Alan Moore is a craftsman of beautiful business. He is a business innovator, author, and global speaker whose life’s work centers on one simple but radical idea: beauty is not a luxury in business, but a necessity.

He has designed everything from books to organizations, working across six continents with artists, entrepreneurs, and leadership teams. He has advised companies including PayPal, Microsoft, and Interface, taught at institutions such as MIT, INSEAD, and the Sloan School of Management, and helped guide some of the world’s most innovative enterprises.

He is the author of four books, including Do Design: Why Beauty Is Key to Everything and Do Build. How to make and lead a business the world needs. His work has been featured in outlets such as the BBC, The Guardian, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and The Huffington Post.

In this second part of our conversation, we talk about:

1. Beauty as a quest for truth rather than surface aesthetics

2. What it means to create something like a jewel

3. Inevitability in design

4. Beauty as a metric for innovation

5. The distinction between extractive and regenerative approaches

6. Beauty as a verb and everyday practices for “doing beauty.”

To learn more about Alan’s work, you can find him at:

https://thebeautifuldesignproject.com/

Books and resources mentioned:

• No Straight Lines: Making Sense of Our Nonlinear World (by Alan Moore)
• Do Design: Why Beauty Is Key to Everything (by Alan Moore)

This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust.

Support the show

Alan Moore is a craftsman of beautiful business. He is a business innovator, author, and global speaker whose life’s work centers on one simple but radical idea: beauty is not a luxury in business, but a necessity.

He has designed everything from books to organizations, working across six continents with artists, entrepreneurs, and leadership teams. He has advised companies including PayPal, Microsoft, and Interface, taught at institutions such as MIT, INSEAD, and the Sloan School of Management, and helped guide some of the world’s most innovative enterprises.

He is the author of four books, including No Straight Lines: Making Sense of Our Nonlinear World and Do Design: Why Beauty Is Key to Everything. His work has been featured in outlets such as the BBC, The Guardian, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and The Huffington Post.

In this first part of our conversation, we discuss:

1. Beauty as a sense of homecoming to self, family, and the natural world

2. Why beauty is felt in the body, not just understood in the mind

3. Beauty as something soulful, universal, and deeply human

4. Living and working through the transition from analog to digital culture

5. Innovation as seeing latent potential and unmet human needs

6. The idea of beauty as the “ultimate metric” for decision-making

7. How beauty challenges dominant ideas of success, value, and the good life

To learn more about Alan’s work, you can find him at:

https://thebeautifuldesignproject.com/

Books and resources mentioned:

• No Straight Lines: Making Sense of Our Nonlinear World (by Alan Moore)
• Do Design: Why Beauty Is Key to Everything (by Alan Moore)

This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust.

Support the show

Lisa Z. Lindahl is an award-winning inventor, artist, author, and entrepreneur best known for transforming women’s sports with her 1977 invention of the first sports bra, the Jogbra. As CEO of JBI Inc. from 1977–1992, she helped shape a global industry, earning ten patents and seeing her invention archived at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and even displayed at The Metropolitan Museum of Art as a “revolutionary piece of women’s undergarments.”

In 1999, she co-founded Bellisse and co-invented the Compressure Comfort® Bra, a breakthrough medical garment now supporting breast cancer survivors worldwide. She has been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame (2022), received a U.S. Congressional Commendation, and has long served as an advocate for women’s health, most notably through her leadership roles at the Epilepsy Foundation of America.

She is the author of Beauty as Action (2017), her philosophical guide to practicing “True Beauty,” and the acclaimed memoir Unleash the Girls (2019).

In this second part of our conversation, we talk about:

1. True beauty is harmony rather than glamour
2. The problem of living in a culture rooted in fear, competition, and accumulation
3. “Practicing beauty” works through simple, everyday disciplines
4. Lisa’s 16 practices of beauty
5. The three-legged stool of truth, beauty, and justice

To learn more about Lisa’s work, visit:

• https://www.lisalindahl.com/
• https://beautyinaction.com/

Links Mentioned:

• Beauty as Action by Lisa Z. Lindahl
• Unleash the Girls (Lisa’s memoir on inventing the sports bra)

This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust.

Support the show