SPIRIT VENTURE: DEFINED WITHOUT LIMITATION

What makes a business a spirit venture?

Since I coined the term in 2007, I’ve been working with that question on an almost daily basis. I still don’t feel I’ve come up with an answer the folks at the Oxford English Dictionary will like, but I definitely have a few key ingredients I can outline for you.

Like a social venture, a spirit venture is distinguished by its values – a desire to serve the greater good, a need to do something more meaningful than just make money, often defined as having a triple bottom line which evaluates performance in the areas of people and planet as well as profit. 

A spirit venture shares those values, and yet takes them one step further – to the quadruple bottom line: people, planet, profit, presence.  That fourth bottom line can manifest in different ways.  Often, it means holding intuition as a decision-making method with validity and effectiveness equal to or better than research or reason. Similarly, it can extend to making mindfulness, “whole person wellbeing” and Integral Self-Actualization (so much more than just work/life balance) core practices in human capital management. 

More than anything else, I see spirit venture as informed by dharma in a way that sees the biggest possible pictures – a multiverse rather than a universe, a perpetual consciousness rather than a single lifetime.  It embraces wisdom over knowledge, personal path over market studies and the principles of karma and livingkindness over “customer service best practices.” 

Inherently Integral, spirit venture is not superior to or rejecting of those principles which came before it – rather, it includes and expands upon them.  It’s not a replacement for anything – rather, it is the next evolution in entrepreneurial consciousness.  

In the simplest possible terms, spirit venture is awareness in action.

And spirit venturers are amazing Visioneers whose expansiveness and creativity are changing their own and their communities’ lives every single day.  Wanna play with us?  Sign up here for news and events.