This chapter explores the foundations of humanistic businesses. It presents a three-pillar approach based on successful business cases and qualitative research, including CEO and stakeholder interviews. The key pillars for humanistic businesses and leadership are a higher purpose, innovative management, and authenticity. Deep listening is also highlighted. The chapter provides practical guidance for SMEs to improve engagement, motivation, and competitiveness, emphasizing soft skills like humility and sensitivity. It's a resource for purpose-driven business networks like conscious capitalism and b-corporations, showcasing essential pillars and skills for impactful businesses and leaders. The research's uniqueness lies in its ability to translate humanistic management into challenging regions, like Colombia's VUCA area, affected by violence, displacement, and poverty over 25 years, offering practical hope and insights for global implementation.
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This article presents the results of a qualitative research1 undertaken in the Fall of 2018 in one Colombian small company in the food-service sector “Las Mazamorras de Urabá”—60 employees, 10 stores, 6 towns—where open-ended face-to-face interviews were held with the CEO—partner and daughter of the founder, plus interviews to 20 workers and stakeholders—the majority women. All interviews were done in Spanish, tape-recorded, and later transcribed by a local junior research assistant. Quotes appears here translated to English by the PI. It is located in the north-west part of Colombia, very close to Panamá in a region called ‘Urabá’. This is the place where a century ago the banana multinationals started to have plantations. The founder and her daughter has been managing this company along humanistic practices for more than 25 years. The PI has been supporting this company since December 2017, doing a pro-bono consultancy to implement humanistic management practices within the company—mainly with the administrative team and the CEO. Hence, there is a very good understanding of the company, the region, the workers, and most importantly, the CEO, Ángela. The PI traveled to the region two times, and have had several face-to-face meetings in Bogota with the CEO, and several skype workshops with the administrative team.
Mazamorras—from here on, this short name of the company is used—become B-Certified in 2019, being the only company in the region. The biggest bank in Colombia gave Mazamorras a recognition and support with training to the CEO. Ángela is in several boards of the civil society—government and guilds. She is well recognized in the region. Her company won in 2013 the privilege to attend an acceleration program among 20 awarded of all Antioquia—this a department, a State, where the second biggest city of Colombia is located, Medellín. In a National contest for export SMEs, Mazamorras got awarded one of only 10 spots to travel to Barcelona-Spain in 2014 for a business round-table. In 2019 received an award from the ‘Inclusion Awards’ by the most important trade guilds of the region, with the support of the Canadian Government-CUSO and the United Nations—UNHCR. Last December 2019, among all the companies in Urabá Mazamorras received the ‘Gold Athenas Prize’ in one of the six categories. Some people call her ‘The Ambassador of the Urabá’.
Being an entrepreneur is a monumental task, if you add being a humanistic entrepreneur, the challenge is ten-times greater. This article wants add a third element that multiplies exponentially the difficulty of creating these organizations. To create a company in a context of extreme socio-economic conditions: violence, displacement, semi-urban, male-chauvinism, low-funded public education, dysfunctional family arrangement, among others. But humanistic leadership can manage all of these. Here lies the splendor of this article, to show that it is possible!
These extreme conditions where present in almost all the interviews in one way or the other. For example, and not pretending to summarize all the extreme conditions, in terms of violence, it is well known that Urabá had one of the highest homicide rate in Colombia and in the world 20 years ago2. That reality has changed dramatically, but in the post-conflict era that Colombia is right now, drug-trafficking still is a big social challenge. The PI spoke about this with Angela. She has hired some psychologists to help her team, and she personally lead workshops about these topics. For us, this is remarkable. In November 2018, Angela did more than four 2-hour meetings with each one (14 women) in charge of 10 stores. Angela knew that something was not good, so she created a workshop called ‘La Silla del Amor’ (Chair of Love). Each one sat alone and the others, with a lot of love and compassion, started to express their feelings and perceptions about their co-worker. The results were inspiring. This kind of emotionally-intelligent workshops are strongly suggested for all Purpose-Driven Companies. In the next quotes, the reader can have an idea of the extreme conditions,