Conscious business

Again, what an impact that can make if we can do that.

Yeah, I really come from, you know, having drank from the conscious capitalism hose for so many years serving the board.

I really believe that business can be a force for good in the world, and I'm out to help champion that too.

So, yeah.

I don't know if we talked about that.

I actually led the Austin chapter of Conscious Capitalism.

We did talk

about that, yes.

Masterson, Steven Schwartzman's What It Takes, really good book.

Conscious Capitalism, I read the first half, but it was really good.

And it really shifted how I saw business and what we want to do with Acquisition.com in terms of giving back and helping all stakeholders.

Because I'll go on the tangent that this book led me to, which is the realization that charity as a whole is a very broken model.

And so it's my belief, and this is what I hope to accomplish with Acquisition is that if we can create an entity that is self-sustaining and self-growing, and continually gives a percentage of its earnings then we will have created a charity that grows and fuels itself rather than creating a charity that solicits money because the exchange just it's just not there it's always banking on goodwill rather than a value exchange from selfish people and so i think it's much easier to focus on people's as a large selfishness and then only have to get one person to be more giving right which you could make the argument that we're being selfish by giving but whatever if you only have to convince yourself to be giving and then convince everyone else to be selfish, it's much easier to do that over a longer period of time than convince everyone else to give, right? That is kind of the perspective that has changed for me with regards to charity and giving overall.

And so Layla and I have given, millions now to charity and I feel like now that we've been involved there are things that I would want to improve and the only solution that I could think of was creating a true for-profit type business that would attract the best talent who could grow the thing and then dedicate a specific percentage of the profit every year no matter what that would go to the causes right and then that way as the company grew so too with the giving right rather than always soliciting All right.

So that's one of the things that the conscious capitalism gave to me.

I read everything that Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have written.

He worked tremendously hard in his last few months to share its message with the world, doing more than 75 interviews, including an appearance on CBS Sunday Morning.

Bob was still doing interviews talking about our message of truly human leadership and promoting the book until his death in March.

To celebrate the year anniversary, we're going to reshare a couple of interviews Bob and Raj did upon the release of the original version of the book in 2015.

And I'm sure their words will seem as relevant today.

We never intended to write a book, but someone Raj knows, Srikumar Rao, came down, stimulated by my participation in a leadership guru summit hosted by Simon Sinek.

Srikumar came down and had and visited our operation with two other very fine leaders and sat across from me and said, Bob, I've interviewed as contributing editor to Forbes, I believe it was.

He said, I've interviewed a hundred, if not thousands of CEOs, and I've never seen anything like what I just experienced.

You need to share this with the world.

Gemma moved to Spain over 20 years ago and never left.

What started as a leap of faith became the foundation of her work as a conscious business and leadership consultant.

The real catalyst came later, a diagnosis that forced her to rebuild her life and business from the ground up and taught her that shining your light inward first is what lets you shine brighter on the outside.

Today, she supports founders, executives and high achieving women who've built successful lives on the outside but feel disconnected on the inside.

Mm

... conscious, conscious capitalism.

You wanna talk a little bit about that? I love it.

[laughs]

I think it's a fabulous, uh, perspective.

Yeah.

Well, well, so I think in a country like South Africa, you, you have to, um, have conscious capitalism.

You, you can't just have capitalism as a, um, outright that's just driving behavior.

There's so many great people that we know up in that area.

That was a meeting for Conscious Capitalism.

And Mark Maxwell is a great leader up in that particular area that I'm so grateful to have a chance to be with us.

And he leans over and says, you should have her on your show.

Another organization that's been amazing is the Women's Executive Roundtable, a group of women CEOs that get together monthly and exchange best practices.

And I just can't tell you how many times I went to that meeting and learned so much from other leaders who had Completed this journey long before I got on this path.

Conscious capitalism was another one you mentioned.

Going to those meetings, I had the blessing of hearing a very large construction contractor talk about what he does from a mental health perspective for his employees.

Do you work with a lot of B Corps as well? Yeah, B

Corps, Conscious Capitalism.

What's most fascinating is this industry.

From my research, 22% of all businesses, not counting nonprofits and social impact ventures, are operating this way.

They just don't know it's a thing.

So they haven't heard of conscious capitalism.

They haven't heard of B-Lab.

And they don't know that there's a lot of us on this journey.

And so rather than sell, like I said, you know, a 12-week whatever, sell the goal and so I think if you can make that shift in your products and services you ultimately sell more people and have happier customers moving along I read 70 books last year I barely read most of them I skimmed the majority and that was mostly because most of them were just not that interesting or that good the books that I read intentionally last year so I would skim thought they had good stuff and then reread ready fire aim which I've talked about which is a Masterson, Steven Schwartzman's What It Takes, really good book.

Conscious Capitalism, I read the first half, but it was really good.

And it really shifted how I saw business and what we want to do with Acquisition.com in terms of giving back and helping all stakeholders.

Because I'll go on the tangent that this book led me to, which is the realization that charity as a whole is a very broken model.

if you only have to convince yourself to be giving and then convince everyone else to be selfish, it's much easier to do that over a longer period of time than convince everyone else to give, right? That is kind of the perspective that has changed for me with regards to charity and giving overall.

And so Layla and I have given millions now to charity and I feel like now that we've been involved there are things that I would want to improve and the only solution that I could think of was creating a true for-profit type business that would attract the best talent who could grow the thing and then dedicate a specific percentage of the profit every year no matter what that would go to the causes right and then that way as the company grew so too with the giving right rather than always soliciting All right.

So that's one of the things that the conscious capitalism gave to me.

I read everything that Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have written.

Happy to meet you.

We met at Conscious Capitalism, and of course, when I heard what you were up to, what did I do? I immediately said, you've got to come on my podcast and talk about it.

And here we are.

Thank you.

So what we believe is that we're not going to get those kind of volunteers if we don't give them a better experience in their life and their work.

So that's our part of the equation.

You and I met at the Conscious Capitalism.

We did.