What a Day for a Daydream
Updated: Sep 3, 2019
The end of shareholder primacy opens us up to a new field of possibilities.
With the chaos meter off the charts these days, I was heartened by the news of the Business Roundtable lobbying group’s new priority statement. Instead of shareholders being the number one priority of corporate America, they’ve ‘modernized’ their principles to a new and improved focus on stakeholders; meaning customers, employees, suppliers, communities, and shareholders. With their revised Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation, the Business Roundtable hopes to help set “a new standard for corporate leadership,” one that promotes “An Economy That Serves All Americans”.
Shortly after that monumental announcement, the community of Certified B Corporations responded with a full-page ad in the New York Times that invited the Business Roundtable to step right up as they’re already “walking the walk of stakeholder capitalism.”
Monumental and reassuring. Once I got over the fact that it’s taken this long, I began to feel vindicated. Finally, consciousness in leadership is going mainstream. The light of evolved thinking has beamed through a crack in the cold hard steel door. Albeit, a small crack (income equality, ahem) at least it’s a beginning.
How will these declarations lead our country to a more socially conscious and enlightened form of capitalism? Time will tell. But the sea-change is happening and I eschew limiting beliefs based on historical truths. It’s time to stop basing our actions on expectations and start imagining what we would like to have happen instead. I say it’s time for some daydreaming. Let’s take some time to imagine how good it could possibly get.
Daydreaming a future of corporate innovation is the first step toward being the change. Now is the time to engage our imagination. We can place our energy on a future we want and allow ourselves to play in the field of possibilities. Thought leaders such as Joe Dispenza say it’s not matter that creates the field, it's the field that creates matter. Our positive thoughts--especially when conjoined with a powerful emotion such as joy, love, compassion, and gratitude--change our brainwaves and allow more pleasing outcomes to present themselves.
"What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust?" -- Salvador Dali
See? We invest time daydreaming, and now we have a vision. The more time we engage that vision, completely absent of resistance, the greater the chance the dream has of becoming a mission, then a goal and then a plan, then reality.
The field of possibilities is where the magic happens, where we get to suspend all logic, where we fire off new neurons and form new receptors make ideas into things. If we don’t imagine where we want to go, we’ll never get there. Do your part to promote stakeholder primacy by kicking off your shoes and shutting your eyes for a few minutes. Slow down your breathing and put your heart into it. Go ahead. Imagine a future you can fall in love with.
Here's a little song to get you in the mood.