Inspiration
Recommended Reading
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
– Mahatma Gandhi
Books
Conscious Organisations
“Der Verzicht auf Hierarchie bedeutet keinen Verzicht auf Leadership. Im Idealfall werden alle Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeiter zu Leadern – in ihren Bereichen und für die Entwicklung der gesamten Unternehmenskultur.”
“You will discover how business can become a place of healing for employees and their families, a source of healing for customers, communities, and ecosystems, and a force for healing in society, helping alleviate cultural, economic, and political divides.”
“And what if these businesses, which prioritize the welfare of all their stakeholders, and help heal their employees, customers, and communities, are more profitable and prosperous than their industry peers?”
“When asked about their biggest competitive advantage, most CEOs of Firms of Endearments say it is their corporate culture.”
“Our great companies, including the ones in this book, but in the past as well, are fuelled by passion and by a sense of purpose. Great business leaders channel their employees’ desires to be part of something bigger than themselves and to be part of making the world a better place for their children into the overall purpose of their business. Profit is the outcome.”
“In addition to creating social, cultural, intellectual, physical, ecological, emotional, and spiritual value for all stakeholders, conscious businesses also excel at delivering exceptional financial performance over the long term. For example, a representative sample of conscious firms outperformed the overall stock market by a ratio of 10.5:1 over a fifteen-year period, delivering more than 1,600 percent total returns when the market was up just over 150 percent for the same period.”
“The values of your company culture are not just the new arena of competitive advantage, they are the sine qua non for effective leadership: Who you are and what you stand for have become just as important as the quality of the products and services you sell.”
“The health of an organisation provides the context for strategy, finance, marketing, technology, and everything else that happens within it, which is why it is the single greatest factor determining an organisation’s success. More than talent. More than knowledge. More than innovation.”
“A good way to recognise health is to look for the signs that indicate that an organisation has it. These include minimal politis and confusion, high degrees of morale and productivity, and very low turnover among good employees.”
“We believed, and statistics and studies have proved, that a company with engaged employees will show better financial returns than a company staffed by unmotivated and unhappy people. Put yourself in the equation: you probably perform much better when doing things that you enjoy and find rewarding. It is simple. When work is exciting and motivating, people thrive and companies flourish. This is not just our belief – it is a verified fact proven by various surveys.”
The way we manage organisations seems increasingly out of date. Deep inside, we sense that more is possible. We long for soulful workplaces, for authenticity, community, passion, and purpose. Every time, in the past, when humanity has shifted to a new stage of consciousness, it has achieved extraordinary breakthroughs in collaboration. A new shift in consciousness is currently underway and a few pioneers have already cracked the code of how to invent a more soulful and purposeful way to run our organisations. This book is full of insights, examples, and inspiring stories.
“The most important thing to understand about transforming a culture, whether that of a team or a whole company, is that it isn’t a matter of simply professing a set of values and operating principles. It’s a matter of identifying the behaviours that you would like to see become consistent practices and then instilling the discipline of actually doing them.”
“Management generally considers three types of resources on hand for strategic execution: time, talent, and dollars. But there is a fourth that trumps the three: commitment of the employee culture.”
“Visionary companies are premier institutions – the crown jewels – in their industries, widely admired by their peers and having a long track record of making significant impact on the world around them.”
“A fundamental element in the “ticking clock” of a visionary company is a core ideology – core values and sense of purpose beyond just making money – that guides and inspires people throughout the organisation and remains relatively fixed for long periods of time.”
“A Noble Sales Purpose is not a tactic. It’s a strategic shift in the way you approach your business. It’s more than a simple sales technique; it’s a sales leadership approach that turbocharges all other techniques. It’s the missing ingredient a sales force needs to take their performance to the next level.”
Conscious Leadership
“Enlightened business leaders know they can only sustain strong positive results if they care about the common good. Enlightened leaders have learned that caring for employees, customers, and the local community is good for the bottom line. They have also learned during the last decades of the twentieth century that it is at their own risk and peril that they ignore their company´s larger social responsibilities, such as environmental protection, social justice, and ecological diversity. Unfortunately, this message still has not penetrated far in the business community and hardly at all in our business schools.”
“We are all leaders in one way or another, and when we choose to be responsible for what is happening around us, we are able to work together in a way that includes and utilises the unique talents of everyone.”
“We can’t split our company up into hi-po’s and lo-po’s, any more than we can rate you on your human-ness and give the most stuff to those who are most human and the least to those are who least human. This sort of apartheid does terrible things to a company. The careless and unreliable labeling of some folks as hi-po’s and others as lo-po’s is deeply immoral. It explicitly stamps large numbers of people with a “less than” branding, derived not from a measure of current performance but from a rater’s hopelessly unreliable rating of a thing that isn’t a thing. And then this rating of a thing-that-isn’t-a-thing opens doors for some, confers prestige on some, elevates some, blesses some, and sets them up for a brighter future, all while relegating others to a status less than human. How explicitly awful.”
“The key neurobiological source of emotional commitment is the ability to live your own deepest values in a relationship or environment.”
“A manager’s emotional commitment is the ultimate trigger for their discretionary effort, worth more than financial, intellectual and physical commitment combined. It’s the kind of commitment that solves unsolvable problems, creates energy when all energy has been expended and ignites emotional commitment in others, like employees, teams and customers. Emotional commitment means unchecked, unvarnished devotion to the company and its success; any legendary organisational performance is the result of emotionally committed managers.”
Conscious Teams
The complexity of human relationship systems, their dynamics and interactions, requires a capacity and skill set that transcend Emotional and Social Intelligence. To successfully lead human relationship systems – teams and organisations – we are part of, we will need Relationship Systems Intelligence (RSI) – the ability to maximize one’s relationship with a given team and relate to it as a whole.
“Now, more than ever, businesses need great team leaders (…) and one of the ways in which organizations are seeking to meet the challenges of a VUCA world is by making more work team-based (…) we are smack-dab amid a massive shift toward more collaboration.”
Constructive Interaction
“If we are going to find lasting solutions to difficult conflicts or external wars we find ourselves in, we first need to find our way out of the internal wards that are poisoning our thoughts, feelings, and attitudes towards others. If we can’t put an end to the violence within us, there is no hope for putting an end to the violence without.”
“While many are afraid of “real,” it is the unreal conversation that should scare us to death.”
“Unreal conversations are incredibly expensive for organizations,and for individuals. Every organizations wants to feel it’s having a real conversations with its employees, its customers, its territory, and with the unknown future that is emerging around it. Each individual wants to have conversations that are somehow building his or her world of meaning.”
“Being real is not the risk. The real risk is that: I will be known. I will be seen. I will be changed.”
“Non-Violent Communication guides us in reframing how we express ourselves and hear others. Instead of habitual, automatic reactions, our words become conscious responses based firmly on awareness of what we are perceiving, feeling, and wanting. We are led to express ourselves with honesty and clarity, while simultaneously paying others a respectful and empathic attention.”
Personal Growth & Wellbeing
“My formula for success was very simple: Do whatever is put in front of you with all your heart and soul without regard for personal results. Do the work as though it were given to you by the universe itself—because it was.”
“If you want real life, real growth, real spirituality, it’s all about letting go of the blockages you’re holding inside of you.”
“Fear of life is really the fear of emotions. It is not the facts that we fear but our feelings about them. Once we have mastery over our feelings, our fear of life diminishes. We feel a greater self-confidence, and we are willing to take greater chances because we now feel that we can handle the emotional consequences, whatever they might be.”
“Every thought, action, decision, or feeling creates an eddy in the interlocking, inter-balancing, ever-moving energy fields of life, leaving a permanent record for all of time. This realization can be intimidating when it first dawns on us, but it becomes a spring-board for rapid evolution.”
“To become more conscious is the greatest gift anyone can give to the world; moreover, in a ripple effect, the gift comes back to its source.”
“People actually feel happiest and most fulfilled when meeting the challenge of their dharma in the world, when bringing highly concentrated effort to some compelling activity for which they have a true calling.”
“I have realised that values are much more than “what is important”; they are the energetic drivers of our aspirations and intentions. They are the source of all human motivations and decision-making.”
The secret to high performance and satisfaction and the in today’s world is the deeply held human need to direct our own lives (autonomy), the urge to get better at something that matters (mastery), and the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves (purpose).
Training
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