Translator: Claudia Sander Reviewer: Denise RQ
I am a capitalist, and I believe in profit.
(Laughter)
What we've learned so far from capitalism along all those years
is that it created a lot of wealth to us.
It helped us to develop
but looking carefully, we also realize that it is destroying value.
So, to know how to improve this, we need to understand what is happening.
Why are we destroying value with the current system?
About 25 years ago another economic system imploded,
and the way it is, it seems that capitalism goes in the same direction.
We watch and think, "Are we going to be out of options?"
"Which one will be the next economic movement or economic system?"
To understand what is going on, we need to access the root cause,
understand what is happening with this system, so we can try to fix it
and create a new form of economic system to live with.
Then a first theme here, burning in hell,
is institutions' credibility.
Large companies have the lowest credibility level of recent years.
This is a survey done in the United States.
Credibility is so low that can be compared to Congressmen's credibility.
It couldn't be worse, right?
Only as a reference:
religious institutions' credibility is a little higher, but also declining.
As this institutions' credibility problem wasn't enough,
another problem is that all those people earning wages to work
have engagement problems.
Twenty percent of those guys play against their teams.
They are internal terrorists inside organizations.
Fifty percent play only to fulfill the fixture.
They do only when they are asked to,
they deliver only when they are chased up.
The championship is over, there is already the champion and the downgraded team,
and I have a game to play.
Scoring a goal or not, winning or losing,
I won't move in the table, nothing will change.
People come to work and leave as soon as they can. It's 5pm, they leave.
Thank God we have 30% of people who are still engaged.
And when I saw that 30% are engaged, I said,
"Where is this? What is happening? Is there any sector where this is better?"
Then I found an increasing group.
Which group is this?
We have this group here.
Nearly everybody.
It is the voluntary work team, that does without receiving.
Then you say, "Gee!"
And this is a statistic from the American government.
So there is a place where people are more engaged in what they do.
How do we learn those things? What is happening?
And the last point:
when we look at our planet, 6, 7 billion inhabitants, and we say,
"Development is having the same standards as the United States, Europe, Japan."
But if the entire world consumes the same way those guys do,
we will need, at least, the resources of four planets.
So this is not the way, right?
Because when we have to throw something away,
we throw it away in the garbage can.
In some places we separate, recycle.
But when the planet needs to throw something away, where does it go?
We can't hide it.
We are in a destructive movement.
Do you agree?
Considering all that, there is a new movement emerging.
A movement that will allow us to produce more,
to produce better, and with more quality.
This movement is the "conscious capitalism".
Conscious capitalism is a different way of capitalism.
What is this different way of capitalism?
It starts with a higher purpose.
It's purpose is other than profit.
Profit becomes the consequence of this purpose.
Another important thing in this conscious capitalism movement
is the concept of "stakeholder".
What is a stakeholder? They are the participants.
In a company, they are the employee, the client, the supplier, the community.
I will explain a little more about stakeholders later.
The third point is the conscious leadership.
We can only start a movement towards conscious capitalism,
with a conscious leader, who will take us there.
With a bigger purpose, in order to engage stakeholders.
And from that we can create an engaging culture,
a transforming culture.
Those four elements will define
a new kind of company, the conscious company.
When we have several conscious companies,
we'll be at a conscious capitalism system.
So, to be clear,
we are in a moment of life, of mankind -
we have the highest educational level mankind has already had.
We are more connected than we have ever been.
We have access to information -
an ordinary person today has access to more information,
than the richest person, ten years ago.
And the most interesting: the fact that we are connected.
Fifty years ago, half the population had never made a phone call.
Today we have more active telephone lines than inhabitants in the planet.
This shows that we are in a transformation moment.
And in this transformation moment, we can choose: to be a protagonist,
take the lead and make the transformation;
or wait for the next train, be a mere supporting actor.
So this is a moment of big transformation of the society;
let's be protagonists.
Let's be protagonists of the transformation of capitalism,
starting to work with purpose, in order to engage stakeholders,
engage participants - employees, clients, suppliers -
engage everyone with a leader who will take us through this path,
and create this culture of transformation.
I will draw a parallel with my work.
I work in the food production chain.
Something cool about the food production chain
is that, even so it is a very fragile sector,
it is also a very powerful sector.
Why?
Why is it so powerful?
Because food is the biggest social network in the world.
Food joins people to produce,
to prepare, and to consume.
In addition, the majority of celebrations involves food,
so it is very important in our lives.
So our work was a work of integration.
We created an integration methodology in the production chain.
We take this guy here in the producer, in the middle, isolated,
and integrate him with the whole production chain.
That work generated from digital inclusion -
because we arrived where Google didn't arrive -
to income and revenue improvement;
profits of all participants in this methodology increased.
What? Profit? Traditional capitalism?
No. The difference is that profit was the result of joint effort,
not from isolated effort.
And this made the big difference.
And when we watched and asked, "What are we effectively doing?"
Mission, vision, this is something difficult to explain to producers.
So we said, "Let's create a belief, what do we believe we are doing?"
We are transforming the food production chain. How?
"The path to result depends on everyone."
And each one achieves the aimed result.
Some people want profit, others want quality, quantity, and so on.
And when we talk to the producer, we explain,
"If one steps on the tomato, everybody splits."
If there are news about contaminated tomatoes,
what happens with the market?
Everybody stops buying tomatoes.
Indiscriminately, it doesn't matter
if I produce organic or conventional tomatoes;
if the excess of pesticides was here or there, everybody loses.
So the path to results depends on everyone.
This was the belief we built into our system, within our process.
Then we realized how people ended up earning more money.
We started to realize
the producer's performance across the food chain.
And then quality and quantity were not a paradigm any more.
You only reach high quality levels when you have low quantities.
Or, when you produce high quantities, quality lows.
We were able to break this paradigm.
And this is the traditional paradigm of capitalism:
someone wins and someone loses.
We changed this -
When we aligned the food chain around a common purpose, everybody won.
Everybody understood where losses were happening.
And watching this story, where is the purpose?
Let's go back to the conscious capitalism: our belief was the purpose.
"The path to results depends on everyone."
Second, stakeholders. Who are the stakeholders?
The most famous stakeholder is the shareholder, the investor.
He invests at the beginning, and receives leftover money at the end.
So he makes a lot of pressure to have money left over from the business.
But the stakeholders, all the participants, recognized
that the chain strength is on its weakest link.
If this link breaks, everyone loses.
And we can't let anyone loses,
otherwise the chain will blow away.
Within this idea, when we look at the concept of sustainability,
we have in mind the traditional concept, the three circles:
environmental, social and economic.
The economic circle is the company, where profit lies.
There is not such thing as intersection.
This is an academic illustration, and it went wrong,
because when someone has an environmental problem
he invests in a school from a poor neighborhood.
Just as a magician, "Look at this hand here!"
while the other hand makes the trick on the other side.
So it is important to know that this is the new stakeholder's vision.
There is only one planet.
We won't have four planets to supply our demands.
We have only one.
Community is embedded in our environment, in our planet.
And, the most important, business is embedded in the community.
The day we start looking this way, we will get a better sense
that there is no intersection.
One circle is embedded in the other.
To illustrate the collective impact of the stakeholders,
this is an Olympic Stadium,
where we have two different 400 meters races.
In one of them, the athlete runs alone and the world record stands on 43 seconds.
But when you gather four runners to run together,
in a coordinated, synchronized manner, with the purpose to win,
they are able to run the same track
in 36 seconds.
In other words, together we don't just go further,
we can also go faster.
So, that is the stakeholder paradigm.
We must work together to reach best results.
So the trade-off paradigm we live today is over.
I can't have something despite of something else.
We need to accept that everyone has to win.
We have to create value so that everybody participates equally.
Otherwise, one day the chain will break.
What is the difference on this race?
The finish line is a finite metric.
Different from the purpose, which is infinite.
Talking about purpose,
there is one which is always interesting to illustrate,
"To organize all information of the world and make it universally accessible."
Every minute, every second, we have more information available.
So this never ends.
This is a kind of purpose.
The purpose to serve.
The strongest purposes out there are those to serve.
Returning to the third principle - we talked about purpose and stakeholders -
leadership.
Leadership in conscious capitalism
is not a revolutionary bottom-up movement.
Why is that?
Because somebody in economy, in a company, owns the right to decide.
This is not a democratic decision made by a council.
Someone owns the right to decide how company's resources will be used.
So the leadership has a critical role.
The leader must have a distinctive consciousness level.
When we talk about leaders we always remember a speech
that occurred at this square in the United States,
during Civil Rights Movement,
and one person, when telephone services were limited
and internet did not exist, gathered 250,000 people,
not to say that he had a plan, a finite idea, "We will go there..."
"I have a dream."
This is a purpose. It has the power and engages people.
And with all those principles we created this.
A culture with power to transform.
A group of people,
highly engaged,
to reach such a goal.
Those from Rio de Janeiro know,
whoever experienced a samba school parade understands its power.
How long do people work for one day?
Sometimes for one parade?
So this is the power of a purpose, to transform and create a culture
with all this power.
Within our universe where corporations have the lowest level of credibility,
people are not engaged, there are internal terrorists where they get paid to work -
non-remunerated activities raise engagement,
people have more interest.
Our consumption level is out of reality.
These are problems we have to face.
And conscious capitalism can help us with this.
So within this approach of conscious capitalism,
doing good is not a good business, it is the best business.
For those skeptics,
companies classified into this model -
in the last 15 years their stocks
increased value ten times more than average market.
What does this mean?
In 15 years, market index raised 160% in the United States.
Companies with these characteristics raised 1,600%.
That is such a difference.
Those who don't believe in purpose,
believe this way returns more money.
So today we have the opportunity
to live the most meaningful and impactful life
a human being have ever had the chance to live.
I invite you all to look for purpose, to work with purpose,
and engage with business and companies that have a purpose,
to create this conscious capitalism.
Thank you.
(Applause)