Raj Sisodia: Is it okay that we are hurting people in order to make money? Is it okay that heart attacks are 20% higher on Monday mornings? Is it okay that 120,000 Americans die from stress connected to work? Is it okay that 600,000 Chinese die from too much work? Do we have to hurt people and kill people to make money? If your answer is yes, then I have nothing in common with you. I don’t believe that.
Tami Simon: Welcome, friends. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Raj Sisodia. Raj is a prolific writer and a highly accomplished thought leader at a very interesting intersection—the intersection of spiritual awakening, healing, and business performance. More than two decades ago, as a professor of marketing seeking a deeper sense of meaning in his life, he researched and wrote the groundbreaking book Firms of Endearment, about how mission-driven businesses outperform traditional companies—a book that gave birth to the conscious capitalism movement, and we’re going to learn more about that. Raj has authored or co-authored 16 books—it’s amazing—including, in the past few years, a book called Awaken: The Path to Purpose, Inner Peace, and Healing, a book on healing organizations, and a new book on healing leaders. Raj is also part of the guest faculty for Sounds True’s Inner MBA program, created in collaboration with the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. It’s a six-month immersion learning program that begins on October 23rd, and you can learn more at innermba.soundstrue.com. Raj, welcome.
Raj Sisodia: Very good to be with you, Tami. Great to see you again.
Tami Simon: As I was reading Healing Leaders—and I mentioned this to you right before we began—I started feeling so close to you, your journey and the path you’ve been on, especially as you shared that when you were writing The Healing Organization at age 60, four different women in your life that you trusted said to you, “Well, what about your own healing, Raj?” And then you really committed to it, and you went really deep. I wonder here at the beginning if you can talk about that moment in your own life and the journey you’ve taken over the past eight or so years.
Raj Sisodia: Yeah. So that was a significant turning point in my life. I think reaching 60 is a major milestone. It felt certainly that way to me. It’s the end of the second act, the beginning of the final act, and you’ve learned a lot, and you still have time, hopefully, to apply what you have learned and also share with others. So I was aware of that, I was conscious of that, and yet at the same time, I was in my usual mode of one project to the next.
I really was deep into research for The Healing Organization, a book based on the premise that the way we normally do business creates a lot of suffering in the world, a lot of burnout, a lot of stress. Heart attacks go up on Mondays. Hundreds of thousands of people die from stress connected to work. Six hundred thousand Chinese die every year from too much work. So I was exploring the opposite pieces of that. And of course, we did interview you, and you’re featured as one of the chapters. Sounds True is one of the chapters, as an example of a healing organization, as a force for healing for the people who work there, for the people you serve, for the community, for the planet. It could be any or all of those.
I was deep into that, and I had set aside the whole summer for a series of writing retreats, which is my normal writing process. And then, as you mentioned, four women asked me the same question. One was Nilima Bhat, my co-author on Shakti Leadership, who also eventually became my co-author on this new book. One was Lynne Twist—I’m sure you know Lynne, one of the amazing humans on this planet. And my coach; I had worked with a coach for the first time. And one other person. And basically, they stopped me in my tracks, and they said, “How can you write a book about healing if you don’t work on your own healing?” And I said, “Well, I don’t have time for that. I have a book deadline. October 5th, this book is due.” They said, “No, you better make time for that.”
So I did, and I had the good sense to listen to them and delay that book by five months. And I, as you said, went deep. I said yes to every opportunity that had been presented to me. One was going to the Himalayas, the high Himalayas on the border between India and Tibet, where a lot of deep Buddhist wisdom comes from that part of the world. So that’s where I had my 60th birthday, literally in Ladakh, in the high Himalayas, visiting all these monasteries with a group called Shakti Spiritual Journeys, which Nilima organizes around the world to take groups of people into different locations like Machu Picchu or various places in India or Croatia, et cetera.
And then I also said yes to a silent retreat in upstate New York, a place called Peace Village, with people like Peter Senge and David Cooperrider and others—about 35 of us for four days in complete silence. And that was profound because I received so much wisdom from the source. I think all of us need to make time for that silence, because otherwise we are so distracted with all of the inputs that come into our lives. Essentially, I had 45 pages of notes at the end of those four days, and these seven steps that are central to this new book really came to me in those days of silence. As I said, I worked with a coach, and I also went to the Amazon rainforest with Lynne Twist and the Pachamama Alliance, which she started with her husband and with John Perkins 30 years ago now.
They’re just celebrating their 30 years. And Lynne told me, “You’re going to learn more in 10 days about healing, being in the rainforest with the shamans, than you will in five years of research. So you must come on this trip.” And I did, and it was very profound for me, because that included an ayahuasca experience that really was, as I said, meaningful, and gave me lots of insights about healing.
So that was a turning point, and that was the beginning. I call it my year of conscious awakening. Until then—I discovered purpose, as you mentioned in the intro, in the process of writing Firms of Endearment. That was the awakening of my purpose: that business can be done with love and with purpose, and that those businesses actually thrive much better, and they create well-being all around them. So I found my purpose. I said I want to dedicate the rest of my life to this story of business. But I had not really found inner peace, and I certainly had a lot of wounds inside me, traumas that needed to be healed. So this was the beginning of that phase of the journey for me, to start working on that.
Tami Simon: There’s so much to talk about here, Raj, but I want to start by addressing the skeptical voice in the room who says, “Yeah, I’ve heard about Firms of Endearment, but come on—we see so many businesses that are successful that are being run by unconscious leaders, by people who haven’t done their healing work. They’re achieving great levels of financial success. How can you make the statement that businesses thrive more when we see all these examples all around us of unconscious financial success?”
Raj Sisodia: Well, it depends on how you define success. If you define it narrowly as purely financial success, what I say is a lot of those companies are actually generating false profits. They’re showing up on the income statement with a profit, but if you look at the impact that they’re having on their people, the impact on their employees and the level of burnout and stress and heart attacks, the impact on their customers very often—making them unhealthy. You know, 70% of our calories almost in the US now come from ultra-processed food. So we’re impacting communities. We’re certainly devastating the environment. So that profit is not real profit.
How do you define success is the real important question here. Because remember, years ago there was a book called Good to Great, and he defined greatness purely in financial terms. Jim Collins’ earlier book, Built to Last, was much more holistic, but Good to Great was only about which companies outperformed the market by at least three to one over at least fourteen years—that made them so-called great. And he found level five leadership and big, hairy, audacious goals and the Hedgehog principle and whatever. Those points were all fine, but that lens allowed in companies like Philip Morris, which at the time was the world’s largest tobacco company. I think now it’s second to China Tobacco. Now, this company was called great because it had delivered above-average returns for a very long time. But my question is: how do you define greatness?
Is it good for the world? Is it good for people? Six million people were dying every year of tobacco-related illnesses. One billion people were expected to die in this century of tobacco, and public health systems were spending six hundred and fifty billion dollars a year dealing with the health consequences of tobacco. So how do we define greatness? I believe that in order to be great, you must be good. I think we put too much emphasis on so-called greatness. We should emphasize much more the goodness. And so success, I think, has to be defined much more broadly. Are we good for the world? Are we good for everybody, including the financial investors?
And what Firms of Endearment found was that the companies that practice these pillars of conscious capitalism—we had twenty-eight in the book, and some were public—outperformed the market by nine to one over ten years financially. But that actually, if anything, understates their performance, because their employees are healthier and happier, their customers are thriving, their communities are thriving, and they have a positive impact on their environment, or certainly a less negative impact. Even they were paying taxes at a higher rate, right? So the net value created is even greater than that.
So I think we have to really broaden the lens. Business is not just about making money. Business is about the impact we have on people’s lives. I mean, we spend most of our waking hours at work. And for the people who work at companies like yours, that is a very meaningful experience. For most people on this planet, work is a drudgery to be survived, right? And it makes them physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, spiritually unhealthy. And then they have to unwind on the weekends, and they say, “Thank God it’s Friday.” And what do we do? We get drunk, and we try to escape our woes, and we come back Monday morning and then heart attacks go up twenty percent. That’s the reality that we’ve created with this story of business. This narrow, instrumental, selfish view that business is only about making money—that’s a very damaging story. And measuring success by that, I think, is just completely wrong.
Tami Simon: In writing Firms of Endearment, you say you discovered your purpose and it gave birth to this architecture of conscious capitalism. For people who are new to this, what are the pillars, Raj? Just in brief, so everybody’s with us here.
Raj Sisodia: Yes. And I have to recall the moment when that realization came upon me, the purpose for me. You know, Tami, I was literally moved to tears. I was sitting in the Poconos in Pennsylvania, and we were writing the stories of some of these companies which we had featured in the book. And I was so moved that I was in tears. And I said to my co-author, David, “I’ve never experienced tears of joy connected to my work.” I’ve often experienced disappointment, frustration, some of the negative emotions. But having tears of joy is a rare and precious thing, and it’s really your heart telling you that this really matters. It matters to you and it matters to a lot of other people.
And I think that is one of the big gaps in business. I had six years of business education—MBA and PhD. It was all about the head and the wallet. Everything is numbers, theories, frameworks, and everything must go to the bottom line. What I realized is it completely bypasses the human being in between, the heart and the spirit. I was never inspired a single day in my business education. I was never emotionally moved to think that, wow, business can be beautiful, business can be noble, business can be heroic. And now I have that experience all the time.
I teach an MBA course on conscious capitalism. And I was at Babson, and in one of those semesters I was teaching a case on a Dutch bank named Triodos, which is called “Conscious Money in Action.” And I looked around, and two of my students literally had tears streaming down their face. I said, “What happened, guys?” They said, “We did not realize that banking could be this beautiful. We have worked in banking for many years, and we never thought that this is possible.” I said, “Everything can be beautiful. Every business can be beautiful if it is run on purpose and on love.”
So what we discovered were these pillars which embody those ideas. The first thing was—and the subtitle of Firms of Endearment is How World-Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose—so the first pillar is purpose. There must be a purpose to everything we do in this life, something that is meaningful beyond money. Businesses need to be profitable, we know that, in order to survive as a business. But that should not be the purpose. The purpose should be: what are we going to do with this entity? With all these people coming together, what impact are we going to have in the world? How are we going to have a positive impact?
One way that people describe it: the purpose of business is not to make a profit; the purpose of business is to find profitable solutions to the problems of people and the planet. And most businesses actually are making a profit while they’re damaging people and the planet. So find a higher purpose, something that inspires, something that aligns everybody together. Employees care about it, customers care about it, investors care about it. It’s heroic. It’s trying to change the world. It’s rooted in love. What is love? The unconditional desire for the well-being of the other. As human beings, the highest expression of our humanity is bringing our love into the world, and we can do that at scale when we create an organization. So higher purpose is the first pillar.
The second is explicitly adopting a stakeholder mindset. We’ve created this illusion that business is only about shareholders, and that everything is done at the board level, that the fiduciary duty is to maximize returns for shareholders. Now, the fiduciary duty of a board is to enable the flourishing of that company, and that includes all of its stakeholders: its employees, who invest far more in that company than somebody who just buys ten shares of that company; the customers; the suppliers; et cetera. So all stakeholders matter. We should create value consciously at a deeper level for each of them.
For employees, for example, we should give them a good job with a dignified wage and good benefits and a good career so they can evolve and grow in the organization. And also it should be a calling for them. It should be work that is inherently meaningful. We hire people for whom this work is meaningful. If you’re Whole Foods, you hire people who are foodies, who care about health. If you’re Patagonia or REI, you hire people who are passionate about our planet, about the outdoors. The work becomes an extension of who you are, and the ultimate test of that is: if you win the lottery on Friday afternoon, you will still show up to work on Monday morning, because the work has meaning beyond the paycheck.
So creating value for all of our stakeholders at a deep level, and then recognizing that they are connected. You cannot have happy customers if you don’t have happy employees, ultimately. And you can’t have good products if you don’t have good suppliers, et cetera. So they all connect together.
The third is conscious leadership—that you have to have leaders who define leadership as not just power and money. It’s really about service. They are servant leaders. I have an acronym for each of these pillars. The acronym there is SELFLESS. You have to be somebody who has transcended the narrow self, as Viktor Frankl talked about, right? Maslow said self-actualization was the peak; Frankl said there’s a level beyond that, which is self-transcendence. Self-actualization is about finding yourself. Self-transcendence is losing yourself in service of something greater than yourself. So these are leaders who have gone to that level of selflessness, and they’re really about serving the collective self.
And then it stands for the qualities of conscious leaders. They’re strong, and they’re loving. It’s very important to combine those two things. Strength without love is tyranny, and love without strength is ineffective. The leaders who have changed the world for the better—like Lincoln, Gandhi, Mandela, King—they were very strong individuals, but also rooted in love. The leaders that we’ve had who are only strong leaders: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, whoever. And now Trump likes to put himself in that list, by the way, of top ten leaders in world history. They are all just strong, so-called, and they almost destroyed human civilization and certainly killed hundreds of millions of people. So we need strength and love to go together. It’s really the masculine and feminine also, the integration of that—and emotional intelligence, spiritual intelligence, systems intelligence, all of those kinds of things.
And then the fourth pillar is the culture: that we want a culture where people actually love going to work. They don’t say, “Thank God it’s Friday,” and, “Oh, God, it’s Monday.” And there are high levels of trust and caring, along with accountability and authenticity at work.
So these four pillars—each of them is powerful in its own right. If you just adopt purpose, you will make a difference. If you just create a stakeholder orientation, you will make a difference. But if you do all of them together, there’s this kind of synergistic, multiplicative impact, which elevates the business, really turbocharges it to the next level, which is why we see these levels of performance that are quite extreme.
Tami Simon: Now, I mentioned, Raj, that I feel extraordinarily resonant, simpatico with your perspective—both about the deeper dimensions of healing and awakening, which we’re going to talk about soon, as well as this approach to business, and business being this force of healing, love, goodness, contribution in the world. Often when I talk to other people, they look at me like I’ve got five green heads or something, that I’m extraordinarily idealistic and that, you know, “You’re some kind of weird creature out there, Tami. It seemed to work for you. You have enough money. You’re happy with enough. You don’t need more and more and more all the time. But guess what? I’m looking at my professional life as a way primarily to make money. That’s where I’m coming from.”
I’m hearing this from people close to me in my own life, young people who are saying, “I have a lot of concerns. I’m not the risk-taker you are. I don’t know if it’s going to work for me. I want a safe path.” I don’t know how to respond to them. How do you respond to the doubters who say you’re talking about a very small, special niche, Raj? This is not what’s happening at large in our society, and it’s too risky.
Raj Sisodia: Yeah. No, I think people are prisoners of certain mental models and certain ways of looking at the world. Somebody said—I think Sam Harris—”Bad ideas are more important or more impactful than bad people.” So we’re under the sway of some very bad ideas, and one of them is: what is a human being? If you’ve ever taken an economics class, the caricature is that of Homo economicus—that human beings are only motivated by individual short-term self-interest, maximizing their own utility at all times. And all the models of economics are founded on that, or are built on that foundation, and therefore businesses are seen as profit-maximizing, as an extension of Homo economicus.
That is not an accurate description of what a human being is. We are Homo sapiens, we’re not Homo economicus. We are self-interested, but that is not the same thing as selfishness. We are self-aware, we are conscious, we are altruistic, we are cooperative, we are loving, and we are purpose-driven. And the sad thing is that social science theories can become self-fulfilling. So when you take an impressionable young undergraduate and you teach them economics, and you have them read Ayn Rand, and they start believing that human beings are supposed to be as selfish as possible, and that’s a virtue—the research actually shows that people become more selfish and more short-term and more materialistic when they take those kinds of courses. So that can become self-fulfilling. And then we built a whole business school curriculum based on that idea, that that’s the only purpose of life and therefore the only purpose of business.
I think you really have to go to the end of people’s lives and see how they look back on those lives and how satisfied and how fulfilled they feel. My partner Neha is a physician, and she’s sat at the bedside of thousands of people at the last moments of their life. And nobody ever was talking about how much money they made or how they wish they could have made more money, et cetera. It was all about love and impact and legacy.
And so I think people are enthralled with this view of life. Our popular culture kind of promotes that. Many of the role models that we’re seeing right now in the world of business in the last several years are all about that. So I believe what we’re in the middle of right now is a reactionary phase. I think we had a lot of progress starting in the nineteen nineties, when we mark the awakening of consciousness to really happen in a big way. If you look at nineteen eighty-nine, it was a turning point in human history: the Berlin Wall coming down, the invention of the World Wide Web, women outnumbering men cumulatively as college graduates, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and many other things that happened. And you started to see a shift. We call it the beginning of the age of transcendence.
And you had lots of consciousness awakening—you had rights for gay people, gay marriage, you had environmental consciousness. You started to see awakening in business as well, the advent of the idea of purpose, et cetera. And I think that movement continued for quite a while. We saw that in the rise of women. And now what we are in is sort of this phase—I liken it to Star Wars. It’s The Empire Strikes Back, and the old order is reasserting itself. They’re trying to take it back to the old way, which served some people very well. People who only care about money and power and are able to rise to the higher levels of those hierarchies have done very well. There’s no question about it. The way they define success, they have succeeded.
But if you look at the fact that fifty percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, if you look at forty percent of Americans having less than four hundred dollars in the bank, that two-thirds of Americans work hourly jobs—it’s not a pretty picture. And so that system that is creating all those outcomes, and of course climate change and environmental degradation and species extinction and crossing seven out of nine planetary boundaries—business as usual is not an option. And the people who are advocating for that, they’re really whistling past the graveyard. I mean, we are in the decade of determination. We have to change. And that includes many things, including changing the way we think about business. So I think that’s a very narrow view. These people haven’t looked at the bigger picture. They haven’t understood what life is really about. They should read Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. They have to educate themselves about what life is really about.
Tami Simon: I want to go into your new book, and you said that the architecture of the book, the seven steps, came to you as a download. Okay, that’s really interesting. What happened? Were you meditating? What was going on? Were you walking?
Raj Sisodia: I was walking. So this was in that silent retreat at Peace Village in July of 2018, and we were in silence, but we were able to keep a notebook and walk around in nature most of the time. And I just started getting all these downloads—not only about these seven steps, but so many other things about life and my life as well. So that became pretty profound, and then I put that aside for a few years. I thought about them over time, and then ultimately—you know, when something comes through you and not from you, I believe it has more power. There’s something there where you’re sort of a conduit, a channel for some wisdom that’s seeking to emerge into the world. And so I really view it in that way. I don’t take pride of authorship of these seven steps.
And again, individually, those steps are not radical. Everybody has heard about know yourself. A lot of people talk about love yourself, be yourself, et cetera. But it’s creating the full set of steps, and then the sequence, I think, also makes sense. It’s logical, right? That you would proceed in that way. And so yeah, that’s essentially how it happened. And then a couple of years ago—three years ago now—I was with Nilima at a program we were teaching on leadership for women in Mexico, and we looked at this and said, “Yeah, this looks pretty interesting.” So we then taught a three-day program on the seven steps, and it worked beautifully—very, very powerful. So then we decided to write the book on it.
Tami Simon: We’re not going to be able to go into all of them, but I do want to pull a couple of the steps out and ask you some questions—questions that have come up repeatedly for me, especially in Sounds True’s Inner MBA program, where people are like, “Okay, Tami, this sounds really good, but what about this?” And I think, you know, I should ask Raj about that.
So here we go. On step three, be yourself. One of the questions that comes up a lot from leaders is: should I really share all my fears? I’m being myself. I’m giving a presentation. I actually have no idea how this thing’s going to turn out, and in fact, I’ve had a lot of dark thoughts about what the possibilities are. But I’m supposed to be myself—or am I supposed to be the confident leader of this organization? I’m grounded, and we have a way through, even though part of me inside is going, “I have no idea if we have a way through.”
Raj Sisodia: Yeah. I think we want to be the most evolved and healed version of ourselves, right? So in the beginning, when you are just starting this journey, there’s a lot of things that we need to do. First of all, it’s very hard to be yourself if you don’t know yourself, and if you don’t love yourself, right? So those are prerequisites, I believe. You really have to know who you are.
For me, for a long time, as you may see from the book, I got to know myself—and we often get to know ourselves through the eyes of others and the words of others as we start becoming self-aware, especially when we’re younger. And very often that could be a negative impact. Like in my case, my father essentially gave me the message that everything that came naturally to me was a weakness, and I saw myself as defective and lacking, and I tried to be the opposite of who I was, which never works. Trying to be the opposite of who you are is basically us acting, and that never works.
So it took me a long time to get to that place of loving myself—first accepting myself, forgiving myself, then loving myself ultimately, and then being grateful to say, “Yeah, these qualities are gifts that I received.” My father said, “You’re too trusting and too idealistic and too peace-loving,” and all of that, “and you should be the opposite of all of those things.” So getting to that place of self-acceptance and appreciation and ultimately self-love—and then you can be yourself, as in being authentic, not acting, right? Taking off the mask, not pretending to be ten different people. For many of us, we’re one way with our spouse, one way with our children, one way with our parents, one way with our colleagues, one way with the people we report to, one way with our friends. It’s just all these different personas. I think it’s much healthier and, just frankly, it’s a relief not to do that.
I think for leaders, being vulnerable and showing that they are human is okay. They don’t have to say that “I have all the answers.” They can say, “Well, I’m here to facilitate us collectively figuring out the answers,” and enable all of us to contribute to that. And as a leader for many years, I’m sure that you can relate to that.
One of the women we interviewed for the book is Marisa Lazo, who is the CEO of a company in Guadalajara in Mexico, and she’s also a judge on Shark Tank in Mexico. Now, Marisa is a very emotional person. Tears come very readily to her. When she became CEO and this company started growing and had thousands of employees, all the men advisors around her said, “Oh, you can’t show emotion like that. It’s not okay. You have to be professional.” So she kind of put on this whole persona of this tough CEO, and she just said, “I just couldn’t. It just felt unnatural to me.” And she felt very disconnected from her people. So she just went back to her own being. She said, “Well, I’m emotional, I cry, I express my emotion, I show it.” And the culture of that company is extraordinary, and people feel very, very close to her, and they trust her, and they know that she’s authentic and human with them. Even on Shark Tank, she said, “I’m not a shark, I’m a dolphin. And there might be times that I cry, and it’s okay.”
I think the main thing is it’s okay to be yourself and to be human. What we do is we create this facade of professionalism, and what professionalism means basically is: don’t show human qualities. And I think that is wrong. We should be human in everything that we do.
One of my co-authors was Bob Chapman, who sadly just passed away three months ago, and I wrote the book Everybody Matters with him. And Bob Chapman, every time he gave a speech, he would be in tears. The leadership programs at Barry-Wehmiller, which they created after he had his own epiphanies and awakenings about leadership, included things like: everybody is somebody’s precious child, and they deserve to be treated with love and respect and dignity; leadership is about inspiration, not just about issuing orders and so forth.
In that culture, there is such a level of openness and vulnerability. The first time I went there, I was with a group of fifteen or so middle-aged blue-collar men in their fifties and sixties with less than high school educations, and I asked them, “Tell me what your life was like before your company got acquired by Barry-Wehmiller, and how it changed.” I look around and there was silence, and then I see, again, tears streaming down the faces of a few of them. And then they started talking about how their life had completely, completely transformed. And I said, “Wow, there’s such a unique atmosphere in this company. When you can get middle-aged blue-collar men to cry in front of each other, there’s something special going on.” That’s a unique, special culture.
So I am a big advocate for bringing the heart and the soul into everything that you do, especially as a leader, and showing that. That’s not weakness, that is strength. As they say, vulnerability is not a liability, it’s an ability. It’s right in the word. We are vulnerable. Let’s not pretend to be not vulnerable, okay? And yet also show, project that love and strength and confidence as well. As I said, leaders have to be strong and loving, so we have to cultivate that personal power inside us as well.
Tami Simon: Another question I get asked a lot is: what about when being loving means you have to do really difficult things, like lay off a large portion of your organization? I’m wondering what examples you’ve seen of that, where the healing mission of an organization is kept intact even through navigating a large downsizing—something that’s inherently like a wound to the business itself and to the people.
Raj Sisodia: Yeah. Again, most companies do this in a very heartless, cavalier way. Suddenly your ID card doesn’t work and you get a message the same day, and then you’re out and you’re escorted. That kind of thing. It’s very dehumanizing, and it’s devastating getting laid off in that fashion.
Other companies, like Bob Chapman’s—they don’t say we will never ever have a layoff, but it is the absolute last resort. So when there was a situation with Barry-Wehmiller in the two thousand and eight financial crisis, which affected their industry more because they are capital goods—they make machines that make toilet paper, that make cardboard boxes, and those kinds of industries tend to go down further in recessions because those purchases can be delayed. Companies don’t have to replace their equipment at the pace they were planning to. So their new orders went down almost to zero, and they had an order book backlog that they thought would sustain them, but actually companies started canceling. Procter & Gamble canceled a twenty million dollar order and paid the fine.
So then they were really worried and said, “Well, how are we going to get through this?” The entire board was saying to Bob, “You must lay off thirty, forty percent. All the competitors are doing that.” And he said, “You know, we have this mantra in our company: we measure success by the way we touch the lives of people. And if we do this, what’s going to happen to these people in these small industrial towns in the Midwest? There are no other jobs. This company is the main employer in each of those towns. And these people will lose their homes. They’ll lose—some of them will lose their marriages. Their kids will have to drop out of college. So we as a company can survive this better than they can as individuals.”
So instead of laying off anybody, they basically had a furlough program and asked everybody to take time off without pay over the next year—I think it was actually four weeks, one month. And they said, “That will save us enough money. It’ll give us at least a year, year and a half runway.” And it was a tremendous relief in the company.
So what you want to do is to resort to layoffs as a last strategy, as a matter of survival. And there are very often things you can do in the interim, including asking your own people, “Guys, how do we get through this? We need to tighten our belts. Where can we cut costs? And if need be, we all share in the sacrifice”—starting with the executives. The executives took a much bigger pay cut than they asked their people to take.
Now, when it does become impossible to avoid that, then the guideline to me is: how do you do it with love? If that was your own son or daughter, how would you handle that? You would want to make sure they’re okay. You would want to make sure that you try to identify opportunities for them elsewhere in other companies. What do they need to do for that transition? So there are companies that we know—for example, one of the CEOs in our Conscious Business Leadership Academy—they had to do that. But they actually did a bunch of things where they vested the stock of those employees. This was a startup, so the people who were leaving were actually given that stock on an accelerated schedule, so that if the company was able to bounce back and succeed, they would actually share in that.
And they did a number of other things as well, including outplacement services and helping them land on their feet. And then eventually, many of them came back when the company did start to grow. And others who left, they didn’t leave on bitter terms. They almost felt like the alumni of this company. They said, “Yeah, we still believe in this company and want to see it do well.” And some of them brought sales to the company, and they became clients of the company, et cetera. So I think it can be done.
To me, the guideline, Tami, is this—and I learned this in the ayahuasca experience, where I got a message: “Here’s what the world needs in order to heal.” And it came as an acronym. The acronym was LIST, L-I-S-T. And each letter became a word. L was for love. It said every single thing that we do in this life should come from love, and that’s at work and in our personal lives. Not from fear, not from greed or anger or jealousy or guilt or shame. Too many business decisions are rooted in fear and greed. It’s fear of competition, fear of going out of business, and greed for more, more, more. Can we make those same decisions from love? Even if you have to let somebody go, can you do it with love? Because there are many ways we can hurt each other. There’s only one way to heal, and that is through love.
The I was for innocence. We all come into this world, this life, innocent, as pristine beings, and then we get corrupted by the ways of society, by the ways of the world, even by our own families. My own family in India, in this warrior caste that I was born in, the feudal kind of culture, was very corrupt in many ways, and it becomes an influence on an impressionable young child. And so you kind of become corrupted. You learn to climb over each other and lie and cheat to get what you want, and all of that is seen as okay. But you don’t have a choice as a child. You’re born innocent, you get corrupted. As an adult, you do have a choice, and therefore you must choose. Do you want to live in that corrupted state, or do you want to return to innocence? What does that mean? Not knowingly being the cause of unnecessary harm or suffering in this world toward another or toward other life. And as the I Ching says, at the very center of us dwells an innocent spirit. If we can be guided by that, that is your true self. That is how you came here.
S is for simplicity. We make life too complicated. The essential things in life are simple. We should go back and remember the simplicity on the other side of complexity, as Oliver Wendell Holmes talked about.
And the T is for truth. What is our commitment to the truth? Truth is fundamental. Gandhi’s autobiography was My Experiments with Truth, and he said truth is more fundamental than peace, because without truth there can be no peace. If you do not acknowledge the truth of what happened—so in South Africa, when they had the truth and reconciliation process that Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela created, that allowed them to move forward from this ugly, dark history of apartheid, to move forward as a unified nation, when people actually acknowledged the truth of what had happened and asked for forgiveness and were given the grace and were forgiven.
So I think those are important messages that we have to keep in mind, starting with love. Everything comes from love.
Tami Simon: The universe speaks to you in an acronym. That’s so funny, Raj. That’s how—you know, everybody gets their guidance in different ways.
Okay, in this seven-step model that you present in Healing Leaders, we’re making an upward spiral journey of growth and love. I took special note of step four, choose yourself, where what you talked about was choose your past, your present, and your future. That’s what it means to choose yourself: to choose your past, present, and future. And I thought, well, okay, choose the present, I’m good with that. Choose my future, I’m really excited about that. Choose my past? I don’t know. I don’t want to.
Raj Sisodia: Yeah. Yes.
Tami Simon: Those were the cards I was dealt, and I’ve been spending the rest of my life working through it. I don’t know if I can get to this place. But I kept reading, because it was powerful for me. And you write, “You’re no longer a character in someone else’s script. You’re the protagonist. You’re the hero. You’re the author.” And I thought that’s really a powerful step. So I wanted to hear more about it and how that has played out for you, because I know in choosing your past, there’s a lot there.
Raj Sisodia: Yeah. So that actually came to me specifically at mealtime at that silent retreat. Because we’re in complete silence, you can’t even point and say, “I want that, but not that,” right? So there’s a bunch of stuff they’ve made. You put out your tray and they put food in your tray. And it occurred to me that that’s a metaphor for life: that there’s no menu, and it’s not a buffet where you pick and choose—that I want this kind of mother and this kind of father, and I want to be born in this country, in this time in history, in this socioeconomic class, and so forth.
You’re given a tray full of stuff, a bunch of stuff. This is your curriculum for this life. Some of it tastes bitter, and some of it looks unappetizing, and yet you need all of it, because these experiences, these people, they’re all meant to shape you and enable you to grow and evolve, to become the person that you’re meant to be in order to do the work that you came here to do.
So that’s the story that we’re telling ourselves, right? As Ram Dass said, “Friend or foe alike, everyone you meet is your teacher.” So when I look back on my childhood—I grew up, as I said, in this very feudal culture within India. My grandfather was an overlord of the village, from this warrior caste. It was very, very hierarchical, very abusive. All the workers were abused, especially the women. Even the women in the house were really suppressed, and they had to keep their heads covered. My grandfather would yell at them, including at my mother, et cetera. So as a child, I observed all of that, and I grew up in that environment. And the realization came to me that had I not grown up in that environment, I would not have written a book about the feminine 50 years later. Because if I didn’t have that experience as a male—I mean, I was really in a privileged role in that subculture—but I had that realization having lived through that.
So I think everything that happens in our lives—there’s a parable called “good thing, bad thing, who knows,” right? Everything that happens, we’re quick to label and say, “That’s a good thing. That’s a bad thing.” You don’t know. That so-called bad thing—getting fired, for example—could be the best thing that happens in your life, because it enables you to then find your true path. You were locked into something that really didn’t matter. And so in a way it starts to make sense of your life, connecting the dots. And even those very challenging things—I would not wish them upon my worst enemy, but I still say, yes, I had a very difficult relationship with my father, but I still choose to have him as a father.
What that does—you cannot change your past, but by mentally choosing it, it takes you out of victimhood. You don’t say, “Oh, woe is me. Why did I have a father who never picked me up and never hugged me and never said I love you?” Yeah, that should not happen, but as a result of that, there are things that I’ve learned, lessons that I’ve learned. All the challenging things that have happened in my life—I think it’s a more empowering framing of your journey to say, “Maybe I don’t understand yet why I went through that, but there’s a lesson in there. There’s something that I’m being asked to learn and grow as a result of that.” So that’s really the framing of choosing your past.
Tami Simon: I want to now share something a little personal for a moment, but I think this is the right moment, Raj. When I went to my first Conscious Capitalism Summit, it was about two decades ago. It was towards the beginning. It was one of the first few that was offered, when you were just in the formation phases. And I had a two-part reaction. Both of these are about me. So on the one side, I actually did sit in my chair and weep, because I felt I’ve been on this path by myself, kind of clearing away with my machete, if you will, through the jungle, trying to find a way to operate on multiple bottom lines in business, and I’ve just been creating it. Now I have a whole group of strong people who are out there paving a way, actually, that I can be part of, and it really felt incredible.
And here was the other thing—also, this is about me. I was like, “You know, this feels very masculine oriented.” I didn’t feel a lot of feminine—and these are just general categories, masculine, feminine. I didn’t feel at the time that there was a lot of room in that group two decades ago for sort of more my—I guess you would call it a very feeling-oriented person, operating from that sort of more emotional place as a person. I was a little bit like, “I feel like an outlier here.”
And yet what I’ve seen happen over the last couple decades, with the growth of the movement and you as one of the leaders as well, has been this very welcome integration of—I don’t know how else to call it, but feminine leadership qualities with these other more strategy-driven, analytical ways of thinking. And I wonder if you can speak directly to that, and to that within the conscious capitalist movement as well.
Raj Sisodia: Yes, I think that is a very important aspect of the conscious capitalism movement—the consciousness part of it. There are some people who want to emphasize the capitalism part of it only, and I say, “No, these are both together.” We have to do everything with higher consciousness, and that consciousness includes recognition of our wholeness as human beings. We all come from a mother and a father, and we all have masculine energy and feminine energy within us, regardless of gender. We all have that.
But we have lived for thousands of years in societal structures that have systematically suppressed the feminine. As we know, women couldn’t vote in this country until nineteen twenty, couldn’t own property for a long time, could not even get a credit card until the seventies in their own name. There were parts of Switzerland where women could not vote until the seventies. So this is a very recently evolving phenomenon. And Lynne Twist refers to this as—what’s the word that she uses? Sophia. The Sophia Century. This is the century when finally women will rise to their equal status in society, as they should have been all along.
So that integration, that wholeness, is very, very important. The feminine is what has been missing, and therefore that is what we have to focus on right now, to elevate that—and not replace the masculine. It’s very important that we don’t swing from one pole to the other. We don’t go from patriarchy to a matriarchy, but we go to wholeness, whole human beings.
And as you will see in Healing Leaders, we talk about not only masculine and feminine, but also the elder and the child energy. The elder energy: the meaning, the purpose, the respect, the transcendence, the legacy. And then the child energy, which is play and joy and laughter and creativity and all of that. That comes from having healthy child energy, and we need all four of these integrated. So the phrase that we use is, “Each of us should strive to become the wise fool of tough love.” That we have the wisdom of the elder, the foolishness of a child—the playfulness, the joy—and the toughness of the masculine and the love of the feminine, all together. And each one of us has a unique manifestation of that.
So I think that is very much a part of conscious capitalism. What differentiates us from all of the other movements is that all of the others are primarily rooted in, as you said, strategy—shared value capitalism, et cetera, right? And there’s a better way to do business, which there is. But ultimately, I think it’s the consciousness with which we do everything that makes a difference, and that includes the heart and the spirit. I think ours is the movement that integrates those elements more so than some of the others, which are, again, very much in the head and in the wallet.
Tami Simon: You mentioned The Healing Organization, a book that you wrote where you did a study and you profiled various organizations. And it’s, I think, fair to say that these are organizations that are at least aspirationally bringing together, integrating a deep caring, relational component. I wonder if you could address the person who says, “Really, is it a business’s job to be focusing on healing? Is that what we’re supposed to be doing at work—healing?”
Raj Sisodia: So I define healing as: reduce suffering in the world and bring more joy into the world. And regardless of what industry you’re in—you could be a restaurant, you could be a travel company, you could be anything. Can you use that as a way to bring more joy and reduce suffering, right? Find profitable solutions to the problems that exist in the world.
And if you don’t consciously choose that path, then you will actually create suffering without even realizing it. People will be burned out and stressed out, and so forth. So you could have two companies doing the exact same business in terms of what products or services they’re in, but one of them views the business as a way to serve themselves, to make money for themselves, and use others, including employees and customers, to make money for themselves, right? The other one says, “This is a way for me to express myself and serve others.” Same business, same product—you will find suffering in one company, and you’ll find a lot of joy and healing in the other company. Same business in that sense. But why you do it and how you do it makes a big difference.
So what I say healing is: Is it okay that we are hurting people in order to make money? Is it okay that heart attacks are 20% higher on Monday mornings? Is it okay that 120,000 Americans die from stress connected to work? Is it okay that 600,000 Chinese die from too much work? Do we have to hurt people and kill people to make money? If your answer is yes, then I have nothing in common with you. I don’t believe that, and I will not be part of an institution that in fact says we have to hurt people to make money.
And I set out in that book to show that the opposite can be true—that not only can the heart attacks not go up on Monday, you can actually be healthier physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, and spiritually at the end of the day than when you came in. Working at that organization actually makes you healthier in all those dimensions, and that is very much possible. So again, when something exists, we know it’s possible. I want to tell people to break past that barrier, to say, “Oh, business—it’s not… You know, work is tough and these are the consequences of work,” and yeah, people will stress out and burn out. I don’t believe that. I don’t want to accept that premise.
Tami Simon: Can you give me an example of a healing organization that really blew your mind when you were doing the research?
Raj Sisodia: Yeah, so many. As I said, in The Healing Organization, we have about 25 of them. Let me focus on one. One is called FIFCO, which is a company in Costa Rica—a company that was producing soft drinks and beer, and they had some resorts as well. And they were operating with a lot of negative consequences on people’s health, on the environment—solid waste, carbon, water, all of those things—significant negative impacts. Getting people hooked on sugary drinks, lots of impact on obesity. In Central America, South America, we have a lot of those problems. A lot of alcoholism as well.
And then they had a leader, Ramón Mendiola, who started to think about the business in a deeper way and read some of these books, and started to transform, and started to, first of all, create a higher purpose for the company. Started to think about listening to all of their stakeholders, especially to the government and to public health. The Minister of Health called him and said, “Ramón, you’re making a lot of kids unhealthy with what you’re doing.” So then he started a voluntary process of internally challenging his people to reformulate all of their drinks and to reduce the sugar, and they did that by fifty percent—they reduced the sugar, and they removed all of the sugary drinks from schools and other places. They started a way to educate people about drinking and excessive drinking, and about trying to moderate their drinking patterns.
They set targets for not only getting to neutrality when it came to carbon and water and solid waste, but actually having a positive effect. So they actually have the world’s first water-positive beer, for example, now—that has a net positive impact on water resources. And they set very public targets, and they advertise them, and they put them in the newspaper: “By twenty sixteen, we’re going to be carbon neutral. By twenty eighteen, we’re going to be water neutral,” et cetera. And then they challenge their people internally to achieve those goals, and every single time they’ve achieved them.
So this is a company that has come a tremendous distance. They’ve also grown by about one thousand percent in that time. They had an incredible record during the pandemic in what they did for people and how they protected people’s jobs, even in their hotel business. They made a public commitment not to lay anybody off. And they’ve been recognized as the best company in Costa Rica year after year, and Ramón as the best leader year after year.
They had a situation some years ago where, in one of their public meetings, an employee stood up and said, “Ramón, I’m incredibly proud of this company and everything that we’ve done, but do you realize that some of our colleagues here are living in poverty?” Some of the employees. And he said, “I didn’t know that. I know that we pay very good wages and way above the norm in Costa Rica, and at least a dignified wage for everybody. So give me some time. I’m going to look into the issue, and I’ll come back to you.”
And they looked at it. They found there were about 350 families that had fallen into poverty because for various reasons, financially, they had overextended themselves. They bought things on credit, paying 50% interest on those installment loans, et cetera. And they just fell into those traps. So then they assigned mentors to each of those families, helped them get through the short-term struggles that they were in, get them back on equal footing, gave them financial advice, and paired them with these mentors to help them and guide them over time. Getting the men also to become more responsible and to drink less, and all kinds of things. And at the end of 18 months, he was able to say there’s not a single family of any person in this company that is below that line now, below that threshold.
So it’s an example of a committed leader and a deeply caring lens that has made a tremendous impact across the business. And now Ramón, having just stepped down as CEO, is working with about 150 other companies in Costa Rica to help them adopt these ways of being.
Tami Simon: Amazing story. Thank you. Amazing story.
As I mentioned, there are seven steps in this spiral of growth and love, and we’re not able to go into all of them. But I do want to ask you about the final step, which is heal yourself. In that section of Healing Leaders, you go very deep into a leader’s tackling of their own trauma in their life—buried trauma, ancestral trauma. And I thought to myself, I wonder how many effective leaders have really done that level of depth work. Probably not many. I mean, here you are, you’re in your late 60s. I’m in my mid-60s, and it’s only as I am no longer even the CEO of Sounds True that I’ve had the space and the ability and really the nervous system expansion—without the go, go, go, go, go of running the company—that I’ve been able to do some of this deep healing work.
So the question emerged for me: maybe you can be a good conscious leader and still be carrying a certain amount of trauma that’s running your system. Of course, the more you heal, the better, but that’s a tall ask, and I’m curious what you think about that.
Raj Sisodia: Yeah. So everybody has trauma, as I talked about. Thirteen million Americans have PTSD, but all of us have PTSI—post-traumatic stress injury. The depth of it varies, obviously. Some people have severe things that are impacting them on a day-to-day basis, and therefore impacting the people they lead. For others, it may be less significant. Maybe they had a pretty happy childhood, and they were loved by both their parents, and they’re able to be okay, and the smaller things they can work on.
But I think, first of all, examining and recognizing: “Do I indeed have anything significant that I need to work on that is causing me to get hijacked?” You know, have these amygdala hijacks or have these triggers that cause me to behave in certain ways. So it’s about self-awareness. It’s part of knowing yourself as well. Do I have things that I need to work on? As I said, everybody has something, and some people have a lot. So I think we have a duty to ourselves and to the people we love and lead to come from as healed a place as possible.
And there’s no endpoint to that journey, because there’s no end to healing. There will always be some other layer that gets uncovered. But certainly being on that journey, starting relatively early, I think is important. We’re trying to introduce this now to our undergraduate students in Mexico at the university I teach at. I think if you can start thinking about these things early on, then you don’t have to suddenly wake up at fifty and say, “My God, I’m not even in charge of my own emotions. How do I—why do I react in this way?” So I think having that awareness, and then a commitment to work on yourself and make time for that, I think is important.
Leaders that I’ve seen, like John Mackey at Whole Foods, have always made time for introspection and working on their own healing—going on the Appalachian Trail, hiking for six weeks at a time sometimes, doing all kinds of other holotropic breathwork and other kinds of healing modalities. I think it’s really a duty that we have as leaders to carve out time for that. Delegate what you have to. If you work on yourself as a leader, it is not a selfish thing to do. It is the most generous thing that you can do as a leader—to be able to step out of that frenzy and to actually refresh and then work on these things.
We are living in a golden age, I believe, of trauma therapy. You’ve had a lot of guests on the podcast, and you know about this way more than I do—Gabor Maté and many others. I think there’s no reason why we should be living this way. As we say, your trauma is not your fault, but healing it is your responsibility. You cannot just go through life and say, “Well, woe is me, this happened to me, therefore I’m like this.” No. Once you recognize that that happened to you, you have a duty to actually work on it and try to heal from it, because it affects not only your happiness and well-being, but it affects your children and your family, and if you’re a leader, it affects everybody that you lead. So I think it’s a sacred obligation that we have that comes with leadership, to say, “How can I keep working on myself?” As we say, you need to become a self-cleaning oven. Okay? Constantly working on healing and cleaning up those things that are within you.
Tami Simon: As we conclude, Raj, what do you see on the horizon for conscious business? I mean, you mentioned we’re in Empire Strikes Back mode, and many people would say it’s just a dark time collectively—of chaos and lack of clarity about the new coming into being and how that’s going to happen. How do you see it specifically in terms of conscious business?
Raj Sisodia: Yes, I think we are in that backlash moment, and we are being tested on the depth of our commitment and understanding of these principles. These deeply human principles are being tested, and a lot of people are being revealed that they really actually never believed in this stuff, because when the times get tough, then people reverse course. It’s a kind of moral recession, in a way. Very few people have stood up and stood behind those principles and not given in. You can talk about Costco, you can talk about Patagonia, you can talk about a few companies that have been out there, but many others have simply bent to this tyrannical and very extreme low-consciousness phase that we’re in.
I do think that this, I believe, is a temporary phase. I believe in that statement of Martin Luther King, that the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice and toward consciousness and evolution. Our evolution has a purpose, and it’s taking us higher and higher. Now, it doesn’t go in a straight line, right? It often backs up, because there’s always a backlash that happens when you have a lot of change happening in a period of time—then there are people who resist. But ultimately, we resume that trajectory, that upward trajectory.
So I think we have to stay committed, even double down on our commitment, and we have to have the courage. This is a time for courage. It takes courage to stick by our principles. It takes personal power. There are a lot of people in this world who only have positional power. You take away their title, there’s nobody there, because all their so-called power came from that position that they were occupying.
Personal power comes from inside. Nobody can take it away. You cultivate it through your own discipline, through your own focus on your values and integrity and principles. Like Gandhi—Gandhi was the ultimate example of personal power. Gandhi was never appointed to anything, never elected to anything, never had people reporting to him, and yet he had world-changing personal power. He was five feet two and he was 90 pounds before he went on a hunger strike, and yet he could change the course of history in the world. And that’s personal power. And that’s what we need to cultivate. Every one of us has access to that. We can cultivate our personal power, and nobody can take it away from us. And so I think that is what we are called to do.
I say episode three is Return of the Jedi. They never went away. They were just in training and coming back and reestablishing our forward progress, our march. I don’t think we have a choice. This is not a luxury anymore. This is an imperative. We have to change. There’s no future on this planet for our children. Why is it that our children don’t want to have children of their own? What is that? It’s because they don’t want to bring people into the kind of world that they’re seeing has been created by the version of industrialized capitalism that we have practiced. It has given us a lot—material abundance and incredible technologies—but it has also come at a steep price, and we cannot afford that price anymore. And we don’t need to. That’s the irony. We don’t need to. We can create even more material abundance, and we can do it in a way that actually simultaneously heals and elevates all aspects of our life, including the natural world.
Tami Simon: Raj Sisodia, a beacon of possibility. Thank you so much. Author of Healing Leaders and The Healing Organization. Raj is also part of our guest faculty at the Inner MBA. It’s a six-month immersion learning program that begins on October 23rd, in collaboration with the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. You can learn more at innermba.soundstrue.com. Raj, thank you.
Raj Sisodia: Thank you. Thank you very much, Tami, and thank you for the incredible work that you’re doing and have done for all these years. Thank you.
