Redefining Success: From Hustle to Flourishing with Meghan French Dunbar

Welcome to The Flourishing Edge, the podcast where we share weekly tips on making flourishing your competitive edge. I'm Ashish Kothari, your host, and each week we'll dive deep with flourishing experts, changemakers, and executives to share best practices that can help you unlock higher performance through science-based interventions. Let's step together into the edge of what's possible and live, work, and lead with more joy, health, love, and meaning. Megan, it's so lovely to have you on the show. I want to start with a question. If there is one idea that you want our listeners to take away from our conversation together, what do you want that to be?

Ah, this is such a good question to think about. Uh, the thing that came up for me was that if you replace a lot of the things that we associate with leadership, the way that we run our workplaces and the way that we imagine success, if you actually look at all those things and replace the key focus of them with the idea of flourishing, it transforms quality of work, quality of life, pretty much all the things that we do care about in the world to be so much better.

Yeah. Megan French Dunbar, friends, author of This Isn't Working, former CEO of Conscious Company Media, which as part of that company and the publications, Megan's talked with thousands of leaders who are conscious capitalism believers. Of business as a force for good. It is so wonderful to have you and to have this dialogue together.

Makes my heart overflow to be here. I'm so thrilled.

You know, and I'm just so delighted that you're actually in Boulder so we get a chance to do this in person. I've always— I was so surprised, Megan, around a year and a half ago, Ryan Heckman, Rally Day Partners, and I were on a walk together. And I said, isn't it interesting that we don't actually have a Conscious Capitalism chapter in Boulder, in Colorado. And he said, funny you say that because I'm actually bringing that to Colorado. And so together with him, became a part of kind of getting the initial set of leaders involved in it. And now there is a chapter that's running here. Thank you. I just couldn't believe it. I'd written to Raj and to Timothy and I said like, I don't get it. One of those unique places in the country.

Yes.

Where if there is a natural owner for conscious capitalism, it is here.

Yep.

Right? We've got the university and we've got Naropa. We've got the mountains and we've got the tech community. Mm-hmm. Everything that you need for the perfect blend of masculine and feminine, of purpose and profit, is here. And yet, it was missing. So, but it's just so great to explore and kind of really bring the power of all that work into the community here now and in this conversation. So look, you said, look, if we fundamentally think about leadership and management and success, and instead of thinking about performance, How can I perform more? How can I achieve more? If we actually anchored it on flourishing, everything changes. To our leaders who have been, who've grown up in the Milton Friedman shareholder primacy over everything else. And they say, yeah, whatever. What would be the points that you might highlight to say, actually, no. Keep your perspective, but let's entertain a different perspective here.

Well, how much time do we have? So starting on the leadership side of things, I just wrote a book, This Isn't Working. And one of the things that I was looking at was looking at leaders who had what we would consider to be a financially successful career in some regard, but had done so in a way where they were flourishing themselves. And had created workplaces where people were flourishing as well. That comes into my answer here because what I figured out was all of them in one way or another had actually centered this idea of flourishing in their leadership approach and to their own personal health and wellbeing, to their management style and to their idea of success. And what I mean by flourishing, so when we take leadership for example, instead of, oh, optimizing their time management and being the most effective, productive leaders humanly possible, they really focused on the quality of their being more than the quantity of their doing. They really looked at all of the internal work that needs to be done to optimize for quality rather than productivity.

Yeah.

So health and wellness, looking at people who invested in their own joy and satisfaction, people who nurtured deep connections with others, had purpose in their meaning, purpose and meaning in their life and their work. All of the key markers of flourishing, they really identify those as what a leader needs to focus on in order to be optimized. So they also took that into management structures. What do we need to do to make it so everyone in the workplace has the opportunity to thrive and flourish as well? And when we look at success, instead of it being achievement-based, wealth, title, status, all the things that we think of as success, Yes, it all actually revolved around were they flourishing? How much were they flourishing? What did their ideal life look like? And how do you build a career that builds towards that rather than a career that the sole purpose is more?

Yeah. Well, listen, we are of such like mind. These words around flourishing and what you just articulated, I'm reminded of a conversation with Bob Chapman when he was asked— Bob, by the way, for those who don't know him, he's the author of Everybody Matters. He is the CEO of a $3.5 billion company, Barry-Wehmiller. They've grown through 80 acquisitions, every one of them successful in a world where 90% of acquisitions fail to create value. Most of it, he's kept 90-95% of the people who worked in those companies that he bought there. This is blue-collar, heavy engineering work. And when he was asked, what business is Barry-Weidliner in? He said, we're in the business of building people. Not building machines, but building people. And when he was asked, how do you measure How do you measure success? He said, I measure it based on the number of lives we touch. And what happens is because of that deep care, the business has done great, right? It's performed better than any other, than the overall index, the stock market index. You know, it's not publicly traded, it's private, but you can look at the growth in shareholder value using any valuation models and it works. And they are not alone, right? They are not alone. Oxford's work highlights that 2% to 3.5% alpha is what you can create if you have flourishing cultures. And the ingredients you talk about are so critical, right? Purpose. Do people find meaning at work and do you find meaning at work? Joy and satisfaction. From what energy are you operating every day? Are you excited to show up to work? Are you learning adaptability? Relationships. What is the quality of your relationships with your people, with your community, with your customers and your suppliers? Are they synergistic or are they exploitative? And then life force, you know, are you taking care of yourself physically, mentally, spiritually? Are you really filling your cup? Because if you are empty, you can't pour.

Yes.

And do the most important life's work. These were not natural ideas for me growing up in India. Uh, you know, I grew up— my mother and father, uh, my mother was a gold medalist in maths, a PhD. My father was the state topper in engineering. And, uh, growing up in the '70s, it was all about, uh, You know, how can you work really hard and do great? In fact, my close to 30 years of my life, I internalized something very young, Megan, when I got 97 on 100 in my first grade math exam. And, you know, I was like, well, you could have got the other 3. 'Great job on 97, but next time try harder.' That 7-year-old— I know you have a 7-year-old— uh, internalized that perfection was the price you pay for being loved. My love for my parents was completely unconditional. They're like the best parents. I talk to them every day. Uh, I am where I am because of all the sacrifices they did for me. But that was my story. I came to all of this work only 10 years ago. And so I'm curious, were you always attuned to flourishing as a way, and this is, you know, flourishing as a force for good, business as a core purpose, or did you come at it through your own journey like mine?

I mean, I wish that I could say that this is, I just came out this way, but I had a similar-ish journey. I very much identify with being the high achiever as a youngling and feeling that that was how I proved my worth. I, you know, captain of the soccer team, captain of the basketball team, striving to be best in class, trying to get into the best schools, all the things. And that high achiever mentality was great as I launched my own business. I was young when we launched Conscious Company magazine and I, if I was going to do something, I was going to knock it out of the park. And that served me well up to a point. So I had the beautiful thing that I did have from that start was I knew that the purpose part was a big element that I wasn't going to compromise on. Every single thing that I did in my professional career after college— I'm trying to make sure that that tracks— yeah, was very much focused on purpose. I worked at the Environmental Defense Fund. I worked in impact investing. It was all things that made the world a better place in some way. So I had that part, but I did not have the self-care, connection, all of the other joy, satisfaction, all those things that we also need.

Yeah.

You can have one or two of those ingredients and it can feel a little bit better than what I watch some people go through in their career, but if you don't have all of them, it will eventually catch up to you. And my journey was very textbook for that.

Walk us through it.

Yeah, we— so I launched, I crowdfunded a print magazine in 2014 called Conscious Company Magazine with a co-founder. Our first issue was picked up by every Whole Foods in the United States. I was 29 at the time. And so all of a sudden this experiment, which was just more of like, let's see if we can do this, became, oh my gosh, I'm CEO of a company and I get to run this. And we did the whole entrepreneur's journey of investment rounds and scaling the business, adding on product lines. We sold the company in 2017. I stayed on as CEO under our parent company. I had a baby in 2019, and when I had come back from maternity leave, it was finally that moment, you know, it was 5 years after we started that all of it had caught up to me in a big way. And it was the— I never saw my friends and family because I was always working. I just completely ignored my health and well-being, physical and mental health, because I didn't have time for those things. I worked nights, I worked weekends, I never did anything that actually made me happy. I was— all I did was work. And then I had a child and I was pulled, like all I wanted to do was work and I really wanted to be a good mom and I wasn't sleeping and all the things. And so it was a level of burnout That is probably similar to many people who've been on your show before, where it's, it's that collapse that you need, unfortunately, to stop and take a bit of an audit of what you're doing, why you're doing it, all the things. So I ended up resigning February 1st, 2020. My last day was March 13th. I had intentions to launch an in-person events company for women. Then COVID, within 4 days of being my last day at my business, I was on global lockdown with a 9-month-old son and went from full-time CEO to full-time mom. And there is about a 2-year period in there from 2020 to 2022. I had another child, social isolation, trying to do consulting and all the things that I, the most extraordinary thing happened to me. I wasn't allowed to achieve. I didn't have the outlet. I was no longer standing on stage and getting the standing ovations and the accolades and all the things. I was no longer CEO. I was just surviving and being a mom. And I had no sense of identity. I had no sense of self-worth. My confidence collapsed. And it was all necessary because it was that metamorphosis is that point at which I had to invest.

The messy middle.

Yeah. And my therapist was always talking about the messy middle and I was like, I hate the messy middle. And I've been in the messy middle for so long. And I mean, I was in the messy middle for 2 years and I was miserable. And then I got to the other side and that was the little kernel that became this book idea, which was, is it possible to be high achieving to do work that you love? Because I, I love work. I love my stretching my brain and creating things and working with people and pushing the envelope. And can— is there a way to do that in a way where I don't destroy myself and in a way where it's additive to my quality of life instead of detracting from my quality of life? And that's been the last 3 years I've been on that journey, and Here we are.

Amazing. I have only gotten through the first 2 chapters of your book, and I loved it. I loved it. So for our listeners, This Isn't Working, it's a fantastic book, and it's a book that you need to read. It doesn't matter if you're a man, you're a woman. You talk a lot about women, you know, paying a heavy price, and it's very, very true. We are in a patriarchal society. Most of the world is. And I think we end up consciously or unconsciously having our women carry, especially working women and especially mothers who are working, just carry a huge disproportionate load. If you're listening to this episode, 2 or 3 episodes ago, I had another conversation with Mary Sheehan. She's at Adobe, who talked about this working mother guilt that so many carry. But this book and the practices are applicable no matter who you are. And I think you've just done such a beautiful job—

Thank you.

—of articulating that framework and talking about them. Thank you.

Yeah, I— one of the gorgeous parts of the book was that I got to distill a lot of other people's wisdom. And so there was very much my own hard-won insights, but I also got to interview nearly 100 other extraordinary humans and bring that all into the book, which brings it to life in a way that it wouldn't have if it was just my thoughts and ideas. Yeah.

So I want to get into what you learned and your core framework that you talk about around flourishing. What are some of the key elements, Megan, that you discovered for flourishing individuals, flourishing workplaces?

Yeah, I, the way that I kind of put them in my head at this point, there's purpose, which we just talked about. There's what I call either growth or expansion, and there's quality of life. And purpose is one that I think has been, we've talked about that a lot. It's been kind of a mainstream thing for a little while. Simon Sinek, Start With Why, you know, That I think we've established that that's a, a core element that we need is the purpose part. The expansion or growth, that is a part when we look at the key predictors of intrinsic motivation as opposed to extrinsic motivation, which is the achievements, the awards, the wealth, the status, the title, things that prove our worth to other people. Intrinsic motivation is the thing that brings us inherent satisfaction, the thing that we would do when no one else is looking. And purpose is one of the top 3 intrinsic motivators. But as is growth or mastery, continual learning, being challenged, following things that you're interested and passionate about instead of the shoulds like I need to get a practical career that I hate. It is I am passionate about this thing and I'm going to figure out a way to monetize it. And so that was a key element of everyone that I looked at. They were doing things that they loved and constantly growing and learning. And then quality of life, as we spoke to, the core elements are health, joy, connection, and feeling a deep sense of values alignment and like inherent satisfaction in what you're doing. And those three things, if you put them as your little flywheel on your leadership, your workplace, your ideas of success, it completely shifts your mindset around those things and has you start to focus on what I think are the things that actually matter.

Yeah, look, I think we can talk about all of these. And you know what I would say is it's true. There is so much research on purpose, right? And why purpose matters and why most companies— when you started your company, you started probably because with a higher purpose of service, of bringing these stories to life. But by the time you sold your company, along the way, as much as purpose is running, we start orienting towards profit and growth and all the other things. And that's the common startup story. But it's also the story we see in so many large companies, right? Most people who work don't find meaning in work. Yeah. It's just a way to earn a paycheck. We had Tamara Miles on our podcast. Not that long ago. And our whole work is around meaning and how do we actually create more meaningful workplaces. It's what we spend most of our time on. Yes. Right? And, you know, I always— a lot of people— I do a lot of work with large companies and people always say, why do I have to find meaning at work? And my response always is, well, because that's where you spend most of your time. And so if you don't find meaning in an activity that occupies 30% of your lifetime, that you do most of your waking hours other than sleeping during the week between your 20s to your 60s, whenever you decide to retire, if you're suffering at work, how can you flourish in life?

There is no distinguishing between the two. And that is one of the fallacies that we have, is that you can just shut your brain off and not just not have meaning at work, but in often cases be stripped of your autonomy, overworked and overwhelmed, chronic stress, cutthroat environments, hyper-competition, isolation, all the things that we need to thrive as humans. We've— when you look at the top predictors of chronic stress and burnout, and then you look at how we've designed workplace culture, we've essentially just You can draw a straight line from each element. All of them are baked into the way that we run our organizations. And if you can reverse that cycle, that's where we start helping people flourish. But most people are going to work on a daily basis and being stripped of dignity and like they're being valued, like people care about them.

They feel like they don't matter. Yeah, right. They don't matter. That was our conversation topic for our Flourishing Leader community that we set up. We had Zach Mercurio talk about mattering. Yes. At work. Amazing, amazing work. But look, I think this is a great conversation. I actually want to get into expansion and quality of life because over the last several years, I've had a chance of serving a couple of really amazing not-for-profits. 90% of people at these companies, right, these organizations, US Ski and Snowboard, USA Gymnastics, 90% of people would say, "I find meaning at work." That's the reason they chose to work in these places. They're not alone. Most not-for-profits or impact companies are very much— those are the people they attract. And yet, as I think about expansion and quality, I think they also consistently get the lower scores because you put so much of you into serving others. Yes. And that's where I think the bow breaks. Very much. Because you need all these things together if you have to flourish.

Yes.

Right? One at the expense of others is just a recipe for personal burnout and less impact in the world. So let's take those. Let's start with expansion and talk about this notion of what did you find leaders who were flourishing and through flourishing achieving great impact in the world, what were some ways that expansion was a key part of their life?

Yeah, one of my favorite case studies in the US right now is Torani Syrups. And if you've ever had a flavored latte, I guarantee you've had Torani Syrups. They're a 100-year-old company. CEO Melanie Dilbecco. She took over 34 years ago, the first non-family member to run the organization. And she has run over 20% annual growth year over year for 34 years in a row.

Wow. 20%. Take over 20% and has taken—

they double in size on average every 3 and a half years. And she has taken them from a million-dollar organization to soon to be a billion-dollar organization. And of course, those are all the numbers that we need to get people to actually turn their heads and listen. How she has done it is the different part. And she always says that their financial performance is the lagging indicator.

Always. This conversation is brought to you by Happiness Squad, where we help leaders build new mindsets, new habits, and transform their ways of working to truly flourish. If you're ready to unleash the untapped human potential in your organization and operate at your best, Come visit us at happinesssquad.com and start your journey today.

The leading indicator is the growth of their people. And so they have 4 things that they consistently focus on. They have what they call an opportunity company model. So the first one very much speaks to quality of life, but it's financial resilience. They ensure that everyone on the team, very specifically entry-level hourly workers, because they're a manufacturing company. They're one of the largest manufacturing companies in the Bay Area right now, but they make sure that everyone hits a living wage as soon as possible, but then is also brought into employee ownership, profit distribution, annual bonuses. And that extends to everyone at the organization, not a select few, as well as comprehensive benefits. And so financial resilience, they also have an ethos of shared success. Is that the second pillar? Yeah. And this is— I spoke to many of the elements of this, but it is very much instead of the I, it's the we. And you see this at a lot of employee-owned companies where instead of all of the financial benefits of the organization going to a select few shareholders, this goes to all of the employees and the shareholders. And the shareholders actually get more returns as a result of sharing the wealth with everyone who is day-to-day creating that wealth. And when workers have an incentive to come in and help their teammates, provide ideas, problem solve. They do those things. So shared ownership is collaborative decision making, employee ownership, profit distribution, bonus plans, and very much instead of hierarchy determining value, it is a baseline respect for everyone at the organization. The people who are working on the floor of the industrial plant, are eating lunch with the CEO in the cafeteria. This owner of the— co-owner of the company, the granddaughter, Lisa, she knows everyone's names in the company. She's walking around handing out paychecks. It's a more of a community feel rather than a hierarchical isolation siloed feel. So pillar number 3 is growth and this continual learning. We call that deep growth and it is that everyone at the organization is a leader ready to be developed. And that by investing in continual learning, of course, skills and professional development opportunities, but also giving them opportunities for growth across the organization. So they have what they call career mixology. That is, if you want to— if you're working in the line and someday you want to go try out marketing, We'll figure that out. So it is internal. You can just shift wherever it is that you are interested in and passionate about. You can try out as many things as you want and we will support your growth in doing so, so that you find the place that you are happy about, that you want to expand into. So there's this career growth element. And then, and the fourth pillar is Autonomy, having voice and choice. And this is one that gets overlooked, but I cannot underscore it enough. When people are stripped of their autonomy, it is one of our core needs as a human. And most organizations are set up in a way that people are stripped of their autonomy. They have decisions made for them, they lack access to information, they are told what to do, when to do it, who to do it with, when to do it by, and they're not valued. Their opinion, it's, people don't ask for their opinions. When you told, spoke about Barry-Wehmiller, I got to visit their plant in Phillips, Wisconsin, and this was a paper machine manufacturing facility. And I got to meet with a bunch of the folks that were there and they had been acquired in 2008. And I got to meet a bunch of the folks who had been at the plant beforehand, before the acquisition. And this guy Jeff says, Essentially, it was leadership walking around saying, if we want your opinion, we'll give it to you. We literally had to wear color-coded hats that delineated our hierarchy. We had to clock in when we got there. There was a horn that went for lunch, a horn that told us to come back, a horn that told us we could leave. Everything was about command and control and just treating these people like they couldn't operate as normal functioning, valuable adults.

It breaks my heart to think, but that's the reality of so many workplaces.

Yes. And he was talking about how angry and disenfranchised he was. And this is what most people are going through. They're being treated like toddlers when they go into the workplace. And so Barry-Wehmiller comes in and one of the big things that they have is a sense of autonomy, of actually listening to people, treating people like leaders, having everyone come in and create core values for their team, telling people that we believe that you can be a leader one day. And this guy was saying, "There was no part of me that ever thought I could be a leader at this company. I was more interested in complaining, but they came in and showed me they believed in my value and listened to my voice." And now he's a line leader. And he also said it changed outside of the workplace as well. He was no longer this disenfranchised, angry person. He felt empowered. He felt like a better part of the community, a better husband, a better father, because he wasn't stripped of his dignity every day that he walked in the door. So Torani does the same thing. It's very much a feedback culture, collaborative decision-making. They're transparent with their company financials, with why they're making decisions. And when you look at their Gallup scores on engagement, they have all these questions that are, do I feel like someone cares for me at work? You know, theirs are like 85%, whereas the national average right now is 20% of people feel as though the person above them cares about them in the workplace. So those are— I love that story.

And if, you know, for our listeners, if you just think about that and say, well, yeah, I mean, you know, financial resilience makes sense, shared success, growth, autonomy. I mean, these all feel like really good things. Think about if the place you are at allows you to do that. But more importantly, think about how are you personally creating those opportunities.

And who are they primarily for? Who are they for? Because those 4 things are almost always available to the very, very top tier of the organization. Has financial resilience, has equity, has growth opportunities as a high potential leader, and has the autonomy.

Most of the organization. In fact, you know, Megan, I'm actually collaborating now. We've just started, very, very early days, but with Zeynep Tawant. She's a professor of operations at MIT. Great. She wrote a book called Case for Good Jobs, and she's been on this mission for the last 13, 14 years now. This is the stat that is in the book that like shook me to the core. Even though I was doing this work around flourishing, I was blind to it, and I want to share that stat. Here with our listeners. 50 million working Americans, 45% of the workforce, their median pay from their primary employer is $19,750. So think about them. So that means approximately 45% of human assets that we have, they're not thinking about customer excellence and operational excellence. They're worried about putting food on the table. Correct. They're putting, working on 2, 3 jobs, trying to balance unstable schedules, not getting fired, just so that they're in a broken system, right? So I love your book. You know, there has to be a different way. It's this isn't working. Our workplaces are not working. If for 45% of people we're not even paying them, forget about, you know, that's not enough money to run any household anywhere. Correct. For a company to put financial resilience as a core element is important. And there was important, you said not living wage, you didn't say minimum wage. No. You didn't say competitive wage. Because most companies, when they decide what they're going to pay, they look at what others in their region are doing. And if you're stuck in a system where the next retailer pays $18 an hour, and this one pays $18.50, and this one pays $17.50, you will never, through competitive matching, get to $30 an hour that Costco pays. Yes. Right? They're operating in a fundamentally different system that allows them to pay people more, create stability that allows them to drive higher performance, which I bet is what's happening at this company, right, Tehrani Syrups.

Yeah, they're— Melanie told me a story that they were redoing compensation structures. And they, of course, worked with a consulting firm. The consulting firm said, here's the market rate that we want you to pay entry-level, mid-level manager executives. All the things. And Melanie looked at it, looked at them and said, let's redo this using the fundamental assumption that the market is immoral. And they had no— they, you know, they're like, we don't know how else to do this. She was like, all right, then we'll, we'll redo it on our own because we cannot pay market rate because it is an immoral element that we are destroying society as a result of it. And I mean, when you're talking about We have 40% of people who do not have retirement accounts in the US. We have 37% of people who cannot afford an emergency of $400 or more. And when you look at the research around this financial instability, they found that people are 5 times more distracted at work if they are financially insecure. And on average, it reduces their productivity by 7 hours per week just by worrying and stressing about their financial stability or having to work another job or being exhausted from having to holds everything together. You cannot expect good work from people if they do not have financial security.

Yeah. And it's the base, right? Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Financial stability is at the base. That means they don't have enough food, safety, shelter, the basic needs. Let's not talk about autonomy and actualization and relationships. If you're stuck there, there is no— nothing above. Yes. And friends, don't get us wrong. Megan and I are not talking about saying, "Just pay people more." Because your business, the way it's designed today, can't afford to pay more. I fundamentally believe all people are good. But my invitation is there is a way forward. Our research when I was at McKinsey showed performance and health Focus drives higher results for everyone. You can redesign your operations. And that's why we are partnering with the work that Zeynep does around good job systems. She had shown companies like QuikTrip, she's shown places like Sam's Club that there is a different way. Yes. Where we can actually pay people more but also create growth, put them in places that allow them to drive higher profits. Drive higher performance. We all want that. There is a different way. Yeah. And it's possible, right? So if this idea around how can I pay people more, how can I actually give them living wage, not minimum wage, not competitive wage, but really something that allows them to live so that they can be fully present and give you their best ideas they can show up fully for you. Reach out to us, and, and I think there is an approach that we can help you with that'll make a big difference. Um, discover Zeynep's work, look up Tarani. Um, I think you're about to publish a white paper around the Opportunity Company and the model that they have. Yep. And I think that'll be another great resource for you to say, wow, like, I want to make a difference, where do I go?

Yeah, they're— I'm hoping they're going to start actually opening up tours and letting business leaders come in and learn about their model a bit more in the coming year because I think it is, like I said, my favorite case study in the country and an example of a fabulous business having fabulous results.

Yeah, I love it. So again, for those 4 factors that is at the base of their business that Megan shared with us: financial resilience, making sure people are cared for. Second is shared success, right? Success is something— it's all about we. How can we collaborate? Growth— helping each person grow, learn, develop, cross-train, move around pathways, career pathways. And fourth is autonomy— centering voice, centering their voices, showing them they matter. Getting their ideas, giving them choice and say in what they do and how they do it that allows them to give you their best gift but also matches their living requirements and how they're kind of operating. I think these are fantastic, fantastic levers that folks can look into. I would love to move into your third element of your model, which is quality of life and bring that to life with a leader you found and a company that really embodies that.

Yeah, I think one of my favorite examples of this is the late Sharon Rowe. And she has a company called EcoBags, which she started in 1989. And she was way ahead of the reusable shopping bag market in 1989, creating EcoBags. And had plenty of opportunity to grow that company to be as big as she wanted it to be. But from day one, she said, I am setting up this company to support my ideal life and I will not grow past a certain amount that compromises it. So she quite literally said no to growth opportunities so that she could just sustain the exact amount she needed that gave her enough money, allowed her to be with her kids on a regular basis, allowed her to cultivate her mental and physical health every day, allowed her plenty of time off every year to go travel, tons of time with friends. She built just this perfect business just for her that supported her ideal life for the entire time that she had it, which is complete opposite of what most of us do, which is I'm going to completely work myself into the ground and then maybe I will have that ideal life when I'm 65. If we make it until then. So she did this for more than 30 years and then right at the ri— 67, in 2024, she unexpectedly passed away from pancreatic cancer. And this is one of those just slap in the face moments for me when I was reading her book and learning about this. I knew Sharon through the B Corp community and I felt so happy for her that she had built her business around quality of life the entire time. She didn't compromise anything. She got to live the life of her dreams while she was here instead of just at the end, which isn't always guaranteed to come. So that's this micro example of it. And then a larger example of it, Erin Wade, who had Homeroom Restaurant in Oakland, California. It was a macaroni and cheese company. It's still there. She sold the company a few years ago, but she very much did what I did. She very passionate about what she was doing. It was her dream. She had actually gone and was a lawyer, Berkeley Law, was working at big corporate, like big corporate law firm, and then was like, I am miserable. Like all I've ever wanted to do is open a restaurant. She ended up getting fired from her law job because she was so miserable and decided to launch this macaroni and cheese restaurant. It was a smash success. But she, so she had the purpose element of building this thing and growing a company where people could thrive. She had the passion, but she was not supporting her quality of life. And fortunately for her, she didn't run herself into the ground until she got to the very end. She had that moment in the middle where she was like, wait a second, I am not supporting my quality of life. I'm, I'm espousing it for others, but I'm not doing it for myself. And so she decided, what are the things that bring me joy? How do I spend more time with my family? How do I cultivate and nurture my health and wellbeing more so that I can show up as a sustainable leader and show up as my highest and best self? So she said the thing that made her the happiest in the world is surfing. So she quite literally Tuesday and Thursday mornings, she blocked off 3 hours on her calendar and she said when she used to go surfing, she'd like try to hide it from her team as the CEO cuz she was embarrassed about it. She put surfing right there on her calendar and her calendar was open to all 100 employees. They could see that she was actually just going out and doing surfing. She decided, I'm gonna stop working so hard, distribute some of my leadership so I can have time with my kids. She just started baking in these elements and by the time she sold the company, they were in the top 1% of financial performance of restaurants in the United States. And as she had done this and modeling it for her executives, they started doing it. And the entire company culture was built around helping people find joy and helping all of her employees have a quality of life. And then you see the results in a macaroni and cheese restaurant, totally unassuming restaurant in Oakland, being one of the top performing restaurants in the country as a result of the leader herself cultivating quality of life and helping model it for others.

You know, one of the joys of hosting podcasts is you get to talk to so many people and you start to see all of these different threads, right? So in these three stories that you just, you know, you shared your story before and then you shared the story of Sharon and then the story of Erin, right? There's so many things that come up for me. So surfing reminds me of the story of Patagonia and let my people go surfing. Right? Right. Literally a company designed, right? They were one of the earliest to actually have childcare. Yes. Because Juan was all about like, look, you know, this is what we want to have, right? Way before it was a thing. And really thinking about, again, super high purpose, making sure and taking care of the people. And it's that consciousness that drives the success. I'm like a diehard Patagonia fan. There are a lot of other brands I like too. I like Cotopaxi, I like REI, but I always go to Patagonia. I never go to Gap. They are in the same business but completely different outcomes. Absolutely. And so, that story reminded me of Patagonia, right? Let my people go surfing. And then, when I heard you talk about Sharon Rowe and quality of life and choosing to stay small, it reminded me of my conversation with John Moncrieff, who's now running Small Giants. And there are so many of these stories of companies that choose greatness over size. They choose to be great. They choose to be great employers. Great impact in our communities, and great role models, rather than choose this external measure of how big you are, are you publicly traded, what's your stock at, all of those markers that, you know, in the end don't matter. So it's just beautiful about hearing, you know, more and more of these stories. And, you know, you had a chance to look at 1,000 of these companies. So for those who are listening who feel, yeah, yeah, yeah, these are one-off examples, they're not. Yes, this is still less than 5, 10% of the full portfolio of businesses. But my point is these are not one-offs. I think as leaders of companies, especially if you're a private company and you have been kind of trying to go down a one-way of fund growth through external capital, step back and look at different models. I read this book, your book is called, you know, This Isn't Working. So I have a similar analog of a second book that I read called Another Way that talks about all of these companies that have chosen to stay private, right? They're called evergreen companies. The book was written by a former disillusioned VC Ashish Kothari, who was part of the Netscape story, and he saw private venture capital getting corrupted. Instead of building enduring long-term companies, it just became about how fast can I grow and I sell and I go IPO and cash out. So these models exist. They exist for an endeavor that we as humans, you know, business, I'm a huge fan of business and capitalism. Me too. It's the force that has allowed us to lift masses out of poverty. But I think we've left, we've forgotten why we start these businesses in the first place and what is the bigger game. We've forgotten that it is about elevating humanity. It's about having a positive impact and profits are just the byproduct that will happen. You don't have to think about profits and purpose as two polarities. You don't have to think about people and profit as two polarities. Purpose and people and flourishing can help you achieve outsized financial returns. Very much. And build enduring companies.

And for anyone who's wanting a very large mainstream example, if the $3.5 billion Barry Wehmiller and Tarani Srups don't convince you, go check out KKR. Pete Stavros, he's, I think, the head of global private equity. He just started Ownership Works a couple of years ago, and they have a stated public goal of making every single KKR portfolio company employee-owned by 2030. And Charter Next Generation is one of the pilot ones on this. My friend Nathan's doing a documentary film on it, and their CEO, Kathy Bolhouse, is one of these CEOs. They're coming up to be a $5 billion plastics manufacturing company and under KKR's leadership, and everything internal is about shared success, financial resilience, growth and autonomy, care. It is mainstreaming more than I think people are realizing at this point. And It's coming. It is coming. Yeah, I love it.

So my friend, we've talked about a lot of concepts, right, that are obviously applicable at, you know, at the company level. But my next question is for listeners who are like, yeah, that is all great. I fundamentally believe the best place to start is here. Be the change. And so what are 3 actionable things that if you're a listener, maybe you're just an employee, you're not leading anyone right now, or maybe you're a team leader or maybe you're a function leader, what are 3 things you would recommend to create space for these ideas to germinate and take life? What are 3 actions they can do?

Good question. I think one of the things that was the most profound for me on my journey was looking into joy a little bit further. I had— I know you want these to be fast, but— No, you're fine. I had— so my father, and coming out of COVID 2021, my dad gets diagnosed with 3 different pathogens of cancer, like absolute unique medical mystery situation. And for a year, you know, almost a full year, he was in chemotherapy and I would go down to relieve my mom at the cancer center. And if you've never sat at a cancer center with somebody who's receiving chemotherapy, at least at this one, my dad was in a room with about 50 other cancer patients all receiving different chemo. And I, everyone's in their recliner chair and my dad would fall asleep a lot and I Had a lot of moments I'd just sit there and hold his hand and look around while my dad was sleeping. And I kept noticing that a ton of the people in the room seemed like they were my age or younger, which was a slap in the face for me. And I had, we had had a woman on a cover of our magazine, Lila Jana, um, founder and CEO of SomaSource. She was in my community and exact same age as me who within one year of being diagnosed with a very rare and aggressive cancer, passed away at age 37. And I started thinking about Lila and just if this were my last year as I'm driving home from the cancer center to Boulder. And fortunately I've, I've done a lot of cool stuff in my life. I've gone for it. I've launched businesses and gotten lots of cool experiences and have a wonderful partner and all the things that I would want. But I was like, I haven't felt joyful in a long time. And then the like real punch in the gut came when I asked myself, what brings me joy? And I couldn't answer it. I didn't have an answer for what brings me joy. What do, what are you doing in those moments where you are awestruck? You just like the moments in your life when you look back and you're like, I will never forget that. That was one of the best days of my life. I felt so extraordinarily joyful. Like, what are you doing in those moments? So I actually started thinking about all those moments and I made a list of things that bring me joy. And I mean, they were everything from dinner parties with friends to travel. I love traveling and COVID, babies, all the things. I hadn't traveled in like 4 years. And so I made my joy list and started on an annual basis having a joy trip for myself where it's a time for me for a week to go travel alone and be by myself. And that is this larger part of the micro exercise, which is identifying your joy and finding a way to commit and schedule it. And a lot of the people I talk to for my book, like Erin Wade, Scheduled Surfing, Steph Grippney, who's in Denver and runs the Impact Finance Center, the thing that brings her tremendous joy in the world is partner dancing. She does it 2 times a week. It is on her calendar and it is a non- negotiable. And because we've gotten into this calendared society, most people literally had it on their calendar and they treated it like they would a very important meeting and they cultivated joy on a regular basis, whether it was weekly, monthly, your yearly joy trip, whatever it might be. So practice number 1 is identifying and scheduling joy.

Love it. You know, I love that. Um, I think that's fantastic. I think most people forget about— most people forget about joy, right? In fact, funny I didn't ask you this question, but oftentimes my first time I'm talking to somebody, my first question to them is, what brings you joy? And most people are like, I've never thought about that. Or, "I don't know when was the last time I felt joyful." Or they default to—

Family.

Family, almost all the time.

I'm like, "No." Being with my kids. Yeah. Serving my kids.

Great. What else? Yes. Right? What else? And I think it's really important. And I think it's a very powerful point you say, which is schedule it. Yeah. I was just with a group of founders yesterday and one of them has scheduled tennis lessons. And everybody notices if he hasn't had tennis, he's not at his best. And so this notion of scheduling joy, I think, is an important one. We can choose what we want to spend our time doing. So that's number 1. What's something else that—

These won't be as long as promised. So number 2, and I think I took this from Lynne Twist in The Soul of Money, but it is defining enough. So this is very much to your financial well-being. We have this internal— I won't say all of us, many of us have the internalized narrative that when it comes to money, the goal is just more. You can always be making more, more and more and more and more and more and more and more. So if you can sit down and look at your life and define what is enough for you to have your thriving little life and retire in the way that you want and build around that rather than just constantly pursuing more. This is something my husband and I have done. And my husband, he's a renewable energy attorney. He is a partner at his firm, so he can choose however little or however much he wants to work. And because we know what our enough number is as a couple, and we know when we're hitting it. He— we always, if he has the choice between taking on more work that would make it so that he can't stop at 5:00 and has to work nights and weekends or can't have as much time with us, or saying no to that work, he says no to it if we're in the enough range because we prioritize family time. Yeah, more than more money. And that exercise of just defining what enough is and understanding what it is and when you're in the parameters and then saying no to additional things so that you can maximize the things that actually matter. Life changer for us as a couple. Uh, and number 3, and this is very much based on Sharon Rowe, is drafting an ideal life statement. And so when most of us think about success or our professional goals, whenever I ask anyone about their professional goals, 9 times out of 10, it's like a promotion, an award, the sales goal. It is almost always extrinsically motivated. There's this— we have this marker of I— what I'm doing and I'm pursuing next, and that is what success is. And we just do that over and over and over and over again until we maybe retire. Flip side of that is defining an ideal life statement. So if you quite literally took everything out of the equation and sat down and said, what is my ideal life? What do I wanna be working on? How much do I wanna be working? How much time do I want with my friends and family? What are my priorities? How much time every day am I committing to working out or spirituality or meditation? How much do I wanna travel? How much time do I want off? All of the things, if you could draft an ideal life, Centering that as your idea of success rather than being on the relentless hamster wheel. Yeah. As an exercise, I have mine literally pinned next to my desk. And in the moments where I feel that pull, the ego-based, extrinsically motivated achievement overachiever lady pulling me towards saying yes to more and more and more and more and more because it feels like I should do that to prove my worth. I look at my ideal life statement and I am very clear on where I can draw the lines. Yeah, I think that's—

I think these are profound. Identify and schedule joy, define enough, and draft an ideal life statement. This has been such a joy.

I'm so happy to be here.

Thank you. Thank you. And I'm so grateful for what you're doing and I'm excited about collaborating together to create something magical for our community here. Thank you, Megan. Thank you. Thank you for joining me on The Flourishing Edge. If today's conversation inspired you, share it with someone who's ready to flourish too. Subscribe, leave a review, and stay connected for more tools to achieve breakthrough performance through flourishing. Until next time, keep learning, practicing, and growing into your fullest potential.