Base of Pyramid (BoP)

Check out this link:
http://www.johnson.cornell.edu/sge/docs/BoP_Protocol_2nd_ed.pdf

Fascinating attempt to build radically new kinds of business models for corporations to 'sell to' the world's poorest (Base of Pyramid) in a win-win way. I like the way they are thinking about their process as a whole...re-thinking models from the ground up. Here's an excerpt:

"The BoP Protocol is a co-venturing process that integrates within a corporate entrepreneurship framework leading-edge thinking across a range of fields, including economic anthropology, international development, empathy-based design, and environmental management. As one senior manager familiar with the process describes, “it is a structured approach to a non-structured challenge.”

Central to the BoP Protocol are the principles of “mutual value” and “cocreation.” By mutual value, we mean that each stage of the process, not simply the new business, creates value for all partners in terms important to each.

The “co-” component of “co-creation” captures the need for the company to work in equal partnership with BoP communities to imagine, launch, and grow a sustainable
business. Co-development catalyzes business imagination and ensures the business model is culturally-appropriate and environmentally sustainable by building off of local resources and capabilities. Importantly, it also expands the base of local entrepreneurial capacity. Key principles, techniques, and methods have been adapted from the fields of “participatory rural appraisal” (PRA) and “asset-based community development” (ABCD).

The “-creation” half of this logic reflects the view that a co-generated business concept has to be enacted through an evolutionary and highly interactive approach that ultimately crystallizes the new value proposition. In the absence of an existing product market that can be researched to reveal customer preferences and needs, the BoP Protocol uses action-learning techniques to roll-out a business concept in a low-risk manner. A “seed” value proposition is progressively evolved by the corporation together with community"

The First Circle

We came together, a group of participants who live somewhere in the overlap between spirituality & business (both words defined in their very broadest possible sense), in NYC last week for our inaugural Discussion Circle.

A documentary film maker/screen writer sat elbow to elbow with a Japanese shoji screen maker; a third world micro finance philanthropist next to a (very busy) hedge fund legal consultant; an advertising executive next to an executive meditation instructor…..more a zen salad than a melting pot.

The ‘shape’ that came to my mind all the way through the dialog was the shape of paradox…something like the poles of a magnet….opposite, but not in a binary sense. One needing and feeding the other in some organic, interpenetrated way.

The pairings of people had this yin/yang quality, but it could also be felt, for me at least, in the energy as a whole, and even the dialog.

Though I was gently moderating the session, and intended to blog about it here after the session, I deliberately took no notes. Normally an avid note-taker and draw-er of napkin sketches, I wanted to see what emerged for me in the half-life of the Circle’s afterglow.

What has come to me so far is this paradox shape. Conceptually, the paradox manifest for me in the tension between, on the one hand, wanting to get the spirituality/business dialog into a vernacular that can be heard and deeply assimilated by business. And on the other not wanting to ‘package’ spirituality as just the latest productivity tool, losing not just the subtly but also the step-change quality of its impact….In short, not letting ego’s game take over & re-creating the same old dynamics, but wit a bow rather than a handshake!

Let’s take the idea of teaching meditation to business executives and CEOs…something that was discussed in the session. Do we Trojan Horse it in there, give it an ROI, or whatever it takes to get the contemplative virus into the system as a whole? One might call this skillful means. Or do we have to resist ‘packaging’ and retain a certain purity of approach that will, by its counter-balancing nature, challenge the substructure of the current system?

A second flavor of this paradox, it seemed to me, was the distinction between impacting business-people versus impacting business-models. If we want capitalism to wake up, do we have to bring self-reflection to the individuals, who will in turn re-shape the system & models of their businesses. Or do we try to show that re-shaping the business models themselves along enlightened lines in will lead to greater abundance and success. “Bring the bottom line, and their hearts and minds will follow”, so to speak. Which has the greater chance of success, the greater speed to impact, the broadest radius of positive change?

The zen salad was food for thought, and I’m still chewing on it….more as it emerges from the field of the future.

Can capitalism wake up?

Word, as is its way in the digital age, is spreading fast.

More and more people are spontaneously recommending that I meet and interview others who live somewhere in the overlap between spirituality (defined in the broadest sense of the word) and business.

And that network effect is what led me last week to be sitting in Pastis splitting a Pellegrino with a man who was introduced to me as an “entrepreneurial mystic I simply have to meet”.

The interview was fascinating, as they have all been (and I’ll synthesize more of it in a later post). But the more remarkable outcome of our conversation, which I want to talk about today, was the desire he expressed to be a ‘guinea pig’(his language).

What he meant by this was that he was not just prepared but eager to try out provocative ‘enlightened practices’ in his own business to help experiment and prove out the case that they can directly and repeatably impact the bottom line. He is also, he explained, part of a loose affiliation of entrepreneurs who try to run their businesses along spiritual lines and who (he felt sure) would be equally willing to participate in such a social experiment.

When I first set out on the interviewing process, I was following a raw impulse. I was also consciously using Otto Scharmer et al’s ‘Presencing’ methodology….go with that initial impulse, talk to interesting people in the space, try to feel what wants to be ‘presenced’ into the field of the future through you and the interviews….

It struck me in this week’s conversation that I was hearing a siren call from this field of the future. Here was an entrepreneur telling me how to structure a living laboratory – a prototyping framework for designing, testing, proving, codifying the fundamental principles of enlightened business really…..how they ‘actually work’ to create greater 360 degree abundance.

It prompted me to ask myself “Why does the ‘field of the future’ wants this?”

And I believe in my heart that the answer to this question lies in timing. All of this is happening now, in New York City in 2008, while we are watching the platform of capitalism burn before our very eyes.

It is a market meltdown unlike others that have preceded it in a number of significant ways…at least significant from the perspective of enlightened business practices:

First, The ‘karmic chain’ (that has always been there) is fully transparent and almost real time. You do bad things (like selling mortgages to people who can’t afford them) and bad things happen to you pretty quickly (you go out of business).

Second, the interdependent nature of the situation (which has always been there) is fully transparent…..the ripple is felt in real time all over the planet through an interconnected economic & informational web

And third, ‘I am that’ (which we always are) – ie: who in America is not using credit to over-leverage in basically the same way as the banks did? Can we really say it’s all ‘them doing it to me’, or do we have to look in the mirror and say ‘I have met the enemy and it is me’?

The shockingly high level of fear that we appear to be experiencing is driven partly, I would posit, by the belief that if we’re not careful we are simply going to re-create the same set of circumstances again….that what got us here will not be what gets us out of here.

In essence then, we just may be living at a hinge on the door of modern economic history – a time when there is a sudden great open-ness to very new ideas about how capitalism should be conducted in the future.

Capitalism will not, cannot, should not go away. It may, however, need to wake up.

If and when the economic fires die down, and if the window of desperation is still open, there will be a space into which quite new models can be seeded. And the field of the future my be trying to give birth to these new models, frameworks, principles….models through which capitalism can re-invent itself to run along more enlightened, and therefore more sustainably profitable lines.

Jane’s 5 Universal Business Laws

Over the course of my interviews so far with people who live somewhere in the overlap between spirituality (defined in the broadest possible sense of the word) and business the most fruitful dialog of all was with Jane (I have changed her name here).

Jane is a partner in a legal consulting firm that operates in the very highest echelons of the world of New York City big finance. She is also a 30-year student of many aspects of Eastern-oriented spirituality. A teenager in the Sixties, Jane maintained, matured & deepened her connection to the schools of Eastern mysticism which blew into America in a rather ‘raw’ form with Hippie-dom and psychedelia.

I met Jane in the formal boardroom of her corporate offices in midtown Manhattan. I explained the subject of my interviews, a little about my motivation for conducting them, and then went right into questions about spirituality and business in the most general sense.

I felt, I have to say, rather intimidated by my surroundings and a little embarrassed to be asking about a think so obviously ‘touchy feely’ to a be-suited lawyer. It was, however, apparent from the first few minutes of the conversation that Jane is, in fact, on a spiritual/business mission…..a mission to help bring business – real, big business - into alignment with what she termed ‘universal law’.

The recent happenings of the stock market are, she explained with the smoothness of a closing argument, the direct consequence of businesses violating this universal law (while still, for the most part at least, sticking to the letter of the corporate law). Even as we speak, the global banking system is - the argument ran - suffering the consequences of operating without a full appreciation of universal (one could say spiritual) truths such as interdependence and cause/effect (also known as karma!).

My goal for the rest of the dialog with Jane was to have her codify what these universal laws are, from her perspective at least. Again, the mission-driven quality of her answers was palpable. The feeling I came away with was that she had been crafting these ideas for many years, biding her time until the ‘market’ was ready to hear them. By ‘market readiness’ here I mean that businesses are in enough financial pain, and finding traditional solutions ineffective, and therefore open to perhaps considering more radical alternatives.

Here then are Jane’s 5 Laws of Spirituality & Business, as best as I could capture them.



1) The law of cause & effect – if an action, policy or institution has negative downstream consequences for any constituent (people, the planet, animals….), that action, policy or institution is sowing seeds that will economically dis-benefit that organization in the longer term. One needs to look no further than how the sub-prime situation has played out for the very institutions that benefitted so enormously in the short-term.


2) The law of intention – The impact of an action taken in any business is ultimately dictated by the intention behind it. It a business gives away a million dollars so it can secure social permission to commit a harmful act, that act of ‘apparent philanthropy’ will backfire. Conversely acts done with positive intent which ‘fail’ or appear problematic at first will eventually accrue benefit to the organization. The J&J Tylenol crisis is a powerful example of this law in action. After finding that Tylenol was possibly dangerous to consumers’ health (unintentional) J&J made a multi-million dollar decision to recall it from the shelves. J&J went of from this crisis to become one of the world’s most successful businesses, with arguably the world’s most positive and valuable brand reputations.

3) The law of abundance – This law poses a radically alternative way to think about resource – as infinite. In this way of thinking, classical economic theory is nothing more than an elaborate form of scarcity thinking….”There is only so much to go around, so we have to fight for a bigger slice”. In abundance thinking, the core premise is that wealth (and everything else) is without end. A new idea is created (out of nowhere….out of creativity), that idea becomes, say, the personal computer, and billions of dollars of wealth is created from that same nowhere. That nowhere is the source of infinite abundance that is available always to everyone.

4) The law of transparency – Nothing is hidden from the universe. There is, in the end, no point in trying to ‘hide’ anything at all. This is in many ways connected to cause and effect and intention as described above. The point is, I think, that there is a lot of talk these days about making corporations more transparent….when in fact they already are transparent. If you are running one of these organizations you may as well accept this fact and align with it more and more fully….because the universe is ‘exposing’ in the end. Look at Spitzer. Look at Kozlowski. Look at Enron. Truth will out.

5) The law of hierarchy – This law could also be expressed in the phrase ‘as above, so below’. Organizations as a whole will mirror almost exactly the core characteristics of their leaders. One way of looking at organizations is simply as a gigantic, amplified mirror images of their leadership. This is not a call to ‘blame’ leaders for the dysfunctions of the organizations, but more a call to leaders to look within and take responsibility for the necessary work on themselves to heal their organizations and help them prosper.

Bottom Line Metaphysics

In preparation for my first set of interviews with a cross-section of people who live somewhere in the overlap between spirituality (defined in the broadest sense of the word) and business, I searched a little haphazardly for frameworks and models that could help set my line if questioning.

I see more clearly, with the benefit of hindsight and of having actually conducted some of the interviews, what I was actually searching for. I was already ‘groping’, in the semi-darkness, for codified connective tissue. I wanted to see the actual building blocks of logic between a defined set of spiritual business practices, and a metricable fiscal outcome. I was looking – as one interviewee put it - for the metaphysics the bottom line.

As well as being a Buddhist I am also a businessman. I was looking for the spiritually aligned principles that would lead to greater success (in the largest and also fiscal sense of the word) for my own enterprise.

What I found was firstly a preponderance of what I will call ‘systems of loose association’. The logic of such thinking systems goes something like this: “If you do such and such kind of good things, then somehow these kinds of good things will result”. Giving money to charities is good for the bottom line in some larger scheme of cosmic refraction.

In short, I can’t help feeling that there seems to be a lot explaining “the what” but not much about “the how”.

And secondly, there is a lot talked about the ‘spiritual qualities’ one might want to bring to the world of work, business and leadership. Qualities like mindfulness, compassion, open-heartedness and so on. This is without doubt an essential element of how a more enlightened paradigm will emerge in the world of business. However, if one applies the stress test of sitting across from a Chief Financial Officer and making a compelling argument, then I can’t help but feel that there need to be more ‘hard’ dimensions to the case for.

That said, I do want to share two of the more intriguing models that I came across. (Just let me say before I begin, any misrepresentation of these models is my fault alone, and results from my lack of a full understanding of their logic….they are pretty complex in their totality.)

These two models stood out to me primarily because of their ‘depth’. By ‘depth’ I mean that they seemed to tie the secular pragmatics of real business right down to the sacred machinery of the great mysteries!

The first model is Theory U (http://www.theoryu.com/) , developed by Otto Scharmer from MIT (http://www.ottoscharmer.com/). As I understand it Theory U is a defined methodology for leading groups systematically into a kind of quantum problem-solving ‘zone’. Think of this as the problem-solving version of what happens when a whole sports team is in perfect synch and appears to be channeling something almost superhuman or beyond themselves.

Scharmer and others are using this methodology and applying it to what might be called ‘wicked’ business problems. ‘Wicked’ problems are defined as highly complex, even chaotic, business probelmes....and are by their nature essentially unsolvable. Said differently they are problems that appear to be ‘tamable’ versus solvable. More and more, it would seem, ‘wickedness’ is the texture and nature of the business challenges faced by large corporations.

Theory U takes the collective mind of, say, a leadership group into a ‘space’ where they are tapping into some greater force field of intelligence that can help them give birth to new ways of tackling the seemingly intractable business challenge.

Here, then, we have a system that starts by defining an almighty business blockage - one that is presumable interfering with productivity and profitability. And that goes on to systematically lead a group into a ‘mysterious’ collective mind zone where new and effective solutions and strategies present themselves as if by magic.

I like this model because I can sit across the table from a business leader and first define his hard-to-crack business challenge, then show him the breakthrough solution generated by Theory U, and then show him the results of that solution in action.

The second model that impacted me viscerally as I did my research was one presented in a weekend seminar by a man who is both a senior teacher in the Shambhala Buddhist lineage and a long-time Wall Streeter (http://www.shambhala.org/teachers/acharya/espiegel.php).

The teachings were a Tibetan Buddhist take on the subject of wealth and power within a contemporary Western capitalistic context. I found these teachings particularly penetrating because they were ‘shocking’ in their core premise…”here's how to leverage Buddhism to generate wealth…and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that!”

I drew a mental picture of the system presented as a kind of pyramid, with the foundational principles as the base and the more advanced or rareified principles as the pinnacle.

The base of the pyramid might be termed clarity. Without a balanced check book, without a crystal clear and solvent sense of what we make, what we spend, what we save, & what we need, we do not have a strong foundation from which to generate increased wealth. The next level of the pyramid might be termed generosity or service. A genuine sense of how your enterprise will serve others is the second foundational principle. What’s this business ‘for’, how will it serve others? This is not, at least to my understanding, a question about philanthropic strategies, but something more about the unique and authentic purpose of the enterprise.

The final two levels are founded on the so called wisdom energy ‘families’…five energetic styles of working with the happenings of everyday life. Of the five wisdom energies, the two leveraged most fully and deliberately for business are the energies of ‘enriching’ and ‘magnetizing’.

The seminar gave very practical, almost manual instructions on how to set-up ‘work with’ the energy of everyday business situations in a way that would attract success, abundance, wealth and power.

I like this model because it helps me design the enterprise, as a whole, along spiritual and ‘energetic’ lines:
- Clarity: what is the business plan & model? Does it actually work? Are we being honest with ourselves here?
- Generosity: what un-filled need are we serving here? What’s our unique and authentic reason right to exist as a business?
- Enriching: getting to know & love our consumers; how do we invite them in, sit with them, feed them, talk with them, become absolutely fascinated with them…
- Magnetizing: 'just right' marketing…how do we resonate at the ideal broadcast frequency to attract our audience to us?

The Economics Of Abundance

One of the interviewees surprised me in the first few minutes of our time together, before I had a chance to ask the first question: “Before we start” she said “tell me your greatest wish for this conversation.” I wasn’t sure quite how to answer, and was candidly a little thrown by the magnitude of the question. I eventually mumbled something about a sense of ‘pockets of business people’ who are realizing that something pretty fundamental might have to change about how business is done, and I’m trying to get a sense for what that change might look like in real terms... Frankly my answer wasn’t all that pointed. However, at the end of the interview I stole a page from her play book and asked “What is your greatest wish for me, now…meaning, what do you wish I would do next with the information I’m gathering from my ‘spirituality and business’ interview project?”

Without missing a beat she answered with a precision and specificity characteristic of all the people I have spoken with thus far. And again, there was that sense of urgency underlying the tone of the answer. “I want you” she explained “to make the mathematical case”. She explained more: someone needs to ‘prove’ that operating in alignment with spiritual principles in a business context leads – causally and undeniably - to a better financial outcome for all concerned. And ‘better’, in this case, means more fiscally profitable today, creating less negative impact on the future, and generating more ‘net human happiness’! In this new ‘economics of abundance’ these three elements are, it seems, not mutually exclusive but rather mutually dependent.

Fascinating challenge. Which I’m grossly under-qualified to tackle…..however….

One of my tactical next steps coming out of this series of interviews is to host a series of discussion groups on some of the core imperatives that emerged from the dialog. And this new economic case was certainly one of those imperatives. Until you can prove that it is good business to operate in an ‘enlightened way’, the logic goes, you will forever be preaching to the converted. In preparation for the first discussion group, I have been pondering models, structures and exercises that might stimulate thinking about making the case. Here are a three. It’s most definitely work in progress:

What does a controlled experiment to test the hypothesis look like? Imagine two basically identical start-up business situations…let’s say two lemonade stands. One operates according to classic, ‘traditional’ business principles; the other operates according to ‘universal law’ (a phrase borrowed from one of the interviewees). What would the core operating principles of the two businesses be, and what would be the key differences. What would you predict the outcome to be & why?

A progressive CEO of a major corporation wakes up (literally and metaphorically) one morning and decides that running her business along more ‘enlightened’ lines will be better for business, for people, for the world and so forth. What would be the three most important shifts she would have to make? Let’s be more pragmatic and consider that questions for three specific types of business – an oil company, a supermarket chain and a sneaker manufacturer. Would the shifts be the same for each or different? What would the commonalities in the shift look like? And what would their business dashboard look like, meaning specifically which metrics of success would be most important to them in the new approach?

And finally, what are the real world cases out there that demonstrate these principles? Who are the businesses and organizations that appear to operate in a more ‘enlightened’ way? How so? How can we draw the economic line from enlightened action to superior results within the context of their business models?

The Interviews

Over the summer of 2008, I decided to interview a handful of people who ‘live somewhere in the overlap’ between spirituality (defined in the very broadest sense) and business. These interviewees included, for example, a corporate executive with a twenty-year meditation practice, a homeopath who counts some of New York’s power players among her clientele, and a legal consultant to hedge funds who took a multi-year sabbatical to study Kundalini yoga.

I decided to conduct the interviews for three reasons. On the most personal level, I am a business consultant and relatively recent practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism. As such I felt a growing need to investigate, and perhaps reconcile, the sense of schism between these two ‘polarities’ within me. Secondly, within my circle of friends and colleagues, and at the level of everyday life in New York City, it seemed as if ‘suddenly everyone is meditating’. Or no longer simply ‘doing yoga’ but now ‘developing a daily yoga practice’, or finding The Secret just old news.

And finally I conducted the interviews from a hard-to-articulate sense that something out there is burning. (All but one interview were conducted before this market melt-down, but the energy of its imminence was in every conversation I had.) On the broadest level, then, I conducted the interviews from a deep sense that the ‘forced separation’ of the realm of business and the real of spirituality is at the root much trouble brewing and boiling over in real time.

The things I heard in these interviews were, to my mind at least, remarkable in at least two ways. First, the ‘energy’ of the responses and the respondents was strong, clear, urgent. It was as if this energy itself commanded me to ‘sit up and pay attention’. And secondly, the themes that emerged were remarkably consistent. As Peter Senge and Otto Scharmer have pointed out in their ground-breaking work on ‘Presencing’, when you ask open questions and then listen quite carefully, you can hear what is trying to ‘emerge from the field of the future’.

Here then is a first installment of what wanted to emerge from the interviews.


The Cosmic Tipping Point is here!


- We are at a “gigantic, cosmic tipping point”, a kind of “second Axial Age” - akin to the one that happened around 2500 years ago when there was a sudden flourishing of major new spiritual/philosophical figures & systems of thinking

- The ‘established way’ is crumbling and some very new paradigm is trying to emerge. The feeling was very much that the ‘point of the tip’ is happening right now, today! Plus a deep sense that ‘it could tip in a very positive or very negative way.” I attempted to tease-out more from the interviews about what exactly is crumbling and what exactly is arising, and how that relates to business.


The Age of Interdependence

- The heart of the interview feedback was that the crumbling paradigm is ‘dualism’ (expressed variously as ‘me versus you’; ‘me right, you wrong’, hierarchy; ‘every man for himself’; ‘logical brain’, ‘patriarchy’…). And the emergent paradigm is ‘interdependence’ (‘we are all connected’, ‘collective intelligence’, ‘intuitive brain’, ‘effect follows cause’..)

- One interviewee articulated this shift very succinctly in respect the nature of current day business challenges – “the new kind of (business) challenges are the exact opposite of the Moon Shot. That was ultimately macho. One problem, one solution. Solved by hard logic. Conquering the thing that couldn’t fight back. Because it’s there. Essentially & fundamentally pointless! We can’t go looking in that same part of the brain to solve today’s challenges….the answer is just not located there.”

- Another interviewee laid-out an ‘interdependence manifesto’ for me, as if she had it already etched in stone and ready to roll. She told me
o “Not operating in accordance with the laws of the universe is ultimately a recipe for business failure
o More specifically, not recognizing the truth of interdependence and cause & effect is ultimately doomed
o Quite to the contrary, recognizing and operating in alignment with these universal laws & truths is a recipe for tapping into an unlimited supply of ideas, creativity, innovation, complex problem-solving abilities (the very resources that will be required to thrive in the new economy)
o In essence, recognizing and operating in alignment with these ‘truths’ is a recipe for tapping into an unlimited supply of abundance…a quantum win-win”

- However, it’s not so simplistic (or dualistic) as ‘something is ending and something else is beginning’, but perhaps that we are waking up to the truth that it has always been thus. As one interviewee explained
o Business and spirituality were never separate to begin with. The failure to recognize this inter-connection is what is manifesting today as toxicity in the workplace – stress, anger, distress, impoverishment
o As we reflect on our work lives we come to feel that ‘something is missing’. There is, perhaps, a growing reflection on this question of ‘what’s missing’ these days



We are the change


- I offer-up here the energy of the interviewees in terms of wanting to be part of helping the balance tip the ‘right’ way. Here is some of what they had to share about their aspiration to play a role in helping the change along
- “For those who are ‘tuned in’ to this meta-change, there is a deep sense of urgency…the whole meta-system will either tip in a ‘healthy’ or very destructive way”
- “For the scales to tip towards the positive side, one of the many things needed is to be able to translate some core ‘spiritual’ imperatives and concepts into the language of business. This is very challenging. The deeper one goes into the spiritual dimension, the more challenging it becomes…Just try bringing the discussion of, say, a Higher Power into the board room and see what happens!”
- “At the heart of this lies the challenge of making a clear, compelling and credible connection between positive ‘spiritual principles’ and tangibly better business results (versus a framework that pits ‘doing good’ against ‘doing well’)”
- “Those of us who live in the cross-over between these two worlds (of spirituality and business) and have recognized this challenge have our work cut out for us. Some of our key tasks/roles are
o Translation – how to translate these ideas so that they are hearable and digestible by the business world
o Innovators – how to build new kinds of frameworks and approaches that live in the cross-over space between the paradigms
o Prototyping – trying different models, experiments etc. until something sticks and works
o Propagators & networkers– how to spread the word, how to find each other and build critical mass”
- And finally, for this installment at least, I end with input from one of the interviewees describing in remarkably direct and daring language how the ‘worlds’ of spirituality and business are not two but one. “For me personally, as a (multi-billion dollar) company president, I always operated from an understanding that the success was coming through me not from me….that I am always tapping into an infinite source of abundance in a very real and ‘measurable’ way. The doubters would hear my approach and say it was soft, not realistic, and I would tell them ‘Just watch my results’…and I consistently delivered four, five, six times above my benchmarks.”