Conscious Capitalism

Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business

By: John Mackey, Raj Sisodia, Bill George

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 11 hrs and 14 mins

Publisher's summary

In this New York Times and Wall Street Journal best seller, Whole Foods Market cofounder John Mackey and professor and Conscious Capitalism, Inc. cofounder Raj Sisodia argue for the inherent good of both business and capitalism. Featuring some of today's best-known and most-successful companies, they illustrate how these two forces can - and do - work most powerfully to create value for all stakeholders, including customers, employees, suppliers, investors, society, and the environment.

Conscious Capitalism helps us better understand how companies such as Southwest Airlines, Costco, UPS, Panera, Patagonia, Google, The Container Store, and many others, use four specific tenets - higher purpose, stakeholder integration, conscious leadership, and conscious culture and management - to build strong businesses, advance capitalism toward its highest potential, and foster a more positive environment for all of us.

©2013 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Recorded by arrangement with Harvard Business Review Press. (P)2014 HighBridge Company

Good introduction to the idea, a bit prescriptive

Overall this is a great introduction to a new way of doing business and many great examples, however he has some false attribution of greatness and I feel he has a too-rosey views of some of the companies he mentioned.

Also, this narrator is great for older books but hard for me to listen to

changed my beliefs about capitalism and business

I learned alot about conciuos businesses and I can now choose where to spend my money based on their practises of treating their employees and customers with absolute care and respect. I already loved whole foods market, but I have a much better understanding of why they matter to me and why they matter to the world!!

Read It or Weep!

My marketing, branding, and culture work helped my clients create a combined total of $7 billion in new revenue.

They always stopped short of going the distance and heeding my admonitions to do the culture work and treat customers, staff, suppliers, sales people, and others in ways similarly outlined in this book. They just wanted the money and the success now!

Ultimately, due to their shortcuts and short sightedness, they all paid a painful price when their growth phase was cut short, their sales dropped rapidly, and their competitors gobbled the spillover.

I no longer will help a company grow that doesn't want to apply these values. I've read hundreds of books and this one is now required reading for any new client. It gives us common language and a measure of proof that the old days and ways of doing business in the 20th Century are as outdated as a rotary phone.

If you care about your business you'll read this book or weep when you lose it to others who apply the principles. Doubt it to your detriment or embrace it to your long-term success.

Just a GREAT book

Paraphrasing Obi Wan Kenobi (from the legend Star Wars) this book is an “Elegant Weapon for a More Civilized Age”. A ‘must read’ book for all state of the art Entrepreneurs

Creating a better business for a better future

loved the book! Being a new business owner this book gives great in site on how to have a more conscious business. it also made me think about all the company's I've worked for and how they could have done things different.
I recommend all business owners and anyone that has a leadership role to read this book.

A must read

If you are in business, you must read this book. I have always said that Crony Capitalism has nothing at all to do with Capitalism. I couldn’t find the words to describe what I meant by that. This book puts those feelings into precise context.

Great paradigm shift

By the end of this book you'll see business in a whole new way! Epic!

Conscious Capitalism Is The Way To Do Business

I love this book. Great concept of Conscious Capitalism. I believe it's the way to do business.

Delightfully optimistic!

I was very excited to learn that running a company that is good for all its stakeholders, employees shareholders, suppliers, the environment, the community, etc. is also correlated better stock market performance. I am excited to start running my business this way!

The Good Side of Business

Many people think the Amazon buyout of Whole Foods for $14 billion was random. Read this book and it’s clear as daylight why Bezos & co. made the deal. John Mackey is a brilliant entrepreneur and businessman, and this is his manifesto on being ‘Consciously Capitalist.’

This book is so high-level that it approaches the realm of the philosophical. It should be required reading for anyone who considers Socialism to be a noble and just system, and business to be evil. John Mackey himself seems to be an evolution of Milton Friedman and John Adams, so if you like either you won’t be disappointed.

The one star reviews most likely come from low-level people in an organization who don’t truly understand how the separate parts fit together, or the ‘Crony Capitalist’ types Mackey speaks so harshly of (namely, Wall Street & the financial sector). Mackey's methodology is hard and requires a disciplined approach — just as eating junk food and playing video games all day may feel good in the short term, but will lead to all sorts of mess, depression and health issues in the long term.

There are so many one-liners in here that are worth the price of admission. My favorites being:
“A company built on fear and stress is like a house infested with termites. It may look fine from the outside — but, it is slowly being eaten away from the inside, until one day it just collapses.”

“Profits are essential for a company to better fulfill its purpose. Creating profits provides the capital our world needs to innovate and progress. NO PROFITS = NO PROGRESS.”