Thank you. It's a very generous introduction. I'm so glad to be here with you.

I'd say they were a mixed bag. I learned a ton that I still keep with me. I think the most important thing that I learned was that it was not the career for me. When I saw the partners and what their lives were like, it was very clear to me that's not what I wanted to be spending 60 hours a week doing. There was one too many cost cutting and best practice projects that I had been on that were wonderful. And I'm sure they had some value created for the clients, but they didn't feel like they were driving much in the way of societal value for me. So for me, the biggest gift from McKinsey was the knowledge that I didn't want to be a management consultant for the rest of my life.

I'd say the other one was a gift from my very first engagement manager, who in my very first performance review, he said, "Jay, you're going to have to figure out in your life whether you want to be right or whether you want to be effective." That was a very succinct and clear and powerful piece of advice that my wife and partners would tell you that I'm still struggling with, but I'm forever indebted to Doug Woodham for giving me that advice on my very first McKinsey project.

Well, I think what he correctly observed in me was that a lot of my identity was wrapped up in being the smart guy in the room and a guy with an answer. Since I was a little kid, raise your hand first in class, go up to the board and get the answer and get your A or move up faster in the reading levels than others in a very competitive sort of environment. And I excelled at it. And then my identity became attached to achievement and to being the one with the answers or at the front of the class. I think what he correctly noted was that if you're leading organizational change, the best answer is the one that moves the organization, that helps the organization find its path to move forward at a speed that it can metabolize. Because, if you push it too fast or try to leap too far, there are going to be some unintended negative consequences. And he had enough experience to have probably had some scar tissues to know that, and he was telling a young, probably pretty arrogant 22 year old, to slow down and to pay attention to the people, not just the spreadsheet. And that not every answer was a quantitative answer.

I studied Japanese political economy. I was an East Asian studies major, which was a self-declared independent study at Stanford. I resisted declaring any major until my senior year and loved to look at lots of different things. At the time in the mid to late 80s, there was all kinds of talk about Japan Inc., and the big competition was between the U.S. and Japan around industrial policy and other things and how that would play out geopolitically. And so I thought if I wanted to be relevant and in a leadership position in the business or political world over the next 20 or 30 years, that I should understand Asia and particularly I should understand Japan. In retrospect, it might have been good to study China and Chinese instead of Japanese, but nevertheless, I studied Japanese political economy because I was quite attracted to the culture as well as what was happening economically and politically at the time.

The wabi sabi was honoring the really spicy part of life. Just a joke.

For sure. The one that comes to mind is, and I don't know whether I'll get the name right, but I think it was the concept of on, which was about reciprocal, mutual obligation in the code of the samurai bushido culture. This concept of reciprocity and mutuality really stuck with me and felt quite counter to the culture I grew up in, in sort of American culture, which at least to me, prides itself on a fierce independence and rugged individualism, out of which comes, I think sometimes at its worst, a heavy focus on transactional victory, where there's a winner and a loser and your object is to win and have more then. And that felt very different when I was learning about some of the deeper currents that were running through Japanese culture, or at least some of them. And the idea of mutuality and interdependence versus the independence of US culture was quite attractive to me and in some ways maybe was an early seed planted that led to the B Corp movement and the B Corp Declaration of Interdependence. If there's a spiritual document, if there's a values document that binds that whole community together across 100 or so companies, it's probably that concept of interdependence.

For sure. It would be like they've honed that craft and they've delivered tremendous value to those organizations within a construct that says value is about shareholder value. And they're exceptional at that. There's probably nobody better at least. What would be fascinating to me is if that same amount of intellectual horsepower and talent could be harnessed to help organizations optimize the value for all their stakeholders, not only for their shareholders. And if you build the frameworks and the best practices and the change management tools, and you worked across from healthcare to finance to all of the technology, and you brought all that to bear to optimize the shared well-being on a healthy planet, and not just the maximization of profits for the shareholders, I think they could unleash immense amounts of positive energy in the world. That's the transformation that I have been working on through the B Corp Movement for the last 20 years and hopefully inviting more and more companies into that community of practice.

No, not at all. I had none of this concept in my mind at McKinsey or at Stanford. It was only a slow awakening over let's call it a decade or more. Like many people, the first step was in some ways like, "Oh, what if we could harness the power of private enterprise to generate charitable wealth that we could then be more generous with the profits that we create to do really wonderful things." And what if we could take not only the profits, but maybe some of the technical experience and technical know-how and bring that management technique into the nonprofit sector to help it professionalize and help it get the innovations to scale and all of those kinds of thoughts which aren't necessarily wrong, but they are at best incomplete. And they're definitely looking at social change in the nonprofit world as a beneficiary of our private sector wisdom as opposed to as a partner in problem solving. And so, the first incarnation of the B Corp Movement was something entirely different, solely focused on companies that gave away all of their profits to charity.

There was a famous American brand called Newman's Own that some people might know from the salad dressing, or some people know from the popcorn or the spaghetti sauce or the lemonade. And Paul Newman was a very famous American actor who had this beautiful, generous heart. He had these incredible camps for kids, called the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang and Camp for Kids, who had terminal illness. He created this company that would give all of its money away because he knew he didn't need any more. He had enough. And could he use his fame for a higher purpose than just making more money, or becoming more famous? And not only did I really like the salad dressing, but I was inspired by that idea because at the company, I was working called AND1, the basketball company, we were giving 5% of our profits to charity every year. As I was reading about companies like Ben and Jerry's or Patagonia or Tom's of Maine or Stonyfield Farm or The Body Shop, these early pioneers of socially responsible business, they were all giving 10% of their profits to charity. I later found out that was because the maximum amount that was tax deductible by the IRS, and I was like, "Oh, we should give 10% and we should double it." And then I got inspired by Newman's Own. I said, "Well, if 10% is twice as good, then 100% is about as good as you can get."

And so, I went looking around the world for other companies that might have been inspired by Paul Newman's example. And the original idea was to create a class of companies called Newman Ventures that gave all of their profits to charity. I found dozens of these companies in the US and in the UK, primarily, travel companies and water companies and office supply companies and coffee companies that all have been inspired by Paul Newman and Newman's Own. And we were working together to create a Newman sector of the economy.

All small scale private companies. Maybe the biggest one was maybe $20 or $30 million in revenues. It was through that by putting that idea out into the world and meeting academics, some investors and some other social entrepreneurs, they very graciously, kindly and generously helped widen the aperture of my lens to come to realize that the money we give away at the end of the year is not the most impact we can have as business leaders, that how we generate those profits has much more impact on society than what we do with the profits that we are ending up with at the end.

And so the business practices, the products that we choose to be, the pricing strategies that we have, all of those things have far more impact on the world than how we divide up the profits at the end between our shareholders and the community. You talk about our experiments with truth, and the first experiment was just to say, "Hey, you know what? I'd like to do more good, giving away all the money that we generate by being really good business people, we can generate profits and we can give it all away. That's really good. Let's try that." That was an experiment. It turned out that that experiment in one way failed. Meaning it wasn't the right answer. But like any good experiment, it pointed you in a better direction. And that better direction was to look at the products and practices, not just the profits of the company, and look at the company holistically for the positive impact it could have. And that was the birth of the B Corp idea.

Yeah. It's a slow awakening.

Yeah, we like to say at B Lab, we said early on that the only thing we knew about the B Corp standards for sure, was that they were wrong, and so we would lead with that statement, which helped everybody to sort of lower their shoulders, relax their jaw and unclench their fists and say, "If you can see things then we have some blind spots where we're not seeing something correctly, we miss something entirely, or we phrase the question in a way that allows bad actors to come through in a way that we didn't intend, tell us, because our mutual objective is to continue is continuous improvement." We're not trying to say that what we've shared is fully baked or perfect. We're just trying to say it's good enough to begin, and then we're on the journey together. And so each time the standards would iterate. Now we're in, I think version six or version seven of the standards. There's thousands of people from all over the world who are actual practitioners in business, running supply chains, or doing the people and culture management or working in communities or whatever it might be in material sciences, and they're helping us improve the standards. So it becomes a very crowdsourced collective effort, where the wisdom of everybody is much greater than the wisdom of anybody. That to me, has been one of the secret sources of the B Corp Movement. It has been designed to be a flexible growth model of continuous learning. Not a fixed set of standards. A sort of rigid that you apply to people as if it's a formula. It's more of like a directional set of guidelines and inquiries.

That's right.

Yeah. I left McKinsey and had a few different jobs in the public and nonprofit sector in New York, and it became clear at the end of that little run that the person that I had been following or working with was not the right person for me to be working with.

Similarly, at the same time, my best friend was just getting out of Wharton Business School at Penn and looking for any reason not to put on a suit and tie and go work for Goldman and translate his love of basketball into an entrepreneurial venture. And so on about the 20th iteration of that idea, I came down to visit him one weekend in Philly from New York, where I was living, went out to our favorite jazz club, a place called Ortlieb's, in North Philly at the time, and I could not get the idea out of my head. I started asking the waiter for little scraps, for the napkins and for their pen that I could borrow and I kept on just writing down ideas.

Then we talk about them in between sets, and by the end of that weekend, we kind of looked at each other with an understanding that then became explicit that I was going to be going back up to New York to tell my then girlfriend, now wife, that I think I'm going to quit the job that I'm in with the Coro Foundation as their CFO. And I'm going to move down to Philly and we will move together if you'll come with me to start this business with my best friend Seth. At the time, it was called the Basketball Marketing Company. That was the birth of what became AND1. Also plenty of false leads and experiments that led to what AND1 became.

From the very beginning AND1 had a commitment to give 5% of its profits to charity. So, there was a notion that we want this to be a value to the world beyond just creating a source of wealth for us. But it was still quite limited to thinking that the source of value we could create for others was simply giving the money and had nothing to do with the products that we chose or how we produce them, or what markets we were in, or what economic opportunity we created for our team members here, or how we treated the workers in the factories overseas. None of that was in our consciousness as 26 year old business novices.

Well Hitendra, you used a word there, I think if I heard you correctly, you said everything that we do can be sanctified. Did I hear that correctly? And if I understand that word correctly, there's something, can we imbue every action with something of the sacred.

I think that's a very powerful frame. One of the things that attracted our family to send our kids to a Quaker school was understanding their belief system that there is that of God in everyone. If you extend that to everyone and everything, then by definition, you would treat people with respect and value them and their gifts, and you'd be looking for the gifts that they have to offer, not the deficiencies.

In business school language and Harvard Business Review language, you would just say it's an asset-based mindset, an appreciative inquiry. You use those sorts of business terms. One can look at that as if it's got a deep spiritual underpinning to it. At AND1 after some really tragic events in 2001, and we were looking for deeper purpose, we created something that we called the AND1 Service Mission, which, its lofty aspiration was to move beyond responsible business practices, which was the term at the time, to what we call compassionate business practices. What we meant by that was that we could look at every action as a service opportunity and expect nothing in return. The purpose of it wasn't the better employee productivity or loyalty or the customer retention or the better press we might get by burnishing our brand image.

The value was we got to run the kind of company we'd like to work for, that we could be proud of, that we could tell our kids about and tell our parents, thank you for all the investments in our education that allowed us the opportunity to create this company and look at the cool things we're doing with it. It was about having that pride and having that pride shared in what we were creating and how we were doing it. That felt like it had that quaker element of looking for the divine or looking for the sacred in every opportunity. And, to your point of looking to sanctify every business relationship is one of approaching it like a relationship and not like a transaction. How can this be something that's good for both of us?

That's right.

Yeah. That was the time period between 2001 and 2005 when we sold the company. Those four years were a series of groping, experimentation with that service mission. We did some amazing things that I'm super proud of. There was just a limit to what AND1 could do to take an existing business and sort of repurpose it in that way. There were prior investors. There were a couple hundred employees. There were other partners who had said, "I didn't necessarily bargain for this." And so I'm with you, but I'm only with you to this degree. It became increasingly uncomfortable for me and said, "I can't live in integrity with my own desire to have the kind of impact I'd like to have in the world within these constraints." And so, I started to look around for other business leaders that were doing things that inspired me that were even further apart. That's when I mentioned before The Body Shops, The Ben and Jerry's and the Patagonia's and all of those, and they were doing things beyond giving more money away. Their actual business practices were designed to have a positive impact in a way that ours weren't. I was really inspired by that and started going to conferences and reading books just starting to get myself familiar with folks that were further along the path than I was.

Around that time, we also realized that the fundamentals of our business meant that we had some changes to make. We either had to sell our company because the fundamentals of the industry we were in were changing dramatically. There was a lot of consolidation. And in that consolidated environment it is typically going to put lots of margin pressure on the smaller players. And so we had to decide either we ourselves had to get much bigger, which probably meant through acquisition of other niche brands that we were going to focus on basketball, what were 3 or 4 other brands that were in different areas that we could be a multi-brand entity or we would have if we're a buyer or if we're a seller, we'd have to sell AND1 so we could be the basketball brand in their portfolio of brands. The couple years of exploration of that led us to the conclusion that we were better off as a seller than a buyer. And as we were in the middle of that sale process, I came back from a winter holiday and was in the kitchen of my best friend and partners and college buddies' house. And I said out loud something that I might even have been thinking about much more, but it was on New Year's Day in 2005 and said, "Hey, Bart, I think I just celebrated my last New Year's at AND1. And I didn't even realize the magnitude of what I had shared, like the impact or the implications of what I had shared. And I could see his jaw tightening and his temples flaring a little bit because as typical, he would recognize the implications of what I was saying or thinking more than I would. He was like, "Hey, I hear you. Maybe we keep that quiet until after the sale is over." And by May of that year, we had sold the company and I had been incubating by then already this idea of a B Corp. So that migration from the AND1 Service Mission to B Corp had already been manifesting over those four years. And so when we sold the company, I was then going to take the summer off and then start the B Corp Movement in that fall.

There's a whole other story about the digressions and perambulations around that. But, the genesis of it was sort of an inadvertent share, an unintentional share that I had reached my carrying capacity for what I could do in that environment. It was time for me to move on.

What's interesting, Hitendra, is that, I don't know that I've ever had that kind of lightning bolt moment. But, the closest I could come to it would be during the month of September in 2001, three things happened within just a couple of weeks of each other that really knocked me over and forced a bit of a reckoning. On September 11th, 2001, we all witnessed tragedy with all that happened then and my sister was safe but was pulled out of, she was covering it for broadcast media and she got pulled out of some of the rubble on Vesey Street by a first responder. I had another friend who used to work on the 86th floor. Luckily, the plane struck at the 88th floor and so he ended up getting out safely. Another friend who worked in the first few floors on the ground level who didn't happen to go into work that day. And so growing up as a New Yorker that was very close to me and obviously a traumatic thing for everybody around the world.

Four days later, unrelated, my dad died of lung cancer. And so with the smoke from what was ground zero still billowing with the wind moving towards upper Manhattan, where my dad was in the hospital at Mount Sinai, I was driving up from Philadelphia watching the smoke still days later, coming off the ground where the World Trade Center was and going to be with my dad during his last days with his mom and I. And so then being there at my dad's bedside when he died. And then two weeks later, again, unrelated, the most beloved person, colleague of ours at AND1, a young man named Jean Bernard, a first generation Haitian American who was the most beautiful human being that I'd ever met at the time, who was just full of warmth and radiant sunshine to everybody he met every day, you were just sort of taken in with his smile and his graciousness. He also was obviously fantastic in what he did, but he just had a way of showing up in the world that made everybody feel better after they had an interaction with him, and he was killed in sort of a freak car accident on his way to work, 2 weeks after 9/11 and my dad died. And so those three things happened right after one after the other. It really rocked me. It wasn't until after that sort of trifecta of trauma that I was forced to say, "Okay, am I doing what I'm meant to be doing? Am I living my life to the fullest, as fun and as successful as anyone had been? Was it my true calling?" We've talked before the recording was going about our mutual affection for the Bhagavad-Gita, and its expression of the yoga path and karma yoga. One of the passages in there talks about living in somebody else's dharma, walking somebody else's path instead of your own. And what was clear to me was that I was walking somebody else's path, even if it was full of material success and a lot of fun, it was still not actually what fed my soul, and I wasn't really able to see that clearly. Or maybe not act on it courageously enough until after those three things happened in September of 21.

So I went away for a weekend, a little bit of a retreat with my wife, came back with the clarity of that what became the AND1 Service Mission which then catalyzed those 3 or 4 years of experimentation, which then led to the continuing revelation that, "Oh, we can do this and we can do that in our supply chain and our practices and the 10,000 young women in our factories in China." How would we make this an amazing experience for them, not just for us? We think about all those things which were all amazing. We did lots of beautiful stuff, but it was still, I could imagine more. And it was unfair to impose that upon AND1. It needed to dig its own foundation and then grow from its own place. I don't think I've ever had the one epiphany, like the one lightning bolt and the light shines and all of a sudden you've got this brilliant eureka idea. I think for me, it took those tragedies to push me to really look inward and then to just start experimenting and trying things. Each step led to another step. More like stepping stones across the creek than one big jump or one big turn.

So for me, it's been more like one step leads to another step. Once that leads to another step, I can see a little bit further, a little bit more clearly. And that's still going on today with what I'm doing. But it's that journey that's been quite enjoyable and meeting all the people that are smarter than I am along the way, who helped guide me to the next secure footing, right to the next step.

100%. Some of it was there were individual entrepreneurs at that stage in the late 1990s, early 2000, they were writing the first generation of books about their experience. And so you could buy and eat a book, take it personal, or you could buy one of Ben and Jerry's books, Double Dip or Inside Scoop or whatever it was. You could read Tom Chappell's book from Tom's of Maine about the soul of a business. And so you could glean from that. I read with a pen in my hand and a marker and I'm like, sort of really dog-earing and consuming those books and learning about it and then writing down, "Oh, they did this and they did that." That would become like a longer compendium of practices. Then as I'm reading those things, I realise they're talking about a conference that they went to with a group called the Social Event. At that time it was called the Social Venture Network or another group called Investor Circle at the time, and then another group called Business Alliance for Local Living Economies. And so I would then join those groups to put myself in the mix with all of these other entrepreneurs that were way further ahead than I was and that were gracious enough to welcome me, correct my mistakes, help me put on some glasses that I could see a little bit more clearly and further and recognize all these other ways that businesses can create a positive impact in the world. I spent the better part of those 3 or 4 years from 2001 to 2005, in that exploration and experimentation. There's no way I would have landed where I did if I tried to do this by myself.

Totally. I'm thinking back to the point we were talking about earlier about independence versus interdependence. An individual versus community, whether it was at AND1 or B Lab or now at White Men for Racial Justice, I've never been good enough to do anything on my own and if I've had a superpower, it's been I've been able to find and attract partners who had different complementary skills than I had who can work together, because we're each going to bring different insights to the work. It's the collective insights that actually I have found to be more powerful than any of the individual insights. At the end of the day, the B Corp idea is about community, not about the individual company. In your intro, you talked about the B Corp Certification, and what I'd share is that the certification is only a means to an end. The certification is only your ticket into the community. The real prize is the community, not the certification. And the real power is in the community, not in the individual business. Because, even the most well-known and largest B Corp, whether they are a $1 billion in revenue or $3 billion in revenue, or $10 billion, they're still tiny in relation to the entire economy. And, those entrepreneurs know it, and they know that all they're doing is creating an example. A lighthouse that people can orient to. But at the end of the day, it's when they work together, it's through collective action that they can have the biggest impact, whether that's in their region or in their industry or in their country as a whole.

So some of the most powerful things that the B Corp community has done is they've helped pass legislation in over 40 US states and 7 or 8 countries around the world to create a new legal corporate form that balances profit and purpose and that expands the fiduciary duty of the directors. So they're required to consider not only their impact in maximizing shareholder wealth and creating shareholder wealth, but also their impact on all their different stakeholders, their workers, their suppliers, their communities and the future generations who are impacted by the natural world that we live in and the environment.

At the end of the day, I think this is all about community. My core insight would be that at the end of the day, this is not about me. This is about we. How we define the we is the most important question of our time, where we've never been more clearly interconnected, whether it's through global health crises like Covid or global environmental concerns or global security concerns, it's never been more clear that we're all deeply connected. And therefore, as it says in the B Corp Declaration of Interdependence, that we therefore have to act with the understanding that we are each dependent upon another, and thus responsible for each other and future generations. That's the cultural shift that's needed. That's the mindset shift that's needed in one person and then another person. Then, as you said, they find each other in these times. You really need to find our kindred spirits, particularly those kindred spirits that are across differences of race, class, gender, country, geography, religion or whatever.

We both believe that there's something beautiful, there's something divine in each of us, and we all have inherent dignity and we should have an economic system that treats us that way as valuable because we're human beings, not just because of what we produce. And that's the beauty and the power of the B Corp Movement, and the standards and the legal structure and the certification are all there, simply so we can recognize those companies that are walking the talk. They're not perfect. But they're at least on the path, and they aspire to be on that path with others and to call each other in, to walk that path together. That's the thing that's most inspiring to me.

Yeah, that's a good question. I think we were aware early on that in many ways, Europe was ahead of the US, particularly around environmental concerns. That's very obvious now, more so even than before. And to a certain extent, like you said, some northern European countries, some Western European countries, Germany in particular, that has co-determination on boards with the Workers' Board and a different board, there were lots of different models that said business exists to serve society, not the other way around. But what there wasn't, whether it was in Europe or in the US, was a way to clearly differentiate between companies that had really good marketing programs about their responsibility or sustainability or their greenness and those that were actually performing that way.

One of the things I admire and like about whether you call it American capitalism or business is, I like performance, I like measurement. I find that can be very helpful in making sure that if we set goals, we know whether we're making progress towards them. The question is, what goals are we setting? And do we have measurements for our non-financial performance? At the time that we were starting the B Corp Movement, there was very little of that. It was almost purely anecdotal. You could read the books by Anita and Ben and Jerry and Tom and Yvonne. You could read their books and it is full of great wisdom, but there wasn't necessarily a way to say when I go to the store, how can I find other businesses? Not just those five that I'm looking for. So I can make a good, better or best choice as a consumer. Or if as an investor, I want to invest my money not only to make more money, but to make a difference. How would I know what I'm investing in is actually performing not only for its shareholders, but for its workers and communities and the environment. And so it required a set of metrics.

At the time, there was a group called the Global Reporting Initiative that was in earlier days, but was still quite established and in partnership with the UN. They created a reporting framework that said, these are the measurements, these are the metrics we ought to use. But there were a couple of challenges for us to use it, it was mostly geared towards huge corporations, not the entrepreneurs that were really leading this transformation. So they often felt like they were not built for me.

The other thing was we asked them, but they were not interested in creating a set of standards or certification that would ultimately be public phasing that would enable to create the market signals that consumers, workers, investors, policymakers could use to buy from, invest in, work for, or otherwise support high impact businesses. And so they said, "Look, we're just creating the base layer of what should be measured and what it means to measure lifecycle assessment and what it means to measure carbon. We're going to tell you how to do that really well, but somebody else has to come in and build the standards or a certification on top of that. That's not our job."

And so, one of B Labs early priorities was to try to get somebody else to build that other layer of infrastructure. We got no takers. And so we said, okay, not necessarily what we set out to do, but we will have to build our own set of standards. And then we'll certify companies who meet a high bar on those standards. And we assume that in three years or ten years, there'd be a dozen other standards that we could use. And our job would be to accredit those standards and say, oh, you could get a five stars over here or platinum over there, or 67 over here, four roses or sunflowers, whatever it is. And there'd be a bunch of different standards that we could use. And as it turned out, and now almost 20 years, almost nobody's done that except for B Corp.

Very surprising to me, B Lab still has the most comprehensive and rigorous set of social and environmental performance standards that can measure the impact of a company on its non-financial stakeholders, on its workers, community, suppliers, employees, environment. We had to create the standards using the base layer that was already out there and using all those books that I mentioned before and capturing all the practices that they were actually doing and then saying, "Oh, here are worker practices, here are community practices, here are environmental practices, here are governance practices, and put them into one coherent framework. The most important thing was to then go out and recruit the first wave of companies, who would be willing to say, I'm willing to be held accountable to a third party set of standards that didn't exist before, when they were likely already doing the work and already recognized for doing the work, which was then counterintuitive. "Why would I go through the pain in the butt of going through your certification, let alone pay you so you can put a little B Corp logo that nobody knows what it is on my door, on my website or on my packaging when no one knows what the heck that is. Why would I do that when I'm already known as a beneficial company, a responsible business, etc."

The most inspiring thing was all of those early entrepreneurs knew that they needed a collective voice and they needed third party validation. Or else, it's just them arguing that they're doing good stuff. And then all the bigger multinationals were going to recognize a good market opportunity and then hire a great marketing firm to market using those same words, but not necessarily be backed up by the same practices and that created an existential threat for those early entrepreneurs to distinguish themselves. So they realized it was in their long term interest as a company, but more importantly, in their interest as change makers to build collective power and collective voice. That's when they all said, "Look, we know these standards aren't perfect, but we recognize this is needed. And we know that you need us to give this credibility."

So when those first 81 companies became the founding B Corporations in 2007, they were the ones who really created the B Corp Movement, not B Lab. B Lab just created the platform. But, it was only when they stood on the platform and they spoke their own experience of why this was important to them and when they told their peers that this is the next path, that's what created the B Corp Movement. That started in the US. Then within 3 or 5 years, our friends at Sistema B, helped build that in Latin America and then in Europe and then in Africa and Asia. It proliferated because entrepreneurs, as you said, were finding their tribe in difficult times. The financial crisis in 2008. We were born into a period of global economic dislocation. The BP oil spill, the financial crisis. And all of a sudden these entrepreneurs are now showing up as a collective, as a family, as a community. And that was really intriguing. People want to go to a fun party. They were having a good party. Who doesn't want to go to a good party? It's playing good music, everybody's dancing and that looked like a lot of fun.

For entrepreneurs whose identity was like, "I'm on the cutting edge, I'm a leader." If that's where the leaders are, then I want to be with them. And that created the sort of a snowball effect, a multiplier effect that now we see we're close to just over 10,000 B Corp in over 100 countries because they see each other and they want to be seen as part of that peer group, and they know they can do things together, like drive to net zero on climate or reduce inequality between lowest and highest paid employees, or change corporate law to make sure it's accountable to create value for all stakeholders. They can do those things together in a way that they could never do alone.

They are probably about somewhere between 30 and 40 publicly traded certified B Corps ranging from unicorn, tech funded startups to multi-billion dollar Brazilian steel companies. And the overwhelming majority of companies in the B Corp Movement, just like the overwhelming number of companies in the global economy are private. There's only 3,500 publicly traded companies in the US, and there's 7 million businesses. So in general, there's always more private companies than public companies, and there's always more smaller companies than big companies. But what's been really gratifying about the B Corp structure that we've created is it's been quite scalable across industries, across geographies and across size. You have big global companies like Danone, the dairy company that certified its North American subsidiary as a $10-$11 billion subsidiary. And then has been the process over the last 5 or 7 years of certifying now upwards of 30 or 40% of its global subsidiaries on the path to becoming certified as a whole, which would become a $30 or $40 billion company, would be by far away the largest B Corp certified company in the world.

But, beyond those publicly traded certified B Corps, there's also hundreds and hundreds of companies that have adopted the legal structure that B Corps have created, it's called a Benefit Corporation. It's a distinct corporate form called the Benefit Corporation. There are 30,000 companies around the world that have adopted that legal structure, half of those in the US and half outside the US. While they haven't become certified B Corps, meaning they haven't met the performance standards of the certified community, they have adopted the legal framework, which has formally expanded the fiduciary duty of their directors. Some of those are most prominent AI companies and medical device companies. There are other folks like for-profit higher ed companies that have said that they know that they've got a problem with brand perception that they're in a predatory industry. And so they have to signal to the marketplace that they're approaching. There are marketplaces in emerging markets where public education isn't a great option. And so having high quality, affordable, accessible private education is actually a pathway to creating broad based economic development and a growth of the middle class, but they want to make sure that people know that they're approaching that in a way that is best for students, not just best for their shareholders. And so there are hundreds of publicly traded benefit corporations that have adopted that stakeholder governance model and like I said, there are dozens of certified B Corps that are publicly traded.

Well, I'm happy to answer that Hitendra, but I'm curious, from your standpoint, from where you sit, what do you think has caused the slowdown or even the reversal or retrenchment around these things, either in the corporate world or in the capital markets? From your perspective, what do you think was driving the growth of this market? And then what has driven the pushback?

I agree with everything you shared. The growth of that marketplace was a bit inflated, where we were counting things that weren't worthy. They were pretty thin practices, and so it felt pretty inflated. Things that we called ESG sometimes weren't particularly high impact, forget about financially, just like socially or environmentally, what their stated impact was supposed to be. There's plenty to criticize in that market, right? At B Lab in some ways, B Corp Movement was in some ways created as an answer to those criticisms to say, there are real rigorous, third party validated standards that are comprehensive about a company's performance. We can believe in these. They're not perfect, but we can believe in them in a way. And that's a much smaller market, even if it's growing rapidly. It's a much smaller market than the ESG investing space. So I do agree that it was a bit fluffy.

I also agree that at the core of this conversation is a conversation about purpose. What is the ultimate objective? It's about ends and means. And so as you really beautifully said, if you're making the case to run a good business simply on the fact that it's better for your shareholders, if that's your entire reason for making the case, then as soon as there's something better for your shareholders, they're going to go do that.

So it builds your castle on sand. There is a famous letter that Martin Luther King wrote from the Birmingham jail. Among the primary people he's addressing in the heart of the civil rights movement, 1963, he is addressing the white moderate. He says, "The biggest impediment to change isn't the members of the White Citizens Council or the people wearing those funny looking hats part of the Ku Klux Klan or burning crosses. That's not the biggest impediment. The biggest impediment is the white moderate, who says not now. Be patient. You're going too fast. You're being a little bit too radical. That was the biggest eroder of momentum."

An article I've always wanted to write, partner with somebody on is the letter from the business case jail. Because I think, we imprison ourselves in a business case jail, where the only legitimate reason we can give for doing something is that it makes more money. And that is a prison. It's a prison ethically, it's a prison for our humanity. Our full humanity cannot flourish in a system that only measures and only values money. So we have locked ourselves in a prison. But, the good news is that we have the key. We can unlock that door and decide that we're going to measure the worth, just like we measure the worth of a man or a woman, on the content of their character and how they show up in the world, how they treat other people. We should take the measure of a business by how they treat other people, not just the people with the most money sitting in the boardroom as shareholders. The B Corp Movement is one path to that. I'm hopeful that there'll be many others, of course. Maybe the B Corp is just a transitional object towards something even greater and more beautiful on the other side. But for now, it's a pretty good, at best, transitional step to say we're going to hold ourselves accountable to not only measure our profits, but to measure our performance at achieving our higher purpose, which is to not only be better for our shareholders, but to be better for our workers, to be better for our employees, to be better for our customers, to be better for our suppliers, to be better for the communities that we do business with. That requires a shift in both norms and incentives.

How I would phrase it, Hitendra, is that we can't ask business leaders to lead in a culture with contrary norms, in a system with misaligned incentives. From a norm standpoint, from a mindset standpoint, you are worth more than the financial value you create for me. We need to shift ourselves from measuring each other based upon our net worth to measuring ourselves based upon wellbeing and the wellbeing we help create for others. That's a normative change. That's a culture change. That's a mindset change. Until our mindsets change, we're not going to change the companies, we're not going to change let alone the systems and the structures that constrain the behavior of those companies.

Your organization talks about inner mastery and outer impact. I think that's really wise. The change out there starts here. That change starts with who do we want to be? Who do we want our kids to think of us as? What do we think they're going to be proud of? When we pass and our kids are standing up there speaking about us, they're probably not going to speak about how many zeros are in your bank account, or how much market share you took. They're going to be speaking about your legacy of impact and care.

And so I think that the fundamental transformation is the transformation of the spirit or the soul of imbuing the sacred in our work. And we can do that from wherever we have to be. We can be on the shipping dock, we can be at the retail checkout. We can approach it all through that lens. But then the other thing that has to happen, this is where those companies need to come together. Those find our tribe. And they'll say, it's great if I do this in my company. But one of the things that B Lab realized early on is that companies don't hold the power in a capitalist political economy. Capital holds the power. That's why it's called capitalism.

Any CEO will tell you, including the CEOs of the largest companies on the planet, that they're not where the real power is. The power is with the capital providers. The power is on Wall Street. It's impossible for any one company to change the behavior of Wall Street. That's going to require policymakers. The power of the companies is to work together to create a business constituency, to engage citizens, to engage policymakers, to say, we need a level playing field. We're now taking additional risk by operating this way to create stakeholder value in a system that only rewards shareholder value. We're taking incremental risk and doing that to benefit everybody. Your job is to create a society that benefits everybody. That's why you're elected official. That's what your stated goal is. We can help you do that. But we need there to be a level playing field. We need all companies and all financial institutions to be required to have a widening circle of care. Their duty of care has to apply not only to their shareholders, but to everybody that's impacted by their business. Until we change the incentive structure, what Larry Fink did at Blackrock, when he retreated from all the purpose statements that he made, is because the incentives never changed. Until we change the incentives and make it a level playing field, even those that want to lead are often going to get beaten back when there's a shift in political wins and a shift in where power is coming from and how self-interested that power is.

And so for me, what you said was so spot on. It is that we need to unlock the door of the business case jail. We need to then shift the norms of the values of what we're bringing to this and then we need to change the systems and the structures so the incentives are different. So that our incentives are to create value for our workers and for our communities, and to safeguard clean air and water so that our kids and their grandkids can have the same freedom of movement as we do. The same opportunity to enjoy nature as we do. We're going to lose that if we don't, because the current system is insatiable like cancer. It will keep on consuming us until there's nothing left to consume. It will consume the host. So unfettered capitalism is a cancer. It is eating us from within.

100% agree again. Once again, I agree with everything you've shared. I think that the orientation of our culture is perhaps the ugliest four letter word, which is more. We need to reorient that to perhaps the most powerful four letter word that is care. As my partner Andrew Kassoy had said, "If we're going to build a new economic system. We have to build it on a foundation of care." Because, the relentless pursuit of more, is ultimately destructive not only of the environment, but of relationships. It forces us to be disconnected and separate from each other. I think we're starving for connection. We've built a culture of separation with hyper individualism, and we need to re-stitch a culture of care which is about a culture of connection. What better place to do that than in the marketplace in a business?

There's a poem by a Sufi mystic named Baba Kuhi of Shiraz. The opening line of which is, "In the market, in the cloister, only God, I saw," and we would often use that as a final reading in that class that I mentioned earlier, that we taught out of the religion department, the Westtown School, that was an applied religion class. This mystic poet said that whether you're looking in the marketplace or in the cloistered realm of a sacred place, only God I saw, I'm choosing to view in either place and I'm only trying to see that of God. And if that were the case, how would I treat this person who works for me? How would I treat this person on the other side of the table in a negotiation? How would I treat this supply contract? How would I treat my vendor and all of those things if I saw myself? Another way to think of it is if I only saw myself on the other side of this table in a John Rawls type veil of ignorance test. How would I want this to happen if I didn't know on which side of the table I would be? What kind of relationship would strike? That ultimately is a quite powerful way to show up in business.

So, I believe that you said something that, what if we can invite people to go on a hero's journey together? I think that so much of our mythmaking, particularly in the business world, but in our culture generally is about an individual hero. The cover of the magazines have a picture of one person. Whenever Bart and Andrew and I are the three co-founders of B Lab, or when it was Seth and Tom and Ray and Bart and Guy that were the partners at AND1. And whenever a magazine or somebody wanted to do a story on us and they'd say, "Well, we just need a picture of one of you." So whoever's the CEO will do, we say, "No, that's not how it works. You either take a picture of all of us, or you take a picture of none of us." Because not one of us is leading this. We're all doing this together. And there was a hero's journey that we were on together. Whether it was building the best basketball company in the world or building the most beneficial community of businesses in the world, the most purpose driven community of business in the world, it was much more fun to do it together. It was much more impactful to do it together.

So to reimagine the hero's journey as not an individual journey, but as a collective journey, I think maybe the biggest insight that we've talked about in our time together today. I think I heard what the Dalai Lama was saying, or maybe it was the Buddha. I don't know, but it was a spiritual leader who said, "When will the next incarnation be?" Maybe it was the Dalai Lama. He said, "The next Dalai Lama may be a community, or the next Buddha might be a community, not an individual." I think there is such deep wisdom in that insight and that also just feels true to my own experience. I've never been able to have more fun by myself than I can have with other people. I've never been able to accomplish more by myself than I can with other people. And so, we want to invite each other on to take this hero's journey together. That's the power of the B Corp Movement. That's the power of business for good. That's the power of purpose. We find that with others, not just by ourselves or some ascetic in a cave.

Thank you, Hitendra. That's a beautiful way to end. I appreciate that.

I think my big dream is pretty simple, which is, if I can personally stay curious and in community in pursuit of a higher purpose than just my own well-being, I will be thoroughly used up when my time in this body is done. If I can do that and I can help nurture communities that share that energy to build, to stay curious and build connections, then I think we've got a shot. I think that, at the end of the day, our only path through the dark times that we're in and that are coming is if we find each other and we go on that hero's journey together. I think community is both the path and the destination.