Sustainatopia 2019 Highlights
Background Story
My own personal purpose evolved following a mystical awakening experience I had surfing in San Diego. When the boundary between one's self and the whole of the natural world drops away, a sense of the sacredness of everything emerges. I wanted to serve THAT sacredness! I became a sustainability advocate overnight. Operating in the context of business, I wanted to heal what felt to me like a wound that exists between money and meaning and profit and purpose to enable business itself to become a force for good in the world.
SOCIAL ENTREPRENEUR EXPERIENCE
After my professional focus moved away from Silicon Valley, I worked in the developing world for almost a decade launching two for-profit social businesses. One was a network of locally-owned eco-friendly taxis in Lima Peru. The second was a pre-paid renewable energy business operating in about 30 countries, until we were acquired in 2017. Launching for-profit social businesses was my own attempt to integrate money and meaning, profit and purpose to enable business to be a force for good in the world.
Introduction to syntropy
Syntropy helps leaders and businesses become a force for good in the world. Through coaching, consulting and training, we help conscious leaders develop personal, interpersonal and organizational practices to help them uncover and metabolize their deeper purpose, driven by authentic leadership, nurtured in the soils of a culture culture to deliver impact in the world.
Purpose Provides Direction
Purpose answers the big "why" behind every company. it reflects the original impulse that brought the company into existence. Purpose then provides direction, the proverbial "North Star" to which the company triangulates in the tumultuous seas of change. Syntropy helps leaders and their businesses identify their deeper purpose and then embody that through training in specific practices to help metabolize purpose to deliver impact in the world.
Leadership is Occupying the Energetic of Deeper Purpose
Authentic leadership is really about learning to energetically occupy the place of deeper purpose and providing the stepping stones for others to follow. By modeling it for others, and it instills a sense of possibility for them to realize this deeper purpose as well.
Anyone can be a Leader
Anyone can be an authentic leader in an organization. Leadership in a conscious or "syntropic" business is more about the capacity of someone in the organization to occupy the energetic possibility of this purpose, than any formal position of power or authority. By engaging regularly in personal practices like mindfulness, visioning and subtle energy work, like yoga or Qi Gong, we can increase our capacity to occupy these potential energetic possibilities.
The bigger the game you play, the more people want to help you be successful.
Tim Kelley at the True Purpose Institute said that when your purpose is to save the world, everyone wants to help you succeed. To attract and retain the most engaged employees and loyal customers, we invite leaders to "play a bigger game and take a longer view." The key to success in an interconnected world, where communication is instantaneous and there is increasing expectation for transparency in business dealings, are businesses doing meaningful work in the world, solving big problems and delivering impact.
Change Happens from the Inside Out from the Individual to the Collective
Change happens from the inside out, from the individual to the collective. For change to be truly sustainable, it needs to be based on intrinsic motivations. For individuals, this means a change in consciousness. For the collective, it's the culture itself. This is why Syntropy offers coaching and consulting around personal, interpersonal and organizational practices to leaders and teams embarking on large-scale systemic change within their organizations.
We’ll know we’ve succeeded when sustainability is just the way things are done around here.
Sustainability in corporate America, is usually considered a separate department Organizationally, Sustainability often resides inside a facilities function or within Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS). About 80% of the Fortune 500 issue Sustainability reports that disclose their larger impact on the world. Ultimately, waste is expensive. So is treating people like numbers. Sustainability, or lately and more popularly "regenerative business", is just good business. On our way to "playing a bigger game and taking a longer view", which we invite leaders to do here at Syntropy, we’ll know we’ve succeeded when sustainability is "just the way things are done around here" at our clients' companies.
The Metabolization of Purpose into Impact
All deeper purpose resolves to serve a call larger than itself. The more responsibility we assume, the more meaning our lives have. The work of conscious, or syntropic business, is to provide the scaffolding for peoples’ deeper purpose to be metabolized into benevolent action and positive impact in the world. The key to building rich inner lives of meaning and an outer world of thriving is the same. Deeper purpose is the through-line between disengaged employees and a better world aching to be born. To win the hearts and minds of all business stakeholders—customers, employees, investors, supply chain partners and the society in which it operates—at Syntropy we invite business to take on the biggest challenges of our time. Whether it’s environmental degradation, early childhood education, affordable healthcare or other issues, it’s important for businesses to find that overlap between their deeper purpose, their core competencies and the needs of the world overlap.