John Mackey on Conscious Leadership: The Hero’s Journey - GCFCL

John Mackey on Conscious Leadership: The Hero’s Journey

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I recently attended the Success 3.0 Summit in Boulder, CO, where I had the pleasure of hearing John Mackey (co-CEO of Whole Foods Market and co-founder of Conscious Capitalism) speak specifically about his views on conscious leadership. What I enjoyed most about John’s keynote was that he took a balanced, pragmatic and business-like view of conscious leadership. Not for John an airy-fairy, loved-up view of being a conscious leader: in fact, he made a point of addressing the audience (some of whom were, in my view, in some danger of veering towards taking an airy-fairy and loved-up view of conscious leadership) by starting his speech with a warning that conscious leadership requires work, discipline and […]

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A good news Conscious Business story for the end of the year GCFCL

A good news Conscious Business story for the end of the year

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Conscious businesses come in all shapes and sizes and I found this little business today in the unlikeliest of places – Port Elizabeth, South Africa. I was on the hunt for baking goods for my daughter’s 6th birthday cake and came upon Bakers Bin in a small, off-the-beaten-track shopping centre. But small did not not mean small-minded. Stefaan, the business owner, and Peter, his trusty sidekick who, he said, had been working with him for many years, made our little shopping experience out of the ordinary. First of all, Stefaan and Peter went out of their way to find us the various cake mixes and icing colours we were looking for. So far, so normal […]

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A Tale of Two Taxis - gcfcl.com

A Tale of Two Taxis

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London. Winter coming. You couldn’t find a better time to be in the taxi business. Punters wanting a warm ride rather than a cold walk or a stuffed Tube. Enter into this scene two taxi businesses, Hailo and GetTaxi. Both offering the same thing: an app-enabled, live-tracked taxi booking service that gives customers the power to book their black cab (from within the comfort of the warm indoors) and watch it arrive in real time, then have it charged straight to their business account. Couldn’t be better. Except, one of these is a classic case of how to do business in a more conscious way, with your stakeholders in mind, and the other is a […]

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Conscious Leadership - gcfcl.com

How Frederic Laloux’s ‘Reinventing Organizations’ points the way towards more Conscious Leadership

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Reinventing Organizations is a great read, a breath of fresh air (and sometimes a mindbend) about how the new and emerging forms of organisations go about their business. It serves not only as a compelling story, but also alters our paradigm as we read it. That is some effect. There are several clues within it that point to who the leaders of these (Teal) kinds of organisations need to be, which hints at an evolved form of leadership. Frederic describes three principles around which their operations cluster: Self management Frederic’s point: Hierarchies don’t work in complex organisations because all the complexity is pushed to the top awaiting decisions. As we know from other writers (e.g. […]

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Tales of Conscious Leadership - GCfCL

Tales of Conscious Leadership

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Facts, figures, budgets, outcomes…so far, so normal in the business meetings and leadership training sessions I typically sit in on.  Heads are full of data, obstacles and concrete mountains to climb, speedily, in the quest for running companies successfully in an ever more competitive and ‘squeezed’ environment.  Bodies become, as Pete Hamill of Embodied Leadership writes, simply vehicles to move our brains around from one meeting to the next. And yet today something different happened.  And it happens every time I address a group and start to talk about the possibilities of being more human as a leader.  Human connections, authenticity, bringing your heart and values to your leadership of others so that they can […]

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Conscious Leadership

An Unlikely Case of Conscious Leadership

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Edward Griffiths, CEO of Saracens Rugby Club, is a most unlikely example of a conscious leader. Not because of the man himself, but because usually we think of conscious leadership in the context of business, and who would think that you would find a conscious leader in a rugby club? But find him we did, as my co-director, Erika Uffindell, and I discovered when we met him in a London lounge for coffee. Griffiths was not particularly identified with being a conscious leader, and quite frankly might even have scoffed a little at the term, but we found in him a rather instinctive consciousness: he knew how to run his business so that it aspired […]

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