1055 - Conscious Capitalism with Symphony Advantage's Kent Gregoire

Jan 27, 2022

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In this episode of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur, your host Josh Elledge talks to the founder and CEO of Symphony Advantage, Kent Gregoire.

Symphony Advantage is helping to create the widespread adoption of conscious capitalism around the globe. They primarily do this by helping entrepreneurs release their own entrepreneurial spirit for good. What is conscious capitalism and what does that mean, though? Kent shares that you have to connect better to your workers and approach things with innovative solutions to build a world that’s better for everyone.

Kent and Josh explore how the movement was founded and how large public companies want to be a part of this movement, too. Kent also shares how to take steps to become a more conscious entrepreneur. He shares that you should compare traditional capitalism to conscious capitalism. Traditional capitalism follows a shareholder model, whereas conscious capitalism follows a stakeholder model.

The viewpoint to start with is your relationship with your stakeholders. Ethics is essential in conscious capitalism. You’re doing work to understand your stakeholders’ higher purposes, so commit your business to actually benefiting you, your stakeholder, and everyone else along the way. In stakeholder capitalism, innovation is at the core. Create and embrace ideas from the fringe and not just the ivory tower. This is one key component of operating in a conscious model.

Josh and Kent also share that more profit is more opportunity to do good, but don’t wait for profit to do good. Look to actually solve problems and measure that success. If your product or service isn’t necessarily altruistic, look to serve and do good for your team, which will improve their life and extend awareness to others outside the business.

Josh also talks about how workers in the younger generations want work that serves a purpose and makes an impact. Your employees want to see the fruits of the company's labor – everything is a team effort, which means everyone is invested in the outcome.

Kent shared a profound statistic – seven out of ten American people believe that businesses have a moral obligation to be triple bottom line. This is absent of political divide, meaning roughly 70% of the American population is saying businesses have a moral obligation to do good and contribute positively to society.

Kent and Josh also talk about how operating a capitalistic model with a conscious lens really does benefit everyone. It will take societal change, though, and it’s society that needs to dictate the ethical standards of how we operate our businesses. We need to all strive to make these changes as well as leave a lasting, positive impact.

Check out Symphony Advantage at https://www.symphonyadvantage.com/.

Check out Kent Gregoire on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentgregoire/.

Check out Symphony Advantage on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/symphonyadvantage/.

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