Podcast: The Gund Company, a Truly Human Leadership Case Study

Brian Wellinghoff: I told you I've been with Barry-Wehmiller for over 20 years. I'm slightly famous in the organization for asking Bob Chapman one key question. I was with the organization only about 12 months. I had the opportunity to have dinner with Bob outside a winery in California. It was a great trip. I had the chance to ask that great MBA question that I could throw in along the way. And I asked him, "Well, Bob, what is your greatest fear?" And he says, "To this day, no one would ever be stupid enough to ask me that question because I'm the eternal optimist, and I always think about the positive." But Brian since you asked, "My greatest fear is what that I started to build here at Barry-Wehmiller wouldn't last beyond my time." And I think that's a question that Steve and I would offer to each of you. Whatever you're already building in your life, whatever you hope to achieve upon graduation, whatever you're doing in your families and communities now, how do you build it in a way that it's sustainable beyond your own time? And frankly, that's what I think Steve is building in his organization. It's been an honor to get to know him over the last about 10 maybe dozen years along the way, both personally and professionally. And I think what you'll find is Steve is somebody who doesn't just think about what leadership can be but actually puts it into practice. And so, Steve's going to talk a little about his journey to those leadership principles. 

Steve Gund: Thank you, Brian. I appreciate it. As Brian said, my name is Steve Gund. It is an absolute pleasure to be with you here today. To some extent, I feel like I'm in church. No one's in the front row. 

But I am here today to talk about defining moments. And one of my defining moments happened here at WashU. We're going to talk about that today. I hope that for you all, today is a day that touches your heart and touches your mind and has you thinking deeply about the type of leader that you want to be when you leave here. That's the challenge that Bob made to me when he spoke to us here at the Knight Center many years ago. So, let me talk to you a little bit about uh my journey. Like you, I went to a top 25 business school many years ago, and we were taught the Milton Friedman Chicago School of Economics theory around the primary responsibility, the primary social responsibility of business. Does anybody know what Milton Friedman said was the primary social responsibility of business? Did you guys take economics? 

Audience Member: Increase shareholder value. 

Steve: Increase shareholder value by doing what?  

Audience Member: Selling more, I guess. 

Steve: Yeah. Yep. Any other thoughts? What did Milton Friedman say was a primary social responsibility of business? 

Audience Member: Profit maximization.  

Steve: Amen. 

Steve: Ding ding ding. He goes to the front of the class. This is what we were taught in business school back in the day. Now, we were taught, of course, finance and accounting and marketing. In those days, we had management information systems, even though we didn't have the internet. But guess what? We didn't get taught besides good English. What else weren't we taught? 

I didn't take a single class on human interpersonal communications. Has anybody here in your education received a class in interpersonal communications here at WashU? Woohoo. Great job, WashU. Awesome. Wonderful. I'm glad to hear that. I also did not have a class in leadership. It wasn't a thing. It wasn't a thing. It wasn't offered. Seems kind of strange, right? But we also didn't have the internet back then. 

So, I had a very traditional business education background back in the day. And when I joined our family business, which was tiny at the time, about 2.5 million in sales, about 20 of us, nine of which were family members, otherwise you know, analogous to an Italian restaurant, right? 2.5 million business is a pretty small business. 20 employees is a pretty small business. And so, when you're a small business, what are you focused on doing?  

You got to grow. You got to take care of the customer. You're trying to survive, right? So maybe like some of you, I came out of college with not a single penny to my name. I had a lot of debt, no money. So, what did I learn in college at a top 25 school? I learned how to compete with very bright people, 95th percentile people like you. OK? And you did it, at least I did it because I wasn't the smartest guy in the room. I did it by out-hustling, by being super responsive, by working my tail off. And that meant 60-70-hour weeks. And guess what that meant for the rest of my team? Also working 60-hour weeks. That was our culture, was a bend over backward, take care of the customer. We got to survive type culture. OK. And so that we were also a family business and a traditional family business in the sense that we did have this feeling about taking care of our employees. We'd work them like family, which meant 50-60-hour weeks, but my father had a famous saying we'll have a layoff over my dead body. So, we were never going to lay anybody off. That's what taking care of people meant. We could work them into the ground, but they were going to have a job. OK? So, that was kind of pretty typical for a family business. 

Now, where are we today? Today, after 75 years of grinding, we’re up to 1,200 employees over 17 locations in seven countries. OK? So, we've survived, and we've thrived. And a big part of that is because we learned. And part of that learning, as I mentioned, started here. What you see in that picture is a group of 25 or so folks that went through our Listen Like a Leader course. We got that course from Barry-Wehmiller. We're going to talk about what that means. It's a human interpersonal communications course. Became absolutely foundational to our improvement as a company. But what do we do? What does The Gund Company do? We manufacture components for electrical power systems equipment. I can put you to sleep in a heartbeat. But you guys have a little bit of experience with this or knowledge of this market because AI is all the rage, right? And what is AI driving? Tell me, what's the biggest thing AI consumes? 

Audience Member: Energy.  

Steve: Energy in the form of electricity generated by power generators flowing through transformers into switch gear. So, we make all those components that go in all that equipment feeding the data centers. So, from the largest power generators, nuclear power generators to hydro to fossil to wind, those pieces of equipment have our components inside them. Our customers are General Electric. They’re Siemens, Eaten Corporation, all the big boys, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, OK. Around the world, this is what we do. 

So, as we're hustling, as we're growing, we have to develop a business model that's going to be safe and secure to be able to take care of our employees, including our family members, of course. And so, what we wanted to do is build a model that had differentiated value. How are we going to compete with Siemens, or I should say Siemens’ other suppliers? How are we going to compete to supply Siemens to supply ABV to supply Hitachi? These are some of the best companies in the world. Emerson Electric here in town, very tough customer to compete at. So, we had to have an integrated model where we're capturing more value add by backwards integrating into making our own raw materials, for example, and then forward integrating into doing more and more complicated assemblies for our customers. Does that make sense? So, we had to add value with the differentiated model. We had to be a high-performance organization. We wanted to deliver on time with the Cadillac quality of parts. Maybe I shouldn't say Cadillac, maybe I should say Lexus quality of parts. OK? And we wanted our employees, our team members engaged economically. We wanted economic engagement. We wanted them a part of helping us improve the business. So, we made them owners. Anybody ever heard of an ESOP? Employee stock ownership program. So, we gave we gave, we gave, we gave for free 30% of the company to our team members because we wanted them economically engaged in the success of the business. So, think open-book management, think developing financial acumen in every team member. OK. And, of course, we wanted a culture of continuous improvement where we were capturing their ideas to help us become a better company. 

However, at this time, call it 2014-15-16 the economy wasn't doing so good, was it? Talking less than 2% economic growth each year. Now, at that time, if you think about it, we're primarily making components of electrical power systems equipment. So, the US is largely electrified. There wasn't a whole lot of growth and demand for electrical equipment. So, we were in an industry that was growing at less than 1%. Yet, our company was growing at 15%. How do you do that in an industry that's growing at less than 1% and you're growing at 15%? How is that possible? Anybody know? 

Audience Member: Take over more market share. 

Steve: Take market share. We got a bright crew here today. That's outstanding. You're exactly correct. So, we had a better business model. We're taking market share. OK. Now, the challenge I faced is I had a board in these slow economic years. They were saying, "Hey, Steve, you got to grow faster." And, "Oh, hey, Steve, your profitability isn't what it should be." We had an awesome board. We had an executive from Emerson. We had one vice chairman from Commerce Bank on our board. We had chief counsel from Solutia, big chemical company here in town on our board. We had an executive from Monsanto, now Bayer, on our board. All publicly traded companies, all very profitable companies. And they're telling me, "Hey, Steve, you guys got to be at 15% operating margin or you really aren't very good?" Really? I'm getting compared to Emerson and the Monsanto. OK, I guess I'm not very good. So, I had to figure out what is the difference between being a manager and being a leader because I didn't know the difference. I'm being challenged by my board for better performance, even though there was no better no burning platform. But how was I going to get better performance? These aren't folks that believe necessarily in no layoffs. You want higher profitability, what's the first lever that most boards recommend pulling? 

Cut costs. What do you do? You cut people. Unfortunately, that's the way business schools teach sometimes. It's all about profit maximization, right? So, if you have to cut some people, cut some people. That didn't fit with us. OK? I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place. So, about this time, about 2014, I get introduced to an ex-special forces leader, ex-military, and he's like, "Steve, you got to develop your leadership." I'm like, "What are you talking about?" He says, "You're not a very good leader." I'm like, "Wow, that's pretty bold. I like feedback. Give me more." And he said, "You manage a process. You manage a plan. You lead people. You're not leading people. You're on the other side of the hill all the time. Everyone you think is following you, they can't see you anymore because you're on the other side of the hill. You got to spend more time with people, slow it down, and learn to lead. So, wow, that's a big challenge. 

Also, around that same time, I'm coming over to WashU. Anyone have class with Panos Kouvelis? I actually had the good luck of buying Panos's house 10 doors west of here, and he invites me to be a part of what was called the operational excellence association. We ran around town looking for companies that we could benchmark and learn from. OK. So, I give Panos a ton of credit. Not only did he sell me a great house, but he got me sucked into the Board of Operational Excellence Association here at WashU. Defining moment in my life because that during one of those speaker series is when I met Bob Chapman, and Bob Chapman told us about a different way of thinking about business. He talked about leadership, and I'm saying hm I'm hearing leadership from this ex-special forces guy, and I am hearing about leadership from Bob Chapman. I don't know anything about it ultimately. I thought I did. I mean, heck, how difficult of a concept is leadership? We all know what it is, right? Maybe we don't. 

So, after hearing Bob talk one day, I find out that they're doing a seminar at Barry-Wehmiller called Beyond Benchmarking. I'm like, hey, I'm into benchmarking. I'm in the Operational Excellence Association. I'm going to go benchmark Barry-Wehmiller. I heard that guy talk. He's awesome. So, I went there, and what I learned was they really weren't talking about benchmark. What they were talking about was leadership and culture. And to me, it was an unbelievable message because at that time in my life, I'm 45 years old and I'm getting pressured by my board, and I think I'm doing a good job, but my board's telling me I'm not really. And I got some of the folks that are on my team saying, "Well, you're really not a very good leader." And I'm going, "Oh my god, how am I going to figure this out?" And so, I'm thinking to myself, "Yeah, maybe I'm not a great leader. I'm having trouble finding the intrinsic motivation of running a manufacturing company. It's not like I'm a teacher teaching young people how to be better. It's not like I'm working in a hospital curing cancer. What is intrinsically motivating about making widgets? I make widgets for a living. Manufacturing, is that sexy? Is it inspiring? Is it motivating? I don't know. It's a lot of hard work. I'll tell you that. 

And so, Bob changed my life. I raised my hand. I said, "Bob, Bob, Bob, tell me what is intrinsically motivating about making the equipment that makes toilet paper? That's what Barry-Wehmiller does. They make the capital equipment that makes toilet paper, among other products, including the packaging for beer cans and so forth. And Bob gives me an answer that I will never forget. He said, "I don't want to go to my grave with people remembering that I made the best toilet paper manufacturing equipment. I want to go to my grave being remembered for the impact that I had on the people whose lives I touched. And he said our product is not the toilet paper-making equipment. Our product is our people.” And then he said a line which is to just burned into my head, put me on fire. He said, “Business is a conduit for providing opportunity that allows people to become who they are meant to be.” Business is the conduit that provides an opportunity that allows people to become who they're meant to be. Combined with our product is our people, I just found the intrinsic motivation of business. Does that make sense? 

So, I was on fire. Bob lit me up. I said, "OK, I just learned the why of business leadership. To serve others so that you can help them become who they are meant to be." That was the why of business leadership. My next question was, “How in this Lord's name would I possibly figure out how to help other people become who they're meant to be?” 

Brian helped give me that answer. 

Brian: And so, I was one of the people running that Beyond Benchmarking experience that Steve came to. I had the opportunity to work with Bob Chapman very closely over the last 20 years as he shared many of the inspiring things that Steve spoke about but also offered the vision to us to make a reality along the way. So, let me give you a few pieces of that vision and the way we started to bring it into reality. You see on the screen, we believe that business could be the most powerful force for good in our world. That's what gets me up in the morning. That's what gets us at Barry-Wehmiller up in the morning. We think it's a change from how things have been perceived in the past, but we think it's an inspirational message. If though, if our leaders will accept the awesome responsibility, and it is an awesome responsibility for those in their span of care. No, we're not talking about span of control. That's pretty typical or a hierarchical vision in an organizational system or hierarchy. Caring for the people in your span of care because the way we lead impacts the way people live. The way I have been leading throughout the morning, the way I and Steve lead in our organizations, the way all of you lead in your different student organizations and perhaps other jobs and things that you have that really impacts how people live.  

This is the thing that I didn't learn previously, that Bob Chapman didn't learn previously, that actually how we operate during our 9 to 5 impacts how people go home as a parent, as a son or daughter, as a community member, as the leader of different organizations, as somebody in government, as whatever role that you might have. How we lead in our 9 to 5 impacts how people live. I hope someday you will have an organization that you feel cares about you. I hope somewhere in your life you're part of a family or a community organization or something that cares for you. But unfortunately, and I'll big do the big reveal in a second, you're on the right track here. The number is not very high for the number of people that feel their company cares about them. How about this question: in the United States, how many people die each year from workplace stress? I'm not talking about safety issues or things like, you know, I'm not even going to give you an example, but like those safety issues in a manufacturing plant. I'm talking about workplace stress. Jeffrey Pfefer, who's actually originally from St. Louis, wrote a book that I actually studied in Stuart's class 20-plus years ago, looked at this research and found the number of people that he estimates die from workplace stress each and every year. I'll note again relatively high numbers regardless of exactly you know what the item is. So let me give you the reveal here along the way. 

Three out of four people are disengaged at work. Only one in eight feels that their company cares for them. We're going to be honest with you here. This is the challenge that you will leave this university and head out into. But it's a challenge we hope that you're prepared to meet to be the kind of leader that helps people feel that an organization cares for them. 74% of stress can be tied back to some aspect of what people experience at work. Whether you work 40 hours a week or maybe at The Gund Company 50 or 60 or 70 or something like that, it's a lot of time that we spend, and it contributes to stress. Our co-author Raj Sisodia helped us realize heart attacks go up 20% on Monday mornings. The highest time for heart attacks is Monday at roughly 5:30 a.m. because it's when the sense of stress of the workplace and the work week is coming back upon us. And I referenced Jeffrey Pfeffer below. He wrote this book, Dying for a Paycheck. And he doesn't mean that you're super excited to get it. He means literally 120,000 people dying from workplace stress every year. That's the challenge, but it's also the opportunity that we shared with Steve in Beyond Benchmarking and that we live by at Barry-Wehmiller today and moving forward. 

And we didn't come to this, you know, amazingly. It took us time as well, but a major event was when Bob Chapman was attending a wedding. And so, I wanted to take just a second and think back to maybe a wedding you've attended for family, for friends, maybe your own recently. I'm not sure in the room, but think back to a wedding and perhaps a traditional wedding ceremony or one of those wedding ceremonies where the family of the bride or the groom walks them in and the whole attention of everybody in attendance is on how amazing they look, how amazing they are, how much opportunity they have in front of them. If I can use one word, how precious they truly are in that moment. And Bob Chapman was sitting in a wedding one day and had this revelation, as he described it, that everyone is someone's precious child. And so just like that, bride or groom or anybody in a special ceremony, a wedding or any other ceremony, we see how precious and wonderful and how much opportunity they have. Every single person that walks through the doors of Barry-Wehmiller each and every day is just as precious. And do we treat them that way with the leadership that we have? That's the challenge that we internalized. And we realized that many of us didn't learn how to treat people with that level of care in their past schooling, in their other jobs, in their other experiences. And so, we began what we call Barry Way Miller-Wehmiller University, which continues to this day, to focus on classes with that interpersonal communication and focus that Steve talked about. We teach empathetic listening throughout our country, around the world. We teach I think in eight or nine different languages at this point in China and India and Serbia.  

We teach recognition and celebration. It's so powerful to actually recognize and celebrate the amazing accomplishments of others, but it takes some skill to do it well. And we also teach about care and accountability, that this message that Barry Way Miller-Wehmiller has isn't just about being nice. It's about helping people to achieve impact with the time and investment that they put together. And so, we like to give this description because sometimes people ask, “All right, is Barry-Wehmiller more successful because of its strategy or because of its culture. And we like this analogy and I think it's something that resonated with Steve as well. Think of a sports car whether you like F1 or IndyCar or NASCAR or some other way. Think of a sports car and how important it is that that sports car has an amazing high-performing engine. There's wonderful engineers and technicians and mechanics that tune up those engines so they run at their optimum level. That's like our business model. If we don't have a strong business model, we cannot care for people. We cannot avoid those layoffs that Steve was talking about. But at the same time, if we don't have a strong culture, but people are actually engaged and feel cared for and offer us their best, then we don't have the premium fuel to put in that engine. If you put the cheapest, lowest-octane fuel into a high-performance racing car engine, it might turn on, but it's not winning any races along the way. If you put in the best high-performance, high-octane fuel, then you've got the opportunity to really do something different and dramatic.  

That's what we're striving to do at Barry-Wehmiller. And that's why we were honored to see that Steve recognized through the Beyond Benchmarking course. Many people come, just like you're listening to the two of us today. We hope that you take at least one thing away that you can focus on or do differently. The thing that separated Steve was, he didn't just take one thing away. He took like three things away and then kept coming back and coming back again and looking at implementing so many amazing things. And what he proved to us is that it wasn't just that one company with one person could do something dramatically different, that it's something accessible to any company that wants to follow down that path. And Steve's going to talk to you a little bit about that. 

Steve: So, one of the things that we learned, as I mentioned from Bob Chapman, was, and I learned it in spades, was that the purpose of business is to serve others. If we can help people become who they're meant to be, that is intrinsically motivating. OK? And so one of the things that we learned very quickly coming out of the Beyond Benchmarking course is that along with the help of Simon Sinek, everybody here familiar with Simon Sinek? Heard that name before? Come up in class, wrote the book Start with Why? OK. So, one of the first things we did is we went back and we had Connie Dooley, amazing person. She was asking for Fridays off to facilitate weekend retreats for her parish community. OK, so here's someone who is finding fulfillment and meaning outside of her job and asking for time off from her job to go do something meaningful. Somewhat insightful, right? And as I'm having these conversations with her about Beyond Benchmarking and she goes and takes the course, she catches fire just like I did. Her heart's on fire. She's like, "Steve, why can't we do this at The Gund Company? I'm facilitating retreats to help people think introspectively about what they want out of life and how to find meaning. What if we help people find meaning at work? How amazing would that be?" I said, "Great. Let's do it." 

And so, she pulled together a group, and they discovered our why, our organizational why, which is really awesome. Who's been through a why discovery? If any of you have been through it, a personal why discovery, really awesome exercise. If you ever get the chance to do it, highly recommend it. Really, really impactful. And so, what she did when you do a why discovery is you tell the stories. You think about the stories in your life that brought meaning, the positive stories that brought meaning to your life. And then you think about your life challenges and what was difficult and what were the obstacles that you had to overcome. And you think about those things in terms of what brings you meaning. And so, when you do it as an organization, people tell stories about what was it about our company that made them feel fulfilled working at The Gund Ccompany. And so, there was stories about uh a team member who got cancer and because we were that person's family, they decided to spend their dying days at work with us coming to work and people were caring for him at work because we were his family. 

We had stories of folks that started with us in low-level clerical jobs, but they finished their college degree, and they learned business intelligence software, became PowerBI experts and transformed their life. Those stories had meaning to our people. And what they came up with as our company's organizational why was our purpose is to recognize and serve others so that lives are transformed. 

Man, when I heard that, I was like, "Holy cow, that's the meaning you guys are getting out of what we're doing every day." I couldn't possibly have been more proud. I was like a proud papa. I was like, "Holy cow, there's no way I could have come up with that." OK, to recognize and serve others so that lives are transformed. Folks, we make widgets for power generators. OK. But our product is our people. We just happen to make generator components. Our product is our people. That comes right from Bob Chapman. So, this team not only discovered our why, but they got into our how. Our how is our cultural values. And the wonderful thing about our culture team is that they decided to define those values in terms of behaviors. How do we behave as a team, as a family? How do we take care of each other?  

And they also affirmed what we call our three guiding principles. At the top of our true north compass there, you see take care of each other. That's our number one true north guiding principle. Take care of each other. You then see take care of the customer and take care of the business. We do those three things in harmony. But there's a pecking order. It starts with take care of each other. If we do a great job taking care of each other, then our folks will do an amazing job taking care of our customers. And if we do a great job adding value for our customers, differentiated value to our customers, they will take care of our business. And if we take care of the business, we can reinvest in our people and their development and ongoing career growth. As the company grows, so grows our people and the opportunities for their continued growth. Does that make sense? 

So, we learned from Barry-Wehmiller to think in terms of defining our why and defining our how. And one message I'd leave with all of you is think about doing that on an individual basis. Determine your own personal why. Determine your own how. define the behaviors that you want to lead with in your own life, both personally, maybe among your family, maybe among whatever organization you're a part of in the future. 

So, one of the other really foundational, super important things that we learned from Barry-Wehmiller is listening with empathy, as Brian said. Guess what? As I mentioned before, I didn't receive a communications class in high school or college. What did I know about listening with empathy. I didn't know anything, but they taught us. And not only did they teach us, they taught us to develop professors. So, we had two professors certified by Barry-Wehmiller to teach ourselves Listen Like a Leader. So, now we have taught 250-plus leaders in our organization this 3-day course on listening and communication skills. Think about that. 3-day full-day course on just learning how to listen to others. Really, really powerful. OK. And guess what we learned? We learned that not only do leaders need to be taught how to listen, our folks on the shop floor, every human on this planet needs basic communication skills training because guess what? We human beings aren't so good at communicating. So, we had to teach this basic skill to our folks.  

So, one of the things that we do: Has anyone here had a working experience yet where you've had a performance evaluation? Has anyone had a performance review yet? What'd you think of the experience? 

Audience Member: A mix of good and bad. Some were very like particular. They set out parameters for me. We had quarterly check-ins, and I felt what I was given was, you know, pretty fair. And I've had some where I've never even seen the rater for the whole rating period and they gave me what felt like an arbitrary rating. Wasn't very scientific or personable at all.  

Steve: Was it motivating?  

Audience Member: No.  

Steve: OK. Generally, would I be fair in saying that performance reviews are stressful and anxiety-provoking for most people? Yeah. OK. I'm not a believer in in performance reviews. So, what we do is uh what's called an individual development plan. And the first thing we start with is asking people what are your hopes and dreams and vision for the future. First question. What we learned from Barry-Wehmiller is to serve people on bent knee. And I think of this image all the time. I'm here to serve you. If I'm a leader and I'm trying to serve somebody else, where do I start? I start with what they want in life. How can I help you accomplish your dreams? And based on where you want to go, I'm going to help you determine a plan. And we break that plan down in terms of knowledge, skills and behaviors, right? Because if you want to do something more in life, you're likely going to need to learn new knowledge, right? You're going to have to learn new skills. You're going to have to learn new behaviors to keep growing and developing. So, we don't have a performance review. We have a discussion, and we listen to what people want out of their life, and we help them get there. 

Another really great powerful message we heard from Barry-Wehmiller is that you have to be very intentional and articulate about the way you build culture. And one of the things they did that blew our mind is the amount of recognition and celebration of folks on their team. And it sounds pretty simple, and it is simple, and it's largely free. All we're doing is systematically finding ways to shine the light on people who are doing great work, and then we tell everybody about it. We tell them why. So and so is doing a great job over here. Woohoo. Let’s party? Awesome. Great job. We do it company-wide systematically. You know, we have this thing in culture where when somebody dies, we eulogize them, and we tell them how great they are, right? You guys are familiar with eulogies, right? We wait till people are dead to tell them how great they are. Not great timing on that, right? Or we give a roast. We make fun of people when we celebrate them, right? You see those roasts on TV every once in a while. But how often do we really go out of our way to tell people that they're doing a great job and we love them? We just don't do that very much. But if you do it, you lift people up, and you create an example of what good looks like for everybody else to see. 

Couple of things we've talked about from a culture perspective. The why discovery, the values, Listen Like a Leader for communication. Lots of things I could talk to you about what we do from a culture perspective. I'm going to share a couple things that we do from a continuous improvement perspective. But when we talk about a business model, our business model combines dignity-based humanistic people-first leadership with operational excellence. But you'll see the connection here in a moment as I talk about a couple of our continuous improvement practices. Of course, you've all heard of suggestion boxes, right? People drop a note in a suggestion box. We don't do that. We have these boards all over the walls in our facilities and we have small teams working together, and they're identifying every possible improvement, every possible problem, and they're making it visual. They're making it visible. Really powerful. A lot of organizations hide their problems. Managers say, "Oh, I'm going to pretend like there's nothing going wrong here, and I'm going to pretend like nothing could be improved." We do the opposite. We shine the light on the problems. We celebrate those who raise these problems, and we make them visible because once they're visible, they can be improved, right? Imagine the average company where you got someone on the production floor who's saying, "Oh, uh, there's a problem. I'm going to go tell my supervisor Joe there's a problem." Joe's busy that day. He forgets. Sam goes back the next day, and he says to Joe, "Hey, Joe, did you forget about that problem I told you?" Oh yeah, sorry. I forgot. I didn't get to it. I'll get to it tomorrow. Joe forgets about it again. Doesn't write it down. Doesn't have a system for writing it down. You think Sammy goes back the third time and says, "Hey, here's my idea. How come we're not actioning it?" No. Sammy forgets about it. He says, "Forget it. I'm now disengaged. I'm 80-85% of the workforce that's disengaged because guess what? You're not listening. So, I'm going to check out. I'm going to check my brain 9 to 5 at the door, and I'm not going to bring it to work. 

Then, another powerful tool, we teach people to solve problems. So, guess what? You got a whole board here full of problems. How you going to solve them? Well, you got to teach people how to solve them. And again, we have demonstrated listening here. You want to get engagement, help people learn how to solve problems. One of the things you'll notice we do is we have these 3M Post-it notes that we hang on the door. And as we walk through the define, measure, analyze, improve and control steps of problem solving, we write down what each person in the room thinks the issue is. Every single person is heard. And the team then has to take that listening and turn it into action. You think that captures engagement? If people feel listened to, if they feel respected, if they're heard, what do you think you get? Engagement. 

But when you systematically build in processes that start with listening that lead to engagement and empowerment, when you're capturing the hearts and minds of those on your team, helping them become who they're meant to be, having development plans that help them grow, then you get individual flourishing that leads to organizational flourishing. And then you get performance like this, world-class operational performance. And that allows a company to grow in a very healthy way. And when a company grows in a healthy way, the people on your team have opportunities to grow in their career. They may start at one position and five or 10 years later, they're at a whole another position because they've grown with you. You're helping them realize their potential and become who they're meant to be. That leads to organizational flourishing. You build a strong business model, then you're around to take care of people for the long term. And so, you see the kind of performance. It's no coincidence that Barry-Wehmiller and The Gund Company's performance is very, very similar over a long period of time. 

Brian: Well, what's amazing about this is the co-author of our book Raj Sisodia actually did research roughly 25-30 years ago and published a book called Firms of Endearment, and it demonstrated that those firms that had the greatest internal culture also had the greatest loyalty of customers, and they also had outsized performance. So, we have graphs of our two organizations here, but the same is true for other similar organizations. And it's because people and performance don't need to be in balance. That's what we thought it was originally. But balance implies that if you want people to go up, if you want people to be more highly impacted, you're going to have to give up some performance. Or if you want performance to go up, you're going to have to sacrifice your people along the way. We don't believe that. We believe those two things can and should be in harmony.  

I don't play an instrument personally. A couple of my children are trying to learn one. But have you ever been in an orchestra or played in a band? Knowing that actually each instrument, each voice, each aspect adds to itself and actually creates harmony, something more beautiful altogether. That's true with people in performance and harmony. When people are engaged, inspired, when they can solve problems like Steve spoke about, they have the opportunity to drive performance to be even more beneficial and helpful. And we know that people like to win. People like to win in the marketplace. They like to make an impact with what they do. They like to provide value for customers. They want to understand what their contribution is to the larger whole. And when we achieve that, it's really powerful. 

Now, I'd like to be able to stand before you and tell you that every single one of Barry-Wehmiller’s 12,000 team members around the world feels totally engaged and knows exactly what their purpose is. I couldn't tell you that today. But what I can tell you is we're striving every single day, every single moment to expand that and get better at it, to drive training and development and business models and internal operations to be better. That's why we just wrote a new strategic plan that's all aligned behind building a better world through business and achieving human and economic prosperity in harmony. 

Well, what if we can do it? Well, what if The Gund Company could do it? What if all the organizations that you're a part of today or will be a part of soon can do that? Think of what the impact will be on our world.