In Good Business, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found that what distinguished extraordinary leaders, and what enabled them to build extraordinary organizations, was “soul.” I find his clear words worthy of quoting in full.

5 “I accept conditionally. I can commit to do what you ask if R (a mutually observable condition) happens. Would that work for you?” 6 “Let me make a counteroffer. I can’t commit to doing X by Y, but I could do S by T. Would that

So if you are already full, why strive for success? Because the game is a fabulous arena for expressing your richness; because competition is a fabulous spur toward excellence. And there is no game without players who strive to succeed. In fullness, you don’t play the game in order to succeed; you strive to succeed in order to sustain the game.

Leadership is the process by which a person sets a purpose for other persons and motivates them to pursue it with

If you engage in business consciously, you never forget that business success is not the goal. Business success is a means toward your happiness. You do business to live (happily), you don’t live to do business. Most people don’t link business with happiness; they think of business as a necessary evil. However, business is one of the most important

Contrary to business school doctrine, “maximizing shareholder wealth” or “profit maximization” has not been the dominant driving force ... of [exceptional] companies ... Yes, they seek profits, but they’re equally guided by ... core values and sense of purpose beyond just making money. Yet, paradoxically, the visionary companies make more money

Instead of looking at the business world as a three-dimensional space, most managers—and investors—focus only on the It. It is as though they wear polarized lenses that filter out the We and the I. Stripped of the human dimensions, business appears to be an unconscious activity in which success and failure depend exclusively on the management of

Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them. DAVID HUME

Freedom does not mean doing what you want without consequences; it means having the capacity to choose, in the face of a situation, the response that is most consistent with your values.