Today’s most successful companies don’t choose between People and Profit — they master both.

Some hardcore business strategists still believe that that you cannot be a relentlessly caring, people-centric leader while also doggedly pursuing profits. They believe you must choose between the two. But at the Center for Social Capital, we insist you must embrace both goals if you want to achieve greatness in business, regardless of how hard it may be. (And it is definitely harder in the short run.)

An increasing body of research and data — illustrated in the real world by an impressive roster of profitable companies — is proving that doing so is the secret formula to long-term success. Hence, it is how we define excellence in business.

There are few ideas more provocative and yet more nebulous than business excellence. There are, literally, hundreds of different definitions and models for achieving it. But just about the only common denominator is that it’s more complex than simply achieving financial success. They all agree that, at least in some part, it is about something beyond bolstering the bottom line.

Yet still, that bottom line can’t be in the red if you want to be defined as excellent in business — and if you want to build a sustainable business. That’s where the powerful potential of people-centric, profit-rich business strategies really hits the mark.

The organizations we feature this month understand that their pursuit and achievement of excellence occur only by taking care of the people they serve, employ and help in the greater community, and they constantly strive to increase their efforts with and value to those groups. But they are also laser-focused on funneling that socially created value into a powerful and sustainable business model — one that allows them to continue to give meaningful support to their teams, customers and employees for years to come.

Purpose Is the New Profit Engine

The data backing this approach grows stronger every day.

Businesses founded or restructured around both profit and purpose are outperforming their peers across multiple metrics, according to a 2025 report by Chief Executives for Corporate Purpose (CECP) — a coalition of more than 200 CEOs from companies like IBM, Johnson & Johnson, and PepsiCo. They demonstrate:

• 58% higher revenue growth
• 63% higher returns on invested capital

Beyond this, the research found:

• 76% of investors now expect companies to define and act on a clear purpose.
• 93% believe purpose is essential to long-term strategy and value creation.

“Purpose is no longer a peripheral initiative or a nice-to-have — it’s a core element of business strategy that drives performance, builds resilience and creates long-term value,” as CECP states in its Corporate Purpose: Driving Business Value report. This isn’t just legacy brands adapting — it’s a wave of new companies forming with purpose baked into their DNA. They’re not choosing between people and profit — they’re building models that depend on both.

Engagement as a Profit Engine

Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace: 2025 report makes the connection between people and profit impossible to ignore. Teams with high employee engagement delivered 23% higher profitability, 202% stronger performance and 233% greater customer loyalty than disengaged counterparts.

These aren’t soft metrics — they’re bottom-line results. The takeaway? Companies that prioritize employee well-being, purpose and autonomy aren’t just building better cultures — they’re building better businesses. Excellence, it turns out, starts with engagement. Or, as we love to say at the Dave Alexander Center for Social Capital, the real bottom line is people.

Governance as a Growth Strategy

Deloitte’s 2025 Transparency Report underscores that ethical governance and people-first leadership are no longer optional — they’re strategic imperatives. The report highlights that companies with clear accountability structures, inclusive cultures and transparent decision-making are outperforming their peers in resilience, investor trust and long-term value creation. In a market increasingly shaped by stakeholder scrutiny and social impact, these organizations prove that solid business practices and people-centric leadership aren’t trade-offs — they’re twin engines of excellence.

Defining Social Capital Excellence

As the world’s leading center for people-centric business strategies, The Dave Alexander Center for Social Capital honors companies that have a proven long-term business strategy built on the bedrock principle of unwavering commitment to people, but doing so in tandem with a steadfast commitment to long-term profitable success. And that leads us to our definition of excellence: the sustained ability to deliver value to people and profit, without compromising either.

In light of all that, we reached out to our network of people-centric leaders to put a face — or three — on the topic, as well as to ask them for their thoughts on how they attain this hard but rewarding achievement. Our Social Capital leaders had a lot of amazing and informative insights to share this month.

These exclusive insights from some of the most successful Social Capital leaders explain how they either specifically look at or how they generally deliver excellence within that space of serving both profit and people — not as separate pursuits but holistically.

We think you will agree wholeheartedly this is a much more organic, easily digested and just downright more interesting take on excellence in business than much of the abstruse and convoluted perspectives out there.

And if you want to succeed in the new world, the new economy and the future, then it is a powerful call to action: Don’t settle for profit or people. Crack the code — and commit to both.

Marshall Goldsmith, Founder at marshallgoldsmith.com

Excellence isn’t just about performance — it’s about purpose.

Too often, I see talented people equating excellence with perfection — believing that flawless execution in their current role is the surest path to long-term success.

It’s a trap.

One of the major pitfalls I see leaders make is to assume that if they simply do great work, recognition and opportunity will naturally follow. But focusing exclusively on excelling in your current job can actually hold you back. Perfectionism may make you indispensable, but indispensable people rarely get promoted. They become stuck, consumed by short-term execution at the expense of long-term growth. True excellence requires a shift in focus — from doing your job perfectly to managing your career strategically. The goal isn’t perfection today; it’s progress over time.

When I coach clients, I remind them that excellence is an ongoing process, not a finish line. The extra effort it takes to go from 95% to 99% perfect at a job is often better invested in preparing for what’s next — developing new skills, building key relationships or broadening influence beyond their immediate responsibilities. As Peter Drucker said, “Never sacrifice the future on the altar of today.” Excellence, in this sense, is not just about what you achieve now, but how you position yourself for continued impact.

Another essential part of managing excellence — especially for leaders — is understanding that being great at what you do is only half the equation. The other half is being recognized for it. You have to earn credibility twice: first through competence, then through visibility. Doing excellent work earns you internal credibility. Ensuring that others see, understand and value that work earns you external credibility — and that’s what expands your influence. As Drucker reminded us: “Every decision in the world is made by the person who has the power to make the decision.”

Excellence means combining skill with courage — doing the work that matters and ensuring it creates impact where it matters most.

Anders Jones, Co-Founder & CEO at Facet

Facet is an extremely mission-oriented company. We started the company to provide access to financial advice to millions of Americans who need the help but don’t have the assets to work with a traditional advisor. Every person who works at Facet has a personal connection to the mission — above and beyond the commercial opportunity.

I share this because the mission dictates the standard of excellence. When we do a good job for a member, we change their life. Knowing you can have daily impact at that level is a wonderful incentive in and of itself.

Separately, we think about winning as much as we think about excellence. We are building a company that is trying to disrupt a massive industry — that’s a hard thing to do. Every single day comes with its own unique set of challenges, and so celebrating success and calling out explicitly when a team member, or the company, puts a win on the board, leads to a strong desire to succeed.

We have a set of very simple overarching financial metrics that we track and share across the entire organization — nothing groundbreaking, but things like new revenue, margin, retention, etc. Additionally, we set strategic priorities that align to those metrics. We work to keep them as simple as possible, and make it clear that everyone at the company has an impact on our goals.

Jason Lippert, President & CEO at Lippert Components

Pursuit of excellence is a pretty broad term, I think. As far as our Mission: It’s to develop meaningful relationships with our community, team members and customers. We want to build great team members, and you have to have a great culture and leadership model so that people want to stay so we can build those meaningful relationships over time. If we do that we will certainly have consistent team with people coming back to the business year after year wanting and willing to make a difference.

As far as community, we have a goal of having every team member serve in our missions. We organize and lead thousands of serving events every year and have a small staff to coordinate these events for our over 100 facilities across the globe. We do a couple of thousand annually. Maybe building park benches for a park, taking 20 people to nursing homes to serve the elderly, boys and girls club Christmas party for the kids, food pantry boxing up food for families in need, cleaning up local parks, etc.

We believe that people grow if they serve, and at Lippert serving the communities is part of being a team member. More than 80% of our team members have participated in at least one serving event this year. Serving builds excellence in people.

Lastly our values, culture and leadership create an environment that inspires people to stick around over the longer term. This creates less turnover, and we all know that less turnover leads to more consistent quality and innovation for our customers.

Measuring and Evolving

We define excellence by measuring how effective our culture and leadership is. The better culture and leadership are, the more people are growing and developing and living inspired while at work. When people come to work with energy, passion and feeling inspired, they are going to make each other, the business and the products better.

We have many metrics to measure our culture. We do an engagement survey twice a year. Ninety-two percent of our people, on average, fill out the survey — so, with 13,000 people, we get a lot of feedback. We make actionable items out of that feedback. We measure about 25 different things and work to get better on all those things. We do weekly listening sessions with our team members and measure how we are responding to their needs. We have a culture index that we measure weekly that takes into account many different things, from turnover to leadership coaching sessions (for all team members) and survey results.

Some of the things we measure:

We measure this by facility so we can really see which facilities have opportunities. We measure personal goals accomplished by every team member. We measure career goals measured by every team member. Every single team member at Lippert has their own personal and professional growth plans; that’s unique but so helpful to monitor people’s growth — if people are growing, our take is that the business is more likely to grow; you can’t get people growing without individual growth plans. We measure community service hours — we’ve served 100,000 hours already this year with our team members in events we have organized around the communities where we live and work. We also measure things like chaplaincy sessions. And we measure the number of businesses we inspire to come in and learn about how they can start healthy business cultures — each quarter we invite businesses here for a two-day session to become equipped on how to go on a meaningful culture journey.