Enlightened Bottom Line
Exploring the Intersection of Spirituality, Business, and Investing
Showing business leaders how to operate with concern for the broader world, Enlightened Bottom Line is an encouraging leadership guide.
As much concerned with making a difference as a profit, Jenna Nicholas’s aspirational, encouraging leadership guide Enlightened Bottom Line is about what success truly means.
Entrepreneurial goals, the book suggests, should align with a person’s values. They should reflect purposefulness, concern with social impact, and stewardship for natural resources. It uses the acronym HEAL (representing hope, empathy, abundance, and legacy) to organize its guidance on elevating one’s goals, infusing their business interests and investments with spiritual purpose. Topics including investing with intent are addressed amid the book’s outlined vision for effecting change.
Guided by Bahá’í tenets, the book also includes anecdotes about Nicholas’s angel investments, showing how she devoted billions to efforts for the social good, including in the climate-preservation, education, and health-care fields. For instance, she recalls advising a second-generation leader to shift their investments away from big tobacco and fossil fuels. Outside examples wend in, too, as with a hotel group that incorporated spiritual values into its business model. Tips from executives on putting such ideas into practice are included alongside helpful warnings about the logistical challenges of shifting the approaches of thousands of employees to effect change.
Both professional and profound, the book encourages interest with thoughts on how “death can paradoxically serve as our greatest teacher about life.” Its proposed approach to conducting business with care is engaging. Quotes from business leaders, authors, and professors about balancing one’s purpose with profit further support the book’s holistic views on leveraging one’s wealth to address social and environmental problems. The book’s variety of insights and perspectives is engaging, with inspiring stories, as of a CEO working to free people from generational cycles of disadvantage. However, the book’s volume of outside expertise sometimes dilutes Nicholas’s own, singular voice.
Still, the book’s guidance is quite actionable. For instance, it lists strategies for becoming an optimistic leader, including accentuating the positive and treating doubts with care. Its tips on developing a culture of excellence, screening for values-aligned investing, and communicating with clarity are persuasive. Further, its advice has a timely quality, as with its considerations of how new technology like artificial intelligence can be leveraged to further a company’s values, with examples as of a virtual reality simulacrum of homelessness that was used to foster empathy.
An inspired leadership guide, Enlightened Bottom Line is about meaningful entrepreneurship that integrates spiritual concerns into its core.
Reviewed by
Joseph S. Pete
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
