Responsible Innovation that Creates Value on Purpose

0:00 The topics and opinions express in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests, and not those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability, explicit or implied shall be extended to W FOURCY Radio or it's employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FOURCY Radio. 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's your host, Doctor Relise Cortes. Welcome back to the Working and Purpose Program. Thanks for tuning in again this week. Great to have you. This show has been on air and brought to you with passion and pride since February of twenty fifteen.

1:11 I'm your host, Doc Durlies Cortes. If you don't know, mean we've not met yet before. I'm an organizational psychologist and local therapist, management consultant, speaker and author. My team and I at Gusto now help companies to enliven and fortify their operations by articulating their purpose and building inspirational leaders and cultures activated by meeting and purpose to turn those companies from a flatline EKG to a vibrant destination workplace. There people are intrinsically lilility to perform at their best, can grow into their fuller potential, and are committed to stay and dynamically deliver on the company's mission. You can learn more about us and now we can work together at gastodashnow dot com and at leastcoret test dot com. Now getting into today's program we have with us today Michael Graeber. He's the managing partner of Epic Pivot and he speaks and publishes frequently on innovation, the power of purpose in business, and the positive influence organizations can make up the world.

2:00 He serves on the advisory board of the Global Institute of Innovation and has been a top forty global innovation blogger for more than five years. He contributes articles to inc among other platforms, and is a contributing author to the Other Side of Growth and Innovator's Responsibilities in an Emerging World. Has also written two other interesting books, Going Electric, Tales of Innovation from Where Rock and Roll was Born and Last Real Medicine Show. He joined it today from Memphis, Tennessee. Michael, welcome to Working on Purpose. Thank you, Elese. It's wonderful to be with you, and I want to thank you for also coming out. I know you're a little bit under the weather, so listeners and viewers, if you're an occasional snivel or a cough, that's because he's he's a trooper and he's coming on here and even though he's not quite full one hundred percent. So thanks for that, Michael, my pleasure. I apologize about any superfluous knowing. I appreciate it. So let me just pull this up. This is one of the things you've created put into the world, the other side of growth. You know this, As I said before, I got on air, Michael. I just think it's incredibly timely, you know, I think the world is position to be able just to really grab this and receive this in the way that I know you've been putting it out there for decades, and so I'm really grateful that we get to talk about this important topic here. It's just perfect and we met on LinkedIn, and I love what you're doing, so I want to share with my listeners and viewers. So let's start first by just talking a bit about your background and how you got working in purpose and conscious capitalism. That's a path that I recognized that we all get there by different different ways. That's right. It's an honor to be with you, and I'm so glad our paths crossed.

3:31 I'll begin just by saying I never expected to work in the world of business. In fact, I was a little allergic to it, although both of my grandfathers had large organizations, large businesses, and I grew up going to them and were family businesses, so my family's worked in them as well until they sold them off, and then I was more of the artistic type. I have an MFA and poetry and used to teach at the University of Memphis and then also play music. And so it wasn't until something happened during a hiring process at the university when I realized, oh my gosh, these people are backbiting and sniveling and getting very political, just over schools of thought about poetry. These politics are going to kill me. And so I did something that was pretty countercultural. I went to work at an advertising firm and a publishing firm and found out they were, believe it or not, many less politics in the world of business in a healthy culture than in some universities.

4:33 And so I always have considered myself kind of a spy in the house of commerce. To quote Shakespeare. You know, I'm still had these noble aspirations. Things like truth and beauty and meaning and purpose still mean something to me. And I think many of us in our species, in our culture and all over the planet are dying for a lack of those things. So it was by accident and happenstance, let's put it that way. Oh gosh, you know a meaning a work researcher. I can't how many times I've heard those exact same words, you're just over and over again to describe a path, and I also get delighted when I see people come from very very different, just diverse and dispersive backgrounds and bring that view that lens into the world of businesses only you can. So I'm very happy to have you bring beauty and meaning and purpose, you know, to the world of business. Thank you for that, Michael in advance. That sounds good to me. And the other thing about too, that's quite interesting to me is that you're an innovator, you know, you you think about how to create things, how to transform things. And I was very intrigued by one of the articles that you wrote where you quote in cite Acupole as saying that more than ninety five percent of the new products fail each year. And you want to say that this really ought to be a harrowing statistic that should sound an alarm or one that says we approach the conceptualization and launch of new products in a way that just doesn't work, but yet we keep doing it over and over again.

5:57 That's right, And so I can talk for a long time here, so please cut me off our interject to question this monologue. But I think it's an important grounding for everything I'm going to say for the remainder of the hour, and that is that in really in the late eighties early nineties, we found ourselves in this conundrum. W we hit the apex of the industrial revolution, right, we were able to zero defect almost everything, and our operational excellence, not our cultures, but in terms of production went sky high, right, and so we're able to produce stuff at a rapid rate at which we'd never been able to produce before. And so you hit this conundrum globally.

6:39 And this conundrum is that you had rising R and D costs, but then at the same time you were getting flat or less returns. Because the old model used to be you could find some clever people and they could buy instinct or intuition, figure out a hole in the market, go and produce as quickly as possible, put their profit margin on it, and push it out in the market. But then when things got almost too much at scale, and too much at a global scale, people just started making things, not because they had that intuitive sense of a need in the market, but making things gasp, just to make money, believe or not. And so everything was surfeited. There was too much, There were too many competitors, private label came in and just boxed so many large brands out. I'll give an example of that at a minute. And so if we're creating things just to make money without figuring out a real human want, need, desire, or a real hole in the marketplace, it's going to end up, you know, as part of that ninety seven percent what I now call bed death and beyond, you know, which is like big lots or something like that, you know, one of the closeout stores, which there's such an aftermarket for all this waste, and then you have to think about the cost of all those things, all the externalities of manufacturing and shipping all this stuff that

8:09 nobody really wanted in the first place. And so smart companies started figuring out and this was written about in the Mackenzie study the Alchemy of Growth. When they looked at what firms were doing that kept rising when so many were just falling off of out of existence, they saw that they were a they were making innovation bets in their core, adjacent and transformative horizons. But then they were also using human centered techniques and using an ethnographic primary market approach, so really understanding what people want, how they use things. Where there are gaps and able to create that. So once we're able to start doing that for some of our clients and they're able to see this revolution, they're able to create things that matter and things that can be copied and things that are protected for a while. So it's no longer a me too race to commoditize everything and put everything towards the average. But they're able to really leap frog in future proof their businesses as well by using some of these human centered techniques.

9:22 My favorite part of doing this work for more than three hundred organizations is that the lights go on in people in new ways. They understand that they're wired for empathy. I'll give you one example. We talked about it in our brief pre call, and this was a lovely man. He was a chemist. He has worked at Merk, at Bear Sharing, Plow all those places, successive owners sim Company and that permission to tell the story. He worked on copper Tone early and created the SPF, the sunscreen spectrum that we have. He's a renowned chemist. Okay, but we were working on an eggs on a platform and I took him. I said, I want to work a different way this time. If it's okay, with you, and he was very open minded, open hearted guy said, sure, so small recruits.

10:09 We started by going three homes right in our backyard in Memphis of extreme exema sufferers whom we had recruited. We went in their homes. They all showed us the clorox, the gallon of clorox next to their bath that they have to put in because they said that this is quote a living hell, and nobody understands, and they feel isolated from their family, say when they go on vacation and they get a flare up and they have to stay in the hotel room when everyone else goes out at the happiest place on earth. And we went back to the car after the third visit, we had more schedule for the next day, and he started crying. Yeah, I didn't know what to do. I was about thirty five at the time. He was a sixty year old man. And what is it? He said, I feel like I've wasted my whole career. So what do you mean, Tom, He said, Well, before it was always about the science, the chemistry, the formulation. But now I'm on a mission to go help people like Susan inside, who's in there silently suffering right now. And so the more you can tether the product, service, the experience to the actual people who are going to use them and apply that heart and apply that empathy, the more you're going to hit that target right and the more you're going to be useful. It really creates a whole wake of goodwill, Oh, Michael, And that's why I'm connected with you, and you can't get away from me, because I am a champion of what you're helping organizations to create and what I want to also put forth for our listeners and viewers to situate why this is so important. As a researcher, I know that increasingly what

11:41 we see is that people are expecting organizations to do better with themselves, so the resources and how they're creating. So when we know that an organization is put in this kind of thought into how they innovate and market and serve, but that already does is it increases the stickiness and the commitment of their stakeholders, including their customers, their employees, the communities in which they serve. So I wanted to situate that because I know you and I are aligned on that in terms of stakeholder capitalistic approach but just how what do I want to say, magnetic that is for organizations to be able to do that, and they then they talk about being able to do this and to perspective people that would come into their fold, and then the other I can yeah, if I can even expound a little face. We worked on all of it was Merk Consumer Cares, all of their product platforms, and we knew the revolution was complete when the president of the Consumer Care division we had quoted posters.

12:37 We took posters of people that we did all types of interviews, intercept interviews, recruited interviews, real people from all over the world. Right, We traveled widely. And when she quoted the names and stories of some of these people, put big posters in all the offices and she said, this is why we're working, this is what we do. People really felt a sense of purpose and meaning. And I'll say that it not only created that kind of goodwill and galvanized the culture and let people work together in different ways, but it also increased the value and valuation for when they sold to Bear Consumer Care. Absolutely, Michael, and that was a beautiful example to bring that home. Thank you very much. So yeah, so everybody, you know, especially when you work for a larger organization and your work becomes more siloed, and it's hard to understand how your individual contribution contributes to the overall purpose of the organization, the mission of the organization through which it's exercised. When you see that kind of thing, now you understand your direct contribution to it, and now you know you individually matter, and that's what everybody wants, right very much. Yeah, you and I also discussed the great Google Aristotle project where they you know, they decoded the factors of high performance teams, and everyone quotes psychological safety. It's become a bit of a cliche and the consulting industry, we want psychologological safety. We need leaders to create cultures that

14:09 are psychologically safe, which was the foremost tentative high performance teams. But I've always liked to quote three and four. So three was meaning through our work and four was purpose through our organization. So you can't just have that trust, the psychological safety without really putting i'll call it the engine of meaning and purpose on it, because that's what we're hungry for as a species, right, and that's what we're warring about because of the lack of whether we're warring in the boardroom or actually warring, but we just can't agree on these things. Well, like I wrote about in the Great Vitalization, which came out in March twenty three, I am fully convinced, based on my research that what happened, part of what happened during the pandemic was it gave people that pause to sit back and really consider what do I want for my life, my work, and what's working? What AREM I not willing to put up with anymore? And I think a lot of people's sense of and desire for a meeting and purpose got radically elevated during that time. It increased people's hunger for that and an insistence on that in ways that they just were willing to let go before. And I of course champion that it's elevated consciousness. Agree.

15:22 Yeah, And we actually started a different practice we call it purposeful transformation right at that point. So I'll get a little subjective and personal because it all begins with one human here. I don't know if you want to do it after the break or yeah, let's do it after the break, because I want to expound and I definitely want that to have it. Stue, so hold that thought if you would, Michael. Listeners and viewers, you just think about what that's going to be like hearing about purposeful transformation. Let's take our first break. I'm your host, Doctor Release Cortes. We are in there with Michael Graeber. He's the managing partner of Epic Pevot and he speaks and publishes frequently on innovation, the power of purpose and business, and the positive influence organizations can make on the world. We've been talking a bit about where his work came from and why I think his background and art to music is so useful and informative to be able to really take another level after the record, get more into this idea of purposeful transformation. Stay with this will be right back. Doctor Elise Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An 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 a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at Elisecortes dot com.

16:52 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 to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Alise alisee at eliscortes dot com. Now back to working on Purpose. Thanks for stating with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes. I mentioned the latest book that I put out in March, The Great Revitalization, How Activating Medium Purpose can radically in liven your business. I wrote that for leaders to be able to help them understand this new playing field that we find ourselves in post pandemic here and it helps you understand what the workforce really wants. And then it offers twenty two best practices to equip you through leadership in culture to actually achieve that. You can find it on Amazon Orleascoortes dot com if you are just joining me. My guest is Michael Graber, who contributes articles to inc among other platforms. It is a contributing author to the Other Side of Growth and innovator's responsibilities in an emerging world. He also wrote going a life trick tales of innovation from where rock and Roll was born in the Last Real Medicine Show. Okay, so let's hear about this purposeful transformation work. That sounds pretty enticing to me. You also had a couple other things in there too that I wanted to dig into it. Let's start there, okay, and it dovetails nicely with the great view vitalization. So again I'm going to start subjective and then get into more of a macro view.

18:25 So during the pandemic, I suffered, just like everybody, what I called a forced retreat. Right. We had to be contemplative, We had to look inside, We had to think about things like meaning and purpose and realize that what we've been doing may not be sustainable, you know. And then suddenly we were in the midst of three great crises that thinker Michael Moore talked about the crisis of climate climate change, the crisis of the humanitarian crisis with so many refugees afoot more than ever at the planet and there's going to be more now and as well as climate refugees. And then probably the most perplexing, which was the crisis of truth and meaning, you know, we don't have an objective reality that we agree upon anymore. And how dangerous that can be, because any demigogue with any type of view can just hijack the conversation and distort fact and science and all these things. We've worked so hard, and so I went deep inside and said, well, what can I do? You know, I've made a lot of companies millions and millions of dollars by helping them innovate and create innovation platforms, innovation departments, new products, new services, new experiences. So what you know that's not moved the social needle at all, and the world's only getting worse. You know that we're creating more stuff and polluting more waterways. And I didn't want to be a Debbie downer, you know, I want to fight the good fight.

19:56 So I at the same time, you know, I fell in love with conscious capitalism. I got to know Raja Sodi a little bit in an interview with him, wrote several articles there, and then started talking to clients about these things. Simultaneously, two large clients, a very large research hospital and one of the two largest hospitality corporations in the world, came to us and they said, hey, we don't know how to handle this great resignation, and we've got all these transformations that have failed. Can you use your human centered work, but instead of using an out on the market, use it inside our enterprise to figure out where things broke down and why. So we reverse engineered everything and we realized that in many cases there was never an express why. There was never a purpose or a declaration of a future state of what we're changing into. You know, they assume that a technology stack was going to save them, and that's the oldest trope in the world, right that do sex makana, Right, that God in the machine and it's not a real thing. And so from that we then sort of right size them, put them back on track, and we came up with this whole methodology of purposeful transformation. But with that we were able to then take a step back and see that the majority of the change that's needed is not going to

21:32 come from governments or from nonprofits. God bless them, they've had hundreds of years, right, and we've gotten as far as we've gotten. But it's only when the private sector is going to be a force of good that we're going to be able to realize our potential as a species, because that's where the mass of people, the majority of us, spend the majority of our waking hours, and we can no longer afford to compartmentalize ourselves, as T. Sla talked about in the dislocation of the sensibilities to put on my work mask and not have my morals, my ethics and just have to say this to this person, that to that person, that gamesmanship is dying. That's one reason for the great resignation. People could not fit in that mask anymore.

22:18 Right. They wanted to be real, they wanted to be authentic. They want they're hungry for meaning and purpose, and so we created this whole methodology around purposeful transformation. And it's our thesis that there are be corps and there is the conscious capitalism that's really good for large companies and for others. But it's not a one size fits all. Prescription can be a little bit too restrictive, and some people, some companies in particular, cannot regovern and become a B corp. They have to stay in escorpus cy corp and LLC whatever their governance structure may be. But they can still articulate a purpose align both their strategy and their structure to that purpose and move to more of a you know, a stakeholder version of capitalism instead of a shareholder version of capitalism.

23:14 And we're able then to start working with companies. Just tell you one brief example. We started working with a plastics container company around the same time we had done innovation work for them, we were writing their strategy, but then we started just getting wind of everybody inside of the company felt like they had to wear a bag on their head when they went to cocktail parties. They were embarrassed to tell people they worked at a plastics company right because of the plastic backlash, And they said, well, what can we do to make people feel better about working here? So, well, you have a great culture and people are very honest, but your product's a little toxic. What if we come up with what if we changed that? And what if you're a So we came up with a three ariz in strategy for changing and the first would be to help the CpG clients start to minimize their input of plastics, start to really lightweight and really better palatize, and then ultimately it is to be out of plastics completely. You know, it was a ten year strategy. They're now all about four years into it and doing very very well and becoming known as the people who are very innovative around sustainability in the CpG space. But they embraced it very much as a way to move beyond their competition, as a way to strategize and flank other businesses, but more importantly because it started to galvanize their culture and the best and brightest in that

24:49 field wanted to come work at this company, and it's been amazing And since that time they've won some of the largest accounts from some of the biggest global companies, and they're helping a lot of the CpG companies meet their twenty twenty five sustainability goals already and then helping them find cost effective ways to move outside of plastics. Listeners, viewers of those, if you don't know what CpG is, what does that consumer package goods? Yes, yes, just want to make sure that in case you stuck on them on the acronym there, Yeah, thank you, You're welcome of course. So then I do want to since you're talking about kind of reorienting a company, I think one of the best examples that i'm personally aware of that. You also reference in some of your articles is interface the Carpet Tile Company, and that is such a great story. Maybe you want to touch a little bit on that, because they're a great example of really recognizing, oh my gosh, we're plundering the planet with these indestructible carpet tiles. Did one hundred and eighty degree turn on how they were making this stuff. It's such a great story. It is a great story, and I think you hit on the highlights are d But they realized that this stuff was going to be around forever, much longer than humans will be on the planet. And then beyond that that it was very toxic and had all kinds of chemicals that would put things that were not supposed to breathe into our direct environments, both office and home, and so they changed the game completely. Nobody believed that they could do it, and then

26:23 suddenly they became one of the most popular carpet manufacturers anywhere by doing the right thing. So that's what we like to tell our clients is that if you want to hold onto your best and brightest employees, if you want to outpace your competition and truly meaningfully differentiate, if you want to build a legacy in a brand that has that type of halo, and then most importantly, do well by doing good. There's a great study by Rajasdia that I quote all the time that if you move to this model, we call it purposeful transformation. But this emerging model of cap that the world is calling us all to move to, you are going to outperform your profit only competitors somewhere. Studies say between eight x and thirteen x to one. So I just feel a little lonely on the mountaintop prophesizing this all the time when the data is so clear. I don't know why we can't get over ourselves. You know, our typical nineteen fifties Industrial Revolution orientation of NBA school and how we think about business is so ingrained in how we think about these things and how we make decisions, but it can be so toxic into itself. You know. I wish we could just do a great flush, yeah, and a reset, right, reset the curriculum. But as my favorite psychologist, James Hi Hilman says, conversation is consciousness, so it starts with what we're doing right now.

27:56 That's right. Well, I'll first let me say, I will stand on that mountain with you, Michael. You and I can get up there and you know, saying have a picnic or whatever. But I'm up there on the mountain with you too. And I loved what you wrote in one of your articles, which I just wanted to say it because I think it's so beautifully written, and I think it's really it's a beacon call for those people who haven't yet made this turn. But you write business is changing for the better. Instead of the sole goal of making money, it now wants to make money while creating significance and social value. And what I'm seeing, and you've been saying it too throughout this program, is you know, increasingly people are expecting that, and organizations are holding themselves to an account because they see some people starting to see that there really is utility and value and return on an investment for this stuff. It's not just really cool and nice, it actually turns a really pretty nice profit. And you and I both know that many increasingly investors are choosing to invest in purpose led organizations then not because they give a better return. Yeah, And so I left out one fact about the plastics company, which is very pragmatic and that is one reason they wanted to work with us on this purposeful transformation is that they had to recapitalize their debt. And as they shopped around their debt, they went to the largest large and the large con traditional conservative investment banking firms said we'll lend you this money, but all money has strings on it now, and so you're going to have to really up your ESG game, and they decided, hop

29:27 this is a golden opportunity. We meet so many people that are kind of cowering and fighting the ESG movement because it's something done to them and done to their model. But this company, because they're leaders, they're able to take it as a pause and say, hmm, maybe there's something here. And if we take this money, we don't want to just do the checklist. We've got to really bake it inside our whole engine and start to understand and articulate why it's important and getting to a philosophy of value. Why are we creating what we're creating. Because I can't have all my employees cower at the cocktail party being embarrassed of where they work. You know, I've got to give them not just a pr line but something from the heart that's going to attract other people to work here and attract other people to buy from us.

30:22 So I call this a philosophy of value that many companies are starting to understand. I love it, Michael. Well, just this morning, here's a great example on the ESG front. So every Tuesday I run six miles in the cold or the heat, whatever it is, at six point thirty with my friend Charles. And today it's cold enough and I always bund a way up. I need lots of layers. And we were talking about headbands, the ones that go over your ears especially, and he said, you know, I just found a fantastic new headband, And he said I was visiting Philadelphia and one of my nieces had it. She said I had an extra one, and so I got to use it and she said, oh it's double lined, he said, And then I checked into the company. I'm sorry, I don't remember the name of the company, but maybe somebody one of our listeners and viewers will. What how do they make those those headbands is they go and get plastic bottles from the sea, pull them out of the sea, clean the sea, and then they re they repurpose, make them into this double layer of a headband that is incredibly warm and cozy.

31:18 Now that's where it gets beautiful. People love that story. They want to be part of that story, part of that solution, and that's if they're going to choose where they're going to spend their money. That thoughtfulness, that consideration for the planet. This is what we're seeing more and more that I know you and I are both compelled by and we are out prophesizing. Excuse me, pardon it, no worries you. Why don't you finish that cough? Let's finish. Let's get our last break here. You have a nice, good cough, and we'll come right back. Okay, I'm your host, Doctor e Lee's Cortes. We're in there with Michael Graber, who contributes articles and other to other such platforms. He's also a contributing author to the Other Side of Growth and Innovator's Responsibilities in an Emerging World, plus a couple other amazing books. We've been talking a bit about his whole process of purposeful transformation. After the break will continue a few more stories and help you better understand just how this makes sense for you. See, we'll be right back, doctor Elise Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies visioneer for a 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 a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at elisecortes dot com. Let's talk

32:52 about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to a lease ALISEE at eliscortes dot com. Now back to working on Purpose. Thanks for Jane with me and welcome back to working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Relie Cortes. Before we get back on with Michael Hope, piece better now, I do want to share something interesting that came across my radar, and that is a conference called the Humanitarian Exchange. It's taking place on February twentieth, twenty twenty four, and people can join either online or in person in England. And what's exciting to me about this, and maybe it's even great for this conversation is it's bringing together purpose driven organizations and individuals across society that are all that are invited to really help address this humanitarian challenge we're talking about here. So in the world of escalating global crisises driven by conflict and climate like Michael was talking about, this Humanitarian Exchange is bringing together a million strong people to come together to try to help address some of these issues. And you are invited to attend.

34:10 So how do you find information? Go to Humanitarian Exchange No. E Humanitarian Exchange dot org. If you want to register. I'm pretty sure it's free. You can use the HX dash priority to be able to get at a little bit of a bigger bump when you actually register, so I will see you there. This to me is important to evangelize, so I hope you'll give it some consideration if you are just joining me. My guest here is Michael Graeber. He's a managing partner at Epic Pivot who speaks and publishes frequently on innovation, the power of purpose in business, and the positive influence organizations can make in the world. We've been talking about quite a few interesting examples here, and I want to be able to finish the segment strong here with maybe some other examples and ideas that you have to really help organizations move away from this traditional way of mark marketing and how do we, you know, own a market to actually serving the needs and improving the lives of the people that we're trying to help. Right, so many people Prospects in particular, they act like it's such a revolutionary premise when I say it, But actually, if you go back to the roots of business, I'm going to quote Adam Smith. You know, he wrote Wealth of Nations, from which we get the invisible hand of capitalism that's going to come and help take care of everybody. But six months after, eight months afterwards, he published a Theory of Moral Sentiment, which is a book that's all about how business should take care of community. And I don't know why that's been summarily rejected.

35:45 Similarly, in the NBA mindset, this is a stereotypical kind of caricature. But in the NBA mindset, people quote Darwin a lot, you know, Survival of the Fittest, Origin of species, dog eat dog world. You gotta fight, you gotta do. But Darwin only said that it's survival of the fittest four times, and he used the word love with different species more than four hundred, and most people don't. And so if you start to measure these things up and not selectively quote something happened when education was really being standardized right after World War Two, and almost what I call the Chicago School of Economics from which we base a lot of our business theory, were in vogue, and that's became the template of how we think. But that's not even the roots of how business worked in community, in society until that point, right, and then that up through the neoliberal era, right through through Clinton and Bush probably set this. People think of it as an absolute truth, but it's actually not. It's just one mental model of reality. Have to question yourself, what kind of work do you want? What kind of work do you want for your children? What kind of world can work build?

37:07 Right? How can work be a force of good or a healthy thing on the planet without externality. It's when I hear that word externality, it sounds like such a strange, disembodied concept. But we do have poisoned waterways, right, we do have so much litter just you mentioned the plastic in the oceans. Ye, who's responsible for that, you know? And that's those are big questions. Yeah, let's just hint. It's not the turtles of fish, that's right. But yet it's now even in the fetuses of many types of creatures, including humans, right, all these microplastics, so it affects us all. And so when I say that it's not a revolution, I'm talking about it's a gentle evolution that's already has many working models from all the b corps are out there, or the values based businesses that there are many case studies of that outperformed profit only companies. But my favorite comes from the Bosque region of Spain. Yes, mindless, yes, yes please.

38:15 So there was a monk who was put in charge of one of the most impolished regions of Spain, and he, you know, he went through a dark night of the soul trying to figure out what could he do, and he said, I can't think myself out of this problem. Dear Lord, help me, right and so so finally he said, well, I've got to help these people enriched their lives and the lives of everybody around them. So he set up a cooperative keyword cooperative style of business and started with one enterprise. Now it's grown into many, many corporations that are doing more than one hundred billion dollars a year. They're still extant, and guess who owns it. Everybody who works there. And for the longest time, the most junior level person, the janitor or the person on the floor in the factories only made or they made a good wage, but the CEO and the sea level only made three x of what they made. Now it's up to seven x, but still that's exponentially much less than what we see in this trillionaire you know, multi billionaire culture that we have these days, and it's a model that we see coming back in Vogue. One of our clients that we helped with a purposeful transformation actually switched their ownership. They had many offers to sell there was it was a family business, they were moving into third generation, and they were private equity offers because they were doing very well,

39:52 and they decided that they wanted to leave a legacy and that was their philosophy of value, and so they restructured as an ESOP, you know, employees the option program. So they did, they cashed out, they did well, but instead of just making a few multi multi millionaires, they were able to make thousands of hundreds of thousand airs right well, and everybody prospers. And so these models are already out there, the cooperative models, the ESOP models, all these other mothers for wealth creation and wealth equity, and I would just encourage people to explore them. Mm hmm, so good there. I really appreciate the breadth of models that you've been talking about this in the show, because it helps people really understand that this isn't as maybe crack pots is they might originally first at first blush think. And the thing that I keep coming back to, Michael is that, you know, and I've had many people on my show talking about this, the importance of you know, human leadership and you know being you know, actually honoring the human person world of work. I just find it amazing that we were having that conversation in twenty twenty three. And I do think that the part of the reason that we get to have this conversation, and I'm going to say get is because we are now in such a world power by artificial intelligence and technology that we've now recognized as the human race that this is the one way we can distinguish ourselves and just how important it is to be able to, as you say,

41:23 the old method of innovating edits out humanity, and what you're out to do is really embrace empathy and co creation in a way that celebrates it. Yeah, even if I'm talking about innovation, there have been many of our clients who are feared of what AI is going to do to them. And when I go inside any of these companies, everyone's scared that there's going to be massive job cuts. Just before I got on here, I was looking at the news and I saw that one of the big tech companies is thinking about a layoff in sales because AI is going to be able to figure out a lot of what their sales strategists We're going to do. They're talking about thirty thousand layoffs in one of the large tech companies. I won't name them.

42:05 But what's so interesting is that there's a there's a large study from multiple universities. Upen is the main author, but Yale and others are involved, and it said, with the best of AI, it always goes to the average of the mean, right, And so if a company is really going to differentiate keyword here, they're going to have to call on human cunning, human creativity making these uncommon, un non average connections that just aren't going to happen with a machine, right, And and then you're still gonna have to have had the huge make the right inputs in the machines to get the right outputs. And so we can never really dismiss our birthright of creativity, of insight and and outsource that to robo. You know, if you're running a bunch of different tasks to try to get to some type of new drug, that's one thing. If you're just trying one molecule after another or one variation or another, that's a right and good use for it. But if you're talking about what people really need and what they want and what they'll bipp put money down, I don't know if machines are ever going to be able to answer that I don't need one thing that I don't either. By the way, one thing that became very apparent to me both in my research and just you know, I guess intuitively, is how much experience became such an important

43:36 thing after the pandemic. People wanted quality experiences. If you were going to ask them to come out to do something or try a service or product. It needed to involve some kind of a quality experience. If it was just a transaction, they were not going to be interested in that. And so I think that also speaks to how we distinguish ourselves from technology. We can provide those kinds of experiences, this kind of an emotional connection, that is what people are hungry for. And so, like you, I want to assuage people's concerns about AI and technology taking over the planet in all of their jobs. It does mean that we have to keep elevating ourselves and keep learning and growing and reaching, which I want you to do anyway. But it doesn't mean that you're you have to worry that you know you're going to be in the unemployment line forever because you know AI took your job. Yeah yeah, but you were asking about vulnerability and being human at work. Yeah.

44:37 I can't imagine anyone expecting to stay at a job now where they're not allowed to be themselves. And it was really interesting. I spoke to the Chamber of Commerce in Memphis just a few months ago. It was an HR meeting. I talked about this emerging model of work, and all of them raised their hands and said, well, we need help. You know, we've got positions, we've got jobs, and we just can't find the right workforce. The labor force. People don't want to work. And my response was, look at your choice of language. You're still singing out of the nineteenth century song. But people are not a label force. They're people. You know, do you you need to change your processes, your language, your experience for touching them, for orienting them, for persuading them to come work for you to add value. You know, it's not the old equation where people just have to have a job. People want to have a life and their identities are tied in their career, and that that duy needs to be retooled massively in hr as. You know, that's that's the majority of your work, I'm assuming, Yeah, quite right, that's exactly right. And you know that's what a lot of it is is gently trying to sometimess not gentle sometimes. Look, you know what's interesting is some of the marketing that I do for our company is I look for organizations that have a glass store rating under three to reach out just to say, hey, you might want to look at something a little bit different here. You know what I find

46:07 oftimes when I go to reach out to them, They're not in business anymore, right, they are not in business anymore. Wake up call. Okay, So completely agree, you know, And so sometimes, you know, a lot of what I do is, especially in my speaking, it is a gentle, ideally inspiring wake up call that says, hey, come with us, this is a better way, this is the new world we live in today. Come with us. But sometimes it does require the look, man, you're about to go out of business here, something's got to change. Yeah. We love when clients come to us. And a quote in the psychologists chair already you know there, as they say in the twelve steps, they're willing right right right, they will you try something open minded?

46:50 Yeah, yeah, try some new mindsets, some new practices, some new behaviors, because our addiction to the old model isn't going to help us at all. You know. That's the first thing we have to do is unlearn in this process before we can begin to learn a new well that brings us to a near beautiful closer to this program here, Michael, you know that this program was listening by people around the world who care about elevating their own experience of work, of becoming a better version of a leader that can really help satisfy the needs and wants of today's world. And people that are starting to get on that bandwagon up want to do a business that betters the world. What would you like to leave them with? I would say, work hard and write your own purpose and really start to discern that and then and then find the right environment, the right context, the right business that is going to see value in that where it's an alignment of values, and then you'll be in a position to really thrive and help others, which is the most beautiful thing. I mean, that is why we're here, right, is to become a boon to others. Beautiful way to finish. Michael, I am so glad to know you, encount you as a friend, as a colleague, as a comrade in this in this work that we're doing together.

48:01 It's really a delight to know you and share you with my listeners and viewers. Thank you for being on working on purpose. Thank you for having me doctor Lacier. Absolutely absolutely, listeners and viewers, you're you're going to want to learn more about this remarkable man. Michael Graeber, the work he needs team do at Epic Pivot and his various writings. So I encourage you to start by visiting epicpivot dot com. Let me spell that for you Epic E p I C Pivot p I v O T epic pivot dot com. Last week, if you missed the live show, you always catch a via recorded podcast. We were on the air with doctor ron J. Golotti talking about his ideas and research at Harvard and helping companies to deeply operationalize purpose throughout their company to achieve new game level results. It's really remarkable his work.

48:44 His book is profound and it's well worth picking up. It's totally next level purpose. Next week will be on the air with Monica Parker talking about her incredibly medy and enlivening book, The Power of Wonder, The extraordinary emotion that will change the way you live, learn, and lead. You will learn that wonder is both a journey and a destination, a verb and a noun, a process and an outcome, and that there are five interlinking elements that comprise the wonder cycle. You also learn the extent to which you might be wonder prone. Yourself. See you there, and remember work as one of the best adventures and means of realizing our potential and making the impact we crave. So let's work on Purpose. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program.

49:24 Be sure to tune into Working on Purpose featuring your host, doctor Elise Cortes, each week on W four C Why. Together, We'll create a world where business operates conscientiously. Leadership inspires and passion performance, and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning and purpose they crave. See you there, Let's work on Purpose.