“I was having a drink with the CEO of one of the largest oil companies in the world and he admitted, 'Yes, I'm concerned. You are absolutely right. This world is going to pieces.' And then he said, 'But, hey, what can I do?' ”

STEP BACK, WAY BACK. THINK OF THE MAJESTICALLY spinning globe we live on. What comes to mind? The striated blue and white marble that the astronauts first saw, vivid against the endless blackness of space? Or the familiar shapes of the continents, with green lowlands and the ridges of mountains like backbones pressing up through the earth? Perhaps you see the play of primal forces—water and wind—as they rapidly shift and move in cloud patterns across the expanse of land and sea. Or take a look at the lights that glitter on its darkened surfaces, connected by currents of electricity that allow us to communicate instantly with anyone, anywhere. Sense the uneasy alliances of democracies, socialisms, monarchies, and dictatorships; the conflicts constantly flaring up, threatening to ignite larger conflagrations, as the interests of cultures and peoples chafe against each other around the globe.

Only a few decades have passed since space travel opened our eyes to the awesome sight of our shared home suspended in the void. Since then, our world seems to have become more fragmented than ever, even as we are bound together more tightly than ever—beyond nation, religion, or ideology—within the web of commerce. Networks of reciprocity now connect the penthouses of Park Avenue with the shantytowns outside Nairobi. Through the development of the capitalist business corporation, we have taken an extraordinary evolutionary step into a complex global interdependence. These giant organizations—Mitsubishi, Nestlé, and DaimlerChrysler, or some so familiar that they go by acronyms such as IBM, GE, GM, HP—are liberated from the constraints of location and national affiliation, extending their influence from Boston to Bangkok. Operating within the stratosphere of international capital markets, they have amassed resources and power that rival those of many nations. In fact, of the one hundred largest economies in the world, fifty-one are multinational corporations and only forty-nine are actually sovereign states. Between their economic clout and their cross-cultural people power, business corporations represent a leap in humanity's capacity to organize for a shared purpose.

Generating a constant demand for creativity and innovation, businesses have literally driven the transformation of the modern world. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, which became Bell Telephone, which gave birth to Bell Labs, which created the transistor, which brought in the electronic information age. The list of consumer goods that have appeared in an evolutionary eye blink—from toothpaste to liquid floor wax to aspirin to contact lenses—is virtually endless. We've traveled from the horse and buggy to the SUV in less than one hundred years because of the relentless demand that business creates for the new. And it's only getting faster. Disney is producing and launching a product every five minutes. Sony launches three new products per hour. Seventy percent of Hewlett-Packard's revenue comes from products that didn't exist a year ago. This constant rush to market has dramatically improved and transformed human life—doubling our life expectancy, improving the quality of living, and expanding the horizon of possibility into the stars.

At the same time, the rush to capture more market share, propelled by the profit motive, has caused untold damage to this planet and its people. Burmese villagers recently sued energy giant Unocal for “encouraging” the Myanmar military—hired to oversee the construction of a gas pipeline through the country—to subject the villagers to forced labor, murder, rape, and torture. Coca-Cola is under scrutiny from watchdog organizations for water pollution and for creating “opportunity” from water scarcity. It's hardly refreshing to read in their 1993 annual report that “all of us in the Coca-Cola family wake up each morning knowing that every single one of the world's 5.6 billion people will get thirsty that day. If we make it impossible for these 5.6 billion people to escape Coca-Cola, then we assure our future success for many years to come. Doing anything less is not an option.” The momentum of the corporate juggernaut is so powerful—fueled by the most basic human survival and status needs—that altering its course seems almost impossible. “We are not just marching toward disaster,” says noted business consultant and author Ichak Adizes, “we are sprinting toward it.”

However, there is another powerful force working within corporations—an unpredictable human force. The breadth and diversity of people brought together within them, beyond nation, beyond religion, race, or caste, is utterly new. Over one million people work at Wal-Mart, the largest employer in the world. McDonald's may be the largest employer of youth on the planet because McDonald's is nearly everywhere. And as more and more people engage with each other in a globalizing workplace—the haves brushing shoulders with the have-nots, one culture pollinating another—a pressure is building. Inside and outside of these organizations, there is a growing appreciation of the effects of corporate activity on the planet and its people, a dawning recognition that we are one humanity inhabiting one world.

What if these gargantuan entities, filled with the creative potential of thousands of human beings, were to awaken to this new global reality? I asked this question of some thirty business leaders and consultants engaged in the nitty-gritty of corporate change. They all agree that if business were to awaken, and then to change, it would have an unprecedented impact—transforming the world in ways we cannot even imagine. In fact, some say that it would create the context for a new level of global consciousness. But can the corporate juggernaut—embedded as it is in all of the economic systems on this planet—really transform itself fundamentally? What would it take to free the creativity and stop the destructiveness of these powerful engines of commerce? Change at this level has never been consciously undertaken before. Will it happen? That depends, these remarkable individuals are saying: World-transforming change is possible, but only if we are willing. And that big “if” will determine what kind of future we will have—or whether we will have any future at all.

THE BIRTH OF THE CORPORATE MACHINE

“There are people you should be interviewing who are far more hopeful than me,” says Meg Wheatley, author of the paradigm-busting Leadership and the New Science. Her eyes narrow slightly and her short-cropped red hair seems to have a wired intensity as she gauges my response. Just a few minutes ago at the Shambhala Institute's Authentic Leadership conference, she was relaxed and smiling, riffing with the small group around her on the four karmas in Buddhism. Now, as I explain to her the topic of my inquiry, she looks almost forbiddingly stern. “I just think that the amount of change that is required to make businesses work from values that are truly sustainable—like community, health, caring, trust—is not possible within the existing machine. The whole system is so large and destructive.”

Her response goes to the heart of the matter—or perhaps I should say, to the lack of heart in the matter. The whole problem is the machine—not simply the grinding gears of a globalizing economic system but an entire way of thinking, or level of consciousness, that views everything in mechanistic terms. This mindset was the catalyst for the ingenious inventions of modernity, which catapulted a significant portion of humanity out of the superstition and poverty of the premodern world. The first scientists of the Western Enlightenment—geniuses like Newton, Descartes, and Bacon—studied nature to learn the workings of God, the ultimate watchmaker. Over time, God dropped out of the picture as the theory and practice of objective scientific inquiry drained the sacred from the material world, leading to the assumption that the entire physical world (ourselves included) is a soulless machine. Freed from thralldom to Church dogma, we human beings applied our God-given intelligence to creating in our own right. This liberated creativity was the oil in the engine of the Industrial Revolution. And the machine was the perfect metaphor for the age.

The creative explosion of modernity led to exploration on all fronts—and the capitalist corporation was born out of one thrust in that exploration. Many of us may recall from history class that the United States was settled by a corporation, the Massachusetts Bay Company, which was chartered by King Charles I in 1628 to colonize the New World. These commercial enterprises came about when the ruling monarch of the most aggressively trading nations—Holland, England, and Spain—granted a charter for a specific purpose and length of time to merchants who were seeking investors for global ventures that were too costly for them to finance themselves. Nation building and capitalism went hand in hand: in return for the charter, these companies expanded their governments' power through colonization, annexing resources (including slave labor) and markets in which to sell goods.

The corporation is the financial mechanism that built the modern world. Originally, these business entities served the public good—creating, for example, the railroad systems that made it possible to trade merchandise efficiently all over the world. Because corporations were granted a charter, over time they began to be recognized as legal entities in their own right—legal entities that could protect investors from any wrongdoing committed by the corporation. If these often-risky ventures went awry, neither the investors nor the business leaders could themselves be sued: their liability was limited to the money that they put in, which made investing in a corporation very attractive. However, it also made fraud very tempting. Even the first corporations were plagued by scandal, as unscrupulous “jobbers” (the great-great-great granddaddy of today's stockbrokers) sold shares in fake companies to naïve investors. Over the intervening centuries, as capitalism took off, its purpose changed from public good to the amassing of private wealth. The engine of capitalism, the business corporation, gathered a tremendous momentum and power in the nineteenth century—a time of enormous enterprise and social inequality.

The protection of shareholders' investment became the sole mandate of the corporation. In one legal case after another, the courts stood on the side of capital, ruling that the corporation's responsibility is almost exclusively to the shareholders who own it rather than to the employees who work within it or those outside who are affected by it. Now, with markets wired around the world, the pressures of stock buying and selling place a ceaseless demand on publicly traded corporations for short-term profits via dividends or higher stock prices. This legal mandate to earn profit for owners/shareholders is the reason so many corporations seek cheap labor overseas, abandoning the towns and communities where they were founded. Short-term profit drives large corporations to buy up small companies and inventions that “threaten” them with potentially costly change—and then do nothing with those inventions themselves. It's the reason British Petroleum, which is doing more environmentally than most in the oil industry, will inevitably bid to drill along Alaska's Arctic Slope, despite the fact that doing so will very likely destroy the wildlife and aboriginal culture living there. It's the reason Pfizer, which has substantial community service programs, invests little or nothing in attempting to cure simple diseases that kill millions worldwide, like malaria and tuberculosis, but will invest an enormous amount researching baldness because they can make a killing by selling its “cure” to the affluent.

Well-intentioned business leaders are actually prohibited by this legal mandate from being socially and morally responsible. Bob Hinkley, formerly a partner at the prestigious law firm of Skadden Arps, took a hiatus from his practice after recognizing the frightening truth of this. He describes the effect of the corporation with a simple but apt analogy: “If you put a whole bunch of children in a schoolyard, and don't restrict them in any way, it would work for a while, but then the bullies in the group would start to take over, and then you would need to have rules. In the 1850s, we started to introduce this new kind of person into the metaphorical schoolyard—the corporation, which is basically an entity in which a whole bunch of people get together backed by millions and sometimes billions worth of capital. They became the bully in the schoolyard.” Hinkley points out that at this point, corporations are capable of outmaneuvering the legal system: they have well-financed lobbying to create rules that they can live with; they can readily move to jurisdictions with looser laws. Sometimes, they aggressively flout the law, risking prosecution because they have enough money to engage in long drawn-out legal battles—and often they can even afford to lose. He likens today's corporation to Hal, the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which placed its own survival above that of the crew and almost killed everyone on board before its plug was pulled. “It's like that,” Hinkley says with a short laugh. “They were programmed incorrectly. We've introduced this thing into our society that has no bounds on its pursuit of self-interest. It naturally looks for ways to make money. Sometimes it finds legal ways, but with no restrictions on its drive to make money other than what is in the law books, it often tries to achieve its goal in ways that harm the public interest.”

The corporation, writes Joel Bakan, author of The Corporation, is “an externalizing machine.” Corporations have never had to account for the damage that they cause to third parties—their workers, communities, the environment, consumers. In fact, there is a neat economic term for all of this: “externalities.” Externalities are figured into the cost-benefit analyses that all corporations use to make business decisions. Is it cheaper to replace faulty equipment or pay damages to workers who might be injured? Is it more profitable to violate environmental laws and risk a fine or to retool a plant to meet emissions standards? These choices often cause irreparable harm to human beings and society at large. Bakan writes, “Every cost [the corporation] can unload onto someone else is a benefit to itself, a direct route to profit.”

The logic of this economic machine seems staggeringly flawed: that if each individual person and corporation shamelessly pursues his, her, or its own self-interest, a positive outcome will be created for all. It's become more than clear that it doesn't work this way. But this logic is quintessentially modernist. Our modern mechanistic mindset created capitalism, the corporation, and our courts. However, it cannot deal with the level of complexity resulting from the global interconnectedness that it has been instrumental in constructing. Mechanistic thinking is notoriously reductive and rests on simple linear chains of cause and effect. Like any mechanical device, it processes in one direction, along one line of reasoning, oblivious to anything that gets in the way. As Peter Senge, author of the classic The Fifth Discipline and founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning, tells me, “You can't approach a business as if it were a machine and expect it not to operate in blind, machine-like ways vis-à-vis the larger communities and living systems of which it's a part.”

But there is another way of seeing the corporation. Senge says, “You can see it as a machine for producing money, or you can see it as a human community.” How you think about your work and how you function, he observes, are very different depending on which view you hold. Toke Møller, of InterChange ApS, agrees: “We need to wake up to understand that the workplace is a human village. It's a living place. And as we are waking up to the understanding that we are one people living on the globe, we are in a shift between two paradigms.” However, the human village in Møller's new paradigm is different from the village of the premodern world. “The village has to come back,” says Møller, “but this time with consciousness”—conscious of itself as a living system.

So, is the work of the moment to transform the entire corporate machine into a collection of corporate villages? Yes, but . . . is Meg Wheatley's answer—and the “but” is a big one. “That's not my experience of how life works,” she says. “From a living systems perspective, once something has emerged, it's very hard to change it. The big system that has emerged needs to disintegrate.” Drawing on an example from the work of evolution biologist Elisabet Sahtouris, she explains: “When a caterpillar is beginning to transform, imaginal cells from the butterfly start to appear inside the caterpillar and the caterpillar's immune system destroys them. The first response of the system to the new work, to the new models, is to eat them alive because they are a threat. And this is when the caterpillar is in its most voracious state.” Wheatley's current efforts are focused on connecting the imaginal cells of the new paradigm so that “they don't get eaten but get connected so that we can grow, we can emerge into something much more powerful. When the caterpillar finally loses the battle, it turns into a goo—a complete mess—but it's that goo that nourishes the imaginal cells that then turn into the butterfly.”

Wheatley reasonably fears that this change will only come through massive destruction and suffering. “Years ago, I learned from Fritjof Capra, the physicist and writer, that we already know how to create very powerful models of sustainability,” she says emphatically. “I know that we already know how to create high-performance organizations. So the problem is not a lack of data. It's something much deeper and much more frightening, which is that we are either getting paralyzed by the paradigm that we're in or we just don't have enough energy, enough will or courage to say, 'Enough!'” Wheatley is right. It is deeper and more frightening, because the problem is our own level of consciousness. Without realizing it, most of us are caught up in the same mechanistic mindset that invented the modern corporation. That mindset has created our sense of separation from each other and from the living systems of which we are a part.

By and large, Wheatley is walking away from trying to change the machine itself. “It's not the time for revolutions,” Toke Møller agrees. “Now is not the moment to fight against the old. We need to step away from that which doesn't work and begin to create that which works—to enter into evolution.” Møller may be more accurate than he realizes. “Revolution” is a metaphor of the machine age with its wheels and engines, and “evolution” pertains only to natural systems. And we have to evolve our consciousness beyond the machine mind that created the modern world and our modern selves.

LIBERATION FROM THE MECHANISTIC MINDSET

“Right now we are a real pain for this planet,” Dr. Michael Braungart remarks to me on the phone one evening. “But it's only because we are not liberated from the idea that we are bad for the planet and should therefore have fewer human beings or minimize our ecological footprint.” While at first I find it hard to follow him—perhaps it's the German accent—as he continues to speak, his inspired ideas about human enterprise reveal a fresh view on the future that is as magnificent and awe-inspiring as the butterfly's emergence from the cocoon. No longer in the grip of the machine mentality, Braungart weaves one vision of transformation after another. The car turns into a “nutra-vehicle”—what he calls the twenty-first-century buffalo. Not only is nitrogen collected from its exhaust and turned into fertilizer, but every emission from the car is consumable and the car itself is consumed—recycled—in the production of the next line of cars. Industrial upholstery fabrics, notoriously toxic, are now benign enough to eat and miraculously clean the air around you as you sit. This is not science fiction. Braungart is a brilliant chemist, and the mentor and partner of architect Bill McDonough, with whom he coauthored the groundbreaking book Cradle to Cradle. His living systems perspective is a stunning leap out of the mechanistic paradigm: human beings are fundamentally inseparable from the cycles of nature, and should create in alignment with the principles that inform the living planet. Moreover, it takes us far beyond the current belief that life on earth can only become sustainable by restraining our activity and impact on the planet.

“I'm proposing a positive agenda which says, 'Hey, isn't it so nice to see human beings on this planet?'” he explains, speaking rapidly in a soft voice from his home in Hamburg, where he has just put his daughter to bed. “Instead of trying to minimize our damage here, let's think about how human beings could support other species. Because less bad is not good. We call it 'environmental protection' if we destroy a little bit less. It's the same as if I were to say to my little daughter, 'Hey, honey, I'm protecting you—I only beat you five times instead of ten times.' That's no protection. We're feeling bad about being on this planet because we went through a process of emancipation from nature and now we feel bad for what we did during that process. We try to compensate for this by feeling guilty about being here.”

Our emancipation from embeddedness in the natural world brought us into the mind of the machine. However, “this split was necessary,” Braungart insists, reminding us that before the life-enhancing creativity of modernity, “we would have been compost at the age of thirty.” (Remarkably, the word “creativity” only came into use in the late nineteenth century at the height of the machine age.) Only after humanity was able to look objectively at nature and try to figure out its workings did human invention take off—the cotton gin, the steam engine, the railroad, the telegraph, the electric light, and on and on. However, as we have begun to wake up to the consequences of this cultural achievement—to the effect of our mechanistic consciousness on the natural world and on each other—our collective response has been a guilty attempt to minimize our negative impact. Yet, ironically, this position is still within the framework of the mechanistic mindset because it fundamentally assumes our separation from nature. It's in this respect that Braungart's cradle-to-cradle thinking literally reveals another level of consciousness. It not only frees our creative potential from rigid mechanical design but also frees us from our separation from the living world to enable human creativity to be generative and life-giving. His mind is a testament to the potency of a consciousness that is inseparable from and aware of the living universe from which we have emerged and that is compelled by a natural impulse toward growth and evolution.

“Waste is food” is Braungart's motto. “We are the only species that makes unusable waste. So we are in the process of making this whole planet a big graveyard. Every other animal only makes things that are available for others as well. We need to learn from nature that nature only does things that cycle.” Rather than conceiving of enterprise as a linear system that mechanically moves from taking resources to making products to selling them to throwing them away, cradle-to-cradle thinking, Braungart tells me, “proposes to see everything as a nutrient—either as a technical nutrient that is reusable or as a biological nutrient.” Perhaps this is the “goo” that the next phase of human civilization will feed on: the disassembly and reinvention of the unusable products from the first industrial revolution to create new ones for the next.

Braungart observes that many young scientists want to create products that they can be proud of, and so they are designing in a way that is “far more evolutionary than everything that's been done before.” Braungart and these new industry activists are ingenious. “For example,” he says, “we designed an ice cream wrapper that degrades within hours because it becomes a liquid when you take it out of the freezer. But the nice thing is that it is not just biodegradable. That's the minimum. You see, many of us litter, throw away the ice cream wrapper, because it's a way to mark your territory, to show that you are important. But now, instead of trying to minimize our footprint, you can encourage a big footprint. Because the ice cream packaging contains seeds from rare plants, so that by throwing it away, you're supporting biodiversity like every songbird does.”

However, these activists within industry, like the butterfly's imaginal cells, are metaphorically being devoured by the profit-driven machine. Their new products and materials cannot get into the market, Braungart tells me. “There is a big blockade by the middle management,” he says, referring to those who are responsible for implementing the corporation's profit mandate. Bound by restrictive regulations in the United States and still driven by the profit motive, Western corporations go to countries like China and Malaysia in order to continue to produce “low-quality products much cheaper with lower environmental standards.” These products—for example, toys made out of “plasticizers” that give off sterility-causing gases when children chew on them—are real “weapons of mass destruction,” he says. Yet business of this kind continues because, as he puts it, “we have socialized the risk and we have privatized the profit, and that just doesn't make sense.” For change to happen, Braungart asserts, “we need industrial leaders who don't simply think in quarterly profits but who are really thinking about the longer term.” And they will need to “make a personal commitment to 'cradle-to-cradle' thinking.” It's clear that the system needs to change, and it will take courageous individuals to go against its momentum. Corporate leaders will need to risk liberating their own minds from mechanistic thinking.

THE LEADER GOES FIRST

“They come in their helicopters or they fly their planes; they come very discreetly. They come to this place and it's safe,” Brian Bacon, the president of the Oxford Leadership Academy, says of his clientele—some of the top corporate leaders on the globe. They seek him out because they have given their lives to the machine and reality is throwing wrenches into its gears. The old ways aren't working anymore. The mechanistic “command-and-control” model of corporate leadership keeps them locked in the command post, blind to and blindsided by the constant changes of an unpredictable market. And they come discreetly because they know that Bacon's “Self-Management for Leadership” (SML) program is going to take them into terrain that is unfamiliar and dangerous for those who have to be on top of everything: the uncharted spaces within themselves. They come discreetly also because they know that they have to go deeper—both for the sake of their businesses and for themselves—and risk everything to find a new way of being and working that can take them into a new future. Given that their companies' stock prices are partly determined by their steady hand on the corporate controls, they can't risk public exposure of their own uncertainty.

Helen-Jane Nelson, director of the consulting consortium, Cecara Consulting Limited, says that when these top executives begin to realize the impact of their choices—on the environment and on other human beings—“the guilt is enormous, and it's very painful.” The economic logic of the machine age predicted that only good would come from the relentless pursuit of self-interest. Most of these executives didn't realize, when they were climbing their way to the control tower, that they were taking charge of a machine responsible for environmental destruction or human exploitation. “We're at a point,” she says, “where business leaders are beginning to recognize that their businesses are not sustainable, that the whole way that they have been doing business—the pursuit of continual growth—is not sustainable. The planet cannot tolerate it. And they're scared. Some are desperate—they are willing to try anything, because there is a sense that the old ways of doing business are not working.” Moreover, the old economic sleight of hand that allowed companies to simply “externalize” any potential risk is beginning to backfire as they are finding that, on our interconnected globe, what used to be external now has the power to impact them internally.

“Events can occur in one area and cascade with little or no warning to have a huge, profound impact on an organization,” explains Steve Trevino, who advises the blue chip consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. “The time in which businesses are currently operating is vastly different—in fact historically unprecedented—in terms of accelerating change as well as deepening and intensifying complexity. The proliferation of networks is changing the way all business activities have to be conducted.” For example, Trevino notes that experts in the reinsurance industry, which is the economic safety net for the planet, don't think that the system will be able to handle “the financial ripple effects resulting from insurance claims if there is a succession of events like 9/11.” He also gives the example of Nike, which had its reputation as a responsible corporate citizen damaged (and its stock price take a serious dive) after negative stories broke about its third-world factories. Trevino argues that the data regarding our networked interconnectedness is so compelling that anyone who sees it “would be driven to action, to a shift in consciousness, to a recognition that we need to design new systems, new financial models to replace the ones that are at the core of the economic underpinnings of the planet.”

To do that, we need leadership. “The word 'leadership,'” Nelson comments, “doesn't have a Latin root or a Greek root. It's an Old English word that actually means to go first.” She explains that no matter what the means by which one assesses a company, “the consciousness of the leader has a significant impact on the consciousness of the organization.” Thus, increasingly, organizational change efforts are focused on getting the leader to go first—to leap beyond the mind of the machine. “You can't transform a group structure without having the leadership go through some sort of transformation,” asserts Richard Barrett, author of Liberating the Corporate Soul and creator of one of the most widely used means of assessing the level of consciousness (or ways of thinking) of an individual or culture. Given the intense demand on CEOs to create organizations that are more responsive than the rigid, linear machine, an increasing number are becoming willing to embrace radically new ways of working.

Indeed, many of them have reached a point where they have no other option. As Bacon says, “These leaders are under enormous pressure. They're totally committed, intensely driven, and highly intelligent. And for a lot of the time they are utterly miserable. This is what often happens when you get to the top: you invest so much in your career, you end up alienating your family.” And, he says, “The closest friends of a CEO are inevitably connected with work, so for reasons of confidentiality and politics they can't confide in them. It gets very lonely at the top.” But the coup de grâce comes when they realize that their “metrics ability—the ability to get the numbers and steer by the numbers” to consistently crank out quarterly profits—is impossible to sustain in a constantly changing, hypercompetitive, and chaotic market. That's why the average length of tenure of a CEO in the United States is only 4.6 years. In Europe, twenty-two of the top one hundred CEOs were fired in 2003. When the skills and techniques of the mechanistic mind fail them, they slam into a wall.

The way out is literally unthinkable within the iron reasoning of the corporate machine. The first step is a new way of thinking—a new consciousness or worldview that enables us to recognize how everything is interdependent and how connection to a larger purpose is critical for personal and professional success. Bacon cites Epicurus who “hit it bang on the head” about the three things that human beings need to be happy: “First, a sense of belonging in a community of friends; second, freedom—the feeling that your life and choices are in your own hands. And third, a reflective life, which means having the time to ponder where you're going and what is important in life.” That kind of reflection creates a gap in the driving logic of the machine. Through meditation, or what are called reflective action practices, Bacon opens hearts and minds to a new consciousness that brings people in touch with other human beings and a deeper purpose in life.

The result is “good instincts,” as Bacon puts it. And the leaders who have tapped their instincts—“the ones who are able to be 'present' and sense the truth amidst the chaos and then make a judgment call with such breathtaking clarity and decisiveness that everybody knows, snap! this is it!”—are the ones who express a deeper happiness and “can generate a sense of meaning not only within themselves but also in the lives of those around them.” They are not buffeted by the winds that are whipping the organization from without; instead, they drive the deeper currents that keep it on course.

Roger Saillant, CEO of Plug Power, one of the first electric fuel cell companies, has good instincts. Saillant has created an organization that feels different, that has an energy that is palpable. Work at Plug Power “is not your job or my job. It's our job,” he states. “And that's how people become enlisted when we are working together. It is what happens when you think of yourself as having no boundaries, when you think of yourself as working in a field of connection and consciousness.” In creating this organization, Saillant has tapped into something that moves human beings and not just machines: “I believe that people want the truth; they want to learn and grow, to be part of a community and a shared inspirational vision,” he states. “When you try to practice these principles, somehow the universe reaches out and gives you insights that guide you at an intuitive level.” No longer isolated in the command tower, Saillant is part of a neural network of human relationship that learns and grows together.

PULLING THE RELEASE LEVER

When the leader of a corporation gets his or her head out of the machine, the creative force of capitalism is liberated to move in a new direction. Take John Akehurst, the former CEO of Woodside Petroleum Corporation, which is a publicly traded Australian oil and gas production company. Now, Akehurst certainly doesn't look like someone you'd identify in a lineup as a revolutionary. He looks more like a mild-mannered behind-the-desk man—and yet there is an ease and openness about him that suggest far more than the fact that he's enjoying his retirement. John Akehurst, if you hear him tell it, is a transformed man. And his transformation led to remarkable changes within Woodside Petroleum.

As a tough-minded “command-and-control” executive, Akehurst joined Woodside in 1994 to cut operating costs and improve performance. He reduced the workforce by twenty-five percent and, using the best practices known within the mechanistic model, Woodside's performance definitely improved. By 1999, the company had doubled in size and was a very high performer on the Australian stock exchange. Their vision, “to be the best operator of oil and gas facilities in the world,” says Akehurst, “proved to be very inspiring for people in the workplace—for a few years.” While he doesn't know why—perhaps his employees burned out, or maybe the time had simply come—the momentum driving Woodside to be the most efficient oil producer possible came to an abrupt halt. “We ran out of steam,” he says. “All of a sudden, I heard people saying, 'What are we really doing all this for? What's the meaning of all this? Is it all about slaving away to reduce costs by another two or three percent per year for the next decade? What's the purpose of life at work?'”

Akehurst was confounded. And no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't come up with a new vision for the company. They were stuck. Unbeknownst to him, he was hitting the walls of the machine—reaching the limits of his own way of thinking. Through surveys, the top managers discovered that the employees felt that the management didn't trust them and that they were not given an appropriate level of autonomy. “My first reaction as chief executive was to say, 'Well, that's rubbish. Bunch of wimps—tell them to read the authorities manual and get on with it.' Only when this persisted did I start to recognize that there were some more underlying issues to address,” he says. “The behavior that we exhibited in the office was quite inefficient. People used knowledge as power. The interpersonal behavior between individuals was often competitive. We could see the problem, but we were at our wits' end to know how to address it. We knew that we had to pull the 'people lever'—people and values—but the question was How?” “Pulling the people lever”—a mechanistic metaphor if there ever was one—meant that Akehurst and his team decided to change Woodside's culture to bring about greater cooperation and creativity. Little did they know that pulling that “lever,” if you are sincere about creating change, can release you from the mechanistic mindset.

John Akehurst found himself and his top management team in a workshop with Michael Rennie, a partner at the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company, and Gita Bellin, a leader in the human potential movement. The effect of the workshop, which was like nothing they had ever done before, was profound. “Perhaps the biggest and most simple thing that we recognized was that our behavior as leaders was creating the things that we were grumbling about in the rest of the organization,” he recalls. “Other people were not being creative and were not acting autonomously because we thought we knew all the answers and kept telling them what to do instead of giving them directional guidance and coaching them so that they had the space to grow, express themselves in the workplace, and deliver the product of their ideas and efforts on time.”

For Akehurst, the experience was a personal revelation. “I was a bit of a bully,” he confesses, with disarming frankness. Like any modern manager, he says, “I'm very good at analytic things. This is very useful in business. But in our 'command-and-control' environment at the time, I also used my intellect to brutalize people without fully recognizing what I was doing.” Akehurst began to seek feedback from his subordinates: “I'd ask people to point out to me after a meeting if I'd slipped back into some of my angry and bullying ways.” But more significantly, he discovered something about himself that stunned him. “The big thing for me was recognizing that I had not felt joy in my life for a long time. I walked around with this cloud of anxiety: Were we going to make our business performance goals? Had I made the right choice about this, that, or the other?” he tells me. “I recognized that this was not good for the business, and I also had a personal yearning for things to be different. I just knew, 'I cannot go on like this.'” During the workshop, when he finally let go of the “shield” that he had built up on his way to becoming a CEO, “there was a huge sense of togetherness as a team.” Akehurst says simply, “The external environment is not different; it's just that I've chosen a different way of being.”

The machine is not simply a metaphor. It is a state of consciousness. A new creativity can be released when leaders reach beyond the numbers and controls to find out what moves the human beings inside organizations. “What we found was that if you ask people to stretch to reach for a higher human purpose and meaning,” Akehurst explains, “they will be more courageous about what they are doing. Then miraculous things happen that are well beyond the previous expectations of the individuals and the company.” For example, discovering that many in the organization felt ashamed about working with nonrenewable resources (even though the company was also engaged in developing sustainable forms of energy), they faced the issue straight on. “We were able to take on a far more challenging vision. We had the temerity to see ourselves as a service provider to humanity.” Akehurst tells me, “We decided that we were only going to do things if we could be proud of them, which really caught the imagination of the workforce. Someone would say, 'Wouldn't it be exciting for us to go to another country, produce their first oil and gas, and do it in a way that is profitable and actually enhances the unspoiled environment and the economy of that terribly poor nation?' Then people would get really excited, realizing that they could make a real contribution to humanity.” By stepping outside the corporate mindset, Akehurst made possible a new kind of capitalist creativity that is generative.

So the leader goes first. When he or she abandons the command-and-control outpost at the top of the corporate hierarchy and begins to engage in authentic relationships that include shared learning, commitment to a vision, and a deeper integrity, then the blood begins to flow in the organization. But transformation cannot stop with the leader. The machine needs to be dismantled. The whole system needs to change.

WHOLE SYSTEMS CHANGE

Helen-Jane Nelson, or “HJ” as she's known, may be the Lara Croft of the business consulting world. “HJ Nelson is a prototype,” Steve Trevino tells me. “HJ is the model. She has mastered the arcane aspects of all the different cutting-edge systems, from Appreciative Inquiry to Barrett's Cultural Transformation Tools to the different levels of Spiral Dynamics Integral, and others, and she has been able to blend it into a whole.” Through these new approaches to understanding human interaction and growth, Nelson has studied the psychological, socio-emotional, behavioral, structural, systemic, and even spiritual dynamics that shape both the experience of life within organizations and their capacity to respond to our changing world. Speaking with her is an unusual experience because of the quality with which she listens and the fullness of her responses. There's a sense that there are no barriers between us. It's easy to see why she is at the vanguard of a small but growing number of practitioners who are working to release the adaptive intelligence of the living beings who are stuck within the mechanistic thinking that dominates the corporate environment.

“The very mechanical Newtonian construction of the corporation is a fragile design paradigm easily subject to disruption and breakdown,” Tom Rautenberg, a partner at Generon Consulting, remarks to me. Ever since the heyday of the Industrial Age, the corporation has needed mechanics—thus creating the boom industry of business consulting. The first organizational theory was Frederick Taylor's scientific management. Taylorism reduced human work—first on the factory floor and then in the office—to small repetitive tasks timed with a stopwatch. Adding in some leeway for rest, Taylor would calculate production levels that the workers then were required to meet. For the first time, “management” became a specialty that was separate from labor, dividing the workplace by function—and creating the need for powerful, highly paid, and vocal experts to metaphorically hold the stopwatch. Despite the increasing sophistication of management science, the function of business consultants—from large firms such as McKinsey & Co., Booz Allen Hamilton, The Boston Consulting Group, Accenture, Pricewaterhouse-Coopers, and Arthur Andersen, to legions of small firms and solo practitioners—has been primarily to tinker with production efficiencies, cost reduction, sales, and training. In other words, to help the machines ever more effectively churn out commodities and services that produce profit for shareholders.

HJ Nelson is not a mechanic. She is an agent of evolution, working with the most sophisticated understanding and methods available to “tap into what wants to emerge next” in the business as a whole. She works almost undercover, you might say, assessing what is not visible from the prevailing framework—the worldviews, motivations, and aspirations that are alive in the human beings in the corporation. “Over just the last three years,” Nelson tells me, “I've begun to notice that more individuals within organizations say that they are seeking a larger purpose—and this desire is rarely being met.” Something happens to human beings when they become cogs in the corporate machine. As Rautenberg observes, rigid corporate structures “don't nurture the human spirit, because they are not living systems—they're machines. They turn us into mechanical objects.” The mechanical object has a specific routinized function. When human beings are placed in narrowly defined positions where those above control the fate of those below, the effect is to constrain our intelligence, responsibility, and creativity—in short, to constrain our consciousness.

Ironically, given that capitalism ushered in the modern era, the human experience within the corporation harks back to medieval times. It's surprisingly feudal. I was struck by how often the business leaders and consultants with whom I spoke referred to “fiefdoms,” “towers,” and the general climate of fear, paranoia, collusion, and subservience within corporations. In high-stress organizations, says Brian Bacon, “ninety percent of the people don't say what they mean or do what they say. Which is why ninety percent of what should happen, doesn't happen.” From top to bottom in large businesses, individuals frequently feel victimized by the choices they believe they have to make in order to survive. So many of us drop our autonomy, our ethical concerns, and our responsibility for the impact of our actions on others and the world when we cross the threshold into the office. In short, our consciousness seems more evolved outside the office than in it.

However, the disparity between individuals' longing for deeper meaning and the narrow interests of the corporations in which they work holds a powerful potential for change from the inside out. Rather than tinkering with the mechanics of organizations in terms of production efficiencies, Nelson works to resolve this disparity and release creative intelligence by using principles of living systems design. In a living system, changes in the environment stimulate response and adaptation system-wide; living systems naturally evolve. Christopher Cooke, a consultant and master practitioner of Spiral Dynamics Integral, a comprehensive tool for assessing such development, speaks of the phragmites reed as an example: this lowly plant is constantly responding to the bacteria in the water in which it grows. Within three days of encountering a new bacterial strain, the reed naturally produces a perfect antibacterial agent to fight it off. In most businesses, however, the capacity for such intelligent response to the environment is frequently blocked by fear, mistrust, and competitiveness within the organization itself. “By helping to remove the barriers that constrain the innovations and new thinking from emerging within the organization,” Cooke explains, “you get access to the evolutionary impulse that naturally moves human beings forward, an experience of a natural motivational flow.” Nelson, Cooke, and others who work with these approaches use the natural human evolutionary impulse toward greater wholeness to shift the organization's culture so that it can respond with creativity and positivity to a changing global environment.

For the world to change, Nelson says, corporations “need to move from a profit-and-growth, fear-based system to a more humanitarian whole systems perspective.” The demand for change is pressing on businesses and the individuals within them. Outside these nearly feudal corporate structures, a shift in the consciousness of the mainstream is already taking place, moving beyond the creativity of the modern era to a postmodern era focused on personal fulfillment, a desire for authentic relationship, and a growing recognition of our connectedness expressed, for example, in environmentalism. This is the legacy of the sixties. Surprisingly, and not a little ironically given the anti-corporate rhetoric of the post-sixties generations, the capacities of this consciousness carry the potential for transforming the culture within the corporation. It allows the development of “mutual trust and respect,” which Ichak Adizes sees as critical to establishing a foundation within the business to “think globally and act locally.” As he explains, “When there is internal political fighting, disrespect, and mistrust, most of the energy goes into resolving internal political issues and only the surplus that is left goes to deal with the external world. The goal is not to eliminate conflict, which would stop change, but to transform conflict that is destructive into conflict that is constructive.” Key to that transformation is realizing a level of consciousness, a way of thinking, that can cope with the complexity of diverse views and multiple demands.

The problem is that the corporate world has scant interest in change that does not seem immediately related to the bottom line. Efforts to “humanize” the workplace are increasingly prevalent but are rarely more than fancy window dressing. Nelson has been looking for a company that wants to truly evolve: “We need a model,” she says emphatically, “to show that it's possible to have a company be totally sustainable and successful using the current business metrics.” We need, she tells me, to show that whole systems change is possible.

“What is 'whole systems change'?” I ask Nelson. “It has to include all four quadrants,” she says, referring to the basic template of reality that is the foundation of Ken Wilber's integral philosophy [see Whole Systems Change diagram]. Whole systems change has to take into account all dimensions of organizational life: individual and collective, cultural and structural, internal and external. Some practitioners, like Nelson, work with individuals' desire for wholeness and meaning to transform the internal dynamics of the company as well as its vision and mission. Others, like Adizes, shift the power structure within the organization to create a context of trust and respect that then facilitates a shift in individual consciousness. Regardless of the strategy, the whole systems approach aims to systematically shift the entire organization to a higher order of consciousness—one that is in alignment with individuals' aspirations for deeper meaning and real relationship.

This is what we could call intraorganizational change, and even this is just the first level of change needed to rouse the company to life. Releasing the human spirit within the corporation makes it possible for “conscience and consciousness to start to develop in the larger networks or systems of which every organization is a part,” Peter Senge observes. “Because while these corporations are huge entities with hundreds of thousands of employees and operations around the world, they still sit in larger systems. And it's those larger business, educational, and political systems that actually have to transform if our way of living together is to be in harmony with the living systems upon which we all depend.” What Senge is speaking about is the power of interorganizational change. If we think about the company as an organism, then we ask, What kind of relationships does it have? What values does it express? And this takes us far beyond a narrow concern only for the growth and sustainability of an individual organization to question whether or not that organization is responsible in the relationships in which it is embedded. In other words, to ask, Is the behavior of the corporation sustainable in terms of its global effects on human beings and the biosphere as a whole?

It is interorganizational transformation that has the potential to bring to life Michael Braungart's vision of a new capitalist creativity. At this level, the interconnectedness of the corporation with the whole planet and its people demands a different motivation than profit-making. A new kind of self-interest, “a self-interest that emerges from wholeness to the parts rather than from the parts to the whole,” as Rautenberg says, has to emerge as the guiding force for the corporation. Yet such an integral, holistic self-interest demands a transformation of consciousness that takes us far beyond the sixties ethos of personal fulfillment. As corporations increasingly realize that their survival is dependent upon relationships that they cannot control—tribal conflict in a country where they are manufacturing, a shift in the Gulf Stream that changes fish habitats, a stock market that's beginning to be responsive to larger humanitarian concerns—the rigid walls of the machine begin to look like an optical illusion. Everything is interdependent. And creating from this living interdependence takes us beyond what we know how to do. How do you run a company in this context? Answering this question was once “the classic domain of general management consulting,” Rautenberg notes. “But in this new context, it is the point of the greatest struggle and lack of clarity.”

To date, general business theories and practices—even those concerned with corporate social responsibility and environmental sustainability—do not address much beyond the organizational level, which is clearly inadequate to the interrelated global problems that we face. Imagine having a health care plan that only took into account the health of your hand, or a finger on your hand, rather than the entire body. That's an analogy that Frank Dixon, managing director of Innovest, an investment advising firm that rates corporate sustainability, often likes to make to illustrate the need for a whole systems strategy, one that reaches to encompass the well-being of the entire global economic system. Without a way of thinking that starts at that level, and sees each corporation as part of a larger whole, we will never reach the goal of an environmentally and economically sustainable world. If organizational strategy is developed separate from an overall systems strategy, it will not be aligned with the whole system.

“It's never been done before,” says Nelson. “This is the very edge of what we know. And the time has come to show that it can work—because corporations are the most influential institutions on the planet. They have to, and can, lead the way.” Whole systems change depends on two shifts of consciousness. One shift, which makes intraorganizational change possible, frees the individuals within organizations from the feudal mentality that the rigid hierarchies of the machine hold in place. The other shift, which is essential for interorganizational change, must create a new hierarchy and a new leadership to transform the systems that govern global enterprise. This latter shift needs leaders who are grounded in a global perspective that recognizes our interdependence and the constant demand to transform in order to meet our ever-changing world.

But how does consciousness change occur? For some, it takes a stark encounter with the reality that our mechanistic mind has created. For practitioners such as Nelson, it takes bringing into the corporate world the knowledge from spiritual traditions and the human potential movement about higher states of consciousness. These pioneers are developing innovative ways of transforming consciousness within the corporation to create both intra- and interorganizational change. They are all working to change the whole system.