What is conscious business?

Being a conscious business is more than including a ‘think before you print this email’ notice on your correspondence, or placing recycling bins on each floor of your sealed tight, air-conditioned  office-cum-tomb. In fact, in this current rise of the ‘green-wash’, people like you and I are feeling our inner cynics starting to pace the room knowing that sometimes the gap between an advertisable eco friendly initiative and deeper corporate values is a chasm the magnitude of the Grand Canyon.

The very act of advertising a new green ethos may be the very thing that gives a business away.

It is the business that lives its principles and believes in them from the core that doesn’t need to tell the world what they are doing in the hope of a positive rub off on sales.

They do what they do because it is the right thing, and in the process others who believe in the right thing naturally find them and support them.

Being aware and responsible are not strategic business initiatives, they are a base line of what it is to be human and in the world, both as individuals and in the communities in which we work.

A conscious business avoids the rhetoric and weasel word mentality that plagues corporate Australia.

Even the word “values’ has been misrepresented over and over again – scan any corporate mission statement and it will no doubt appear as a key to success, but what does it all really mean and how does it translate to action?

I don’t have answers, but I do think we can all  bring a sensibility and substance to the notion of a conscious business, through the understanding and unpacking of the very words we use to define our daily business activities.

As a human being in the world and as a professional writer, I realise the power of a single word.

If the words lack depth, so too does our content, our message, our mission.