John Mackey

It is essential that the ‘conscious mind’ of management create a system in which all major stakeholders are aligned with the purpose of the organization and with each other. All should function as organs of a single body (indeed, the word corporate comes from corpus, or ‘body’), and all should be respected.

Trust is the essential lubricant of a smoothly functioning conscious organization... Trust can only be earned slowly, as a result of actions and not just words.

All worthy purposes eventually take on a heroic character, because at some point, vision combines with scale to transform the world. In many cases, the purpose, too, becomes explicitly heroic, far grander in its scope and ambition than anything that could have been imagined at the company’s birth.

You cannot have a conscious business without conscious leadership.

This is one of the most important ideas in this book: If you look for trade-offs, you will always find them. We guarantee this. Humans have a strong confirmation bias. If we expect to see something, we are likely to start seeing it.

Most importantly, I have learned that life is short and that we are simply passing through here. We cannot stay. It is therefore essential that we find guides whom we can trust and who can help us discover and realize our higher purposes in life before it is too late.

Frankl taught that people can discover meaning and purpose in their lives in three ways: by doing work that matters, by loving others unconditionally, and by finding meaning in their suffering.

Purpose, mission, and vision are often used interchangeably. However, it is important to maintain a distinction among the three. Purpose refers to the difference you’re trying to make in the world, mission is the core strategy that must be undertaken to fulfill that purpose, and vision is a vivid, imaginative conception or view of how the world will look once your purpose has been largely realized.

Conscious companies are much more productive than their traditional counterparts. But it is not the kind of productivity that is squeezed out of harried, pressured team members through threats and incentives. It is the kind that results when people are in a state of flow, producing excellence, creating innovations, and loving what they do. You can move mountains with that kind of energy.

But mistakes are actually great opportunities for learning and growth. The idea is not to celebrate our mistakes, but to learn from them as quickly as possible and move on. If we don’t learn from our mistakes, we will keep repeating them, and it often becomes harder to deal with their consequences.

There may be no more important truth in our book than this: What we collectively envision, we can create and bring into reality. Together we create our future reality, so we should do so consciously, collaboratively, and responsibly. The Good, the True, the Beautiful, and the Heroic can be made manifest in our world through the power of our collective creative dreams.