Raj Sisodia is the co-author of our CEO, Bob Chapman’s, book, Everybody Matters, and the co-founder of Conscious Capitalism.
Raj is working on a very special project we’ll be able to talk about soon and, as every conversation with Raj is enlightening, we decided to roll the proverbial tape to capture some of his insight.
We ended up talking about Raj’s experiences for the last 20 years or so, specifically through some of his books: Firms of Endearment, Conscious Capitalism, Everybody Matters and The Healing Organization. Raj’s career in and out of writing has mirrored the rise of the conscious leadership and conscious business movement, and so we talk a little history as well.
On this podcast, you’re going to hear that conversation. One of the reasons it’s such an important conversation, is that while Raj recounts a bit of history, he traces things to today and where the conscious business movement is right now. It’ll give you a lot to think about.
Transcript:
Raj Sisodia: That work was really coming out of years of, in a way, frustration with the story of business, and especially the story of marketing, or the way marketing was being practiced. And being a professor of marketing, you know that was something that that hit me more personally. And I had done a series of things before that that were really looking or, you know, in a way giving voice to my angst about marketing, so we have done a large study on the image of marketing. We interviewed 2000 people, businesses, business leaders, as well as just ordinary people and the result of that was basically revealing, which we already believe that we knew, that which was at a very low level of trust and credibility in marketing, that if something was marketing, that means this wasn't the truth. And even within businesses, there was not a lot of respect for the marketing function. And I've also done a lot of research on the productivity, what I was calling the marketing's productivity crisis that we were spending more every year on marketing at the aggregate level and the overall indicators were going down. Customer satisfaction was low and had plateaued. Customer loyalty had fallen a lot. Customer trust had fallen even further. Even as spending was rising year after year, in the aggregate we estimated in that around that time that we were spending a trillion dollars a year on marketing. If you add it all up, ads and coupons and junk mail and sales and you know all of that stuff. So this is marketing; this is not personal selling, it does not include. You know, that's all another probably another trillion dollars, which was more than the GDP of India that year. So that really struck me that a billion people are living on less than what we're spending here on ads, coupons and junk mail. And in that study, we found that, you know, what are we getting for that? For customers, companies and society, and we basically conclude that we were not getting much. In fact, we were having a lot of negative impacts. And so I then organized a conference called “Does Marketing Need Reform” in Boston. And it was a one-day conference and we had all the leading scholars. This was 2004.
We have the American Marketing Association meeting in Boston, and so I just added on a one-day event at the end of that conference because all the marketing columns were here and I wanted them to address this question. Does marketing something fundamentally broken in our field, in this discipline, in this profession, where everybody else is doing more with less over time and we're doing less with more over time? We're spending more and getting worse outcomes. And we're having a negative impact probably on society. We're creating obesity and you know, overconsumption and anxiety and depression and using women's bodies to sell products. And you know, I could see all of the downsides which nobody talks about. Very few people focus on those things. And we had about 20 people speaking at that event and pretty much concluding that, yes, there's something fundamentally wrong and we need to rethink, from foundational principle, what is the purpose of marketing? Why are we here? What are we doing? Why are we do what we do?
And then we published a book with that theme. Well, that's with that same title: Does Marketing Need Reform? Basically a collection of, essays by different scholars, including I wrote a few pieces in that and my co-author, co-editor as well, Jag Sheth. And so all of that then led up to the question of what do we do differently? How do we change this? And I had been coming from a negative place. So you know what became Firms of Endearment really had many names and many lives before that. It started in a way darker place. I think I was calling it marketing malpractices at one point. Then I was calling it the Shame of Marketing, which was a phrase used by Drucker referring to the consumer movement. But I was focused on all my research that was showing everything that was dysfunctional about marketing. And I had written about, I don't know, a dozen or so paper academic articles on that team.
So I was going to culminate all of that work in a book to say marketing is fundamentally broken. And the other book Does Marketing Need Reform? was an edited book. But this was going to be an authored book, right? So that was the difference. But then, as I said, I was stuck in that negative mindset. and I did not have any pride in my profession. In fact, I had a sense of shame about it. So when I call it the Shame of Marketing, it was really my own shame, in a way I didn't feel I was in a noble profession. I didn't feel proud, you know, to say I'm a marketing professor. The world doesn't necessarily need more marketing professors or marketing professionals. Yeah, there are many professions that are self-justifying. I didn't feel like this was one of them and it didn't help that my father got a PhD in agriculture science and plant genetics. So he was clearly doing something novel. He was trying to cure world hunger with his education and his profession. And I was just trying to get, you know, get people hooked on more junk, you know? Essentially, for the most part, right? And so I have that, you know, in our dialogue going. And so I was without even recognizing, I was searching for meaning. I was searching for purpose in my life, but in those days we didn't really have the language. It wasn't widespread or common to talk about these things. You know, in 2004, 5-6, but there was a hunger inside me and it also was around midlife, you know, for me. Midlife is a time of the so-called midlife crisis, right? That was a few years prior to that. So that's when you have this deep dissatisfaction with your life and with the status quo and what seemed OK until before that a few years before that, yeah, you're building your career and you're getting publication. You're getting promoted and you know you're moving on, but then you say, is this it? I mean what's the impact of all of this? And can I imagine doing this for another 40 years? And I could not.
You know, I was like. You know, I had no inspiration and I was kind of miserable in in my profession and my work. But I was coming from that negative place. And going to issue a full-blown indictment of this whole profession. But then my mentor Jag Sheth was also going to be my co-author. I mean, he was my co-author on everything pretty much. Looked at my proposal and said, Raj, you know this is too negative, you know? We need to focus on the solution. People want to hear about solutions, not problems. And I had been so immersed in the problems. And at the end of every article, we would have a little section on what we could do better. But the focus was on the problem, right? So then that was a big aha for me because I said, OK, let's turn this around. And then I started looking on the positive side. I said OK. So this is the problem. We’re spending so much and we're getting lousy outcomes. What's the alternative? What's the opposite of that? That we don't spend a lot and we get much better outcomes? We don't waste money. We're efficient and effective with the resources as we need to be. We should be and we create higher satisfaction and higher loyalty and higher trust, which you cannot buy with marketing dollars. You can't buy trust, right? You have to earn it. And so that turned it around. And for a while, the working title was In Search of Marketing Excellence. And we were looking for companies that were embodiments of marketing excellence, which means they didn't spend a lot. And yet they are outstanding levels of customer loyalty interest. And so, we started looking for companies which fit that mold and initially had about five or six that we identified. And then we started to look at them in more detail and then we saw there's a deeper story there. It's not just customers, but it's also employees who are loyal and trusting to these companies and suppliers who are in long-term relationship with them and communities that embrace them, so we discovered that there was a stakeholder orientation in these companies, that you cannot isolate just the customers who will only care about the customer and we won't care about anybody else. You know those things go together. Ultimately, customer satisfaction is very hard to attain without employee satisfaction, right? And without good suppliers, et cetera. So that started to broaden the lens as we were looking at these companies that we had found. And then we started to try to understand more about what made them tick like why were customers and employees and everybody attracted to these companies and bonded to them? And then we hit on the notion of purpose and values that there was an alignment on purpose and values which is what became the magnet that attracted all these stakeholders to the company and that created a much stronger ecosystem that was much more closely tied in, you know. It was much more of a tight network. In a way, there's much higher levels of customer loyalty, employee loyalty, et cetera. And you don't have to buy those things. You know, you don't have to bribe people to be loyal. They just are because of what they believe in what you're trying to do.
So anyway, that was the background and that's how that went from all those from Marketing Malpractices to The Shame of Marketing to A Search of Marketing Excellence. Then I think in between we were calling it Share of Heart. Because these were companies that were loved by everybody. But then we got pushback on that from the editor at one of the publishers said, you know, marketing was about Share of Market and then it became Share of Wallet and now you want Share of Heart, you know. Where does this end? Is it going to be Share of Your Soul, you know? So then I came up with that name, Firms of Endearment, and ultimately, for me, it was a turning point in my life. Not in the beginning. Not when I started the research, but in the middle when I was writing some of the stories of these companies, and I literally found myself moved to tears, which was a very, very shocking thing because I had not cried for decades before that, maybe 20 years. And suddenly I moved to tears by just the stories of some company. I think it was UPS at that time I was writing about something that they had done for an employee that actually the the wife of an employee who had died and how they turned her life around. And so that told me something.
You know that there's something significant here that matters deeply to me. You know, tears are a sign of something that really matters, right? And I said if it matters to me, I know it matters to others as well. Maybe not to everybody, but this is something that now suddenly my heart, which had been dormant in my career for the 20 years before that, right? My heart was never part of my work. My work, as I say now, was all about my head, the head and the wallet, right? Everything was about the theories and the numbers and the frameworks. And ultimately, everything was about the bottom line. And the bypassing the human in between, and so now suddenly my heart was connected.
As I was moved to tears of joy. I had anger and bitter frustration and disappointment before. But now suddenly I had this tears of joy. So my heart came alive and eventually my spirit as well, right? I was inspired for the first time. For the first time, I was touched, and I was inspired by my work, and that's a powerful feeling. And I said I don't want to let go of this, you know? I didn't know that I could have this. And I wanna go down this path and explore what that means in the context of work and business. So in that instant, I feel like my purpose kind of found me, even though I wasn't actively in the search. Consciously I wasn't searching, but you know, in a way, I was because I had looked at everything that broke my heart. About my work before that right, Andrew Harvey talks about follow your heartbreak, what gives you pain, but other people are not moved by it. And I had been in that place for a while and then on the other side of that is follow your bliss or discover your bliss. What gives you joy, which is typically the solution to that heartbreak, right? So now I found the other piece of that which Joseph Campbell talks about following your bliss. And between those two is your purpose. Alleviate that suffering and bring more of that joy. And so it became very clear to me that this was it for the rest of my life. What I would be doing or wanted to do, it took me a while to figure out whether I would be able to do that. Because, you know, initially I didn't get a lot of traction when I was talking to people because they were still stuck in the old mindset, right? And they didn't care. But when I met John Mackey, that's really when it turned around.
Brent Stewart: Now that was what I was going to ask you, that how, I guess, Conscious Capitalism in working with John Mackey, gave you more of a funnel to expand, but your thinking had already become with Firms of Endearment. It also kind of gave you a mouthpiece too, because John was a very high-profile person and Whole Foods is a very visible business, so how did that change things for you? That whole exercise and that whole process?
Raj: Well, you know it's it's it's kind of discovering your tribe, right? I mean, you think you're alone and you know an outlier and so forth, which I was in many ways. I certainly was in my academic community and in the university. But when I met John, and he had read the book and reached out, and I went on a stay with him in Austin and at the end of that, at the dinner that we had, I shared my mind map what I was calling the Institute for New Capitalism or INC. I said John, I want to devote the rest of my life to this vision of this story of business, which I was never taught, and I didn't know it was possible that this not only succeed, succeed at an even higher level. And I want to understand this deeper. I want to bring that to students, bring that to executive CEOs and so forth. And then he looked at my mind map and he said that's exactly my vision. But I like the phrase Conscious Capitalism. And so then we decided to have a retreat at his ranch a few months later, in February of 2008. And at that retreat, we each invited about a half dozen people and at the end of three or four days, we said OK, let's try to launch a movement on this so that October we had our first conference and what that did was it kind of attracted all kinds of people to this idea who had been in their own lives, kind of lone rangers and doing their own thing and being outliers in their industry, you know, they're trying to operate with these kinds of values. And it gave them a sense of wow, there’s a community. There's a tribe, there's a mindset, you know?
And Firms of Endearment was an important piece of that because like John said, when I met him, he said I thought we were the only weird company, but the 28 of them in your book, you know that are aligned in some ways with these things. And so he felt lonely in his own journey when he interacted with so-called normal CEOs. You know, he felt like a fish out of water, like they didn't speak their language. He didn't care about the same things that they cared about. And so this enabled us to feel like we're not alone. And we're part of this community of incredible people and they're running very successful companies and they're doing it with heart, you know, and with passion and purpose and all these things. And so it was deeply validating. It was deeply joyful. I mean, I've never been as joyful as I was in those three days of that first conference, you know it was like a love fest. I mean, it was just you could not wipe the smile off our faces. You know, it was just very inspiring and very heartwarming at the same time. So yeah, they definitely did give. And then as the movement grew, it certainly created a platform to spread these ideas. And not just make it be a tiny sliver of companies and an aberration, but really, ultimately our goal is to make that the default mindset.
Brent: Yeah, Raj. Something that I've been wondering as I've been thinking about all this, and I don't know if you've ever been asked this before or if you've thought of it, but how do you think your journey, or at least your journey up to this point aligned with American society and business culture. You know, I've heard you speak many times before and I've heard you talk about how the 80s changed a lot of things in business, where the focus became on shareholders and shareholder supremacy. A lot of our thinking from pre-80s to now, a lot of thinking before the 80s and then into the 80s, a lot of things changed. In terms of you getting to this point where Conscious Capitalism the book was written, Conscious Capitalism, the movement was created, do you think there are any parallels there? Do you think people were ready for this voice because of coming out of this obsession with shareholder value and shareholder supremacy? Do you see anything there?
Raj: Yeah, I think so. You know, so I came to this country in 1981 as an adult. I have been here as a child for a few years, but I came to the PhD program in New York at Columbia University in 1981. This was the beginning of the decade of greed as it came to be known later, right, the movie Wall Street, in that famous speech, greed is good. You know, greed is what makes the world go round. And it was also the beginning of the journey for Jack Welch, our CEO of General Electric. And he was kind of the poster child for the whole shareholder primacy mindset in business, which had been building in the 70s. You know you had Milton Friedman's essay in 1971. You had a bunch of academic work in 1976. The agency theory, and so forth, and some companies that were starting to be that way. But then, you know, Jack Welch essentially, you know, created the template completely focused around that and became enormously successful by his own measures. They wanted to create the world's most valuable company and by the end of his 20 years in 2001, when he retired, GE was the world's most valuable company. Now, how he did it and how sustainable it was is a different question. How much human suffering was involved? How many hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs? How many, you know, 1600 or so times that they were found guilty of a variety of different offenses by the US government? You know, from bribing Defense Department officials to dumping chemicals to price fixing, et cetera. I mean, they did all of that in a way as a cost of doing business, just to make more money. And ultimately, he created a house of cards. And there was a lot of so-called creative accounting in there as well. And massive amounts of share buybacks. Send in huge enrichment of the executives, all under this theory that our system works because everybody's out for themselves and greed is good. And the more, you know, if it's not working, then you just need to double down on the greed, you know? You just need to make it more about money, and, ultimately, we realized that that was pretty hollow, right? And at the same time you were starting to see, you know, the income inequality, the gap was starting to rise dramatically. You know, worker pay had essentially been flat since the 1970s, an executive payment of 1000%. So all of those were pressures that were building under the surface throughout the 80s into the 90s. Then of course 90s, we had the whole .com phenomena, which gave another spurt to the economy. But by the end of the 90s and you know, it came to 2000 and we had the .com bubble burst and Jack Welch's tenure ended, and I think we were reaching the limits and starting to see the downsides of that and people were starting to ask questions. Is that the right way? Is that the best way?
And I think what was also happening, you know, at the end of the 80s, so that you know, he started in ‘81. If you look at the end of the ‘80s, 1989 was beginning of the turn. It was a turning point, I believe, in Terms of Endearment, we actually refer to it as the beginning of the age of transcendence. That there was a fundamental shift in society, especially American society. But before that, we had been at this age of knowledge. You know, we had first, of course, the age, I'm trying to remember what we called it, when the US was first started, I think empowerment, knowledge, and now age of transcendence. So what happened in 1989? You had the Berlin Wall come down, right? So that was the end of the defining debate of the 20th century between these competing ways of organizing society, free markets and free people versus communism, dictatorships, socialism, et cetera. It was also the year that the World Wide Web was invented, the Internet. The Internet already existed, but the World Wide Web was invented in ‘89, which would fundamentally transform society and democratize access to information and communication. It was also the first year that women outnumbered men in college, as college graduates. Cumulatively, women were already more in the enrollments, but if you look at the number of overall graduates in society, there were more women than men starting in that year. And then that number has continued to skew in the favor of women over time, and so, you know, we started to see the seeds of bringing more feminine energy into the world, into the world of business and leadership. It was also the year of the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the awakening of environmental consciousness at a scale that we haven't been there before. And there were a number of other things as well. It was also the year that the median age in the United States of adults crossed the number 40. So we had more people, more adults over the age of 40 than below and 40 is midlife, right? So what happens when people reach that threshold? For many people, they start becoming hungry for meaning and purpose. The midlife crisis is a crisis of meaning and purpose, as it was for me, right? You start to ask is this all there is? I'm not satisfied anymore. I was satisfied a year ago. Now I'm not satisfied because I'm looking for something more, deeper out of life. And so, you had all of these factors that were coming together, you know, in this one extraordinary year.
And I believe that was the beginning of what we call the age of transcendence, which is going beyond just the material, selfish, narrow, the sort of, you know, homo economicus assumption about what we care about as human beings. It's just about how much what's in it for me. How can I maximize what's in it for me in material terms? People are starting to, you know, look for more out of life. And so I think we start a period starting then gradually, but over time where you started to see a lot of evolution happen in a very short amount of time. You started to see, for example, you know gay rights, You saw the end of apartheid. Couple of years after that, you saw the end of communism, right? Women's rights, et cetera. All of these things started to change rapidly in society. So I think we were in a period of escalating rising consciousness. That started to happen, as I said early in the ‘90s, but then even more so in the 2000s, et cetera, especially now that the World Wide Web became available and people could find each other and you know, small movements could coalesce into something more sizable because of the technology. So I think there were these mega shifts that were happening in society and that paradigm of money and shareholder value and profit being the only thing was starting to run into its limits. And people were looking for other ideas. That's when you started to see corporate social responsibility and took a bottom line and Conscious capitalism and many of these ideas were starting to, you know, come to the fore more so in that time period. So I think there was something that was happening and you know if you look back, there's a tremendous amount of progress over 30 years starting in 1989, right?
And now what? We're entering around 2020. After 30 years of progress, we started to see the backlash. You know, so what happens when the status quo is threatened? The existing order, the existing way of thinking about business, about life, about the power structure and all of that is threatened by some new ideas. Initially, those new ideas are dismissed as just fringe. But when they start to get some traction, next is, you know, multiple streams that start to come together into a kind of river. Then you start to see the established, the system, in a way, trying to reject that, right? I liken it to the Empire Strikes Back in Star Wars. And you have all this change that happens, the Force awakens, a new beginning, and now it's like slam. And this is this is how change happens in society, right? It doesn't happen in a linear upward projection. It goes like this and then it slides back, you know, and then starts another trajectory that's I think the longer term history of that. So I think we're going through a bit of that right now. You know, and it is true that some ideas can go too far, right? So any strength becomes a weakness if it's over, man. So some ideas around diversity and inclusion and ESG and it is possible to take anything too far, right? And make it unreasonable. And I think maybe there was some of that which is fueling the backlash. But I think the backlash is independent even of that because People want to protect the status quo, which has served them very well some people.
Brent: How do you feel private equity works into all that? Is that part of the backlash, or is that just a new way of reinventing the wheel from the ‘80s?
Raj: Yeah. Private equity is very much a creature of the Welchium mindset, right? Where companies are viewed as just commodities, interchangeable parts buy and sell them and fix them up, sell them again. It's all about money. I mean, it's purely about money. There's no purpose for most for the most part. Now, there's some private equity companies that are starting to bring in some elements of that, like KKR, you know, with employee ownership and Pete Stravros and some others, but for the most part, I think private equity has purely been about economic efficiency, as they see it, and getting outsized returns, you know, for the owners, by financial engineering, by cutting, chopping, selling, downsizing, whatever they need to do. But not seeing the company as an organism, as something that has a soul, you know, that has a purpose, that has life, but just seeing it as this, it's kind of a, you know, inorganic commodity, I feel. But again, there are ways to do it that are like, I think what Kyle has done and worked in a way, what you know what Forsyth Capital did, well that was different.
Brent: Well, that brings us to Barry-Wehmiller. And when you met Bob, Bob Chapman, and were asked to be the co-author of, Everybody Matters, that was a few years after Conscious Capitalism and a few years after the Conscious Capitalism organization had started, and I think you were a little skeptical at first when you were asked to be Bob's co-author, but that was the next step in your life, so let's talk about that for a second.
Raj: Yeah, so Conscious Capitalism, the book, had just come out in 2013. And I think Bob may have approached me a few months after that, you know, in July of that year. So I think it was not too far after that book had come out, and not knowing much about Barry-Wehmiller, I thought maybe this is a good example or another example of what we've already written about. And so, my initial, without knowing a lot, my initial response was, well, sounds like it's a wonderful company, but, you know, we can't devote a whole book to every wonderful company, right? I mean that, this is, we’ve already written about these ideas. Then Bob, of course, said, why don't you come and see? And so I went there, not expecting to see anything different than what I had already studied and already written about, but that first two-day trip really opened my eyes and gave me two ahas on purpose and on leadership.
Brent: Did you go to Phillips? Was that the first trip?
Raj: I think I was in two locations. I think Phillips and Green Bay or something. I visited two companies, two locations, and so it expanded the aperture on both of those. Then how do we think about leadership and how do we think about purpose? So first of all, on purpose, you know, we had thought about purpose mostly in advance of what you do for the customer. So you've got a purpose, you're trying to solve some problem in the world. Mostly that's a customer problem. But then you come to Barry-Wehmiller and they say our purpose is our people and we measure success by the way we touch the lives of people. And you know the the machines we build are, you know, that's almost, almost an afterthought that that's like the economic engine so that we can provide a better life for people. So that was a different take on purpose. And I started to think of it. Wow, this is a second engine. It's like an airplane with two engines, right? There's a people engine and a product engine. We are only focused on the product engine. Those companies, had they treated their employees like stakeholders, but there that wasn't their purpose. Their purpose was always external. And I recognize that it's possible to have a purpose that is also internal, right? And that if you had to pick between these two, then ultimately, the people should matter more, right? Because you can't have a company that has a global purpose out there in the world, but it's a miserable place to work. Whether that suffering inside the company while they're doing something great for customer. I mean, that's not OK. You have to, you know, charity begins at home when caring begins at home. And so the idea that purpose can and should be multifaceted and every company should have a people-centered purpose in addition to ideally also an external purpose.
And over time, I've come to realize that that external purpose can also be about supplier in some companies, right? If you're a company like, you know, some of these chocolate and coffee companies that are all about fair trade and they're all about making sure that the farmer in Ethiopia or Columbia has a decent life and is not exploited, so their purpose is very much rooted in the supply chain, not so much in customer, right? Or your purpose can be about the planet like Patagonia, and it's rooted very much in saving our own planet. Some purposes might be in the community, so the broadening the lens on purpose was one big thing and the other one was about leadership. That leadership I had thought about is primarily focused with what happens at work, right? You create conscious leaders so that people have a wonderful experience while they're at work. They're engaged and they are, you know, innovative and creative and passionate and all of that. But the idea at Barry-Wehmiller that the way we lead impacts the way people live and it impacts their families and their children. All of that. I had not thought about that. That wasn't part of our research up to that point. So yeah, you can have a purposeful workplace, but then people are getting burned out and they're spending all their time there and their children are suffering or, you know, there could be a variety of ways in which that can be disconnected. So the idea of leadership as a stewardship of the lives entrusted to us, that was a deeper concept and conceptualization around leadership. And then, of course, my experience being with the people and asking them a simple question like tell me how your life changed once this company was acquired by Barry-Wehmiller and just that question resulting in tears, several people in the room suddenly having tears in their eyes. And it was a shock because I said, wow, these are middle-aged blue-collar men for the most part, right? You don't expect them to be so, you know, vulnerable and suddenly being in tears. And I didn't ask what I thought was such a deep question, you know? But then they started talking about how their lives had changed dramatically, right? And they used to get laid off frequently, and they were treated without any respect. And so they, you know, they felt terrible. And then that the economic insecurity that they lived with and there was moving stories as you know. And so that was powerful to me as well. I said any company in which people feel, first of all, they are that moved by their experience. And secondly, they're willing to show that to each other or in front of each other. That's a rare culture, so they're doing something different here, so those were the factors that caused me then to get excited not only say yes, but actually get excited because for me, every book or every project I get involved in, there has to be some learning and growth, right? For me and for these ideas, it's not, just, here's another example, and I felt that was very much the case here.
Brent: It seems like The Healing Organization was really an outgrowth of Conscious Capitalism, Firms of Endearment, Conscious Capitalism and Everybody Matters by going one step further in what business could do.
Raj: Barry-Wehmiller was the first healing organization that I identified, right? That what Bob was doing, and especially when I talked to him at one point, after we had written the book and before I started working on The Healing Organization, and he told me he was heading off to Europe to look at some acquisitions and planned to acquire 10 to 12 companies that year. And my question to him was somewhat flippant. I said, Bob, why do you need all this? You know, you’ve got seven children and 26 grandchildren or whatever the number was at that time and you could be just enjoying your life. Everything that you have built here. And his answer was “Raj, I don't how much time I have left. And on my death that I will not be proud of the machines we built or the money we made. But I will be proud of the lives we touched. And before I go, I want to touch as many lives as I can” and I said, “Bob, you're not growing a business empire, you're spreading a healing ministry, right?” Because there are people who are waiting for Bob, for Barry-Wehmiller. Their lives are miserable and uncertain, and they don't have a future in those towns. And now they and their children have a future because you know Barry-Wehmiller found them. And so, yeah, The Healing Organization kind of took all of that and said business can not only be done in a way to create less harm, but to proactively do good. To proactively make life better, to actually seek out suffering, here are these people in Phillips. You know, 900 of them working for this company and the population of that town was, I don't know, 14-1600 or whatever it was, that this town would disappear. And the mayor of that town, I remember that one at one time, and he pointed to Bob. That man saved our town and this town would have been wiped off the map, you know? So it's like seeking out ways in which we can reduce suffering and bring joy into the world. That was very much the evolution of my thinking.
Brent: Yeah, you know you said something earlier that I thought was really profound and maybe I hadn't thought about it in these terms before, but you were talking about the backlash. Obviously, when there are new ideas, there's going to be a backlash to those ideas to preserve the status quo. And in 2019, we had the Business Roundtable redefine the purpose of the corporation to not just be shareholder supremacy, but also involve stakeholders, all stakeholders. And then we had a once in a lifetime global event in a pandemic, right after that. And then here we are today in 2025, five years later, and a lot of change has happened. Those new ideas that you documented throughout your career in Firms of Endearment to The Healing Organization, there seemed to be more hope in 2019 than in 2025 that those ideas were really taking root and becoming more the norm. How do you feel about that now? Is it just a backlash or is it a reversal or what’s your thinking about that?
Raj: Well, it's hard to separate what you want and what, you know, you see, right? I see this as a backlash. I see this as a temporary phenomenon because ultimately what we're talking about are things that in the long run will, I believe, be proven to be important and right, putting people's well-being at the center, putting the planet's long-term viability, the environment, society, all of these things are fundamental. How can you disregard them and just go back to that narrow lens of saying business is only about making money and everything else? Oh no, it doesn't matter. ESG doesn't matter. Nothing matters, right? I think that's a narrow and selfish way of looking at it, and it's going to we all are going to pay the price for that and I think you know everything goes in waves and there's a wave right now that is that you know capturing some of that mindset. And now it's come to power. And they're gonna try to do various things, but I don't think ultimately.
You know, I do believe in the Martin Luther King's expression of it, right? that the moral arc of the universe does bend towards not only justice, but also what's right. Ultimately, we we do what is right, but in the, you know, in the interim we end up doing a lot of horrible things. And I think this country has a history of that. We get very close to the edge, you know, and then we back off. You know, we almost didn't become a country in the first place: The Revolutionary War. Civil War could have gone the other way. The whole Nazi, the 1940s, that whole thing could have gone the other way. There was a big, sizable percentage of people here who didn't want the US to be involved in the way that it was involved. So there's a lot of things. I forget who said it, that America always does the right thing after it has tried everything else, you know? So I think right now we're flirting with some of these ideas that are I think they've shown their bankruptcy, you know moral bankruptcy and other ways as well, they're simply not viable in the long run. And so I believe it's, you know, it is what Thomas Kuhn wrote about the structure of scientific revolutions or something. He called it, right, the paradigm shift, when a new paradigm comes about initially it's ignored, then it is mocked. OK. And then there's a fierce attempt to kill it. But if that paradigm is sound, then it will survive, and it will come around ultimately. After that, the energy of that backlash is dissipated, ultimately, I think.
In this case, you know the consequences of not paying attention to all of these things, climate change, societal dysfunction, epidemic levels of burnout, epidemic levels of disengagement, all of that, all the stuff that we know about, right, those things, all better. And they're not going to be helped by this reversal. They're going to be made worse. And so I hope and I think that that will reverse itself in the world, but we all have to be shoulder to the wheel, right? We cannot be sitting back and watching it. We all have to do our part, you know? I say, the third episode is The Return of the Jedi. The Jedi have to keep training and keep fighting, you know.
Brent: Yeah. Well, and you know something that a phrase that you and I have bandied about lately, that is something that Bob has talked about, the human revolution. You know, maybe we thought that a few years ago. The human revolution was happening, but maybe it's not quite happened yet. Maybe it's getting ready to happen.
Raj: I think so, I think so. We were moving in that direction and I think now we've got, of course, the AI, on the other hand, and then we have this sort of reverting to the shareholder primacy model on the other side as the combination would be very dangerous. It just becomes about making money and then AI becomes used as a tool just for that. You know, that can really create negative consequences for society. It is more important than ever now that we approach this new revolution of AI with higher consciousness, with putting human and all life, really, you know? I even maybe go beyond the human that it's about people only. It has to be about all of life, you know? We have had profit in the center of our universe for a long time. We need a Copernican revolution that puts life at the center, you know? People, but not just people, but also the planet, and other species. Because there is no flourishing for people without the planet and without other species. We're all connected in a web of life, right? So I think we need to put light, the flourishing of life, at the center and everything, including AI and including profit, have to serve the flourishing of all life. I think that's the broader evolution there.