Winning on Purpose with Fred Reichheld

Hello, I'm Adam Durrell and welcome to the Account Experience Podcast, which is dedicated to professionals at the intersection of growth and B2B customer experience. Today we have a very special guest. Yes, it's the father of Net Promoter. It's Fred Reichelt himself. I'm so excited to get a chance to speak to him and we'll get to that in a moment. But just before we do that, I'd like to get into a little bit of my history with Fred because I've been working with net promoter since February 2004. When I look back into my annals, it's ever since I read about it in the Harvard Business Review and, well, I became a true believer in the whole process and later I even founded a company. That's right, CustomerGage was founded to help companies grow by monetizing Net Promoter. As we've evolved over the last few years, we've got more specialized in the whole B2B part of it with key account management, especially where we find that NPS really plays a really important part of this process of improving growth. And you know, on a personal basis. I first met Fred when my comic strip version of the Ultimate Question Book caught his eye. And now I try to catch up in the flesh once a year and if we can, at this beautiful Cape Cod home. Fred's a longtime partner in Bain Consulting. He's now advisory partner and a Bain fellow. His new book is out at the end of November. It's called Winning on Purpose. And I guess those in the Net Promoter business are going to think of it as Net Promoter 3.0. So I can't tell you how happy I am to get Fred on to talk about his book for the first time publicly on the Account Experience podcast. Welcome, Fred Reichelt. Fred, hallo. Welcome to the Account Experience Podcast. You thank, thank you so much for joining us today.

My pleasure, Adam.

So I'm just going to get straight into this. I started using net promoter in February 2004 and I think it been around a little bit before then. So by my calculations, net promoter is 18 years old, just coming into adulthood.

You know, that's a good thing. It's sort of, it's still a little bit teenager, not quite grown up, but, but pretty close.

Why don't we talk about the way. Perhaps if you can. I'm assuming everybody listening to this knows a little bit about Net Promoter, but maybe you can just recap about how it came into being.

I'll go to the very beginning. Early. After I joined man and Company, I saw Companies who were far outperforming the competition. And you couldn't explain their success through classic strategy principles which I'd learned at business school and the early years at Bain. The accounting was confusing. And it finally occurred to me that these companies earned the loyalty from their customers and employees. And that flywheel of customers coming back for more and bringing their friends and inspiring employees because they knew they were doing something meaningful, look, the customers are actually responding to it. That was the core of it really was a different paradigm of what made businesses ticket. And I initially launched into, I was trained in economics, so I thought the loyalty economics were cool. Then tiny changes in retention rate would explode differences in profitable growth. But pretty soon I started wondering, well, how is it that these companies earn loyalty? It's not through gimmicky marketing programs and loyalty schemes. It's not through anything I'd seen in textbooks. And so I started thinking, well, if this is going to become a science, we have to measure it. And retention rates is not sufficient. That's where this need for I need a metric of have I touched a customer in such a way that they want to share this with a loved one? The Net Promoter score came out of the recognition that retention is not good. I need an indicator of success or failure. And boy, when someone recommends you enthusiastically, that seems like the best thing around.

Well, I'm going to touch on that later because you even dive into that in your new book about why this is an act of love. I mean, I was actually quite, I was blown away actually by how much love you speak about in this book. It's kind of strange for a business book, but let me segue into that by talking about you had a different name for Net Promoter when it first came out. That was also a surprise to me. Can you talk a little about that? Yeah.

I have a philosophy that the best businesses are communities where people are treated right and the objective function is to enrich the lives you touch. That's a pretty high minded approach. But that's what these loyalty leaders, the Net Promoter leaders, are doing every day. They're living a set of ethics. They have a moral compass that is pretty close to that religious, almost religious notion of love thy neighbor as thyself. So for me, Net Promoter was when I was originally thinking of the name, I said, you know, it's when a company or a team or a person touches a customer, have they enriched the life or diminished the life? And so I originally thought of calling it Net Lives Enriched. And I wish I had in some, you know, Hospitals. There are a lot of businesses that are important in their lives where or enriching lives really resonates with the employees. Much better than Promoter Detractor. I thought, oh, you know, netlives Enriched is just too soft and lovey dovey. You need something that promoters, that's what you want in a business. Those are truly assets. They're coming back for more, bringing their friends, making, promoting your success. And maybe that was why it spread so fast and so far. But I sort of wish I'd called it Net Lives Enriched and stuck with that.

I think it's wonderful. But I think one of the things that works for me about Net Promoter is you can think about a promoter and a detractor. And when I explain it to people I'm like a promoter is an evangelist and a detractor. Really, it's almost like a terrorist blowing up value in your business. And I don't know what you would have put at the end of the scale for Net Lives Enriched, but it's a fascinating thought to really put it in people terms like that.

It's a good point. Although I remember sitting in a cab sort of pondering these various names, Net Advocacy Score, Net Fan Score and, and Promoter was sort of winning in my head. But then I had this image of that fight promoter that used to work for Muhammad Ali and some of the great fighters and his hair was just crazy. And I thought Promoter, that's, that's just not a good name. But I, you know, I, I settled.

Now let's talk a little bit about how Net Promoter has evolved. So you know, as we discussed, Net Promoters now just coming out of its teenage years. How have you seen it evolve over the years? And has digitalization changed the way you think about it?

Yeah, digitalization is awesome. There are people who say just the opposite. Oh, Net Promoter is less relevant in the digital age. And I think, my God, are they the stupidest people I've ever met. This is crazy. Digital is just this awesome opportunity to measure this effectively and to delight customers. Because in the reconceiving of the whole customer journey, there are so many touch points and opportunities to really shock and amaze customers with wonderful, thoughtful, kind, caring innovations. This is like, you know, this is the age of Net Promoter and the evidence is clear. The Warby Parkers and pelotons of the world that are digitally on the cutting edge, they are heavy users of Net Promoter and continue to stretch it in this open source movement. One thing I should mention is Open source, that was probably the biggest strategic choice we talked about naming it and I thought naming was the most important choice. That was not. The most important choice was going with an open source mentality where practitioners could use this experiment with it, change it, modify it and it just. The innovation and the insights exploded. And now I read in Fortune last year that over 2/3 of the Fortune 1000 use net promoter. That never would have happened if we made it a black box. You have to pay us to use. Pay Fred to use this thing. That might have made me rich, richer, but I'm rich enough.

Well, I think it really enriched your life. It certainly, you know, I really think about it as a real gift to the marketing community. Look, I've been in marketing for years and I've always searched for common metrics. They don't really exist in my world. So that's why we're so excited about Net Promoter. I love the fact that you made it open source but as you say, giving people the opportunity to tinker with it. Well, that's also had its pros and cons, right?

It has. Like any open source movement, the negative is you lose control of it and people do stupid things. Well intentioned, but just inimical to the core philosophy of Net Promoter. And if my core philosophy is to treat people the way you'd want a loved one treated, that's the key to a good life, it's the key to a good business. Net Promoter measures that. But then so many people probably like you in marketing and they've been just dying for a more reliable statistic they could hold people accountable to. So they've, they've turned Net Promoter score into a key performance indicator and they link it to compensation of frontline employees and get people into trouble. If you're in the bottom decile or bottom quartile.

Yeah.

Which destroys it. They don't. It's well intentioned but every time I've seen this happen. When you link Net Promoter score to someone's bonus anywhere near the front line or touching them customers, they start caring more about the score and they could. And not about what that feedback might teach them about how I could innovate ways and learn how to serve my customers better. So do not. And that was. And I think most people do it. So I would. In the book Winning on Purpose, I say at the beginning, I think most people are abusing and misusing the system. They're making this cancerous decision to link it to compensation at the front line. They probably see it work for a short period because you get people's attention when you link it to their compensation. But within a year or two or three at the outside, it essentially destroys itself. And you get begging and pleading for scores and every survey has on the answer box. And by the way, in our company only a 10 is a passing grade. And don't get me into trouble, I'm just the poor employee. Don't give me a six or a seven because it's really the rest of the company that's messing this up. I'm here to help you. And it's a waste of the customer's time, it's a waste of the employees time. It diminishes the credibility of Net Promoter. You know, it's just bad. And there we are. That's the downside of an open source.

No, I totally agree. I think that you really put your finger on it. It's the targets of net Promoter score that drive terrible habits. And where I've seen it really working companies when they target response rate to get more responses in and also really have a culture of accepting it and making sure that they answer the customer. But that's maybe a whole different thing we can talk about. Let's get back to your book. The new book is called Winning on Purpose. Why winning on purpose?

I sat back, I had the advantage of a cancer diagnosis that put me in off. I was in bed and other uncomfortable places for a long time. But it gave me time to think and I thought why is it that the world doesn't see this, that the golden rule is the core to great business. Andy Taylor, where did Net Promoter come from? Well, I watched the system that Andy Taylor was using at Enterprise Rent a Car. It was a two question survey. Very high response rates linked it to frontline branch learning and it was brilliant. And we looked for the question that was more universal. But essentially it was just taking Andy's insight and just for listeners that don't know, this Enterprise was a tiny little leasing company in St. Louis, Missouri and Andy grew that to the largest car rental company on earth. The biggest fleet of privately owned cars on earth as a private company. So he's generating so much cash to finance this without ever going public. And when I asked him why Andy, how'd you do it? He says, fred, there's only one way to succeed in business. You treat your customers so they come back for more and bring their friends and you feel duh. But the insight was he measured it and none of the other companies I knew were measuring this idea. And he also told me, Fred, when you get it, when someone is Unhappy. And you're the leader of a company, your name's on the door, you've diminished their life. It hurts your reputation. So when I go to barbecues and neighborhood picnics and I overhear people saying bad things about how they were treated in an enterprise branch, it reflects on me personally. And I think that notion of this is your reputation, it's your impact on the world. Are you making it better? Are you weakening it? That was the inspiration behind Net Promoter. But very few people get the idea of the moral compass. So you ask, why winning on purpose? Cause these great businesses that do earn the highest net promoter scores, they have a leadership team that considers their primary purpose. The reason this business exists is to make our customers lives better. And I came to recognize that was a minority point of view at Bain. We surveyed over 200 executives around the world and asked them, what's the primary reason your company exists? Most of them said, oh, it's either shareholder value, maximize shareholder value, or be a great place to work. Or this bloating black hole of balanced stakeholderism, this hazily defined, we have to be good to everyone. Which it's sort of true. Obviously you got to treat everyone right, whether they're a supplier, an investor, an employee. But who do you exist to serve? Customers. That's why companies exist. And if you don't put customers first, you'll never win. And we found that only 10% of executives today believe that customers should come first, that the primary purpose of a business is to make customers lives better. And I was just stunned by that. And so the book Winning on Purpose will show not only that that's a good idea. There's pretty powerful evidence that's the only way to win in business.

I was fascinated by this. When I also read that stat, I was really blown away by that, that only a minority of companies, 20% of them around, thinking about putting customers first. But as I read through the book, I was thinking another title for it could be this is the dawn of, I don't know, Customer Capitalism.

That was almost the name of the book too. But I thought Customer Capitalist was a little highfalutin. And you know, I have with Bain on my resume and Harvard Business School and Harvard College, and it's pretty easy to dismiss me as a fancy pants, you know, know nothing. So I thought something a little more down to earth, you know, why do we exist?

I mean, I'd say the takeaway when you think about this, this shift towards the customer. I was also struck by your point about how most companies are thinking about, I think you would call it Model T Ford era accounting, thinking about fixed assets as the key part of a company's value. And yet the more you really explain this, that actually of course it's the customer relationships and increasingly in an era of employee shortages, the employees behind this. So let's go into that a little bit, talk about what you think some of the new valuations could be really all about.

Well, accounting really was developed for capital intensive industries, the railroads and the steel companies and it has evolved very little since. So when you get into a company, take Bain & Company. A balance sheet for Bain is just a stupid waste of time. You sort of have to do it, but in a peer services business it makes no sense at all. And then you get into a tech business or a SaaS business and standard P and L and accounting balance sheets are just. Why do we have to do this again? Well, because Sarbanes, Oxley and there are these rules, we go to jail if we don't. But when you. One of the best private equity guys I know, he says, you know, when we go in and we evaluate a business, the reason I hire hundreds of MBAs and I hire people like Bain & Co. Is because I have to take the accounting numbers and readjust them back into something that actually makes a difference with cash flows and what's driving cash flows. And that's a lot of work. And why do we make these entrepreneurs starting little businesses go through these semi useless accounting traditions Instead of doing what you know, let's measure something that really counts. Who are your assets? It's your employees who are inspired to delight customers or maybe it's their customers themselves. Let's keep track of those things. But that doesn't, you know, accounting statements don't have that stuff. How many employees you have, that's not on the accounting statement. How many of your customers of your growth in revenues, how much came from existing customers coming back and buying more stuff and referring their friends? Oh, that's not part of the accounting statement. And I could go on and on, but we really need an upgrade to customer based accounting. If customers are the reason the company exists, let's get clear. Accounting ought to keep track of that asset.

Okay, let's go into that then because how does accounting keep track on it? What are the key metrics that the finance world should be thinking about to track these new assets?

Well, Net Promoter score. If you're really doing it carefully and appropriately and not bribing and you get apples to apples truth. Net Promoter is pretty Good for that. But it's been so distorted and so many people are using it for the wrong reasons. And so many companies are just reporting their net promoter score with probably not any appreciation for. We got a 19 survey based scores and sampling and response bias and sampling bias, unconscious bias. Oh, I don't want to get that employee in trouble. I'm going to give you a 10, but I really think you're a 6. This stuff accumulates into useless data and now we've got hundreds. There was a Wall Street Journal article a year or two ago that just slammed this practice of reporting net promoter scores to investors with no explanation of which customers did you survey and how frequently and what were the response rates? And was this right after a transaction or some relationship and the CEO, they have no. Or the investor relations guys, they have no idea. So I felt like we had to come up with a new metric that investors could trust. And it could not be survey based. It had to be cash flow, accounting rigor, audit worthy and it became clear that earned growth was the right metric. I saw a bank in the US First Republic using something very similar and I felt like just like I saw Enterprise rent a car and I said, oh, they've got it. If I can just make this a little more universal, we've got something that's killer. First Republic bank was reporting to their investors. You know, we're growing at 15% a year and that could make in a 3% loan growth market. You might think if you're an investor or a regulator, you're dropping your credit standards. You're really bringing a lot of risk into your portfolio by outgrowing the market. And it's the regulator mentality, it's not a bad one. But they said this is not true because 90% of our growth is coming from existing customers who we know very well. And people, they refer and they keep track of that. And when I saw that, I said that's brilliant. How do you keep track of that? They said, well, when we bring a new customer on board, they can't. You have to put them on your records. We ask them what's the primary reason you join? And if they say referral, we learn what we can, but then we keep track of that. So they know for the referral generated book and how it performs versus all other acquisition channels. And that's what I think every company should have and will have if enough people read this book and talk about it, because earned growth. And there'll be a Harvard Business Review article at the end of the year just focused on earned growth as the metric. And it's how much of your growth is earned through referral and how much is bought through sales, commission and price reductions and advertising and promotion.

I couldn't agree with you more. And my personal experience is when I speak to big companies, almost all of the effort on reporting goes on how we're acquiring new customers. Everything is in that space. Pipelines, conversion, funnels, everything is there. And you say, okay, what are you going to do about retention? Oh, well, we don't really measure that. You know, what's your retention rate? We don't really know. So there's got to be a huge shift in businesses around the world to get their heads around this, right? So it's great that people are going to read your book, but then who's going to bring it to life in an organization? Is it a lowly chapter?

There's one chapter. There's a chapter that will get people's attention. Because at Bain, we have this philosophy of put your money where your mouth is. And I have been saying that companies that earn loyalty and get this flywheel going of back for more and bring your friends, the world undervalues that. And now that we measure Net Promoter carefully at Bain, in nps Prism data business within Bain, I really have a pretty clear picture. Industry after industry, who's earning the highest net promoter score. So whenever there's no client conflict, I invest in the company. And I've been doing that for 10 years. And my returns are more than triple the stock market over the decade. And there are very few private equity funds that come close to that. And there are no public mutual funds or ETFs that come close. And I think that, I mean, that's, that's a logical way to beat the market. And if that's not newsworthy, I don't know what is.

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So, Fred, chapter five, which I think is really my favorite one because it's the one with all the graphs. You talk about how you name this index and you've called it. I thought it was a folksy neighbor first, but actually I think it's really got some resonance. So what's behind this index of yours?

Well, I've thought about what my life, my purpose in life was. And with Fred as a name, it's sort of. I said, well, it's Foster recommendation, Eliminate detraction, that little acronym. That's Fred. And since I invest in all the NPS leaders, I've actually got a stock index that I can report publicly. And so, Freddie, the Fred stock index is what we publish in the book and show people. This is how you're more than tripling the stock market over the last decade. I begin the book with evidence that greatness has been mystified. People think about greatness as financial greatness. We look through an accounting lens. I think greatness is lives enriched. So let's take this Net Promoter as a rough measure of how many lives enriched and the people that I used as exemplars in the previous book, the ultimate question 2.0, I took every one of those that was a public company and just tracked over 10 years what has been the total shareholder return. Those companies actually were five times the US median return. And that's shocking. And so greatness not only makes more sense to me using Net Promoter as a metric, it actually is truly a resilient investment strategy that crushes stock market averages and I believe will continue to until the market really understands the power of Andy Taylor's insight that the only way to grow a profitable business is to treat customers so they. To love them. To love them so much they want to come back for more and bring their friends. And I think I've got at least another 10 or 20 years of beating the market in front of me.

I think you're right. I mean, I've been thinking about this for years, about how you could try this. I think even you and I spoke about it 10 years ago. Wow. You should make an index to do it. So when you actually put it in the book. Well, I'm not going to give away any spoilers because people have to read this, but the graph where, for example, you show where T Mobile gives the best total shareholder return, I mean, it's really astonishing.

T Mobile is a great example. This was a company on its knees ready to go bankrupt. And a new CEO came in and convinced his team we have the worst network, we have terrible service, we got nothing. All we have is a set of customers. And so the one thing we can do is love those customers better than anybody else. And he turned that into the best shareholder return over the last roughly decade.

Yeah. And I love the way that you put all the competitors there on a scale. I mean, for someone that loves graphs like I do, those pictures in the book really, really speak volume. So if there's any way of getting.

Yeah, when I was in school I was going to get a PhD in economics, so I took all the advanced economics courses and I, I took the statistics, the graduate level probability statistics stuff because you sort of get it out of your way and it's a cheaper way to get a PhD and then I lost interest in that. But all these critiques that Net Promoter seems to attract from these so called expert statisticians. You go, oh Polly, those are so lame and lack, oh my Lord. Those are first grade insights.

But it's also okay because you know, you've got basically a system to beat the house in Vegas as far as I can tell, you know, if you, if you, if you take to a logical conclusion, if you can find a way to really understand earned growth and use Net Promoter maybe as a forward indicator of that. I think it's a fantastic investment thesis.

And that's really what the evidence is on my side. It's only 10 years of data.

Let some, let's pivot a bit because you know, I want to get back into the whole lives thing. It is reading the book, it is quite touchy feely. Dare I say it's almost a woke business book. Please don't get upset by that. But it's really about, I keep reading words like love in this and I was really, I was actually quite moved as I went through the book. You know, what's the best signal you get back from a customer that showed that you've made their lives better?

Well, if you're in front of them, you see the smile on their face, the look in their eyes. In most businesses we can't rely on that anymore, especially as you move toward digital. So I found that when a customer behaves in a way that they think that you've been remarkable, that you've made their life better, the most reliable signal is they want that experience for a loved one, for a friend or family member. And so legitimate, not bribes, not begging, but when they just on their own refer friends and family to that brand or to that product, that's an act of love on their part. Not so much love for you, love for their family member or friend. Because they want to enrich their life by making them aware of this special opportunity. And so Net Promoter is a net love score. I mean, talk about not getting acceptance in the business community. If I'd started with that, Net Lives enriched is flaky enough, but it's this notion of what makes people loyal. Well, you don't trick them with fine print and bribes with loyalty programs. You act in their best interest, you love them in love in the sense of your happiness is a function of their happiness. One of the guys that joined Bain and Company about the same time I did is Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit. And Scott went off after several years and did his thing and built this great company, Intuit. And when he was one of the, he was probably the first outside company outside Bain to adopt that promoter because this philosophy fits so well with what he was trying to build. And he told me a long time ago, he says, fred, we don't deserve a dollar of profit from a customer until we know that customer's happy. And I thought, now that is a high brow. I mean that is a wonderful philosophy for a business. And you would have dismissed him as an idealist years ago. But Intuit is just a crushing success story. I think the market value is 150, maybe 200 billion. It's a huge success through thick and thin, through software changing from shrink wrap stuff. And he was almost acquired by Microsoft. And then you go to the cloud and through all these changes, that philosophy of love, of we don't deserve a dollar of profit until we've made our customers life better and we've solved their problem. That's the key behind this, that great businesses love their customers.

I think they might have seemed flaky a few years ago, but if you think about the choices that millennials and Gen Zs have about where they work, it's more important than ever to believe in a mission. And I think that really does speak to knowledge workers because you do need something to go after it. So I really think this is resonating.

Yeah, good people are not going to go commit their work lives to a place that embarrasses them or it's purely about making money. And if they're forced into that, they'll do it as long as they have to. And when they get enough money, they quit. So the insight, and you're right, I think this new generation of young people, they are clear that they want to have purpose in their own lives. And so that's the connection with the book Winning on Purpose. You can't attract talented, digital, digitally skilled, young, energetic, top, top flight people unless you have a purpose that energize, attracts them and keeps them energized. That however, has led to a very fuzzy understanding of purpose and it's become, use the word woke. I think that's almost never a positive, it's a pejorative word and it should be because, oh, I've got, you know, we've got all these cool missions and this is, we're committed to this. You know, we're gonna end racial bias and, and we're going to, you know, we're going to fix all the problems in the world and those are lovely ideas and people should work hard on them. But in a business, if you don't love your customer and rally around that very energizing notion as we exist to enrich the lives we touch, primarily customers. Yes, there's golden rule. We treat everyone in this community the right way, but we exist as a community for customers. That's the only purpose that wins. And all these flaky marketing schemes are so manipulative of. Oh, what purpose du jour are we going to commit to that will make everyone love us? There's only one purpose that wins and that's loving your customers.

I think this really resonated with me because I think for me there's implications for leadership changes. A world where you just go after maximizing shareholder value or capturing customers for the quick win to me seems quite an aggressive male dominated world which certainly doesn't love customers. So is that driving a shift or will the shift to more diversified demographic make that. What are your thoughts on that?

I think the shift has already happened. The reason that NPS leaders are crushing the competition and generating cash. Why is enterprise number one in the world? Why is Apple number one in the world? Why is Amazon number. There are a lot of very impressive successes who have committed to making their customers their primary responsibility. I think earned growth and some of the things in the book will accelerate that, I hope. But it's a paradigm shift. This idea of our financials are accountability devices. They're the only audited information we have. People go to jail if they fudge those numbers. And when I sit on boards of directors, that's what you talk about 90% of the time. And that's a big shift that has to take place and in a different understanding. When financials guide your governance, your bonus systems, your capital allocation, you can say all the nice people things and love customer things you want. But if those are always the data that you're returning to for setting priorities and holding people accountable, you have a financial mindset and I'm arguing in the book that has to shift and people have to think about the world from a customer mindset. Customer capitalism is a pretty good name, but customers are the true asset and our behavior has to shift. And I think, well, what's the evidence? The evidence is if I love my customers and I do it well, shareholders are getting rich. That's what the Freddie proves. But if you focus on shareholders first, your customers are not happy because that's where you get these bad profits. This is where, oh, I'm going to charge you 400% markups on refilling your gas tank for the rental car. And oh, if I am allowed to, I'll charge You roaming fees with your mobile phone that'll put you in the poorhouse. All these little gimmicks that are legal for the moment but are abusive, they make sense only in a world where profits is purpose and they make no sense in a world where loving your customer is purpose.

Yeah, and I think I also took away, you know, in a world where cash has been relatively cheap or money's been cheap, it makes no sense to focus on that moving. I mean you speak very eloquently about looking a customer in the eye. This, this is very much in the consumer domain. But as you move into more business, to business relationships, does the loving the customer relationship still work? And if so, how can you frame that in a way that works in a business relationship?

Yeah, most people seem to think that net promoter is primarily consumer and that couldn't be farther from the truth. It started in a business to business mindset at Bain & Company. A classic. Consulting to large complex enterprises is where the idea came from because our business shouldn't exist today. It just was a little pipsqueak. McKinsey and BCG and others were big and strong and successful. Bain had a deep insight that only when you commit teams to make their clients succeed, both at a corporate level, sort of a stock price, financial success, but also humans that you're working with, you have to help their careers and help them be better people. That is the core to success and it made Bain a big successful company. When I said only 10% of leaders in the world today think customer is the primary reason they exist, we did that same survey across Bain teams, frontline teams. Two thirds of them think making clients lives better is the primary purpose that Bain exists. Not making our partners rich, not being a great place to work. By the way, Bain is number one on the glass door. Best great places to work. It's been number one four or five times in the last decade. It's certainly among the handful of best places to work in the world in my opinion and thousands, millions of other people's. And it's not because that's our primary goal and our people know it. They know our clients. Our success is why we exist. And I think that's what makes it a great place to work. How many of those great place to work lists have anything in their surveys about this is a company that enriches the lives of its customers? None. It's just, it's how, it's, how fancy are our fringe benefits? What's our compensation? How cool are we? How woke are we? And you go Wait a minute. That's all cool stuff, but that's the fringe. The center is this a community that treats each one another right and has. Is committed to this purpose of making our customers lives better because that's what inspires good people. You know, you'll work hard, you'll go, you, you'll crawl through the mud and have tough times, if it's worth it. And enriching lives is worth it.

That's a great way to end on that one. But let's find out what's next for you because you're back with enormous amount of energy with this book, winning on purpose. What's the next horizon for you as this starts sinking in?

It's a great question, I think. Yeah. Mr. Cancer is the one that's going to determine that. If I can keep cancer under control. I think there are a lot of important things to focus on. Number one, I really would like to see earned growth become a reportable metric for all companies. Something that not only investors deserve to understand, but it will help companies run themselves better internally. And it's something that employees and prospective employees should be able to evaluate. Is this the kind of place that I want to commit my life, you know, make my life's work? And there's a long way, you know, Net promoter is almost 20 years old. It took 20 years to get that through open source. And lucky things. I hope earned growth can get to that same level because in many ways earned growth is just the accounting twin of Net Promoter. Score.

Yeah. Oh, that's a really nice way to think about it. Yeah.

Yeah. So there's a long way to go. I'll keep investing and try to prove to people that this is a great thing. But I'm open to suggestions. If you or your listeners have opportunity ideas, let me know. I'm always open to feedback.

I think that's great. And that is actually a really good philosophy for life. Right? Open for feedback. And we probably need to encourage companies to have a safe space for feedback in their organizations. But for me, if I take one thing away from Net Promoter, it's not the score. It really is embedding the golden rule in what you do in business. And in a way, it's so blindingly obvious, but.

Oh, but if the golden rule were so blindingly obvious, I mean, I have a full section, you know, an entire chapter on the golden rule and how people don't really understand it. If it's such a powerful idea, I think it's probably the most important idea in human existence. It's certainly the gold standard in human relationships. And yet when you were actually treated that way, it's so noteworthy. You tell all your friends about it. It's actually quite uncommon. So you have to resolve why, if this is such a damn good idea, is it so rarely put in practice?

But maybe that's the point. Maybe the winners that put it into practice, these are the ones that deserve the customer love. Therefore.

Yeah, and I think leaders need to. I think they're, as you know from reading the book, leaders are responsible for building the community and the rules of engagement and how you measure success today. They talk in golden rule terms, but they don't build systems and processes that are rigorous and help people fight against the current that's created by short term financial metrics that overwhelm our thinking. I think the smartest leaders, they recognize I need a set of management processes and measures and all these boring things that the accountants take care of for me. No, leaders have to grab control and say no accounting, we have to earn are caustic. We have to return profits or we can't exist. But right now, because those are the only measures and processes that drive things, people get it confused. They think that's our purpose. No, our purpose is to treat one another with kindness and dignity and respect and to make our customers lives better. Did you see the article in the Wall Street Journal recently? This restaurant put a sign in the front window that said this is to customers says be kind or please leave. And I thought that is a brilliant leader. That is what all CEOs should think carefully about. Should they have a sign in their front window that says treat people kindly with dignity and loving, dignity and respect or please leave because there's 5 or 10% of the population that you want them out. They might be profitable customers, they might be great salesmen that look like they're making you a lot of new customer money. They're bad and you got to find a way to squeeze them out of your community. Or we're stuck in this game of saying we are woke and we're still maximizing shareholder value in our hearts and souls.

That's a wonderful way to leave it, Fred. Leaders that can inspire by giving out kindness and generosity, I really think is that it's such a great beacon of hope for us out there. And if you want to read more about this, Fred's book Winning on Purpose is out at the end of November. Fred, thank you so much for talking to us today. I'm looking forward to speaking to you again and maybe next time we can talk about the Net Promoter Manifesto, which is a whole chapter in itself. But once again, thank you for sharing your time and listening. I wish all the success of the new book.

Thank you, Adam. I appreciate it.