Encore Profitable and Beautiful: Elevating Business to Soulful Heights

0:05 What's working on purpose anyway? Each week we ponder the answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their highest potential. Business can be such a force for good in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we all want working on purpose. Now Here is your host, doctor Elise Cortes. Welcome back to the Working and Purpose Program. Thanks for Junina again this week.

0:45 Great to have you. I'm your host, doctor Relise Cortes, Junia Lai from Dallas, which is home base for me. If you don't know me yet, I'm a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose, organizational law, of therapist, inspirational speaker, social scientist, and author. My team and I help companies discover and articulate their purpose to throw it through culture and operations. We work with forward thinking or forward reaching organizations to develop inspiration leaders who create cultures where people actually want to come to work and do their best, and we provide programs like the Grab Your Gusto that enable individual team members to discover and unleash their passion and purpose of work to catalyze fulfillment, engagement, and productivity. You can learn more about us and how we can work together at at least corotest dot com, orgustodashanow dot com. With us today is Stephen Morris, a brand and culture advisor, at author and speaker. He works with business leaders to mind articulate and activate their driving belief system to create organizational integrity, evolved leaders, connected cultures, and unignorable brands. He's the president of Matter Consulting and the author of the Beautiful Business, an Actuable manifest to create To create an unignorable business with love at the core, we'll be talking about beautiful business, evolved leaders, and business brand. He joined today from San Diego, California. Steven, Welcome to Working on Purpose. Oh, thank you, Elise. It's such a pleasure to be here and have this converse with you. I'm very excited me too. I just need to share you with listeners around the world. This message is so profound and so important and so timely. And your book, of course, it's so beautiful Steven. Here it is. Let me show it to our viewers. This is what it looks like, the Beautiful Business. I read it, of course cover to cover, and I want to dive in here this first part

2:17 to actually talk about what we mean by or what you mean by beautiful business. So if we can, maybe the best way to start, I thought, is to have you open with the comparison and contrast. You talk about two distinct companies that you worked with early on in your book, and I think if we contrast those we can start to distill more of the essence of this conversation. So can you tell us about those two companies? Yeah, well I can. I'll tell about the companies. I won't mention the company names. That'd be great, And in the book I call it the Monday Client and the Tuesday Client story, and they're real stories, but I don't call out their names because you know, they're really anecdotes for the way a business can operate, and really they're anecdote for and really even metaphors for how one set of leadership team can actually approach the work at hand. And in this case, it was brand evolution work and a little bit of culture work and how another leadership team can approach them very differently. So the quick story behind it is the Monday client. And it's worth saying that they were both in more or less the same industry, the financial services industry that they happened to be in. They were on different coasts. Was on the West coast, ones on the east coast. And you know, the things that they had in common is that they both have a national presence, and they both handled lots of people's money, other people's money, and there was a lot of things at stake in what they were doing. So the Monday client is essentially it's a it's a tail where the client leadership team really didn't have what I would call evolve leadership. They were really out for one another, sometimes

3:47 gunning for one another, out for the other people's jobs within the organizations. They were not in it for the collective hole. They were. You know, there was a system essentially a top down management system, and there was a lot of confusion, chaos and dysfunction amongst the team. And in contrast, the Tuesday client, which was the following week. And I tell the story through the through the lens of presentations of essentially findings reports for both clients that happened to week apart on different sides of the coast. The Tuesday client had a completely different way of operating within their business. The leaders on that particular team were conscientious and thoughtful. They didn't deploy what we would call this command and control, a top down sort of management system. And how they worked and because of that, the outcomes, the level of contribution, the level of creativity, the level of openness, even the sense of belonging amongst that leadership team was exponentially higher. And in the story I tell about not just my experiences with you know, here's the contrast between these two different leadership groups, but here's the contrast and not only how they approached the work, but even in the exponential outcomes that the Tuesday client received over the Monday client.

5:03 So very quickly, i'll just cover this, the Monday client took significantly longer to realize even less outcomes than the Tuesday client did, and they did so with massive turnover. The Monday client had big turnover on their leadership team. There was infighting. They actually spent more money achieving less results than the Tuesday client did, and the Tuesday client achieved those results in half the amount of time that the Monday client did. So it was an eye opening experience for me to have those two frankly juxtaposed experiences with two clients that were in more or less the same industry, but they had completely different leadership styles, completely different cultures, and completely different ways of working with one another and even driving towards what they even considered what were outcomes and measurements. I could go into a lot more detail, and I want to be careful not to unveiled too much about the downside of the Monday client and really spotlight on the upsides of the Tuesday client. Yeah, thanks, Steven. I just thought that was a great place to start because it helps our listeners and viewers just kind of get right into the space of business and how does it manifest and how does it show up, and so real life examples to open the space to start. And then I want to talk about some of the principles of beautiful business as you described them in your book and for you listeners and viewers.

6:23 Why I think this is so important is, you know, what Stephen has put forth, in my view, is really any invitation for all of us to be able to be more creative and intentional to rise our intentions to be able to create a business that has even more beautiful impact than if we just go out to try to just make money. And so if you would, Stephen, talk to us about it. At least, it's just a few of the principles, the ones that you that maybe your closest to your heart. Yeah, so there's really four core tenants to the beautiful business that I believe are really important to employ and really corral around within the organization. First, it's probably fairly obvious to a lot of people that this first tenant it really has to do with leadership. It's what I call evolved leadership. And this is where leaders become self aware individuals or they are self aware individuals.

7:13 And by self awareness I mean that they have both the internal version and the external version of self awareness. Internal side of self awareness means that they have a clear understanding of what their motivations are, what their drivers are, what their values are, what even their purpose is. And the external side of the self awareness has to do with they're very clear that how they affect the people around them, and so the way they go about leading, they understand how the team is responding to them. They understand sort of the psychological mindset of the team around them, and they're being very thoughtful about how they affect the environment that they're putting themselves into. We can you knows a lot of science behind things like codregulation and self regulation and self aware leaders because they have this strong sense of internal and external self awareness, they really understand how to create a great environment for people to thrive in. So that's the first tenant is what I call evolved leadership. The second tenant is what I call belonging.

8:11 Now a lot of people talk about belonging. I don't. It's not my word. Everybody uses it. Brene Brown, I think, is the queen of belonging and our sort of in our culture and society these days. But it really it really talks about how the company and how the individuals within the organization, how they bond with the people. And this could be the employee side of the organization, or it could be the customer side, or it could even be considering how the investors or the community or even partners within the organization, how they belong to what we're doing. And belonging I believe happens when we create the sense of psychological safety within the organization, and that's I believe starts with the leadership role, but then it's continued throughout the entire team that they have to actually carry that mantle forward and then they have a clear operationtionalized system of how we communicate, how we treat one another within the organization. And when this fusion of psychological safety and this clear sort of operationalized system can create this operationalized system and our operating system, if you will, of belonging both inside and outside. So when we think about how do how do things like customer service happen and what we call CX and an employee experience happen, when we have belonging in the organization, we can have a cultural sense of belonging for the employee experience, and we have we have belonging on the customer side of things, we can have a customer experience sense of belonging where the customer feels like they are actually joining the brand that they're buying from

9:45 instead of just purchasing or having transactions. So I think this attribute is belonging is really important, and then so belonging to the second attribute. The third attribute is what I call magnetism, and this is really on the external side of the world, where we stop, we get out of the business of chasing customers and we actually act like the flame and not the moth, where we stop chasing customers out in the world and we invite them in, and we invite them in through this attribute of belonging because we, in some way, shape or form, have articulated from a brand standpoint, here's what we believe, here's what our value system is, and here's how we live up to that in the products and or services that we create, and how customers respond to that, they say I want to be part of that. They don't just buy from the brand, they actually join the brand. So that's magnetism. And then the last element is this sort of the full encompassing when all cylinders are happening within the organization and its integrity, so that which happens on the inside of the organization, our belief systems, our behaviors, and even how we treat one another within the organization, as well as how we treat our customers and the environment and our community and social justice issues. Thinks of that nature, all all of those things have an integral system to them.

11:03 So it begins with evolved leadership, it goes into belonging, and then it goes into magnetism and integrity. And those are the four key pillars or tenants that I tend to hit on throughout the Beautiful Business. Well said Stephen, thank you. That just really opened a space for us. That was great, Okay, And then next if we can, because I think a lot of people who haven't been consuming this kind of space like I have, or haven't read your book yet covered cover like I have, don't still quite understand what we mean by beautiful business. So some of the principles that you use in your book to describe it like you do, say things like, you know, work with beauty. And for those of you who are watching this program, the painting behind Stephen, he painted that he's an artist as well. So some of these principles, work with beauty, integrate your worlds, live and work with soul, allow love to show up in your business.

11:52 These are some of the beautiful principles that you show that you talk about, and as you and I said before we got on air, are not articulated in today's business world. Yeah, so much to go into there, so much opportunity. Yeah. Yeah, So you know, let's talk about what I mean by beauty first, because you know, in our Western culture, we tend to think about beauty as this superficial adornment of things, how something looks, and in the world of business, we would tend to think about that is how the business looks. And part of the intent by writing the book was a reclamation, a reclaiming of the definition of beauty into the felt sense of beauty, the things that we can experience, even having senses of transcendence and all. So when I'm thinking about beauty, I'm thinking about how something feels or how you experience something. And so now all of a sudden, when you begin to think about that from the context of a business, all of a sudden, our entire sensory system could be enlivened, not just our eyes the way something looks, but our heart and our soul and our passion and the things that we've learned to love in this life, which includes how we deploy and how we employ service to humanity and to one another.

13:05 And so when we think about business as an active service, we're actually thinking about it from the standpoint of if I'm here to create a business. And here I'm thinking about from the entrepreneurial lens. I'm thinking about Obviously, it's got to be a sustainable business, so it's got to make profit, or if it's a nonprofit, it's got to have enough financial flow to be in business and serve people tomorrow. But that isn't why you should build a business. So then it leads to the question, which is, if I'm in the business of serving and whatever however I define that for my customers and for my employees, all of a sudden, I can ignite a level of passion that goes into this sense of service that I'm contributing to something greater than myself. So when we think about everyone, as we have reached a level of safety, security, even abundance in westernized culture, all of a sudden we begin to look around and say, Okay, now, with this precious time on this planet, this beautiful life that I've been given in the precious gift of life, what then will I do with it? What then?

14:13 Well, how then will I serve as an entrepreneur or from a leader at any level within the organization, How will I serve the purpose at hand and the customers and what we're looking to solve and help help serve for them, and whatever shape or format, whatever the business leader defines that to be. So when we put passion, we put love, and we put love inside the business, all of a sudden it can then be this act of beautiful service that people then feel within the organization and they can feel it as customers as well. So one of the big mantras that I have within the book, and it's even sort of the biggest mantra that I use within my consulting practice, is there's nothing more powerful than a united group of souls ignited in a common cause with love at the core. So when you think about that sentence as an invitation and you break it down into there's nothing more powerful than a united group of souls. When we bond together, we as human beings are better for it. And when we're contributing to something larger than ourselves, which is this common cause that we have in hand and businesses I tend to call that a purpose, then all of a sudden we can become this unified front that makes for this unignorable force, and all of a sudden we become very attractive. And so that's the aspect of beauty, this thing that we human beings really have no defenses for, which is the true felt sense of beauty, and it's unignorable in our world. You know, if you know, if you have kids, the newborn face of your baby or even your

15:46 grandchildren, or whatever, the feeling of a sunset, or even in a business meeting where you're tapping into this sense of connection with the team of people around you and the innovation that you're coming up with on behalf of the service that you're providing for them. That can enlive in our heart, it can enliven our soul, and it can enlive in our lives and the lives of everyone surrounded with the business. I well, it was beautiful generated I'm one hundred percent with everything you said, and I'm going to give us take us into our first break, and after the break, I want to give an example of what I think is a beautiful business and see what you think. So I'm your host, Alie Cortes Hunamirro with Stephen Morris. He's the president of Matter Consulting and the author of the Beautiful Business, an Actionable manifesto to create an unignorable business with love at the core. We've been talking a bit about what makes for a beautiful business. After the break, we're going to talk about evolved leadership and stay with us. We'll be right back. Doctor Release Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose and inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite Elise to speak to your organization, please visit her at a Leasecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes.

17:18 To reach our program today or open a conversation with Alise, send an email to a lease Alise at Eleasecortes dot com. Now back to working on Purpose. Thanks for stating with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. Before we get back into the program, I would like to invite you to check out my book. It's called Purpose Ignited. How Inspiring Leaders ignite passion and elevate Cause. It's on Amazon now. I wrote it to a Weekend readers to their passionate purpose and help transform them into inspiration leaders who enliven the workplace and elevate the contribution of business to all at stakeholders. I use the content as a basis for my filin Inspired Leadership program in the Grab Your Gusto program. If you're just starting the program today. My guest is Stephen Morris. He's a brand and culture advisor, author and speaker. He works with business leaders to mine, articulate, and activate their driving belief system to create organizational integrity, evolved leaders, connected cultures, and unignorable brands. He helps human centered and future ready organizations. I'm your host, doctor Relie Cortes.

18:18 So the example that I would like to share with you that I think comprises a beautiful business so that we can go from the conceptional for the listeners and viewers for the more, the more practical and tangible. I had on my radio program a woman named Brittany Merrill some years ago. She created the Acola Project, and I know it's evolved since then. I'm not going to get all the details right, but the gist is something like this. She graduated SMU, she found herself, she wanted to go to Africa and do some help. She goes to Africa and she sees all this need and all of these people that are doing such important things just to kind of keep people together. She's like, I got to I got to help. We gotta do something to help. So she finds a way to be able to start to get the women to make jewelry there in Africa, and she pays them for that so that they now have current, so they have money they will wage. She brings that jewelry back to the United States. She then assembles a group of women who have actually been traffic She gets them out of trafficked situations. She then pays them a living wage to then add in more like jewels and other fine sort of gems to be able to increase the value and beauty of that jewelry. She then goes to Nieman Marcus as her distribution channel in South Marcus and makes her profits. Then uses those profits to be able to come back to do projects back in Africa like building schools and building damns, et cetera. In my mind, that is a beautiful business. Oh all day long, that's good. Yeah, yes, absolutely, I wouldn't disagree with any of that. And you know, one of the things that I love about that particular anecdote and story is that, you know, this person saw both a challenge and an opportunity within it and deployed her own version

19:55 of what we call or what I would call business artistry and thought about this precious thing that we call imagination, leaned into her own imagination and asked herself, well, what can I do here? How can I serve? How can I help this situation, remedy this situation, and you know, serve the lives of these people who not just the people who are doing the work and putting the jewelry together, but also the customers who are receiving it, and those people I would imagine that receive the goods and services that are provided within that and if they understand the story behind it, all of a sudden they have this direct connection to the people behind the business. And all of a sudden, we've transcended beyond this world of transactions and in the world of connection, and there's now belonging that it's created between these two entities. On one end of the entity is the organization that is creating the beautiful artifacts, and the other side is the receiver of that of those entities in the artifact, and how they feel about what they're contributing to, and when they go out into the world and you know, adorn themselves with the beautiful products, all of a sudden they become enlivened and they're carrying that story forward. I think that, you know, one of the most advanced and overlooked technologies that we have in our world today and it will continue to always be the most advanced technology, is our ability to tell stories. You think about, like

21:26 what like the power of a story. No war ever started without a story, No political crisis ever started without a story, and no solution was ever remedy without changing that story or remedying that story or healing the story that happened before. So the story that you just told there is a blessed one. It's a beautiful one, and certainly it's a beautiful business. Yeah, I thought you were going to say when you said two, I thought you're gonna say mouth. But storytelling certainly works. And this what you're talking about leads just beautifully into the next topic we wanted to get into in the segment, and that's evolved leadership and so one of the things I want to just share directly from your book that I think just gorgeous and opens the space perfectly.

22:10 You say, leadership is defined more by mindset of responsibility than by title, role or years of experience. Leadership sees what's possible and aligns them mastered or practice kits or parts and manageable forces to make it happen. Evolving leaders are alchemists of possibility. Oh that's gorgeous. Yeah, thank you for that, and thank you for reading that. It's kind of funny to hear your words back back to you. Yeah, that's a couple of nice sentences there, and I do believe that they are alchemists or possibilities, or at least you know, one that has evolved leaders when we you know, through the story that you just told you, when an organization or a leader sees an opportunity out there, sees a possibility out there, we then lean into this beautiful gift of human imagination and you can think about the most powerful, most valuable, most precious businesses on the planet all began with an idea, somebody out of a garage tinkering with the components, or you know, Yvon Schnard at Patagonia where he was starting to develop different climbing gear that was what he called clean climbing gear. You think about how Hewlett Packard began, how Apple began.

23:26 You know, these people just they began to play with things out of their garage or ideas that came from their mind, and they began to make those things happen, and all of a sudden, not overnight, of course, they become some of the most powerful, beautiful, amazing products and businesses on the planet. And I think it is this precious gift that we have of the imagination, our ability to see the possibilities in front of us, that can both create you know, certainly it creates some very negative things in our world, but it also can create remedies and antidotes for the things that currently ail us. And my invitation for those that might be out there listening, who might have an entrepreneurial set of lenses that they're thinking about, my invitation would be to look at a problem that you feel you can bring solutions to and pull your full imaginative artistry into that set of solutions so it can serve a greater number of people and remedy or heal whatever needs to be remedied or healed. And I actually believe that, you know, part of the role of leader is actually healer. And especially in corporate America these days where you know, we've were coming out of I believe a time frame where we have this top down leadership, command and control style of leadership. And I think in a decade from now, maybe sooner, that will be out the door. People will no longer and maybe we're seeing in the great resignation right

24:56 now, they're leaving organizations that you know, people are not welcoming their full self to the work to work or to a business, and people want to belong to something that's larger than themselves. And so this beautiful attribute of leadership alchemy and even the attribute of healer as leader or leader as healer, begins with healing one's self. And this is what I talk about when we think about evolved leadership and those people who have leadership responsibility, let's call it that. And that could be anyone from the CEO or of an organization, or the middle manager of an organization, or a solopreneur or an intern that's in charge of the holiday party. They're all leaders within their own domain because they've taken up or have been assigned with a set of responsibilities. And this act of imagination begins with healing oneself and then through the auspices of when you comment the world with this sense of peace and healing and wholeness, then all of a sudden, the world around you becomes to adapt to that. And you know, we call this coregulation in the physical world space or in the somatic space. But there's tons of science behind how this happens right now. And so the role as leader, as healer, and even the role of leader as artists, I think is absolutely the way people should be. I believe thinking about what leadership responsibility is what a great invitation and to take it further, because I assure there are people that are going, okay, great, great, great, I'm convinced, how do I become an involved leader?

26:29 And so one of the things that you say in the book so beautifully is you say evolving or evolved leaders have likely experienced some sort of awakening or turning point. They may have been confronted with a serious life circumstance, death, divorce, disaster, or some version of failure and emerge more committed and more lucid in there, knowing of why they are here, what they are here to do with their life. Yeah, I think it can happen that way, and I've seen it just as often in the other way, where people have realized the sense of mastery over their world and have achieved a level of success, and as David Brooks called it in his book, the Second Mountain, they've climbed the first mountain, which is the mountain of success, and they've looked at the viewpoint from that, from that perspective and said, is this all there is? And then all of a sudden one begins to ask deeper questions about Okay, this can't be all there is, and I have a sense of mastery and I even have a sense of agency over my world.

27:26 What next? What else can I raise my hand to and how can I do what Maslow talked about and go into the evolution of the hierarchy of needs where our base needs of safety, psychological needs are met, our sense of belonging, we have love in our life, and all of a sudden, we've also gained a certain level of mastery over what we do in our domain and the world that we live in, and we take our gifts and we begin to apply them as a gift out into the world and a service to humanity. And so I think it's a very fair question to ask yourself, based on the unique genius or the unique set of skills or mastery that I have, regardless of what level of leadership role you might have, how can I apply them for the greatest good of humanity and the people around me?

28:15 And the beautiful thing about beauty is it's subjective. And the beautiful thing even about that particular question is it's only answerable by the individual who is asking the question of themselves. But it does begin with asking or giving yourself permission to ask that question and even to dream that other future opportunity into being, which is what we call imagination, you know, And what a great invitation, right. I guess what I would say to that Stephen, is that to further extend it and again bring it to a place where people can also access it even more, maybe more and more readily. Is you know, this nosent of just knowing there's so much more you can do than is sitting right in front of you, if only you will employ your imagination, extend yourself in and lead from soul from heart and just to see what does the world need? What can you do to help the world. And so what I really appreciate about your notion of evolved leadership is that it is the invitation for us to bring forth. You say something about calling the better angels of our nature, which I know from your book is a reference to Abraham Maslow's inaugural address. But excuse me, you did put that on there and I said that wrong. Yeah, but that is a beautiful way to think about it, calling forth the better angels of our nature, right, yeah, yeah, you know, I think a lot as I began to write the book, and you know, it was a couple of year journey about the times that we're living in. And it's worth saying that I wrote a lot

29:45 of the book, or at least the beginning stage of the book came in probably twenty seventeen twenty eighteen timeframe, and then a lot of the writing happened during COVID. So here we were in a world of crisis, COVID related crisis. I think, you know, in here in the US and I think other parts of the globe. I believe that we're in a societal crisis. Of us versus themness, and even the crisis of the distractions that we have through both our work and our social media and the way that we absorb all kinds of mass media. You know, the ability to be simply present for family members is a very very difficult thing in this day and age, let alone the ability to have conversations with people who might not be of the same faith or the same political affiliation. And what happened? What happened to our humanity? Why did we lose our way? And so this better angels of our nature I think invites us to rise above the petty grievances that we have in the day in and day out issues, and some of them are not petty. I understand that there are very very significant social issues which would include Dei and Jedi type of issues, inclusion, diversity, things of that nature. There these are real issues in our society, and I believe business leaders have the opportunity to rise above those things and tap into their own better angels of their nature and deploy these acts of imagination to begin to heal not

31:22 just themselves, their family, their work environment, and the world of their customers. And I think this is sort of the time that we're living in. I believe this is the mantle and the opportunity, the steering wheel that all business leaders can potentially grab the hold of and shape a future destiny that we're heading into. And not the least of which which I should have mentioned, this is the global crisis of our environment. You know. We have to get away from using resources as if they're only resources that can be just destroyed and depleted and not regained for future purposes. We have to think about our now her world around us and the beauty of nature quite frankly, and how that enlivens all of us from a human standpoint, and that also taps into the better angels of our nature. Is to lean into the natural world.

32:12 I'm with you, Stephen, and I will so help you along that journey so well together, help steward the world and bring it up. Let's cover our last break. I'm your host, doctor Relie Cortes. We've on the air with Stephen Morris. He's the president of Matter Consulting and the author of the Beautiful Business and Actionable Manifesto to create an unagorable business with love at the core. We've been talking this segment about Evolved leadership. On the last segment, we're going to talk about business brand. Stay with us, we'll be right back. Doctor Relise Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose and inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite Elise to speak to your organization, please visit her at elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or open a conversation with Alise, send an email to a lease Alise at elisecortes dot com. Now back to working on purpose. Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working on purpose. One other bit of news I want to share with you is that in August of this year, at twenty twenty one, I also put out my second book. It's an anthology this time, and this is where I went trapsing across the world and I found twenty five women to

33:45 share their intimate stories of how they've discovered their purpose and how they're now serving from it. So it's incredibly inspirational and I'm so proud of it I could bust. It's called passionately striving and why an anthology weaving a person reminded to live their purpose. You can find that as well. You're just joining the program today. My guest is Stephen Morris. He's a brand and culture advisor, author and speaker. He works with business leaders to mine, articulate, and activate their driving belief system to create organizational integrity, evolve leaders, connected cultures and unignorable brands. I'm your host, Doctor Release Cortes, So for this last bit here, now we get to really come directly into your space even and that's the world of brand and a few things I also want to call back out that I think are just gloriously beautiful about how you write.

34:27 You say a beautiful business is a journey, a way of doing business instigated by the leaders or leadership teams awakening to an involved brand. In order to evolve toward a beautiful business, you need to understand both the relationship between a business and a brand. It's my belief that the two are inseparable. Yeah. Yeah, So the way I tend to think about and talk about brand, and it's probably worth saying that I tend to think about all business from a humanistic psychology perspective, So I like it. Yeah. One of the ways that I tend to describe brand, which is I think pretty different than most of the other sort of brand experts that exist out in the world, is your brand is your character, and your character is your brand. You know, a lot of people talk about archetypes and personas and things like that, and I think that's finding good. I think, you know, there's a purpose for having archetypical work that leans into the union archetypes that happen, and I think that that certain team members and teams can have that. But the reason I think character is more a better or more apropos way of describing what a brand is is it becomes a character comes from your belief system.

35:34 And so you know, if we if we take business as a metaphor and we say, I don't know, Let's say Patagonia, for instance, is an individual and we know our friend Patagonia because we hang out with Patagonia, we hang out with their products. We understand what they believe from protecting national resources. And you know, we understand their political activism, we understand where they source their materials and things like that. We begin to then understand what the character of that entity is like. And that character comes from the actionable beliefs shown up every day, day in and day out, in all their decisions and all their behaviors as much as we can possibly live up to them.

36:15 So then we ask ourselves where do beliefs come from within the organizational life? So how does an organization begin to form its beliefs about why it exists, what it does, how it serves the world, how it produces its products and or services, how it treats its team and thinks of that nature. So now when that organization shows up in a predictable way, we then have a sense of character. So we'll go back to what I was just talking about, where do those beliefs come from? What are those beliefs? So it begins from my perspective with purpose. Purpose is the reason that a business exists beyond simply making money or making profit. And I'm not not an advocate. I'm a huge advocate for making profit. It's a non negotiable attribute of doing business. It allows you to be in business tomorrow and to serve more people. And by the way, profit is the avenue for all innovations.

37:08 So the more extra income you have, the more you can innovate, and the more you can innovate, the more you can serve your customers and your employees in better and greater ways. But purpose is not just about making money. And if your business is only in business for the purpose of making money and or profit, you are likely going to be exposed for that at some point, and you are likely have decisions that lead you down some pretty dark galities. So I believe organizations will look very closely what we do corporate soul searching, and ask themselves the question, why beyond profit are we here, what are we looking to accomplish? That it's a big, hairy, audacious goal that is going to change the world, or at least the world of our customers and ideally the world of our employees. So it begins with purpose, then it goes into vision. The connected part of vision is an extension of purpose, which is how does the world begin to look like as we go about achieving our purpose. If it's a purpose, it's got to be big enough that it's never really done because there's always more people to serve.

38:12 And then this vision is how the world begins to look like. So we can have different measurement systems within that, and we can have different markers over different periods of time. I love working with organizations that have audacious purposes or excuse me, audacious visions or audacious purposes and audation's visions like one hundred year vision. So it might feel incredibly audacious for some organizations to set out, in one hundred years from now, our vision for our business and the world around us, the world that we're affecting is going to look like this. And I work with three businesses right now that have been in business for more than seventy five years, and I'm happy to say that I've helped them a couple of them shape future visions that go out just as far as they've been in business. But you can be a startup and still have one hundred year vision. It's totally okay to do that. So purpose and then vision and then core values are the operating system to a culture. So this is the core values define what our belief systems are in action. They define how we hold each other accountable for communication, for how we treat one another, how we serve people, and it becomes the operating system because it's not just a set of stated values that sit on some conference room wall, but they have to be lived. And there's a lot of different ways that you can cultivate core values. One of the ways that I love doing it with the organizations is to ask them to tell me the stories of their people at their best that we would like to exemplify going forward. And typically there's heroic stories

39:45 that exist within organizations that we can identify and say, oh, this story, this story, and this story are the kinds of stories that we want to be telling one hundred years from now. What are the attributes that went into the character that created those stories that we can deconstruct and say, these are the things that we want to cheerlead, These are the things that we want to celebrate within our team and with our culture. And then be able to the other thing that I love doing. And this is sort of a tip for anyone out there if you're thinking about how do you activate core values, is you can turn them into questions, so you know, if you have a core value that has to do with I don't know, let's say innovation at some level you could ask you you could you could reshape that core value question or a core value statement into a question that says, are we being innovative enough? Or what does innovation look like in this moment? So in that particular scenario, we could say innovation looks like a spirited, open minded, curious conversation. In a business meeting, it could look like serving customers in a very different way by getting innovative about how do we solve the problem that they're coming to us with. In a customer service situation, it could it could look like how do we get innovative in terms of how do we onboard new team members or interview new team members? And so these questions should help people make decisions throughout the organization. But they're all connected to the core values and the behavior system that we want to see consistently modeled. And again this goes back to character. So character is connected to the core values,

41:15 which is connected to the purpose. And then the last attribute, which I think is really important to talk about, is the stated promise, or in the world of business, there could be multiple promises. Typically there's two promises that an organization can make. One is an external promise to a set of customers, and a valuable promise is broken down into three different levels, one of which is is it explicitly stated? Are we actually stating the promise, because it's not a promise of we had, I don't actually say it out loud. Secondarily, it's got to be valuable for the customers, so there's got to be something in it for them. And thirdly, I believe there has to be some accountability, some way to measure to the extent that we're living up to the promises that we're stating to be. So that's the external promise, but there could also be internal promises, promises that we make to one another within the organization, and I believe those things that have also the same three attributes, which has to do with we have to explicitly state it. It's got to be valuable for the people, and we have to hold ourselves accountable for living up to it, so we measure it. There's so much in that. I want to acknowledge you for using a very important four letter word, and that's soul. Remember we talked about that, so I appreciate very much that you just wove that right in there so beautifully, Stephen. And then if we could go on here, we're coming to the close of the show. Here, I want to just let you talk a little bit to the invitation you've given us, and that say you say, your invitation is, my friends, this book and implications for the beautiful business

42:47 within it is an invitation for a reclamation. What reclamation, Yeah, I think And I'm about to pen an article on this. I think you and the title of the article will likely be something along the line to the death of corporate America. And I think you know it's time to reclaim business as a dirty word. I think you know the societal perspective that most people have on large institutions, including very big businesses and government and things like that. Our skepticism for big business has dwindled, mostly because of the nefarious behavior of certain organizations over time. And I think it's time for reclaiming what a beautiful business or what business can actually be for our sense of humanity and reclaim that in action, and I believe in doing so, it will begin to reshape our society. It will begin to reshape social justice and elements of equity, and diversity within not just our society but in our workforces. And I think it will begin to also reclaim our relationship with our natural resources in the environment.

43:55 And I believe a beautiful business needs to operate on all those cylinders. And with all of this deserves a reclamation, All of this deserves redefining. And by the way, folks, this has happened over time. You know, capitalism is a relatively new invention of human beings. So it is then up to us to reinvent, or reshape or reclaim what a culture, what a society can look like based on our previous form of capitalism. And that can change, It can certainly change, but it's really up to us. It's up to the people of our generation to step up and serve that mantle, to understand that this is our responsibility and stop looking around at other people around us and saying, oh, when are they going to fix it?

44:37 By the way, folks, they is us. When we think about the world out there and we blame them for whatever our plight is. We're part of that, and so especially people who have a business leadership role, they are us. And so now it's the time to reclaim all that and to write the ship sounds good to me. Stephen, I'm in let's do it together. I want to thank you so much, so much for being a guest on myself, for being findable. When I reached out to I said, you absolutely simply must come on the Working in Purpose show, and you said, okay, I'll do it. So thank you for saying yes, for dancing with me, for sharing your beautiful message. Steve, I'm so happy to know you. It's my pleasure. This has been a great conversation, and at least the work that you're doing in the world is just incredibly beautiful. I applaud everything that you're doing, and we are comrades and arms.

45:22 We're in the sign boat together and I'm cheering you on for everything that you're doing and no doubt everything that your show and your work stands for. Thank you, Steven. I really appreciate that we are comrades and arms, and I'm happy to be in your company, to be in service with you. So listeners and viewers, if you want to learn more about Stephen and the work that he's doing or his book, the best place to start is his website. It's matter co dot co. So it's m A T T E r COO dot co. Last week, if you missed the live show, you always catch it rerecorded podcast. We are on there with Nikola chen Nielsen, who is the co author of Return on Ambition, a Radical Approach to your achievement, growth, and Being. We talked about what we can learn about our own ambition and how we can optimally manage it, the value of listening to the voice of the employee, and creating work environments where ambitious people actually thrive. Next week, we'll be on there with Greg Milanoak, author of Curing Corporate Shortterm. Short term short terminism is a hard wad to say future growth versus current earnings. We'll be talking about this idea as a basis for creating sustainable value that benefits all stakeholders. See you there. Remember that works at least I've third of our lives and let's work on Purpose.

46:28 We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune in too Working on Purpose featuring your host, doctor Elise Cortes each week on the Voice America Empowerment Channel. Together, we'll create a world where business operates conscientiously. Leadership inspires impassioned performance, and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning and purpose They crave see you there. Let's work on purpose.