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Is LOHAS the Business Culture of the Future?

With this worldview, we’ve created unprecedented wealth, knowledge and communication. And, we’ve created environmental toxicity, cheap throw away products, denatured industrially-produced food, and a culture of low self-esteem and spiritual poverty.

Since the 1960’s, there has been an increasing counter-cultural rejection of this worldview, and a declaration of the value of healthy food and lifestyles, social justice and environmental sustainability. New generations of LOHAS entrepreneurs have emerged – people who express those values with distinctly capitalist solutions for improving quality of life.

Is there a distinctively “LOHAS” business model?

Does having a healthy, sustainable product imply having a healthy, sustainable business culture to produce it? Are LOHAS businesses really run differently from “conventional” businesses? I believe the answer is YES.

I’ve been interviewing business leaders in the LOHAS sector for the last two years, and have more recently begun sharing these conversations on internet radio. There are common threads in these stories, threads very different from what I was taught in business school 25 years ago.

A New Metaphor – Business as a Living System

The models we use to visualize business, far from being abstract business school stuff, are actually critical. The metaphors we use to describe the world inform our sense of what is real, our ability to imagine possibilities, and the choices we make. If we think the world is a machine, a fundamentally meaningless bunch of stuff, we see and act accordingly.

“Common sense” in the modern world emphasizes the separation of the self from nature, and a linear notion of cause and effect. This shows up in business planning models that view markets and organizations as machines, to be “managed” via command and control.

The business metaphor is changing from that of a linear, mechanical system to a complex, biological one. Your business environment is more like a forest than a set of gears. As a result, today’s emerging business planning models imagine enterprises as interdependent networks of resilient, individual players. Processes of planning and change are not straight lines from A to B, but cycles involving action, learning and adaptation.

Valuing Multiple Stakeholders

If you see your business environment as a machine, you want to improve your ability to manipulate it. If you view your business environment as a forest, you see a variety of plants and animals that behave according to their own rules, rules that you need to understand and respect.

In the industrial age model, business exists solely to make a profit for shareholders. LOHAS strategies begin with the intention to respect the values and needs of all the stakeholders they touch. The forest is only healthy if all the plants and animals in it are healthy. The value of a business model is maximized when all the players – investors, suppliers, employees, consumers, communities - benefit from being a part of it. And in a surprising number of cases, returns to investors are just as good or better.

Collaboration and Trust

Industrial age systems get people to work together by command and control, carrots and sticks. Networked organizations require greater skill to enable people to collaborate. Why is this essential? In a complex world, no one person can see the whole picture. Wise leaders tap into the collective intelligence and motivation around them. This means building trust.

Effective collaboration requires trust in order to creatively innovate and solve problems, negotiate healthy win-win agreements, and manage performance based on agreement rather than on power.

Head, Heart and Hands

It’s striking how many LOHAS leaders benefit from practices like yoga and meditation. These practices develop personal resilience and creativity, integrate mind and body, and enable one to act confidently within that more complex view of reality. We often use the term “authenticity” to describe this way of being.

To be authentic is to know and act from the heart, as well as the head. In the language of the heart, having the right questions is more valuable than having all the answers. Authenticity is a confident, wholehearted state of being that puts all these ideas into practice – purpose, complexity, interconnectedness, respect, and collaboration.

Is LOHAS the business culture of the future? If evolution is about adapting to greater and greater levels of complexity and intelligence, I believe it will be.

Dan Montgomery is a professional management consultant who helps entrepreneurs in the Natural Products and Clean Energy Technology sectors plan and develop businesses to make their ideas happen. Dan is host of the internet talk radio show Sustainable Leadership at www.blogtalkradio.com/sustainableleadership, and writes a text blog at www.sustainableleadership.wordpress.com

future culture - LOHAS

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