The Future of Business Is Integral

Contributors: John Mackey and Ken Wilber

John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, needs no convincing about the merit of an Integral Approach to business: "I'm certain that Integral Business is a higher synthesis... that it is going to grow at an extremely rapid rate... and that it will out-compete anything else out there." If the success of Whole Foods is a sign of the more integral endeavors to come and we think it isthe future looks very bright indeed! For a sneak peak at the politics of tomorrow, and the business models leading the way, listen in to this hopeful dialogue about the future.

John Mackey
John Mackey is Chairman and CEO of Whole Foods Market, a $4 billion Fortune 500 company, the largest natural foods retail chain in the world, and a Fortune 100 Best Companies To Work For for 8 years running. Whole Foods is a $4 billion Fortune 500 company, the largest natural foods retail chain in the world, and a "Fortune 100 Best Companies To Work For" for 8 years running. It donates generously to charitable causes locally and globally, and, among other environmentally-conscious actions, has purchased enough wind energy credits to offset 100% of the electricity used by the entire company. This is rather extraordinary. By fostering health and growth in so many important domains of human experienceall quadrants (I, We, It, Its)John has been leading Whole Foods in an intuitively integral direction. John comments to Ken, "Your maps have helped me to make explicit what's been tacit, and conscious what's been unconscious." Ken points out that he is simply providing ways to describe a territory that John did all the work to get to. Integral consciousness is a wave of development appearing in individuals across the globe, and Ken's AQAL (All Quadrants, All Levels) approach is an attempt to provide integral pioneers with a comprehensive map of the territory they are already living in. Not to mention that, according to Ken, preliminary

studies have shown that people functioning from an integral wave of consciousness are about 10 times more efficient than previous waves of consciousness. In the past, when the leading edge of any culture has reached 10% theres been a kind of tipping point that occurswhich is what happened with the French and American revolutions, and the revolution of the 60s. Now 10% of the population is about to reach 2nd tier.... Wow! Sign me up for that. But, um, what are these waves of consciousness John and Ken keep mentioning? In his book Integral Psychology Ken compared and contrasted over 100 developmental models and noted that, whatever disagreements there might be between them, they shared the unmistakable drift towards higher and higher levels, stages, or waves of complexity and integration. From this research Ken distilled the concept of altitude, which itself has no content, but is more like a yardstick of consciousness by which one can judge the development of various human capacities. This is the "all levels" part of AQAL. See the graphic below for a brief synopsis of some the altitudes discussed here. The defining characteristic of 1st-tier waves of consciousness is that they all believe they have the only fundamentally correct way to understand reality. 2nd-tier waves of consciousness, on the other hand, understand that all levels of consciousness are important and, in fact, necessary. So why does all this matter for integral business? Because an integral business helps people at every stage of development be the best they can be at that stage (healthy translation). A happy employee is a productive employee, so it is truly a win-win situation. People at amber often feel secure in accounting, people at orange often love the challenge of sales, people at green often feel comfortable in human resources, and so on. Contrary to the critique that stages of development unfairly pigeonhole people, this kind of understanding can help people flourish in the roles that they would chose for themselves. And because Integral Business recognizes the transformative impulse in human beings, people are always invited to step into their next level of growth and fullnesssomething a 1st-tier organization could never offer, because a 1st-tier organization can't appreciate any level other than its own. John and Ken go on to explore the fascinating possibilities for a 2nd-tier libertarianism, and why freedom without responsibility isn't actually free. We invite you to come find out why both an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur Of The Year, and a philosopher endorsed by Bill Clinton, agree: the future of business is most definitely Integral....

Altitude is a measure of development in both culture and consciousness, indicating the degree of developmental unfolding of such qualities as organizational complexity, depth of consciousness, and the number of perspectives one can take.