Carter Phipps writes and speaks at the crossroads where business meets inner life, asking what it actually takes to lead — and build an economy — with integrity. His 2020 book Conscious Leadership, co-written with Whole Foods Market co-founder John Mackey and Steve McIntosh, was named a Financial Times Fall Book Pick and drew praise from voices as varied as Adam Grant, who called it proof that “we don’t have to choose between purpose and profits,” and Jamie Dimon, who praised its vision of leadership as “a neverending journey.” The book makes its case less through theory than through Mackey’s own hard-won story — including the near-collapse of his leadership at Whole Foods — reframing conscious business not as a slogan but as something forged through genuine self-examination.
Phipps’s earlier book, Evolutionaries, traced how insights from science, spirituality, and culture are converging into a new understanding of human development. That same integrative instinct led him to co-found the Institute for Cultural Evolution, a Colorado-based think tank working to bridge America’s polarized worldviews — work NYU psychologist Jonathan Haidt called some of the most insightful writing he’d encountered on why the country’s divisions run so deep. Phipps also hosts the Thinking Ahead podcast, where his wide-ranging conversations track how business, politics, science, and consciousness are shifting together, not in isolation.
Why Their Voice Matters: Phipps writes from the conviction that outer systems — economies, institutions, leadership itself — can only evolve as far as the people inside them are willing to grow. His work offers a grounded, tested vision of what it looks like when personal transformation and structural change move forward together.
