders to raise capital. Meanwhile, high-profile raises by well-known companies with, as she puts it, “white-guy founders,” were all over the news. She also saw fewer early-stage individual impact investors — what the tech startup world calls angels — than she wanted. So in 2011, she launched Pipeline Angels via what would become the company’s signature program: an angel-investing bootcamp for anyone identifying with womanhood (cis, trans, or third gender). “I’m on a mission to change the face of angel investing,” she says. “We’re creating capital for women and non-binary femme social entrepreneurs.” Pipeline Angels recruits and trains those who might invest in such entrepreneurs. Since its inception, the program has graduated 300 members who have invested more than $5 million in more than 50 companies via the group’s pitch summit process. We recently corralled the jet-setting Oberti Noguera for several hours of wide-ranging conversation about her work and her vision for the world. Here’s what she revealed. Let’s start with the basics. How does Pipeline Angels work? Natalia Oberti Noguera: Our members are the friends and family round for entrepreneurs who might not have critical early capital support. Our bootcamp has three main components: education, mentoring, and practice. For the education piece, we hold workshops led by experts on various topics such as portfolio strategies, measuring impact, valuation, due diligence, term sheets, and exit strategies. I like to call it the book-smarts part of the program.

The second component is the mentoring. We connect our members with seasoned angel investors who can share best practices and best mistakes. And then we’re huge believers in learning by doing. So one of our signature events is a pitch summit; 8 to 10 entrepreneurs get to present a five-minute pitch to our members followed by a 10-minute Q&A, and then we invite the entrepreneurs to stay for lunch. At the end of that day, I facilitate a debrief, and the members decide on three or four companies to consider investing in. Those move forward in the due-diligence process, and then we have a final entrepreneur interview a few weeks later. The members select at least one company to invest in. By the end of the bootcamp, I’m cheekily saying our members have earned their wings. For the majority of them, this is the first time they’re making an angel investment. Why create a special investment pipeline by and for people identified with womanhood? NON: Around 2012, a very wellknown white guy investor in Silicon Valley was interviewed at a tech conference, and he was asked, “What do you look for when you invest?” He said very nonchalantly, “Someone like me.” This was before pattern recognition and pattern matching became super trendy terms. I wanted to turn the issue of pattern recognition on its head and say, “Well, if we invest in what’s familiar, if we invest in what looks like us, let’s get more of us on the investing side, because we’re probably going to be more open about investing in more of us on the entrepreneurship side.” Marian Wright Edelman says “You can’t be what you can’t see.” We are literally changing the face of angel investing, and changing the stereotypes. When people hear the words men and money, they’re like,

Pipeline Angels (PA) founder Natalia Oberti Noguera (center) with with PA member Cee Smith (left) and Rica Elysée (right), founder of BeautyLynk, a PA portfolio company.

“Sharks. Financiers. VCs. Businessmen.” These are very different words than when people hear women and money; that’s like: “Philanthropists. Donors. Charity.” Those are great things. At the same time, guess what? Women and femmes can also be sharks, financiers, businesspeople, VCs, and angels. I launched Pipeline Angels in April 2011, and later that year I was invited to attend a meeting of an angelinvesting group. There were 22 people in the room — 19 white guys, a black guy, a white woman, and me. They were deciding whether to invest in a startup. This is going to get very heteronormative, so brace yourself. They were

going around the room saying things like, “Well, my girlfriend and her friends think we should do this,” “My wife and her friends think we should do that...” It was obvious that the expertise and networks of these women were in the room, but who wasn’t in the room? The women themselves. I got really excited witnessing this: “This is exactly why Pipeline Angels needs to happen. We’re on the right track because Pipeline Angels is about bringing these women into the room.” Why focus on investing in, as you put it, “women, non-binary people, and men of color”? That’s essentially everyone except white men. Why explicitly leave them out?

Photo via StartOut

NON: Pipeline Angels member Asha Collins says “The opposite of discrimination is justice.” What we’re talking about here is economic justice. Investing and entrepreneurship opportunities have historically been benefiting straight white guys. I’m asking: how can we talk about wealth building in a way that is more inclusive? A quote I learned from Rachel Sklar, co-founder of TheLi.st, is: “Privilege is like oxygen. You don’t realize it’s there until it’s gone.” If someone’s benefiting from the status quo, it’s hard to create an incentive for them to want to be part of the change. What do people need to know about angel investing?

WOMEN (& FEMMES) + MONEY = POWER

NON: This is where my lawyer would say, “Pipeline Angels is not an investment advisor, financial advisor, or a legal advisor.” With that out of the way, it’s helpful to ground it in the funding continuum. As Nicole Sanchez, CEO and founder of Vaya Consulting, points out, “The tech media glamorizes ‘bootsrapping,’ while for a lot of our communities, it’s simply called living.” The next steps of funding beyond bootstrapping are the family round, the angel round, and the VC round. The reason the angel round is after and separate from friends and family is that angels tend not to know the entrepreneur and may invest a larger amount. Pipeline Angels members are the friends and family round for

is it’s like a sisterhood. It’s this welcoming, warm, friendly environment, a very safe space to learn. Also, our deal flow is entirely women- or femme-led, for-profit social ventures. My friend Vanessa Hurst says, “Shouldn’t doing good be the only way to make a profit?” And yet a lot of people still think about it in a binary way: “Make, make, make money, and then donate.” The second use case is someone who maybe hasn’t ever come across the term angel investing. What they are is active philanthropically, or in community service, or they’re super volunteers. One of my favorite definitions of angel investing is that it’s smart money, meaning that it’s not just the financial

What’s your advice for angel investors? NON: Especially during the duediligence process, really, really get comfortable with the difference between what you need to know and what would be nice to know. People are super curious. There are infinite questions that could be asked. Honor the entrepreneur and the entrepreneur’s time. There might not be an answer to all your due-diligence questions, and it’s okay if there aren’t answers. Identify your dealbreakers. In angel investing, these can be super-early-stage companies. What do you need to know and what do you want to know? I’m also hugely passionate about

“When people hear the words men and money, they’re like, ‘Sharks. Financiers. VCs. Businessmen.’ These are very different words than when people hear women and money; that’s like: ‘Philanthropists. Donors. Charity.’” entrepreneurs who don’t have that early critical capital support. The difference between angel and VC investing is that angels invest their own money, VCs invest other people’s money. Some VCs are also angels, and vice versa. It’s important to remind people that angel investing is high-risk. Who makes a good Pipeline Angel? NON: We have two use cases. The first one is individuals who are familiar with Shark Tank, or who have gone to a local angel group. They have found that these local angel groups tend to be predominantly white and/or male, and have not felt really welcomed in those spaces. In addition, the deal flow is usually later-stage than ours, and the investment focus of these groups isn’t something they’re gravitating toward. What they like about Pipeline Angels

capital, it’s also the human capital and the social capital — human capital in terms of skillsets and experience, and then social capital in terms of connections and networking. Sometimes I’ll be provocative, especially for that second demographic. I’m like, “You’re already doing two out of the three. That’s called volunteering and community service.” I encourage and challenge them to add the third. Write that checkto these startups, these social enterprises that are looking to do well and do good and that are led by women and femmes. Our members are late-20s to over 60, multi-ethnic, multiracial, with different backgrounds in terms of industries and professional experiences. We are curating these diverse cohorts so that the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts. We are interested in people who gravitate towards group learning.

activating local capital for local entrepreneurs. Some of the places I really want to launch are New Orleans and Anchorage, and other places that are not necessarily getting the spotlight. Some entrepreneurs aren’t wanting, willing, or able to go to Silicon Valley, and if there’s local capital, why should they? How does Pipeline Angels decide where to expand/spread? NON: It’s not a cookie-cutter method. Each city has its own culture, its own way of being. For me, connecting with local influencers, establishing those bridges and that rapport is really important. At the same time, I am a huge believer in the power of early adopters. Generally, we have about five investors-in-training in a cohort, but when we launched in Miami last year, and when we launched in Minneapolis this spring, we had two or three mem-

bers in our inaugural cohorts. The reason it makes sense to launch with two members is because we need to show the minimum viable product. By having that pitch summit, by having that program, it’s like, “You know what? We did it. Our local members invested in a company,” and then we have those local members helping us continue to grow for the next semester, and so forth. We just announced we’re launching in Puerto Rico. But anyone who’s an aspiring angel investor who’s like, “You know what? We need you in Tampa,” or, “We need you in blank” — email info@pipelineangels.com. Let us know that you’re interested in us heading there and then we can start the conversation, because that’s really the first part of it. What are myths that you see out there that you’d like to bust? NON: I already talked about “Who is an angel investor?” The other side of the equation is, “Who could get support from angel investors?” Our members often are the first angel in their community. They become these hubs. And their network includes entrepreneurs who maybe have a scalable business that could benefit from angel and VC financing. They just didn’t even realize that that was an option. So having one of our members become known as an angel investor in their own community is helping to dispel some myths about who could be an angel investor and who could get funding from one. How is what you’re doing for entrepreneurs — say, your pitch events — different? NON: People have often said that the traditional VC and angel world is very opaque. I’m a visual person, so I’ll give you an example. Picture closed mahogany doors and the entrepreneurs lined up, and then they go one by one through these doors, and then they go out one by one, and you don’t really know what’s happening inside. I wanted to create more of a collaborative, transparent process. This goes back to conscious leadership and how we want to change both systems and processes. We also invite the entrepreneurs to stay for the whole day. And even for the ones who don’t secure funding, we want to make sure that the feedback they’ve gotten from our members has been valuable. In addition, they’re getting to meet other entrepreneurs. We often hear that entrepreneurship can be lonely. We’re creating a community. We’ve also had some B2B transactions happen-

4 SIMPLE WAYS ENTREPRENEURS CAN DE-RISK THEMSELVES TO INVESTORS Natalia Oberti Noguera not only judges a lot of pitch events, she also hosts a 20-minute podcast called “Pitch Makeover” where she helps women, non-binary people, and men of color who are entrepreneurs improve their asks. Here’s some of her advice for entrepreneurs seeking funding from investors.

GET YOUR TEAM IN PLACE. A leader isn’t a leader until the first follower arrives. If you don’t already have a team in place, who knows if you’re going to be able to gather the people you need to scale? If you think about it, investors are followers, advisors are followers, your first employee, your co-founding team are followers. The more followers you’re able to showcase to the investor, the more they see you are a leader who is able to get people to believe in what you do.

GET HONEST ABOUT THE COMPETITION. I hear so many entrepreneurs say, “We’re so revolutionary, first to market, there’s no competition.” Really? I find it more compelling when an entrepreneur says, “Hey, these are the five to seven players in the marketplace, and this is how we are different from each of them,” because it shows that they have done their research, it shows that they understand what was missing, and then it shows that they get how they are adding value to the space.

REVEAL WHAT’S RELEVANT ABOUT YOUR PERSONAL STORY. I remember judging a pitch event, and at the end, during the Q&A, we found out that this tech-startup founder had a computer science degree from Princeton and had worked at Bitly. Knowing that kind of stuff helps — so put it in the pitch. Especially because investing in the startup is about investing in people, that story of who you are is important.

TALK ABOUT HOW YOUR TEAM CAME TO BE. You and your co-founder, wow did you meet? Did you work at the same place? A lot of investors don’t want to invest in a team that hasn’t ever worked together in the past. It’s like, “Drama. What could happen?” Even if you and your co-founder volunteered at the same place, that’s how you met, or you worked on a project together; if there are those relevant scenarios, they help. Investors can then say, “You’re choosing to work with this person again.”

WOMEN (& FEMMES) + MONEY = POWER

ing. And then they get to see each other pitch, and so someone might be like, “Whoa, I really liked that competitive landscape slide, maybe I should think about incorporating that into my own presentation.” What’s exciting is that for the majority of entrepreneurs applying to a Pipeline Angels pitch summit, it’s the first time they’re stepping up to a plate to pitch. What conversation is not happening in the conscious business world that you think we need to be having? NON: While social entrepreneurship existed before it was called that, in terms of the branding and feeling like a field, it’s newer than other industries — and yet we’re repeating the same mistakes. Why does it have to be mostly white guys? Shouldn’t we be correcting these

Pipeline Angels member Opé Bukola at 2018 Pipeline Angels New York City pitch summit.

things from the beginning? A few years ago, the Aspen Institute invited me to be part of a delegation of Colombian diaspora entrepreneurs and investors. By the way, I’m a queer cis Latina. My gender pronouns are she/her. I have tons of labels I use. I did not realize that “part of the Colombian diaspora” could be one of them. We went to Bogotá and Medellín and we checked out some accelerators and incubators. They invited me to speak. The majority of the audience were, once again, guys. Afterward, so many of the entrepreneurs, particularly the women, would swarm and say, “We need Pipeline Angels right now in Colombia. We need your help.” This white woman from one of the international groups, not from Colombia, approached me saying, “Because angel investing is still super new in Colombia, I don’t think

it makes sense for Pipeline Angels to come here yet, because there still isn’t an angel-investing ecosystem.” And I was like, “Well, this is exactly why we should hypothetically be here, because if it’s still nascent, how amazing would it be that this angel-investing ecosystem starts off diverse, starts off inclusive?” — versus this concept that it needs to start predominantly with guys, because those were the ones in the room, and then we’ll think about opening the doors to more people. The gaze she gave me, it was almost like there was this light bulb I had turned on. The reason I’m bringing this up is because there are so many amazing things regarding conscious leadership, and we are doing a disservice to this conscious movement to not do things better the first time around. We also have to push on what

Photo by Kat Araujo

impact investing means and what social entrepreneurship could mean. If queer, trans, black women founded a very simple dating app, I would count that as social entrepreneurship. Hopefully there’s an exit, and we’re able to create wealth — because at the end of the day, that’s what investing is about: wealth creation. Wealth creation should be not just for the investors; we should

A month or so later, we had our first in-person Pipeline Angels team meeting that Anisa joined. It was a dinner at a sustainable, woman-led restaurant. I had found the one black, female ASL interpreter in San Francisco. I was like, “Awesome. Check, check, check.” The next day, Anisa told me, “By the way, Natalia, that was not a Deaf-friendly restaurant.” It hadn’t

The world is not treating us the same. That would be my current best D&I [diversity and inclusion] mistake. That experience has been powerful because it’s such a tangible example of how having someone with a different life experience adds to the team. When the most marginalized are leading, that’s when inclusion happens.

“Wealth creation should be not just for the investors; we should make sure the entrepreneurs and the founders are part of that equation. ” make sure the entrepreneurs and the founders are part of that equation. So for me, even if it’s a dating app, the fact that we’re creating wealth in a super-marginalized community — that’s impact investing. What’s been your biggest failure in this journey? Your best mistake? NON: Last summer, I spoke at a conference called Tech Inclusion, and Emily Ladau, a disabled white woman who’s a disability advocate, brought up an important point during the Q&A: when we talk about inclusion, disability does not often get talked about. She asked us on the panel, “Do you have any people who are disabled on your team?” I was like, “Is this a place there could be more room for improvement?” At the time, we had a parttime paid opportunity, and so I made a specific note encouraging people of color who are deaf or hard of hearing to apply. There was like one random direct message that I got from a person saying she’s queer, Deaf, indigenous, Black, a woman. And I remember telling my colleague, “Oh, my gosh, I think we are getting trolled. This is too good to be true. This is too much diversity in one person.” It turns out that Anisa Flowers is real, and she is phenomenal.

been a round table, and apparently round tables make it easier to see and communicate, and the restaurant had dim lighting, which made it more difficult to lip-read, to see people’s expressions, and for the sign language. I felt so disappointed. Here I thought we had done all these great things, and then I find out that, no, it had sucked. Not long after, I ended up interviewing Ellen Pao, who was kind of the leading edge of the #MeToo movement, about her book “Reset” and her lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins. I shared this story with her, and she said, “Anisa told you. You created a culture where she felt comfortable telling you, and that is, in some ways, just as important, if not more.” It reminded me of Maya Angelou’s quotation — now that I know better, I do better. As you can imagine, as we’re thinking about our next Pipeline Angels team dinner, I’m keeping these things in mind. However, if Anisa had not been part of the team, had not been in the room, as a hearing person, I might not ever have had a reason to know or learn, because the world’s default setting is for hearing people. That’s a hugely important and underrated part of what diversity and inclusion is supposed to be about. So many of us don’t have the same experience.

What’s giving you hope? NON: That there’s still stuff to learn. I recently found out about Micky ScottBey Jones and her poem “Invitation to a Brave Space,” for example. There’s so many people out there doing great work. If I can be part of amplifying what they’re doing, if I can be part of helping to center the margins, that’s exciting, and that’s reenergizing, and that gives me hope.

Who’s who?

Meet the entrepreneurs (and companies) Pipeline Angels has funded (from page 46). Photos courtesy of the founders: (1) Rebecca Alexander, AllGo (2) Crystal Icenhour, Aperiomics (3) Whitney Beatty, Apothecarry (4) Kate Woska-Sirtori, Atikus (5) Morgen Bromell, Thurst (6) Catherine Mahugu, Soko (7) Helen Adeosun, CareAcademy (8) Diana Lovett, Cissé (9) Cat Berman, CNote (10) Jen Gurecki, Coalition Snow (11) Jean Miller Truelson, Dogpatch Technology (12) Chantal Pierrat, Emerging Women (13) Sumayah Jamal, ENB Therapeutics (14) Nicole Van Der Tuin, First Access (15) Rachna Govani, Foodstand (16) Saskia Sorrosa, Fresh Bellies (17) Gitte Pedersen, Genomic Expression (18) Tanya Van Court, Goalsetter (19) Jane Barratt, GoldBean (20) Patrice Darby, GoNanny (21) Sarah Shewey, Happily (22) Melissa Hanna, Mahmee (23) Carol Barash, Story2 (24) KJ Miller, Mented (25) Courtney Jones, MomSource (26) Marie Wesselhoft, MSDx (27) Ursula Hessenflow, myLAB Box (28) Leslie Ali Walker, Need/Done (29) Charlene Brown, ReciproCare (30) Lauren Gropper, Repurpose (31) Amrita Saigal, Saathi (32) Brooke Wentz, Seven Seas Music (33) Steph Speirs, Solstice (34) Kina McAllister, StemBox (35) Cheraé Robinson, Tastemakers Africa

GLOBAL IMPACT

HOW TO HELP THE

WORLD’S BIGGEST COMPANIES FUND SOCIAL GOOD Closed Loop Partners has raised $100 million from giants like Walmart, 3M, and Dow to finance local recycling. Here’s how their co-founder, Rob Kaplan, gets the corporates to play nice with each other — in service of the whole world.

CLOSED LOOP PARTNERS AT A GLANCE • Location: New York City • Founded: 2014 • Employees: 10 • Traction: The fund has invested about $41 million to unlock more than $104 million of recycling infrastructure • Recognition: First Runner-Up for the Investor Award at The Circulars 2018 (an initiative of the World Economic Forum and the Forum of Young Global Leaders) • Structure: Hybrid • Certifications: B Corp • Mission Statement: “Closed Loop Partners invests in sustainable consumer goods, advanced recycling technologies, and the development of the circular economy.” 54

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“W

hen you have Walmart in your email address, your emails are generally responded to,” jokes Rob Kaplan, now managing director of Closed Loop Partners, as he explains his early success in convening a coalition of major multinational corporate players to invest in improving the supply chain for recycled plastics in the US. “These companies wouldn’t have put five or ten million dollars into a project that they didn’t believe in,” Kaplan explains, “but Walmart accelerated the consideration remarkably.” The year was 2013, and Kaplan, in his role as director of sustainability at Walmart Inc., had been investigating how to reduce the company’s carbon footprint by increasing the amount of recycled content in every package on millions of store shelves. When he started engaging with suppliers about the issue — companies like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Procter & Gamble — he got feedback that the problem wasn’t a lack of interest in using more recycled material; rather, the challenge was lack of supply. The companies just couldn’t get their hands on enough of the right quality of recycled materials. So from within his position at Walmart, Kaplan began trying to help solve that supply problem. He soon partnered with Ron Gonen, who at the time was head of recycling for the City of New York

and a successful entrepreneur in the recycling space (later, Gonen became co-founder and CEO of Closed Loop Partners). Gonen had been thinking a lot about how to solve this problem, and had a hypothesis that the key was helping local governments get better access to capital to create the right kind of recycling infrastructure. “It doesn’t matter how much you educate people to recycle,” Kaplan explains. “If they don’t have access to a convenient curbside recycling program, they’re not going to be able to.” It took Kaplan and Gonen about a year to identify a solution to the supply-chain challenge they were seeing. “We held a couple of meetings, virtual and in person, with mayors, recycling companies, suppliers like Coke or Unilever, and packaging companies, to really understand what was holding back the system,” Kaplan says. A key moment was a day-long brainstorming session hosted by Goldman Sachs. More than 20 stakeholders showed up. “One of the incredible values that a [company like] Walmart brings to these types of conversations and debates is that convening power,” Kaplan explains. A popular solution that emerged was the idea for a private fund that would take the question “Who’s going to pay for this?” off the table for recycling companies and municipalities. With financing in place, stakeholders could focus on building a functional, sustainable recycling supply chain. Thus was born Closed Loop Partners, an investment firm that focuses on companies, technology, and infrastructure that turn waste into value and advance the circular economy. The first Closed Loop Fund, which was announced in 2014, included investments in the $5 to $10 million range from 11 large corporations: 3M, Keurig Green Mountain, Colgate-Palmolive, Johnson & Johnson, Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Nestle Waters North America, and Walmart. It provides loans directly to cities and to companies to build the infrastructure required to divert plastic and other packaging from the landfill into consumer-goods supply chains. As of summer 2018, the fund has invested about $41 million in 17 projects to unlock more than $104 million of recycling infrastructure across North America, and Closed Loop Partners is expanding. New projects include partnering with Starbucks to deliver $10 million in grants to develop more sustainable cup solutions, launching a fund to clean up ocean plastic in the waters around Southeast Asia, and much more. We caught up with Kaplan to hear more about the lessons he’s learned in wrangling dozens of large corporations into investing — together — for the greater good.

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GLOBAL IMPACT

THE CLOSED LOOP FAMILY OF VENTURES Though Closed Loop started with a specific project — Closed Loop Fund — the organization’s larger mission is to help finance the whole spectrum of innovation and infrastructure required to move to a circular economy (a system in which “waste” becomes an input to some other value chain). Because of its systems-level point of view, the Closed Loop family of ventures continues to grow and morph. “Different opportunities require different types of capital,” says co-founder Rob Kaplan. “Early-stage research and development needs philanthropic money. Startups need venture capital. Later-stage infrastructure needs project finance. We’ve built impact investment products to solve for the gaps.” Here’s a snapshot of what the group is up to as of press time.

MATURITY OF PROJECTS FUNDED

• Closed Loop Foundation – A 501(c)(3) nonprofit that funds the research and development of technologies and business models focused on building the circular economy. • Center for the Circular Economy – This new for-profit entity aims to host a physical space that accelerates new materials and companies. Example project: a NextGen Cup Challenge in partnership with Starbucks. • Closed Loop Ventures – A for-profit fund for individual and institutional investors, funding early-stage sustainable consumer-goods startups, advanced recycling technologies, and services related to the circular economy. • Closed Loop Fund – Project finance that invests in scaling recycling infrastructure and sustainable manufacturing technologies that advance the circular economy; a for-profit designed to break even (see page 58 for details on its model). • Closed Loop Ocean – At press time, this project of Closed Loop Partners was exploring how to properly resource and structure an initiative in South and Southeast Asian countries to invest in financing innovation in waste and recycling infrastructure specifically addressing ocean plastic pollution.

What was it like to make the business case to these companies for investing $5 or $10 million in this partnership? What is the most compelling, real reason they decided to do it? RK: Companies are not monolithic decisionmakers. They are actually an amalgamation of lots of individual decision-makers. So there are lots of things that motivate big decisions. The reasons varied based on what the company’s interests were and where they saw value. The trick of it is helping develop a business case about improving the system where a rising tide lifts all boats, and then letting each company determine what the value is of that rising tide. For example, a company like a Coca-Cola or a PepsiCo — they have real challenges getting enough [packaging made with recycled] PET plastic. Procter & Gamble and Unilever don’t use PET plastic. They use more HDPE and polypropylene plastic. But you can’t solve for one problem individually; you can’t just build a PET recycling supply chain. It won’t sustain itself. The good news is that if there’s more collection, more sorting, and more processing of recyclables, including all those types of plastics, the companies can all get what they want. Most of the capital came out of supply chain and procurement budgets, because this is about enhancing and future-proofing supply chains for these companies so they’re not 100 percent dependent on virgin oil-and-gas supplies. There’s a diversification benefit to them. There are other reasons companies get excited about these things, too: reputation and employee engagement, a general sense of responsibility to solve this problem. But it took all of the reasons added together. If it was just reputational benefit, that wouldn’t be enough. If it was just supply chain benefit but no reputational value, that probably wouldn’t be enough. It’s working within each entity, understanding the stakeholders’ decisionmaking process, and helping everybody get something they need to make it a win for the entire organization. Why is it important to have a separate entity like Closed Loop to make this happen? RK: Paramount is the antitrust [regulations]. Coke and Pepsi need to be careful about being

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in the same room working on this stuff. It’s illegal for them to work directly with each other. They need to work through somebody else to benefit the entire system. What are the key lessons you’ve learned through Closed Loop Fund about creating an effective container and culture for these kinds of partnerships? RK: It’s a lot of work. We’re actively engaged with each of our partners; we’re managing a lot of money for them. We basically have one person, full-time, managing those relationships. Part of the governance of Closed Loop Fund is quarterly inperson meetings to review all our in-

to understand where their priorities are shifting and where their new strategies are developing. What’s the thing that people misunderstand about what you do? RK: That we just do recycling. What we do is a lot bigger than that. It’s about the circular economy, which [involves considerations that go] almost [to] the molecular level of product supply chains. It’s not just about recycling carts. It’s about the full value chain, from collection, sorting facilities, all the way to domestic manufacturing and companies that make products that are made using recycled content. It’s easy to think about this as a 1980s or 1990s recy-

Do you think multinationals are starting to embrace their role? RK: Yeah. I think it’s a bell curve. You’ve got leaders, you’ve got laggards, and you’ve got most people in the middle who are just trying to keep the lights on, do their part. I remember having a great conversation at Walmart where one of the business leaders I was talking to said, “Look, I don’t want to kill baby tigers. I want to know what we have to do to stop this. But I don’t have time to understand it myself. I’m just doing my day job.” For the last 10-plus years, a lot of these companies have been going down the maturity curve of [corporate social responsibility (CSR)]: finding

“Historically, people were ashamed that we would be making money by doing the right thing. Now I see more and more companies interested in focusing on that.” vestments, review our strategy, etc. We’ve spent three years building our culture at that level, and that has paid dividends. We built a group that can collaborate and trust each other in a safe environment. That takes time, familiarity, and being careful about who you let in the room and how you structure conversations. I remember when we first started, we spent a whole meeting just talking about what due diligence meant for Closed Loop Fund. It was a laborious, boring conversation, but after that, we never had to spend much time explaining our due diligence. Instead, we spent all our time talking about each individual deal. The trick is, the culture is dynamic. People change jobs, board members leave companies, new companies join, and every time that happens we have a big cultural shift that we have to manage for. We are also in active communication with all our partners

cling kind of frame, but this is about the future of consumption. From where you sit, including both your personal beliefs and what you see emerging in corporate America, what is the role of business in solving social problems and creating a better world? RK: I’m obviously biased, but I think it’s critical. I’ve spent my career working on causes I believe in. I started in public policy in DC. I went to nonprofit and public policy advocacy. But we live in a capitalist society; in order for changes to happen at a systemic level, we have to do it in a way that benefits the capitalist society. The only people who can play that role directly are businesses. I don’t think we can regulate our way out of these problems. I think regulation and policy are the key enablers and can raise the floor, but it ain’t going to get us there.

their baseline, setting their first set of goals, achieving those goals or not, and setting their next set of goals. It’s getting increasingly sophisticated, which means increasingly more impactful. I see a lot less interest from corporates just to do CSR for the sake of doing it or on the side. They’re more asking, “How does this strategically enhance our industry or our business?” Historically, people were ashamed that we would be making money by doing the right thing. Now I see more and more companies interested in focusing on that. What’s your advice to someone trying to partner with people within large multinationals, maybe on an impact project like Closed Loop Fund? RK: Recognize that they are people. It’s so easy to say, “This company is evil.” Companies aren’t evil any

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There are very smart people at each of these companies working on these challenges. If they’re not making progress, it’s because the solutions aren’t apparent. In an engagement with the corporation, how do you focus on being a solution-provider rather than a problem-identifier? There are plenty of problem-identifiers out there already.

provider for them, so that people inside the company that you’re trying to influence want your help? You’re not just pointing out the problems, you’re pointing at the solutions. Eighty percent of the people who engage a corporation are problemidentifiers. “You should do something different on palm oil because palm oil is bad.” The answer typically is, “We know that, but here are the 45 reasons why it’s intractable. Help us with one of them.”

more than they are good. They’re not motivated in a human-emotion way. The individuals are. And individuals on the sustainability team are usually your biggest advocates. They agree with you, probably with everything you say. Then their challenge is “How do we get the people inside the company who actually make those decisions to agree with us?” How does one do that in a way that doesn’t demonize them individually and cause them problems, but rather is a solution-

Do you have any tips for being a good solution-provider?

HOW CLOSED LOOP FUND WORKS Packaging Makers Bottles, cans, etc

Plastic ﬂakes, pellets, etc

Recyclers

3 $

2 $

CLOSED LOOP 6 FUND 4

Consumer 1 Goods Producers & Retailers

Other Investors

recycled materials flow

Consumer Products

Waste Collection

Residents & Consumers

information flow

1. In 2014, 11 consumer goods producers and retailers each pooled between $5 and $10 million to create the $100 million Closed Loop Fund (CLF). 2. Municipalities and private recycling companies apply to CLF for project financing. CLF performs due diligence on behalf of its investor/partner companies.

3. CLF makes zero-interest loans to municipalities and below-market-rate loans to private companies. These usually aren’t for the full project amount and are intended to unlock additional capital from institutional investors. 4. CLF recruits institutional co-investors to help fully fund particular recycling infrastructure projects. 5. Recyclers repay their loans over periods ranging from five to nine years (CLF’s fund life is 10 years).

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6. At year six of CLF (2021), the fund flips from making new investments to being in a five-year harvest period. All money that CLF collects from recyclers goes toward repaying the original investors. The intention of the fund is to break even after 10 years. CLF’s management costs are anticipated to be covered by the proceeds from the low-interest loans to private companies.

RK: Bring deep expertise in the sector that you’re trying to be a solution-provider in that will help fill gaps. In our case, our partners want to develop solutions in Southeast Asia, where their businesses are growing, to prevent their plastic packaging from getting into the ocean. The research shows that more than half of the plastics flowing into the ocean are generated in Southeast Asia, and this is because those markets have long coastlines and rivers. They have rapidly developing economies where they’re producing exponentially more waste than they used to, and it looks more like Western waste, and there’s no waste and recycling infrastructure in those communities. In partnership with the Ocean Conservancy, we’ve created an initiative called Closed Loop Ocean that is focused on figuring out how we can develop a financing mechanism to catalyze investment from institutional investors and other institutions to build the infrastructure required to prevent waste from getting into the environment. Our approach is to figure out how to develop that pipeline of investable opportunities to say, “Here’s what it would look like,” or “Here’s how we can incubate opportunities on the solutions because there aren’t enough out there, and it would require this kind of capital commitment, but we’re bringing the technical expertise to the table.” How would you fund that kind of deep solutions research before you have a committed corporate partner? It seems rather chickenand-egg. RK: We put a proposal together and said, “This is how we would solve this problem. Phase 1 looks like this kind of research and this type of convening. Phase 2 looks like this kind of research and this type of capital commitment. Do you want to do this with us? We’re serious. We’ve

got the right partnership together. We’ve put the pieces in place. You’ve identified this problem. Here’s a way to develop a solution. We don’t have all the answers, but here’s how we go about answering them in partnership with you.” And that worked because there was not a lot of competition for solution-providers. Everyone was looking for some way to address this challenge — and not just the corporations, but governments, development agencies, and nonprofits. Historically, a lot of the approaches to solving big issues like this have been critical rather than enabling. Activist organizations would be running boycotts or campaigns against the corporation to get them to agree to a new policy, or something like that. So it’s a matter of deciding, as people who care about an issue, to invest in a collaborative, enabling framework instead of, or in addition to, an oppositional one? RK: Right. I’d say “in addition to,” because they both serve their roles and their parts. But emotionally different skills are required. When you’re doing the collaboration side or trying to be the solution-provider to offer value for lots of people, you will compromise. If you are a purist, that may be really frustrating for you. I find I have a very high tolerance for the frustration, and I’m okay with envisioning moving a mountain, and in reality moving it a couple inches by the end of the day. I’m happy about that couple of inches. But that’s my own personality. A lot of people would not find it satisfying. You’re very tuned in to the nuances. RK: And what the actual work is, what it means to be working with these companies on a day-to-day basis. It’s not as exciting as it might

sound. It’s a lot of PowerPoint presentations, phone calls, and meetings where you’re trying to move people and influence them in a lot of different ways. That’s a different skillset than hanging banners on the company’s headquarters. What’s your big audacious goal at Closed Loop Partners? In 10 years, do you see yourselves going beyond recycling? RK: There are lots of adjacent areas, like transportation for example, where I could see a corporation investing in their supply chain in a way that would benefit them and the [investing] environment at the same time. It’s this idea called “catalytic capital.” The goal is to unlock or enable institutional investors to deploy money into these sectors. We don’t plan on managing billions of dollars. The opportunity here is to show that these investments are bankable, these sectors are investable, and thereby to attract institutional capital to those sectors. We want to use our unique capital, which is more flexible and more impact-driven, to bring those returns so that investing in waste and recycling, for example, is as [common, safe, and] boring as investing in bridges and roads. What’s giving you hope? RK: The way the public — and private — sector has been reacting to the ocean plastics issue has been exciting in the last year and gives me a lot of hope. The great thing about this issue is everybody’s against it. It’s not like climate change where you have to debate somebody about whether it exists or why it’s important. Everybody you ask thinks there should not be plastic in the ocean, which means that it’s one of the more solvable environmental challenges we’re facing today. That gives me hope.

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GLOBAL IMPACT

REIMAGINING MICROFINANCE Meet a Texas lender that funds entrepreneurs based on trust.

JUST COMMUNITY AT A GLANCE • Location: Austin, TX • Founded: 2016 • Employees: 3 • Traction: Loaned over $1 million with a 99.3% repayment rate (average loan size: $1,250) • Impact: 91% of clients now save consistently, compared to only 19% who did so before joining JUST • Structure: Nonprofit • Certifications: Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) • Mission statement: “JUST invests in low-income female entrepreneurs to build more resilient communities by providing access to capital and coaching through a network of empowered entrepreneur leaders. Our higher purpose is to create a more just world where people have the opportunity to live with less stress and more joy.” • Company values: A.C.T. = Action: Learn by doing, do to learn more. Community: Be and do more together. Trust: Begin with a fundamental belief in people.

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JUST co-founder Steve Wanta (right) with with Maria Gonzalez, one of JUST’s first clients. Photo by Ha Lam

Microfinance is big business. Since Mohammed Yunus and Grameen Bank won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for bringing economic and social development to poor communities via micro-loans, the movement has flourished worldwide. Today, more than 10,000 microfinance institutions provide around $40 billion to more than 70 million borrowers. Yet about 40 percent of that activity is in India, and though Grameen America has helped more than 100,000 borrowers since it was founded in 2008, the microfinance model hasn’t fully taken off in the US. Steve Wanta plans to change that. Wanta is the co-founder and CEO of JUST Community, an Austin-based nonprofit that provides investments to low-income female entrepreneurs — starting with Hispanic

women — to help them lead better, more financially secure lives and create more resilient communities. After a decade working in the microfinance sector via Whole Foods Market’s Whole Planet Foundation, Wanta was tasked with awarding $1 million in lending capital to a USbased organization that could serve entrepreneurs needing loans less than $5,000. He couldn’t find a viable option. “What I came to realize,” he says, “is that in the US, there are very few organizations offering sufficient, affordable opportunities to entrepreneurs without requiring credit scores or elaborate business plans; there’s not the sort of approach that is so common around the world.” But don’t think that this common approach hasn’t spread here because the US doesn’t have a need for it. On the contrary, the US has its own financial inclusion problems. Nearly 27 percent of US households — 90 million people — are unbanked or underbanked. Sixty-three percent of Americans don’t have enough savings to cover a $500 emergency. Many small-business owners and entrepreneurs lack access to capital. Only 4 percent of small business loans from mainstream institutions go to women. Meanwhile, Latinos and African-Americans tend to launch businesses starting with only a third as much capital as their White counterparts. Yet, as Wanta points out, between 1990 and 2012 the number of Hispanic immigrant entrepreneurs more than quadrupled, going from 321,000 to 1.4 million. “These numbers show that there is a natural entrepreneurial spirit among Hispanic women,” he explains, “even as they remain excluded from the financial markets, leaving a large pool of untapped talent.” Since 2016, Wanta and the JUST team have been iterating a microfinance model to help unleash

that talent pool. They use a threepronged approach offering a combination of capital, coaching, and community to help their clients achieve JUST’s higher purpose: a life with more joy and less stress. “We’re trying to prove we can put those three things together to uniquely serve low-income entrepreneurs at large scale,” Wanta says. JUST’s key innovation on microfinancing is leveraging loan recipients to scale the program. After eight weeks of leadership training, loan alums, called JETAs — JUST Entrepreneur Trust Agents — form their own lending circles and invite women they trust to join the loan program. “As long as our JETAs trust these entrepreneurs, we trust them, and we lend them $750,” Wanta says. JETAs then facilitate weekly group meetings that offer coaching on building stronger businesses, taking control of money, building better money habits, and increasing social capital. “The community helps

keep the entrepreneurs on track in reaching their financial and business goals,” Wanta says. “And when JETAs manage their own lending circles, they enable JUST to implement a high-touch program at a low cost.” In 2018, JUST plans to expand its business to another market (Dallas), bring its JETA training program online, and take advantage of its new status as a certified Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) to expand its loan capacity. We spoke with Wanta to learn more about how JUST works, why he incorporated his social enterprise as a nonprofit, and how he’s used a commitment to learning to grow both the organization and its impact.

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GLOBAL IMPACT

Tell us the story of how JUST got started. Steve Wanta: I was a business major in college, got out of school in 2000, worked in technology. Every day I would go to work, it was the worst. I was trapped in a land of cubes. I felt stifled in my career and, as the only way out I could envision, I joined the Peace Corps and worked in rural Guatemala. When I finished, I was in the right place at the right time. This was when John Mackey [CEO of Whole Foods Market] met Mohammed Yunnus, and they decided to work together as Whole Foods was launching its Whole Planet Foundation.

mentor, sat and talked about how we could collectively reimagine global microfinance for the United States. The venture capitalist, Bill Wood, put up the initial seed money that gave me the confidence to leave Whole Planet and see if we could do something unique and different. What was it like taking the leap from a foundation job to running a startup? SW: When I first left Whole Foods, I didn’t know what we were going to do. I didn’t really want to create a lending organization because I know how hard it is. It requires a ton of

ing inspiration from other examples in the world, my thinking started to evolve. In April of 2016 we hired our first employee, a woman who was from the community we knew we wanted to serve first: Hispanic women. This woman, Ivonne Salinas, had been a borrower of [capital from] Mexico’s largest microfinancing institution, Compartamos. It was the first time in 10 years I got to ask a microcredit client what her experience was and she didn’t have a vested interest in telling me what I wanted to hear. She talked about some of the reasons that it was great, and some of the areas where it fell short. She and I began the process of testing a new

“If we have confidence and trust that our community is capable, we can act more fearlessly.” Yunnus said that he could send a team of Grameen Bank staff anywhere in the world as long as there was money. They decided on Guatemala and Costa Rica, and the Whole Planet Foundation sent a team of 10 Bangladeshis who didn’t speak Spanish to Central America. They hired me to go back to Central America and help the Grameen team. It was the best way to learn from the inside out how you do propoor microfinance. Flash forward 10 years with the foundation, and we grew our support of this sort of work to 70 countries and $70 million. I continued to ask why we couldn’t figure out how to do it here in the US in a way that really responded to the needs of the entrepreneurs, a way that was leveraging modern technology. It felt like there was a gap there. I was fortunate to be connected here in Austin to a venture capitalist who wanted to reimagine his philanthropy by backing entrepreneurs. He and I and another gentlemen, a long-time 62

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money, it requires a lot of discipline, and it is an unrelenting job. I had a two-month exit from Whole Planet to make sure I trained my replacement, and it was the greatest time. I had a job, I had all the potential in the world, and none of the responsibility. Day one [at JUST], it was like, “What did I do?” I actually had to take a nap at 2 p.m. on a Monday. I was like, “Oh, my God. What are we going to do?” As one does, I got out of bed eventually. And from there, it was this really beautiful experience. I knew we wanted to try and create a system that was about peer support from the ground up. I went to Weight Watchers for a month to see how community came together. At Weight Watchers, they charge people to weigh in every week. It’s a value-add service that they charge people for, whereas in microfinance, I had seen the weekly meetings be perceived as an obligation, not a benefit. Going through this process of seek-

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concept. What we had to do first was do it the old way. We needed to organize people in small groups. We set a goal of 100 clients. In the course of about a month, we organized 14 small groups and we lent $1,500 to each person, a little over $150,000 total. We started collecting money; we started building a program. We thought if we could deliver meaningful content in these small groups, they would build stronger businesses. That meant we traveled north, south, east, west, every single week for 14 different meetings. And normally, in a traditional microcredit business, we would be doing that forever. It would be a never-ending series of small meetings that we would have to hire people to staff. And if we wanted to serve more people, we would have to hire more people. The one thing that was abundantly clear for me was that this was very stressful. If we were going to reach our higher purpose, we had to think of something different. The other two major lessons from

that pilot phase were that there was potential, in the community we were serving, for leadership. There were women who clearly demonstrated their ability to be leaders; they were entrepreneurs already. The other aspect we saw clearly was they wanted to give back. They wanted to help their neighbors. In those three realizations, we saw an opportunity to create something, and that was this eight-week leadership training program, which we developed and launched January 2017. We really didn’t know what we were doing. We thought that if we could figure out how to create great facilitators, there was a chance that they could take this concept to people in their community.

The programmatic backbone of the eight-week leadership training was creating lifelong learners: this idea of test and learn, set goals, and it’s not whether you accomplish your goal or not, it’s whether you’ve learned along the way. That was what we continued to instill. We’ve adapted SMART goals into Spanish (see page 64). We created eight weeks of games for them to share. They graduated and, to our surprise, they were excited to invite new people into our program. We started with 25 graduates, and in the course of a month, we had 80 new clients. We were like, “Holy cow. Wow, this might actually work.” Then came the next part of the challenge, which was money.

We’re a lender — we have to have access to capital. As a startup nonprofit lender, not a lot of people are excited to give you money, especially if you don’t have collateral and you’re lending someone $750. We were fortunate to be able to raise some new capital from a family office in Salt Lake City, which allowed us to start another round of leadership training. That leadership training session in September of 2017 was head and shoulders above the first. We learned so much through that experience. We did a lot of user research on what worked and what didn’t. We introduced far more transparency into the process. The cool thing was we’d been able to build a fully digital [lending process] from off-the-shelf technology, which

The JUST Community Business Model $

$ $

FUNDERS

1. JUST, a nonproﬁt CDFI, raises its loan pool from foundations and philanthropic donations and plans to also tap into funds from traditional banks under the Community Reinvestment Act. 2. JUST helps its clients in 3 ways: capital, community, and coaching.

3 $750

CAPITAL

COACHING JETAS

3. In an 8-week leadership and facilitation training program, JUST creates JETAs — JUST Entrepreneur Trust Agents. 4. JETAs convene their own community loan-management circles, which meet weekly for support and training.

$15

COMMUNITY

5. JUST underwrites exclusively based on trust. If a JETA recommends an entrepreneur and they complete the JUST process, the entrepreneur is accepted 100% of the time, regardless of their past, for an initial loan of $750 to be repaid over 13 weeks, including $15 of interest (the average global microcredit interest rate is 35%). So far, the repayment rate is 99.3%. 6. JUST repays its own investors and lenders; the organization’s goal is to be 100% ﬁnancially self-sustaining in the long run.

COMMUNITY LOAN CIRCLES CONSCIOUS COMPANY MAGAZINE

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GLOBAL IMPACT

has made our operation significantly more efficient and more impactful. What we believe is, repayment of the loan is a start. If we can help our clients build stronger businesses and build better money habits, we — at a minimum — will be paid back. What we’re seeing now is people saving more money and saying things to us like, “I now know how to save.” And a lot of that is due directly to the community support that has emerged. How do you understand iteration, failure, prototyping, trying things? How has that been important in your business and with what you teach? SW: One of our core values is action. We want to learn by doing, and we want to learn so we can do more. It’s so clear the best teacher is experience. Everything we do, we live first as a team. When we built this leadership program, we went through a dry run every time with our own internal team. We’re really fortunate to have so much trust in both directions. Our clients trust us and we trust our clients. We have more freedom to stumble. They’ll forgive us. We figure that if our intentions are good and we learn faster and we fix our problem faster, then we’ll get to a better solution more quickly, which means we can do it again and make it better the next time, or add the next product or service. That has been a really important

piece for us to instill in our clients. The idea of Lean Startup hasn’t trickled down to the woman running a cleaning business or the woman selling things at the flea market, and many of our clients fall into that category. We think we can simplify many of those concepts even further. We launched a one-day boot camp for our clients that centers around many of those same principles. It has been eye-opening for many of our clients, this idea of setting a goal and it having specific attributes. Translating SMART goals to Spanish has essentially been the most important thing we’ve done to instill the idea of testing and learning (see below). We all have dreams, and in order to make those dreams a reality, we have to have goals to give us direction. It’s not whether we accomplish those goals or not, it’s whether we’ve learned along the way. I do believe that our clients are internalizing that concept and are able to share it with their broader community. You said the level of trust you and your clients have in each other has been instrumental to giving you the freedom to stumble. How did you get that? SW: Give someone money. [Laughter] But in all sincerity, trust is a two-way street. Because we start with money, there is this unique thing that happens. But you can’t just give people money and [expect that] they’re going to trust you. What we have done

and have gotten better at is establishing clear expectations and being consistent in our follow-through, so there is no confusion. I’ll give you an example. Our first loan is $750. It is by no means enough money for anyone to build the business of their dreams. It’s an instrument of trust. If they are incapable of making timely payments every week for the next 13 weeks, we will not give them a loan increase, though we won’t kick them out as long as their group continues to believe they’re worthy of another chance. But if they fulfill all those commitments and do what they said they were going to do, then we’ll increase their loan amount, right now up to $5,000. We have those same sort of clear, black-and-white policies for our community, and in particular on loan sizes. So you make it very clear how they can gain your trust, and in being so clear and consistent on that they come to trust you as well? SW: Yeah. If we can’t fulfill our end of the bargain, we compromise the trust as well. You mean if you can’t give them what you promised you’d give them? SW: Yeah. In microfinance, we start with a small number of clients and small-dollar loans. What happens is, you start adding hundreds or

Meet METAS: SMART Goals for Spanish Speakers Leaders have been using the SMART acronym to help set better goals since the concept was first articulated in a 1981 Management Review article, but no one had translated the idea to a meaningful acronym for Spanish speakers until JUST took the time to do so in 2017 (“metas” means “goals” in Spanish). 64

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SPECIFIC (“WHAT?”) MEASURABLE (“HOW MUCH?”) ACHIEVABLE (“YES OR NO?”) RELEVANT (“WHY?”) TIME-BOUND (“WHEN?”)

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MEDIBLE ( “¿CUÁNTO?”) ESPECÍFICA (“¿CUÁL?”) TIEMPO (“¿CUÁNDO?”) ALCANZABLE (“¿SÍ O NO?”) SIGNIFICATIVA (“¿POR QUÉ?”)

thousands of clients and they all start to get larger loans. We have to make sure we can fulfill the capital commitments of the loan demand from our clients. That’s part of our responsibility in this trust game. Why are you focusing on women? SW: Women are most excluded from access to capital, access to opportunity. Having women fulfill roles of leadership in all levels of society is really important. There’s research that talks about women reinvesting in their families. And there was already plenty of proof that women in the United States could access capital and pay it back at high rates. We’ve had some men enter our program, and we are 0 for 3. There were three men who entered JUST and we had problems with all three of them. What’s your favorite success story of one of your clients? SW: One woman borrowed $1,500 and started her nail business inside someone else’s nail salon. Her business didn’t immediately take off. So she started to establish more goals. She started to test and learn what worked on social media. Through that, she took a step to move into her own salon with a colleague, also a client of JUST. Through that experience, her business continued to progress. A month ago, she opened her own salon that has 13 chairs — haircutting, manicure, pedicure — and this woman just borrowed $4,000 from us. This is her fourth loan. She was just featured on Univision the other day. Time will tell how she continues to grow her business and make it more established; she’s starting to compete with the formal businesses that we think of when we think of small businesses. She gives JUST, the program and the capital, a lot of credit for what she’s been able to do. I’ve got another, more human-side story too. One of our clients is a single mom with three kids, and she lives in an affordable-housing community.

Juanita Agüero, JUST’s very first client (left), with Cynthia Ramos, JUST’s one hundredth. Photo by Steve Wanta

She buys and sells handbags. Through the JUST program, she looked at her business and saw that she didn’t have control of inventory. It was a classic “I don’t know where the money comes from and I don’t know where it goes. I just know that I end up at the end of the month with no money.” She challenged herself to save money. She got inspiration from a Facebook ad, and decided she’d save every $5 bill that came across her hands into a separate envelope. Again: single mom, three kids. In one month, she saved $900. What’s so cool about that story is we’ve had her share it with hundreds of women in our large group meetings. And every so often, in their own small WhatsApp groups, a woman will post a picture and say, “Hey, look at my savings bucket,” and it’ll be this stack of $5 bills. How did you decide to be a nonprofit lender, and not a for-profit? SW: It was a very conscious decision. We believe this work needs to have a small and strategic subsidy as part of ruthlessly protecting our mission. As a group that wants to serve lowincome communities and charge them the least amount possible, we need to find ways to reduce our costs. As a

nonprofit, we have an opportunity to keep fees low because, for example, we receive services like Quickbooks Online at discounted rates. And the capital we can raise to fund our loan pool appears to be more available. Even if we decide we’ll raise more money or make more money by being a for-profit for other products and services, we can have our nonprofit be the owner of that organization. Our vision is to be fully financially sustainable. If we do that, we would be one of the first nonprofit lenders in the United States [to do so]. But we believe that in order to make systemic change, we need to be financially sustainable. What’s giving you hope? SW: The women, without a doubt. Though there’s a Buddhist, Pema Chodron, who says the goal is to abandon hope to lead to fearlessness. To me, that means if we have confidence and trust that our community is capable, we can act more fearlessly. For example, we don’t hope they’ll pay us back. We are confident they will, and we can act accordingly. Instead of focusing on ensuring they pay us back, we can build stuff that helps them transform their lives.

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Traditional Medicinals makes its herbal and medicinal teas from organic plants.

Photos courtesy of Traditional Medicinals

OPERATIONS

CASE STUDY

FINDING ALIGNED INVESTORS How do you raise capital for a successful mission-oriented company that never wants to sell? Make sure your partners are on the same page. Here’s how one brand did it. BY JENNIFER KONGS AND ELIZABETH FREEBURG

TRADITIONAL MEDICINALS AT A GLANCE • Location: Sebastapol, CA • Founded: 1974 • Team Members: 180 • Traction: Fourth-largest bagged-tea company in the US; largest organic tea company in North America; largest socially certified (Fair Trade/Fair Wild) tea company in North America • Impact: The company purchases 120 different herbs from 280 collectors and farms in 40 countries on six continents • Key Awards or Recognition: 2017 B Corp Best for the World Honoree • Structure: Private for-profit • Certifications/Memberships: B Corp, Certified Organic, Fair Trade, and CA Green Business, to name a few • Mission Statement: “To connect people to the power of plants to change lives.” • Company Values: Quality, Collaboration, Humility, Respect, Innovation, Sustainability. Employees are hired and reviewed annually on these values.

hroughout Traditional Medicinals’ more than 40-year history, the tea company had never taken an outside investment other than from friends and family. By 2016, most of the business was still owned by co-founder Drake Sadler and his family, with no plans to ever sell it. But for the brand to reach its potential, the board realized something had to change. “Historically, if a Traditional Medicinals shareholder wanted to sell their shares, the company purchased them and retired them,” says CEO Blair Kellison. “With the company continuing to grow each year, the board came to realize that was not a good use of our earnings, which should instead be invested in supporting the company’s growth.” Traditional Medicinals (TM) decided it was time to take outside investment — but Kellison and the board were committed to finding an investor who shared their values and would only support growth that aligned with the company’s mission. “We set out with the lofty goal of creating a private, liquid market for about 20 percent of the ownership of the company,” Kellison explains. “This was quite challenging, as most investors’ first question is about the company’s exit strategy.” How would they find investors for a company they planned never to sell? TM worked with Big Path Capital, a B Corp investment bank that assists purposedriven companies in mission-aligned capital

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PRIVATE LIQUID MARKETS Michael Whelchel, co-founder and managing partner of Big Path Capital, explains more about how this funding option can work. Usually, private investments into companies are highly illiquid — years can pass before an investor receives their money back. That’s very different from the public markets, which provide daily liquidity. But it’s possible to set up a process to allow existing investors to sell part or all of their interest in a company to either other existing investors or new investors, thereby creating liquidity on a specified frequency; normally every one to three years. This is what we call a private liquid market (PLM).

HOW DOES A COMPANY KNOW IF A PLM MIGHT BE A GOOD OPTION FOR THEM? • This strategy can apply to most companies that are in a growth stage or later stage. It would not be good for early-stage companies. • It helps if the company is performing well — e.g., valuation is increasing over time. • It can be a good solution if the company needs growth capital, has investors who are looking for liquidity and don’t want to wait for a full exit, or for companies that never want to sell majority control but have a need to bring in outside capital or want to generate some liquidity for themselves.

WHO INITIATES A LIQUIDITY EVENT? The company controls the timing. Typically, a company would pick a window of time every two to three years where there can be a buying and selling of shares within that pre-defined window.

WHAT SAY DOES THE COMPANY HAVE IN WHO BUYS THE SHARES? The company can control how the buying and selling occurs. Here are some examples: • The company can have a first right of refusal so that it has the opportunity to purchase any shares from the sellers. This gives the company one type of control over whom the shares go to. • Although not as common, the company may also have a veto right on whom the shares can be sold to. This is not common because an investor would be unlikely to agree to this on the front end as it exerts a lot of control over how that investor can exit their investment.

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OPERATIONS

raises and exits, and by April 2017, a third B Corp, The Builders Fund, announced it had made a minority investment in TM. We asked Kellison and Tripp Baird, co-founder and managing partner of The Builders Fund, to tell us more about the details of the creative deal and what they learned from the experience.

All three of your companies are certified B Corps. Did that play a significant role in the investment? Kellison: It’s no accident all parties to this transaction were B Corps. There’s actually a fourth: our attorney for this transaction was Wendel Rosen, a B Corp-certified law firm in Oakland, CA. When working with another B Corp in any capacity, there is inherently a level of comfort and trust. What recommendations do you have for purpose-driven companies and investors?

Blair Kellison CEO, Traditional Medicinals

Tripp Baird Co-founder & managing partner, The Builders Fund

Why was this the right time for TM to seek outside investment? Blair Kellison: Our new investment enhances our capitalization and increases our financial sustainability, which will in turn enhance our environmental and social sustainability. We were upfront in every initial conversation that our company would never be sold. The new investors do not have the ability to sell for several years, and when they decide to sell they must give the company enough notice for us to find another buyer to replace them. We were pleasantly surprised at the level of interest in such an investment. Why was Traditional Medicinals an investment The Builders Fund was interested in? What role will The Builders Fund play in the company as investors? Tripp Baird: We decided to invest because of our development of a strong relationship with ownership and management based on shared values and a shared vision for the potential of business as a force for good in the world. We are, by strategy, a hands-on investor. Our name is meant to celebrate the “builders” — entrepreneurs and management teams building companies that improve the world. All of us at The Builders Fund have also built businesses ourselves and have raised most of our capital from former operators, who serve as resources to our investments. That said, Traditional Medicinals is also a 43-year-old business with an exceptional management team, which means we don’t need to be heavily involved in the day-to-day.

Baird: Start from the long-term, aspirational goals and work back from there to strategy and an operating blueprint. Financial returns become a natural byproduct of that alignment, rather than the fundamental goal. In our experience, a shared understanding of that spectrum — from long-term vision to short-term execution — creates the best kind of mission-aligned partnerships. Kellison: All growing companies need money and are excited at the prospect of receiving equity financing, but you must be cautious and make sure your goals and expectations are aligned with your investors’. If not, you will quickly create a stressful situation for both you and your investors. Take lots of time on the term-sheet process, which is arduous and tedious. During this time, you’ll get to know each other and determine whether you’ll be good longterm partners. Don’t sign a term sheet that says “standard terms” and “standard investor preferences,” as there is no such thing. Don’t ever sign a term sheet that only spells out the valuation and the amount to be invested; that is important, but that is the easiest part of the process. Investors and their expectations around return and exit will drive the overall strategy of any company, like it or not. All investors deserve the ability to earn a return and have an ability over time to exit their investment. Any other advice? Kellison: Don’t sell your company. Raise money from an impact investor, hire a good team, and let the idea and products that launched your company and your mission and values reach their full potential.

An extended version of this interview was originally published on B The Change (bthechange.com). Jennifer Kongs is the editor of B the Change (bthechange.com), a Medium publication run by the nonprofit B Lab in coordination with the community of certified B Corporations. Elizabeth Freeburg is lead copywriter and content manager at B Lab. Learn more about what it means to be a B Corp and check your company’s impact at bcorporation.net.

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LEADERSHIP

GOODBYE, WALL STREET Gayle Jennings O’Byrne reveals why she walked away froma job she loved to pursue her passion: supporting female entrepreneurs of color. BY MARY MAZZONI

omen of color are the fastestgrowing population of entrepreneurs in the United States. As of last year, more than 5 million Black, Latina, Asian, and Native American women sat at the helms of their own companies — pulling in $360 billion in revenue — and women of color now start between 600 and 800 new businesses every day. Yet despite their growing prevalence and success, funding opportunities for businesses owned by minority women are few and far between. Overall, women entrepreneurs receive only about 3 percent of annual venture capital funding, despite the fact that women start companies at twice the rate of men. The landscape for female entrepreneurs of color is even more difficult — they attracted a mere 0.2 percent of all VC funding in 2015. If investors funded them on the same level as even white women, female founders of color would have

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generated $1.1 trillion in revenues last year. “Those first critical dollars just aren’t there,” says Gayle Jennings O’Byrne, founder and CEO of iNTENT Manifesto. Inspired to change the statistics, Jennings O’Byrne did what many deem unthinkable — she left a coveted Wall Street job (VP of Global Philanthropy at JPMorgan Chase) to strike out on her own. Trailblazing is nothing new for Jennings O’Byrne and her family. When her mother, Thelma Bataille, was a high school senior, she was asked to transfer to an all-white school nearby — the same school that had rejected her brother four years earlier because of his race — to help desegregate it. “Much like the civil rights archival footage that you see in videos, there were mobs,” Jennings O’Byrne said of Bataille’s experience facing new students at the school. “They were cursing at these children.”

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Although she was poised to become valedictorian of her segrated senior class, Bataille accepted the risks of being at the forefront of integration to ensure the school could never again reject deserving students like her brother because of the color of their skin. Even though she was the only black person — and often the only girl — in her classes, she not only survived but thrived. She graduated with honors, attended college, and eventually landed a job at McDonnell Douglas, where she worked on coding for DC-10 air tankers and M-15 fighter planes. She later spent 30 years working in Silicon Valley. “For me, she was one of those ‘Hidden Figures’ that you see on film, and her story motivated me to take a chance in my own life,” Jennings O’Byrne says. Jennings O’Byrne’s latest venture, iNTENT Manifesto, calls on financiers, investors, and other stakeholders to support minority women

founders and shares the stories of successful female entrepreneurs of color. “We have to start telling their stories so they’re no longer hidden figures,” Jennings O’Byrne says. “We have to show the world this population matters.” She hopes to gather one million signatures for the Manifesto and build out a network to help women of color find funding through projects like the Prometheus Exchange and Project Diane. “Our big vision is to move a billion dollars’ worth of investment into women-of-color startups,” she says. In March, she moved one step closer to her goal when her former Wall Street employer, JPMorgan Chase, funded the iNTENT Manifesto to the tune of half a million dollars. Conscious Company spoke with with the courageous entrepreneur, change-maker, and cancer survivor to find out what it’s like to leave a job you love to pursue your passion — and how it feels to attract your old employer’s support. You worked on Wall Street for almost 20 years. Now, JPMorgan Chase is a partner on your new venture. How does it feel to have your former employer support your work, and what is it like partnering with such a giant corporation? Gayle Jenning O’Byrne: I decided to leave JPMorgan — a career and employer that I loved — to join the front lines of advocating for women entrepreneurs of color, specifically tech entrepreneurs, and telling their stories. It wasn’t long before my team at JPMorgan invited me back to talk about what I was doing. When I shared the work with them, they got behind me right away, and we spent the next year deciding how we could collaborate. I’m proud of my former employer not only for their commitment to small business and women of color, but also for their support of a former employee. Now, I have been on both sides. I’ve worked inside the company as a partner, and now I’m on the outside partnering with the company. Through that experience, I learned that champions are everything and it’s critical to

find more than one champion within a partner organization. I’m very intentional about building a matrix of people within the company who are genuinely excited about iNTENT Manifesto and what we do. Many people at the company want to help — the will and commitment is there — but everyone has their own to-do list to worry about. The best way to keep moving forward is to build relationships with a group of champions who are committed to the work. How do you go about recruiting champions within a partner organization? Do you have a method for getting someone excited about your work? GJO’B: It sounds hokey, but the best way to find a champion is to listen. As with any relationship, making a connection is all about listening to the other person and understanding his or her motivation and definition of success. For instance, I recently met a JPMorgan team member for the first time. We sat down, and she told me what she enjoys about her job, the projects she’s working on, the performance goals she needs to meet, and what gets her excited. She talked and I listened, and it completely changed the conversation. We tinkered out some ideas that benefit both of us, as opposed to me pitching her about the help I need from my corporate partner. She probably has a hundred things on her to-do list already, so rather than put more on her plate, we focused on how the project can help her with the work she’s already doing. Listening opens the door, but it’s also important to have an ask. Suggest some homework. We’re all busy, but if you have an ask and ideas for next steps, people will be more willing to help than if you leave the conversation open-ended. It makes sense to go into a meeting with an ask in mind. Can you give us an example of a good ask for a potential partner or champion? GJO’B: Start with something easy. Right now, we’re asking people to sign the Manifesto. It takes all of 38 seconds,

it’s on the front page of our website, and I always have it on my phone. If someone I speak with says, “I would love to do that,” I just hand them my phone and away we go. The simpler the ask, the more you’ll find people are willing to help. For homework and next steps, you can go a bit deeper, but make it as seamless as possible for the other person. We’re building a tribe and a community, which involves a lot of introductions and conversations that inspire people to care about this work. Making an introduction is an easy ask, but the last thing anyone wants to think about is how to pitch my idea to another person, so I provide a blurb they can use in their emails. Finally, I always end my conversations with, “How can I help you?” It’s a simple question, but I find it so beautiful because people don’t expect it. A certain calm comes over them, because I’m expressing authentic care. I love seeing how people respond. What motivates you to continue advocating for women entrepreneurs of color, even when things get difficult? GJO’B: At one point, it was a story of heartbreak. The women I advocate for have, in many ways, followed the rulebook of the American dream. They attended great colleges, they went on to work at Fortune 500 companies, and they started their own businesses. They did all of the things that are supposed to equal success, but now when they need the support of the financial market, they’re suddenly invisible. Society isn’t there to help them reach that last rung on the ladder. It broke my heart because that’s me, that’s my mother — but my story isn’t about heartbreak anymore. Now, it’s a story of joy and glee. I’m living my fullest life. I get to bring my full self — the African-American woman, the Wall Street person, the geeky numbers girl — into my work each day. I see the beauty in the women entrepreneurs I work with and the people who support them. How did you move away from that

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place of heartbreak and frustration to where you are now? Was there a certain moment or mindset shift? GJO’B: I got into a new morning routine a couple of years ago. It starts with meditation and journaling, and then I write a thank-you note for one person each day. I don’t want to make it sound like I’m an uber-enlightened person who has all the answers. I meditate for a few minutes, and I usually struggle to keep my to-do list out of my head. My journaling is often as little as half a page. Even though it’s not perfect, that morning ritual brings me to a place of inner calm. It helps me let go, trust the

group meditation class and workshop that meets on Saturday mornings in Harlem, New York. It became a lovely community for me and helped me learn to practice meditation and have empathy for others.

dollars toward investments in women entrepreneurs. I believe people will stand with us, and I know our work is good for the economy. Our mission just needs champions. I decided to be one of them.

Do you see a connection between your move toward mindfulness and meditation and your decision to leave a job you loved to pursue another calling?

What have you learned since leaving corporate America to pursue your dream of empowering women of color in business?

GJO’B: One of my life coaches once said, “So much of what we do is out of fear.” He told me I was procrastinating. I was putting things off, and not necessarily because I didn’t want to do them, but because I was afraid.

GJO’B: The beautiful thing is, I am not alone. This conversation is taking place all over the world. I recently attended a conference at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, Norway, where we talked about empowering minority women

“I wake up unshakeable in my belief that we can move a billion dollars toward investments in women entrepreneurs.” universe and the people around me, and be confident that good will prevail. It reminds me that if I come from a place of authenticity, have empathy in my work, and care about others, good things will happen and I will be made whole as a part of it. Likewise, writing a thank-you note helps me focus on what I’m grateful for each day and gives me a chance to tell other people I appreciate them. Time after time, day after day, those little reminders moved me to a place of joy. What inspired you to start a mindful morning routine? GJO’B: I started it shortly after my cancer diagnosis. I went home to Northern California over the Easter holiday to tell my family, and the first question my brother asked was, “Are you meditating?” He had spent the past couple of years living in Thailand and Cambodia, and I’d say he’s the more enlightened, spiritual one in our family. When he said that, I realized I’d never meditated and didn’t even know how, so I Googled meditation and set down the path of exploring how it could work for me. Then I found Mindful Harlem, a 72

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He challenged me, “What if you tackle the things that you’re most fearful of first?” When I was diagnosed with cancer, I remember being terrified of dying. I didn’t want to miss anything, so I started to observe everything. I probably stared at people longer than I should have, but I was taking mental pictures. I took a bite of food and savored it, because I wanted to remember how it tasted. I smelled my husband’s T-shirts so I’d never forget him. I memorized people’s laughs. Then I got to a point where I stopped being afraid of dying, because I was capturing it all. I knew I’d never forget. In that moment when the fear of not being on this earth faded away, I decided to do something I’d always been afraid of — leave corporate America and dedicate myself to something I feel strongly and passionately about. I knew I had to leave JPMorgan, and I asked myself, “What do I care about?” Maybe it’s narcissistic, but I care about women like me. I stopped being afraid and recognized that I had the tools I needed to be a successful champion for women. Now, I wake up unshakeable in my belief that we can move a billion

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and their role in the technology trends like blockchain and cryptocurrency. I just returned from Dallas, where I met with JPMorgan executives to talk about women entrepreneurs of color. I feel the time has come — we have a window in which to show success. The world will rise up to meet us, but we have to show them the on-ramp to this inclusion highway. It starts with good stories, good investments, and good companies. You don’t bring people into an idea or a movement by bombarding them with statistics. You engage people by helping them see themselves in the story and see their role in the solution as opposed to their role in the problem. The stories we tell are for everyone, and I’m pleased they’re being received that way. It’s exciting to see a Wall Street guy have an aha moment and say, “I get it. I see myself in this story. I’m inspired by this company. I think this technology is really cool. How can I help?” That’s the piece I love, because in many ways this is the story of us. It’s not a them story. It’s not a those women story. It’s a story about us. I’m just lucky to do my little part, and I’m having fun as well.

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A CALL FOR

LONG-TERM CAPITALISM Capitalism is stuck in a state of pathological urgency that’s harmful to us all, including our businesses’ bottom lines. So why can’t we snap out of it? BY RAND STAGEN The vast majority of CEOs, board members, and investors in power at larger public organizations today have been conditioned and rewarded to deliver short-term results at the expense of long-term organizational health. Not hitting your numbers as a CEO? No problem; simply buy blocks of your own shares, raise the share price, get your bonus, and deliver quick cash to short-term investors. According to the Economist, share buybacks “have become a kind of corporate cocaine that induces a temporary feeling of invincibility but masks weakness and vacuity.” The rising popularity of share buybacks is just one symptom of an epidemic of pathological urgency negatively impacting our communities and society at large. Our mass culture seems almost enslaved to the immediacy of social media and always-on communication tech. Our politics have become so infected with chronic urgency that campaigns run on media soundbites and promises that pander to the short-term demands of lobbyists and voters. And

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like an addict getting a quick fix, we’re depleting natural resources at a rate faster than our environment can possibly regenerate. We have become far too accustomed to instant gratification and immediate results, and our planet, communities, and prosperity are suffering as a result. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Fueled by a looming existential crisis, today’s most conscious business leaders are catalyzing a massive evolutionary shift in our culture at large, one that’s related to developing their own capacity to think and act for the long term — a skill I call “decading.” By committing to their own emotional and psychological development, these trailblazers are creating conditions for our whole society to move into a healthier and more sustainable future state. The work they’re doing is challenging, but it’s not random or haphazard: the internal developmental path is well documented. But to truly transform our culture, we need more business leaders to join them. Here’s why and how.

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THE BUSINESS CASE FOR LONG-TERMISM Our understanding of human psychological development is informed by decades of work by researchers such as Jean Piaget, Abraham Maslow, Lawrence Kohlberg, James Fowler, Jane Loevinger, Robert Kegan, et al. Amazingly, these independent studies documented a common pattern in which individual development unfolds in predictable stages of vertical development. These stages, also referred to as levels, represent milestones of increasing mental, emotional, and spiritual complexity. In short … consciousness complexity. Drawing on this substantial body of work, American philosopher Ken Wilber mapped out the implications of individual consciousness development on societal development. He posits that when 10 percent of a societal population reaches the leading edge of consciousness development, a tipping point is achieved where the qualities of the leading edge begin

TIMELINE: THE RISE OF THE LEADING EDGE

Since 2008, a new cohort of leaders who can help tip our culture away from short-termism has been emerging. Here’s a brief history of some key moments and players. 2008 – Whole Foods Market CEO and co-founder John Mackey launches the Conscious Capitalism™ movement to promote higher levels of consciousness in business. 2009 – Paul Polman becomes CEO of Unilever and shocks the market by eliminating earnings guidance on his first day in the job and urging shareholders to put their money somewhere else if they don’t “buy into this long-term value-creation model, which is equitable, which is shared, which is sustainable.” 2009 – Vanguard founder and former CEO John Bogle, former US secretary of commerce Barbara Hackman Franklin, and Berkshire Hathaway’s CEO Warren Buffett join a coalition through the Aspen Institute calling for us to overcome short-termism. 2010 – Jay Coen Gilbert and his partners establish the first B Corp (Benefit Corporation) as a new legal entity in Maryland, launching a global movement to protect the legal interests of all stakeholders for the long term. 2011 – Harvard’s Michael Porter launches the Creating Shared Value movement that promotes the economic benefits of long-term strategy. 2011 – McKinsey’s global managing partner, Dominic Barton, commits one of the world’s leading strategy firms to a long-term capitalism initiative that remains a central ideology of the company. 2014 – The World Economic Forum convenes global leaders in London and launches the Inclusive Capitalism movement. 2015 – Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff declares that Milton Friedman was wrong about the purpose of business and asserts that “the business of business isn’t just about creating profits for shareholders — it’s also about improving the state of the world and driving stakeholder value.” 2015 – Michael Bush becomes CEO of the Great Places to Work Institute and re-purposes the global organization and its powerful lists into a catalyst for inclusion and long-term transformation. 2018 – Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi serves on a Davos panel titled “Towards Better Capitalism” and reflects on her 12-year journey battling Wall Street while transforming her company toward healthier products. Based on her cumulative performance, her activist pastattackers and many critics have to eat crow. 2018 – Blackrock CEO Larry Fink mobilizes his $6 trillion platform (the world largest money manager) to demand that CEOs of the world’s largest companies demonstrate their organization’s social purpose and long-term strategy.

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to permeate the entire culture. So, to change our culture and evolve its center of gravity from chronic shorttermism to sustainable long-termism, we need 10 percent of our population — and especially our business leaders — to start operating in a way that supports that shift. While we are close to reaching this tipping point, we’re not there yet. The crazy part of our predicament is that, from an economic point of view, there’s an incredibly

the board. During the period from 2001–2015, long-term-oriented firms delivered cumulative revenue 47 percent higher, cumulative earnings 36 percent higher, and combined market capitalization of $7 billion more than short-termist firms. Armed with credible data on the benefits of long-termism, why have the behaviors of so many capitalists remained unchanged? Why do executives of public companies report

AMERICA’S CULTURAL EVOLUTION The epidemic of pathological urgency is everywhere. It’s in our home lives, work lives, technology, media, politics, and financial markets. But it’s important to remember that our culture — including business — hasn’t always been this way. Following the extreme experience

“During the period from 2001–2015, long-term-oriented firms delivered cumulative revenue 47 percent higher, cumulative earnings 36 percent higher, and combined market capitalization of $7 billion more than short-termist firms.” strong case against short-termism. In 2017, McKinsey released findings from a 15-year study of 615 large- and mid-cap publicly listed companies in the US. Through the application of their Corporate Horizon Index, which measured patterns of investment, growth, earnings quality, and earnings management, the researchers were able to differentiate between companies that operated with a long-term orientation and those that operated with a short-term orientation. The long-term companies outperformed the short-term ones across

that the pressure to deliver quarterly results is getting worse, not better? What drives this urgency for immediate reward over long-term gain? Pathological urgency isn’t just a business issue, it’s a consciousness issue. And though we can see that chronic short-termism is hurting business and society, we seem to be trapped by cultural forces beyond our reach. Ultimately, the only way to change a culture is to change the humans in the culture. This is our work now. To succeed, we need to better understand what got us here and what will be needed to move us forward.

of World War II, we worked arm in arm with our allies and rebuilt our economies in a spirit of cooperation and long-termism. As a result, major western economies boomed throughout the 1950s and 1960s and grew conglomerates that symbolized our collective strength. During this period, America’s cultural center of gravity reflected a duty-bound, group-centric consciousness in which individuals sacrificed and conformed to the good of the whole (a company, a union, a church, etc.) for the long haul.

Short-termer noun

Decader noun

1. A leader who evaluates success in the context of a quarters or a year

1. A leader who evaluates success in the context of decades and/or lifetimes

2. One who is habitually driven by pathological urgency

2. One who is consciously motivated by existential urgency

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10 PRACTICES FOR DECADERS Decaders are individuals committed to playing the long game in life and in business. They understand that life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived. Wrestling with these 10 orientations can help you live that mystery.

LOCATE YOURSELF IN THE LONG ARC OF TIME

Own the fact that you are a beneficiary. Your life is only possible because of the hard work and sacrifices of your parents, their parents, and countless others who came before them. Consider that it is now your responsibility (a noble obligation) to pay it forward for future generations that you will never know. In the words of poet Walt Whitman, “the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” What will your verse be?

LEARN DEEP LESSONS FROM HISTORY

Ground yourself in the fundamentals. Study the formation of the universe and explore the evolutionary history of life. Find mentors and use books to learn about key historical figures such as Plato, Lao-Tzu, Queen Elizabeth I, Lincoln, Hitler, Mussolini, Gandhi, Mother Theresa, and Mandela. Find eternal patterns and reflect on how they apply in your own life.

ACCEPT IMPERMANENCE

Realize that change is the only constant in life. Stop clinging to a fixed and permanent reality. Each day, empty yourself of the illusion of your own certainty about how the world works. See the fleeting nature of everything, especially your own sense of self.

BE IN THE PRESENT MOMENT

Every moment offers you the opportunity to stop, interrupt your normal automatic process, and be here now. Practice gratitude and acknowledge the present moment as your ultimate teacher. As Charlotte Joko Beck says, “Life always

gives us exactly the teacher we need at every moment. This includes every mosquito, every misfortune, every red light, every traffic jam, every obnoxious supervisor (or employee), every illness, every loss, every moment of joy or depression, every addiction, every piece of garbage, every breath. Every moment is the guru.”

CULTIVATE ACTIVE CURIOSITY

When grounded in present-moment awareness, you have access to active curiosity. In this state, you can choose to be interested and nurture a meaningful relationship with your questions. Discover how questions can be far more powerful than answers, as they represent the gateway to possibility and transformation. The right questions — whether “why?” or “why not?” — can be revolutionary. Lean into the unknown.

RECOGNIZE THE INTERCONNECTEDNESS OF EVERYTHING

No one is an island, and just as your life’s journey has been shaped by the experiences and struggles of all your ancestors, your present and future are a product of many interlinked relationships and systems. Connect the dots, learn to see larger patterns, and extend your maps. Discover a sense of awe and enrich your perspective though travel, engaging unfamiliar cultures, and experiencing the richness of nature.

resilience and understanding. Notice the temptation — and resist the impulse — to reduce the world to something more familiar and manageable. Seek what Oliver Wendell Holmes called the “simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity” as a means to maturing your whole self.

EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY, COMPLEXITY, AND AMBIGUITY

When we’re able to befriend the uncertainties, complexities, and ambiguities of life, we’re also able to cultivate

DEFER IMMEDIATE GRATIFICATION

Recognize and resist your default drive towards immediate short-term satisfaction by pausing to consider long-term intentional outcomes (the very basis of awareness and choice). Note when impulsive action, whether motivated by anger, fear, or desire, can lead to regret. Begin with the end in mind and consider how the choice you make in this moment connects to your future.

RELEASE ATTACHMENTS TO SPECIFIC OUTCOMES

Practice the simple act of observation without judgment or evaluation. Work with whatever shows up, right or wrong, good or bad. See everything that happens as feedback for growth and a contributor to your future self. Work with the energies of disappointment, failure, and frustration rather than against them. Surrender to win.

DANCE WITH THE ALWAYS-EMERGING FUTURE

As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke said, “The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.” Open yourself to the emerging future and participate in its unfolding. Find your rhythm as you shape and are shaped by the miraculous movement of time.

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Eventually, the massive conglomerates became slow and inefficient and a consciousness of individualism came into vogue. By the early 1970s the thought-leadership from figures such as philosopher/novelist Ayn Rand and Nobel-prize winning economist Milton Friedman began influencing policymakers, CEOs, and investors. And at a structural level, governments implemented decades of deregulation that reduced constraints on business and promoted a spirit of free markets, competition, and individual achievement. As our cultural center of gravity coalesced around individualism, the shadowy side of Wall Street capitalism (think Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good” mantra from the movie “Wall Street”) gained massive momentum over a three-decade period starting in the early 1980s, and ultimately became one of the major contributors to the pathological urgency of today. To be clear, our current circumstance is not an indictment against capitalism as a system. Over the past 200 years,

capitalism has pulled the majority of the world’s population out of extreme poverty and achieved unprecedented levels of human cooperation and opportunity. However, everything has a shadowy side. For capitalism, that shadow has revealed itself as the system has become more and more infected with a chronic short-termism driven by self-interest and greed.

THE RISE OF THE LEADING EDGE Consistent with historical cycles, the 2007–2008 financial crisis emerged as a dramatic correction, reminding us of the importance of collective action and the need to protect the long-term interests of our society. On the other side of the crisis, a small but growing group of leaders began to stand against short-termism. These individuals represent today’s leading edge of consciousness and they are drawing upon a complex understanding of global interdependencies informed by long time

horizons. Exemplars include Pepsi’s Indra Nooyi, Unilever’s Paul Polman, and Blackrock’s Larry Fink (see page 75 for more). This leading edge refuses to submit to Wall Street’s short-term obsession and insists on playing the long game. They’re being compelled by a sense of existential urgency, the natural evolutionary impulse that says we have to move beyond where we’re stuck — in this case, pathological urgency — and we have to do it now. Although the post-conventional worldview held by these modern-day exemplars is highly complex and rare, the developmental path to achieving its aims is well understood. Thanks to the study of adult development and more than 120 years of research, it is now widely accepted that human beings develop both horizontally (impacting what we know and can do) and vertically (informing who we are). Integral Theorist Barrett Brown’s white paper “The Future of Leadership for Conscious Capitalism” is one of the best resources for learning about the topic of vertical development.

THE EIGHT LEVELS OF LEADERSHIP MINDSET According to integral theorist Barrett Brown, leaders with higher stages of development during adulthood attain the capacity to consider longer time horizons in their thinking and decision-making. Unfortunately, that capacity is rare.

Level of Development

Prevalence

Time Horizon

Level 8:

<1% of Leaders

Eternity

1% of Leaders

Multi-generational

Level 6:

4% of Leaders

Own Lifetime

Level 5: "Good to Great" Leaders

10% of Leaders

1–10+ Years

85% of Leaders

Up to 5 Years

Level 7:

The Leading Edge

Level 1–4: Conventional Leaders

Adapted from “The Future of Leadership for Conscious Capitalism” by Barrett Brown, 2015

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Drawing upon the data of researchers Bill Torbert and Susanne Cook-Greuter, Brown’s model explains that one fascinating attribute of higher stages of development is the capacity to hold longer time horizons. Per the illustration on page 78, Conventional Leaders (levels 1–4, representing 85 percent of all leaders) operate with time horizons of up to five years. Those at the next level (described by author Jim Collins as “Level 5 leaders” in the book “Good to Great,” and representing 10 percent of all leaders) operate with time horizons up to approximately ten years. Those highly conscious leaders at the leading edge (levels 6–8) operate with time horizons

dilemma of success: those with the most money, power, and influence are the least likely to engage meaningful change (especially vertical development) because of a fear of losing what they currently have. Therefore, individuals best positioned to change capitalism for the better are more likely to fight to preserve the status quo and their own limiting selfinterests. Paradoxically, the winning formula that created success at one level eventually becomes the very formula that holds a leader back from moving to the next level. In many ways, leaders find themselves psychologically locked into a winning formula that defines who they are.

invite you to become a Decader. Join the emerging 10 percent who are capable of challenging and overcoming the powerful status quo. Learn to source the courage, selflessness, and patience necessary to help transform the world over a period of decades to benefit your children and their children. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late.” “This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.”

“Armed with credible data on the benefits of long-termism, why have the behaviors of so many capitalists remained unchanged?” ranging from decades through eternity. Unfortunately, only 5 percent of today’s leaders are at these highest levels of development — not the 10 percent that Wilber posits we need to tip our culture to the next stage of collaborative, conscious capitalism. Thus, the vertical shift from one level of development to the next is today’s leadership imperative. This is our call to adventure.

JOIN THE 10 PERCENT: ARE YOU READY TO BECOME A DECADER? After many years working with senior executives, I have found that vertical development is available to most leaders if they are willing to engage their head, heart, and guts during the messy process of reinvention. However, I have also found that very few are ready and willing to embark on a true journey of transformation. A compounding factor is the

So how can we change a game where so many powerful players and those who make the rules are likely pawns stuck in a vicious cycle of short-termism, captured by pathological urgency that’s part of our culture at large? As leaders, we first must acknowledge our own contributions to the current state of the world. Where have we helped fuel (intentionally or unintentionally) today’s pathological urgency? Where have we identified with the orientation of the “shorttermer” and benefited from quarterly or annual successes that negatively impacted the long-term health of the system? Where might we be locked into a current winning formula that benefits from the status quo of today’s short-termism? If you’re ready for your ultimate hero’s journey, willing to leave the comforts of the known world, brave enough to navigate the uncharted territory between where you are today and the shores of the leading edge, I

It’s ok if you don’t yet know how; we can teach you that (see page 76). The important part is the willingness. Because if not us, who? If not now, when?

Rand Stagen is the Managing Director of the Stagen Leadership Academy. Established in 1999, the Academy trains leaders from across North America who are committed to long-term personal development and using their organizational platforms for positive impact. A passionate advocate for elevating humanity through business, he is also a founding board member and past chair of Conscious Capitalism International.

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parting thought...

“There’s extraordinary suffering in this land of plenty. I believe alleviating that suffering and bringing joy has to be our primary purpose, regardless of the work we’re doing. This is business as healing. Business is a way to serve.”

— Raj Sisodia, co-founder of Conscious Capitalism, at the 2018 Conscious Company Leaders Forum