Everybody Matters: From Page To Screen

I often say to people that where Barry-Wehmiller is today compared to when I first became the senior leader is like landing on the moon. It is astounding. You can’t appreciate where we are today unless you understand the transformation from where we were more than 40 years ago.

From my father’s death in 1975, to our rise in the late 1970’s, to financial troubles in the 1980’s, to our rebirth through acquisitions in the late 1980’s and 1990’s, to the birth of Truly Human Leadership in the 2000s – our story is anything but conventional. It’s filled with challenges and lessons learned; reminders for ourselves as we look to the future and inspiration for others on their particular paths.

A few years before we documented our journey in Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring For Your People Like Family, I was concerned that future generations of team members would lose a connection to the challenges, experiences and awakenings that have made us what we are. So we produced several historical retrospective videos to preserve our story. We had anticipated producing a third installment, but in the process of writing and editing Everybody Matters, we chose to move in a different direction.

We are committed to spreading our message of Truly Human Leadership as far and wide as possible. It is one of the reasons we wrote Everybody Matters. But people learn and absorb information in different ways. We decided to produce a documentary about our journey, along the lines of the story told in our book.

Everybody Matters, the documentary, features interviews with myself and a number of Barry-Wehmiller team members throughout our organization, interweaving the story of the ups and downs of our business with the transformation of our culture.

We premiered the documentary at Conscious Capitalism 2016 in Chicago this April and it was met with rave reviews — called “funny,” “heartwarming” and “inspirational” by those who attended. From that event, a number of organizations have asked to show it to their teams. Right now we’re working on finding opportunities for distribution, but we’re also facilitating showings to our team members in our companies throughout the world and to companies or organizations who would use it to have a meaningful dialogue about their leadership. Eventually, we’ll make it available to the general public.

If you’d like to inquire about showing the documentary to your company or organization, visit its website: everybodymattersfilm.com. You can watch the film at the link above.