A few months ago, we were honored that Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, named the week of October 13, 2025 "Chapman Leadership Week." That week, their School of Business Administration hosted the inaugural Chapman Lecture on Truly Human Leadership, named in honor of Barry-Wehmiller Chairman Bob Chapman.
It was the culmination of a partnership our outreach team has had with the university to bring the principles of Truly Human Leadership to their classrooms, as well as their training of educators and staff.
The speaker at this inaugural Chapman Lecture was, fittingly, Kyle Chapman, Barry-Wehmiller President and CEO and Bob’s son.
Kyle used this opportunity to talk about how Barry-Wehmiller is changing the game of business by showing that economic and human vibrancy can exist in harmony. And he issued a challenge to these future leaders at Gonzaga to demand more from their future workplaces and join us in our goal of building a better world through business.
So on this podcast, we want you to hear Kyle’s challenge at Gonzaga and give you the opportunity to join us as well. You can listen through your favorite podcast provider or through the player above.
In addition to this podcast, you can watch a video summary of Chapman Leadership Week through the link below:
Transcript
Kyle Chapman: Thank you all very much for being here. I see what free credits and free food can fill the room, so I love this. This is a room filled with future leaders, and so our message is really important tonight.
We are so honored that you all named something after my dad called the Chapman Lecture. So grateful that I get to give the first Chapman Lecture, which I did not vote myself in, I was asked to do it. I hope that the message that we bring to you all today resonates and starts showing you that you can own this future of building business as the most powerful source for good in the world.
Unfortunately, right now business is not in great shape. It's viewed negatively and it's actually doing things that harm our world.
But what if we could come together and prove that human and economic vibrancy can actually exist in the same place?
And so my invitation to you all, future business leaders, existing business leaders, is to join us on this journey. And let's prove out together that business can be the most powerful source for good. If we can redefine what success is, we will contribute more to human vibrancy.
I'm going to give you some reasons why and some proof points, why you should believe in this and why you should join us on this journey. Business shapes our world. I want you to think about parents, friends, et cetera, they spent their careers working.
Right? The average worker in their adult life works 90 to 100,000 hours. That's 45 years of tenure on average.
It's 33 percent of their waking hours spent at work. It should be a meaningful experiment.
It should be something that drives value and happiness in what they do on a daily basis.
In fact, you will spend more time working than you will with family, getting an education, your religion, community work, sports. Business will consume most of your life, and it does impact human vibrancy. But unfortunately, the way it's currently set up is that it is destroying human vibrancy.
Harvard just came out with a study that says employee engagement is the lowest level in a decade. Only 39% of people believe their company cares for them. 30% feel invisible.
27% feel ignored. If you feel invisible, ignored, do you think you'll be engaged at work? No.
Also, when you feel invisible and ignored, guess what? It's stressful. You don't feel like anybody's listening to you or helping you out or supporting you.
When work equals stress, what is the leading cause of chronic conditions in health? Stress.
Work causes stress, stress causes illness.
You could argue business is contributing to hurting people in the world. In fact, your supervisor has more control over your health than your primary care physician. The sad part is over 60% of the people in the workforce today would fire their boss in lieu of a raise.
That's a sad state of where we are, but there are opportunities. When you think about driving, Harvard also did another study on what drives high-performing cultures, and you have to have a high level of courage and a high level of connection. Right, and so that means with courage, you can take smart risks, you can go do things and have accountability and ownership of things.
High connection is you feel cared for and trusted and powered, right? That sounds great. I want to be up in the high care and high connection.
Unfortunately, in today's business world, you have short-termism with public companies and private equity owned businesses. You have people prioritizing dollars over their team members and their employees.
Shareholders are the only thing that matters, right?
Not your communities that you serve or your team members or your customers or suppliers, but shareholders. And layoffs, when often announced, result in a stock price increase. So, we are rewarding companies for bad behavior.
But we fundamentally believe there is a better way. If you operate with people and performance in harmony, not one and sacrifice the other, you can operate in a high-performing culture, that upper right-hand corner, which is where Barry-Wehmiller hopes to be. I would not say we are there every day, but we hope to get there as much as we can.
So, we are trying to be a proof point. My dad wrote a book that outlined how do you listen to folks, how do you care for your team members like family. So, we put it out there.
So now people can hold us to it, right? It's out there. They can cite us chapter and verse as you are not doing this.
The other thing that we did is that got more and more momentum, is that we decided okay, we have to understand, we talk about culture a lot, are our teams feeling it? And I just presented a statistic that only 39% of people feel cared for by their direct leader in their business. Fortunately, the ground is fertile, Barry-Wehmiller.
82% or almost more than two times feel cared for by their direct leader. So, we are trying to show the world that you can perform with excellence and care for others and do well the whole time. And so, you all as future, you know, current students and future business leaders have got to demand that this is the environment you go into and not be subject to the bad environment that I've been talking about.
So, before I go further on, I just want to give you some background on myself. I am the youngest of six kids, three older brothers, two older sisters, and I'm the only family member in the business. There was never an option to work in Barry-Wehmiller.
I'll come back to that in a second. I grew up loving sports. I loved playing sports, basketball, football, baseball, enjoyed it thoroughly.
I went to University of Virginia, studied finance, and then got directly into private equity. I am a father of four kids. I've got three boys and a girl. Two of them are also attending University of Virginia.
When I graduated the university, I went right into private equity, the bad side of business. I was focused only on buying companies and making financial returns.
Over time, spending time behind Excel spreadsheets, I decided I didn't know if I could execute any of these strategies I was talking about. I didn't know how to make humans do the things that Excel said they should be able to do. So, I decided to get out of private equity and go into a private equity owned business.
And I realized the human element of business is a lot harder to do when you're not just sitting behind a desk and when you can't just think up a thing. So, I went into a business that helped execute strategy called Swett & Crawford and helped them grow. What I didn't know is that my path would eventually collide with Barry-Wehmiller.
Again, no family worked in the business. We, my dad's business grew by buying companies from other families, because their sons ran their dad's companies into the ground. So that didn't seem like a good successful solution for us.
And so, I came back to start something different. Having been in private equity and had run a private, or been a part of the leadership team of a private equity owned business, I knew that there was a different way. My dad, who hated my career, but said, you know what, I think you can come back and help us do some things.
So, I came back to prove there was a different way, a humanistic way to approach building, buying and building businesses, where you combine some of the good things of private equity and some of the good things of being a big strategic acquire and put them together. The one thing that we did, no one else did, was we focused on culture as much as we did acquisitions, financial discipline, strategy, etc.
Culture is what no one else did.
The other thing that we did is we did long-termism. We don't buy things and build them to sell them. We buy them to build great businesses that endure time, endure economic crises and create value for all stakeholders.
So that is what I came back to do to start Forsyth Partners. Fortunately, that did really well. It resonated with the market.
And so, from 2009 to 2020, I did that. Then I was asked to come over and be interim CFO in January 2020. That turned out to be a really interesting period of time.
Anybody know what happened in March of 2020? So, I was a COVID CFO, where I had to control cash, metrics, calls, calls with our debt providers, our shareholders, team members.
Being in front of the camera, it thrust me into a field of leadership that I was not looking for, but all of a sudden was in front of the organization.
Fortunately, based on our business model, we did quite well and we moved. Then I found a new CFO and was asked to be president. So, the board invited me over and I've been doing that for five years.
Recently, I became a third-generation CEO of Barry-Wehmiller. Does anybody know the statistics on how well a third-generation CEO does? It's 12 percent, 12 percent likelihood to succeed.
So, I'm going to need your all's help to make sure we do this a bit better. All right. So, I want to give you an example, a little history on how we got here and some of our beliefs were shaped.
Okay. So, I'll try to be quick through this. So, the other reason why it started in 1986, Barry-Wehmiller was founded in 1885.
It's a 140-year-old business. The Chapman family came into it in the mid-50s. My grandfather started running in the 60s.
My dad ran it in the 70s. There's a whole period of time before 1986 and there's case studies on it, etc. Barry-Wehmiller was reborn in 1987 as a $20 million business.
And we went out and started buying businesses that were broken. We deployed an operating playbook around aftermarket, cultural initiatives, financial disciplines and we bought anything that nobody else wanted.
We called it seeing value where others don't.
And so, we built the foundation of this business. Now I'm gonna get a little self-serving here. Given that I'm so concerned about being a third generation CEO, the fact that I'm claiming Barry-Wehmiller was reborn in 1987, really means that it's a second generation.
So, I've improved my odds by like three times of being successful. So again, very self-serving. That business model, buying distressed businesses, growing them, breathing life back into them, took us into the mid-90s.
Prior to the mid-90s, we were not necessarily a human-centered business. But we started having a series of epiphanies about there's a bigger calling to leadership. It's not just about financials and means to an end.
It's about caring for those whose lives are entrusted to you. If you read my dad's book, Everybody Matters, you'll read about the wedding story, which changes people from being headcount to somebody's precious child that works for you. And how do you want to make sure you take care of that precious child that have come to you and entered in your organization, just like they would have been walked down the aisle?
He also had an epiphany about why can't business be fun? Right? It was during March Madness that he realized the customer service reps were there, as it got closer to 8 o’clock, their interest in work was going like this.
So, he put games and scoreboards together and gamified work. So, we had these series of epiphanies which said there was a higher calling. We also got into new markets.
We diversified our business which proved out that our business model and our strategies would work. So, we went from packaging equipment into corrugating equipment. We make equipment that makes corrugated boxes.
I'll talk about that in a second. And we were building a business model that could survive any crisis. At least that's what we thought.
We were building it based on balance, balance of products, balance of markets, balance of technologies. And that balance got tested in the 2008-2009 crisis. Not many of you had to live through that, but our orders fell 40% overnight.
How do you manage a business when your orders fall 40% overnight? How can you be good to your people in that scenario as well?
And what was going on during the time is every public company, every competitor that we had was firing people, laying folks off to try to avoid going bankrupt.
We managed to fire no one. We approached it with shared sacrifice. And at the very time, we could have thrown away our culture that we galvanized in the early 2000s based on the epiphanies my dad had.
We could have thrown it away. We had a tipping point. We decided to handle that crisis like a family.
Shared sacrifice versus any individual getting hurt. And I tell you what, it was one of the best experiences. That's right when I joined Barry-Wehmiller, which is like, that's not a good time to start an investment firm.
When there's no capital to deploy. But it was a great learning experience for me because I saw how we were making those active decisions in the boardroom and we were using our culture as a filter. As we got out of ’08-‘09, things started taking off.
We had more confidence in our business model. We were able to prove out that we were actually a value added operator investor by launching Forsyth Partners. And into the 2020s, we started stepping up our game to even a whole new level and building new muscle to achieve results by design.
So, this has been a heck of a journey that we've been on, cultural journey, operating journey. So what? What does it mean?
Well, we're trying to provide credibility that we can do this. You all can demand that companies operate with human and economic vibrancy in harmony, not in sacrifice to the other. We have 12,000 committed team members.
We have created annual share price returns in excess of 15 percent since 1997. We've grown from 20 million to three and a half billion. We are truly now a growth and value-added operator.
We have a strong business model. We have a proven playbook. We know how to do acquisitions.
Our portfolio of companies are unbelievable, serving your daily needs. I'll walk you through what we do. But they have created lasting value from daily essentials to toilet paper, to life-saving drugs that are the leading cure of diabetes.
We have an unbelievable business that creates lasting value. But really what is the special sauce that makes this business model run? It's our promise to each other, which is we will operate with people and performance in harmony and not one and sacrifice the other.
And I will detail that in one second. So, here's our business. This is what we started with.
In 1885, we made machines that washed bottles. Today, we have two-thirds of our business is in the industrial and packaging automation. We make highly engineered machines that make bathroom tissue, the nice way of saying toilet paper, cardboard boxes, cans. We put shampoo in your shampoo bottles. We put cereal in your cereal boxes. You interact with something that comes off our equipment on a daily basis.
About a third of our revenue or 30% of our revenue comes from professional services where either through consulting, major engineering consulting firms, we stand up some of the best food processing, you know, pet food plants or food related to, you know, the big meat packing and things that are very exciting like that, all the way to highly engineered data centers. We are working with some of the most complex data centers being installed in the world right now. So, we've come a long way and in life sciences technology, we are literally trying to build a better world.
Our equipment delivers minimally invasive medical devices to people to have easier surgeries, and we also make centrifuges that make some of the most novel therapies right now that are being developed. So, again, we do stuff that is essential to life, and it brings to life our business. So, you know, we're not a tech company that you can just look at.
It's like, oh, our culture is based on playing ping-pong and having pizza nights, right? We're a manufacturing business, and you can still have this culture of people-centric. It's not dark, dim manufacturing.
It's an exciting place to be, and we are honestly just getting started. What makes us different? There are going to be some things up here that you're like, that doesn't sound very different, Kyle.
We're a proven scaler of businesses, right?
We're privately held and professionally run. A lot of folks can talk about some of these.
We have permanent capital, right? So, we are not building this thing to sell it. We are building it to build a great business that provides for our communities and team members.
But a couple of things of why I think we're here is that we have a globally recognized leadership model, one that is gaining significant momentum, and we could not be more enthusiastic about Gonzaga's diving deep into this with us. And we have a culture that fuels people and performance. That is huge.
A business model is great. But if you don't have a strong culture, it will not perform at its highest level. We like to talk about our culture being literally the high-performance fuel that makes our business model run at a higher level than it could.
This people and performance and harmony thing, what does it mean? Right? At Barry-Wehmiller, everybody matters.
We want you to show up and be your authentic self. We want you to lean in and differentiate your work or whatever, however you can. So, we are valued, our team members are valued, recognized and celebrated.
You heard recognition and celebration being a major part of who we are. We cultivate leaders at every level. We don't call our team members employees.
Everyone's a leader. Whether you're leading your own assembly cell or whether you're a leader of other folks, everyone has the right to lead and everyone has the right to be developed to achieve their fullest potential.
That is on us.
That is our cultural promise to each other. We own results. We try to create opportunity.
We like to raise the bar. We are always intellectually curious, benchmarking outside to see how things we can do better. Then the last thing is we're driven by a shared purpose.
That is what brought us here today. We are genuinely looking to build a better world through business. That's it.
And that shared purpose is what connects our entire organization. And we got to be intentional about it. But we can't just keep it inside of our four walls.
And I'll talk about how we're looking to expand that. So, we're going to need your help.
So, as we go, right, we're a $3.5 billion business. We're 140 years old. We're at this point. We're just getting started.
But we're being more intentional about naming what we believe in so that we can either be called out on it or people can join us in this journey. We want to build a better world through business. Our strategy is to redefine what success in business looks like by proving that human and economic vibrancy can exist in harmony.
I'm going to keep saying that so it sticks because it's really important. I want you all, new leaders in the world to go out and experience what this feels like because when one is offsetting the other, it doesn't feel quite as good. We have our scoreboard.
You can tell we measure success by the lives of the people we touch. We want to be a top performer for our customers, a top performer for our employees. We want to generate shareholder returns for our shareholders, and we have financial targets that we're going.
Why is that important? Why do you want to keep growing? Scale, scaling these platforms, these portfolio, these family of companies that we have, will amplify our impact.
Listen, we could sit still and not grow another nickel's worth of revenue and be just fine. But we wouldn't be going after our calling. We would be being selfish.
We wouldn't be sharing our message.
Hopefully, creating outsized return. We have transformation plays, that's interesting for you all.
But what I do want you to see being an awesome athletic university as you all are, is how we're using sports here to up our game, to change the game. It permeates all of our language, everything we're trying to do. What I love about sports, especially team sports, is how teams, the best teams in the world have accountability.
They play for each other. They trust each other. And that's what we're trying to do here.
We are literally trying to build high-performing teams that play for each other and win at higher levels than they could do on their own. And if we can unlock that key, good things will happen. As I mentioned, we've been pursuing how to share this message and create the biggest impact outside of our four walls.
I told you there were certain stories that my dad came on, the wedding story and other things. We also started understanding that listening, sitting down and doing true, empathetic listening, is one of the most powerful things you can do as a leader. Yet no one really knows how to do it.
So, we started a university, and we launched our first class. We then had people from the outside coming to some of these classes, because my dad likes to give everything away for free. And they started coming in from the community.
And we realized this listening is transforming not how people show up at work. It was having more of an impact about people showed up for their families. For their friends, for raising their kids, for being in the community.
We were having outsize impact outside of our organization. So, if we thought, my gosh, if we could teach people to empathetically listen to each other, care for each other inside, they go home feeling more fulfilled and supported.
They're nicer to their family, and they come back in energized for the next day.
What a wonderful transformation that would be versus today. I'm disengaged, and I'm going home pissed off. I kick the dog, right? Have a beer, right? Throw something at the TV, and you go, you dread the next day of work. You're not going to get a lot of engagement and growth if that is the model that you're working with.
So, we started creating, listen, we wanted to drive change in the communities that we serve. And so, we started a class in Phillips on listening. We had our first academic engagement with Georgetown and Washington University.
We started gaining global credibility. My dad did a Ted Talk. A gentleman by the name Simon Sinek became our muse. I'm not sure if any of you have heard Start With Why, but he's a pretty powerful speaker.
We founded the Leadership Institute where we went out and taught other companies how to have a high performing and a high carrying culture. We wrote a book, right?
So, we started gaining global credibility. Then we're like, okay, well, this is getting pretty serious. So, we iterated a bit.
We built a bit. We launched Chapman Foundation in a more specific way and scalable way to go out into the world. Our outreach, we started gaining more and more interest to go help, to go to the root cause of the issue, which we found to be education was teaching all the wrong things.
And when folks would get out into the workplace, we had to undo what they've learned. So, we started saying, let's go help teach and transform education. And now we're creating influence.
The United Nations and the Vatican have taken notice. Harvard is taking notice at all new levels. Gonzaga is taking notice and getting in at a deeper level than many of the other universities that we work with.
It is an incredible period of time. There is a movement. There is a hunger for what we're doing. And you all are very much a part of it.
So, when I talk about Barry-Wehmiller outside the four walls, it's not different than what we're trying to do inside of it. Yes, we have BWU where we teach ourselves.
We've got Chapman and Co. where we teach others. We've got Chapman Foundation where we're going out into communities to make them better.
We've got BWU Outreach. That's what we're doing here. And you can see the force multiplier effect of by having these other things.
Look how many lives we're touching. I told you about 12,000 lives in Barry-Wehmiller.
We've now touched over 750,000 lives, and it's growing exponentially.
But this is not a side project. Our purpose is inextricably linked from business and from outside our four walls. Our purpose drives performance, which creates scale.
Scale amplifies our message, which allows us to redefine success in business. As we think about some of our more philanthropic focus, purpose drives external impact. Gonzaga provides us credibility and brand equity, which allows us to have influence in the world.
We are doing this all together because of our goal to build a better world through business.
We are trying to share this with whoever will listen and take the ball and run with it. It's an incredibly important time and we've never had more clarity than we do right now.
And to be honest, the world needs this. As I led off with, we have the lowest level of engagement in a decade in business right now. And that's terrible for you all and terrible for your friends and families that have to participate in it. So, as I said, we are gaining influence. The noise coming out of Barry-Wehmiller is getting louder and starting to create more and more waves. We're getting attention from all these institutions and we are so, so very lucky to be here.
I talked about creating human vibrancy. Human vibrancy, human flourishing, it's a very known concept. And as a global enterprise, a pioneer in a new leadership model, a philanthropic arm out trying to help communities and families get better, we are touching every one of the pathways to human flourishing.
And I already told you, work has the highest amount of time that you all give to it. And work, it's what's causing the obstacles to human flourishing right now. When work isn't doing it, guess what?
It affects your ability to be a great community member, to be a great family member. So, we got to get this work thing right, but we're attacking it from all over the place. And one thing that I would love for you all to take away, as much as you might think decisions from your 8-to-5 job with your team members don't affect them as they leave the four walls, you're wrong. They carry it with them. It affects how they treat their family. So, the one thing that you all would walk away with today, the way we lead impacts the way people live.
That's a different level of responsibility. It's not just a paycheck. It's not just fair benefits.
You are literally impacting people's lives as they leave your organization and go out in the community. That other third of the time that they're not sleeping, work 30%, sleep 33%, that other 33% you're impacting too in a negative way if you don't understand this. So, the call to action.
You all are here for a reason. You took interest in this. You needed credits, and you were hungry.
But what does this all mean to you? You have the opportunity to be part of it, to shape it, to put your fingerprints on it, to own this new message. You all have it.
And we can't hope that it happens. Hope is not a strategy. You all have to take learnings from this lecture or these type of leadership weeks and say, I am going to demand and shape my future in a different way. That's on you all. And you have to choose your employer or whatever you end up doing and make sure that you demand this of them.
And then when you become a leader of hundreds of thousands of people, that you demand this of yourself.
What if the future leaders of business around the globe came together to prove that business can be the most powerful source for good? Wrote how to redefine success in business that promotes human and economic vibrancy in harmony, not in sacrifice of the other.
I need you all to own this. We need you all to own this. We will not create the scale and impact and we will not change low engagement or people feeling ignored or dismissed at work. If you all just think this is another strategic lesson that you can choose to opt in or opt out.
I need you all to opt in. I need you all to want this. It's a really important time. So, consider, how do you measure success?
How does it show up in your priorities and choices? What is your true north?
And how does it shape your work? How does it guide you in what you're doing? I need you all to raise expectations of the business leaders that you're gonna go interview with.
You all have to raise expectations and demand different things. There are proof points out there. It does exist that people and performance can exist in harmony.
I hope you get a small snippet into what Barry-Wehmiller does to give you all confidence in that. We're trying to shape the future of whoever will listen, but I need you all, the masses, to demand that this be a different world. One, again, that human and economic vibrancy can exist in harmony and not sacrifice the other.
So, it's time to change the game of business. I need you all to join us, and all I have to say is game on. Thank you all very much.