Name: Conscious Business
Rating: 4.3 (56 reviews)
Author: Fred Kofman

What’s in it for me? Learn how to create a conscious business and succeed.

Are you someone who acts consciously? In your personal life, do you take responsibility for your actions, communicate constructively and importantly, live according to your own values?

Now ask yourself whether you do business consciously. Do you negotiate contracts with your values in mind? Do you communicate as constructively with your employees as you do with your children?

It’s clear that in today’s fast-paced business world, doing business consciously is the key to success – yet how do you turn your company into a conscious business? These blinks will help guide you toward creating a business based on values that work.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why balancing the it, the we and the I is good for business;
how to resolve conflicts through constructive negotiations; and
how to answer the question: am I a player or a victim?

Becoming a conscious company is your key to greater business success.

In Good to Great, author Jim Collins shows how the most successful companies are the ones that strive for more than financial success, as they’re motivated by higher values.

But how is it exactly that values could create a successful company?

Many successful businesses are powered by conscious employees. They take responsibility for their actions and know how to communicate constructively, without compromising their core values.

Unconscious employees, on the other hand, tend to undermine a business as they often blame others for problems and see themselves as the victim. They aren’t self-aware, and thus are not able to act according to higher values.

This is why managers should make it a priority to hire conscious employees.

Yet if you want to build a truly conscious business, you can’t stop here. You must also cultivate a balance among the impersonal, the interpersonal and the personal dimensions of your company.

The impersonal is the “it,” things like shareholder value, productivity and other technical considerations inherent to any business.

The interpersonal is the “we,” or the relationships among different people within your company.

And the personal, of course, is the “I,” relating to each individual’s happiness and desire for meaningful work and a mindful life.

Yet instead of creating a harmonious relationship among these three, most managers tend to focus entirely on “it,” the impersonal elements of a business.

When a company neglects its human elements (the interpersonal and the personal), business is a mindless activity, in which failure or success hinges only on managing arbitrary technical matters.

In a conscious business, however, harmony exists among the three core dimensions.

So how do you create a business built on harmony and core values? Read on!

Taking responsibility for your actions is the first step toward building a conscious business.

When something goes wrong at work, do you blame someone else for what may have been your mistake?

If yes, then it’s high time you start taking responsibility for your actions.

To safeguard your integrity, try to focus more on process than on outcomes.

Children do things just for the fun of it, without thinking too much about goals or what they want to accomplish.

This attitude changes once we become adults. Many of us become too focused on outcomes rather than on so-called process attributes.

Everyone sees the world differently; we should recognize, respect and learn from these differences.

Are you often frustrated because your colleagues don’t see things the way you do? While it might be hard to accept, everyone sees the world differently.

Developmental psychologist Jean Piaget came up with what is now a classic experiment about perspective. He gave children blocks of wood, with one side painted green, the other red.

Say what you mean and establish common ground with your conversational partner.

It’s sad, but true. Many of our conversations aren’t really meaningful dialogues but overlapping monologues. We say one thing when we should say something else; and we really don’t listen to what our partner is saying.

This makes “conversation” extremely unproductive – and collaborative work near impossible.

Handle conflicts properly – don’t deny or avoid them – with constructive negotiation.

Do you thrive on conflict? Ugh, who does? But the thing is, when conflict isn’t handled properly, it can have serious consequences.

The most common methods of dealing with conflict in business are, unfortunately, deeply flawed.

To run a successful conscious business, learn how to better control your emotions.

You can be emotional and rational – these two states are not independent of one another. In fact, our rational mind would break down without guidance from our emotional mind.

Still, as we all know, emotions can mess things up, which is why you need to master your feelings.

A conscious business is filled with self-aware people who are concerned for the team’s well-being.

The first time the author lost a game of Scrabble to his son, he made an astounding realization: when you love your opponent, it’s impossible to suffer from a competitive loss.

And the author then wondered, what if business was based on such a principle?