Brian serves as a conscious business coach, author, speaker and facilitator.

By the age of 30, Brian had received a Ph.D. in computer science from UC Berkeley, raised $20 million for two high tech startups, become an internationally known academic and speaker, made and lost millions – and burnt out twice. He had gone from “being the one in high school that the chess team made fun of” to seemingly having it all. Yet he felt miserable. In the midst of an emotional and spiritual crisis, he began reaching out for help, and found his worldview shaken to its core. This led to six years of deep inner work and a M.A. in Spiritual Psychology from the University of Santa Monica.

Today, Brian delights in doing business in a different, more loving, more purpose filled way – and in helping others do the same. He specializes in supporting entrepreneurs and executives as they build companies that create both money and meaning, and in teaching practice builders how to “give their way to a soul-centered, six-figure practice.” Brian is the author of Selling By Giving and the soon to be published book Love Beyond Belief. He’s an advocate for the development and spread of conscious business practices and has appeared on programs as diverse as the NBC show Starting Over and the MIT CIO Symposium.

However, this is not to say he has all the answers. He continues to reach out for help, and is particularly grateful for the coaching he’s receiving as part of his partnership with master author, coach and public speaker Steve Chandler.

Blog Entries by Brian Whetten

The Core Problem in Business - It's Not What You Think

Posted July 28, 2009 | 05:41 PM (EST)


GM's bankruptcy. Goldman's bonuses. AIG's collapse. It's easy to look at what's going on and say "How Stupid!" And this is true -- but perhaps not in the way you think. This is because study after study shows that the core problem in business is not a...

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The Death of Mass Marketing

Posted July 7, 2009 | 01:17 PM (EST)


Most people -- including most salespeople -- have an inherent distrust of being sold. And the more purpose driven our work is, the more we tend to wish we could just avoid all that "sales and marketing stuff." For example, most non-profits see fundraising as a necessary evil, and most...

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The Financial Industry: Who Can You Trust?

1 Comments | Posted June 3, 2009 | 07:26 PM (EST)


The financial industry is based on trust, and in the last year Wall Street has lost a ton of it. So what are we to do about this? In the face of all that's going on, who can you trust?

The bad news is that large pieces of the industry...

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Conscious Business: Like Water To A Fish ...

8 Comments | Posted May 18, 2009 | 06:11 PM (EST)


If you're a fish living in an aquarium, it doesn't take a whole lot of ingenuity to discover things like food, rocks, bubbles, and other fish.

But it takes a genius to discover water.

In response to a recent article on conscious business, someone asked me "so, what do...

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How to Create Meaningful Ethical Reform in Business

12 Comments | Posted May 13, 2009 | 02:29 PM (EST)


In the wake of the financial crisis, there's been a lot of talk about ethical reform. With the disgrace of so many of the "best and the brightest," there's a lot of soul searching going on in government, industry and business schools. Most of this discussion is...

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How to Survive - And Thrive - in the Face of a Crisis

2 Comments | Posted May 8, 2009 | 10:43 AM (EST)


There's a lot of fear in the air. We're in the middle of what many are calling the biggest financial crisis since the great depression.

So how do we deal with this? How do we survive -- and even thrive -- during this crisis?

Our fastest growth happens when we...

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Why Most Small Businesses Fail and What to Do About It

5 Comments | Posted April 29, 2009 | 12:48 PM (EST)


Small business is big business. In the United States, more than half of all jobs are in companies of 100 people or less and more than 10% of all people are self-employed.

Yet most small businesses fail.

Why is this? And what can you do about it?

The biggest problem...

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What Does it Mean To Practice Conscious Capitalism?

6 Comments | Posted April 22, 2009 | 10:52 AM (EST)


In last week's column, we talked about how capitalism's great strength is its capacity for economic expansion, and its great challenge is its addiction to economic expansion. We looked at the problems that come with unconscious capitalism, and the need for us to develop a new form of capitalism...

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The Real Roots of the Financial Crisis

32 Comments | Posted April 15, 2009 | 03:33 PM (EST)


With the financial crisis, we've seen a lot of talk about why it happened and who's to blame. We've pointed a lot of fingers at a lot of targets, including bankers, regulators, and homeowners. We've identified a number of symptoms, including greed, incompetence, fraud, and inadequate regulation.

But none of...

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