Simon is the founder and CEO of Sounds True, a multimedia publishing company that Tami founded in 1985 at the age of 22 with the mission of disseminating spiritual wisdom. Today, still faithful to its original mission, Sounds True has grown to have nearly 110 employees and a library of close to 2000 titles featuring some of the leading teachers and visionaries of our time.  Sounds True is a pioneer in the conscious business movement, and Tami leads in a way that values their multiple bottom lines, which include relationship and mission as well as profit.  Tami also hosts Insights at the Edge, a popular weekly podcast where she has interviewed many of today’s... posted on Nov 24 2018 (6,219 reads)

my books, my paintings and really leaping onto the sublime with the full sense of passion and purpose. My heart and my soul were pulling me stronger than anything that was stopping me. So that is exactly what happened. And here we are, 15 years later. I still at the moment own nothing in the world apart from one suitcase.   Along the way I had the incredible honor to meet the most influential and powerful humanitarians, those volunteers that join me, and celebrities and the well known business leaders that I have met in the front lines. All great humanitarians. Audrey: Learning about your work, it really is about brokering relationships between all these different people. Betwee... posted on Aug 3 2018 (4,445 reads)

Laloux is a business analyst and author whose book Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness is considered one of the most important management guides of the past decade. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon talks to Frederic about what it takes to become a "next-level organization" that meets the challenges and opportunities of expanding human consciousness. Frederic explains that the next stage of human development will be to move beyond ego, elaborating on how this will look in the business world. Tami and Frederic discuss the difficult balance between fulfilling financial... posted on May 13 2019 (7,428 reads)

we were a French company. And I'd write them back, and I'd say, "What a minute. We're not French. We're an American company. We're based in San Francisco." And I'd get a terse response: "Oh, that's worse." (Laughter) So one particular day when I was feeling a little depressed and not a lot of joie de vivre, I ended up in the local bookstore around the corner from our offices. And I initially ended up in the business section of the bookstore looking for a business solution. But given my befuddled state of mind, I ended up in the self-help section very quickly. That's where I got re... posted on Sep 2 2016 (26,468 reads)

were off the hook for resolving a difficult situation, he was exacerbating the problems the company faced. We gave him our frank assessment of the damage he had been doing. Joe, obviously taken aback, was thoughtful and silent as he contemplated our feedback. We’ll get back to Joe’s story, but first let’s look at why we paid such close attention to the conversations he was having with the newspaper’s employees. Conversations Create Culture James A. Autry, businessman, author, and poet, says, “We do make things true by what we say.… Things and people are what we call them, because in the simplest terms, we are what we say, and others are wh... posted on Oct 22 2017 (11,961 reads)

is the transcript of an Awakin Call with Mayuka Yamazaki, moderated by Pavi Mehta and hosted by Cynthia Li. Pavi Mehta: It is my pleasure now to introduce our guest. In many ways Mayuka Yamazaki's life is a study in contrast: Her credentials in the business world are impressive: She sits on the board of three public companies, has worked as a management consultant with McKinsey and Company, and is backed by a decade of experience working as an executive with Harvard Business School at their Japan Research Center. During her time with them, she co-authored 30 Harvard Business School case studies about Japanese companies, business leaders, and societal issues. Mayuka is also... posted on May 3 2023 (2,329 reads)

was one of America's greatest poets. The author of "The Emperor of Ice-Cream"and "The Idea of Order at Key West" was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1955 and offered a prestigious faculty position at Harvard University. Stevens turned it down. He didn't want to give up his position as Vice President of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. This lyrically inclined insurance executive was far from alone in occupying the intersect of business and poetry. Dana Gioia, a poet, Stanford Business School grad, and former General Foods executive, notes that T.S. Eliot spent a decade at Lloyd's Bank of London; and many other... posted on Dec 19 2012 (32,899 reads)

is about inspiring and influencing people to action. The servant part—it’s not about being a slave. Being a servant leader is not about doing what people want. It’s about doing what people need, and there is a huge difference. It’s not about being a slave, it’s about being a servant. What my children want [laughs] sometimes is not exactly what they need. What my employees want may not be necessarily what they need. So what servant leaders are about [is] the business of identifying and meeting people’s legitimate needs, seeking their greatest good so that they can grow. So the test of servant leadership is, do people leave you better than they found... posted on Aug 7 2014 (29,630 reads)

8, 2015 Underlying the collaborative economy are a handful of very strong and general trends that are challenging the conventional business models in just about every sector of the economy—not just in the types of transactions that we usually think of as the sharing economy. Focus is shifting from selling stand-alone, physical products to creating services that enable users to make the most of the resources around them. The cost of coordinating even very small and non-standard resources to fit individual user’s needs is falling. Everyone is increasingly empowered to participate and contribute to the value creation. Everything is getting connected; ... posted on Sep 1 2015 (12,599 reads)

first era of sustainability, call it sustainability 1.0, focused on cleaning up the planet’s growing environmental mess. Federal legislation restricted air and water pollution, as well as hazardous waste, and businesses adapted to the new regulations. Sustainability 2.0 took a broader perspective, reducing not just toxic waste, but waste of all kinds. The business community realized that less waste meant less cost and pitched in, often increasing efficiency and boosting profits in the process. But throughout this era of growing environmentalism, the linear business model, which has dominated the modern world since the industrial revolution, remained fundamentally unchanged. &ldq... posted on Jul 18 2017 (6,656 reads)

families." I wanted to start by acknowledging my wife Randi, who is responsible for me being here, not just by creating the space to allow me to do my work and care for our family, and having been the primary caregiver for our kids. She also carried the financial burden - when we started our first company, she was the only one of the three of us (who started the company) that actually had income. And so, to the extent that we had food on the table, it was because she was employed.While that business grew incredibly rapidly and was quite successful, there was a period there in the back half of it which was also quite painful. There was a Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael sort of schism; a ... posted on Apr 16 2024 (1,579 reads)

boss who enjoys the glories (and bears the burdens) of success all alone. That’s what makes executive life (in theory) so glamorous: Who isn’t eager to match wits with brilliant rivals and stay one step ahead of a complex world? Of course, that’s also what makes executive life (in reality) so exhausting: What happens when rivals come at you from more directions than ever, when markets change faster than ever, when problems loom larger than ever? As a business culture, we’ve made the lure of executive leadership hard to resist—and the job of leadership virtually impossible to do. A harrowing essay in the Atlantic (titled, appropriately ... posted on Jun 17 2013 (26,080 reads)

works on forging ties between her Nepalese staff and her manager in Uganda, the other country where her organisation has saved the lives of thousands of mothers and their children. “If you want to know me,” the former corporate lawyer and banker says as she greets me at the door, a flourish of blonde hair, blue eyes and Nepalese silk, “you have to know me in this context. The truth of me is here, it’s not dressed up in high heels and a business suit in Sydney.” This is the woman who New York-based distressed debt manager Victor Khosla tells Good Weekend has raised hundreds of millions of dollars over the past deca... posted on Oct 28 2013 (29,361 reads)

people who are affected by wars, people affected by discrimination. They come to us for a seven-month course and [then] go back and create social impact within their own community. Knowledge@Wharton: So you are definitely involved in the whole area of social entrepreneurship, which is a pretty hot term these days. What have you found works in this area, and what doesn’t work? Tenberken: First of all, I have a problem with the term social entrepreneurship because people say only business helps to make the world a better place. I don’t really agree. We feel that there are many, many other methods and tools that need to be focused on to make a sustainable difference. Peop... posted on Apr 28 2014 (10,177 reads)

in the workplace, these are symptomatic of a deeper underlying cause – the way we relate with life, and our sense of place and purpose within life. Our relationship with ourselves, each other and the world us, is in desperate need of our dear attention. This way, we move beyond applying the very same logic to our well-intended solutions that created the problems in the first place. For several years now, my focus has been on attending to the relationship our leaders, managers and business change agents have with Nature by exploring how our organizations can be perceived as vibrant emergent living systems that thrive by tending towards harmony with life (regardless of whether t... posted on Apr 3 2017 (11,026 reads)

with the ServiceSpace movement -- because they say, ‘hey, let's do small things, or big things; let's just love and serve others.’ Preeta: So in the prairie where you grew up, there is so much about individualism and finding your own way in the world.  There’s pride about rugged individualism.  How did you find resonance with others or talk about Pay It Forward in that context?  Greg: I think for some it was really hard. I was in the business school where we learned to monetize, maximize profit, return resources for shareholders.... I didn't connect there. I found myself more interested in the international students or people ... posted on Jan 2 2019 (3,206 reads)

perspective. You teach this, go to the balcony, to all kinds of people all over the world. Outside of meditation, how do people develop this capacity, this quality?   WU: Practice. We have a chance to practice every single day. All these things, these are lifelong lessons, whether it’s learning to pause or learning to listen to the other side, but they’re natural human potentials that we all have. And I ask audiences, I say to them, the people I work with, all kinds of audiences from business people to unions, to teachers, to students, “What’s your favorite way to go to the balcony?” And everyone has one. I mean, it could be just to breathe, like they teach you in meditation... posted on Dec 31 1969 (6 reads)

and part of the difference between now and the mid-20th century is that — and I don’t want to say we don’t have a moral center of gravity — we don’t have a vocabulary of morality or worth or value, except for the creation of wealth. I’m going to use a wealth analogy: We are really impoverished. Mr. Giridharadas:I would think about this almost as the second hat problem, which is, I think if you were to go back a little bit in time and think about businesspeople in 1950 or whenever, they would always have — in addition to their businessman hat, they’d have a second hat. That hat may just be “strong community member”... posted on Feb 22 2019 (4,837 reads)

1966, a dyslexic sixteen-year-old boy dropped out of school. With the help of a friend, he started a magazine for students and made money by selling advertisements to local businesses. With only a little bit of money to get started, he ran the operation out of the crypt inside a local church. Four years later, he was looking for ways to grow his small magazine and started selling mail order records to the students who bought the magazine. The records sold well enough that he built his first record store the next year. After two years of selling records, he decided to open his own record label and recording studio. He rented the recording studio out to local artists, including one na... posted on Jun 25 2015 (24,360 reads)

worked, and it worked incredibly cheaply. He’s been able to measure that and try it in other cities. It’s even being introduced in Syria right now. This idea of trying creative new approaches, measuring them carefully and tweaking the model in a sort of iterative process to get the most impact you can at the cheapest price is such a powerful model. Grant: What can companies learn from this approach? Social impact is a theme that runs throughout your book, and what do you think businesses should be doing differently based on everything you’ve been learning and studying? Kristof: Businesses tend to approach corporate social responsibility [CSR] as this kind of fringe... posted on Sep 26 2015 (12,173 reads)