The Value of Coaching and Building Evolutionary Businesses, Ft. Geoff Graber

[MUSIC] You're listening to the Evolution Podcast, where we dive deep into the leadership practices and concepts that drive startups and other highly dynamic businesses. I'm Matt Orin, co-founder and managing director of Evolution, and an executive coach that guides leaders in fast-growing companies. Join me and my team as we speak with executives and other experts about modern methods to achieve long-term sustainable success. Welcome everyone. I am here with my good friend and co-founder Jeff Graber. Jeff is co-founder of Evolution, managing partner of evolutionary ventures and has a 30-year careers in an entrepreneur executive and advisor with passion for supporting leaders of evolutionary businesses. Jeff has worked with Slack, Snapchat, Radiology Partners, Coursera, Change.org, NBA, Density, Wink, and Cliner Perkins, amongst many others. He began coaching after recognizing the critical need in companies for leadership and cultural development, as well as a belief that business has a far greater potential than just profit maximization through increased consciousness and progressive organizational design. At the time, Jeff was a member of Axel and a partner at Axel and a global coaching firm with clients that included Yahoo Google Microsoft from Facebook and received extensive training and mentoring by experts such as Fred Kaufman and Carolyn Taylor. In addition to his work as a coach, Jeff has had a long career starting and leading technology companies, the first video games company in China for electronic arts, like Yahoo Games, become the world's largest games website, and three prior companies. Jeff graduated with honors from UCLA, and East Asian studies in business, studied in Taiwan and Hawaii, as well as the California Institute for Integral Studies. He currently lives in those lievos, and is one of my best friends. Welcome, Jeff. Thanks, Matt. Like the formal introduction. So beyond your bio and all of the things that you've done, but certainly including all the things you've done, one of the first things that we always ask is tell us a little bit about your journey about how you got here, and especially noting the topic that we're going to talk about, which is evolutionary business, businesses role in the world, and what leaders and founders can do. It's a lead evolutionary businesses, but we'll get there next. Just want to hear a little bit about you, and if you just share a little bit of how you got here. Yeah, I got into coaching because I had a coach for the first time and realized how badly I needed it. Part of the journey that's really most critical that I kind of skirt around in that bio is that when I had a coach for the first time, a Yahoo, which was around 2005, I was already about 15 years into my career, and I already led businesses, started businesses, led teams, and it was such a wake-up call for me because I was just absolutely clueless about how I was as a leader. I just was a winging it. It was super unconscious, and I guess I did okay. I don't really think I did that great. I did some things well, but those were not what it took to really galvanize a team and communicate effectively and provide the right kind of feedback and ability to support other really critical things. I just really did not know how to do that. I remember actually Yahoo one time, this is quite embarrassing. You've heard the story before where I went and complained to somebody. I said, "God, just spent all my time managing up, managing across, managing town. How am I ever going to get anything done?" I was like, I was running the department. I was like, "Oh my job." But I was clueless. I thought my job was have the vision and the strategy and acquire things and make the, you know, just do stuff. And I was like, "I forgot about the people part." So having a coach for me was like absolutely a massive wake-up call, probably more than for many other people, and that's part of that. That's a big reason why I had that realization that others could also probably benefit, especially folks in Silicon Valley who kind of come up through, you know, believing in and creating businesses that are based around technology that are supposed to grow really fast, et cetera, and don't have like a more conventional background of some kind of training program, like a field school GE or something like that. And that was a, so you got a coach in the Mid-Au T'Yahu, and you know, that was a big, there's been a big kind of talent diaspora from that period, right? A lot of the folks that have become our clients and whatnot. And you worked with, you went through the conscious business workshop, right, Kaufman, but it was also a more broadly transformational time for you as well, right? And so, you know, maybe it's kind of curious about like there was internal realizations you were having that like also manifested in what seems to be external realizations. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, I usually don't talk about this, but the other internal stuff, because I think it's related just really quickly to mention is I started doing a ton of personal deeper work, therapy, men's work. I was really digging deep. I was learning about integral theory. I was getting into meditation and, you know, Fred connected a lot of those dots for me that I'd never before seen connected between like depth personally and leadership and business. And so the part that, you know, especially you're speaking to is Yahoo was, I thought a really amazing company. I joined there and it went through a massive growth and transformation during that time where I thought it really lost itself. It forgot who it was. If it never even knew. It was unconsciously running great. And then it unconsciously went way awry and it was really sad to see for all of us who were there. It was like very frustrating and most famous thing that came out of it is the peanut butter manifesto that Brad, our house, Brad Garland House wrote a raid around the same time I left. And that was, you know, that Yahoo just didn't, you know, kind of lost who it was because it was trying to be everything and anything. And then there was a related piece to that, which is that there was so much potential good that it worked real good at it and potential more good it could do. And yet there was just a disconnect between that and, you know, what was considered success. And then we go back to the individual piece of that of that wealth and the disconnect being that and happiness. And so all those pieces were coming in for me at that time. And I just thought, okay, there's got to be something more to this. It can't just be about making money over here. And then doing something good over there, right? Which we eventually saw Bill Gates kind of go do. And I'm like, no, we have to, there's an opportunity to integrate these pieces. I really believe that we can integrate this piece is that's kind of where I started feeling like I need to do something different with my life. I can't just keep doing what I was doing anymore. It wasn't working. Right. And before we move forward from that, I mean, previous you had been kind of a classic entrepreneur, right? Starting companies and raising money. Yes. We spent what seven years in China and for EA games and essentially hustling as an early stage entrepreneur over there. And you really have that operating system going into those kind of mid-Auth. Yeah. Who you're totally. I'd been an adventure capitalist. I'd seen the whole startup playbook. I raised capital. I hired people. I tried to scale businesses both internally and kind of my own. I just thought that was the way to go. You know, to me made a lot of sense. Was there any seeds of this kind of awareness around kind of yourself or business before that? I mean, were you didn't meditate at all or contemplate the role of business in the world or? Well, I did a little bit because of my work in China. You know, I was being, you know, I was one of the very early, where the first media company in China. So I was the first, you know, American running a media business on the ground in China, I believe it or not. There were folks doing aspects of some of those bigger older companies, but like actually publishing and distributing product in China and, you know, given the nature of that market during that time of piracy and nopping up the self-IP for a lot of money, which was the normal, like say, video game model, raid, make a piece of software on a disc for a dollar or something, cost of goods and sell it for 50 or 60 or something in China. Like, no, in fact, I couldn't even sell some of our games because the pirates were selling them for less than we could make them for. So I had to think, I started thinking about different models for business at that point and thinking about like, again, what the purpose was, especially, you know, having studied and, you know, lived in a country that is theoretically socialist. You know, how do you put these pieces together where you can actually get the best of all those all those worlds? So, you know, that started creeping in my head at that time. Well, what's, you know, that's a crazy time to be over there and in Hong Kong when the change over was happening, what's like one of the crazier China stories you have? I have so many. I mean, certainly there's crazy food ones about eating absolutely terrible things. Right, but I just think about like, business stories. Is that right? Yeah, or just like the culture. I mean, that was really a time when, I mean, certainly, you know, China had started to slowly open, but like that was really before it started blowing up and became, you know, what it is today. So I just imagine really being on the front lines at that time. We did all kind of, yeah, we had to do, we couldn't, we couldn't pay people in China. We didn't have a bank account. So I had to carry cash, you know, every week when I flew from Hong Kong to China to pay our people. And you know, the high, the largest note was 100 yuan, which is like, you know, well, bucks, I think at the time. So I had to, you know, we paid, we had to try to pay well. So I carried a lot of cash with me to pay people in China. read it in brief cases. Essentially, like, like a bag, yeah, I carried a bag of cash a lot of times. - International man of mystery. - I mean, basically that's what it was like. And I was involved with everything, including getting to see firsthand a lot of piracy operations, massive piracy operations, taking place right under the note, basically with the support of the government, governmental people, and then when we question it, they're like, "Hey, what are all these people "going to go do? "This is their employment." It's like, it's a good point. - Yeah, so yeah, lots of crazy stuff back then. It was really the wildest. - Wilbur talks a lot about this, right? Moving from egocentric to world-centric as a world view. And like the mechanisms that do that, and also how important that is, right? That people adopt essentially a global view of the world, right, for all the reasons, the decisions you make, and whatnot. And so I'm curious, like, how do you describe maybe some of your world view, or kind of what happened to you, which we should get into next as a part of seeing all these different perspectives over there, right? Like living abroad and being that culture. - Yeah, 100%, right? I mean, and especially China, and especially then, I mean, I was supposed to go to spend a semester abroad in 1990 when Tien and then massacre happened. So basically, the UC program was shut down for that year, and I went to Taiwan instead, and then I ended up traveling in China, and then a couple of years later moved, and again, I didn't even live in China, because the only people living in China at that time, in the early mid 90s, were like the CNN reporters, people like that, you know? - Yeah, we were followed around by the plane closed police and all the rest of those folks. And it was totally different, right? At first time I was in Shanghai in 1990, like the bun was covered and set to all the buildings along the river there. The largest department store in China, the number one department store, I had, when it may be one out of every 10 lights on, the display cases were cracked and dirty. Go there now, it's like Hujie and Prada, and everything else, and it's so flashy and fancy. There were no cars in the road, there were 100% bicycles. I mean, there's just nothing mechanical, basically maybe a bus or something. And, you know, so, trying to work and build a technology business and that market was pretty fascinating, because I was there just as, like, that stuff was coming online. People were getting computers, they were interested in gaming, I received help to open those markets up a lot, right? That's, like, kind of, you know, Intel's little secret that they didn't really want anybody know, is that they were happy, probably, I received a some degree, because it made people buy a lot more computers and because everything was available. And so, what the US world view is, it's so hard to be, like, I'm not being back in the US for like 20 years, it's so hard not to have a US-centric world view from living there. Our country's big, the opportunity, you know, it's like, it's also, we can do everything almost here. In China, like, going to China and not like Europe or some more, also more closely related to the US, definitely change my perspective on, you know, live like how to help support a more global perspective to our lives, really, because, you know, it's right in front of you, right in front of me. (mimics voice) - Yeah, yeah, no, it's great. I mean, I, I've never really thought about that part of your story being impactful and, you know, mind opening. But I think travel does that living abroad, you know, getting outside of the US and kind of the systems that have been designed and business a lot of them are rooted in a very US-centric mental model, right? And then, so, okay, so then you come back, you start some companies and then you get into that kind of Yahoo period that was broadly transformational, you were in coaching, you're doing men's work in therapy, and then after you left Yahoo, what happened? - Yeah, so I left Yahoo for a variety of reasons I won't go into, but it was, you know, clearly not the place I joined, and also my job changed a lot, which I wasn't happy about. And I had other opportunities, but I decided instead to go try one more gaming startup, (laughs) and I chose the perfect one for me to like get the absolute less than I needed to change the way I was changed my path. And that was this startup company from Israel with a bunch of venture capital behind it, and they offered me a lot to come on board and leave the company. Pretty quickly, I, we, I butted heads with the board members and investors about the strategy where things were going. And it really challenged my, you know, conflict-avoid nature because I wanted to try to make it work. I tried everything to try to make it work. I'm like, I'm gonna just do everything so it can work. I'm gonna prove to these guys that it's gonna work the way I see it. You know, and I finally kind of reached my point, I'm like, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna quit unless they change things. And then next, and there's more to it too, I'm in terms of control and stuff like that, but it was finally ready to quit and went to Jerusalem for like a board meeting, and I got fired and I put for the board meeting by two of the investors, which is kind of ambush me at the dinner. That was, so that was only three months into the job. I was, you know, they didn't want to give me my equity cliff. That was kind of the reason I had to take, gave me a huge amount of equity for this company, more than a huge amount of money. So that probably kind of forced them to move faster. Then they didn't, I had a contract for salary, they didn't want to pay me. I'd fight, anyway, I got it. It made a big difference because that gave me some runway to step back finally and really take a look at like, what I was doing with my life and how I was living in it. I mean, while I was forced, and so all these changes at once in my 30s, and that was like, okay, I am not gonna just go do the same thing again. I'm really gonna take a broader perspective and think about like what's most important to me and follow that path. And that's basically the path that eventually led me to Axialin to eventually here. - So you, and Axialin was also a really impactful experience and I remember hearing some of those stories, right? I mean, so you had this last kind of run as a kind of CEO founder, although I guess you include Scout, that was even one more. - I came back to it. - Yeah, yeah, but kind of classic thing, like raised money, like heavily backed, and you had that, I mean, it's a very archetypal kind of founder experience. And then you worked at Axialin, and I think it's like, that's, you seem like, at least from what I had heard, like a really incredible experience and kind of moment in time, right? That's I think impacted evolution a lot in a lot of ways. - Yup. - And so, you know, maybe, I'm just, I curious to talk about that a little bit, and then, you know, we can kind of maybe, you know, pivot to talking about all the evolutionary business, but I think it's so fascinating. So. - Yeah, I think one thing that pops in my head even just before the Axialin thing, 'cause it wasn't clear to me at all that Axialin and becoming a coach made sense, given what I was interested in. However, when I was sitting in Fred's workshop, which wasn't called conscious business back, then it was called courageous leadership at Yahoo. I, for whatever reason, so all my, so I had this realization, like, I could see myself doing that, what he's doing. And I was like, wait, what, why would I stand up in front of a bunch of business leaders and teach something about leadership? I was like, very surprised that that awareness had. So that happened. And then, also before Axialin, after the Israeli startup, I spent three months traveling around Europe on to see the World Cup, Croatia, and spent a lot of time in Spain. And I remember, like, distinctly, having these lightning bolts of awareness around individual responsibility, and then how that translates to organizational responsibility, and how that translates to systemic responsibility. And responsibility sounds like a strong word. But it's this idea of taking care, and it starts with the individual person, starts with me, right? That's kind of like my awareness, like, oh shit, that starts with me. I gotta do something. And then how in concentric circles, and it doesn't stop. I don't think it stops. It's not like, oh, good. Now we got our really successful company. Woo-hoo. It's like, yeah, but meanwhile, the planet's like dying, right? Or people are suffering. It's like, okay, it's not enough, clearly. So, you know, that's where I started having some awareness of like, I wanna do something to support a shift in how we all are working. And I believe technology can play a role in that, but it all has to start with the individual sense of like awareness and responsibility. And so I had those hits during that time after having been smacked like I had, getting fired from my job. And so when I came back from this trip, I talked to my former coach, Max Helens, and Albert Durg, great man, incredible guitar player as well, by the way. You should probably meet him someday, he's down in our Argentina. Anyway, and he's like, oh, you should be a coach. And I'm like, wait, what? Why? And he's like, 'cause you're gonna have a chance as a coach to get to start addressing some of these things. And I'm like, yeah, but it's one on one. And he's like, yeah, but you know, it's like you're working with leaders who have a lot of people working with them. And I thought, huh, okay, maybe. And then it was a bit of serendipity, right? That I ended up even going to Axial, and I just happened to be in Las Vegas for a birthday. They were doing a recruiting session there in Vegas in all places. And so I happened to just go, 'cause it was the same time. And I wasn't planning on staying, and I just was blown away. So I ended up joining. And the reason I did was because I was like, wow, I feel like I'm in my men's group or something else like that with a bunch of people who really care about their own weird self-awareness and consciousness and supporting others. And they're doing it with business. I'm like, wow, this is pretty remarkable. Mm. And there's a lot of great stuff being done there and great people. And there was also some real shadow that that wasn't part of their of vocabulary. I don't think to be honest to really dig into that and you know go that far. But for me, it's like it doesn't work unless you go all the way there. Gotta go into that depth and be rigorously, you know, honest. Right. There's some pieces there being put together where it's like, you know, you having awareness, you know, having opening experiences like you did going through a transformational period, having some reflections and downloads about the role of business in the world and really starting to put some macro pieces together. And then that conversation where it's like, oh, the mechanism that you can really drive a lot of that change is through coaching. Exactly. And then and seeing and understanding, you know, for yourself, the kind of inside out approach to that and then, you know, X-O is really remarkable in the sense that it was like quite large and well connected to Ken Wilbur and Peter Senge and you know, you would come back from these Samurai weeks and there'd be all of these luminary kind of type people like David Data coming and doing work and remember just kind of hearing all that about the community and the quality of coaches that you're getting and then the development experiences. And it's quite remarkable to have a system that's that large, that was that intentional about building, you know, that kind of internal awareness in the coaches and then kind of taking that out in the world quite successfully. Massive impact in Silicon Valley. I mean, I don't know if you agree, but I think like, you know, Cheryl Sandberg buying, you know, tons of axialline coaching, both at Google and Facebook, seeded a lot of coaching in Silicon Valley. Exactly. I mean, in some ways more than anything. Yeah, I think Fred, Fred in particular, had Fred Kaupen out of massive influence. It was the right kind of person for Silicon Valley at the right time. Conscious business, I think is a fantastic book. The kind of core workshops and programs that axialline delivered on the I and we dimensions, you know, it's evergreen material. I mean, it was using other Peace Bulls great stuff and combining it. Fred is an incredible storyteller and he's just gifted with his ability to just weave the work programs in with great examples and all that stuff. And I think that the timing was good because as we said, we're like, you know, there was a, I think that was the time when there was beginnings of realizations of like, you know, I love it. It happened for example. Maybe that has something to it beginning of the 21st century. There was some awareness that like, it's not quite good enough the way we're doing it right now. There's like a need for more better. We realize we don't actually know all of this stuff. We're really good on the tech stuff that we think Silicon Valley people got so good on this people stuff. And in part, it's like about efficiencies, right? Just like operating more efficiently, but it's also in part about how can we do a better job here? What we're doing. Right. We talk about I individual, we relational and it technical and personal is three parts of how to holistically approach an issue and doing a lot of individual work and relational work. And you know, this is maybe kind of a good pivot point because you left Axel and eventually found your way to a place where you wanted to coach and also start conceptualizing around different ways business could act and this kind of concept of evolutionary business. And why don't we talk a little bit about that? I think, you know, it's a, it's a part of your story and a part of evolutionary business is it's inclusive right of the individual aspects of transformation and the awakening that people have their own individual journey that is not just healing, but also takes them to understand like, how can I be a vehicle for change in the world in the system that I'm in? Exactly. Let's break down what evolutionary business is and what that concept means and also why it's important in the world today. The challenge with evolutionary business is being succinct in describing it in a way that's like really understandable, I think. What I would say is that it's a couple of things. It's a framework, a way of looking at something, a kind of a mechanism for looking at business as a force for societal benefit or care for all stakeholders including all people, depending regardless of what roles they're in related to a business or any business and the planet of course. And it's thinking actually about those first and then the business is the mechanism for supporting them so that instead of the business being a mechanism for supporting itself through maximization of profits say or maximization of return for investors, only say it's looking to figure out how to maximize its impact of service to all of the stakeholders. Including investors, we don't want to not give state investors good returns, they deserve it for risking their capital. And so it's a framework of way of looking and thinking about things and then how to how to support how to operate, lead a business like that, how to be in line, how to create one. There's a lot of room for growth in that. It's a wide open idea. It's very related to other kind of encompassing I would say as a big tent or a big umbrella for B-corp's and benefit corp's and what conscious capitalism and impact investing and ESG, they're all within this framework as well as just conscious leadership or evolutionary like leading in a more conscious and evolutionary way. They're all part of the same structure and in that way it's also basically a movement that is broad and it exists. It's been going on for a while and I think one of the reasons for having a name like evolutionary business is that I don't see yet today a other name that covers all this. They're all those other things I mentioned cover parts but they miss out on other parts I think. And that's maybe if they added more than one of those is a better name to follow. The point is is the idea of having this supportive mechanism and a community or really positively impacting all aspects of our world for business. Right and part of the issue is what you're saying is that and there's a lot of people, well it's not an issue I mean it is positive. There's a lot of people out there that are experimenting with alternative ways to do business right people are meditating people are looking at environmental impact people are looking at social responsibility people looking at training and developing people in a in a different way people are looking at the right use of whatever is left over as profit and you're talking about broad movement because there are so many examples and I'm curious you know well I mean maybe I'll just kind of say and you can react to it but when you're talking about other other examples that are like when people are describing ways of business being more progressive they leave some stuff out right because they're not broadly inclusive they say you know you should just be you know we're just going to talk about the environment or we're just going to talk about being community activist but there's not a you know an integral way of webbing all of it together that is really the holistic. Exactly that's it and and it ends up often being a split between the progressive human oriented aspects within business you know there's business a lot of clients of ours have very humanitarian aspects to them they really care about their people they give them coaching and development and they you know really create a place where that people can feel many people can feel included which is awesome and equate and an equitable environment and on the other side they're still like okay how do we maximize our profits and it's really tough to put these pieces together this is like a very challenging thing or they're focused on the structure like a holocrystery but they forget about what it's going to take for the humans who are supposed to be operating this holocrystery and how it might feel to suddenly go from one structure to another structure that's so different and you know you've got to take all these things and no account otherwise I just don't think it's sustainable that's the piece none of these to me that I've seen so far by themselves is truly self-sustaining and as broadly enough unless it's like not limited at all like the part of the problem is we have a lot of limitations in a lot of these other programs benefit corp is a good example I just talked to a founder who's creating clearly a company that has it's organized with benefit and he's like I want to be held back by that structure and it's like exactly that's the problem right now and so there's there's some real opportunity here to do a lot more than we're doing today and so that's a good one. It assumes that you know the stakeholder-based approach that is developmental is that business exists in a bunch of different stakeholder groups like communities the employees the world etc shareholders and they all need and they all have a right to be related to and optimized by that business and it's also developmental right it's not just doing something but it's doing increasingly levels of good purposefulness across all those different stakeholder groups but you know I guess the the cynical view of that is like if you take that and people listening are like you know that sounds great but I feel like the way business is structured makes it incredibly difficult to do that. It is it's incredibly difficult and yeah it's worth the effort because the incredible impact business has today on everybody's lives it's just we can't escape it people who work in business are working most of their time they're awake right people who are consumers are combining from businesses right the businesses are impacting the environments we live in I mean I can go on and on and on right and so it's like if we don't do it it were really left with nothing. And the great thing about business is it does change. It has changed. It will continue to change. It evolves. And I think the real question we have to ask ourselves, many questions, but what should be the true purpose of business? So the Keynesian view is, oh, the true purpose of business is just to increase returns for investors, because it's just a capital machine. I disagree with that. Wholeheartedly, I don't think it works. And yet, if you focus on everybody else, I do think you end up getting potentially great, like unbeatable returns. Longer story about how to get there. Another one is what's enough individually, right? So you look at a Mondragon in Spain, which is a great example of what I would consider to be an evolutionary business. It's not structured as a corporation. It's cooperative. It's the sixth largest entity in Spain. It's 80 something thousand employees there in Spain. And nobody makes a lot of money there. They have a very narrow ban between the top folks in the bottom. And it's owned by all the people who work there and who are also in their local community. And I think there's models that exist that we can learn from, but do it even on greater scale and with greater impact. And that's my interest is Zach or Bezos or Elon. The next versions of those people could be the people who can help make this happen, because they have created something that's incredibly powerful, but not just to make money. Yeah, I mean, some people are like meditating into a lot of personal development or invest in culture. But we think of Mondragon when you think of some of the examples in the book reinventing organizations, even the alocracy example and the example is Zappos that you were referencing where it was done, you know, very badly and callously. The actual, the structure and the governance of the business itself needs to have a people and planet centric orientation, right? So the Mondragon example, there's a bunch of owners. And other examples, it's a very flat organization where people are able to self-organize and manage their own work with a lot of overhead, which increases both the effectiveness and their sense of fulfillment, but then the actual governance and the board and then how resources are allocated. All those decisions need to be done consciously. And meanwhile, you have to keep the thing afloat, which is hard. That is very hard. And I think that's the opportunity, right? It's like, how do you lead a business where, first of all, you're not using your P&L or your balance sheet as the primary mechanisms for knowing whether you're doing well or not, right? You're using a scorecard that looks at all of your stakeholders and you're getting feedback from your stakeholders and actually maybe helping them help in government of the business too to give you the proper kind of support accountability that you need. But figuring out as a leader of a business like that, how to dial things up and down because not every stakeholder group is going to be equally positively impacted at any one time. It's not, I don't think it's possible. I think it's going to have to be, this one we're going to have to a little, you know, shareholder, sorry, you might wait a little longer for your return. Because we're going to be doing this a little slower over here because we don't want people to work so much. You know, we want to really take care of the people who work at the company or, hey, we're not going to cut corners so that we don't have, we don't hurt our planet. And that means things cost more. How to go in you? A perfect example of that, right? They're probably going to cost a lot more because they go to great lengths to try to not hurt the planet in the product. They're constantly trying to do it better. How to go in you? It's a pretty small company. Somebody said to us, I think when one of the workshops we did a coffin, it was like, oh, maybe company shouldn't be too big. It's like, that's an interesting thought. You know, I generally, I'm a big fan of massive scale because I see massive impact. But maybe it's impossible, as you just said, to really positively help our support everybody. Well, yeah, so I have a couple of questions here. And one is I think about what Stewart Butterfield from Slack talks about when he used to joke about, you know, all the Silicon Valley companies saying, we're going to change the world. And it's like, you know, some fintech thing or whatever, right? And his point was like, look, you'll change the world by just being who you are. Like every part in a greater whole, playing its part in the fullest sense is the point. And so I'm just curious, like, if you think of, like, if you're a communications technology, and that's your purpose, like, shouldn't you do that? rigorously and focus on that. Because if you do that, all things will line up behind that versus like a diffuse focus on all the different stakeholders. For sure in the beginning, right? If you don't have a product that people want, there's no context for anything else, right? And if you have a product that people want but is harmful, then you shouldn't do that. But if you have a product that's positive, even if it's simply allowing people to communicate, like a Zoom or something, there's positive aspects to it. It's not like the most positively impactful social venture in the world to create Slack or Zoom or something like this. However, it's certainly not bad. And it could be seen, there's some real positive aspects to it. Should you just do that and then let everybody, if somebody else take care of the community you're in, let the government and how's that working in our country these days? I would say, I say you have to once you're at a place where you can. And so as you grow, you do that. Just like as a leader, you have to scale and evolve. Same thing as a company. So as your past product market fit, you have capital, you're self-sustaining the business, you should be thinking about this as you're doing it. And ideally, before you go public, by the way, because if you're public, you're going to have way more rigorous analysis of your business. So you might build it in from the beginning. Slack gave 2% of their equity to Slack for good, which is using, they use for next chapter, for really positive things. I think that's a good example of things you can do as a company. My question would be, I don't know what the right amount to do is. That's not, to me, evolutionary business is the leader, the leader is the board. That's their job is to try to figure out what else they can do more to be of service. But they have to have the context of the business. If you forget the context of the business being the product, then it doesn't work. Right. It's almost like a star or something. There is a tree north, and everything is constellating around that. But there still is a constellation. 100%. And what I was going to say is, I remember what Stacy was talking about from the Strozi Institute, which is a place that does somatic social justice and leadership. You should have a little wins about giving money to this. So we're spending a lot of time here. We're investing in development. And probably a little, I would also say a little earlier than you think you should. Because I hear what you're saying. And I think that's the point with great size comes greater responsibility. And so with scale-- Exactly. You've got reach. Or in millions of people's lives, you've got employees and cities across the world. There is an implied social responsibility with that that you've got to use that. And I think one of the things that you were also talking about is developmentally, it's also important at earlier stages to survive. And if you don't do that, you're never going to be able to grow up and have the resources to do good with them. Exactly. And that is kind of one of the reasons to grow, isn't it? I mean, it's like-- That's to me the only reason to grow. Right. That's the reason to grow. This is the first year at Evolution that we're going to be-- we're going after being carbon neutral. And we could have never done that. We didn't have the resources to end up the time. We're big enough. And it's like one baby step. And so it flips growth on its head a little bit from just kind of worshipping the God of growth because you want to exit or because that's the thing that you do in business. But you look at growth as a way to do good. Exactly. It's Maslow's hierarchy, basically. That's a model to use where at the base level, you just need to survive. But as you grow up that pyramid or ladder, you can get to this kind of self-actualization. And then again, it goes to this quite fundamental question, like what is the fundamental purpose of business? And yes, Walmart, a lot of folks don't like them. But they're doing lots of very interesting sustainability things. They've kept their food waste down to single digits. I think 1% to all their facilities, they are using way more fuel-efficient trucks. I mean, so they don't have to do that. In fact, they don't publicize it very much because they don't think their customers care. But I think they have a responsibility to do that kind of stuff. I think that's great. I'd like to see Amazon get rid of cardboard boxes for shipping, isn't there something better? We can use it at this point. I know they're recyclable. But really, is that really the best thing we can keep going? So they should be thinking about stuff like they're enemy, of course, is Wall Street. Typically, of course, shall I? That's the biggest-- that's going to be the biggest problem is like, oh, the share price. And then they have to worry about that. And then they can't do as much because this share price is depressed. They can't acquire a business or some other thing. People focus on that. It's a big, big challenge in this area that I don't think is easily resolvable. Yeah. Certainly, if you can be a private company, stay private as long as you can, right? Makes it easier. For this reason, but that you're still missing something then in terms of the potential for impact, too. Patagonia is great, but they're tiny and they're private. And I'd like to see them do way more. The Hillary Clinton example, she's interviewing the CEOs. And they're all like, look, I want to do good in the world. I know it's the right thing to do, but I know I'll get sued by activist shareholders if I make a move like that, right? And so I've said this before, but I think this calls into question capitalism itself and the public markets and how their run is the highest order of effect. Maybe, but I think we can evolve past it. I think there's potential for evolutionary change in those markets. We saw that with what's this space? One of our stock exchange. One of our stock exchange, for example, we see that with Carta and other folks making it more possible to start trading even though in your private. It's like, so, you know, walls. Street is a big problem. Corporate, traditional, corporate, multinational, you know, conventional businesses massive problem. But that doesn't mean capitalism is necessary. Like, again, it maybe it depends on what you define capital as a man. Like, is maybe we need a different name for what I'm talking about here. Maybe, maybe we do need to start do something different and it can't work within the structure. I'm still optimistic that it could, but I think it's going to be really hard. And so maybe it's easier to find an alternative path to being able to do this and still have that kind of scale and impact that you can as a public company. So what would you say first if you were a founder, right, at maybe in a earlier stage, maybe you're just starting your company, maybe you've gotten to that level of growth where you've raised an A-round, this is called the venture capital, where you know, the buds of a real product and it's fit or starting to emerge, you know, maybe you've got 30 people, you know, or what actually, whatever perspective at an earlier stage you have, like, what should they do and what's their role other than survived? It's a great, really great question. We know from working with so many founders, it's a roller coaster for many of them. The question of whether there's, whether they are going to survive lasts quite a while, you know, often until they exit actually in some way, unfortunately, right? And so it's tough, but again, it's like, what can you do with what you've got right now, right? So, you know, it starts with you as a founder, the individual, and not just a founder, by the way, any leader, any, actually anybody in a company can have a leader take leadership in this regard of first working on themselves, knowing themselves, recognizing that helping make sure they show up in the best way possible for the people they're working with and they're impacting, thinking about the impact of the product they're working on or anything they're doing, like there's an opportunity there always. Like, so I just think of it as like a tiny circle or a dot and then little, another concentric circle and another one and another one and they just keep expanding. And the, you know, it's not linear. So sometimes maybe you expand and then you need a retrench a little bit, right? Like, oh man, we just had a bad, we're having a recession. Okay, we got a bat in the hatches down and we're going to really focus on making sure this business is sustainable because we're not in the growth cycle right now. Okay, maybe you're not going to do as much in the community then as you would have done or were doing and you have to wait for that. So you have to be very thoughtful as a leader to consider like where you are and what's possible. The key is though, do not forget about that. So get support and great accountability mechanisms for you in the business to be thinking about it. Are you doing the best you can with regards to each of your stakeholders? You're probably start with your custom, your employees or your customers. Those are the first two typically, right? That you're going to care about investors are hard to ignore. You're going to have to care about them at least somewhat giving them information and listening. But then when, where can you go from there and how far can you go with them? I or in coaching, for example, or things like this, when can you start doing that stuff that you feel like the business can sustain itself? And also, by the way, if you don't do it to your point about a little bit of pain, if you don't do it, you're not on the full potential path. You start losing potential because, and it can be things like people aren't giving each other direct feedback, by the way, right? And so, you're starting to just miss out on market opportunities. I'm not just talking about doing good. I'm talking about the whole thing working really well. And so you've got to be thinking about it. And if you're not doing it and you're starting to miss, you're missing out. You're starting to miss out on that potential you could have. So that's my broad-based guide to that. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I also think what about the piece of like, because I was thinking about the choice to go public and how harmful that can be in terms of if you don't need to do it or whatever, also just taking money from the wrong people, right? Yeah. Exactly. At an early stage, it seems disastrous, because obviously, you want to do all this good. And then you have a board that isn't aligned with that or is, you know, in your chain. So, you know, sometimes that's forgotten when we're recommending to people to meditate or whatever. Exactly. I mean, that's exactly it, right? The meditation is for a practice so that you're able to respond more completely, wholly to opportunities and challenges, right? So, for example, I need to raise money. We're about to run out of money. And here's an investor ready to write a check. And then investor, I know, doesn't share my values or my beliefs. And is doing this because all they care about is return. That is a dangerous, fubstian bargain you're about to enter your interior, right? And we see this happen a lot. And then founders end up eventually saying, you know, I'm getting out of this because I want to go do something that's more true to who I am. Not just founders, again, it all kinds of leaders in businesses. And it's okay. It happens like, this is a long journey. We're not going to solve this thing in 10, 20 years. This is a, I don't know how long, a long, long journey ahead to do this work. So it's all learning opportunities. The whole business game is a context for learning development, growth and evolution. And so, you know, it's like, don't go too hard on yourself either. Okay. So kind of maybe one last question. Then there's a million follow up, but at least and maybe in this conversation is, evolutionary business is a framework that is being tested real time about the role of business in the world that includes individual elements relational and technical and impersonal. A lot of forgotten things like your governance or where you take money from in the kind of, you know, I mean, this positively wisdom 2.0 kind of view of the world, which is people doing personal development and spirituality and business, which is really cool. Because as you said, the more grounded and awake you are, the more deliberate you are in your decision making clearly. And if you're a founder at any stage, you have enormous power to affect all of those stakeholders. And, you know, at earlier stages, you said it's really customers may be an employees and of course shareholders. But what if you're not a founder? Like what if you're an executive in a company and you believe in these concepts? Like you want business to be a transformational force in the world and you want to support this broad base movement? What do you do if you're a vice president and a large technology company? I mean, it depends on how large, right? The battle might be larger, the bigger it is and the less, the more conventional the company is that you're in. However, I actually think there are some opportunities for non-founder leaders of businesses like VPs, as you say, to impact, to like effect change potentially more easily than the founder who feels extremely responsible for this thing, not failing and is just constantly being like has to hold that between the board and investors on the one hand and all of the employees and this customers and you you're you're the head of whatever engineering or marketing, it doesn't matter what your role is HR. And you see opportunities to do things that are going to positively impact other stakeholder groups in different ways. This is that you have a great opportunities to do this. You don't have to change everything at once. In fact, you know, Davidus story that you can tell better than I can is a great one about, you know, Yoda's work, fixing, improving one thing at a time, right? One thing at a time is really what it's about. So find that one thing and go lead an effort on that and get people to follow you and then go lead the next thing on it. And I actually think that is there's something that's actually probably a better, more easy path than this one about this. You know, I'm dreaming of the next talk being like incredibly conscious and wanting to do good in the world. And you know, that's that's that's more like one and a billion or trillion. This other path is actually more realistic for people who, you know, and if you are a founder by the way, you can do the same kind of thing. Also, you know, try to just do one thing. You don't have to do everything at the beginning. Right? Just one thing at a time and sort of taking it a little easier. So that's what I would recommend. Yeah, the example that you were referencing was when Doug Bell check known as Yoda and the early days of the Vita and the turnaround in 2000s, essentially a broken healthcare company. And his early work was running like thousands of CQI projects just doing process improvement. That was it. And it was like very efficiency and quality based. But what that did is it kind of started up build into a pretty radical focus on culture and personal development. And he talks about his change like having these moments where he's like, huh, maybe we should do some like really intensive management training. And he started to care as much about the people as he did the patients. He mates as the patients and just his journey over the arc of that company. I think as an example of like a vice president doing one thing that led to another that led to another in some ways big companies are an incredible platform. And I think what you said is like, just got to do your work to not lose heart, right? Because all of us are just change agents, whether it's in a community or the government or a big company. And we face resistance and inefficiencies and dull people and all those things. And it's like don't lose heart. And how do you stay close and clip into your own fire? Exactly. Be powerful. Not powerless. Right? This is like the ultimate opportunity to do that. It's constant thing for people facing these opportunities. These challenges is like, uh, it's so terrible. They go, okay, do something about it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's great. I really appreciate it. And I think you know, there's a lot more conversation here. I mean, each stakeholder group that we talked about would be an interesting conversation to talk about, right? And just take the social one. The business is role as a social advocate and social change. Exactly. What's the responsibility of a business in employee development and developing them as humans, right? And so maybe what we can do is just kind of tee that up and have a bunch of those conversations and just like pull that apart a little bit too. But I think this is a great start. Maybe we'll have a buck written by the end of the talk. Yeah, exactly. Oh, yeah, great. It's just a great story that you have and how it all fits together. So thanks and uh, talk to you on the next one. (upbeat music)