Mudita Journal

John Mackey on Conscious Capitalism

December 8, 2009 · Filed under: Current Events, FLOW, Individualism
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John does an excellent job, here, of explaining the theme he’s been promoting in recent years.

I particularly like what he conveys in the first few minutes. I’m more ambivalent about the idea of businesses having “responsibilities” to the community, since it seems one-sided to me; it is not clear to me that businesses have any more obligation to the community than communities have to businesses. So why emphasize one over the other?

At the same time, I do think that if I owned a business such as Whole Foods, I would be looking for ways to use our massive influence to have a good impact not only within the direct sphere of our business (our customers, employees, owners, etc.), but also on the communities in which we operate.

What do you think?

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  • Austen

    The “deeper purpose than profits” theme reminded me of something that’s always amused me about professional sports. Perhaps it’s related. In team sports, winning is the professed ultimate goal of everybody. Especially winning championships. There’s no NBA player who says his driving goal is to have an interesting career full of diverse experiences, or to play in lots of closely competitive (thrilling) games, or even to contribute toward lots of winning seasons. Nor can a player have maximizing league revenue as his top priority. A player who professed to be in it for the beauty of the sport, who saw himself as an artist contributing to a kind of vast dynamic artwork — and who put all that above winning — would not be welcome on any team. heh. All of which is kinda weird because anybody who loves sports knows that winning isn’t even really what we love about them. It’s all the other stuff — the entertainment, anticipation, competition, etc. And yet winning is everybody’s organizing principle. It’s what drives the competition, and guides the decision making, and maybe sports would fall into dysfunction if that changed very much. Do you think there’s any parallel in business? Does profit as an organizing principle function anything like winning in sports?

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