Raj Sisodia: How Conscious Capitalism Brings Love into Business

Companies built on love outperform the S&P 500 by 14 to 1. Conscious capitalism, stakeholder leadership, healing organizations — Raj Sisodia proved it with data, then spent a year in the Himalayas and the Amazon proving it on himself.

Raj Sisodia, Co-Founder of the Conscious Capitalism movement and author of sixteen books including Firms of Endearment and The Healing Organization, grew up across four countries and eight schools before the age of 18. He trained as an electrical engineer in India because that was what you did if you were good at math. He stumbled into a PhD at Columbia almost by accident — following seven friends to pick up a GMAT application and ending up the only one who made it to New York. From there, he built a body of research that fundamentally challenged Milton Friedman's doctrine that the only business of business is profit. Then, at 60, he turned that same rigour inward: pilgrimages to the high Himalayas, silent retreats with Peter Senge, and the painful reckoning with a father who once pointed a gun at him.

This conversation runs close to what I have lived. When I watched Satya Nadella introduce "model, coach, care" at Microsoft — a framework Raj references directly — I saw firsthand what happens when a leader chooses purpose over power. And Raj's conviction that business must actively heal what it has broken echoes what drove me to create Live for Good: the belief that the organizations we build should leave people stronger, not depleted.

In our conversation, we explore:
 → Why companies that spend 95% less on marketing than competitors have the highest customer loyalty — and what that reveals about extraction-based capitalism
 → The four pillars of Conscious Capitalism — higher purpose, stakeholder integration, conscious leadership, conscious culture — and the specific acronyms (HEALING, SPICY, SELFLESS) Raj uses to make them actionable
 → The Bob Chapman story: how one CEO refused to lay off a single employee during the 2008 crisis by asking "What would a family do?" — and emerged stronger than every competitor
 → His year of conscious awakening at 60 — pilgrimages, silent retreats, ayahuasca in the Amazon — and what four women forced him to confront about his own unhealed trauma
 → What conscious capitalism demands of AI: the marriage of humanity's most important idea with its most powerful technology — and why the market will ultimately correct for unconscious companies

🔑 Key Themes: Conscious Capitalism, Stakeholder Leadership, Purpose-Driven Business, Healing Organizations, Personal Transformation, AI Ethics, Positive Leadership

🎧 Related Episodes:

•  Paul Polman (ex-CEO Unilever) — Becoming a Courageous Leader: how Polman proved companies can grow while addressing environmental and social challenges
• Vincent Stanley (Director of Philosophy, Patagonia) — Leading with Purpose: why purpose-led constraints drive innovation and stakeholder alignment 
• Dr. Martin Seligman (Founding Father of Positive Psychology) — Paving the Way to Positivity: the science of flourishing that underpins conscious leadership
• John Elikngkton : Rethinking Capitalism: A Conversation with the Godfather of Sustainability

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Transcript

Raj Sisodia: How conscious capitalism brings love into business

Host: Jean-Philippe Courtois 

Guest: Raj Sisodia, co-founder of Conscious Capitalism, author of 16 books including Firms of Endearment and The Healing Organization

JP: Hello and welcome to the Positive Leadership Podcast, the podcast that helps you grow as individual, as a leader, and ultimately as a global citizen. I'm Jean-Philippe Courtois, your host, JP. Today I have the privilege of welcoming a man who may have done more than anyone else alive to reshape what we believe business is for. He was born in India. He trained as an engineer. He came to the US with a vision. And over the past few decades, He has quietly and persistently changed the conversation about capitalism, leadership, and what it means for a business to truly succeed. He's the co-founder of the conscious capitalism movement, a philosophy built on a radical premise that the most profitable companies of the future will not be those that extract the most value from the world, but those that contribute the most to it. But what makes today's conversation, I think, extraordinary is not just his body of work, It is a personal journey beneath it because this man, I'm going to introduce you in 30 seconds now, has not just written about healing organizations, he has spent years healing himself. He's the author of 16 books, over a thousand talks on six continents. I think including one at the White House and the Vatican is described as an intellectual shaman, Raj Sisodia, a very warm welcome to Positive Leadership Podcast.

Raj Sisodia: Thank you very much, JP. It's a delight to be with you.

JP: So I like to start, Raj, with the very beginning always with my guess. As I said, you were born in India and spent, I think, part of early life in Barbados, California, in Canada, moving abroad between the ages of 7 to 12 before returning to India. So my first question is, as you went through so many cultures growing up, were you ever trollied at home anywhere, by the way? And when did that happen? constant reinvention of yourself as a child shaping you.

Raj Sisodia: Yeah, that's a very perceptive question, JP, because I was in India until the age of seven, as you said. And my father had gone away to Canada to get his PhD in agriculture science, plant science. And I was literally living in like in a small village in the middle of India, in a very traditional sort of warrior caste feudal family. oceans apart, literally and figuratively from the West. And my father came back and then he got a job in Barbados working on sugarcane research. So suddenly I'm airlifted from essentially, you know, like being in the 19th century to all the way in London. We were watching the changing of the guard and then we arrived in Barbados, which is, as we know, this lovely island in the Caribbean. And we lived there for two years. And then two years, my father got a job in California working on wheat research. So we moved there in some very tumultuous times, 67 to 69. You know, these were the years of the peace movement, the Vietnam War, civil rights, Martin Luther King getting killed, Robert F. Kennedy getting killed, man landing on the moon. You know, I was able to witness all of these things while I was out here in the West. And then a year in Canada, and then my parents decided that we should go back to India because it was like living on another planet almost because there was very little communication. You couldn't go back and forth very easily. And we were growing up completely. disconnected from our roots and our culture. So we went back and I had to readjust. So what that did for me is created this, first of all, an adaptable ability to adapt to my circumstances quickly. Because by the time I finished high school, I had been in eight schools in four countries. But it also gave me a lens that was simultaneously as an outsider and then an insider. So when we left India, I was kind of coming to the West with Indian eyes and seeing everything. reacted that way, but then after five years, I had become quite inculturated in the West. And to the extent of even forgetting our language to a large extent. And then went back to India. Now I'm looking at India, especially my culture within that conservative Rajput warrior caste culture, kind of with American eyes or outsider eyes. And therefore I could see things that my cousins and uncles and all were immersed in. They couldn't see some of the many ways in which that was a very abusive and exploitative system that they were part of. And then finally, when I came back to the US in 1981 at the age of 23 to get a PhD in marketing at Columbia, again, I came with that external perspective. I had some degree of connection back from my childhood, but still I was looking at it now from an outsider objective lens. So I think that has been one of the gifts and challenges of my life, as you asked about feeling at home. At one level, I feel at home everywhere. At another level, I'm not completely at home anywhere, you know, because of all of that change. I've kind of been an immigrant three times over, first to the West and then back. I was an immigrant in India, then I was an immigrant back here. So it does give me, as you have talked about yourself, kind of that global citizen perspective. You you see that people are similar everywhere, that the values are aligned at a deeper level, ultimately what we all want, et cetera. So I can see the commonalities.

JP: You Yeah. Hmm. Yeah.

Raj Sisodia: now more than I focus on the differences.

JP: And is there, if I follow up on this very interesting start Raj, is there a place you call home today?

Raj Sisodia: Well, I mean, we are in the process of moving, so we don't even have a home right now. We are living with friends in California. I have my home base in India, know, my ancestral home, which has been there for hundreds of years in our family. But again, I'm not fully rooted there anymore. So yeah, right now I would say I don't have a particular place that I would call home. And therefore I think we have to find home inside ourselves. You kind of come home to yourself. So wherever you go, there you are. I to cultivate that, sense of being myself, being comfortable in my own skin, regardless of where I am.

JP: Yes. So you don't need a physical place. You have to be with you, within yourself to feel home actually.

Raj Sisodia: Yeah, I you want a physical place too, of course we need that, but I think ultimately wherever you go there you are, right? So you could be the most beautiful place in the world, but if you're not comfortable here internally, then you're really not at home.

JP: So let's continue about your kind of again early days and and training as well. You trained first I think as an electrical engineer at BITS, one of India's most prestigious technical universities. Then you had an MBA in marketing in mobile and a PhD from Columbia University, which is a remarkable pivot, by the way, from engineering to marketing to becoming one of the world's most influential business philosophers today. Where did that evolution come from, engineer to marketing? And was there a moment when you realized that actually numbers and secrets were not enough for you and that you were searching for something deeper?

Raj Sisodia: Yeah, well, I became an engineer in the 70s in India because that's what you did, right? India was, as many people know, a closed economy. It was kind of a socialist democracy. The government controlled the economy. The government produced so many of the products that we bought. So there was a huge public sector and then there was a hugely regulated and constricted private sector. So the economic opportunities were very few. India's economic growth rate was one or 2%. The marginal income tax rate the year I graduated high school was 97.5 % or something like that. And the economy was very, very constricted. So if you wanted to buy a car, there were only two models available. And they were like 30-year-old European models. If you wanted to buy, and most people couldn't afford that, so they had to do without or drive a scooter. But if you wanted a scooter, there were two models available. There were Italian models, Vespa and Lambretta. But there was a seven-year waiting list. to get one of those. Or you buy it in the black market. If you wanted a telephone, only one or 2 % of people had phones, but the government ran the phone company and there was a 14-year wait list to get a telephone. So that's just a sense of the stagnation. And therefore, your purpose in life was to figure out how to survive and get a job. And therefore, if you were good in math and science, coming out of high school, you automatically went towards engineering. If you were good in biology and science, then you tried to become a doctor. And if you weren't good in either of those, then God help you, you get a Bachelor of Arts and figure something out. Maybe get a government job, which was a prestigious thing at that time in India. And so being good in math and science, I ended up in engineering. Now, was that my passion? Not really. I used to love to write even as a young child, as a teenager. And my heroes were journalists, the people I looked up to the most in the world, journalists in the US like Woodward and Bernstein. and in India as well, as India went through a lot of political turmoil in the 70s with the emergency and so forth. There were many heroic figures in that world. But it wasn't seen as a viable option. And therefore I became an engineer, spent five grueling years in that very tough academic environment and had a job in Mumbai as an engineer. And then I had heard that there's a thing called MBA, that if you get an MBA, by the way, my salary was 800 rupees a month as an engineer. for a company called Larsen and Tuberon. The exchange rate at that time, that was about $150 per month. And I had heard that if you get an MBA, that your salary will be double of what an engineer gets. And you'll probably work in an air-conditioned office. So being in Bombay, the heat and humidity, that sounded pretty good to me. After one month in the factory, said, let me apply. So I got into one of the, again, it very hard in India.

JP: on here. Wow.

Raj Sisodia: institutions and the competition, the numbers are extraordinary. Literally, you have to be one in hundreds to be able to make it through those things. So I got into one of the business schools. And why marketing? Because I didn't like finance. That's all I knew. Those are the two big things, know, finance didn't appeal to me. So I said marketing at least seems more interesting. So fast forward two years, and I get that MBA. I'm almost I'm in my last semester, and I had a job lined up with a consulting firm.

JP: Yeah. Yeah, of course. Yes.

Raj Sisodia: at two and a half times my salary as an engineer. So that part worked out. But then I came down for breakfast one day in our graduate dorm in Mumbai and I see seven of my friends are dressed up and going somewhere. I said, where are you guys going? So we're going to the US information agency to get GMAT applications, the Graduate Management and Admission Test. I said, why do you need that? We already are doing our MBA. They said, no, we want to apply for a PhD in business. I said, I didn't know you can do a PhD in business.

JP: Yeah. huh, yes.

Raj Sisodia: Give me a few minutes. I'll change my out of my pajamas and I'll come with you and So the irony is that of that group of eight of us I'm the only one who ended up coming to the US to get a PhD You know, so suddenly my life took a right turn and a few months later I'm standing in Times Square in New York City saying what the hell happened My life took a direction but I think for me it was I had very positive Memories of being in the US and California and you know growing up in those years

JP: Yeah? Really? Yes.

Raj Sisodia: And I thought it would be lovely to go back, but I didn't know how. We certainly could not afford to pay the tuitions of American universities, but here was a fully funded 100 % scholarship from Columbia and Michigan, et cetera. I ended up coming to Columbia. So I kind of became accidentally, I would say, business and marketing professor. Because I was opportunistic, and I just took something that was a door opened, and I walked through it.

JP: Yeah. Yeah, maybe you said that marketing was about telling stories, right? Like a writer in a journal.

Raj Sisodia: Yeah, maybe there was some thinking like it certainly was interesting at one level. But then as I started to get immersed into it and I saw the consequences of marketing infused culture like the US was so 1981 in the US. This was the beginning of the Reagan years. This was the beginning of what's called the decade of greed by some. This was the movie Wall Street. Remember the famous speech greed is good. Greed makes the world go around, etc. So it was kind of. the go-go years for capitalism in a way. Jack Welch had just become CEO of General Electric, Very much focused on shareholder value and all of that. So there was kind of a marketing mania here, the amount of money. And then I looked at, my God, I came from a country where literally there was one television station which ran ads for 15 minutes per day. And they were all concentrated in one block of time. So you didn't have to watch them.

JP: yeah. That's it.

Raj Sisodia: And then I come to New York City and I'm like in a tsunami of ads and coupons and junk mail and you know, everything is like screaming at you. And after a while I said, my God, how much is this? How much are we spending and what are we getting for this? And that question would define my career for the first 15, 20 years, you know? What is

JP: Yeah. So if I may interrupt you Raj on this particular food, were you actually excited about the kind of craziness in the US, were you inspired or were you actually shocked in a way given your roots and where you came from and what you had in yourself maybe at the time?

Raj Sisodia: Yeah. Well, it was exciting in the sense of the dynamism was palpable. Now, of course, New York City in the 80s was in a challenging place with a lot of crime and so forth. But it was still, compared to India, it was just like a very, very dynamic environment. But as I started to absorb the business philosophy that was behind all of this, which was all about share of the value, profit maximization, that had really become now the dominant theme. If you go back to the 50s and 60s, it was a little more holistic. Companies were more stakeholder-oriented. they were rooted in their communities. There was a broader sense of what business is about. But starting in the 70s and accelerating into the 80s, it really became business is only about one thing. And that's what we were teaching and we were being taught in business school, shareholder value, profit maximization, and all the theories, agency theory and Porter's work and transaction cost analysis and Milton Friedman and all of that was basically creating this picture. Business is only about this one thing and it's just our job is to maximize. I was asking questions about is it good for people? What's it doing to their well-being, their health? All this aggressive marketing of so many products, junk foods and sugary cereals to children and using women's bodies to sell products. I started to look at the consequences of marketing on people, on society, on companies and I started to find that a lot of it was quite negative. One thing that I found and you know as a marketing professor, what is the image of marketing? I did a big study, 2000 interviews, and I confirmed what I suspected, which is that most people do not trust marketing. They say things like if it's marketing, it's not true. That's just marketing. That's not real, right? Now as a professor of marketing that kind of creates and my father being a scientist and professor of genetics, he would say to people my son is a professor of marketing holding up his fingers like this.

JP: Yeah. Uh-huh. So, does he mean he was not proud of you as a marketing guru?

Raj Sisodia: and He was a little amused, like what is marketing to him? was these ads and the silly stuff, you know? These people who show up at your door trying to sell you something. That was starting to happen in India in the 90s. And so I had this almost a sense of shame. I said, I'm not in a profession that is inherently self-justifying. You can't say the world will be better off if you just had more marketers in it, you know? I mean, certainly we need more engineers. We need doctors and we need engineers. We need many things. that may do make the world better, but it's hard to see that because of the vast majority of the practices gained. It's aimed at manipulating people and getting them to do things that are good for the company may not be good for them. So my focus of my research became marketing productivity, efficiency, effectiveness, and ethics. How much are we spending? What are we getting? And the picture was pretty bleak. When I did that analysis in 2004, we estimated $1 trillion a year. on ads, coupons, and junk mail in the US, which was more than the GDP of India. I said, a billion people are living on $700 billion a year. The US, we're spending so much. What are we getting for that? Are customers happier, healthier? No, they're not. They're cynical, disconnected, and they're disloyal. Customer loyalty and trust were falling rapidly, even as spending was increasing. I said, there's something wrong here. There's a marketing mania, and we're doing less with more when everybody else is trying to do more with less.

JP: was, yeah, wow. Yes. Something I'd like to come back to, or to start talking about Raj, although we'll discuss that even further in this podcast, is the relationship with your family during that time, right? Because as you went back and forth with your dad and your mom and maybe some siblings around the world, how did that relationship evolve over the years? At least in the first 20, 23 years, right, of your students as a student as well, how did it go, actually?

Raj Sisodia: Well, I there's a whole other dimension to that. I left home before I was 16, because I went to college, and I never lived at home after that. And I had a little bit of a distant relationship with my father, first of all, because I didn't know him until I was seven years old. Now, imagine I'm assuming you have children, right? And imagine not knowing your child until they're seven, right? I mean, that's a pretty late age to essentially be meeting someone. So between us, there was that distance. And secondly, I was in many ways the opposite of him, just in terms of my nature, my persona, my being. I was much more like my mother. And he was much more from that warrior caste, aggressive, hyper patriarchal, masculine, dominating kind of energy. So he saw in me this kid who was the opposite. He said, you're too trusting. You shouldn't trust anybody. You're too idealistic. I really was very idealistic. And I still am to some degree. He said, no, you can't be idealistic. have to be pragmatic in this world. I was very peace loving and harmony seeking. I never had a fight with anybody. With my siblings, I still haven't had a fight in 67 years. And he said, you need to be rough and tough. And I was good in school. And he said, that doesn't matter. You need to be street smart. So the message that I got was that everything about me, in a way, was defective by his way of looking at it. And for many years, know, I have a book, my recent book, I talk about knowing yourself, loving yourself, being yourself, et cetera. For me, that was a big challenge because the more I came to know myself through his eyes, you know, to see myself reflected in him, and it was not a pretty picture from his perspective and everything about me was defective. So I kind of had this distance. And for many years, I was trying to impress him, to feel worthy of him. Maybe I got a PhD because he got a PhD, you know. I'm trying to live up to it because he was like a larger than life figure, you know. And so I had a difficult relationship and a somewhat distant one. And he was a little surprised that I was doing OK, you that I got this scholarship at Columbia. it's like, oh, but then, you know, a completely different dimension when I I was when I started teaching and I wanted to marry somebody that I met here in the US, somebody who came from our part of the world, from Nepal, which is adjacent to India, similar culture in many ways.

JP: Of course. Yeah. Yes.

Raj Sisodia: He completely refused to accept that. And he said, you must choose between her or us. If you marry this girl, you're dead to me. I curse your marriage. And so that began a whole chapter of my life where I had to essentially stand up to him and stand up for myself and say, you don't get to dictate my life, you know. And he was doing it because he believed in the caste system and he wanted somebody from our community. I know he wanted to be part of the arranged marriage kind of thing. And I said, know, so anyway, that led to an estrangement between us for five years. I even talked to him. You know, he did many things to try to get me to not marry her, threatening to kill himself and all kinds of stuff. So these are some of the traumas in my life. It has taken me a long time.

JP: Yes, yeah, yeah. Not for me. Yeah. Wow. Wow, wow. Okay. I will come back to that because yes, because I know you've been writing a wonderful book about that. Actually, we'll come back to that. Let's come back again to the chronology. you don't mind, I think in the early 2000s, you set out to study companies loved by everyone they touch, customers, employees, suppliers, investors, communities. You call them firms of endearment and what you found turned conventional wisdom on its head. Actually, these companies were not trading profit for purpose. They were outperforming the S &P 500 by 14 to 1 over 15 years, which is pretty amazing number. And this actually resonates deeply with me in a conversation I had with John Elkington that you may know, who is the godfather of the triple bottom line, people, profit and planet. And I had a wonderful discussion with John as well a few months back. In a way, I think your research gave that framework the most powerful empirical proof.

Raj Sisodia: yeah, yes I know.

JP: So can you take us back to that research? What surprised you most when the data came in? And why do you believe love is not a soft concept, but actually the most precise strategy force that you found?

Raj Sisodia: Yeah, so that book was a turning point in my life. I was a frustrated, unhappy, unfulfilled, unpurposed. I didn't have a sense of purpose. I almost had a sense of shame about being a marketing professor. And I was, after doing 10 years of academic research, documenting all the ways in which marketing is inefficient, ineffective, and ethical, right? With lots of data and surveys and all those things, academic work, and a book called Does Marketing Need Reform? That we published in 2004. Then I finally turned my attention to the other side of that. And I said, is there a better way? How do we improve this? OK, we said it's not working. I think we have a duty. My mentor said, Raj, people want to know the solution, not just the problem. So let's think about the solution. So I said, OK, is there a better way? And I think that's a very important question for any domain. If you ask, is there a better way, the answer is always yes in any domain. It doesn't matter how good it is today. It can always be better. There is no limit to human ingenuity and our capacity to improve things. so asking, is there a better way to think about marketing and by extension business? That not just maximizing market share and selling as much as we can, et cetera, et cetera. And that query led me to a very simple filter that I applied. So my research had shown that generally speaking, companies are spending a huge amount of money on marketing and yet customer loyalty and trust are falling. That's at an aggregate level. Right? And what is the opposite of that? Are there companies that are not spending a lot and yet they have outstanding customer loyalty and trust? Right? So it started as a narrow project called In Search of Marketing Excellence. As a working title playing off of In Search of Excellence, the classic book by Peters and Wademan. And so with that lens, I found initially about six companies which had very, very low spending on marketing and very, very high level of customer. interest. Whole Foods was one of them. Whole Foods Market, the biggest natural and organic grocery retailer, was spending 95 % less on marketing compared to its industry peers. They didn't have a chief marketing officer. They did not have an ad agency. So the small amount of money that they did allocate was spent at the store level, not at headquarters. Most of it had to do with community relationships and outreach. But they did look after the wellbeing of their customers. Their customers trusted them. They believed that Whole Foods would guide them in the right way. So they had very, very high customer loyalty and trust. So I started to look initially at a narrow way that just how do these companies manage their marketing function? And when I found that anyone have a marketing function in a way, I started to look at, okay, what else is happening here? And I found that these companies not only were the customers loyal and trusting, but so were the employees. Employees loved.

JP: There are people as well.

Raj Sisodia: Yeah, they love going to work. And suppliers were loyal to them. had long-term partnerships with suppliers. Communities welcomed and embraced them. People would camp out in the parking lot overnight when a Trader Joe is opening up or when IKEA is opening up or when a Costco is opening up. People would anticipate those kinds of things. And so I found that they were embedded in a system of relationships where there was a mutual caring between the company and all of its stakeholders. And then I said, what makes that happen? What is the secret sauce here? And I found the principles, there's a higher purpose. There's a reason why these companies exist. That they are not just a business with a mission, they're in some ways a mission with a business. They're trying to bring about something positive and beautiful in the world and using a business as a way to do that. So they have a deep commitment to a purpose and they have some core values that they adhere to that are strongly felt in their culture. And that this is what attracts the right employees. who resonate with that purpose and align with those values. It's what attracts the right customers, it attracts the right investors, et cetera. So that purpose becomes kind of that magnet and aligning mechanism for all of your stakeholders. And then you have leaders who are not just hired hands going from industry to industry. These are people who actually believe in the purpose of that enterprise. So their personal purpose is aligned with the purpose of the organization.

JP: Mm. Yeah. Organizations, help us here.

Raj Sisodia: All the executives at Whole Foods are foodies who really are passionate about health. They're kind of almost a requirement to be a leader there. So they're not so much motivated by just power and money, which is kind of what we assume is what people are motivated by. And therefore, we use power and money as a way to attract people into those roles. And when you use power and money to attract people, you get people who only care about power and money. But when you have a broader lens, then you get people who are truly passionate. They are more missionary leaders, not just I would say mercenary leaders. And then the culture, the cultures are one where people feel cared for, they are excited about going to work, there's a lot of joy and playfulness in those environments. So those, we discovered the four pillars of conscious capitalism through that.

JP: I will come back to those pillars, but it must have been very controversial at the time, Raj, because we all remember Milton Friedman mantra, right, which is the one and only social sensibility of business is to increase its profits. That's it. And that sentence became actually the operating system of capitalism for decades. And you can still argue today, by the way. And your data and research changed that. What does a firm of endearment actually feel like from the inside? You share some of that, but as an employee or as a customer, and what are the daily behaviors, maybe you studied, you witnessed, and the cultural signals that you've seen of such companies that are so distinctive?

Raj Sisodia: Yeah, so I think there's kind of a family feeling there that everybody is in this together and there's a sense of shared values and shared purpose and shared destiny. This came out, for example, in the early history of Whole Foods when there were just literally one store in Austin, Texas, and it was an immediate success because it was created with all of these values that the founders had. And John Mackey is asked, how long did it take for Whole Foods to become profitable? He said it was about 2 p.m. on the first day. You know, this thing just took off. But then within a year, they had a massive flood in Austin. And it's the Memorial Day flood of 1980. And the store was completely destroyed. was eight feet of water. And so all the inventory was gone. All the equipment was destroyed. And they had no inventory anywhere else. And they had no money in the bank. They had already used up all their credit. So they were literally $400,000 in debt. They had not paid their suppliers for a lot of those products. So they were essentially going to be bankrupt. But then what saved them is that their employees showed up and started to clean up the store. Their customers showed up. Their community, people who lived in the community showed up. Suppliers showed up and said, we'll restock you on credit. We'll write off some of what you owe us. The bankers doubled their credit line. The friends and family reinvested. So all of the stakeholders came together in order to prevent this little baby company from dying. So that's kind of the feeling of it. People literally were having musical concerts to raise money for Whole Foods. They were having bake sales, selling cookies and brownies to raise money for Whole Foods. That doesn't happen for normal businesses. Exactly. And that's where this line between a nonprofit and nonprofits are defined by being purposeful. And we always assume that there's a wall.

JP: No, it happens in a non-profit usually, an NGO would do that, a foundation, but not a business. Yeah, rarely. Yes.

Raj Sisodia: There's purposeful people go over here, start a nonprofit, be noble and heroic and good, and then all your greedy people go over here. And profit, so profit and purpose were set up as kind of opposite things. And the greatest realization here was that they're not opposite, they're complementary. That profit without purpose is unsustainable. That purpose without profit also is unsustainable. You have to have both. And they reinforce each other. Today, Whole Foods can achieve its purpose at a far greater scale.

JP: And the others, yep. Yes. Yes.

Raj Sisodia: because of the size that it is today, right? It's the profits that have enabled that to happen. So there's a vibrancy, there's a sense of oneness, there's a sense of joy, there's a sense of connection, and people going the extra mile for their work, as well as customers having incredible emotional connection, right? It's not just wallet and head. See, in business, we too often leave it at, my business school education was all about the wallet and the head, and most relationships. of employees, customers, investors with the company are wallet and head. But these companies have heart and spirit as well. Okay, it's not instead of, but in addition to. So you are emotionally connected to your work and you are inspired by what we're doing.

JP: Yes. Absolutely. I'm so much with you, obviously, Raj, and this is at the core of a positive leadership. We'll come back to that philosophy of positive psychology as well. One of my guests that you may know, maybe, I'm sure, Ranjit Gulati, author from Alva, the author of this book about the purpose, he concluded that purpose must be embedded as a radically new operating system for enterprise. And of course, not a marketing statement or a CSR addendum to the company. So can you walk us through now the four pillars that you talked about of conscious capitalism? And please, if you don't mind, start with that higher purpose. What does it really mean for business to have a higher purpose? And how does a leader discover what that purpose should be, by the way?

Raj Sisodia: Yeah, so the higher purpose is the starting point. Does Simon Sinek's famous book now start with Y? You have to start with Y. Why are we doing this? And the traditional answer was very simple, to make money. Business exists to make money. And so, well, no, no, we all have to make money. That's a given. A business that doesn't make money will die. So that's a fact. It's like saying I need red blood cells to live. But my purpose in this life is not to produce and then store all this, so as much.

JP: Yep. You

Raj Sisodia: as many red blood cells as possible, right? It's to use that in order to do what I want to do with my life. So what is my purpose? What is the why? And every one of us as individuals should have a purpose. I think this is something fundamental to us as human beings. The sense of, as in a classic book, the most impactful book that I've ever read is Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl. And so it's basically, it's a fundamental human need and hunger.

JP: Yes. Yes. Wonderful book. Yes.

Raj Sisodia: for relevance, for meaning, for purpose, that my life matters. I'm here for a reason. That I was here, I was born, not just as a random event, but actually I'm here, each of us is here to contribute something. So that realization at an individual level also translates to anything that we create. So if we create an entity like a corporation, then that should also have its purpose. And that purpose becomes incredibly energizing and it becomes, again, it creates coherence. in the enterprise because it attracts people now who are not just looking for a job or a career, but they want a calling. People who would come to work, even if they win the lottery on Friday, they still show up on Monday because their work has meaning beyond the paycheck. And we want that to be true for everybody. There are many, many relatively rich people in the world who don't have to work from a money standpoint, but they do because it gives meaning. It impacts others, creates well-being, happiness in you, and creates a legacy after you're gone. So work is incredibly meaningful in people's life. Gallup's research has shown that the number one driver of human happiness and satisfaction is a good job, even more than your health and your wealth and even your family. Work that matters, work that makes a difference, as Victor Fankl said. Yeah, as he said, happiness cannot be pursued, happiness ensues.

JP: Yeah. meaningful job, yes.

Raj Sisodia: It comes from living a life of meaning and purpose, and that comes from doing work that matters and makes a difference in the lives of others or in the lives of animals or the planet or somewhere. Loving without condition and finding meaning in your suffering. That's kind of the teachings of Viktor Frankl. And you can apply that to business. Businesses pursue profit the way humans pursue happiness, but profits cannot be pursued. Profits ensure they're the outcome. of creating a business that is doing work that matters, that has a noble purpose, that is trying to bring about positive change in the world, that building the business on love and care, not just on fear and greed, and growing from adversity. So that's the starting point. We have to find our purpose. Why does this company need to exist? The world has enough banks and enough airlines and enough stores and enough of everything. Why does we need one more? Yeah, it starts there.

JP: Yeah. This is the foundation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Raj Sisodia: Now, I have this thing for acronyms, right? So I've got an acronym for each of the four pillars. And the acronym for purpose is healing. Healing originally was the qualities of a great purpose that it should reduce suffering in the world in some way and bring more joy into the world. Elevate joy and alleviate suffering through your business. You can decide in what dimension of life you are doing that because there is a lot of suffering. And, you know, we have

JP: Yeah. hearing. Yes.

Raj Sisodia: done a lot to bring about material prosperity in the world, but there's still 3 billion people living on less than $5 a day, so it's not fully done there. And there's many other kinds of suffering that are still very, very widespread in the world. And as a human being, our response to suffering has to be healing. It's the only human response to suffering. So healing is the acronym and the word describing our great purpose, and it stands for the quality that it should be heroic. It shouldn't be something easy to do, and you do it by next week, and then you're done. Your purpose should be something that is a lifelong pursuit. Now, some cases, Microsoft is an interesting example. When Bill Gates had a vision of a computer on every desk, that got realized. That pretty much got realized by 2000. And so therefore, the need was for a new purpose. What is now the next journey, next step? And I think in the Steve Barber era, that was not a focus. So Microsoft was kind of drifting in some ways, right? It was kind of an autopilot. But Satya came along and gave it a new. a renewed sense of relevant purpose for the world today. So it has to be heroic. It evolves as the company evolves, as the world evolves. It aligns everybody together. All your stakeholders now are aligned. Otherwise, they are cross purposes. If the company says we're going to maximize profit, then employees say, want to maximize pay and minimize work. Customer wants the lowest price. Supplier wants the highest margin. Society wants the highest taxes. Everybody becomes a taker. But when you have that purpose, but when you have the purpose and values, everybody is a contributor now.

JP: Yeah. It's a, this barrel. Yes.

Raj Sisodia: to that flourishing of that. So it starts with that higher purpose. How do you find it? You have to go back in many cases to the founding energy behind the company. Why was this company created? Often there's a hint there, there's a clue there. Sometimes there isn't. Sometimes it really was a mercenary act that people just wanted to make money. But you can still try to find today what would be a heroic and noble purpose. What is...

JP: Mm-hmm. define. Yes.

Raj Sisodia: What is a social sadness in the world that we can help alleviate? Or what is a way that we can create extraordinary impact and value for people? What is it that's going to get people excited to get up? And they don't say, thank God it's Friday, and God it's Monday. But people are excited to go to work, right? That comes from that alignment of purpose.

JP: So it's super critical job to start. What are the other three pillars, Raj, if you can go them? mean, the nice step.

Raj Sisodia: Yeah, so the second one is stakeholders and we say stakeholder integration, right? So stakeholder, so you have to have a stakeholder mindset, which is that all of the stakeholders that are connected to the business that impact the business and are impacted by the business, that the well-being of each of those stakeholders is important to us. So the well-being of our employees. Yeah, so employees should be happy and healthy and thriving. Our customers should be loyal and trusting and also their life should get better because they are our customers.

JP: Equally important.

Raj Sisodia: Our investors should not only have returns, but impact and legacy through this investment. Our suppliers should have a steady long-term relationship and should be mutually beneficial. So we want to consciously create value with each stakeholder and for each stakeholder at a deeper level, understanding them deeply, understanding their needs and their motivations and their drives, et cetera, so we can create deeper value. Seeing them as an end in themselves, not just as a means to an end. Because the traditional mindset said our primary purpose is to make money. We need employees and therefore let's hire as few as possible and pay them as little as possible, right? Because that's a cost, right? But we have to use, so we use them to make money for the company. But this says let's treat them as an end in themselves. Human beings must be treated with dignity and with respect and care. Their wellbeing is inherently important. Not just because happy employees are more productive employees, therefore we want them to be happy. We want them to be happy because that's what people should be. Now it turns out that happy employees are more productive, are more engaged, et cetera. So we create value consciously for and with each stakeholder at a deeper and deeper level, understanding them at a deep level. And then we figure out how they are all connected together. So it's the integration. So we should never have to make a trade-off to say that in order to increase my margins, I must lay off people or cut the amount of salaries or pay people less. or I have to raise prices in order to increase shareholder value, we can figure out a way simultaneously to benefit all stakeholders. And that takes creativity. And that takes intentionality. It's very easy to make a trade-off decision. If I cut this cost, then this will go to the bottom line. But how can I do it in a way that everybody will thrive at the same time? That's the challenge and the art, I would say, of stakeholder management.

JP: But if I push back a bit on you, Raj, if I may on this one, as you rightly said, it's really hard to actually kind of equalize the benefits across those four or five stakeholders, right? And when you have to make a real-time decision in the business, either in terms of investment or in terms of know, depression happening in the world or your business is falling short of your expectations, you have to make pretty fast decisions. So how do you do that? How do you make that? balancing act of basically doing the right thing, but still having a business actually.

Raj Sisodia: Yeah. Yes, so I say that first of all, I use the acronym SPICY for the stakeholders, society, partners, investors, customers, employees in the environment. But before I go there, I say that there's a forgotten stakeholder. And that is the one that most a lot of people don't realize that the company is its own most important stakeholder. Just like if I were to ask you, JP, who are your most important stakeholders in your life? You might say my family, my children, etc. But I say, what about you? Like who is primarily responsible for you and your well-being, but also your growth and development as a human being. Yes, you are, right? We are in charge of our own development and growth. So it's not a selfish thing to say that I am my most important stakeholder because I have a duty to do so. And by doing so, I can then be a source of greater impact in the world for others as well. Now the company is its own most important stakeholder. Now what does that mean?

JP: Myself, yeah. Of course. Yep.

Raj Sisodia: that you have to ensure the strength, the vibrancy, the viability, the long-term sustainability of this enterprise. Now, that seems almost a given, but I would say in the last 20, 30 years, many companies have under-invested in themselves. You know, when I was in business school, retained earnings used to mostly be reinvested back. Dividends were relatively small. Share buybacks were unheard of. But now what you find, and Jack Welch really popularized this in a way, dramatic way, that companies are spending in many years, more than 100 % of profits have gone to two things, dividends and share buybacks. In some years, it was 125 % of the S &P 500 profits, right? So what does that mean? They were borrowing money to buy back shares, right? Et cetera. And so what that is doing, of course we want to reward shareholders, but in many cases, what that's doing is under-investing in the business. So if you look at the Big Three Airlines, for example, and when the pandemic happened,

JP: Yep. Yep.

Raj Sisodia: They had been quite profitable the previous decade, but they had done massive share buybacks and borrowed a lot of money. Their balance sheets were very, very weak. And without the government stepping in, I mean, they could have been bankrupt very quickly. They had no resilience to survive under investing in the coming. I forget the exact number, but I believe something like 68 % of S &P 500 companies spend $0 a year on R &D right now.

JP: Wow, shocking.

Raj Sisodia: and many are under investing in capital upgrades as well because the focus is short term and it's harvesting, you know, getting and by the way, there's there's an alignment of incentives there with the senior executives, board members, etc. Their options are all time bound and expiring and therefore there's a tremendous set of incentives to do things that in the short term will boost the stock price, but are not creating long term strength and resilience for the company. So I think that is one big important area. And therefore it says that

JP: Yeah. Okay. Yep.

Raj Sisodia: When you have a existential challenge for a business, that if you don't do these things, that we won't survive and that all the stakeholders will suffer, then we have to do things sometimes which will create some suffering. Now, even there, if you have the orientation to try to prevent that. So, for example, I wrote a book called Everybody Matters with the CEO named Bob Chapman, who just died actually last week. sad. During the 2008 financial crisis,

JP: Mm-hmm. Yep.

Raj Sisodia: when he is in the capital goods manufacturing sector. So they make machines that companies use like Procter & Gamble to make toilet paper and things like that. So their orders completely dried up and they were facing an existential threat. Literally the order book went to zero, new orders. They had existing orders that they thought would get them through, but some companies started canceling existing orders, paying fines and canceling. So they didn't know when the bottom would come.

JP: Canceling,

Raj Sisodia: Everybody in their industry was laying off 30, 40 % of people and manufacturing was very common. But Bob Chapman lived by this credo that they have in their company. He we measure success by the way we touch the lives of people. And leadership is the stewardship of the lives entrusted to us. And these are people in these small towns in Wisconsin and Ohio. This is the only factory in town. And there's really no other big employer. The entire economy is based upon that. So he said, what would a family do in this situation? The family would not say to two of their five children, we have to let you go because we kind of want to keep you. It will say, how do we get through this together with a sense of collective commitment and sacrifice if you need to. So what they did was they had a furlough. So everybody took a month off without pay and Bob reduced his salary by 90 % and they stopped contributing to the 401k. So they do things that would buy them about a year of runway. They said the company can survive this.

JP: Yeah. Yeah. And then, yep.

Raj Sisodia: through these measures, but these people won't be able to survive this. They will lose their homes, right? The kids will have to drop out of colleges, some marriages might end. So they did that thing, right? And people were waiting for the layoff notices to come. And when they didn't come, people were just so relieved. And they used that time, because even after they came back from the furlough, there was not enough work. They acquired new skills, They reorganized the factory plants. They did lots of things. And 18 months later, when everything came back, after the financial crisis, they were in a position actually to be far more successful than their competitors who had to rehire people and retrain people. So they actually gained market share and their revenues went up dramatically. But most importantly, their culture was strengthened. The commitment to that culture that this company really does mean it when they say we measure success. So I think I'm not saying that you never should do layoffs and that is not necessary in some cases. But if you have the mindset to say that is a last resort.

JP: Kim back. Yeah. Yeah.

Raj Sisodia: when it is a matter of exist survival, it's an existential issue. Yeah, and then let's hire more carefully so we don't have to give that shock down the road to people. So I do think that, sometimes the tough decisions have to be made and some people will be hurt. Now, in the case of Barry Waymiller, there was one time when they did have to have a layoff in one of the 150 companies that they have adopted, never sold a single one. But the way they handled that was extraordinary. There's a Harvard case about it, actually.

JP: Yeah, you can find some other ways. Yeah. Yes. Yes. was, yeah.

Raj Sisodia: They help people find other jobs and they rehire people back after a period of time and they were able to recover, et cetera. So again, treating people, the wellbeing of people as inherently important and therefore doing things in a loving way. Can you let somebody go with love? Okay, if you have to let somebody go, right? As opposed to suddenly there's a notice, you're gone, your car doesn't work anymore, you're escorted out of the building, you know? So there's a different way to do it.

JP: very strong story. Yes, for sure. So you've done a wonderful job, you know, kind of opening up the first PIDA on the peripose, and then talking about what it takes to truly, you know, drive this balancing act of managing your stakeholders in a very different way. What about the conscious leadership? I'd love us to dwell on that third PIDA, which I think is something that actually I believe a lot. I believe that is super important. To me, that PIDA doesn't come alive without actually real leaders, leaders who are truly awake. So what does it look like in practice to basically drive conscious leadership? And what to you separates a leader who is generally conscious from one who is merely performing consciousness? How do you do that? How do you become conscious as a leader as well?

Raj Sisodia: Yeah, sure. That's a very critical question, and I'm sure conscious leadership is quite similar to what you call positive leadership. So leadership matters. Leadership matters so much in our world. As Peter Drucker said, there only three things that happen naturally in organizations. There's friction, confusion, and underperformance. Everything else takes leadership. Leadership matters even when people are more intelligent, more educated, more informed, more connected, more everything as is the case today. We still need leadership and the fact is leadership impacts our lives. Better leaders make for a better world in every arena, political, business, etc. And by the same token, bad leaders can destroy so much that has taken us decades or centuries to create can be destroyed very quickly through bad leadership. So who becomes a leader and for what reason? is very, very important. Now, if you become a leader for selfish reasons, if you say, if I get bigger, then I'll, know, the salary and the power that comes with it and all the perks, et cetera, et cetera. If that is the primary motivation to become a leader, then you will end up doing things that will probably cause suffering in your people. Okay. So the acronym that I use for conscious leaders is selfless.

JP: surface.

Raj Sisodia: Selfless. Selfless is that you have transcended the narrow definition of self. That everything I do is just about this, you know, for me, me, what's in it for me, right? Because if you're a selfish human being fundamentally by your nature, that means that you primarily care about power and money and your ego. And when you become a leader, you're going to look at all the people you need and say, wow, I can use all these people to fill my own ego-based needs for power and money. Right? So that's not a leader. To me, that's the definition of a tyrant.

JP: Hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes.

Raj Sisodia: A tyrant uses other people to fill their own ego-based needs. A true leader is there to serve people, to take people to a better place, collectively moving us forward, right? The definition of self is not just the small individual self, but the collective self. All of us will do better. So I think a great leader is able to create a vision to see a future and imagine a future that others don't, are not able to see and help devise a strategy for how do we get there, inspire people and then leverage, harness.

JP: Okay. different.

Raj Sisodia: all of the extraordinary capabilities of people in order to achieve something together that we can't achieve otherwise. And fundamentally is motivated by that, by servants. So there are servant leaders, there are positive leaders, there are conscious leaders. And then selfless stands for the qualities of a conscious leader and those can be cultivated and they can be selected for. So who becomes a leader in our system is very, important. I think Microsoft went through this probably when you were there.

JP: Yep. Mmm.

Raj Sisodia: that under the mantra of model, coach and care that Satya had, model the behavior. There were a lot of middle managers who said, I didn't sign up for this. That's not what I, I don't want to do that, right? I don't want to be caring for people. So they said, no, maybe this is not the right culture for you, right? So who gets to be a leader is very, very important. And so the quality is selfless, S is for strength. You have to be a strong human being to be a leader. It's one of the hardest things that human being can do is to be in a leadership role. But the kind of strength I'm talking about is

JP: That's right.

Raj Sisodia: is moral courage to do the right thing and personal power cultivating a sense of power that comes from inside you not from outside because if you got a title or an appointment. Personal power can never be taken away. I mean if you look at Gandhi right Gandhi was the epitome of personal power because Gandhi was five feet two and weighed 90 pounds and he was a very meek and kind of you know timid young man he could not even enter a room until his

JP: Yes. Yep. Yes. Yes.

Raj Sisodia: His wife, they were teenagers, they were not married. She had to enter the room first, you know. From that, he built himself, developed himself, cultivated himself, worked on himself to become literally a world-changing figure. Right? And that's personal power. He was never appointed to anything. He was never on a title. He never learned anything. Right? And his possessions could all fit into literally one little bag. And yet he had this incredible power. That is personal power. That comes from within knowing who you are, your sense of purpose, your values.

JP: Yes. Cheers.

Raj Sisodia: cultivating yourself, the discipline, right? All of the virtues, cultivating all of those. So personal power is what you want in a leader because positional power can be taken away and a lot of leaders when they lose their, when they retire, suddenly they seem to shrink and there's nobody there. It's like, you know, your power was all rooted in that. So personal power and moral courage.

JP: Yes. For sure. For sure. Yes. Yeah. Yes. In that title. Yes. I love your philosophy, and obviously what you study, what you work on. for many years of your life, unconscious capitalism. No, I like to confront it to today's world, right? mean, today, in 2026, the US has withdrawn from global climate commitments. Political forces are actively dismantling the regulatory infrastructure. and the worldwide governance that conscious businesses relied on. And the AI revolution, of course, is concentrating economic power as well in ways that may not be compatible with stakeholder harmony, by the way. That's a big discussion to have. So Raj, in this new super volatile world, is the case for conscious capitalism stronger or weaker than when you first made it in 2007?

Raj Sisodia: Mm-hmm. I think it is much stronger, not only the case for, but the need for it is much stronger because in times of uncertainty and challenge and turmoil, you need the consciousness to guide you. That's your compass, right? As to what is the right thing to do. And we are living at a time in the US certainly and some other countries as well, where I think we've lost sight of some of those higher level virtues and values. I think we're living through a kind of moral recession in many ways. The absence of truly conscious and moral leaders who have the courage of their convictions to do the right thing even when it's hard in the face of what the trends might be. So I think that is, I'm hoping, a short-term phenomenon that's going on here. I think that you could go into a reason, as to why we're going through that period. I think in many ways, It is the old order reasserting itself. We had a lot of progress in the last 30, 40 years. The world was moving in a certain way on human rights, on diversity, on environmental issues, on consciousness in general, on women, all kinds of things, feminine energy, et cetera. Many things were coming and lots of change literally starting, I think, in many ways in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down. That was not just the only big thing that happened that year. There many things. The World Wide Web was invented that year.

JP: We did indeed. Yes.

Raj Sisodia: the Exxon Valdez oil spill happened that year, There many things and then over the years, lots of progress. I think we're living at a period and Trump kind of coalesced that resentment and the old order kind of feeling threatened by that and feeling a sense of a loss of privilege, know, that other people are rising and therefore I must be falling in some ways. And so I think I somewhat jokingly liken it to the Star Wars trilogy. where the first one is a force awakens, a new beginning. I think we were in that world. Remember 1989, all these communist countries were becoming democracies and it was like a time of such great hope and positive movement. Episode two is the empire strikes back. And this is the empire striking back and however you define the empire, the status quo, the privilege, where the power was, et cetera, the mindsets and the worldviews that were dominant.

JP: You Yes. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yes. Yep, yep, yep, yep.

Raj Sisodia: This is also a paradigm shift, right? Thomas Kuhn talked about paradigm shift. And the old paradigm does not die easily. Shareholder value, profit maximization, et cetera, right? It kind of tries to reassert itself when it feels threatened. And I think that it was feeling threatened that whole world. So we're in that phase right now. And I think what our duty is to stay true to what we know is right. What we know is essential. We do not have a future on this planet if we continue. the business as usual. I mean, you look at all of the indicators, it is extraordinary, just literally in the last 50 years, what we have done to this planet and to other species. The species extinction is going on. The insect apocalypse is going on. I mean, the mammals are gone. The large fish are gone in the ocean. Most of the old natural forests are gone. mean, a lot of irreplaceable things are happening. And if we continue doing what we've been doing, I mean...

JP: Yeah. I know, pretty amazing.

Raj Sisodia: This planet has been here for now a billion years and human beings, homo sapiens have been here 3000 centuries in less than one century. The amount of damage that we've through industrialized capitalism that is operating without high consciousness. We still need industrial capitalism. We're big believers in capitalism, but we have to apply higher consciousness and we don't have to this trade off that we must destroy the planet and heat up the planet in order to make more money or that we must burn people out of their work.

JP: Yep.

Raj Sisodia: in order to our companies to be more profitable, et cetera. All of those trade-offs are not acceptable. It has to work at every level for the individual, for the family, for the community, for the country, for the planet. It has to work. And that takes different consciousness.

JP: Yes. So I can see, can feel Raj, you're an optimist. I'm an optimist as well. You think that trilogy, I mean, reference you made to Star Wars is going to happen as well and good things will happen. I still want to ask you the question about AI, which is there today, right? It's going to grow and AI doesn't really care about purpose. It just executes faster than any human can do actually. So the system is built around short-term extraction, is some of the words you've been using yourself. AI will be extracting faster. If it's built around stakeholders value, maybe you will create more of that. So what does conscious capitalism actually demand of AI, you think? If you have to rewrite your book with AI, maybe? I don't know if you use it every day, by the way. And what does it mean to be a conscious AI company? What is it?

Raj Sisodia: Yeah, no, this is Well, I do. Well, absolutely. So we have written about this recently because the conscious capitalism book that John Mackey and I wrote in 2013, we are now doing a second edition of that book with three new chapters. Yeah, so three new chapters. One is on conscious strategy. One is on conscious capitalism and AI. And one is on how do you stay awake? There are many conscious companies that become less conscious, unconscious again.

JP: Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. Yes.

Raj Sisodia: They kind of go back to the old way. Unilever right now seems to be going through that. But the AI thing is very, very critical. So capitalism is probably the most important significant idea humanity has ever created, this idea of capitalism, the mechanism. And now AI is probably the most impactful technology that human beings have ever invented. And the marriage of these two is vital in a positive sense. if we have the sort of narrow perspective on capitalism, that it's only about maximizing for shareholders, et cetera. AI can accelerate that and make it much more harsh in some ways and speed that thing up. But if you apply consciousness to it, AI can also make us super conscious. These technologies we're using, we've developed our own AIs. There's one called the Conscious Enterprise Oracle, CEO acronym, right? And it can actually answer all of your questions about what should I do and how should I do it or what are my dilemmas and here's a trade-off that I'm facing and...

JP: Mmm. Okay, really? Okay, that's cool. Aha.

Raj Sisodia: How can I do this without hurting employees, et cetera? I there's a tremendous amount of value that it can generate. So it's at two levels. One is AI companies themselves. It's so vital that they be conscious organizations. They have a sense of purpose. They have a sense of values on what they're doing and what guardrails they can put around it so that it cannot be used for somebody looking to make an explosive or somebody looking at et cetera. And so I think the conscious AI companies to me, from what I've seen, Anthropic seems to be more of that. Anthropic has some of that. Dario, I think, has written about that. They've talked about that. at least at this time, openly, I talked about that. But I don't think they're walking that talk anymore. But that's very important, I think. And regulation doesn't exist yet. And I think at some point, there will need to be well-thought-out regulation worldwide on a global scale, because this thing is too powerful to let it just go in any direction. it can be learned. It's one of the most incredible things in the history of, I mean,

JP: Mm-hmm. We need to be, yeah. Absolutely.

Raj Sisodia: Literally, we have the wisdom of all of human history available at our fingertips. If you're a leader, you want to become a more positive, conscious leader, you've got access to the most brilliant wisdom of all of the greatest sages and teachers that you can tap into and develop yourself. So it's all there. It's an incredible thing to make you more conscious and more purposeful and enact your purpose at a more granular and deeper level and serve each of your stakeholders again in a much deeper way. All of that can be done. And we're showing that. But at the same time, buy it. But I believe the market in that sense is efficient because conscious companies, when everything is working well and they have a good strategy and they add all of these conscious elements to that, they far outperform in the market. And so ultimately, we believe that many of those other companies that do not make those adaptations in those ways will not compete, will not survive ultimately in the long term. So that will be a correcting mechanism.

JP: So I really look forward to seeing and use that conscious AI, Raj, not actually the sentient AI that everybody is kind of expecting as well. But let's shift gears now because the time is moving pretty fast. Six years after conscious capitalism, you published the Heating Organization, where conscious capitalism made the case that business can do good. You just talked about that. The Heating Organization makes the bolder claim that business has a moral obligation to actively heal what is broken.

Raj Sisodia: Thank

JP: And this resonates with me on this podcast as an example, a couple of former French ministers, Elisabeth Moreno used to be France's former minister for gender equality, Mireille Penneco was a French minister as well of labor. And both have argued that the private sector cannot stand apart from the social crisis in both causes and could and should help resolve. And you are making, I think, the same argument at a civilizational scale. So what is the difference for you Raj between a company that avoids arm and a hitting organization?

Raj Sisodia: Yeah, so a company that avoids harm is simply not adding any more to what has already been done. But there's a lot that's already been done, right? In terms of nature, of course, we need to reverse. So it's not just sustainability anymore, it's regeneration, right? And that can be done. But we are the stewards, human beings are the stewards of all life on this planet. And by our actions, we can restore ecosystems and we can bring back species that are on the verge of extinction. We can do all of that. but it takes our intentionality. So the Healy organization recognizes, first of all, that business is a moral system, not just an economic system. Secondly, that the reality of stakeholder suffering is something we have to face up to. Most leaders in most companies have no idea what life is like for people in their own organization. They have no idea where they live and how they get to work and how they pay the bills and how their children have or don't have a future. There's an extraordinary amount of suffering that is inside companies. Microsoft maybe not because that's a different level of, know, but I'm talking about manufacturing companies, retail companies, know, the other parts of the economy. And people are really struggling, you know, worldwide to make ends meet fundamentally and that we have a lot of chapters in the new organization that are about that. The financial insecurity that people have, the fact that worker pay has been flat for decades and, you know, that the... 40 % of Americans have less than $400 in the bank and 62 thirds of Americans work hourly jobs. And this is America, rich country, you can imagine and elsewhere. So the reality of stakeholder suffering, that people are suffering, that people who work in our company full time and they can't look after their children and their children have no future, that should not be okay. Likewise, our customers, their health and their wellbeing, our communities, the environment, et cetera. So recognizing all of that and then saying that our role and our job as a business is to reduce suffering and bring more joy in the realms in which we operate. So, and that book is essentially a collection of about 25 stories of companies that are doing this. And what people love about it is very practical. You can say, wow, I can do that. I can create a pothole fund so that my employees when their car breaks down, suddenly they don't lose their car and they don't lose their home and they can survive, you know, these potholes that show up in our life. And most of us We don't worry about it because it's not a big deal, but for some people it changes their life, right? Little things that can happen. So there are many, many examples in that book that people are using and applying and recognizing that fundamentally as human beings in a world with so much suffering, the only human response is to be part of the healing. If you do not consciously choose to be part of the healing, you are part of the suffering. Most people don't say, I'm going to wake up today and create suffering, but they don't open their eyes. If you could see a thought bubble over the head of everybody you see.

JP: cross.

Raj Sisodia: and recognize what challenges people are dealing with and all kinds of struggles that people are going on, right? Then your heart opens up and then you can do something about it. can really help. Companies are extraordinary sources of healing. They can be. Unfortunately, most companies are places of stress and suffering and burnout, and heart attacks are 20 % higher on Mondays, and 120,000 Americans die from stress every year connected to work, and 600,000 Chinese die from too much work every year. I mean, these are some of the numbers and statistics that are very real. And we have to face up to that. And actually, it doesn't have to be that we cause any of it. It could be the opposite. People can be healthier and have fewer heart attacks because they work at our company, et cetera, et cetera. So that's the beauty that is possible when you think about it as a healing organization. What can I do to heal?

JP: Yes. Yeah. the Yeah. I like to build a bridge now and back to you again, Raj, because I think just like you, I'm a strong believer that, you know, the core positive psychology, as you know, well, very well, you start with yourself and the same way you talked about finding your own purpose as a human, as a leader and connected that purpose to your organization's purpose. I think the same applies to healing and you made a brilliant demonstration of that. So I'd like you to talk a little bit about, obviously, your book, Awaken. because you're right about traumatic use you had. You touched on it a little bit at the beginning of this discussion about your father, moving between countries, as we said, but also about years of searching with a pilgrimage near Malaya, silent retreats, plant medicine ceremonies, before finally arriving at something you call wholeness. And you know that world father wouldn't stay with me because actually just a couple of months ago,

Raj Sisodia: Thank

JP: at Nick Thompson, the CEO of the Atlantic on a podcast. And Nick has authored this wonderful book called The Running Grounds, where he talks about the same wounds with his dad, which has been a big trauma. And he's been running basically, he's been running all of his life. He's becoming a marathon, actually, record man in the US for the 45 years and older because of his dad. And he has actually kind of reinvented himself through that trauma and by healing as well. So what is your message about, in a way, that healing? What did it take for you, first of all, to tell that story to the world, which is not easy? And what would you advise to others to do the same?

Raj Sisodia: now. Yeah, well, so the book Awakened is really my memoir. Came out in 2023, but the seeds of that were planted in 2018, which is the year I turned 60. And that felt like a big milestone in my life. I think for many of us, it's kind of the end of the second act of your life and the beginning of the final phase. And I was writing the Healing Organization that year. So even though I knew that this is kind of a big moment, but I was busy in my work and I just had, you know, the entire summer was for writing that book and I had done all the research. so, and then four women that were friends of mine that I had talked to about this project, they essentially asked me the same question. They said, you're writing a book about healing. What about your own healing? Have you worked on yourself? And I said, well, I don't have time for that. I have a book deadline, October 5th. This book is due, you know. They said, no, you have to make time for that. It's very, very important. I said, I don't think I need healing. I'm OK. They said, no, we know your story. There's definitely a lot that you have to work on that you have to heal. And so I had the good sense to listen to them. I delayed that book by five months. And I said yes to all these experiences. As you mentioned, I went to the Himalayas, the high Himalayas, which should be 22,000 feet at the border of India and Tibet, which is the seat of some of the deepest Buddhist wisdom. And I went there with a group called the Shakti Spiritual Journeys. It's a book I wrote called Shakti Leadership, which is about the feminine integrating with the masculine. And my co-author organizes these spiritual journeys to these meaningful places around the world. So that's where I had my 60th birthday, immersed in that deep Buddhist wisdom around suffering, around healing. How do we learn about that? I also went to a silent retreat in upstate New York for four days with Peter Senge and David Cooper, and many other interesting people. And that was a very profound experience. And in fact, these seven steps came to me in that silent retreat, which I subsequently wrote in the book Healing Leaders. I learned a lot about myself and about life in general. I also worked with a coach for the first time. And she helped me reframe my life. What had my life really been about? What was I doing here? What was the meta narrative around my life? And what she said to me basically was that you spend 45 years, the first 45 years of your life. trying to impress your father. Even after my father cut me off and basically banished me, I was still deep down trying to prove myself worthy of him. And she said, now you've spent the last 15 years honoring your mother with your work. That everything you've done with firms of endearment and conscious capitalism and Shakti leadership and everybody Matt, that's bringing this mother energy. the love, the compassion, the acceptance, the inclusion, the nurturing, the gentleness, that is missing in the world of business and leadership. And that's your mother's core energy, right? And that's the core teaching. So that was a big aha moment because I had not thought of it that way. I am more like my mother and in many ways I do channel some of those things in that way. And I also went to the Amazon rainforest with a group called the Pachamama Alliance. went to Ecuador. Spent 10 days with the indigenous people there, the Achuar and the Zapara tribes, and did a lot of healing work with the shamans, including an ayahuasca experience, a plant journey. And that was very profound. And it opened up things for me and gave me insights about my own life and about healing. I went there to learn about healing, and all night long, I was given visions in my mind about what healing is really about. And so all of that.

JP: Thank

Raj Sisodia: became pretty profound and that was sort of the, I call it my year of conscious awakening, 2018. I consciously decided to work on myself, know, five months off and focusing on these kinds of things. And that was not completed in that year. That's been an ongoing process ever since. And uncovering, for example, traumas. I did not realize that I had trauma. I did not frame it as such that when my father threatened to kill himself in front of me, that was traumatic. And later on, when he pointed a gun at me, because I would not give in to him, basically threatening me, that was traumatic, so traumatic that I actually erased that memory. I don't have conscious memory of that, but other people in the room told me. It's called disassociative amnesia. And I realized that there's a lot of trauma, and I became familiar with the work of Gabor Mate and his incredible documentary, The Wisdom of Trauma, and that we all have trauma. 13 million Americans have PTSD, post-traumatic stress. disorder, but all of us have post-traumatic stress injury and most of us deny it. We refuse to acknowledge that we have trauma. We just say things like, I didn't go to Afghanistan and I didn't go to Iraq and I was not a first responder. And so why should I complain about my little problems? Life is hard, suck it up, right? Don't worry about it. But that doesn't do anything. Just because somebody else had a bigger trauma doesn't mean that your trauma didn't matter. And the fact is that you are living your life in a reactive state.

JP: Cross.

Raj Sisodia: and you get triggered by things and you don't even know why, you're not in charge of your own emotions and your own actions and reactions. And you end up inflicting a lot of suffering on yourself and others. And so once you start to identify those and you start to, as you say, to reveal it and feel it in order to begin to heal it, you have to talk about it. In my case, I wrote about it in the book, you have to talk, trauma cannot heal in silence and in shame, which is what most people do. And so, and when you do that work, You have the gift on the other side, which is post-traumatic growth. You are stronger because you had a trauma and you healed it. And now you become the source of healing for others. That's why healing leaders has two meanings, healing the leader and then becoming a leader who heals in the world for others. So that's the gift of it, ultimately. So that was kind of my journey beginning in 2018. I wrote the memoir, but then I realized that these seven steps that came to me They had some weight and some profoundness to them. Because I think something that comes to you from the source, wherever you think of the source, that has more power than something you just say, OK, let me brainstorm some steps here, right? That's different than saying, wow, this has received wisdom. So these seven steps, which I then wrote the book Healing Leaders, is know yourself. Who are you? You have to know yourself. That's the beginning of all.

JP: Mmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. cross. Yes. Yeah.

Raj Sisodia: life, meaningful life is self-knowledge, understanding yourself, Because there are 117 billion humans who have walked this earth. Eight billion today, but 109 billion that have died. Everyone is different. Everyone is unique. We have to understand what that uniqueness is. What's your nature? Not your identity. I'm an Indian and I'm an engineer and I'm a PhD in this and I'm a Hindu and I'm whatever. That's all. Those are all tags. That's not you. Who are you?

JP: Absolutely. Self-knowledge, self-awareness, yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

Raj Sisodia: as a child, what was your essence, your true nature? What defines you as a being? And then love yourself. For me, it was a huge challenge to love myself because the messaging I got from my father was that I'm defective. I'm not equipped to face this world. I need to change everything about myself. You can't change your core nature. So getting to that place, not only of self-acceptance, self-forgiveness, self-compassion, but ultimately self-appreciation and self-love. Because we have received this as a gift. This is a gift from creation. To be born a human being with the consciousness, the intelligence, the capacity that we have. We are divine beings. We can create, right? I mean, we are the only creatures who can imagine something and then bring it to reality in this life, in this world. We can manifest things, right? Literally from our minds to physical reality. So this is a gift and to not love yourself is to be deeply ungrateful. for receiving the ultimate, the pinnacle of four and a half billion years of evolution as a human being. To know yourself, love yourself, and then be yourself. Rest comfortably in your presence. You're not trying to act and put on all these masks and I'm one way with my boss and one way with my children and one way with my spouse. Be the same person, be you. Be authentic to yourself. And then choose yourself, which is choose everything that happened in your life. Don't be a victim. For many years, I was a victim of my own history.

JP: Be yourself. Yeah. Be authentic, yeah, be yourself. yeah. Yep. Yep.

Raj Sisodia: Why did I have that harsh father? Why was I born into that warrior caste? Why was I whatever? The fact is you can't change it. You might as well choose it to say, you know, I don't know why, but maybe there's a reason why. And there is a reason. I had to be witness. I had to be born into that warrior caste with that abusive culture towards women, et cetera, so that 50 years later I would write a book about the feminine. Otherwise I would not have the sensitivity to write that book. So I had to experience something. That's true of all of us. We have to go through what we go through in order to become who we are meant to be and do what we are supposed to do. So, it all as a gift, even though it was a hard and challenging thing, right? Choose your past, embrace it. Say, yes, I'm looking for the gift in it. And then express yourself, which is find your purpose and live it, go on the hero's journey, become the person you're meant to be. Complete yourself, which is integrate your masculine and feminine energy, but also your elder and child energy, so that you have the wisdom of the elder, the playfulness of the child, the strength of the masculine and the love of the feminine all inside you. regardless of your gender and your age. That you can be a whole, that's truly a whole person. We use the phrase, a wise fool of conscious, I'm sorry, a wise fool of tough love. A wise fool, your wisdom of the elder, foolishness of the child, toughness and love. And then step seven is heal yourself, which is your wounds and traumas, right? And yeah, you said.

JP: Tough love, yes. which we discussed here. It's a wonderful, incredibly inspiring framework, Raj, and obviously you've gone through it. But can you tell us, how can you actually leave those steps on a daily basis? So next Monday, how do I start that journey? I'm being very pragmatic and very, yeah, so how do you do that? What would be your advice to all listeners while trying to embrace that in their life? What should they... start doing on Monday. Of course, it's going to take time. It's not going to be just a week. But what is it they should start doing?

Raj Sisodia: Well, it's just like the pillars of conscious capitalism. You start with why, start with that question of purpose. I think here you do start, we put them in that sequence for a reason, you do have to know yourself. How can you love something you don't know? How can you be something that you don't know who you are, right? And how can you be somebody that you don't love? So you have to, I think, go through it in that sequence. So in the book, we provide lots of guidance on that, lots of activities, exercises that you can do. We run a three-day workshop on this.

JP: Yes. Yep. Yep.

Raj Sisodia: where it's a very experiential thing where we take people through their identity review and then we go deep into their values and then try to understand who was I when I was a child, et cetera. So I think that starts really with that self-knowledge. Over time, I think all seven steps are important. That's why we believe in the book. should make sure you focus. Now, some of us might be pretty good already on some of them. You already have our purpose. You're fully expressed in your purpose. You're expressing yourself. That's great.

JP: Yep. Yeah.

Raj Sisodia: but the other areas that might be blind spots. then figuring out which are the ones that I really need to work on today. But each of them kind of becomes a portal into the whole. You work on loving yourself and then that actually opens up other things. And it's not one and done that, okay, once I do all seven steps and all the exercises and so forth and journaling and everything that I'm done, because you are constantly evolving, number one. And secondly, you're discovering deeper layers of yourself. There's so much within you. There's a whole world inside you. that you don't even know until you are confronted with a particular situation, you don't know something about yourself. say, wow, I didn't know that I would react in that way. I didn't know that I knew how to do that. So you know yourself again at a deeper level. And then you have to go through that. So I think it's an ongoing, it's like a spiral, an upward spiral that keeps going.

JP: Hmm. Yes. Yeah. That's a long-going journey. Yes. Yeah. So we're getting into the very last questions of the podcast. the time goes pretty fast, Raj. You know, something that really strikes me, and we discussed that a little bit together before the podcast started, reading your books and reading Martin Seligman's book, reading Barbara Fredrickson's book as well, Love 2.0, seems to me that positive psychology, neuroscience as well, been probably fueling some of your thinking and your philosophy as well. So how much has, again, positive psychology in your senses shaped or influenced kind of your thinking and work?

Raj Sisodia: Yeah, it definitely has. I I became aware of positive psychology, I think in 2007 when I took a course called Creativity and Personal Mastery and we have people there talking about some of those frameworks. And then of course, reading Martin's work on learned helplessness and cultivating optimism. Now going to the World Happiness Summit for the last five, six years, speaking at that as well. And there's a lot of positive psychology that is at the root of all of that as well. Tal Ben Shahar, who taught the happiness course at Harvard, and now he's got a master's in happiness studies and so forth. So I think that whole world is incredibly important. And then the positive organizational scholarship work that has been inspired by positive psychology at the University of Michigan, where Adam Grant came out of that, for example, and Amy Vresnevsky came out of that. And so I think that has permeated. in my life as well as in many areas. And I've also used this as a model, you know, to say this was a reformation of psychology to look at it in that direction. So likewise, conscious capitalism in many ways is a positive framing of capitalism, right? How do we look at the upside without getting sort of those externalities on the downside? So it's been a huge influence. I think it's just that framing, as Victor Frankl also talked about, is the height psychology, not just the depth psychology. You need both. But let's not stop at just that and let's look at human potential, which is extraordinary. So I think to me, the unrealized potential of capitalism is what this is about. Conscious capitalism says, yes, we have done a lot. Incredible what capitalism has done in two centuries, where capital incomes, life expectancy, the human population has been able to rise. I all the things, extraordinary technologies. But there's a lot of unrealized potential there because we've done it with a constricted consciousness. And when we liberate, that's why the nine to one outperformance of these companies at one level were shocking, at another level not so shocking. These companies don't have to spend any money on marketing. Their employee turnover is like a fraction of what their competitors is. Their legal costs are very low. Their administrative costs are low. know, they have a lot of ways. Employee engagement is dramatically higher, right? And creativity and innovation is far greater, et cetera. So then you start to see, wow, there's an unlock. that's waiting to happen when we start to align everything together in this way and we release human potential, which is unlimited, right? When we unlock the power of an atom, it literally blew us away, right? Atomic bombs. You unlock the power of a human being. You say every human being can literally change the world. There have been human beings like that, but every one of us carries that potential. So that is what this unlocks, I think. And then every problem that we have is an opportunity. And there's no doubt that we can actually address that's why I'm an optimist ultimately, I believe in human beings, that we will once we have the consciousness, then we see the world in a different way. And then we are able to bring the solutions that are needed.

JP: You know, I'm % aligned with you, Raj, and we are coming to an end with my last two questions. you know, I'm spending most of my time with the new generation, young leaders or young aspiring leaders, social entrepreneurs and more. And I like you to basically give an advice. What advice would you give to a young leader who feels the tension between the values they hold and the pressures of the organization they are working in? How can they stay conscious?

Raj Sisodia: Thank

JP: in an unconscious system, basically. How can they do that? How can they awake?

Raj Sisodia: Yes, yes. Yeah, I think we face that because we have our students that take these classes and then they go out into the world and they don't find that it's not resonant with what they are, how they feel and how they think about things. What I say to my students is change the company or change the company. If you're in a small company where they're open to these ideas, you know, give them to the CEO, et cetera, these books, et cetera, see if they are open to that, then that's great. and be part of that evolution of that company. Or you find another company. Do not be stuck in an environment that's going to really be soul crushing for you because it's not going to change until the people at the top change. that's not, you know, that's a big challenge, biggest challenge of our movement. How do you awaken consciousness in leaders? And you asked me that question. I don't think we got to that. There's no systematic process for that. There are ways in which different leaders awaken. Somebody reads a book and they get transformed like Ray Anderson.

JP: Move on. Yes. Yeah. Yes.

Raj Sisodia: interface carpet read the ecology of commerce and he was fundamentally different after that. Other people like Bob Chapman had all these awakenings and epiphanies, one at a wedding, one at church, know, etc. And suddenly, my God, or you have a mentor or a coach who opens your eyes, or you have an experience in nature, or you visit a slum or it's, you what we call disequilibriating experiences, take you out of your comfort zone and suddenly, wow, you're shaken up a little bit, you need to.

JP: Yeah. Mm. Mm. Check it out.

Raj Sisodia: You need to consciously put yourself into those environments in order to awaken. But again, many people are stuck in that purely money and power kind of mindset. they're in some ways limited. Sorry, I have another team meeting that's about to start. I told them I'd be a little bit late.

JP: Yeah. Can we finish for the last question? I do the wrap up. Sorry, we'll just make an edit right now. Okay. So finally, Raj, if you had to distill all of your wisdom, I mean, the books, the research, the movement, the healing journey, Everything you know into one thing to the world's business leaders right now, the one shift in thinking that would change everything, what would that be?

Raj Sisodia: Yes, yes, we can. told them I'd be a little late, so yeah. So. One phrase that comes to mind is that everybody matters and everybody needs to win. Let's create a world in which everybody matters and everybody needs to win. All life matters, really. I don't say that only human beings matter. All life matters. We need to put life at the center of everything we do, not profit or anything else. And everything should serve the flourishing of life. That's what our ultimate responsibility is as human beings. We are the stewards of all life on this planet. And so let's enact that in everything that we do.

JP: Yes. Yes. Well, those were huge thank you, Raj. It was such inspiring, such exciting and awakening discussion together. you know, I'm sure listeners will love it. So for all of listeners, please make sure you share your feedback, subscribe to the Positive Leadership newsletter and stay tuned for the next episode. Again, this is Positive Leadership podcast. Until next time, stay positive, keep leading with purpose and take care of yourself as Raj said it. Raj again. A huge thank you, merci, for this wonderful inspiration you gave us.

Raj Sisodia: Thank you very much, JP, and I really appreciate the deep insights that you had and the understanding that you came into this conversation with, and of course, everything that you've done in your professional life as well. Thank you for that.