Conscious Enterprise and Social Change with Rinaldo Brutoco and David Gershon
What is Conscious Enterprise and Social Change? Gino Pastori-Ng writes, “Tranforming the global, exploitation-based economy into an equitable and life-affirming system for collective well-being is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. We can map every current societal problem to our economic model, which treats life itself as a commodity.” Rinaldo Brutoco and David Gershon, co-authors of Our Moment of Choice, join Dr. Julie to talk about the core principles of social change and re-inventing business and the planet for the good of the whole.
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Rinaldo Brutoco is an accomplished futurist, author, speaker and founding president of, the World Business Academy, a collaborative network of mindful individuals collectively exploring the leading edge of business and a pre-eminent publisher of new paradigm business literature. He is the co-author of a book published last year, Freedom From Mid-East Oil, and several other books in prior periods.
Rinaldo’s work includes a great deal of travel as a featured speaker at business schools, conferences, and at senior-level executive meetings. He serves on the board of The Men’s Wearhouse, Omega Point Institute, Peace Partnership International, the Ojai Film Festival and has served on numerous other boards including The Gorbachev Foundation, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, State of the World Forum, The Peace Alliance and The Center for Earth Concerns, adding to his ability to transform companies through a multi-disciplinary approach.
Rinaldo formed The ShangriLa Group where he consults, as principal, on an extremely wide variety of business applications at both the micro and macro level, both internationally and domestically.
He has served as Chair of the Evolutionary Leaders Administrative Circle (September 2009-November 2010). When he is not traveling, Rinaldo and his wife Lalla divide their time between their homes and offices in Ojai, CA and Hawaii.
David Gershon, co-founder and CEO of Empowerment Institute, is one of the world’s foremost authorities on behavior-change and large-system transformation, and applies this expertise to issues requiring community, organizational, and societal change. His clients include cities, government agencies, large corporations, and social entrepreneurs. He has addressed a wide diversity of issues, ranging from low carbon lifestyles, livable neighborhoods, and sustainable communities to organizational talent development, corporate social engagement and cultural transformation. Over the past thirty years the empowerment programs he has designed have won many awards, and a major academic research study described them as “unsurpassed in changing behavior.”
David used this empowerment proficiency to organize at the height of the cold war, in partnership with the United Nations Children’s Fund and ABC Television, one of the planet’s first major global consciousness-raising initiatives—the First Earth Run. Building on his background as the Director of the Lake Placid Olympic Torch Relay, he used the mythic power of relaying a torch of peace around the world to engage the participation of twenty-five million people in sixty-two countries, the world’s political leadership and, through the media, an estimated 20 percent of the planet’s population in an act of global unity. Millions of dollars were also raised as part of this event to help UNICEF provide care for the neediest children of the world.
Gershon is the author of eleven books, including Social Change 2.0: A Blueprint for Reinventing Our World, winner of the National Best Book Award, and the best selling Low Carbon Diet: A 30 Day Program to Lose 5,000 Pounds. He co-directs Empowerment Institute’s School for Transformative Social Change which empowers social entrepreneurs and change agents from around the world to design and implement cutting edge social innovations. He has lectured at Harvard, MIT, and Duke and served as an advisor to the Clinton White House and the United Nations on behavior change, community empowerment and sustainability.