Integral Investing
From Profit to Prosperity
Dear friends,
Did you know that according to a recent study (1), one in two founders considers value-add more important than a VC’s money or brand? Of the 500+ researched VCs, 92% considered themselves value-add investors, but only 39% of founders thought they received any value add from their VC.
There is a huge gap between perception and reality when it comes to the necessary mentoring and emotional support the founders need to grow their business vs. the actual value they truly receive from their funders. In other words, providing value and receiving value must be appropriately customized in order to be successful to fulfill the goals of financial capital.
But what exactly is value?
Who decides what value is? Me? You? Warren Buffett and his Value Investing? What about Shariah Investing?
Obviously, we associate value with what we value personally but also with what is valued in our own culture and social environment, including ethics and morals.
As we awaken to the importance of values, we see not only how the success of our business depends on them but also our future.
Money Speaks
The financial information tends to be a good way to convince people empirically of the value investing approach, AKA conscious capitalism. Research shows that corporations with a culture based on sustainability and higher ethical values have also performed well financially—on average, eight times better than S&P 500 companies (2).
The Conscious Capitalism movement, started in 2005 by John Mackey, who founded U.S. food retailer Whole Foods, is one manifestation of this trend (3). Under the leadership of Mackey, Whole Foods had a 40 percent higher ROI than other types of organizations over a period of 10 years (4).
The shareholder value for investors in Whole Foods, which was sold to Amazon in 2017 for US$ 13.7 billion (5), grew between 1995 and 2006 to more than 1800%.
What are the value characteristics of a conscious capitalist company?
Companies such as Whole Foods, Stoneyfield Farms, REI, or Puma are financially successful also because, according to research (4), they cultivate values such as trust, integrity, transparency, caring, passion, and fun in addition to love, interdependence, loyalty, and the feeling of oneness.
More importantly, these companies are led by conscious leaders such as Whole Foods founder and self-identified integral thinker, John Mackey.
This is why it is with great pleasure that I present to you in today’s podcast episode Carter Phipps.
Together with Whole Foods founder John Mackey, and Steve McIntosh, Carter is the co-author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Conscious Leadership.
Carter Phipps is an integral thinker, a visionary writer, a business futurist, and evolutionary. He is the author of the book Evolutionaries: Unlocking the Spiritual and Cultural Potential of Science’s Greatest Idea and co-founder of the Institute for Cultural Evolution.
Conscious Leadership and the Mindshift
In this week’s podcast episode, Carter reveals the leadership characteristics of a conscious capitalist such as Whole Foods founder John Mackey and provides a roadmap for what it means to be a value-based entrepreneur and a business innovator that contributes to the great mindshift.Carter Phipps challenges conventional business practices to rethink outdated standards and shows what it means to embark on a life-long personal growth journey that leads to self-actualization, outgrowing one shadows, and living a life of purpose.
Enjoy the show and share it widely!
Warmly, Mariana
Podcast: Interview
Conscious Leadership and then What?
Mariana Bozesan interviews Carter Phipps, co-author of the bestselling “Conscious Leadership”.
As usual we make this interview available as a podcast audio edition and a video version. Click on the screen shot to watch the video on YouTube, or use your favorite podcast player (Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud) for the audio-only version.
Please like it (thumbs up!), subscribe and share widely, so we can reach more people! On your podcast player, please subscribe and rate 5 stars!
The Book
Integral Investing:
From Profit to Prosperity
Today, early-stage investors and entrepreneurs find themselves in a dilemma in which they must choose between profit and impact; between traditional, for-profit-only models on the one hand, and multiple-bottom-line structures with a positive social or environmental impact on the other. At a time in which climate change, exponentially growing technologies, social polarization, and looming pandemics are calling into question humanity’s priorities, this Report to the Club of Rome and the World Academy of Art and Science dissolves this dilemma by proposing a new investment paradigm, namely Integral Investing. Read more…
By Dr. Mariana Bozesan, with a foreword by Ken Wilber; published by Springer 2020.
Blogs and Articles
- Who is the Next AI Superpower? Blog
- Mindshift as a Trend. Blog
- 2018 Worldwide CO2 Emissions (variwide chart). An annual data visualization project. Blog with diagram.
- Scaling and Derisking with Human-centered AI. Article in CADMUS Vol. 4 Issue 2. Blog. In CADMUS.
Videos
Please subscribe to our YouTube channel, and give it a thumbs up! This is only a selection of the recent episodes:
- Interview with Carter Phipps: Conscious Leadership and then What? on YouTube
- Interview with Tess Mateo: Women Hold Half the Sky, but Not the Wealth, on YouTube
- Interview with Anders Wijkman: Rethinking Economics, Education and Science, on Youtube
Upcoming Appearances
- May 19-23, 2021: Integral European Conference; IEC 2021 Online; info and registration here
- May 25, 2021: Celebrating 60 Years of Moonshot Thinking; by futur/io Institute; more information and registration here
In the News
- ZDF Aspekte, 1/21/21, German public TV network; whole episode available in their online archive ZDF Mediathek, or in the 5 minute segment here (in German)
- Brand eins /thema, 8. Jg., Heft 18, Jan-März 2021, here (in German, behind a paywall)
- We provide a summary of interview questions and answers here (in German)
Get in touch and follow us
This conversation requires the participation of passionate investors committed to growth, learning and cooperation. We invite you to join it through LinkedIn as well as follow the real-time social media conversations about critical choices to be made now on our Twitter, YouTube and SoundCloud channels.
Upcoming
Integral Investing Global Community
Later this year we will launch our most exciting project yet: The Integral Investing Global Community. This is a professionals’ network of peers passionate about integral investing, committed to personal and career growth, striving for professional excellence in making the right investment decisions, putting more capital to work at addressing the UN SDG within Planetary Boundaries, and eager to cooperate on a global level.
Please sign up for the waitlist, and let us know if you like to contribute in any way.
About Integral Investing
Integral Investing is our methodology of early stage investing, based on 25+ years experience in Munich and Palo Alto as entrepreneurs-turned-investors. It embraces and leads beyond ESG, CSR and impact investing. We are committed to address the Global Grand Challeges as defined by the UN SDG within Planetary Boundaries, fully aware of and utilizing exponential technologies, e.g. artificial intelligence. Our model is based on Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory and acknowledges fully that investing is a means of self-actualizing, and is most successful when practiced by teams of integrally aware professionals, investing in projects lead by fully developed founders and teams.
References:
1) https://tinyurl.com/rse3drs3
2) Bozesan, M. (2020). Integral Investing: From Profit to Prosperity, p.126. Springer
3) https://www.consciouscapitalism.org/
4) Sisodia R, Sheth J, Wolfe DB (2007). Firms of endearment: How world-class companies profit from passion and purpose. Wharton School, Upper Saddle River, NJ
5) https://tinyurl.com/ya3k2j27