Podcast: Remembering Bob Chapman pt.1

A few years ago on this Truly Human Leadership podcast, Garrett Pototts, a professor at a University of Florida, asked Barry Wimler, chairman Bob Chapman this question. What does it look like for you to think about this exercise as you consider your own eulogy? How would you like to be remembered, if I may ask? — I think uh thank you for asking that, Garrett. I the way I would answer that is number one, I came to a vision for a company that I think reflects my life that I want to measure success by the way I touch the lives of people. Okay? And my family, the people I work with, people like you that I influence. So I want to look back on my life with people whose life I have touched that caused them to rise to a higher level of purpose in life and to that we create a movement of caring that will live well beyond our time. Okay. So that's my purpose to make sure that my I'm totally focused on in my calling today to make sure that this blessing we've been given of empathetic listening and caring becomes foundational to society because there is you know not one ounce of doubt in my mind that is the key to the society where we have civil discourse. We can live in harmony with the unique differences and beauties. But until we teach these skills that we were blessed with, we will not live that society. We'll continue to blame others, blame government, you know, it's everybody's fault but ours. But it's, you know, ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. Until we individualize caring, until we institutionalize the skills, we have learned that you can teach people. You can't ask people to care. You have to teach them how. You can't ask people to live as God intended to. We have to teach them how to do that. Okay. — This episode of the Truly Human Leadership Podcast is a very special one. Uh we pay tribute to Bob Chapman, CEO of Barry Way Miller for 50 years, chairman of the board, the inspiration for what is now called Truly Human Leadership, and co-author of the book Everybody Matters with his friend Raj Codia. I'm Brent Stewart, your host. Thanks for listening. Let me read a little bit from an email that Kyle Chapman, Barry Weim Miller's president and CEO and Bob Chapman's son sent to Barry Wayiller team members. Kyle said, "It is with a heavy heart that I share the news that my father, best friend, mentor, and our beloved Barry Way Miller chairman, Bob Chapman, passed away on Thursday, March 19th, 2026, surrounded by his loving family. For the past 16 months, he's battled leukemia with the same optimism, humor, and resilience that defined his leadership. He was fortunate to receive extraordinary care, which gave him time to continue pursuing his passion, redefining what success looks like in business. And he continued to lead, listen, and care for the team members he held dear while reminding the world that what caring leadership looks like. Even as his body grew tired, his commitment to people never wavered. My dad was an eternal optimist. His ability to see what's possible was rooted in a deep belief in others. He often said that he was not most proud of the equipment we built or services we provided at Barry Waymiller, but instead the people who built and provided them. He measured success by the lives he touched. That belief shaped this company. It shaped all of us. His passing is an immeasurable loss. And yet what he created does not leave with him. It was never meant to. It gave us all a greater purpose, a clear enduring belief that business can be the most powerful force for good. That was his life's work. And now it becomes ours to steward, to strengthen, and to bring to life in ways that reach far beyond where we are today. That was Kyle's note to team members, which applies not only to us and Barry Waymiller, but to all of you in this audience who also work toward building the better world that Bob dreamed of. Those of you who felt a kinship with Bob and who his words resonated with because you also knew that there was a better way to do business. There's no way that we can encapsulate the whole of Bob and what he's meant to so many on this episode, but we want to try to pay tribute to Bob through clips from a number of interviews we've

featured with Bob over the duration of the podcast. Clips that we selected that not only pay tribute to his ideas and insight, but hopefully showcase the person he was. I want to start off with Bob talking about what heaven would look like for him in an answer to a question I asked about his dad, William Chapman, whose untimely death in 1975 led to Bob becoming the leader of Barry Way Miller. You know, you came in to the business uh your dad somebody who he could trust in the business and then you were kind of thrust into the uh leadership role when your dad passed. What do you think that he'd think of the company now and all the different parts of the company, the leadership message, the way uh our people feel and the way people feel about our company? — Well, um the way I'd like to answer that question is uh five or six years ago, I was at dinner and some lady uh very nice lady sat next to me and we had I always say I'm too old for trivial conversations. So I was challenging her about what she was going to do with her life and she looked at me and threw an equally good challenge and she said, "What do you think heaven looks like? " I've never had anybody ask me that. So I hadn't really thought about it and so I thought a minute and I said, "You know, to answer your question, I think heaven would look like sitting down with my dad and explained to him what happened to this company that he tried for 23 years to give a future to but struggled to keep it alive when he joined the company. " And um and when I was thinking about that, people will say to me, well, I'm sure he knows, you know, with, you know, people with faith would say, well, he knows. I said, yeah, but I want to see his face, you know. him say, you got to be kidding me. because, you know, I mean, A, I was not a kid that he thought had turned out too well, which he was probably more right than wrong given my high school and early college experience, and B, that he'd spent 23 years trying to keep this company alive and give it a future and just couldn't break it out of the kind of the historic rut it was in. And for and so I use the analogy it'd be like us sitting here and seeing the moon and saying wouldn't it be amazing to be like the original astronauts to land on the moon. I mean just can you imagine even landing on the moon sitting on the moon when you sit up there and then the next evening we're sitting around having a beer together and we look around why is it so dusty here and we look and I said wait a second we're on the moon. How in the hell do we get on the moon? And that's the way that's honestly the way I feel when you understand kind of we talked about in the brokenness of the 80s where we couldn't pay a bill that we're in an old industry with old technology and we sit here today with uh people uh putting their faith in us and believing in us and the stories being written about us amazing opportunity to share it through the book through the TEDex talk through the speeches we get to give today. It is a joy beyond words. Uh, but clearly I would love to see my dad's face because he there's no way he it if he since he's already dead I can't kill him twice but they would kill I mean he would die thinking he'd say oh my god I mean he wouldn't even imagine because he spent 23 years trying to get it out of this rut. He kept it alive. Uh but he couldn't break the better to think of it's a $3 billion company today with the caliber of investors we have today and the faith people put in us and the talks and the way it's helped his family and other people. Um it would it'd be like landing on the moon to him beyond your imagination. This is beyond my wild. You know, we had a goal of getting to 100 million in 1988 to get to 100 million. And that plan that we had to get 100 million got us to this year will be about three billion. — So, and then if he looked at you and said, "Okay, how'd you do it? How'd you do it? " And you had give us your elevator pitch on how'd you make that happen. — Oh, I asked my mom. I used to ask my mom when before she had Alzheimer, I said, "Mom, what do you think you did with me? " And she said, "I have no idea. " She did. She was because she just liked me as a kid, but she had no feeling I had any potential. Uh, and the simple answer is that I would say to you um to my dad that somehow I was blessed with the ability. I'm inc I'm an eternal optimist. Um in the worst of times I never gave up. I could always see tomorrow I and I come in every day enthusiastic go to the next day and I was able to see value where other people were not because there was no elements of traditional value left to see. So if I didn't find some nuances of value that nobody else had seen. So I would say to you

that is what has driven our company to today. I'd say, dad, that I was given not intellectual intelligence, but common sense int. I just have the ability to see things other people can't see and come up with creative solutions. And I think I don't I personally don't think you can be a great leader without being an optimist. I think a great leader gives the people in their care a grounded sense of hope, hope for a better future. That is our responsibility. Uh and I don't think people understand that. We don't teach that, but that's our responsibility is to give the people in our care a grounded sense of hope for a better future and be able to articulate it and because people put their faith in us. Do they do they decide to have a child? Can they do they have enough job stability financially? They can afford a child. Can they buy a home? car? you know, when you hear the stories in our book where somebody, you know, lost their job, couldn't afford their child, was collecting, you know, Ken Coppins, um, it really takes seriously when every time you hire somebody that they're putting their faith in you. Bob was an unshakable optimist and he brought an overwhelming enthusiasm to everything he did every day. In this clip, we were talking about holidays, and it kind of gives you a little glimpse into how Bob approached every single day with purpose and meaning. I for most of my life have never been much of a holiday person because I don't want to wait until holiday to enjoy my family or my life. So I I've been blessed with this attitude that I want every day to be special, you know. So because you can never go back and say, "Let's go back tomorrow and really enjoy it tomorrow or yesterday. " So I would say to you is I don't really reflect on the holiday season any differently than others, you know. Um I just feel every day is an opportunity to live life fully and enjoy it and contribute to it and hopefully live leave lives better than uh you found them. So, um, I think it's nice to be with family, but I don't wait for holidays to be with my family. I work, you know, quality time all year long, every day. — So, you would say the season of giving or season of caring should be all year long, not just one time a year. — Yeah. I mean, it's I you just massively understated what I think. I mean, I think, you know, that's the world. We we wait for holidays to have gatherings. And I don't I don't think any of us know our time, okay? And I think we need to capture every opportunity of every day. That's why I like to get up early in the morning. I just can't imagine missing the opportunity to enjoy every day fully. So holidays, birthdays are just not meaningful to me. What's meaningful is quality time with good people. And I think that's what I treasure. One of the things that made Bob so relatable were the stories that he told. Bob would be the first to tell you he wasn't perfect. And his transformation from traditional manager to leader is the core of his story, book, Everybody Matters. And here, Bob tells a story about an interaction with his beloved wife, Cynthia, and what it taught him about listening, a skill he's often said was the foundation of truly human leadership. You know, it makes me want to tell a personal story because it's where I first saw um in hindsight, it was a revealing moment in terms of communication because I came home when our youngest son was just about to move into his own bedroom. I walked in the house and my and Cynthia said to me, Bob, I went out and bought a wallpap I brought a sample home of a wallpaper I'd like to put up in Kyle's bedroom. I said, fine. She said, I'd like to know what you think about it. I thought, well, fine. So we walked upstairs to the bedroom and she held it up on the wall and she said, "What do you think of it? " And I thought, what she asked me is what I thought of it. And being a loving, caring husband is the best of my ability at the time. I saw something I didn't like at all. And so I tried to find a caring way to say that. And so I said to Cynthia, "You know, Cynthia, it's a nice wallpaper, but don't you think it would look better in the family room? " to which her reaction was to throw the wallpaper at me and say, "If you're so smart, you pick out the wallpaper. " And we had a couple's class at our church about a month later. Because I was bewildered as what should I have said, you know, I tried to, you know, she asked me what I thought. I tried to find a diplomatic way to respond. I thought that was I thought Cynthia was asking me what I thought of the wallpaper because she held it up and she showed it to me. So, but in a couple's class, the director of our church said, because I revealed this uh issue with a whole group of couples and the director of our church, and he said to me, "Bob, what did Cynthia ask you? " And I mean, the whole room erupted, "How do you like the

wallpaper? How do you misinterpret that statement? " And Ed said, Bob group, what Cynthia was asking Bob is, as your wife, as the provider of the home, am I competent to pick out a wallpaper for our son? And what did I tell her? No. Okay. So that day I learned that quite often what people say, they don't even know what they mean. Okay? Much less me as a listener. And obviously in hindsight the the loving answer, the caring answer would have been, you know, Cynthia, you've done a wonderful job with our home and I, you know, I think this is I think uh if this is you've looked around and you found this, I think it's great. Thank you for doing that. And I wouldn't have had the bruise on my forehead from the wallpaper hit me. There are a lot of terms to describe what we call truly human leadership. People say a lot of different things and call it people centric leadership or servant leadership. Conscious capitalism is also sort of another term. But the term Bob most often used when talking about leadership was talking about leadership as care. And in this clip, Bob describes why in an answer to a question about how he defined professionalism, why he used the word care. I think the word professional is misused. Okay. And I don't it has no place in my language. Okay. Caring. You know, some people talk about love. servant leadership. All great feelings, but I just I've settled in on a word that I believe invites everybody into the tent. There's no barriers to get into the tent when you were use the word care. And I've learned that when you look at people as somebody's precious child, that is the most impactful thing our message shares. You know, when again just last night at dinner, I asked people, these people from Europe, what did they experience about Bon who said the biggest thing I've taken away is when you look at people who you have the that work for me, that's the way the words they use as somebody's precious child, not a you know, not a salesperson, not an accountant. That was the biggest thing they were going to take away because it all depends. Life depends on the lens through which you see it. And our lens has been refocused on our responsibility as leaders to the people who we are entrusted with. And through our communication skills, we realize we can't treat all people the same because we are uniquely different, born with different personality profiles. And so we need to treat people as they need to be treated given their personality type and our own personality type. And so it's just been a huge explosion of learning for us. Uh when you put all these pieces together and you look at the issues we face in the world, there is no question the sum total of our learnings. If embraced through our education system and we started creating leaders who have the skill and the courage to care and organizations who want those kind of leaders, we could profoundly change the world as we know it. Over the last year and a half of his life, one of Bob's most treasured projects was working on the 10-year anniversary revised and expanded edition of Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family, the book Bob had written with Raj Codia. And this version Bob felt told a more complete story than the original book. And here's Bob talking about why he felt that way. Let me begin by kind of going back a notch. The purpose of the book. Clearly, we feel that we had been blessed with a vision of what leadership could be in this country that would address a lot of the issues we face in this country and we felt compelled to share it. our journey and the idea the original idea of the book working with Raj was first of all to articulate my journey from kind of traditional management thinking to truly human leadership. So that's about the first third of the book which to kind of capture the journey and then for the book to become howto. So the second twothirds in theory were how do you do how do you go from management to leadership a how-to book and um so I think that was the idea of the original book and then we've had 10 years of tremendous exposure to the world to all parts of our society and the impact this message had and we felt a need to capture that in this new edition. the tremendous learnings we've had from the

reaction to the book and the ability to talk about this book in the world. So I think our goal of the next edition is to capture the power the healing power of this message on really all aspects of the world where people learn to care for each other uh as opposed to use each other to achieve goals. So I think that's I think the intent of the new edition was to capture the power of this message to heal a lot of the issues we face in the world. Again, if you think of the kind of the evolution of this transformation from these revelations I had that just kind of naturally flowed through our leadership of Barry Wimler, we didn't really know what we had. We were touched by what we had but we didn't really know the power of what we had outside our company. It was people like Simon Senic and Raj who've noted authors thinkers in the world who've helped us understand we were blessed with something very special and I think it was Ralph who said to me Bob you have to share this with the world you have got and then Raj with his incredible experience in writing uh forms of endearment conscious capitalism raj his experience and said this is a message that has to be written and I'm going to write it and so I think and when you see the reaction in every part of our society the world you know just to think that we sold you know I was told by our publisher that five to 15,000 copies was a typical business book the fact that this message has been validated by the sale of over 110,000 copies in seven languages around the world is a statement that of genuine interest in this message as we search for kind of a north star something to guide us as we live in life where we learn to care for each other. Okay. My hope is for this next edition is this becomes virtually the textbook used to teach leadership in every part of our society in every country in the world where we learn the profound responsibility of leadership on the lives that you have the privilege to lead. You know, so I think the exposure of the book gave us the global exposure it gave us simply amplified what Raj said when he first saw it when Simon said that we have something here that virtually people have never seen before. Okay? Where people feel valued. Okay? uh not to improve productivity, not to improve engagement because that is the responsibility of leaders to send people home each night knowing that who they are and what they do matters and when we do that we profoundly impact their relationship with their spouse, their kids, their health. So again, I think the amazing theme that we have for this next edition is the way we lead impacts the way people live. That is a profound statement. true of every part of our society from medical to military to government to nonprofit to business. The way we lead impacts the way people live. — We're going to close everything out today with a uh speech that Bob gave in 2019 at Washington University in St. Louis. It was to a conference called the Higher Purpose Conference. Um there are a lot of other business people speaking about their experiences in business, their experiences with the value of having a higher purpose in business. And I picked this one because it's not one that we've shared very often. And I felt like Bob in this speech um was really talking to the times we're in right now. And I think it really does a good job of encapsulating Bob's vision and the mission that we have to carry on. So this is what we're going to end the podcast with to with today. And um here's Bob Chapman. Some years ago, um, one of our directors, Dick Ford, sent out a couple of organizational development professors from West University to interview me early in our journey. And after about an hour and a half interview, uh, they said to me, "You're the first CEO I've ever talked to that never talked about his product. " And I said, "Uh, we've been talking about our product for the last hour and a half. It's our people. We build capital equipment uh around the world. But I won't go to my grave proud of the machines I built. I will people who built those machines who

the people who built those machines who had lives of meaning and purpose. So I would say to you in terms of igniting a human revolution, one of the things that I've observed and I have the privilege of speaking all over the country now in every part of our society and I feel the pain that we're talking about here today, the lack of purpose, the lack of meaning. Uh and I would say to you that uh what we need to do is we need to create a human revolution. We had an industrial revolution. which was about economic value creation. But what we didn't do is we didn't marry that with human dignity. We took people off of farms. We put them in factories. They made more money consistently. They could afford a home and to provide. But it was not for the dignity of that person. It was we needed people to create economic value. And so I would as I go back and I look at kind of my career the journey I've seen through business what we really need is we need and I hope the higher purpose is a human revolution in harmony with an industrial revolution where human value is created in harmony with economic value. So that's my message I want you to leave. We need a human revolution. I believe higher purpose can create that for us. So what I believe we need to move from is from management to leadership. I have come to define the word management in my journey. It means the manipulation of others for your success. What does leadership mean? The stewardship of the people you have the privilege of leading. And that means is our society. We need to move from a me centric society to a we centric society where we genuinely care about others because we become in economic terms very focused on me. We define success as money, power and position. So we define it as people, purpose and performance and the it's intentionally in that purpose. It's around the people we have the privilege of leading around a purpose that inspires them to share their gifts fully. And then we have to create value. We cannot be good to our people. You your family if you don't produce a reasonable income. You cannot be good to the people in your company if you're not creating value. And I believe people say to me all the time, how do you justify doing this? What kind of return on investment are you getting? And I said,"I can't even believe you asked me that question. " I was teaching Air University recently and a gentleman in the back said to me, "Mr. Chapman, I work for a public company. We've got to justify things like this. How do you justify the return on doing this? " And I said, "Did you just say you work for a company that we have to justify caring for people? I doubt anybody in this room is going to apply to your company when they graduate from Morris University. And I said that's pitiful. I think you have to justify not caring for the people you have the privilege of leading. So I believe you can create and that's our message. You can create human value and economic value. They are not in disharmony. You don't have to give up economic value to care for people. In fact, they're actually in harmony. Nobody debates the numbers I'm just going to give you. Three out of four people in this country are disengaged in what they are doing according to G. And this is not just in business. 71% of teachers are disengaged in what they are doing. CEOs complain to me about the cost of health care. I said you are the problem. 74% of all illnesses are chronic. The biggest cause of chronic illness is stress. And stress is work. There is a 20% increase in heart attacks on Monday mornings when people have to go back to work. We live in a society today where we have TGIF. Thank goodness it's Friday. Get the hell out of this place and go drown my pain in a beer. I imagine a world where we have TGIM. Thank goodness it's money. get away from the kids, their spouse, and actually be to a place where I feel cared for. 88% of people in this country feel they work for an organization that does not care about them. And again, I speak in the military, government, I speak in healthcare. It is prevalent in all part of our society. We have never learn to care for people. The Mayo Clinic told us recently that the person you report to at work is more important to your health than your family doctor, which goes back to the stress issue.

We recently learned that over 50% of people would trust a stranger before they would trust their boss. And not surprising from what I've just told you, 65% of all people would give up a salary increase if they could just fire their boss. Jeffrey Feifer, a legendary Stanford professor, uh, just wrote a book called Dying for a Paycheck. And he doesn't mean anxious to get it. He estimates we're killing from workrelated stress over 120,000 people a year. What we are suffering from is leadership malpractice. Okay. It's also described as an epidemic of anguish. I was uh speaking to university presidents at Brown University last spring and I went up to Harvard ahead of time and I said, 'You know what's on the minds of our university presidents and they said the articles are being written described as an epidemic language that the amount of anxiety and depression young students are entering colleges today is at an epidemic level and they don't feel they can handle it. Okay, I spoke at Charleston Air Force Base, spoke to 1700 airmen a few weeks ago, and the Air Force shut down the base for a day of suicide prevention. Today, more airmen are dying of suicide in the Air Force than in combat. I then spoke in Charlotte at a uh medical gathering on this issue of physician burnout and we have a epid sponsored by AMA Stanford and Mayo Clinic and we have a record level of burnout and suicide in the medical profession in every part of our society despite record unemployment because I thought our government's purpose was to provide envir environment for economic prosperity and safety. We have the lowest unemployment in 50 years. We are at peace in the world and we have one of the highest levels of anxiety. Why? Because we don't know how to care for each other that me society. So I would say to you while we do good in the world, could we do less harm? And I'll tell you a really brief story. a a private equity investor um heard me speak one time and he flew out to Aspen to have dinner with me. I sat down with him. I said, "Jay, what do you really feel good about in your life? " He said, "Well, every I'm known for my $140 million gift to Notre Dame, but what I feel good about is the five or six minority athletic students we could help every year with scholarships. " I said, "That's wonderful, Jay. How many people work for your companies in the world? " He said, ' 100,000. I said, ' So, you're telling me you're really proud of five or six students you can help and you don't give a about the 100,000 people that made it possible for you? And this really fine gentleman who's just playing the game of the ways to find said, "I never thought about that. " So I would say to you while we do good in the we have a society where we celebrate people that write checks to uh charities wonderful family they just gave to the cancer society the United Way and a gentleman came out to the Aspen Institute a few years ago New York Times reporter and said while we do good in the world could we do less harm and they said, "What do you mean? " He said, "Thank you for writing the check. It's very generous of you, but how did you get your money? " And they booed him out of the room because it doesn't matter how you get as long as you write a check, you're going to go to heaven. Okay? It doesn't matter how you got that wealth. And so his statement was while we do good in the world, could we do less harm? Which is what I had talked uh to you about. So what we've learned is the way we lead impacts the way people live. And I'm going to add to the dimension of health because I doubt any one of you in promoting somebody to a position of leadership said you're now going to run the accounting department. The way you lead that department is going to determine the health of the people in your department and how they go home and treat their spouse and their children. When we began our university to create to convert managers into leaders internally, 95% of the feedback we got when we started teaching people how to care for the people they had the privilege of leading was how it affected their marriage and their relationship with their kids. They didn't say, "I came in and ran a better production department

accounting department, sales department. " They came in and said, "My marriage is improved and my teenage daughters are talking to me. " Because our leadership model came from Cynthia and my raising of six kids. Okay. What is what is parenting? The stewardship of these precious lives that come into our families through birth, adoption or second marriage that you all take very seriously. What is leadership? The stewardship of those precious lives of people who walk in your building everywhere in the world and simply want to know that who they are and what they do matters. So we can make a difference. we don't need to pass any laws or raise taxes. So, I look back on my education in Indiana and Michigan and my experience in Price Waterhouse shortly. I was I took management classes, got a management degree and got a job in management. So, what did I try and do? I tried to manage people. Name anybody in your life you can manage. Why do we use these words in business? Management, bosses, supervisors. Name anyone you want to have that you wouldn't rather fire. Okay. I was never taught leadership. I was it was implied I saw people as objects for my success. Okay. I needed an engineer. I needed an accounting department for my success. And we define success in my perception as money, power, and position. Get those. You're going to be just fine. I was never taught to inspire the people I'd have the privilege to lead and I was never taught to care for the people I would have the privilege of leading. So that's that is what I call traditional management. So again just real briefly um Barry Wimler was about 120 year old company 125 year old company uh that I stepped into in n in 1969 from Price Waterhouse and uh today it was a broken $18 million old company with old technology. Today it's a global company with three billion in sales, 12,000 people. Uh our share price has gone up about 14% a year for 25 years in a row. So we are not a nonprofit organization, okay? We're a combination of 110 acquisitions around the world. So what I'm talking to you about today, these points I'm making are not an American issue. They are a global issue. In every country we operate, the issues are identical. Absolutely identical. People simply want to know they matter. And you have the power and the opportunity to show that to them. And I, you know, I think the most significant story I tell that converted me from traditional management to what I call truly human leadership. And uh I was at a wedding uh in Aspen, a friend of ours from St. Louis, daughter was getting married to another friend of ours, daughter son. And uh with traditional ceremony, all of you been there. And as my friend was walking uh his daughter down the aisle, everybody ooed and how special she looked, how proud he was. And when he got to the altar, he took the hand of his daughter and gave it to this young man. Said, "Her mother and I give our daughter to be wed to this young man. " And he sat down next to his wife. And they started hugging him. Having walked two of my precious daughters down the aisle, I knew that's what he was told to say at the rehearsal dinner. But that's not what he wanted to say at the rehearsal dinner at the wedding. What he wanted to say is, "Look at young man. Her mother and I brought this precious young lady in this world. We've given her all the love and care we can possibly give her. And we expect you, young man, through this marriage for you to allow her to continue to be who she's intended to be as she will with you. Do you understand that, young man? That is what every father wants to say as we give our precious daughter away to a young man. And my mind went to immediately from that thought to all 12,000 people that work for us are somebody's precious child. They're not accountants, engineers, receptionists, production workers, headcount, uh, direct reports. They are somebody's precious child put in our care and we will have a profound impact on their life. Our journey from management to leadership has been an unbelievable transformation for me and I can't believe that the that I've been that we believe as a company we've been chosen to show the world the way we were intended to live and work together where people are cared for. Okay. And when we look at kids today with anxiety and depression where are they coming from? homes where parents feel un not valued, appreciated, inundated with the brokenness of the world. The way we lead impacts the way people live. Not only their health, but the way they treat. And that aligns to the other statement I made because when we teach people to be leaders, they don't tell us how they ran a better department. They tell us how it

affects their marriage and their relationship with their kids. Leadership means the stewardship of the lives entrusted to you. Everybody that works for you simply wants to know that who they are and what they do matters. And you have the power and the gift through recognition and celebration to do that. The first thing we teach people who are going to become leaders is how to listen with empathy. I thought when you cared for somebody, you went over and talk to them. It turns out when you care for somebody, you go over and listen with empathy. Barry Way Miller developed about the time of the Enron scandal and the uh Clinton Donald Golinsky scandal. We were trying to define our purpose, our higher purpose. We didn't call it that then. We just it simply came to us and we came up with an expression stimulated by the lack of respect for leadership in this country politically, business-wise. We are going to measure success by the way we touch the lives of people. What did the CEO roundt statement make? We need to think of something other than shareholder value, stakeholder value. This is just the way we say it. We measure success by the way we touch the lives of people. We're at a time when we need a deeper connection with our human spirit to make a link between our search for meaning and the organization's purpose, which is the higher purpose. We know what it is, which is to create value for people.