This led him to discover Buddhism. With a big hole in his heart and a lot of questions about who he needed to be in order to make a real difference, Mark met a Buddhist priest who introduced him to the ideas of really understanding oneself, self-mastery, and the exact qualities he had admired in his mentors. The Santa Monica Zen Center was where he trained and practiced Zen Buddhism, which had an amazing lineage in the world of Zen. This is where Mark learned about the challenges of teacher student power dynamics and how to understand the political chaos unfolding in the U.S. at the time. However, he also learned to understand the distinction between what is real and what isn’t. He learned how to work with people with very different interpretations of what the world is, a skill he uses today in his current venture. About 8 years in, he took his vows to become a priest. 

“All of us are seeking the same thing and it can be articulated as having the experience of love, being loved, knowing that you matter, that people care, and that you actually have a path to realize about what you are supposed to do here with your time.”

What came out of his time at the Buddhist center led him to creating his current venture, Common Foundation, which uses a strategy called maniacal business attack. Organizations hire his foundation to respond to a challenge: a change in their market, an internal culture challenge, pursuing a new opportunity, etc. Common creates a space to bring groups of strangers together with the client’s team, with very different backgrounds and points of views, in order to create a breakdown that results in revealing what has been preventing a massive thrust forward in the organization. It’s a powerful process that creates incredible results and is unlike other business strategies.

“I see business as a vehicle for expression and as a vehicle to pursue what matters to you.”

Very early on in Mark’s work, he saw that as soon as a group or individual crafted a vision for the world that was huge and aspirational, it would just pull them over the cliff with its magnitude. They would freak out and be overwhelmed. Instead, he learned to see vision as an experience that you can engineer and amplify to allow people to incorporate into their own self-narrative. It becomes part of who they are and how they want the world to see them and interact with them. This led him to the world of brand and storytelling and his passion for it.

In Mark’s eyes, the world of capitalism is an invitation to anyone with an idea that will be meaningful to create a powerful solution. It can be beautiful and it can be brutal. It can be bigger than oneself and create amazing scale and impact. The results largely rest on the leadership of a company and their values. While the pandemic has revealed the fragility of capitalism, it has also shown us the impact of capitalism on our environment. Founded on the idea of neo-liberalism, capitalism has run us aground by going unchecked for too long.

“Wait a minute, maybe we do need to start taking account . . . for the externalities of what it means to bring a product all the way to market.”

The three things Mark believes are critical to turning around capitalism are these: one, we each need to develop our ability to make sense of the world around us as accurately as we are capable of. Two, we need to develop the ability to really sit with other people’s experience. Three, we need to continually develop the ability to be self-aware. That means catching our own biases and preventing ourselves from engaging in harmful behavior. As a summary, we need to evolve as human beings. 

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