In this episode of Social Capital Revolution, host Chris Benguhe interviews Bob Chapman, CEO of Barry-Wehmiller and pioneer in people-centric leadership. 

[From the Insider vault: a look back at an interview with Bob Chapman during the pandemic.]

Chapman shares his transformative journey from a traditional accountant to an advocate for human dignity in the workplace. Through compelling stories, Chapman reveals how treating employees as ‘somebody’s precious child’ boosted his company’s productivity and profitability.

Key highlights include three pivotal moments that reshaped his approach to business and leadership, and the importance of empathy, recognition, and service. Chapman emphasizes that true business success is about valuing people, making business a powerful force for good.

Bob Chapman:

I’m always amazed where people hear of us, and I’ll say …

Your assistant editor read our book [Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family]. Remember, the reason we wrote the book is a guy named Srikumar Rao, who we met at a leadership guru conference, he came to visit. Srikumar Rao I think was a contributing editor at Forbes at one time, and had set up this kind of leadership practice. A brilliant gentleman from Indian descent.

He toured our operations and he sat right across from me here and he said, “Bob, I’ve interviewed in my journey hundreds, if not thousands, of CEOs. I have never seen anything like I have just seen, spending two days listening to your people. You have to share this with the world.” Which is why we decided [to] — because Penguin Books always said, “No, you’re going to write a book,” and I said, “I don’t write books. I’m an accountant.”

He said, “No, you’re going to write a book.” And so, when Srikumar said that, we felt compelled that we had been given a blessing of the way the world was intended to be, where people know how to work and care for each other in harmony. And so, we then say, “Well, if we’re going to write a book, I can’t write a book, so we need a co-author.” So Raj Sisodia, who wrote the book on Conscious Capitalism with John Mackey of Whole Foods, is recommended to us. We called Raj and said, “Srikumar Rao said we should write this book. Would you help us?” And he said, “Bob, I can’t write a book about every nice company I hear about.” And we said, “Okay. So, if you want to sometime come down and visit with us, great.”

Some four or six months later, we still hadn’t picked an author because it wasn’t our primary goal. And Raj Sisodia, again with his work at Babson, writing Firms of Endearment — writing Conscious Capitalism book with John Mackey of Whole Foods, and then writing Firms of Endearment — he spent two days in our operations and he looked at me and he said, “Bob, this is a book that has to be written, and I am going to write it.” And he said it took him from Conscious Capitalism to how organizations can be a source of healing in the world.

I’ll mention something to you, Chris, I feel compelled to say. I was interviewed by Washington University organizational development professors a few years ago because they’d heard about our culture. They came out. So, they interviewed for an hour and a half. At the end of the hour and a half, the professors looked at me and said, “You’re the first CEO I have ever talked to that never talked about your product.” I said, “We’ve been talking about our product for the last hour and a half. I’m not going to go to my grave proud of the machinery we build for companies. I’m going to go to my grave proud of the people who built that machinery.”

And they were startled, because business is all about products. I said, “Our product is our people. We build great people who do extraordinary things.” So, Chris, we have been blessed. I’m a simple accountant from Ferguson, Missouri. Basic public education, pretty average college education, very traditional business education. How could I possibly stand up to leaders of the world today, all over the world: Simon Sinek of the world, Bill Ury, world peace negotiators, Fordham University, Jesuit universities who are trying to embrace this. How could I have a message that McKinsey partners, Harvard professors say, “I’ve never seen anything like this”? How could a kid from Ferguson with an accounting degree possibly have a message that some of the leading thinkers of the world say, “Wow”?

So, people like you, again, I’m really glad you gave that preamble because you are a deep thinker. Clearly you are a deep thinker, and we need people like you. This is not our message, Chris. I didn’t think of these things. Somebody is using us to show the world the way we’re intended to work together, where people feel valued and go home and treat their family as they’ve been treated for 40 hours a week.

People like you who can help us share this message, we’re profoundly grateful. And in service to … Mary will remember this; I’ll give you a really short story: I was asked to give a speech in Dallas, in Texas, a few years ago with Raj Sisodia, my co-author. Raj is brilliant. He can talk about how capitalism has impacted the civilization of the world brilliantly, and beautiful slides. And I went to give my speech. So, I went down … of Raj to present, and I walk into this Marriott conference room. There’s a thousand entrepreneurs in there, which surprised me. I hadn’t paid much attention because I was doing a favor for Raj.

So, the organizer said, “Well, Raj, why don’t you go first today? And Bob, you can go after Raj.” I said, “Fine.” So, Raj gives a 45-minute presentation with slides on how capitalism has benefited society. Fabulous presentation. He gets a very nice round of applause after his hour. And I get on the stage, simple kid from Ferguson, an accountant, following Raj, and I tell my stories about my transformation. At the end of my 45 minutes, people jumped out of their chair, started yelling, and had a standing ovation for my message.

Chris Benguhe:

Wow.

Bob:

And I stood back and I said, “Why?” Raj was brilliant. He was thoughtful. It’s years of research. And I told my stories. And the answer was that Raj gives information and I give inspiration. Okay? Okay.

Chris:

I love that.

Bob:

And I was on a call last week with Martin, how do you pronounce it, Martin Seligman?

Mary Rudder:

Dr. Martin Seligman, yeah.

Bob:

Who is the founder of Positive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania who’s known around the world for Positive Psychology. He was a keynote speech, and I followed him for 15 minutes. But like Raj, the professor gave a lot of academic research and rigor to his message of how Positive Psychology leads to resilience in people, which is important. It was very informative.

But then I told my stories, and, because it was a Zoom meeting and I could see people’s faces, they were much more engaged, if you will, in my simple stories of my transformation than in academic theory. And as Simon Sinek said, “If it exists, it must be possible.” So, Chris, the difference between me and brilliant people like Raj and Martin and Srikumar is our story is simple in words, and stories people can embrace.

Chris:

Yeah.

Bob:

Does that make sense?

Chris:

It totally makes sense. I thank you, first of all, for the compliments and the appreciation of what we’re doing. It’s so in line, and right back at you, it’s so in line with what you’re doing and vice versa. And you nailed it and hit it on the head with what we believe: We are part of something bigger. This is not something we’re doing or you’re doing. It’s something we’re doing together.

Bob:

And Chris, it’s what the world desperately needs.

Chris:

Exactly. Exactly. And one of the other things and reasons we started this is, there are so many honors out there that try to pick out these very specific little technical things. And they’re important. They’re all important, right? There’s magazines or publications that honor environmentalism or honor sustainability, and these are all important things. But you can get really lost in the minutia of these little things sometimes and forget the big picture of people. And that’s why we love the whole idea of what you talk about: The product is people. We are helping create people that have wonderful, happy lives. And that’s the whole point of us being here.

Bob:

So remember, Chris, I was on a call with a lady from Munich today, brilliant lady, and I said, “We have a world movement on sustainability; environmentally to be good stewards of our greens, environment, energy conservation, all the other things in the environment, recyclability. We have a lot of people passionate about preserving our planet, but what about the humans?”

We are destroying humans, because remember, these statistics are horrible. Chris. 88% of all people feel they work for a company that does not care about them. Eighty-eight percent  of all people! There’s a 20% increase in heart attacks on Monday mornings when people have to go back to work.

Chris:

Wow, I did not know that.

Bob:

Sixty-five percent of all people would give up a salary increase if they could fire their boss. Fifty-five percent of all people would trust a stranger before they trust their boss. And we have executives concerned about the cost of healthcare in our country. When I talk to CEOs, I say, “You’re all concerned about the cost of healthcare. You are the problem.”

Seventy-four percent of all illnesses are chronic. The biggest cause of chronic illness is stress, and the biggest cause of stress is work. So, we are killing, as Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford said; his book is called Dying for a Paycheck, and he doesn’t mean anxious to get one. He estimates we’re killing 120,000 people a year of work-related stress, from his research.

Chris:

Wow. Wow.

Bob:

So, when we talk about sustainability of the earth, what about sustainability of civilization? If we’re destroying each other for economic gain, why don’t we want to preserve human dignity?

And so — you’re going to like this — about three months ago or something like that, Bill Ury of Harvard, world peace negotiator — he’s been negotiating world peace for 30 years — he called me and said, “Bob,” — he’s one of our biggest supporters — “Bob, I’m just concerned about the social unrest in our country, I’m concerned about the pandemic, and I’m concerned about the political dialogue.” And he said, “Let’s just talk.”

So, we talked for about an hour, and we talked, and I said, “The problem, Bill, is we have a country that doesn’t know how to listen to each other. We talk at each other, but we don’t know how to listen to each other.” And that’s the problem. We can’t solve these problems by talking to each other. We’ve got to learn to listen and understand. Anyway, we chatted for an hour and the next day, he emails me Tom Friedman’s article in The New York Times, unrelated to my conversation but it nailed it.

Tom Friedman said it beautifully. He said, “We don’t have a poverty of money in this country. We have a poverty of dignity. And when people don’t feel a sense of value and they feel lack of dignity, their dignity is not validated, you’ll see humiliation, anger and unrest like you’ve never seen before.” And he quotes Nelson Mandela in terms of social unrest. And what Tom Friedman went on to say is, “What we need is deep listening” — which is the foundation of what we teach at Barry-Wehmiller University.

So, here we have a world peace negotiator with a New York Times columnist, articulately bringing these messages together and saying, “We have a poverty of dignity in this world.” Because when we use people for organizational success, we’re using people; we are devaluing them as humans and viewing them as functions. People who read my book, incredibly thoughtful people from the highest level of executive coaching in the world … [For instance,] Egon Zehnder, the top coach, called me after he read my book, and I said, “What did you get out of my book?”

And he said, “The biggest thing I got out of your book is the thought that everybody is somebody’s precious child. They’re not engineers, accountants, writers. When you look at somebody, the people you’re interacting with, as somebody’s precious child, knowing that the way you lead them will profoundly affect their health and the way they go home and treat their family, it changes everything.”

Chris:

How did you come to have this point of view? I know you went through a period of your time and a period of your life where you were doing everything the same way everybody else did it. It’s especially interesting to know you came from being an accountant, because we don’t identify accountants with coming up with and having these ideas normally, right? They’re looking at the numbers. How did you come to have that?

Bob:

Mary may fall asleep when I tell this because she’s heard it a thousand times, but it was a series of revelations. It was a very traditional business. I had undergraduate accounting, MBA, Pricewaterhouse. Then I ran a company, and I used all the tools I was taught and I observed when I was in business — cutting costs, improving profitability — but it was always about me and my success. Why did I want to be profitable? Because I wanted to be proud. I was never taught to care. I was taught to create shareholder value. That was what I was taught, that is what is valued, and that’s what I did. Even though I took a very struggling company and transformed it, I did it with traditional ideas applied in a very creative way.

So, in 1997 when I had just acquired this company in South Carolina, I flew down there to be there the very first day. It was a big acquisition for me. And I walked into the offices. It was March of ’97, when they have March Madness. And when I was getting a cup of coffee in the cafeteria before I met with the leadership team, the first day I was the new owner, I was getting a cup of coffee and these young men and women were standing in the lunchroom having coffee, talking about the outcome of last night’s basketball games, how they were doing in the office pool, having fun. I wasn’t paying attention about who won, but I was watching their body language. They were having fun.

But the closer it got to eight o’clock, you could just see the fun go out of their body. Now, I didn’t have these thoughts at the time, Chris, but in hindsight, what was developing in my mind is, “Why do we call it work?”

Where do people express their gifts more fully? It’s when they’re having fun. And so, I walked away. Again in hindsight, I put this together retrospectively, but what I realized that day is why can’t business be fun? Why do we call it work?

Okay, that was the first. And I began doing some things to make it fun, and I saw dramatic changes in behavior and value creation. I mean, just dramatic, beyond my wildest expectation, when we align having fun with creating value.

So, the second was I was in church a few years later. The rector of my church was my mentor, a brilliant rector. And one day I looked at my wife after the sermon, and I said, “Cynthia, Ed has only got us in church for one hour a week. We have people in our care for 40 hours a week. We are 40 times more powerful than the church to influence people’s lives.” As I walked out of that church that day, I developed an expression that drives me today: Business could be the most powerful force of good in the world if we simply cared about the people we had the privilege to lead. Because we have a dramatic impact on their personal life; not just the outcome of the company, but the way we treat them will affect the way they go home and treat [their family].

And the final one, the one people love the most, is I was at a wedding; a good friend’s daughter is getting married. I was sitting on the aisle as he walked his daughter down the aisle, very proud of his precious daughter. Everybody oohed and aahed at how precious she was. As they got to the altar, he took the hand of his daughter and he said, “Her mother and I give our daughter to be wed to this young man.” And he sat down next to his wife and the ceremony continued.

I’m sitting back there, my mind is in a different place. And I said to myself, having walked two of my daughters down the aisle, “That’s not what that father meant to say. That’s what he was told to say at the rehearsal dinner. What he meant to say was, ‘Look, young man, her mother and I have brought this precious young lady into this world. We have given her all the love and care we could possibly give her so she could be who she’s intended to be. And we expect you, young man, through this marriage, that you’re going to continue, as she will with you, to allow her to be who she’s meant to be in partnership with you. Do you understand that, young man?’” That’s what every father wants to say as he gives his precious daughter away to somebody else.

Then my mind went to the next spot. “Oh my God,” I said — this is all going on during the wedding — “Oh, my God, all 12,000 people that work for us around the world are just like that young lady and that young man; they’re somebody’s precious child that’s placed in our care, and the way we treat them will profoundly affect their marriage and the way they raise their kids.” And so that was my biggest shift. I went from seeing people as a function for my success — you’re a receptionist, you’re an engineer, you’re an accountant, you’re a production worker, hourly. The biggest shift was, that day, the accumulation of those other two experiences. I said, “People are not functions. They’re somebody’s precious child, just like that young lady and young man.” That expression around the world is what resonates most universally.

And remember, Martin Seligman and Raj Sisodia an Srikumar Rao talk about educational theories, scientific theories on behavior. I talk about people being somebody’s precious child. Everybody can relate to that. They’re simple, transformative stories. So, those are the three experiences that changed me from management to leadership.

So, the word “management” — one of the things I’d also say to you, Chris, I went to school and I took management classes, got a management degree and I got a job in management. So, what did I try and do? I tried to manage people. Why else would they call me a manager? Name anybody in your life you can manage and name anybody in your life that wants to be managed. What we need to do is to be leaders. People who, basically — just like parenting — bring out the best in the people we have the privilege of leading.

Leadership is the stewardship of the lives entrusted to you. Management is the manipulation of others for your success. We have this broken language in all parts of our society — managers, bosses and supervisors. We fire people, okay? We downgrade organizations. We have an inhuman language to deal with human people that are our kids, our daughters, our mothers and fathers.

So, those transformational events. And the beauty is those stories are so simple, people can embrace it real easily. It’s not a theory of mine, it’s basic simple stories. And to this day, 15 years giving these speeches around the world, nobody has ever debated what I just said to you. It’s just so far from what we teach and what is practiced. Nobody debates if I walk outside in the daytime and you can see the moon, nobody debates there’s a moon up there, but that doesn’t mean they know how to get there. So nobody debates, not at Harvard, not at Stanford, not at McKinsey, nobody debates what I just said. They just have no idea how to get there.

Chris:

And speaking to that, because that’s a great issue, I mean, you are an amazing [advocate] of this dignity concept and this beauty, and it’s so organic and so real, I so appreciate you and what you’ve done and what you’re doing as a human being.

And then on another level, as someone who’s promoting this concept and this idea, you’ve got this university, you’ve got this institute. You talk about these things all the time, and we have probably 10 different interviews we could do with you, and we’d love to do that. And I’d also love to have you writing some articles for us as well.

In a nutshell, in a few minutes, do you have something that you can share with our viewers and our readers on [this topic]: Is there a quick way to get yourself — and maybe it’s not so quick, but, is there an effective way to get yourself into this mindset, to do this in your company, that you teach or that you tell business leaders that can quickly get them from where maybe you were to where they want to be?

Bob:

Yeah. I would say to you, first of all, Simon Sinek asked me to do a TED Talk about eight years ago. And he said, “Bob, it’ll get your message out to the world.” So, I would say to you that I always say to people, “Number one, you can watch a 10-minute animated version of my TED Talk, 10 minutes, and say, ‘How does this resonate with your heart?’” Because, even though we gave that TED Talk about seven or eight years ago, it still is true to the fundamentals of the transformation. And I would say to you that when people watch the TED Talk, they get it.

The second thing, we wrote the book. … And then how do you do it? So I would say to you, from my standpoint, we have the TED Talk, we’ve got the book, but the basic, I mean I can give it in two minutes because it’s basically about caring for the people you have the privilege of leading — looking at them not as functions for your success, but understanding the way you treat them is going to be the major factor in their health and in the way they go home and live their lives in our communities.

So right now, what I don’t understand, Chris: the statistics I gave you earlier. Remember, I gave a speech at Brown University about three years ago, and I went up to Harvard ahead of time and I said to Jan Rifkin, the chair of the MBA program, “What is on the minds of university presidents? Because I’m going to be speaking to a group of international presidents.” He said, “It’s called an epidemic of anguish.” And I said, “What’s that?” And he said, “The rate of incoming students to our universities with anxiety and depression is at record levels.”

So, I’m going to go back to pre-COVID. Our government thought that their purpose was to create peace and prosperity so you could pursue your dreams, live in safety, and realize success. And prior to the pandemic, we had the lowest unemployment in 50 years, we were not sending young men and women off to war in various parts of the world, and we had a prosperous economy where virtually anybody who wanted a job could find one, and the stock market was strong. So we had, prior to the pandemic, the vision we had for a culture of peace and prosperity. Why would we have the highest level of depression and anxiety we’ve ever had when we have peace and prosperity? Why? Because people don’t feel valued. They feel used for somebody else’s gain. And so, again, nobody debates this with me because it’s such simple thoughts.

And when you see people who are exposed to our message … I mean Doug Parker, the chairman of American Airlines, said he thought his goal was to build the world’s biggest airline until he met me. Now he looks at his 125,000 people and his million passengers in a totally different way, which really gave him a higher calling. I would say to you [that] the people at Harvard, Bill Ury, world peace negotiator at Harvard, spent two days [with us] because Simon Sinek said, “You’ve got to see this.” He goes into our plant, several of our plants, to interview people. And he said, “I just saw the answer to world peace.”

I said, “Wait a second. You went into manufacturing in America and saw the answer to world peace?” He said, “Yes, Bob.” He said, “I saw a place where people genuinely care for each other.” And Simon Sinek said, “I no longer am a … idealist. If it exists, it must be possible.” So, it validated his dream that business could be a powerful force for good in the world.

So, I’ll go back just because you seem to be incredibly talented and passionate about this. Jan Rifkin said, “The purpose of education in our country was originally to have an informed citizenry so we could have a democracy.” That’s what the Founding Fathers wanted, according to the professor I talked to at Harvard. But Henry Ford came along with the Industrial Revolution and mass production, and we needed skills. So what did our universities become? They became skills factories. They got raw material in, which is the best students they could; they processed them through the educational system; and then they sold them to the market for the highest price they could.

And if they got a good price and good demand and good raw material coming in, they must be doing something right. But they forgot. They gave them engineering, accounting, scientists, all the professional skills, but they didn’t give them human skills. We didn’t create leaders. We created technical specialists in finance and accounting and management, but we didn’t give them leadership skills because the market wanted technical skills. And the universities are rewarded by the market with financial support and buying your product — your graduates.

So, what we’ve realized is that our Leadership Institute that’s going out and helping companies awaken them to the need to care, feeding the hungry, the people who want to do this, what we realized is we are treating cancer, but we’re not curing cancer. The cure for cancer is education. We need in our education system to create technical skills, accounting, math, reading, speaking, but we need to equally create human skills so we can learn to live and work together and see the beauty in the people that we have the privilege of being with.

And so, we have shifted. We are still out trying to heal the brokenness of the world through the Leadership Institute, but now our major initiative is on universities. How do we teach people to become leaders? You wouldn’t let a family member of yours go into an operating room [with] a doctor who had not been certified in surgery. Why would you let a child of yours go work for somebody who’s going to influence their health and life, who’s not been taught to be a leader? We just promote people.

I just came off a [call with a] JPMorgan young man who’s come to [to ask me], “I’ve now got 24 people in the office in St. Louis, can you help me, Mr. Chapman? How can I be a leader? Because they just promoted me.” I said, “Well, did they give you any program on skills?” He said, “No, they just promoted me.” It’s kind of like saying to a nurse in the operating room, “You’ve been in the operating room for a while. Do you want to try being the doctor for a while?” Does that all make sense, Chris?

Chris:

Oh my, it’s …

Bob:

It’s so obvious to me.

Chris:

Yeah. No; and once someone like you explains it as simply as you do and as anecdotally as you do with human stories and human explanations, it’s very clear and it becomes like one of those, “How did I not realize that?” But that’s the thing. It takes people like you to explain that in leadership positions, like you explained it.

And we’ve been blessed to have so many incredible CEOs come on board, and we had Hubert Joly talk, who is the former CEO of Best Buy, and turned it around and talked about how people are the whole point of this. And when people who have done it explain it, it is so much more powerful. And what you do that makes it even more powerful is talk about your human transformation as well and how it changed you. And there’s nothing more powerful than an accountant talking about how …

Bob:

And Chris, the greatest compliment somebody ever gave me is, “I can’t believe you’re an accountant.”

Chris:

Yeah, exactly. And I could keep you on here for another two hours, but I know you need to do what you need to do. But I would like to ask you just one last question here, which is, “How has this transformed your own life personally?” Because obviously you are a person that seems just overjoyed to be alive and overjoyed to do what you’re doing and to be able to do what you’re doing. How has coming into this understanding of this changed your life personally?

Bob:

Well, I would say to you I was an extremely happy, satisfied person doing traditional things because I was very financially successful in traditional terms, but my journey through this transformation is giving me a sense of purpose beyond your imagination.

I mean, it makes clear every day what I should be doing. I’m 75 years old, and I have a passion like I’ve never had before. I’ve always been passionate about my role, but it has given me a sense of purpose beyond our company because, seriously, how could an accountant from north St. Louis and a public education with an accounting degree possibly be blessed with a message that people at McKinsey, Harvard, Stanford; [and] Simon Sinek, Bill Ury would say, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” How is that possible, unless some higher power is using us?

When you go back and spend time and look at how this journey occurred to me, you’d say, “There is no way you thought of this, Bob. This is not Bob Chapman speaking. This is some higher power.” I can stand up with some of the most thoughtful people in the world today, which I’m blessed to get to meet. And they go, “Wow, I’ve just never … It seems so simple.” And people who read my book and watch the TED Talk, and then after I give a speech, they say, “I read your book. I loved it. I watched your TED talk. But boy, when I hear you personally with passion, it just really is compelling.”

I would say to you, Chris, my goal: I feel this incredible sense of responsibility to take this blessing I’ve been given and share it with the world through medias and thoughtful people like you, because we are self-destructing in the world. We have people trying to protect the environment. We have the world green movement, the environmental movement to protect our environment, but we don’t have anybody trying to protect our humanity. And what good is the earth if we are self-destroyed as humans?

And again, I want to add this: I speak in every part of our society, not just business. I speak in the military. I spoke to 200 members of Congress. I speak in healthcare, I speak in nonprofits. It is broken everywhere. It’s not just business. We don’t have leaders who have the skills and the courage to care for the people. Why can’t we teach — if we can teach military officers their primary responsibility is the men and women in their care, why can’t we teach business leaders their primary responsibility is the men and women in their care? Why can’t we? We can. We are, we can. And the impact is profound.

Chris:

I absolutely love that. And you hit it on the head when you talked about your passion for this because it just explodes off the screen. And I’m sure in person it’s even a thousand times more effective. You literally are on fire with this. And there is this energy that is obviously going way beyond you and fueling you, and we’re so grateful to be able to share that. And so I want to first of all, thank you for taking this time.

I’m going to also say we are going to expect that you help as much as you can to help us spread this because we’re going to really give you an opportunity to talk about this in a lot of ways, where we’re offering all our CEOs the opportunity to write some articles for us, to be part of panels that we’re doing. We’re going to be doing all kinds of other interesting things. And there may be even some possibility of doing some kind of a partnership with your educational …

Bob:

Institute.

Chris:

… institute to actually maybe co-promote some things that we’re trying to do. So, we really want to welcome you in all kinds of ways. We think of this as a movement, and it’s a powerful and important movement.

And I’ll leave you with one little funny anecdote about George Carlin. I don’t know if you remember George Carlin, but he did a wonderful monologue on environmentalism one day, and he said, “We want to save the planet.” And he said, “We can’t even take care of ourselves. How are we going to save the planet?”

And it was really a wonderful look. He had an incredible way of looking at things in a different way. And it is such a simple thought, right? We’ve got to take care of each other, and no one is telling us and teaching us how to do that except for people like you.

Bob:

Chris, that’s the point I want to make. We have our religions say we need to care for others. We have good people in the world saying we need to care for others. And we say that, but what we don’t realize is it’s like saying we need to start speaking Chinese on Monday. This is a teachable skill. You can’t ask people to care. You need to teach people to care. That’s what I want. And so that’s what we learned.

Remember, it starts with empathetic listening, where we listen to understand, not listen to judge, which we certainly see [in] the brokenness in Congress. Around recognition and celebration, looking for the goodness in people and holding it up — focus on the goodness, not the brokenness of the world. And three, culture of service, we teach. How do you seize the opportunity to serve others? As Bill Ury summarizes beautifully, we need to move from a me-centric world to a we-centric world, where people genuinely think of others first. That will save the environment because it’s hard to care about the environment unless you feel cared for yourself.

And what we find when we launch this is, care is contagious. When I treat you with respect and dignity and send you home with a sense of purpose and being valued, it turns out that you treat others to the left and right of you at work the way you’ve been treated. The good news is caring is contagious, and you don’t need to take a shot to stop it. It is one of those contagious things that’s good in the world. Caring is contagious, if we can just spark and light that.

If you’ve ever been to a Christmas Eve service where you light a candle, then you light another candle, and you pass that lighter down, and all of a sudden the church is lit up, that’s what we do. We are lighting individual’s candles, who light others’ candles, who light others’ candles, and pretty soon the whole church is alight with candles because we lit each other’s candles. That is what care does. It lights each other’s candle.

Chris:

I love that, Bob, thank you. What a perfect punctuation on everything you said. And to be continued, because we’re going to continue this in many ways. And one last thing, you are contagious, Bob. I would love to hang out with you half of the day. I would just truly enjoy that.

Bob:

Mary will tell you that’s highly overrated. But remember, we need voices like yours around the world elevating this message to places, because if I say it, it will have one meaning. When you say it, it validates; it’s a validation. So, we need voices like yours, with your background and passion and team, to take this message and shape it in a way with your skills, as Mary does, so people can hear it, and they start hearing the drumbeat growing around the world.

Now, that’s why we’re working with Harvard. That’s why Harvard’s using our case studies for all their graduate schools. Twenty other universities are using our case studies. We got the TED Talk. I gave a talk to dozens of people in India … The humanistic organization, I talked to 200 people the other day. Sarasota, Florida, Western Florida Business Plan Association — we’re going to speak to three or 400 people. The drumbeat needs to come out, but organizations like yours are what we desperately need to embrace this, not for a story, but to make a difference in the world. That’s what we need.

Chris:

Bob, it’s incredible. It’s like you’re in my head because you are saying exactly what it is that this is all about. We didn’t want this to be one story or one feature that we did here and there. This whole section [now the Dave Alexander Center for Social Capital] is devoted to this concept and this idea because there needs to be something that’s devoted to this on a daily basis, not just incremental or from time to time writing a nice article about it.

Bob:

Yeah, exactly. There needs to be a cadence of voices rising up in the country to say …

Chris:

Exactly.

Bob:

Just like in the environment.

Chris:

Exactly.

Bob:

Not only do we need to save the environment, we need to save humanity.

Chris:

I love that, Bob. Thank you so much.

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