We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Blaine Bartlett a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Blaine thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

I founded Avatar Resources in 1987. The word Avatar is Sanskrit in origin and means the embodiment of and idea or ideal. All organizations are founded on some idea and ideal and the organization literal embodies this in its products, services, and operations – the organization “is” this idea or ideal. Our company provides resources to the leaders of organizations that assist in keeping the connection to the founding idea/ideal relevant and intact.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

The primary focus of what we do is built upon a foundation that focuses on returning to or regaining the soul of your business – that esprit that gives what you do meaning and vitality and connects to everything your business touches. We call this Compassionate Capitalism.

We focus on this in order to ensure that the workplace of today and tomorrow enables individuals, society and the planet the opportunity to thrive. Answers for how to do this are rooted in compassion.

Part of our mission is to shift the consciousness of existing business leadership from that of a predator intent on accumulating in order to survive to that of a steward focused on thriving. We do this because you act differently if you think you’re responsible for the whole. We look to shift the consciousness of young people going into business so they see themselves entering the temple of a noble profession rather than a jungle, because you don’t give yourself permission to do things in the temple that you do in the jungle. We seek to shift the conscious of the public at large, so they put their purchasing power, their money, where their deeper values are. When they do that, business will follow the dollars and will give the public what it really wants – opportunities to thrive.

Our mission is to provide resources and services that foster Compassionate Capitalism. We define this as an economic model for ensuring that the workplace of today and tomorrow allows individuals, organizations, society and the planet the opportunity to thrive in a generative and sustainable manner. We believe that developing and leveraging this model is fundamental to our collective long term survivability. We further believe that business has a unique and primary responsibility in uplifting the quality of all life on the planet. Business is responsible for the whole of life on this planet. Compassionate Capitalism is the model for behaving as if this were true.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

Nature has been my first and best teacher. I grew up on a farm and the lessons from that time are even more relevant today than they have ever been. Chief amongst them is the singular observation that Nature is the only truly free market economy. In Nature there are no artificial constraints to what we might call commerce. Nothing is wasted or thrown away. Nothing serves as a center of accumulation…everything is in some way a center of resource distribution. There is always growth in death. Abundance is everywhere. Transformation and evolution is the norm not the exception. Adaptability not strength is the key to surviving and thriving.

Applying these lessons to my businesses and the way I and we work with our clients is literally the way we’ve grown the business. No major or expensive marketing strategies. Simply word of mouth referrals, attending to the quality of the relationships with our stakeholders, providing content that is valued, a mindset of abundance, and ensuring that we “first do no harm” in the ways we conduct our business. Nature’s lessons.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

Employee engagement is the holy grail of most businesses. This is because most managers and leaders try to “manage” their people. People don’t like to managed and will eventually emotionally disengage from what the company is trying to do. Gallup’s annual engagement surveys over the past 20+ years consistently indicate up to 87% of the global workforce is emotionally disengaged from their work. You can manage process but you need to learn to lead others effectively in order to maintain high morale that leads to consistently high performance.

Leadership in the way I define it is the process of “influencing others in ways that co-create coordinated movement.” Influence is NOT command and control. It’s an invitation to participate. Co-creation is about ownership transfer – my idea becomes our idea. Effectively done, it produces emotional engagement and commitment versus compliance. Coordinated movement is how inevitably occurring conflict is used to facilitate the achievement of the organization’s and the employee’s goals.

Contact Info:

• Website: blainebartlett.com avatar-resources.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/blainebartlett/
• Facebook: facebook.com/OfficialBlaineBartlett/
• Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/blainebartlett/
• Twitter: twitter.com/blainebartlett
• Youtube: youtube.com/blainebartlett1