Creating a conscious enterprise

Author

Dominique Conterno, CEN Founder

Conscious Enterprises

All

​Creating a conscious enterprise
The traditional challenges facing enterprising, regardless of their sizes from sole traders to large corporations, fall into three categories:

• Risks as an enterprise’s aims are always based on the promise that a product or service will be successfully marketed
• Leadership is highly required as the enterprise must be led by its drive, determination and energy. This will allow an enterprise to overcome any challenges it meets on its way to success in launching new businesses
• Imagination is also required to understand market opportunities and come up with solutions

This leads to the conclusion, in the best-case scenario, that an enterprise is only successful if it meets these three criteria and therefore generates lots of sales and money. This is because the two key factors are stability and ability of an enterprise to grow. But is this conclusion everything that can be said about an enterprise? Is there anything else we ought to consider?
Yes, the missing dimension so far has been the human element, either as the entrepreneur or as a society. Classical capitalism has led the world to a crazy state of being.  The lack of real human considerations has reached levels that were unsought before. Everyone and everything become just numbers in a society regulated by glorified and mostly unqualified accountants. In such a world, empathy, emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence are greatly lacking. Fortunately, more and more entrepreneurs and enterprises are becoming aware of the old shortcomings and want to add value not only to their lives but also to societies.
The first question for entrepreneurs and anybody working for enterprises is to understand what their most important values are. These values must be important as well as physically, emotionally and spiritually enriching both for the entrepreneur and for society. Once you have created your journey in understanding the values you will hereafter be championing, you need to make sure that everyone, shareholders, partners, employees, suppliers and customers, feel included in your conscious culture. How will you communicate? Conscious communication demands that no egocentric or selfish purposes are employed to manipulate others. In effect, you do not want to benefit a few to the detriment of the many. Its aim is to create a positive environment for all where compassion and respect reign. Therefore, sharing your conscious culture to others is in many ways educational and powerful.
Who will abide to the conscious culture? Trust is the key element as enterprise data may have to be shared across organisations in a way that it is never doctored for achieving manipulation rather than understanding. Enterprises’ executive teams must fully embrace this principle they want to create the required trust across all employees, suppliers and customers. This also means that your executive team must not only commit but deeply understand the enterprise conscious culture. Indeed, when recruiting executives and other employees, emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence may play a critical role in the selection criteria. Your HR department or activities must fully enforce this requirement.
Being a growing conscious enterprise also means that internal or external training in conscious matters must also be implemented.  We are living in a dangerous world that is growing very quickly to a size that can make it explodes at any time… hence the importance of keeping everyone, from directors, managers and all other employees, in the enterprise focused on the conscious culture and what it means in today’s world.
To satisfy your internal conscious culture, programs such as wellness, will have to be implemented. A conscious enterprise can only be healthy if its human components are also healthy, or at least given the opportunity to be healthy. In a broader sense, this means:

• Quality over slavery. Employees work for creating values not for matching present hour constraints. Gone is the 9-5 philosophy
• Flexibility over rigidity. Working from home, having time to take kids to school and picking them from school demonstrate a few of the flexible adjustments a conscious enterprise must make
• Empathy over ostracism. Everyone has the right to be heard and understood, with respect and care. This does not only apply to enterprise specific topics but also to individuals’ ones
• Education over indoctrination. A conscious enterprise thrives on ensuring that his members keep on learning new skills, whatever they are, as well as the society it revolves in
• Caring over uncaring. A conscious enterprise stands for caring for its members and its society. Standing for the goodness, wellness and education of everyone becomes paramount
• Political soundness over political correctness. Conscious enterprises have a great political responsibility as they must educate and nurture conscious politicians for changing the world to a better place for all of humankind