Sustainable Business Practices and Ethics with Amanda Fornal

**SPEAKER_1** (0:03)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media and programmatic ad experts.

**Steven Sakach** (0:18)
Welcome back to the show, everyone. I'm Steven Sakach here with my cohost again, Tullio Siragusa and our special guest who we'll introduce in a moment. So, I sometimes think sustainability is really just love extended over time. You know, when we care about something, a community, an ecosystem, a company, we naturally want it to endure. And the challenge is that many of our systems are built around that short-term transaction and extraction, just constantly thinking about that. But today, we're going to explore sustainability, not just, you know, from a compliance standpoint, but as a leadership philosophy.
Tullio, introduce our special guest today.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:58)
Absolutely. Our guest today is Amanda Fornal, a founder, executive coach and startup advisor and business consultant with over 25 years of experience in technology, business transformation and change management. Through her company, Orange SFM, she helps leaders build resilient, human-centered organizations by improving strategies, strengthening processes and guiding teams through complex transitions. She is the founder of Founder Buddies and serves as a director with Founder Institute Germany, where she has advised more than 100 early stage founders. Amanda is also the creator of the Investing in Kindness initiative and the founder of Elephari, a storytelling platform born from her global research interviewing 612 people across more than 75 countries about how they define love. A fellow of the Explorers Club and founder of Women in Exploration, Amanda brings a rare combination of enterprise consulting, startup advising and global culture research to the intersection of strategy, leadership and transformation. Amanda, welcome to The Bliss Business Podcast.

**Amanda Fornal** (2:10)
Hi, everyone.

**Steven Sakach** (2:12)
I love it. I want to get into so many of those different things. But Amanda, first, you work at this intersection of strategy and transformation and human-centered leadership.
How do you define sustainable business practices in today's environment?

**Amanda Fornal** (2:29)
Well, I believe overall diversity of thought is how we push forward innovation, not just externally with who we interact with, but also with ourselves. I think that intersection is really important to push forward in sustainable business practices. And it's also important to think about long-term and short-term, right? So you don't want only quick wins, and you don't only want to think about your long-term success of sustainability. I'm thinking, okay, how can I be happy today as well as happy tomorrow and everyone else be happy tomorrow, right? So we don't want to just be self-centered, and we don't want to think in just one time frame.

**Steven Sakach** (3:09)
Yeah, I think there's that Native American philosophy of what this decision I make right now, how is it going to impact seven generations from now? And I think today we typically are thinking, hey, what's the next quarter results? We're always optimizing toward that quarterly earnings call or something coming up, and it develops all kinds of issues along the way.

**Amanda Fornal** (3:31)
It's so true. And I remember I did a large scale project for a software company where we looked at pipeline management. And we were looking at pipeline management, and we looked at all the other companies, what they were doing, and they weren't thinking ahead many quarters. And that was really interesting to build a project specifically thinking far ahead for multiple quarters. And so that idea of being more sustainable, and it wasn't normal at the time when we implemented it. And I thought that was fascinating because we do want to think about quarters far ahead, not just the next quarter.

**Tullio Siragusa** (4:05)
Yeah, I always say, you know, two years from now, that quarter coming up is going to be the next quarter in that moment. So you can plan for it now, right? So we did a whole show on the Iroquois. Remember, Steven? They influenced, I think, even the Constitution and some of the principles. OK, so Amanda, you created the Investing in Kindness Initiative. How does kindness influence leadership and decision making at scale? Can you share a little bit about that?

**Amanda Fornal** (4:37)
Yeah, the project was inspired by someone saying that they wanted to invest in sociopathic founders instead of kind founders. And I found that odd and not great.

**Steven Sakach** (4:49)
All of our businesses are designed right now to promote the sociopath.

**Tullio Siragusa** (4:53)
And mangal maniacs. Those are the only people who get funded.

**Amanda Fornal** (4:56)
I think this is a great idea, guys. So let me say, and I was on a panel and I was asked what gets you up in the morning, and I was like, to do good.