Creating A Beautiful Business: Designing Meaningful Work And Connection With Steven Morris

9 Dec , 2024 podcasts

 

A beautiful business is more than just a profitable venture. It’s a harmonious blend of passion, purpose, and positive impact. In this episode, Katherine Twells is joined by Steven Morris, a creative visionary who explores how to foster a beautiful business by cultivating self-awareness, clarity in leadership, and meaningful connections within the workplace. Drawing from his diverse background in design, psychology, and fine art, Steven reveals how leaders can create environments where teams thrive, flow, and experience transcendent moments of connection. Steven shows how these practices can transform business into a space of creativity, connection, and lasting impact.

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Creating A Beautiful Business: Designing Meaningful Work And Connection With Steven Morris

Evolving Organizations With Love And Beauty At The Core

Greetings, friends, and welcome to the podcast. At its heart, business is a human-to-human venture. Much of what we do, we actually do unconsciously. We often make decisions with our heads as we try to understand the landscape and analyze in the right ways, but we really act with our hearts. What often stops a business from succeeding is the ability to execute on good ideas with integrity. The potential is to fuse together strategy, leadership, culture, and brand to create loyalty, belonging, and trust inside and out. My guest is Steven Morris, brand and culture advisor, author, and speaker, and such a skilled guide in helping companies create organizational integrity and truly connected cultures. Steven has worked with more than 3,000 business leaders across global and regional organizations.

His time-tested process of brand evolution has been applied and refined to more than 120 successful brands. He’s been a student of human behavior, positive psychology, and spiritual psychology for the better part of 30 years, so what a powerful combination. He uses his unique background to help others find their own artistry at work, creating wholehearted, engaged, and innovative cultures. He is the author of several books, and the latest, called The Beautiful Business: An Actionable Manifesto to Create an Unignorable Business with Love at the Core, is a work of art in itself. His TEDx talk on this concept illustrates the potential of what we can create together when we allow love and beauty at the center of life and work. Please enjoy the conversation with the very wise Steven Morris.

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Steven, thank you so much for taking the time to join me. I know when we had our conversation before, I really only discovered you and all the amazing work you’re doing not that long ago. I’m just super excited for this conversation because of all the things that resonate so deeply. Thank you for taking the time.

It is my absolute and deep pleasure to be here with you again. We had a wonderful first conversation, and I’m so glad through the auspices of Wisdom Well and Chip Conley’s world at Modern Elder Academy that somehow I showed up on your radar. Let’s dive into wherever you want to go.

Steven’s Journey

Fantastic. It’s all a little bit of magic. I love in the work that I do, I find these people, and so many of us are up to a similar thing but doing it in our own way. It’s super cool to be able to have these intersections so that we can learn from each other and understand the path on a deeper level. This conversation is going to do so much of that. I always begin at the beginning because I believe that the seeds of who we are today were planted a long time ago and shaped our lives. Our lives are deep in stories. We could probably spend the whole hour on that, but if you can, share with us the highlight reel of some of the things that have made you who you are.

I’ll try and be brief on that. Thank you for the invitation. The brief version of the story is that I was raised in a lower middle-class family in Wilmington, Delaware, of all places. A side story, at some point I might tell here, is I met Joe Biden when I had a paper route. I was eleven years old. Anyhow, he had a trailer in a parking lot, and I gave out Joe Biden bumper stickers. I came back the next day, and Joe was in the trailer. I shook his hand and all that kind of thing. He was a junior senator in Delaware at that point. Anyhow, I was born into this middle-class family, and my parents couldn’t be more different. I have these really amazing influences from my parents.

On my mom’s side of the family, essentially all of her brothers and sisters, this was in the 60s, and they were hippies. A couple of them went and came back, luckily came back, from Vietnam. They indoctrinated me into a couple of really pivotal things, one of which was the 60s movement and all of what that stood for counterculture, musically, artistically, etc. The other side of that part of the family is that they were hunters. At the ripe age of ten years old, I was given a shotgun and taught lessons immediately on gun safety and things like that.

I just have a quick comment. I hate to interrupt you, but I’m like, hippie peace movement straight into hunting? That is fantastic. That’s so different.

Yeah, they would hunt geese and deer and all kinds of things. That would be the things that showed up on the Thanksgiving and Christmas table. It wasn’t just “go buy the turkey at the supermarket.” They believed in the more organic approach of eating off the land, so to speak. There are other stories within that. That’s my mom’s side of the family. My grandmother on her side, and my mom’s dad, spent his whole life on the B&O Railroad, Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. He was very much a blue-collar guy. I was very close to him. He taught me a lot about the ethics of hard work. I would go over to their house and do a lot of chores around the house and things like that.

He had this beautiful tradition. I’m going to tell you this story because I know you’re at Coca-Cola. He, in the garage, always had two cases of Coca-Cola, the old ten-ounce bottles in the green glass. After whatever we ended up doing, when the hard work was done, the treat was a Coke directly out of the garage. It was just like, to this day, that version of Coke, it just reaches my soul. It was beautiful.

Thank you for sharing that. People have their Coca-Cola stories. We collect them actually at the World of Coke. People write stories like that. It’s so amazing. It’s such an experience. Thank you for sharing that.

I could go into the semantics of all that, into a deeper version, which I’ll save for another conversation between you all. On the other side of my family, my dad’s side of the family was a very Puritan work ethic. They were firefighters. My great-grandfather was a furniture maker and a craftsman. My grandfather, who I didn’t actually get to know very well, he died when I was pretty young, was an entrepreneur. He had a hardware store and had a little market for a while. I think the Great Depression was tough on that particular family. We lost the business or two during that timeframe. I definitely was taught the meaning of hard work and the meaning of service through that particular side of the family. The firefighters were all volunteer firefighters.

Most of my childhood, I remember going to Christmas and actually weddings and funerals at the fire hall. As an 8- or 10-year-old kid, I had two brothers and a younger sister. My younger sister was too young to do what me and my brothers would do, which would be climb on the fire trucks and just put the boots on and the helmets on and all that kind of thing. It was just like, you could smell the diesel and smoke out of the room. It was just like, for a young boy, it was just beautiful. During my whole upbringing, I always had this fascination with art. I always found myself doodling and creating art. With friends, we would create cartoons and sing songs. I was always creating something.

Fast forward into when it was time to leave home for college. I left at the ripe age of seventeen and a half. I really wanted to study, A) far away from home because I wanted a different culture, and B) I wanted to study a combination of art or design and psychology/philosophy because the whole search for meaning in life started when I was in high school. I couldn’t pinpoint the books that I was reading in high school literature classes or any of those things specifically, but it began to open my mind into, what is it that makes people really tick? What is it about literature that tells stories about people that reach beyond just the normal everyday life? It really captivated my imagination.

I went up to Boston and got my undergraduate degrees in both philosophy, psychology, and fine art. It was always this weird combination of the three of those things together, especially the psychology and the artwork and how, in-depth psychology, we call this the act of individuation, which is the creative act of going into what we would call the unconscious, or what Jung would call the unconscious self, and cultivating that into a world of meaning here and as we live that out. Artwork is a form of both catharsis, development, and expression. It was always there for me. When it came time to go and shift gears out of undergraduate school to graduate school, I applied to two different paths, and I let fate essentially decide where I was going to go.

One set of degrees would have taken me in the fine art path, which I had a lot of skill in. Another set of degrees would have taken me into a master’s program in design. I ended up getting a free ride at Temple University, Tyler School of Art, in a master’s program where I could fuse the two things together. It was beautiful. It was mostly about design. It was a Master of Fine Arts in Design, but I also continued to study fine art through the painting teacher there, Margo Margolis. I got my wish. I got the both-and, the middle path, which I couldn’t have actually created or I wasn’t even aware that I could have. When I came out of graduate school, it was time for me to start working.

I went into the agency path and all that kind of thing and realized very quickly that the world of agency was a lot of work. I loved it because it was mostly around storytelling. It was mostly around the cultivation of ideas through the auspices of businesses and expressing them in such a way that made people move. That really got into how do we touch people, not just from an intellectual level but from a heart and soul standpoint. I think that always drove my design work. At the age of 25, I was a creative director for a big, well-known agency in Washington, DC. My clients were Coca-Cola, IBM, Discovery Channel, History Channel, Black Entertainment Television, and a variety of others. I loved a lot of that.

A lot of that I started not to like because it ended up being not just a 9:00-to-5:00 job, as you probably well know, but a 6:00-to-midnight job, seven days a week. I had the energy back then, but I also had got married, and I was like, at the age of 26, I’m starting to burn out. That’s not a good sign.

Not good.

I got to make a change. My wife and I then decided it was time to uproot from Washington, DC. We had been to San Diego, where we live, on a vacation, our first vacation we took out here. I rented a Mustang convertible and flew out some camping equipment and immediately drove to Mexico, which I didn’t know you weren’t allowed to do in a rental car, at least not without insurance. Anyhow, it was the foolishness of youth. We fell in love with San Diego. Our first anniversary was spent in a 20- or 40-foot Ryder truck, towing a ’71 VW bus out to San Diego, to a city where we knew no one. That’s when I started my agency. I’ll just pause there.

A couple of things, Steven, that I want to unpack from what you said. What is so fascinating to me is all the different pieces, everything from family. You talked about the influence of the ’60s and the hunting and the fire trucks and all that in the book. I know you just talked about some of the differences in the upbringing of both your father and mother. You are just a true fusion of all these facets, like a diamond, with all these facets where the light is shining through in a million different ways. I look at the work you’re doing in the world, and we’re going to get into so much of what you teach and believe about creating beauty in business.

I love, and I think for anyone listening, as you think about your journey, you can look back. In hindsight, it’s always 20/20 as you look back, like, this happened and that happened, and that created who I am. It’s why we need to trust the process because even sometimes things happen that we don’t want, and we realize later that they gave us something very important for the journey. I love your story because there are just so many aspects that affected who you are. There’s a story in the book, even about your art teacher and what he said about you at a very young age and your incredible attention to detail, and him seeing the artist in you at that point. I love it. I love seeing how it shaped how you’re serving in the world. It’s pretty cool.

I appreciate that. Shout out to Mr. Bartoli in Miami. I think it was my fifth-grade art class. It was beautiful.

Our teachers and our coaches, they see things in us. I actually think about mentors within the company who have seen things in me. Other people see your leadership or certain qualities you don’t see in yourself. That’s how we continue to grow and are shaped. I also love, as you talk about art and business intersecting. I don’t usually talk a ton about Coca-Cola in the actual podcast interviews, but as you shared your Coke story, and even I’ve seen, like, with the Andrew Warhol, when you go to our headquarters, there’s art everywhere.

One of the initial creative briefs for creating the Coca-Cola, the traditional eight-ounce Coca-Cola contour bottle, was that it needed to be recognized if it were broken into a thousand pieces. There’s this really cool piece of art at headquarters that just shows the bottle in a bunch of pieces, but you could recognize the contour and the green glass. There was this artful quality to the brand. You really brought that forth as you were telling your story about how those two merge, which is amazing.

You can actually take that metaphor that you just described, which I love. I don’t think I’d heard that story. As a brief, create a bottle that can be broken into a thousand pieces and still be recognizable. Let’s reverse-engineer that. I think the path of life that we’re all creating and living, if we looked at this point in time, we’re a mosaic of all the things that have come before us. We’ve collected and gathered these pieces of our past, both in this lifetime and even partially our lineage. We’ve reassembled them into this thing called a life that we’re living.  I think, ideally, if we’re living a version of an awakened life or a conscious life, or whatever language one might want to put to that, Socrates would say a well-examined life, we aren’t picking up those pieces and assembling them in such a way that isn’t a replication of the DNA that we came in with per se, but rather it’s a version of ourselves being reassembled and putting ourselves together as we move through the world.

I think, as we think about entering into the world of work, we bring that mosaic into other people’s mosaics, and we get to recognize the beautiful humanity of the mosaics of the people around us. We begin to not just look at the individual fractals of that mosaic, if you will, and recognize the beauty of those individual elements, but also the collective whole of how that person’s put together and how you can work with them. This is part of the beauty of the world of work in that we can’t do it alone. It’s actually such a beautiful design when you think about even just the definition of corporation. The etymology comes from the idea of corpus, which is the collecting of the body, a collection of parts and pieces, the heart, mind, the lungs, the nervous system, the arms, the limbs, everything that’s within us that cooperates together to create something that no individual part can actually create on its own.

 

A company is the same way. The more I think that we can recognize it and treat it as this beautiful mosaic that is always evolving, just like the human body is constantly evolving, constantly adapting, constantly changing to not just what our inner drivers are but the environment around us, including the people around us. The more that we can see it that way, the more we see this entity as a creative process or what I would call a work in progress. It’s never done. It’s not going to be done, but you can recognize it for what it is, celebrate that, and then intentionally move it forward.

You just said some incredible things. I feel like you were just channeling from, like, the quantum field right there, Steven, because of how you talked about the mosaic and the pieces and the parts of all of us. I even think about this. I was having a conversation the other day about something that was going on in the company. The conversation was like, what’s going on with the company in regards to this? The truth of the matter is the company is just made up of layers of cultures defined by different leaders. People can work in the same company and be having very different experiences because they’re looking at the company through the lens of the leader and the team they’re on. It’s very different from another team.

The Beautiful Business

The company is just a microcosm. It’s all these people that make it up, and it is always shifting and changing because it’s like a chemistry experiment all the time. You are speaking my language, and I think it’s fascinating to dig into this. In your work, this is what you’ve done. You’ve taken all the pieces and parts of who you are, all the pieces and parts of your experiences that you’ve learned from being in the art world, being in the business world, being in the agency world, your spiritual journey, to really understand, how do I wisely guide other people into this different state of consciousness? Your book, The Beautiful Business: An Actionable Manifesto to Create an Unignorable Business with Love at the Core, and you have a few books, and I think you’re working on another one.

I’ve got another one in my brain.

You’ve got one that you’re percolating with, but this book that I have in my hand, The Beautiful Business: An Actionable Manifesto to Create an Unignorable Business with Love at the Core, you are walking your talk here because it’s a beautiful book. It’s full of poetry and imagery. I was just doing some decluttering the other day, and I was trying to, like, create fresh newness in my space and going through my stacks of books. I’m like, this is a book that I always want to keep because it’s just gorgeous, and one that is so easy to reference. Let’s talk about the case for beauty. It’s maybe not the first thing people think about when they say, let’s talk about business. It’s not like, let’s talk about how beautiful it is. That is not usually where we start.

I want to read something from your book to kick us off on the case for beauty. This is at the beginning of your book. You have this page called Manifesting Beauty, and you’ve already shown the poet in you through the language, but it shows up again and again in this book. Let me read this, “There is a revolution afoot, a rumbling, a groundswell, a quiet tsunami. We’ve reached levels of such abundance in many parts of our society that our attention can be attuned to aims that go beyond survival and security. Business leaders and entrepreneurs are evolving into the fusion of ideas that with the abundance of these times, there’s an opportunity to serve and help humanity in larger ways.

Certainly, there is the awareness that life is finite and uncertain, precious and unpredictable, fleeting and abundant with possibility. People just like you and I are acting on the realization that life is a precious gift and our positions and leadership, regardless of our role or size of business, our stewardship responsibility to care for people and the planet.” That says a lot there. Here’s what I want to unpack a little bit more, what is the case for beauty in business? There are a couple of tenets we’ll get deeper into, but let me start broad, and then we can get a little bit deeper.

I think at this juncture, it’s probably wise and beneficial to describe what I mean by beauty. In our Western culture, beauty tends to be described as something that is purely aesthetic or visual. We actually have a whole industry called the beauty industry, which is primarily cosmetics and fashion. It’s not what I’m talking about. It can include that. I do believe it should include the aesthetic elements of beauty, but really what I’m talking about, I’m borrowing from Japanese philosophers and Japanese tenets of beauty, has to do with the experiential versions of beauty. When we think about how one then experiences beauty, true beauty, we’re then set into a state of transcendence or awe, where time begins to stop.

We have a sense of deep resonance with the thing that we’re identifying. It might not be a thing. It could be a situation. It could be an environment. It could be, frankly, anything. Ideally, it’s an experience that, when we’re immersed in that experience that we call beauty, we’re transcendent beyond what we would consider the normal state of the mind. In fact, it’s not a mind question in any way, shape, or form. It’s a whole-body somatic experience that you can have. There’s a lot of science around the attributes of awe and beauty. When we experience these things, we actually go into a different mind state called the theta state. We can have those experiences in the world of business.

We can have those experiences in a society. When we think about if beauty is all about, then, at least from my perspective, the experience that we can have with a set of somethings or a set of somebodies or a particular environment, then all of a sudden, it transcends the transactional in the business world and goes into the relational realm. All of a sudden, because we’ve had this deep emotional and beyond-just-the-mental-side experience with it, it becomes a relational connection we have with this thing. There’s resonance, there’s connection. I talk about magnetism a lot. John O’Donohue, the poet-philosopher who, unfortunately, is no longer with us, wrote an entire book on beauty.

One of the things he says within that book is that the human animal has no real defenses for actual beauty. What he’s talking about, in that sense, is that experiential beauty that takes us into that place of transcendence and awe. We have no defenses for that. We actually crave it. When we think about beauty in nature, like, I look upon the canyon that I live on here, or if you could imagine, or any listener can imagine, an experience they had in nature, it could have been at the ocean or the Grand Canyon or some sunset or just some experience where you’re feeling fully swept away by the moment.

At that point, it’s not a mental thing at all. We humans are designed to be connected to one another through this attribute of beauty and connected to the natural world. I do believe that this has a direct application to how we cannot just create and run, but also experience, a business.

I was just reading a book the other day on awe. I think everyone listening to our conversation can think of a moment in their life, you talked about being in some grand vista. Usually, it’s in nature where we experience this level of connection that is so much bigger than us that we know we’re a part of something more. I don’t think people associate that very much in the world of work. I think they’re like, there’s work and this whole living the dream, I’m doing work, and I get to go on vacation to the Grand Canyon and feel my sense of awareness. What I love about your proposition in The Beautiful Business: An Actionable Manifesto to Create an Unignorable Business with Love at the Core is that we don’t have to leave the business world to create that absolute awe and transcendence.

It can happen anywhere, everywhere, when we decide and choose to be in that level of self-awareness, that level of connection to other humans, where we see it beyond the busyness and the productivity and the goals and the results that we’re trying to create. If you’re listening to us, and people are like, “Steven and Kathy, I get what you’re saying, but still, there’s work. I don’t know if I feel awe at work.” Let’s just get real for a minute. What would you say to someone who’s trying to grasp how they could actually make work that beautiful?

I don’t know that you can go directly at it. I think there’s no way that I can imagine that you can fabricate an awe experience. You’re probably referencing Dasher Keltner’s book.

It’s exactly the one.

He actually talks about beauty within it and both artwork and nature as one of the core tenets, or, I think, the seven wonders of awe or something like that. You can’t really fabricate it, but you can create the conditions where that’s possible. When you think about, or when I define, leadership, there are three pillars that I define leadership or the core role of leadership under. One of which is, I think, a leader’s role, number one, is to set and clarify what the vision is for where we’re headed, either as a company or as a team or even in a particular meeting. Leadership can happen on all different levels.

Setting the vision is the first part of that. Then, secondarily, equally important, is creating the conditions so that that vision can be realized. It’s the leader’s job to create the vessel, the container, and the conditions, either across the organization or in a particular meeting or a particular project, creating those conditions. The third attribute of the leader is to up-level and support the people who are working towards that vision so that they can be at their best to realize that vision. All of a sudden, when you take those three tenets, if you will, of leadership, you actually might look at that and go back to our question of how we can create experiences or moments of awe in the world of work.

A leader’s role is to set a clear vision, create the conditions for that vision to flourish, and support the people working toward that vision so they can be at their best. Share on X

If you have a clear vision, if you have the conditions to really succeed, both as a team and as individuals, and you’re helping support one another, all of a sudden, you’re drifting directly into flow-state opportunities. A flow state, as we all know, is all about the balance between things that are very difficult and require a certain level of mastery, but then letting go of control in those moments so that you can go and truly be in that state of flow. When you’re in that state of flow, all of a sudden, you’re having these moments that transcend time. Things become effortless, there’s deep connection with everything around you, including, and especially, yourself, and your genius, however you want to define that, is coming out on center stage to play this game in the world of work, to play the game of flow in the world of work.

Even if we just backed off a little bit from the language of let’s aim for awe, what if we just aimed for flow based on the conditions of the leadership scenarios that I just described? I think if you can do that, then you can have these very deep, transcendent experiences more or less every day, or anytime you want to, either for yourself or in a team environment, when you’re leading a meeting or going for an offsite, whatever. I think those are the ways that I would think about how we might create those conditions and those experiences.

Beautifully answered. You’re really getting to the heart of the power of culture because these conditions are created by culture. The tone is set by the leader. I’m sure you’ve worked with companies or at least witnessed that if there is dysfunction, if there is a lack of trust or belonging, everyone’s in survival mode, and it’s very hard to get to a flow state. I often also find it very interesting how we associate work, maybe in general terms, as a negative, “I have to go to work. I have to go to work.” It’s like I’d rather be on an island in Fiji having a boat drink, which sounds good too. If you did that all the time, you would be quite bored because part of the human evolution is to be in the game, in the arena.

Evolved Leadership And Self-Awareness

My father, for years, had Roosevelt’s In the Arena up in his office. I still have it here, as I lost my father years ago. It’s all about being bloodied and marred and being in it because when you’re in the game, that’s where the growth, the development, the self-discovery, and the evolution happen, from being in that game. You just talked about evolved leadership, and there’s four key tenets that you mentioned in the book. You mentioned evolved leadership, levels of integrity, belonging, and magnetism. One of the pieces of evolved leadership is this idea of self-awareness. I think that’s key, just starting with understanding that. Why is having self-awareness so important if we’re going to create these flow states and strong cultures for others?

Let’s talk first about what I mean or how I define self-awareness. From my perspective, there’s two versions of self-awareness. First and foremost, it’s the internal version of self-awareness, which really asks and answers the question: to what extent am I aware of my own motivations, my own drivers in life, what my core values are, and why I’m here doing what I’m doing? That’s both a meta question for an individual, but I think there’s also a situational set of questions that have to do with the internal self-awareness. For instance, why am I heading into this meeting? Why am I in this meeting as a leader? What are my internal motivations to be in this meeting? What are my internal motivations to contribute to this meeting? What are my internal motivations to get out of this meeting?

Of course, a meeting is one scenario, but it applies to lots of different things. That’s the internal self-awareness. It’s a degree to which, and it’s not a yes or no or black and white question, but a degree to which I understand what my internal motivations are. The second side of self-awareness is to what extent do I understand, as I move through the world, how I affect the people around me based upon how I’m living through those motivations. As you can imagine, you’ve probably worked with lots of leaders, some with a great degree of internal self-awareness but a low degree of external self-awareness, or vice versa. Or they can be very low on both or very high on both. The idea is that with self-awareness, we want to have a high degree of both. We both understand what’s driving us and then how we’re affecting the people around us.

 

It matters because if you don’t have either one of those things, then you’re going to run ramshackle through the world or rather, which is the scenario I see more frequently, some leaders, or most leaders, or a lot of leaders have a strong degree of internal self-awareness. They understand what their motivations and drivers are, but they care less or are less aware of how they affect the people around them. This, by the way, creates the conditions that we were talking about earlier. If a leader isn’t aware of how they affect the people around them, then it’s going to be very difficult for them to create the conditions for the team to succeed and for them to uplift the people around them. If they don’t know how their behaviors, actions, feelings, or even their nervous system are affecting the people around them.

One of the things that has come out of my training in somatic experiencing, which is it’s really a therapy modality to deal with trauma, but it also works in the world of work with stress and anxiety, is that the belief is that the most powerful person in almost any room, except for when people have power over somebody else, the most powerful person is the one with the calmest nervous system. What happens is this very measurable thing called self-regulation and co-regulation. That powerful person who has the strongest sense of calm in their nervous system, the people around them will naturally gravitate in their direction and their own nervous systems will attune to their nervous system. All of a sudden, the nervous system has created the container and the vessel for a flow state to potentially happen, and it calms everybody else down in the room.

I am both passionate and fascinated by this topic that you just brought up. A lot of our work in the Compassion Lab is to invite people into this journey of becoming very aware of what’s happening somatically. Because of what you just said, are we working out of our reptilian brain? Are we in a place to respond wisely or react in survival mode? How does the invisible affect the visible that’s going on within the world of work? We have tried to dismantle or decouple those things for many years, put on the game face, put on the mask, walk in the room, but you cannot strip your humanity and your inner experience away from what’s going on. Everyone brings that into the room. I think this is a powerful conversation.

It’s so like, you see it in your corporation. I’ve seen it in so many different corporations. Through this training and somatic experiencing, I’ve adopted a lot of their methodology, and I’m training teams and leaders on how to create nervous system coherence in their own and give them some tools through these trainings so that they can take it into their everyday working world. That first, the noticing happens. My nervous system has gone amok, and my prefrontal cortex is offline, which means I’m in a reaction mode, fight, flight, or freeze mode. What do I do then? First, I notice it. Second, I have some tools because of this training to regulate myself. Secondarily, I can go back into that meeting, into that particular environment, as a full person, not just brain on, but heart and brain connected.

You mentioned bringing the heart into the matter. I don’t know about you, Steven, but I think it was probably 15 or 20 years ago when I read some of Jack Welch’s early books. It was like differentiation, and only we keep only the strongest, it was like survival. I feel like businesses continue to evolve, like in a spiral dynamic world, from this very survival-oriented, achievement-orange competition, it’s either you or me, dog-eat-dog world, into this higher state of consciousness of understanding that it is an ecosystem.

Love And Belonging

That if we’re all in this thing together, we have to start thinking about it in a different way. It’s our nervous system, it’s our journeys, it’s our growth, and it’s how we choose to belong and even love in that environment. You would not talk about the word love in business for a very long time, but it has a place. I want to ask you, you talk about this in the book, where does love and belonging start to come into this new way of being in the business world?

There’s so much to talk about around that. To your point that there’s a little bit of danger in the topic, you start talking about love and business and the C-suite, and some organizations are going to start tuning out. They’re going to be like, where’s the pragmatism behind that? I’ll offer this in response to that particular perspective, which is, you know what love feels like. You know when you put love into something that you’re doing, whatever it is that you’re doing, the results are exponentially better: higher quality, deeper connection, deeper connection from yourself, and deeper impact into the people who are receiving whatever it is that you’re creating. That could be as simple as a presentation or product development or a product development team.

When you put love into something you're doing, the results are exponentially better—higher quality, deeper connection, and a greater impact. Share on X

When an organization operates from what we might call love at the core of it, there’s essentially a passion for what they’re doing. They put their heart, their soul, their mind, and essentially their best genius forward into the work at hand. It’s only through those lenses, I believe, that we solve the biggest problems and create the most beautiful products and businesses that the world, frankly, not just wants but deserves and needs, especially in a broken society that we’re living in. The other, more esoteric style of response that I might have to that would be, love is the antidote to a lot of the ills of our society, which are separating us. Love is the antidote to a lot of the brokenness that we’re seeing within our organizations. It won’t be fixed.

The problems that we have within organizations, stress, anxiety, fighting, this team against that team, or this tribe against that tribe, we have to love our way through it. Ultimately, we must remember that we’re all connected, interwoven in this together. I don’t know if you see it at Coca-Cola, but I’ve seen it at other organizations where you have teams that are actually pitted against one another in their own. They’re in the same company, and they’re fighting against one another. I obviously don’t find that to be a particularly healthy thing. I think in our first conversation, we maybe touched on this element that I tend to want to look at very closely, which is called the invisible culture.

Every company has one. It’s the stuff that gets brushed under the rug or the ruts that have been driven over time through habit or ritual or “this is the way we’ve always done it.” It’s almost like the human subconscious, unconscious, that drives people into ways of being. We think, how did we get here? The Carl Jung quote that says, and I’m paraphrasing here, but it says, until we make the unconscious conscious, it will direct our life, and we will call it fate. If you apply that to the business world: until we make the unconscious within our culture, within our teams, the things that we’re not aware of, until we make them conscious and begin having conversations and identifying the reality of what’s in front of us, we’re going to go down the same path, and we’re going to feel fated to the destiny where we currently are, that we say we don’t want.

Everything you’re saying, Steven, is going back to this invitation to do this work, each of us to do this work, because this invisible culture, this unconscious that’s driving all of us, we can choose not to look at it. We can go like, “I’m not going to,” but it’s not going to go away. It’s going to be the undertone of everything that’s happening within our business environment. I have seen it. I think we’ve all seen it. We’re seeing it in our world. You mentioned chaotic and divided. Here we are, we’re recording this the week before the election here in the US. Before we hit record, we talked about the intensity of that, how people might feel about that. What’s so ironic is all of us, there’s been the rise in diversity, inclusion, and all of us learning to know that we all have our own ways to contribute to the different arenas. We all get that.

A More Connected And Less Tribal World

You and I can sit there, and we can have ten other people join us and be like, do we understand the power of diverse thinking? We’re all our unique people, and it makes us better. Everyone would be like, absolutely. But then you get into a conversation about the election, and two people are ready to take each other down and not come from a place of love and compassion. We still have a ways to go on our evolution of consciousness to find these better angels in all of us, and like you said earlier, there’s no shortcut. It’s continuing to create the conditions. For those listening, if you were to start somewhere, it’s like, it’s just me. Maybe you’re a leader, maybe you’re not a leader. Where’s the place that you begin to make the ripple effect and the changes to make a world that’s more connected and less tribal?

I would say start as close in as you possibly can, which likely means a process of self-examination. What am I doing to contribute to the best version of this company, or what am I doing to undermine the best version of this company or the best version of my team? I think that self-examination, again, going back to self-awareness, to what extent do you really understand the deepest motivations that you have for the work that you’re doing and why you’re doing it? Secondarily, to what extent do you understand how you’re affecting the people around you? I think it’s very valuable if you’re a leader listening to this, to pay close attention to those things that we have counted as invisible, but you know are there.

Anytime I even say the word, let’s say I’m stepping into a new engagement with an organization or even something public like this, and I say the word invisible culture, people know exactly what I mean. They usually go into, it turns into, a quasi-confessional. I’m noticing this, I’ve noticed this. All I’ve done is shine the light on something that says, this is probably existing. To your earlier point, you could just ignore it and move down the path and say, we’re just going to move forward without it. Recognize it’s like a backpack full of rocks that you and your team are trying to carry forward to do the best work possible. If you empty that backpack, how much more effective would you be?

 

How much more effective would your team be if you cleared the slate for all the invisible things and you brought them up into what we will call rational thinking and dealt with them as they are? We could actually become a greater version of both our team, our company, and our business. I would say start there, maybe read The Beautiful Business: An Actionable Manifesto to Create an Unignorable Business with Love at the Core. There are some ideas in there that you could probably get your head around.

I agree with that.

Thank you. You brought up consciousness. Consciousness and self-awareness, I think, go hand in hand. To what degree are you consciously working through your vocation, and where is your voice? What is your true voice? How much permission are you giving yourself to express that in your vocational path, your work, and to the people around you? To our preamble conversation, not to unveil too much, I think that takes a certain amount of courage to step into what this world might consider weird when we start talking about consciousness and business, love and business, belonging and business.

Luckily for us, if we rewind the game tape, say 15 or 20 years ago, it’s a totally different environment. It feels much safer to be able to talk about these things. Luckily, the work that some people are doing in this world is making it more safe to include those types of things into the world of business, which makes the world of business better. Frankly, because we live in a capitalist society, I believe it makes our culture better.

I totally agree. So much of this is also language and the things that we’re associating. You mentioned the word courage. I had this written down on my notes here, that in order to be self-aware, in order to know who you are, how you want to contribute, to even reflect on whether you’re in alignment on a regular basis with those ideas of who you want to be, it takes the courage to look. It takes time to reflect. I feel like we’re so addicted to productivity. We’re so busy. We’re so distracted. We’re on our phones every minute at the stoplight, people are checking stuff.

If you don’t give yourself the space to look, then you’re not going to find out. Before you know it, time will have gone by, and you’ve just been asleep at the wheel. I don’t say this out of judgment. We all fall prey to this. I say this out of a call to action for us to slow down and really think about how we’re showing up.

In the coaching work that I do, I coach both individuals and teams. The biggest thing I work with them on is slowing down. When we slow down, we can actually begin to notice the things that we’ve been flying past, such as the invisible culture or the anxiety that we’re having about the work that we’re doing, or the environment that we’re in, or how things are not working out the way they should be. By slowing down, we can begin to notice not just what’s happening within us, but we can have the presence to notice what’s happening in other people, and then begin to heal and grow and do this evolutionary curve where we get better at what we do and who we are as an organization.

To me, it is the ultimate unlock to this next phase in all of our evolution. As we go back to language, I think it’s very easy for people to hear words like love, compassion, and belonging, and to feel like they’re soft, fuzzy, and warm. I would say they’re tough. It takes courage, strength, and fortitude to do those things because it means you’re not on autopilot. You are willing to look in the mirror and you are willing to change and to put yourself in the shoes of others and to know you’re a part of an ecosystem because business is an ecosystem, not different from nature.

In the book, you draw parallels to nature and how art is repeated in nature, but in business, we are like nature too. Every piece of that, going back to the fragments that we talked about earlier, is creating what’s happening. The more we get that, the more we’re going to actually do some beautiful things together in business and in the world.

I think people can be business artists. You think about the role of the artist as really to create from a place of mastery so that it’s presented in a manner that moves people from one set of reality, one set of experience, one set of knowing, into something else. If you think about most organizations, Peter Drucker said this back in the 1960s, there are only two core roles in any organization, one is innovation, the other is marketing. At the core of both of those things are creative endeavors. Marketing is essentially about storytelling. Innovation is the beautiful human capacity to envision something and bring it into reality. All businesses, we use the word innovation, but it’s still creation.

All businesses are based upon how well we innovate and keep innovating, and then how well we tell stories that reach people, the right people in the right ways for the right reasons. When we think about how a business can operate, these mindsets around this ingenious human attribute to create something, we do this every day, and we do it every moment. We’ve done it in this conversation. I’ll do it in an offsite that I’m running next week. You’ll do it in an offsite that you’re running next week. We’re creating the vessel of that. We’re creating how we show up, the vessel and how we show up with our energy system and our nervous system every moment in every conversation, be it in a boardroom or a one-on-one by the water cooler with our closest comrades and our closest friends.

I agree so deeply. As human beings, we are fundamentally creatures of creation. That’s what we’re doing all the time. Just pulling the through line through with our conversation, the more we know who we are and have a vision for the beauty we want to bring into the world, the more we consciously choose to show up in that way over and over again and reflect and grow. That’s how we tend our garden. That’s where beautiful things happen from there.I’m looking at our time, and I’m like, this has been like a time warp. Because I kid you not, we started talking, and I looked at the clock, and it was like almost an hour has gone by.

Closing Thoughts

I have all these notes on deep noticing and on transactions to transcendence and magnetism. We haven’t got to any of that. Maybe you’ll come back and have a part two conversation because there’s a lot more to talk about here. But what I’d love to do, being respectful and very mindful of your time, is to make sure people know where to find you, Steven, but also just your closing thoughts. We haven’t painted the whole picture, but we’ve talked about a lot. Are there some thoughts you’d like to leave people with from this conversation, and how would they find you?

First and foremost, a deep gratitude for you and for the space that you’ve held and for the invitation for us to have this beautiful conversation. Parting thoughts are, and this was part of our preamble, just to have the courage to show up and be the very best version of yourself, put your genius out there for the world, and just know that sometimes it’s not going to be met with either understanding or with the openness of arms in the world. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. We’re here to live this beautiful life, and it’s finite and it’s precious, and it can be full of meaning and impact in every way that you want to bring that to the world.

Have the courage to show up and be the very best version of yourself. Put your genius out there for the world. Share on X

My invitation for people is to be courageous enough, be even crazy enough, to live your own genius. How can people find me? MatterCo.co is my website. On there, you can find out about a lot of my work, but the biggest thing there probably is I have a blog that I’m very active in writing. I have about 40,000 people that read that blog every week. I’ve got a little podcast that’s sometimes a little broadcast, very selectively, out of some conversations that I have. You can find out about my work there.

Fantastic, and of course, The Beautiful Business: An Actionable Manifesto to Create an Unignorable Business with Love at the Core, which I would highly encourage anyone to pick up. This book is art. It is poetry and art and wisdom all in one place. I am deeply honored by the conversation. I am grateful to know you. Again, thank you for taking the time to co-create with me. I’m really grateful.

It’s my pleasure, Kathy. Thank you.

 

Important Links

• The Beautiful Business: An Actionable Manifesto to Create an Unignorable Business with Love at the Core
• Matter Consulting

 

About Steven Morris

In 1994, I launched my brand strategy and marketing agency Mth Degree, which I built, ran, and grew for 23 years. My firm served global and national clients that include Sony, Habitat for Humanity, the NFL and MLB, Samsung, Disney, and Amazon.

In 2017, I sold my marketing services business so I could fully focus on serving client partners through my brand evolution process. This time-tested process has been applied and refined to more than 120 successful brands.

My background includes earning an MFA in Design from Temple University, Tyler School of Art and undergraduate degrees in fine art, psychology and philosophy.

I’ve been a student of human behavior, positive psychology, and spiritual psychology for the better part of 30 years. I’m especially focused on the thinking of Abraham Maslow, Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell. As well, I use the tools of the artistic process, that I learned, taught, and still apply as a painter, into my work in leadership circles.

I leverage all aspects of my diverse background to help organizations activate the intrinsic motivations of their people, so that they can be more wholeheartedly engaged, innovative, and fulfilled in their work.

As well, I’ve had the honor to work with the poet-philosopher David Whyte and his talented faculty in the Invitas program on Conversational Leadership.

I have taught and lectured at a wide variety of universities across the US, including San Diego State University, Temple University, UCSD, and Medill at Northwestern University.

I have spoken about The Beautiful Business at TEDx, on Cultivating Curiosity at Creative Mornings, and events that range from CES, HOW Design Live, AIGA events, Social Venture Network and various conferences and in-house events. I regularly give talks on topics that include “Brand & Belonging,” “Cultivating Curiosity,” “Values-Based Stories,” and “The Beautiful Business.”

I advise, consult with and speak to Fortune 500 and privately held companies, entrepreneurs, leaders and communities around the world, helping them to build trusted brands and connection so they can build the future they envision.

 

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Beautiful Business, Business Evolution, Heart-Centered Leadership, Love In Business, Organizational Transformation, Workplace Culture

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