For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about business leaders redefining success through ethical capitalism.
JeVon McCormick, the CEO of Austin, Texas-based book publishing startup Scribe Media, keeps an unopened jar of peanut butter on the bookshelf behind his desk. McCormick tells people that he “grew up in chaos,” in a family dependent on welfare checks and food stamps to survive. As a child, that jar of sandwich spread represented an unattainable luxury. Today McCormick keeps it on display as a reminder to himself and others of what it is like to live in need — and what his calling is as an entrepreneur and CEO. “Some people believe that with those three letters come power, but they focus on the wrong power,” McCormick says. “The power that comes from them is the power to serve. That’s it.”
McCormick is one of five business leaders featured in online videos highlighting ethical approaches to capitalism, produced by online content producer Freethink in partnership with Conscious Capitalism and the John Templeton Foundation. The brief interviews offer more than feel-good stories of creative and compassionate leadership: they underscore the tenets of Conscious Capitalism as crystallized by the organization’s co-founders, Whole Foods co-founder and CEO John Mackey and business school professor Raj Sisodia: higher purpose, stakeholder orientation, conscious leadership, and conscious culture.