Conscious Business: How to Build Value Through Values

Winner of the 2009 Nautilus Award

Consciousness is the main source of organizational greatness. Conscious business, explains Fred Kofman, means finding your passion and expressing your essential values through your work. A conscious business seeks to promote the intelligent pursuit of happiness in all its stakeholders. It produces sustainable, exceptional performance through the solidarity of its community and the dignity of each member.

Conscious Business presents breakthrough techniques to help you achieve:

• Unconditional responsibility—how to become the main character of your life
• Unflinching integrity—how to succeed beyond success
• Authentic communication—how to speak your truth, and elicit others' truths
• Impeccable commitments—how to coordinate actions with accountability
• Right leadership—how being, rather than doing, is the ultimate source of excellence

A conscious business fosters personal fulfillment in the individuals, mutual respect in the community, and success in the organization, teaches Fred Kofman. Conscious Business is the definitive resource for achieving what really matters in the workplace and beyond.

Fred Kofman is Axialent's co-founder and President. An extraordinary teacher, Fred awakens people to act with greater responsibility, integrity and courage; his ideas combine philosophical depth with practical applicability. He has created and taught programs in leadership, personal mastery, team learning, organizational effectiveness and coaching for more than 15,000 participants. His clients include leaders such as Microsoft, Shell, Yahoo! and General Motors.

Fred holds a Ph.D in economics from the University of California at Berkeley, where he was distinguished as outstanding instructor. He worked as an assistant professor of Management Accounting and Control Systems at MIT's Sloan School of Management, where he received the "Teacher of the Year" award in 1992. At MIT, he was also a senior researcher at the Organizational Learning Center, where he worked with Peter Senge. He is a founding member of the Business Branch of the Integral Institute, where he works with Ken Wilber. He is also a member of the Dharma Ocean Foundation, an organization devoted to meditation practice led by Reginald Ray.

Fred has led seminars in the U.S., Europe, South America and Asia and presented his research at MIT's Sloan School, Harvard University's Economic Department, Harvard Business School, the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the University of California at Los Angeles and Berkeley, The London School of Economics, the University of Tel Aviv, Universidad de Barcelona, Nanyang Technological Institute of Singapore, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Instituto Tecnologico de Buenos Aires, and Universidad Francisco Marroquon. He also teaches in Naropa University and the University of Notre Dame's Executive MBA and non-degree executive education programs.

His work has appeared in several publications including The Fifth Discipline Field Book, The Journal of Organizational Dynamics, Management Science and Econometrica. He is the author of the trilogy Metamanagement (Granica, 2001) and the audio program Conscious Business (Sounds True, 2002).

Beyond his work, Fred enjoys traveling and outdoor activities, having run nine marathons, climbed Aconcagua, Kilimanjaro and Mt. Kenya, heli-skied in the Bugaboos and the Himalayas, scuba-dived in the Caribbean, and trekked for several weeks in Nepal and Thailand. Fred lives with his wife and six children in Boulder, Colorado.