Soulful Enterprise began when Andrew Baughen studied for an Executive MBA at the same time as being the vicar of a church.
Soulful Enterprise began when I studied for an MBA at the same time as being the vicar of a church. At the ‘TheoTech’ intersection of business and ethics I kept thinking ‘yes but …’ Yes, companies need to make money, but what about their motivation to make a difference? Yes, competitive strategy is about creating and capturing value, but how are you defining value and how widely is that value shared? Yes all firms do what is legally required of them, but do they go beyond that? Soulful enterprises have a ‘both and’ attitude. They move from a distributive ‘zero-sum’ logic to a generative ‘mutual-gain’ logic. They don’t think in trade-offs that split the pie - they grow the pie! The ambition of Soulful Enterprise is to help organisations become ‘both and’ enterprises that generate all sorts of value for the customer, business and common good.
The outcome will be a diagnostic tool that measures where a firm is currently generating value in a wide range of ways and highlights areas for growth and development. It will help soulful enterprises know why they do what they do and like doing more and more of it.
Andrew Baughen
Why Soulful Enterprise?
Soulful Enterprise is a generative mindset:
• intentional growth through good business that does good
• expansive strategies that look to add, extend and connect productively
• people shaped principles that root out dehumanised practices and silo thinking.
Soulful Enterprise develops organisations that:
• staff want to stay working for and customers make a positive choice to do business with
• reduce dissonance risk by acting with common vision and integrity
• generate greater societal impact that underpins longer term profitability.
The Research Project
Soulful Enterprise began in 2016 as a research project with a major grant from The Templeton Religion Trust. The project lead is Andrew Baughen who is a Visiting Lecturer and Honorary Visiting Fellow in the Faculty of Management, Bayes Business School (formerly Cass), City, University of London.
Project Activities
• Identify universal principles of Soulful Enterprise and how they are practised in different business contexts
• Identify the categories of value organisations have the potential to generate and produce measurement tools
• Identify generative practices and behaviours and senses their long-term business impact.
Project Outcome
• A set of diagnostic tools, workshops and publications that help build generative organisations
• Mapping of the whole value an organisation is generating
• Strategies for further value generation.
The Whole Value mapping workshops will help firms explore the values behind what they do and how to generate more value they believe in.
