Consciousness as Competitive Advantage (the power of the benefit corporation)

There is a shift in the business world from a “maximize shareholder value” paradigm to a more evolved “purpose and stakeholder” paradigm; one that views the role of business as serving a higher purpose, adhering to values and making a positive impact across its entire ecosystem. This orientation, exemplified by the benefit corporation, looks beyond the short term and bottom line to how people and the environment are affected over time. And as it turns out, this is just a better way to do business, yielding better results, financial and otherwise.

However, taking the form of a benefit corporation and adopting its practices is insufficient; it is the consciousness or mindset behind the externals that powers the company and fuels its advantage in the marketplace. This briefing explores and provides insights into the nature of an evolved consciousness, how it operates in business and how it is supported by the structure of the benefit corporation.

The briefing will be delivered in three, half hour sessions with Q&A at the end of each session:

1. John Montgomery will share how collective consciousness currently works within corporations, how it is coopted and rendered amoral by the corporate doctrine of shareholder primacy, and how benefit corporations, by broadening the scope of their purpose beyond profit maximization, can transform business into a force for good. He’ll explain how by better utilizing their collective intelligence, these corporations can generate breakthrough solutions. He’ll describe how in these corporations, love will replace fear as the prevailing operating system to unleash the limitless potential of the corporate collective.
2. Mike Bauer will illustrate how consciousness operates on an individual level, the role of mindfulness or meta-cognition, and how greater awareness informed by the purpose, values and stakeholder orientation of a benefit corporations empowers a person to produce remarkable results. Drawing from his personal experiences he’ll provide concrete case examples how consciousness, imbued with the tenets of a benefit corporation, was instrumental in responding to changing market conditions, finding and entering new markets, establishing strategic relationships.
3. TBD  will chronicle the role of consciousness in creating and operating the benefit corporation XYZ, to fulfill it purpose to ___________.