Two Ways of Prospering

Beingful leader-sages such as Paul Polman, Jochen Zeitz, and Azim Premji represent a well balanced synthesis of leadership qualities because of their focus on the higher relationships and shared purpose of business. 

For a sage, the lower bird in the tree of business life connects directly and steadily to the higher bird because the higher bird embodies integrity and radiates trust. These qualities have become absolutely critical because of the erosion of societal trust in business since the financial crisis of 2008. Business leadership urgently needs to address the widespread public perception that companies prosper at the cost of society.

The wealth creation that illustrates a Beingful approach is one where the long-term stakeholder wellbeing is improved from the beginning of the wealth creation process. By involving key stakeholders from the beginning and considering their different levels of identity or sense of self, the wealth co-created by business is real, relevant, and long lasting. I was an affiliated scholar at Stanford University’s Kozmetsky Global Collaboratory, where we defined such wealth as shareable prosperity and explored how it could be created where it was most needed. Shareable prosperity begins with a mind-set that is beingful, where a sense of inner abundance leads to shared external prosperity.

When wealth is created in ways that do not add real value to society, economists call it rent seeking. It is defined as “getting income not as a reward [for] creating wealth but by grabbing a larger share of the wealth that would otherwise have been produced without their effort.” Rather than create new wealth, rent seekers take wealth away from others. Under rent seeking, wealth acquisition becomes a zero sum game where there are winners and losers. As a result, private gain is not aligned with societal gain.

There are grounds for arguing that many important business innovations in the financial sector in the last thirty years have relied on rent seeking rather than real improvements in business productivity or efficiency. These innovations have been directed at increasing monopoly power, circumventing government regulations, taking advantage of imperfections in the marketplace, and enabling unequal access to relevant information.

As a result, the gap between the richest 1% and the remaining 99% of US society has widened, as it has elsewhere in many other countries in the world.