3 lessons from Altura Capital’s Monika Mantilla

For decades, many investors have viewed impact and financial performance as separate conversations. One is about doing good. The other is about generating returns.

Monika Mantilla, CEO & Co-Founder of Altura Capital, argues that’s a false choice.

In her conversation with Timothy Henry and Raj Sisodia on The Conscious Capitalists podcast, she explains why some of the greatest opportunities for value creation exist precisely where many investors have been conditioned not to look.

1. Underserved markets are more than ‘charity’

Altura was built on a simple observation: thousands of strong lower middle market businesses lacked access to institutional capital and strategic support.

Rather than seeing these companies as higher-risk investments, Mantilla saw an inefficient market. Less competition, untapped potential, and entrepreneurs who needed more than capital to reach the next stage of growth.

For CEOs, it’s a reminder that competitive advantage often comes from seeing value where others see complexity.

2. Patient capital is active, not passive.

Patient capital isn’t about waiting longer for returns.

It’s about committing to the work that creates them.

Mantilla describes Altura as an investment platform rather than simply a fund because capital is only one part of the equation. The firm works alongside entrepreneurs on strategy, governance, leadership, financial discipline, market access, and operational improvement.

The lesson extends well beyond investing: sustainable growth is built through capability, not capital alone.

3. Impact is an outcome of building better businesses.

Throughout the conversation, Monika resists framing impact as philanthropy.

Instead, Altura measures outcomes like quality job creation, investment in underserved communities, and expanding opportunity because they believe stronger businesses create stronger economies.

The point isn’t that companies should pursue impact instead of performance.

It’s that businesses designed to create long-term value for employees, customers, communities, and investors are often the ones best positioned to deliver durable financial performance.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the conversation is that conscious capitalism isn’t about lowering the bar for returns. It’s about broadening our understanding of where value exists, and having the conviction to invest in it.

If you’d like to dive deeper into the conversation, listen to Monika’s podcast episode here ->

Most leaders don’t struggle with accountability as a concept. They’ve spent years being measured against targets, delivering results, and taking ownership when things go wrong. 

What’s changed is something more subtle, and more difficult to navigate: who they’re accountable to, and how those expectations are shifting at the same time.

In a recent episode of The Conscious Capitalists, Kate Adams, Chief Impact Officer at Conscious Capitalism, explored this shift, drawing from her book Accountability Under Fire. It’s a conversation we’re particularly proud of because it reflects something we’ve been thinking about more deeply across our work: what accountability actually demands of leaders today.

If you’re navigating this in your own organisation, here are a few takeaways.

1. Accountability shows up when things don’t go to plan

Most organisations are usually well-structured. But when something breaks, the conversation changes quickly. It stops being about who owned the task and becomes about who was accountable for the outcome.

That’s where the role of leadership sharpens. When trust is tested, people look for clarity, and that clarity is expected to come from the top. Leaders who recognise this early tend to navigate those moments with more conviction. 

2. Trade-offs are part of the job 

There’s been a long-standing belief that most decisions can be structured in a way that works for everyone. In reality, many leaders are dealing with situations where expectations pull in different directions, and something has to give.

The real work is being clear about where you draw the line, and why. That clarity matters more than trying to maintain the appearance of alignment. Most leaders already know this. The challenge is being comfortable acting on it.

3. Accountability shapes what the business becomes over time

Accountability often gets framed around values or reputation. What’s becoming more apparent is how directly it influences long-term performance. The decisions leaders make under pressure, especially the ones that aren’t immediately visible, tend to define the strength of the business later on.

These decisions don’t feel dramatic at the moment, but they stack up. A year or two down the line, they’re the difference between a company that’s steady under pressure and one that’s constantly catching up. 

Accountability hasn’t become more important so much as it has become harder to define. The structures that once made it clearer don’t fully hold anymore, and expectations continue to evolve.

For most leaders, the real shift is this: being more precise about what they’re accountable for, especially when the answer isn’t obvious.

That’s the conversation we’re trying to move forward.

Listen to the full episode with Kate Adams on The Conscious Capitalists →

Dive deeper into the changing conversation around accountability in her book Accountability Under Fire →

Most companies still approach Gen Z with a familiar assumption:  if the campaign is strong enough, the customer will follow.

That assumption is weakening quickly.

Younger consumers are not simply deciding what to buy. They are deciding:

• what communities they want to belong to
• which brands reflect their identity
• which companies feel culturally aware
• and increasingly, which organizations they trust enough to participate in

That changes the role of leadership.

In a recent conversation on The Conscious Capitalists podcast, Brieane Olson described how Pacsun evolved from a traditional retailer into a community-led brand by rethinking one core idea:

The customer should not sit at the edge of the business. They should sit much closer to the center of it.

If you’re thinking about how your company can stay relevant with Gen Z customers while building stronger community, customer loyalty, and brand affinity, here are a few takeaways from the conversation:

1. Gen Z trusts communities more than traditional marketing

One of the clearest themes from the conversation is that Gen Z consumers increasingly trust creators, communities, and peer networks more than polished campaigns coming directly from brands.

Olsen shared the story of a teenager in Nashville who purchased a pair of Pacsun jeans, posted a TikTok video from her bedroom, and ultimately drove the sale of more than 200,000 pairs of that model. The significance of the story was not simply that it went viral. It was that relevance and trust originated outside the company itself.

For leaders, this changes the role of modern marketing entirely. The challenge is no longer just creating messages customers respond to, but building a brand community that customers genuinely want to participate in and help shape.

2. Companies struggle when leadership becomes disconnected from culture

Many organizations still operate through top-down structures where strategy and innovation remain concentrated inside leadership teams. That model becomes increasingly difficult when Gen Z culture, digital behavior, and consumer expectations evolve in real time.

Pacsun’s response was not simply more customer research. The company created a Youth Advisory Council made up of young people between the ages of 13 and 26 who now advise leadership on strategy, technology, innovation, and culture.

Co-creation should go beyond customer engagement or social media strategy. Companies that cannot stay close to the communities shaping future consumer behavior will struggle to maintain relevance, point blank. 

3. Gen Z evaluates brands emotionally

One of the more revealing moments in the conversation came when Olsen described how customers refer to Pacsun as a “safe space” where they feel seen and experience a sense of belonging.

That language reflects a broader shift in Gen Z consumer behavior. Younger consumers are not only evaluating brands based on product, convenience, or price, but also on whether a company understands them culturally and emotionally.

The bottom line

Co-creation can only work if leadership teams approach it as an organizational challenge, and not an emotionless and clinical Gen Z marketing tactic. Companies should work to create genuine safe spaces and inclusive campaigns to build a connection with their younger audiences naturally. 

🎧 Listen to the full conversation with Brieane Olson →

In a business environment defined by constant disruption, most organizations are still designed for stability. 

That mismatch is starting to show. 

In a recent episode of The Conscious Capitalists podcast, Timothy Henry and Raj Sisodia sat down with Jana Werner and Phil Le-Brun, both Executives in Residence at AWS and co-authors of The Octopus Organization, to explore why traditional models are breaking down, and what leaders need to do differently. 

If you’re thinking about how your organization can keep up with the pace of change, here are a few takeaways from their conversation:

1. Most organizations are optimized for control, not adaptation

Many companies still operate on an industrial-era model: centralized decision-making, clear hierarchies, and tightly controlled processes. That worked when environments were predictable. Today, it creates a bottleneck. As Phil explains, the further decisions sit from the front line, the slower and less accurate they become. 

True ownership looks different: teams are accountable for outcomes, not just tasks, they have the freedom to decide how to achieve those outcomes, and decisions are made closer to the customer and the work. This shift requires leaders to give up a degree of control, which can feel uncomfortable, especially now, but with it, organizations default to waiting rather than acting.

2. Innovation often fails before it even begins

One of the more striking ideas in the episode is the tendency for organizations to invest in visible progress: labs, pilots, and programs, before validating whether an idea actually works. The metaphor they use is simple: building a pedestal for a talking monkey before knowing whether the monkey can even talk. 

This leads to what many executives recognize as “innovation theater”, activity without real outcomes. To avoid it, start with the hardest assumptions, not the most polished solutions; reward learning, not just progress and accept that stopping early can be a sign of discipline, not failure. For leaders, this reframes innovation from a funding problem to a learning problem.

3. Being “ahead of the organization” is a leadership challenge

Jana shares a personal story of presenting a great idea to a leadership team and being completely out of sync with where they were. The feedback she received was blunt: if you’re one step ahead, you’re a visionary. Two steps ahead, and you risk being dismissed because you’re too far away from anyone else. 

That doesn’t mean you have to slow down your thinking, just make sure that you’re bringing others along if your ideas are out there. 

4. Adaptability comes from distributed intelligence

The “octopus organization” is a metaphor for a system where intelligence is not concentrated at the center. An octopus has a central brain, but much of its processing power sits in its arms, allowing it to react quickly to its environment. 

The organizational parallel is that leadership provides clarity, purpose, priorities, and boundaries, while teams at the edges sense, decide, and act. This allows the organization to move faster, learn continuously, and respond to change without waiting for top-down direction. 

The bigger picture

This conversation isn’t about replacing hierarchy with chaos. It’s about recognizing that the conditions organizations operate in have fundamentally changed. In a world of continuous uncertainty, advantage doesn’t come from having the best plan. It comes from building a system that can learn faster than competitors, adapt without constant restructuring, and make decisions where reality is closest. For leaders, that means shifting from being the center of decision-making to becoming the architect of how decisions get made.

🎧 Listen to the full conversation with Jana Werner and Phil Le-Brun →

Most companies don’t drift because of bad intent. They drift because leadership teams make decisions and operate with assumptions that feel reasonable in the moment but don’t hold up over time.

Those decisions shape how the people of the organization show up, perform, and respond under pressure. And that’s where the real impact sits.

Each choice, taken on its own, can be justified. Each approach can be defended. But over time, those decisions begin to compound through the organization. What looked sensible in isolation starts to weaken capability and reduce the company’s ability to adapt.

In a recent episode of The Conscious Capitalists, Timothy Henry and Raj Sisodia sit down with Mary K. Bush, President of Bush International, and unpack a more grounded way of thinking about how companies actually perform.

Here are five practical ideas from their conversation that are worth carrying into the boardroom.

1. Decisions don’t fail in isolation, they fail in accumulation.

Most leadership teams are disciplined about evaluating individual decisions. Fewer are disciplined about understanding how those decisions interact over time.

A cost reduction can improve margins and still weaken execution months later. A tougher stance with suppliers can produce savings and reduce flexibility when conditions shift. Holding back on hiring can protect short-term performance while quietly slowing the business.

None of these are poor decisions on their own. The problem shows up in how they compound.

Leaders who build durable companies develop the habit of tracing consequences beyond the immediate result. They look at how one move affects talent, trust, capability, and resilience. That level of thinking is what separates short-term optimization from long-term performance.

2. Companies should see themselves as capabilities

During the early days of the pandemic, a local government had ventilators it couldn’t get to work. Instead of turning to a medical manufacturer, they called a CEO whose company had no connection to healthcare but did have strong engineering talent.

Within a day, the team had the machines up and running.

What stands out here is not speed. It’s how the company understood itself.

Most organizations define themselves by their products or industry. That definition becomes a constraint. It limits where talent is applied and how problems are approached.

In this case, leadership saw something else. They saw a pool of engineering capability that could be redirected to solve a completely different problem. That shift made the response possible.

This is what separates companies that operate within a model from those that operate from capability. When pressure hits, the latter have more room to move.

3. You can’t build a high-performing company from a narrow talent funnel

Many companies assume they are getting the best people simply because they run a rigorous hiring process. The harder question is whether the right people ever had a chance to be in that process to begin with.

The distinction that matters here is between opportunity and access. Opportunity may exist in theory, but access to it is uneven in practice. 

Companies that recognize this invest in talent earlier, widening entry points, and creating real pathways into leadership roles. When you improve the range and depth of talent inside the company, performance follows.

4. The shortest path to performance runs through your people

There’s a line that has been repeated often, but rarely taken seriously enough:

“If we take care of our employees, they will take care of the customers.”

It sounds simple. It is not. Most companies still treat people as a cost line that needs to be managed carefully, and down the line, that leads to employee disengagement. 

When people don’t feel valued, they don’t give discretionary effort. Over time, that shows up in revenue, even if it doesn’t appear that way at first.

5. Leadership is revealed in what you choose to confront

During a period of civil unrest, one CEO brought together a group of young Black men in his company and asked them what they were experiencing. The conversation quickly moved beyond work. What surfaced was the reality they were dealing with simply to show up each day.

He didn’t try to resolve it on the spot. What he did instead was ensure that it was understood at the leadership level. That distinction matters. If people are carrying that kind of weight, it affects how they show up, how they perform, and how they engage with the business, whether it is acknowledged or not.

Leadership is not about always having a response ready. It’s about choosing to have the tough conversations and making your people feel seen. 

None of these ideas are complicated on their own. The difficulty is in applying them consistently when decisions are being made in real time.

The companies that hold up over time tend to work through that difficulty. They think beyond the immediate outcome, they understand what their organization is truly capable of, and they invest in the people and conditions that make performance possible.

If you want to hear how these ideas come through in practice, listen to this episode of The Conscious Capitalists with Timothy Henry, Raj Sisodia, and Mary K. Bush.

Many leaders reach a point where motivation dries up and strategies that used to work before end up becoming obsolete. It’s not always a sign of failure. Often, it’s a signal that something deeper needs to be addressed.

In the latest episode of The Conscious Capitalists, Nilima Bhat and Raj Sisodia share insights from their new book Healing Leaders: A Manual for Life and Leadership Recovery. Their conversation offers a fresh lens on leadership, one that treats inner work as essential, not optional.

Here are five ideas from the episode that speak directly to the inner journey of leadership.

1. Your past is a path
Raj describes how a silent retreat helped him see life not as a random collection of events, but as a specific series of experiences meant to shape him. This shift, from avoidance to acceptance, can help leaders reclaim agency and clarity from their personal story.

2. Emotional patterns shape performance more than plans do
Even experienced leaders can feel stuck without knowing why. Nilima explains that unprocessed emotional experiences often show up as indecision, burnout, or control. Leadership development that ignores this layer misses the root of many challenges.

3. Balancing masculine and feminine energy creates range
Many organizations default to ‘masculine’ tasks like doing, driving, and output. What’s often missing is feminine energy and the ability to pause, listen, and respond with presence. Integrating these energies allows leaders to navigate complexity with both strength and sensitivity.

4. Lightness unlocks trust and creativity
The “wise fool of tough love” is a leader who brings clarity and care, but also lightness and play. In overly serious environments, this archetype can help reintroduce psychological safety and spark breakthrough thinking.

5. Healing is systemic
When a leader starts to heal, it changes the culture. It creates space for others to show up more fully, speak more honestly, and work with greater purpose. Healing is personal, but it’s never just personal.

If you’re in a season of leadership that feels stuck, heavy, or out of sync with your values, this episode offers a perspective shift. It’s a reminder that growth doesn’t always come from doing more, but from understanding what’s already within you. 

Listen to the full conversation here ->

Many mission-driven companies start with strong values. Far fewer succeed in protecting those values as they grow.

In a recent episode of The Conscious Capitalists, Dusan Vujovic, Head of North America at Tony’s Chocolonely, joined Raj Sisodia and Timothy Henry to explore what it really takes to institutionalize purpose. 

Tony’s Chocolonely has become known not only for its bold mission to end exploitation in the cocoa industry, but also for the way it has embedded that mission into its business model. The episode dives into the mechanics behind their approach, offering valuable lessons for leaders working to scale their impact without diluting their values.

Here are three takeaways that stood out:

1. Protect the mission with structure, not just culture

Tony’s has established a legal “Mission Lock” that ensures the company’s founding purpose remains intact, even as leadership changes or new stakeholders come on board. An independent group of “Mission Guardians,” including outside experts, has the authority to veto decisions that conflict with the company’s ethical commitments.

Many companies rely on culture to uphold values. But culture can shift. Structural protections like these offer long-term accountability and continuity, a model worth considering for any business serious about long-term impact.

2. Transparency builds credibility, even when it’s imperfect

Tony’s publishes detailed reports on its supply chain, including instances of child labor. Instead of hiding the uncomfortable realities, they put them front and center as a way to demonstrate commitment and build trust.

Too often, businesses wait for perfection before communicating progress. Tony’s model shows that honesty about the journey can actually deepen stakeholder trust and reinforce authenticity.

3. Open your playbook and multiply your impact

Through its Open Chain initiative, Tony’s invites other companies (including competitors) to adopt its sourcing model. It’s a clear example of using influence to drive systemic change, rather than guarding ethical practices as a competitive advantage.

If the goal is systems change, sharing what works may be the most powerful move a business can make. Tony’s reframes collaboration not as a threat, but as a way to accelerate mission outcomes.

Tony’s Chocolonely offers a powerful case study in designing for integrity. Rather than relying solely on good intentions, they’ve built mechanisms to hardwire purpose into their business, and made transparency and collaboration central to their growth.

For conscious leaders, the takeaway is clear: protecting your purpose at scale requires more than passion. It takes thoughtful design, structural safeguards, and a willingness to lead in ways that challenge the norms of traditional business.

🎧 Listen to the full episode of The Conscious Capitalists here!

And what conscious leaders can do instead

Most senior leaders sense it: the tools that built past success are no longer sufficient. Markets are volatile, institutions are strained, and leaders must make high-stakes decisions in conditions of sustained uncertainty.

On a recent episode of The Conscious Capitalists, executive coach and author Nicholas Janni joined Raj Sisodia and Timothy Henry to explore what leadership needs to become in this new context. The conversation challenges standard approaches to leadership development and reframes what true executive capacity looks like.

Here are key takeaways from the conversation on how leaders can build the internal presence and relational strength that today’s environment demands:

1. Reconnect with the body to sharpen perception

The fastest way to improve decision quality is through presence.

Most leaders are living “neck-up,” disconnected from their physical selves. But the body is a critical source of data: it holds stress signals, intuitive insights, and the energy to sustain focused attention. Even one minute of conscious breathing before a meeting can help a leader drop into a state of grounded awareness.

Try this: pause, exhale fully, and notice your contact with the chair beneath you. This small act recalibrates attention and makes room for deeper listening and clearer thinking.

2. Make space for emotional truth

In many corporate cultures, emotions are treated as irrelevant and sometimes even dangerous. But unacknowledged emotion doesn’t disappear. It distorts team dynamics, narrows critical thinking, and erodes trust.

Great leaders build what Janni calls “radical inclusion”: the capacity to fully feel what’s happening without judgment. That includes fear, anxiety, sadness, or even boredom. When teams normalize the inclusion of feeling states (without analysis or overexposure), collaboration improves and conflict becomes less personal.

3. Build inner work into leadership development

As Janni notes, most leadership development programs remain heavily cognitive. They focus on behavior, communication, and strategy, but neglect the inner terrain that shapes those actions.

Forward-thinking companies are starting to reimagine leadership development to include body awareness, emotional literacy, and even trauma-informed practices. These aren’t luxuries. They’re the foundations of resilient, relational leadership.

If you’re responsible for talent or culture, ask yourself: are we developing the whole leader or just the skillset?

4. Shift from control to coherence

Ultimately, the leader’s job is not to control everything, it’s to create coherence: in themselves, their teams, and their organizations. That requires slowing down internally, even when the pace outside is accelerating.

Presence isn’t about doing less. It’s about doing what matters, with clarity and alignment.

A new frontier of leadership

The C-suite is being called to a different kind of leadership, one that fuses critical thinking with emotional clarity, strategic vision with embodied presence.

This is a hard requirement for navigating the complexity of our time.

You can listen to the full conversation with Nicholas Janni on The Conscious Capitalists podcast here ->

The role of the CEO has changed. Ten years ago, the focus was on operational efficiency and driving profit through performance. While those are still important, they’re no longer enough. What sets leaders apart now is their ability to lead with vision, empathy, and adaptability in a world defined by constant change.

For Ashli Blumenfeld, Co-President of Standard Meat Company, this meant stepping into leadership not through hierarchy or tradition, but through deep personal reflection and culture-first decision-making.

In her recent conversation with Timothy Henry and Raj Sisodia on The Conscious Capitalists podcast, Ashli offered insights that speak directly to what’s keeping many CEOs up at night: How do you lead a company where people want to stay, grow, and give their best?

Here are three powerful takeaways from the session: 

1. Culture is an infrastructure.

Standard Meat is a fourth-generation meat processing and innovation company navigating both tradition and transformation. Ashli emphasizes that culture isn’t the “soft stuff”, it’s what holds everything else together.

If your culture still lives in your HR department instead of in your operational strategy, you’re leaving value on the table. Culture determines whether teams feel safe enough to innovate, give feedback, or speak up when something’s off, all of which directly impact performance and retention.

2. Vulnerability scales faster than performance metrics

Ashli came into the family business from the outside, literally. With a background in fashion PR, she didn’t immediately see herself as a “business leader.” But instead of faking confidence, she embraced radical self-awareness.

Your own relationship with uncertainty sets the tone for your executive team. In a world full of volatility, your willingness to model transparency and growth can become your company’s emotional center of gravity.

3. Stakeholder loyalty is built in the tough seasons

One of the most compelling moments in the episode comes when Ashli describes how Standard Meat handled downturns. Rather than protect their margins at the expense of their customers, they chose to absorb some of the risk.

Stakeholder capitalism is a long game. The decisions you make during low-margin quarters define the partnerships that carry you into the next cycle.

Bottom line:

If you’re only measuring what can be quantified, you’re missing the core drivers of long-term value.

Ashli Blumenfeld’s story is a reminder that conscious leadership is about decisions that create stability in uncertainty, strength in culture, and loyalty across your ecosystem.

Listen to the full episode for a grounded, candid look at what it really takes to lead a company with heart and rigor.

🎧 Listen here!

What happens when a seasoned private equity leader believes that culture is  a core driver of performance?

In the latest episode of The Conscious Capitalists podcast, Timothy Henry and Raj Sisodia sit down with Stewart Kohl, Co-CEO of The Riverside Company to dive into what it means to lead with values in one of capitalism’s most profit-driven sectors: private equity.

Stewart’s résumé is stacked: from co-leading a $14B global investment firm to raising nearly $30M for cancer research and serving on numerous civic boards. But what makes him stand out, is how he champions the idea that “values and valuation” are both connected AND co-dependent.

Here are some takeaways that stood out:

1. Values Drive Valuation

In a world where private equity is often seen as extractive, Stewart flips the script. At Riverside, evaluating culture is part of due diligence. They go beyond the C-suite, engaging with employees three levels deep and tapping tools like Glassdoor to read the cultural pulse.

2. Soul, Love & Empathy at Work

Stewart reflects on the role of empathy, drawing on research about love and connection in the workplace. 

In his view, the best-performing companies aren’t just operationally sound., they’re emotionally intelligent. Leadership, especially in high-stakes environments like private equity, isn’t only about strategy or execution. It’s about the capacity to understand and support people in meaningful ways.

3. The Future of Private Equity Is Stewardship

While the PE industry grapples with backlash against ESG and calls of “woke capitalism,” Stewart reframes the conversation around responsible investing. The goal? Long-term value creation through stewardship, not just short-term profits.

This ethos echoes conscious capitalism’s core message: elevate the practice to sustain the system.

Stuart offers a parting insight worth framing: growth should be good, productive, and constructive. It’s not about compulsive expansion, but about aligning purpose, strategy, and stakeholder value.

While private equity firms may be interim owners, they have a responsibility to steward the business thoughtfully during their tenure.

If you’re a conscious CEO or leader striving to balance impact with performance, this episode is a must-listen. 

Hear firsthand how a major private equity firm is rewriting the rules. with empathy, responsibility, and purpose at the helm.

Listen to the episode here ->