hello and welcome to worlds apart the collapse of the soviet union seemed to agree or for him capitalism as the only viable economic system only to see it and to a major crisis a few decades later and as the whole world still struggles to recover from the downturn brought about by the greed and excesses of a selected few can capitalism be really trusted to reform itself well to discuss that i'm now joined by russia sylvia one of the founders of the conscious capitalism movement mr society thank you very much for your time and you know in the later years of the soviet union when structural deficiencies for already

obvious some of the fishes talked a lot about the need to create socialism with a human face and a deal was that it would be based on the same with comic principles but with human experience add the core of its value system and i think many thought it was redundant because social is by its very definition was supposed to be humane and you know had these human streak about it isn't capital is by its very definition supposed to be conscious and rational well let me go back to your premise which is about socialism being inherently rude to me the way in which it was expressed actually ran counter to human nature because human beings want to be free and we are all unique species that actually not only creates value but exchanges where and with each other this is something we're almost programmed to do and if you look historically across civilizations and of human societies every time we have been

given the freedom to focus on what we choose to focus on and then to be able to exchange. with others we have prospered through the wasn't deny that in the ideology of socialism their idea was that your god was the highest form of freedom when you could contribute to decide and by doing so also improve your own wellbeing that was at least the ideology that was arguably never put into practice i think the underlying premise of socialism is the motion of a fixed. and therefore the onus is on the fair distribution of those limited goods or those outcomes. fundamentally what capitalism shows us and what business is all about is an expanding. there's almost no limit to the amount of value that can be created when people come together and they cooperate and they elevates the amount of value that there's exchange constantly and if you look at an i phone you buy it for

a few hundred dollars this several billion dollars of technology that's inside of that but through the system we're able to get access to the militant really much lower amounts and there is you know the opportunity to create of expanding pool of you whereby them the equal distribution of that becomes less of an issue because within that system there will be inequality doesn't matter how much you force it into equality of opportunity is one thing which we should have that equality of outcome can never be too i wonder if when we talk about conscious capitalism we are really mixing our conscious with conscientious because if i'm a smart business leader with even a smidgen and social intelligence i would understand that working my people into the ground and treating them unfairly is ultimately you're bad for my business but i think you have a different idea how with creating these sustainable operations focused on profit making be different from what you are advocating well i think. in

lightened self-interest sensually is what you're talking mud which is has always been the case and very had conscious businesses for hundreds of years without using the label but i think what got capitalism doing it was this notion that economists brought to it which was the idea of profit maximisation so they somehow made that the only objective function and this is about maximizing profits subject to all the various constraints so they essentially reduced business which is a tremendously complex human undertaking to some kind of a math problem and gave it a symbol object simple single objective function and it became a self. you talk a lot about love and care the center of company's culture and i think in your definition of. you see it as something as both renewable and reciprocal but both love and care aren't always fairly distributed i mean there are people who can

take advantage of those who show them care and i wonder how would you make sure that love and care at a workplace don't degenerate into abuse and manipulation those are think it has to be blended with wisdom and strength. so it's not about. giving in to what people want it's almost you know if you think about tough love or parenting as a as a metaphor it's knowing what's vital knowing what's good overall. so having leaders who are able to blend strength as well as love and care is very important because if you just have love and care then as you said you know it can be taken advantage of it can be exploited so you need to be able to make the tough choices when it is necessary but even those are made from a place of caring and compassion so that even when sometimes you have to downsize and let people go these companies will go to extreme lengths to make sure that

those people have been given opportunities to find alternatives and some of the reason why i ask this question is because there are a number of countries in particular russia where western business executives find it extremely hard to implement basic western management principles and the main reason for that is that people don't really draw the line here and that's been a personal and a professional and it has deep roots in russia's own history in the communist past one distinction but then personal i'm collective was eradicated so i think what you are arguing for it comes from a totally different add these this american notion that you know nothing personal just business but i think blending the two would be a just as difficult as blending any are very to extremes but i think it's. it's interesting that we're getting away from that notion of phrases such as it's not

personal it's just business to me business is the most intensely human activity you know it impacts people's lives not only their livelihood but it impacts their state of mind their state of being their sense of satisfaction so i think the fact that there is a predisposition in this culture to connect personal and professional i think actually plays in favor of of of this in society being more receptive to a conscious business because those businesses very much care about the whole person . well you are never going to marry me for business is caring about those people are as individuals it simply makes it easier for some of the employees to put personal interests ahead of the profession and that would ultimately the fact of the business is bottom line no i think there's always has to be accountability and so just because there's a caring environment doesn't mean that people up to sponsible that they're not accountable because they're they are accountable to each other as well so if i do

so if i don't deliver on my commitments i'm letting you down as my colleague and so there is a culture of very much that includes accountability along with trust so i think you know it's not either or it's really a blending of all of those things now i think if you look at animal studies and the study of evolution reciprocity seems to be the main law all for any successful relationship and i think your theory your movement rather is all about reciprocity but we also know from again evolution there is that is that cheating is usually one of the first behaviors to emerge and it is almost a sign of agility of mind and ingenuity those qualities that are very important for successful business i wonder if when you talk about. being prime human drivers if you are discounting you know some of the other sides of the human nature such as self interest the desire to dominate and those qualities are ultimately at the core

of capital is this is what capitalism is based on no i think we are in a we're starting to broaden our trum just the idea of self-interest alone the human need to care is a strong you know adam smith talked about self-interest in the theory of more the wealth of nations but in his other book the theory of moral sentiments pointed out that we have a need to care that is in fact even more powerful times what unfortunately have been as of the two got disconnected in other words you know in corporate. of this human capacity and need for caring into the world of work in business and hence we have this separation i think if you bring the two together that creates an extraordinary powerful thing the notion that human beings are susceptible to these lower kinds of motivations and so forth it's always true but i think this is about harnessing the better angels of our nature you know we can operate as human beings at a very high plane of consciousness where we are connected to those those higher motivations

and militants or we can operate at the lower level now when we're operating out of fear and out of desire for survival which is really what most people are operating in work then you start to descend to those kinds of things but if you create a climate which is trusting where it is fundamentally based upon love and care not for your stress then i think you're more often connected to the higher engine of our nature and things like cheating i'm cutting corners and doing those kinds of things they only work if i have a transactional relation if i have to do one transaction with you i never see you again but in a relational context where we have to do business hundred more times then those things we know are not going to work i bet it all comes back it's interesting that when you talk about. that are angels of our nature and again brings me back to the idea of communism and comparing it with capitalism because

you know you could argue that one of the main reasons why communism failed is because it ultimately refused to recognize the complexity of human nature and the underlying promise of communism was that if you serve others that's will improve your own wellbeing now capitalism stars from an opposite and that if you serve yourself that will also improve society even without any deliberate efforts and. i wonder if. something like this what you are proposing. could only be implemented in a country with a fairly strong legal system with a low crime rate and ultimately more or less harmonious society because if you remain there don't you don't qualify you know people will inevitably take advantage of your i think there may well be some some truth to that i think definitely when you have a high social capital in the society which means people have trust in institutions they trust in the laws they can believe in contracts this property rights all those

kinds of things then it enables this form of transacting of this form of commercial relationship to happen but if there's sort of a wild west out there and you know that is it is as you described then i think that is the real possibility of of being taken advantage of that in that fashion. having said that i think most places in the world are moving towards greater order and greater role of law and greater. of those kinds of conditions prevailing but certainly i think that that would be a moderating factor that would make it more difficult at the same time we do see companies i'm in india for example we see companies there that are one hundred plus years old that have been operating largely in this way and have been able to do it despite all of the environmental factors that you talked about by the tremendous amount of corruption and on all of that so it is possible but it's more difficult

mr said hey we have to take a short break now but one of the comeback should companies be given the freedom to conduct their business in their conscious way or should they be forced to do that that's coming up in a few moments on the wall of the party. the

playing. field the big spirit travels with the flame from its place in greece. joining james brown for an elemental and epic journey around russia and beyond. where art thou.

welcome back to worlds apart from be discussing conscious capitalism with one of the moments founders rush this audience mr so did i think what you're really talking about is the idea of social responsibility of big businesses and this idea may be fairly foreign american businessmen but in many countries around the world including in russia it is often perceived as a vestige of the old communist regime companies want to be efficient they want to focus on that bottom line but instead they are mandated to spend their valuable of resources on various social programs and they feel that it may actually hold them back what do you think about the idea of the obligatory here for your employees i think i mean action that is going to take a while internally. through

a sense of doing the right things for the right reasons always a lot more power behind. you mandate so the things it takes it takes that purity you. intent of it to give you an example in india now they've just passed a new companies law where they have essentially mandated that you have to spend two percent of your profits on c.s.r. corporate social responsibility defined as things that have nothing to do with your business they have to be things like building the hospital you know school things of that sort and i know that companies are looking of new polls or trying to figure out what one of their activities can be can be put into that or how they can avoid that i think from and of course the idea that what you do in society has to be disconnected from your call business i think is fundamentally wrong because there are things that if you are in the food business you're able to do that are related to food that are essential and important and will have

a big impact but are you not allowed to do that under the under that kind of mall so again imo against the idea of mandating these things i think when you do it out of a sense of enlightened self-interest and genuine caring then it has a lot more power and has it has a lot more effect but on the other hand i think the idea of free choice even in western societies is a big call for my eyes now i specially given the recent economic crisis because it was believed that you know there's big business is big banks should be trusted to make their free decisions and self regulate and look where it got us and i would make an additional point that. american taxpayers were mandated essentially to bail out some of the banks and companies nobody asked for that pain and so it seems to me that you may be allowing for more freedom for big businesses than american taxpayers an american people are currently being afforded and i think it's a very valid point i think. industries and companies have to sort of.

on the right to be able to regulate themselves and when that doesn't happen then i think there is obviously room for in light and form. well thought out and somewhat limited regulation to say here are some abusive practices that should not be allowed so i definitely think it's not about a blanket amount of license to operate freely there are constraints and there always will be in society we have to apply but in a sensible way i think what happens in the us as well when there's a problem that happens the regulatory response to it can often be heavy handed. and can impose a larger burden on the system rather than solving the issue that it was intended to solve and they don't have a sunset clause so these are lost forever unless you know fifty sixty years later you figure out of the changes you often side be example of whole foods as the

company that fully embraced the principles self conscious capitalism and yet there are also many critics who suggest that by now the. emphasis on sustainability and ethics has essentially become a marketing tool and i wonder isn't that ultimately you know natural life cycle we all start out as idealists. you know by the end of the middle of our lives we tend to become pragmatists and me maybe even cynics interesting you know i think with any of these kinds of things there's always a need for renewal and recommitment and really engaging rediscovering your essence and your higher purpose. and of course no company is perfect just like no human being is perfect so wholefoods i'm sure we can find examples of things where they have not lived up to that but but i do think that they try and they have certain processes for example they just completed a few weeks ago

a process called future search which is something they do every five years so they bring together all of their stakeholders four hundred people for seven days so they have employees of different levels the customers at work community members of our suppliers investors board members then they dream about the future of this and what should the future of this company be where we wish to go from here so this is a collective process with the entire community of stakeholders all of them come together and collectively dream about what that should be and the company has implemented a lot of those things over the years so that's one way in which they try to renew and stay connected with all of this to quote i wonder if we can to make it easier for the viewers to understand what really makes for conscious kept as whether we can compare whole foods for example mcdonald's because men don't also sees itself as a company with a mission as a company that tries to implement its vision through various charitable causes they

try to source from local producers and yet the food culture that they seem to be promoting it is at odds with the foot culture that whole foods are noting at the moment do you think both of these companies could be recognized as companies that are thouse conscious capitalism i think up to this point although i would certainly say that mcdonald's is moving in the right direction i would say over time if you look at the number of the offerings that are available in mcdonald's they're sort of of the periphery of their menu the core of the menu essentially remains what it has been and so the dilemma we just talked about with whole foods so i think they are like most companies that i know are moving in that i don't actually. they're moving in the right direction but the consequences of their daycare long operations are at very detrimental to the national health in the united states and that food culture is taking all over the world the rates of obesity are growing all

over the world and those companies you know i place partially responsible for that i agree and therefore i would not label them as conscious businesses today i think there is a way for them to become that way over time but they have to move faster they have to move more broadly and they have to look at the core of their business model just at the periphery of the business but i know a lot of companies are trying to figure out you know how do we keep the business going while we start to align with what society really needs going forward and all these businesses when they started they were aligned with society women started we didn't have the diabetes crisis we had a problem with finding food when we were traveling that was safe that was affordable that was predictable convenient and so forth and so they made a real leaps just solved when companies move to need even tobacco companies mental real need of helping people relax did not know about the cancer side effects and

the question is once we become aware that society has shifted and the consequences of our products which we didn't know we know once we become conscious of those then we have to act differently and i think that's the real test now muhammad yunus who won the two thousand and six nobel peace prize for his microcredit work and i know it's held in a very highest i mean your movement argues that socially oriented business or socially conscious business should not make a profit off poor people and he did earn a small interest rate on things like or credits but as far as i understand it there is the primary goal was to sustain his operations rather than earn. a profit i wonder if you also apply moral. judgment profits is there such a thing as too much of a profit for a company were absolutely. profiteering profiteering is different than having profits so if you're taking advantage of people lack of information or

a lack of choice if there were no plea then clearly there's a moral dimension to that but if you are creating a superior amount of value and as a consequence of that or you are earning higher profits than some of your competitors might be then i don't think there's anything wrong with that because ultimately the profit is not a bad thing. if you don't have profits you don't have taxes if you don't have to it says you don't have money that governments can use to spend on infrastructure and education public health and all of the other things if you don't have profitable businesses ultimately you don't have employment you don't have again the ability of people to donate to charities and all the rest of it so profits are essential but they're not the purpose if i could pick up on basepoint conscious capitalism seems to put a lot of emphasis on more democratic more egalitarian style of management but at the same time you recognise the role of leaders and you argue that over time

there's been a transition from military leaders driven by power it's universe and leaders driven by profit and by money making to missionary leaders driven by the sense of higher purpose whom you believe to be the most effective and i wonder who do you think should be the ultimate safeguard. the mission of any particular company doesn't go right and especially as the companies are getting global and as their influence spreads around it well should it be left to competition as it is usually done in capitalism or should it be regulated maybe self-regulated or regulated by the government i don't see how the government can come in and tell a company what its purpose should be. i do think it has to be. a choice that the company and its leaders to mentally stakeholders make and if they make the wrong choice then the market is pretty effective but for example let's take

a fast company you know that many governments have to invest a lot of money into their health care systems and diabetes heart attacks take a lot of public resources so for example as a government if i want to limit operations of this change am i am not entitled to decide especially because i'm paying for the consequences of the business interests but i think a better approach those targeted taxation so just like we tax alcohol and tobacco at a higher rate to discourage consumption of those products as well as to use some of that money back to. do. dealing with the consequences of their use i think it's perfectly legitimate to say that the products that do have negative effects on him most of them others do and therefore they should be higher taxes on those on that money or a portion of that at least should be earmarked back towards education and so forth i think that's legitimate but for the government to come in and say you cannot do this i think that you know that's a slippery slope and we always have to be wary of the opposite track is just

a slippery as the recent economic crisis when you give companies too much freedom they they may abuse it at the end then you seem to have this very idealistic very positive view on human nature but i think you would also recognize that socially there's always a pretty stable distribution of good and bad and the proportion of those enlightened business leaders is also pretty limited i'm in a you may have a very expansionist plans for your movement but ultimately you know that. you know do gooders still contain it is come to me but i do believe in lot of the data and evidence supports the things that is that we human beings are not staying still as a species that we're evolving so even though there's always a spectrum. i think the trajectories of forwards i will becoming more intelligent there's no question about that in i.q. is a rising but also our consciousness are rejecting off violence of various kinds in

all of the data are pointing to are operating at a higher plane of consciousness and better connected to the higher angels of our nature so i do think that over time the proportion of people who. teams will grow and has been growing we look at the young generation today is the most meaning and purpose driven generation i've met so many here in russia as well where the idealistic young people and the same is true in india and in the united states of the room so there is this something happening with us that that we are moving towards towards these that's right yes well missis i did this since to be a very optimistic. note to finish the program on and if you like the show please join us again same place same time here on the walls of.

the european union likes to think of itself as one of the brighter and fairer parts of the world the european commission report on corruption the first of its kind betrays a very different picture in every single member country there is corruption in some cases on a massive scale so what can the e.u. teach the world how corruption. in.

the headlines from our to international the best of the best the first sets up. medals are awarded in soft cheer as day one of the twenty fourteen winter olympics comes to a close. a team of german skiers and biathletes reaches out for assistance after its equipment fails and finds a helping hand in the russian opponents we decided to put rivalry aside. street violence and goals bosnia herzegovina protesters clashed with police and seven government buildings ablaze amid soaring unemployment economic stagnation and corruption. and a suicide bombing reportedly carried out by a briton in syria the first such attack by a u.k. citizen in the country sparks fresh fears that westerners could pose a threat when they return home from war. we'll have more news in about an hour becoming.