271: Deborah Westphal — Let’s Build a Human-Centric Future

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Once again, today we're talking all about big picture stuff. So not the more immediate kinds of things that you think about, you know, how to get more of this or that, but the bigger trends and things that, that are impacting us not just in your neighborhood, in your industry, but globally. Great, great guest on today to talk all about that. We'll get in just a second. Hi everyone, again, my name is Bill Gallagher, Scaling coach, host of the Scaling Up Business podcast. We've done hundreds and hundreds of these shows now and I'm excited to bring another one to you today. If you want to hear any of our back catalog of all of the great guests that we've had on before, you're going to find all that and more@scalingcoach.com all the show notes, all of the links, the special offers, all that kind of stuff@scalingcoach.com we'll even give you a copy of the Scaling up book for free if you pay the shipping and handling. All that and more. Scalingcoach.com so we're joined now by Deborah Westfall and she'll tell you more about it. But she just has an extraordinary background, starting first in engineering and design development for the Air Force at Wright Patterson, going on to work in different aspects of development there, and then being selected to help found the Toffler consulting organization with Alvin Toffler, noted futurist. Right. And then has gone on and worked with so many really substantial organizations, not as much in our sort of general category of scale ups, whether they be tech or mid market companies that we work with all the time. But she has a book out now about the convergence of a lot of different forces that we're seeing and I'm excited to have you on the show. Deborah, welcome to the show.

Yeah, thank you. I'm very excited to be here.

So I'll let you say a little bit more about your background. Maybe you could take people through a little bit of an arc of your career because I think it leads to the work that you're doing today, which feels like a culmination of a lot of this stuff. So why don't, why don't you talk a little bit about, then we'll get into the book and the subject at hand.

Yeah, wonderful. So I think you have to go back to the real younger years. And I grew up in a household that we made things. My dad was an electrician, we built houses, I helped him fix cars. So a lot of very technical how do you work with things? How do you, you know, how do you make things and fix things? And I kind of knew that that's what I wanted to do as I, you know, thought about college and in my career. And it led me to engineering. And I'd started, actually started with chemical engineering and that wasn't meeting. Meeting the itch. And so I transitioned into electrical engineering, which is what I got my, my degree in. And, you know, one thing led to another. You're, you're, you're interviewing for jobs. And I got interested in the Air Force as, as a possible way to start my career, and it was through the civilization workforce. And I started at Eglin Air Force Base. In their laboratory.

Yeah, yeah.

And. And I did travel. I, I did transition to Wright Patterson, but it was really fun. It. We started, it was in weapon systems and, you know, bomb racks and cockpit seats and, and so got to work on airplanes and, and missiles and. And you know, it is a lot of structure, a lot of thinking about the, the structure of things and the process of making things and, and, and not a lot about the human. Right. The human factor part was kind of a necessary messiness, but it was really about the system. I work system with the Air force for about 13 years, did some amazing things. And then I decided to go back and get an MBA because I became fascinated with the business of making things. So did that went through a pretty traditional MBA program. And on reflection, there was a lot of systems and a lot of process and a lot of building of the organization and the people side was taught. But it was again, it was kind of the messy thing. It was build the organization around the variance of people in humans. And so, you know, that kind of led me to consulting and consulting with major corporations with small startups. I did, you know, I did help create our own startup, Toffler Associates. So not only the consulting side, but doing it for ourselves. And you know, again, it was this learning around where's that balance between systems and processes and people. So I think that's what is kind of, you know, led me here to today. And of course there's been. Aha. Moments, you know, all along that pathway.

Yeah, it's interesting. So this conversion we think about, and I know that people as a subject area. Right. Is one of the things that's most challenging for our entrepreneurs. They often have an idea or a focus on solving some particular problem, some area of work in the world, and then they struggle to align the people with it. And people are the least predictable, the least rational piece of the system that they're working around. And you're looking at specifically the intersection of technology, people, and some of the other factors. Right. That are, that are affecting it. As you were talking, it occurred to me that predicting people's behavior is one of the hardest things we do. I think it's maybe harder than predicting the weather and can turn faster.

Well, you know that, and I talk about that in the book about the human system. And that human system resides outside the organization as well as inside the organization. But the premise of the book, too, is about how organizations have been built over the last many, many decades and they were optimized around efficiency and effectiveness. And you can go back into history around the, just the, you know, through the industrial age is the people side wasn't to take the whole person. It was to scope their job in such a way that they could perform with speed and efficiency. And so, you know, that switch from moving from optimizing maybe shareholder profit, shareholder returns in a very efficient, effective way to this, this momentum that we see around shareholders or stakeholders, a broader stakeholders, which is people. We're going to need to rethink how we have organized our organizations.

Yeah. So your book then is about this convergence of technology, people and business.

Yes, yes. And the simple is how humanity is changing business, business. Because I really do think in the information age that technology has allowed people to connect in ways, to share ideas, to demand things that they maybe not have been able to demand. So there's a power shift, if you would, to people. Again, that could be larger society or communities or inside your organization. So technology is allowed for that. And because of that is these voices that are starting to be heard that says we need things fixed like climate or clean water or inequality or inclusion, diversity and inclusion. And so that's putting pressure on businesses to be more responsible in solving some of these problems, which in turn really, I think is affecting this momentum of what is the purpose of a business? Is it truly to maximize shareholder profit or is there a larger responsibility of the business in meeting employee needs and community needs and suppliers? And I talk about the human centric side of this, which is these larger issues that go across all of humanity that, you know, if large businesses are supporting communities, some of them are in communities, thousands of communities around the world. So they have the ability in a lot of cases to be a part of that solution of, you know, fill in the blank of the hard problem. Climate, for instance.

We've talked about some of these things. Let me just. Before we dive into the ideas and the stories in the book, let me just draw the Connection to guests and things that we've covered in the past. So conscious capitalism. We've had Raj Sisode on to talk about that, about multiple stakeholders and balancing the interests and that kind of thing. We've also had on Tom Peters talking about the human side of things and being human centered in particular in a. Achieving our business goals. And we've talked about some of the, a couple of different ways of the trends and technology ideas of Kurzweil Diamandis, the exponential organization, singularity. How does your book relate to sort of those three or four things? Is it just in that nexus of that or distinct from that?

No, I think it's in the nexus. It's a part of those voices. You know, I use the analogy to kind of start the book of the Galapagos Islands, this really amazing place on earth that has these unique plants and.

Animals and yeah, I've never been dying to go.

It's beautiful. The water is blue and it's warm and it's amazing and there's some hundred and, and they're being created volcanic eruptions. So it's still a very lively area. Right. It's very dynamic. But it's also at the convergence or the nexus, if you would, of some major ocean currents that are coming from the west or the north or the south. And it's right in that point of the Earth that you know, these, these currents are coming together that are bringing nutrients and you know, unique weather patterns and that really sustains that life. And you know, those currents represent technology, humanity and the purpose of business. And so, you know, if any one of those currents in the Galapagos island got more powerful than the other two, it would put, it would create an imbalance in that ecosystem and probably create harm and possibly death to those wonderful islands. And so it's the same idea about the balance of how much energy we put on people and humanity and that consideration and technology and also the purpose of business. These things need to be balanced. They need to be in consideration because if any one gets stronger than the other, there creates imbalance and there's negative consequences to that. And in a lot of cases we see that right now, the imbalance of the notion of shareholder returns and the inequality of the top leadership pay with the workers and be kind of crazy sometimes, in fact.

Right, yeah, the imbalance disparity is just like really how many fold over the other doesn't make a lot of sense.

It doesn't make a lot of sense in, in, you know, some would say, some leaders might say, well, you Know what? That's just the system. It's just I, you know, I, I am just a part of this too. I can't really change how we do these things. I, I think that's that moment of time that we're in where it is, there is an opportunity to change and more people, especially some financial leaders and some CEO leaders, are saying it really is time to change those processes.

Let's talk about some of, and share some of your stories from the book, I think are interesting. One in particular struck me right away. I worked years ago in telecom and I was involved in a lot of international traffic, particularly on the sort of human consumer side, not as much on the business side. And at that point in time, Back in the 80s and early 90s, it was largely controlled by PTT Postal Telecom Organizations in foreign countries. And the tariffs and the exchange balance of traffic was a big deal. And then along came, and not only that, they could control ideas, which they still do today, by filtering the Internet and things like that. But then along came Iridium, which famously went bankrupt right away, as so many satellite systems do, and then has reborn after they've wiped out the initial overly optimistic investors.

Well, the government helped him with that too. Right.

But now we have the Starlink system coming in. And so technology is one of the disruptive factors. And you, you talk to us about visiting Uganda and the, and some of your thoughts on that.

Yeah. And this is where, you know, this idea of balancing that, that technology and business and people because, you know, there's, you talked about the satellite communication companies and it's, first of all, the technology is amazing and I've worked in the space industry for many, many years and have been a part of that, you know, kind of that growth of that industry, if you would. And so, you know, when you, when you talk to them, especially on the commercial side, it's, what is that? What are we trying to do? And what we're trying to do is connect up the other 3 billion people on the planet. Right. Get them connected. And there's, there's some amazing outcomes possibly when we do that. You know, we can bring education, we can bring information, there can be telemedicine, there can be all sorts of wonderful things brought through this capability, this satellite communication capability. But when you visit a place like I did just a couple of years ago in Uganda and you start thinking about that, those outcomes, not necessarily the infrastructure that's floating around the earth, but the outcomes that we're trying to achieve, you know, you look at this and you Go. This is going to be really hard. Uganda is an emerging country. You know, just on my trip to get, I went there to see the mountain gorillas and just trying to get to the place where I needed to be was quite a journey. In send off, it's, you know, you land at a major airport, you got to spend a night, you got to get on a little airplane. The airplane doesn't even have tickets. It's, you know, you land on a dirt airstrip, you have a jeep that picks you up, you drive for two or three hours across these really dusty, bumpy roads and you know, you start talking to the locals. They don't necessarily have water. You know, they got to walk 10, 15 miles a day to get, get water. They don't have consistent electricity. There isn't computers, you know, readily accessible for them to even get on the Internet. And if they, you know, if they even could buy computers, they don't have the economics to buy computers. And so when we think about, especially as we think about this human centric perspective, how do these businesses need to think through what they're trying to do and what are some options for them to be successful? It might be new partnerships, it may be new relationships with other businesses, it may be relationships with local governments that help them really achieve the outcome that they want to achieve. You know, places like Uganda, there's a lot of companies that are looking at Africa as a market for their goods. But yet you got to create that market. And that creating that market has to start with what are the people's needs and meeting those needs where they stand. And that will allow them to build a market to where they can sell their products or services to these places.

Well, it does seem like for a long time Africa in particular, also Latin America have been places that we, that first world countries would go to for resources and without any thought about them as a market opportunity, as a partner like that, and with some really substantial impacts in terms of environmental impacts, social human impacts, as well as the political like, you know, funding wars and crap like that. That's been just really creates messes beyond which that we really want to pay for. So it's interesting to think about going in there for and operating or trading as partners, seeing it as a market opportunity or as some place to, to work with and develop.

Yeah, leave it better than it was, not go in and exploit it. Right. It said, I mean, we're talking about.

It like boy scouts or early in life and in other realms to leave a place better than you found it. Right.

Right.

You don't always practice that later in life or think about that.

But that's the idea of the stakeholder focus or human centric focus is the communities in which you, you operate in or that you, you operate with to support your business. You know, it's, I think it's interesting and it's all, it's, it's good, right? We want to bring more electric cars to the United States. We have goals. We want to, you know, get off the, the petrol fuels and move to alternative fuels that is good for climate. There are certain aspects of that that are very good. But to mine the batteries for electric cars, it's in communities that we don't see. And it's dirty and it's dangerous and it's disruptive. And getting those rare earth minerals that are needed for those electric batteries, how are we thinking about that upstream and our responsibility as a business also downstream? What do we do with those batteries when they're no longer of use? You know, it's, we can't, you know, the day of just, you know, I'm going to make things and sell things and this is the, you know, this is the opportunity are, I believe, are coming to an end. We've got to have much more responsibility, you know, with our businesses. And I think that's what it means to scale up a business is to, to broaden that aperture and think about the broader responsibility of really what is that, you know, that purpose of your business not only today, but, but into the future too.

One of the more important questions has been asked by a lot of folks and one who's repeated it, I think on the show, actually, guest Lynn Twist with her organization, the Pach Mama alliance, and others have asked where is away? Right? We're going to throw something away. Where's away? Right. And I mean, there is a specific away that we're referring to, right? If you throw something away here where I live, it goes to a dump that, you know, I can go to if I want to throw something away. And then that gets buried for the most part. But that has impacts on the water table and the air and lots of things like that. But there is a like much. And for how long can you throw one away? And could we throw less away, right? Could we reuse more? I worked for a number of years in the jewelry industry and we got concerned about scaling our business because we're like, you know, who's making this stuff? Where is it coming from? What's going into it? And as we started to dig into it, Realized it was a bigger problem than we could solve on our own. So we started working more with industry groups to address it. But there's the work workers that mine the materials, the rough stones, the metals, things like that, and all of that environment. Then there are the, the, the people that actually build it and put it. And there's waste and byproducts of all of the manufacturing, whether it be the cutting and polishing and all of that kind of thing, and trying to sort of clean that up and level it up and make sure that the people doing it aren't living in, in virtual slavery is a substantial thing is if you go to any of those places like you've been in the. I have not been, but my sister worked for a little while in that Lake Kivu region and the stories were like, really? Wow, substantial. That, that I heard from, from that.

Yeah, yeah. I think that's, that's what it means to be human centric. I think it's, you know, many. The debate right now is around shareholders versus stakeholder kind of focus. And again, I expanded stakeholder to a broader perspective of humanity because there's things that we do here that will impact overseas, but the impact overseas will come back and bite us. And so we need to be conscious of that. And we also need to be more future focused about the markets. If we don't have a market to operate in the future, then our businesses won't exist. And that's Another challenge for CEOs of today or people today is. And I get the startup are just trying to survive. But some of these more traditional companies, your responsibility is to manage for today, but it's also to leave a future market for your predecessors that they can be successful in too. And I think we've forgotten that part. It's I'll get in, I'll do this for two or three years, you know, I'll get out. And that's not the role of a leader. The leader needs to continue that.

You know, you're pointing to something I think that's worth underscoring here. You know, we work with a lot of people who'd love to be billionaires, right. And all things being equal, maybe everybody would love to be a billionaire, right? And billionaires are very visible in the world today. They tweet, they pound them out, they show up in our video and media feeds and that kind of thing. And some of them do interesting things and some of them do not. And there are a jillion of them. We have no idea how they got to be that. But I see again and again people get more fascinated by their business or their business idea than in the underlying problem that it addresses. And it seems to me as you speak and as we talk to others that, that being more interested in the problems than your particular solution and business idea is a lasting way to keep your company relevant. And then the people tackling the biggest problems often end up in kind of, you know, if you want to get to that stage or you want to make a dent in the universe, pick big problems to work with and be less preoccupied with your solution of the moment. Which, you know, may be something for right here and now, but, but maybe not in the long run.

Well, you know, we'll have problems. We'll always have problems. They'll just be different problems as, as we move into the future and, and to solve those problems, we need a lot of different products, we need a lot of different solutions, we need a lot of different, you know, technology and innovations. And it just seems to, to me, as you, you just pointed out, it seems to be more common sense. If you open up that purpose of your business and that definition of your business, you're going to have naturally a bigger board drawing board to really innovate around. What's our next thing? If it's just about the product in the one or two. I mean, you've seen it, I've seen it where a company starts with one product and what do they do? They take that product and they try to move to another market with a different industry, a different market, a different customer with that product and just keep selling that. Once they have gone through all the different companies and industries, well then they, okay, well, we need to acquire something that kind of looks like our product, that's an extension of our product so we can keep selling our product and this other product, right? And there is a point of that companies get to where it's. Now they're stuck and then they're asking.

Themselves, by the way, a focus on. We know again and again, at least intellectually, that a focus on the customer is better than a focus on the product. That it's cheaper to think about different ways to serve the same customer once you have a relationship, than it is to go find more customers, more markets, right?

Absolutely it is. Right. And if you think about that customer, you think about it in a broader sense too because there are not necessarily there's customers out there or potential customers that you're not serving right now, but you could serve in the future because again, that, you know, I sometimes using Stakeholder gets us into trouble too because a lot of people, a lot of companies say, well, stakeholder is my customer. And then they segment that customer and they know that customer and they have a list of names of those customers. But they're not thinking about the broader. Who else is in this community? Who else could we serve, who's impacted, who's. Yeah, right, right, yeah. So.

Or even multiple value opportunities. Right. If you're a network or a plat, then you're connecting different parties in some useful way that solves a problem, that creates some value.

Right, right. And that's where a lot of that work. That when we think about the suppliers or the relationships that we have, you know, how can we use those in a more productive way rather than just, you know, transactional. They give me something. I worked for a very large global hospitality chain and it was very interesting to see how it was in their IT department. They decided to outsource all of their IT and they had five major contractors, IT contractors. And that relationship was, was really interesting. Very transactional. We have a contract, we will give you our needs, you will return what we need. Rather than. And you'd ask them, are you doing any strategic planning together? Are you doing anything to create new opportunities together? Are you sharing ideas? Well, no, we wouldn't know how to do that. And so that power of the network is not being necessarily used.

I think a lot of companies in our world, the growing mid market companies, are interested in being trusted advisors, key partners. They would like to open a deeper dialogue. And the people that they work with on the other side are just so busy, so focused on stuff, they're not doing that. And there's such like cagey, like, oh, I don't want to tell you too much because then you'll get too cocky or you'll overcharge me or like that kind of thing. Instead of that partnering is, is a lot rarer than maybe it could be.

Right, Right. Yeah. And I think some of that stuff that we believe, that we believe or that we fear, there's probably no basis to it. And I know, I was there, I did that too. Right. It you would go in and you'd be like, well, can I trust these people? And, and but what I personally found is if you put all your cards on the table, you're going to get to the value. There's a lot of beliefs and biases. If you would inside our individually or inside the organization that says, well, we just wouldn't do this. Maybe you had a bad experience, but that was one experience. It doesn't have to be all experiences.

Yeah, you talk about some additional or downstream secondary impacts of things when we think about both the social and the environmental connections. And I think one of the things that I'm struck with that has accelerated a great deal this last year is mostly driven by Amazon, but maybe also some others. As we sheltered as we were, work from home, as we did things like that, the pace of Amazon boxes arriving at my door increased. And I know for everyone the shopping in small stores decreased and that changed where the money and the profit opportunities went and shifted things around A great deal in the last year accelerated a drop in local and independent retail that was profound. But also the packaging and I wonder though if I buy something at a local hardware store or whatever that had to ship to a distribution center, had to ship then to the store, had to be unpacked and put on the shelf and then I had to pick it up and take it home and that kind of thing. And we get very preoccupied with the amount of cardboard and the drop offs, that kind of thing. But I wonder if it's actually any less efficient from a environmental and packaging waste standpoint than the shipping to the store. I don't know if you have an answer for that, but I'm curious about it. There's clearly an impact on local retailers and on that thing. But have you spent any time looking at that in relation to this?

I think the whole concept or the whole idea of packaging, whether or not it's, it's through the, the local store shipping chain or an Amazon chain needs to be considered. You know, the amount of garbage that we are generating and you know, the packaging, it's, it's, it's overwhelming and we're going to, you know, it's, we don't. What did I saw something last week that only 9% of, of all plastic is recycled. Okay, where does that other 90% go? Well, it goes into the ocean or it goes into landfills and if it goes into landfills, it doesn't degrade.

It's not biodegradable plastic.

It's not. And so it's not one or the other. And I think that's where sometimes we justify it. Well, it's a little bit less if we do it this way or it's, it's, you know, it's better than if we did it this way. I think the whole idea around take packaging has to be considered. And so if you're a business and you're starting, you know, a new product or you're thinking about a new product. What is that? That whole, you know, responsibility throughout your communities and humanity and people. What is that downstream impact that you're going to leave because you can't, you know, it's really just kind of pushing it off into somebody else's responsibility. You know, it's no longer good enough to say, well, you know what, I make things and I distribute things and the environmentalists can worry about, you know, our Earth, we can't do that.

The other one that you mentioned there is water management. And I don't think we think about that so much most of the time. But I noted that just in the last day or so, Tesla's come out and they bought a company to obtain a patent that dramatically drops the water requirements to produce the batteries. Right. Which are going increasingly in cars, but in lots of things. And producing batteries and the components, the sub components, cathodes for the batteries is a particularly water intensive process. Like a lot of things are right.

Yeah. I don't think there's any manufacturing that doesn't use water. Batteries, pharmaceutical, electronics, everything uses water. Water also sustains life if it's second to air. If we don't have, we don't, we.

You don't last too many days without water. You don't last many minutes without air.

That's right. Right. And so water is so important and it's, it's so in, in, you know, in the United States, in most parts of the United States, it's highly accessible too. We don't even think about it. When we go to the tap and we turn it on, well, there's water. You know, there are places around the world that don't have water. And it's very complex. It's a very complex. Not all water is the same. And who owns the water and the water rights and who manages it from a state, local, country level? But if we don't, again, if we don't think about a water management strategy in our business to reclaim and reuse or to put back into the environment to use, and we're just using that resource, we're going to use it all up.

And then we think about it like just think about human, like we think about water very obviously. We're standing in the desert. We look at the fountains of the Bellagio hotel at a Las Vegas resort and we're like, oh my God, that can't be good. We fly into Phoenix and we see all the green lawns and we're like, that doesn't belong in this environment. So that seems obvious, but we don't necessarily think about it. That goes into the batteries or into any other product that we have, the amount of water it took to make and use those things. And even if you're not a primary manufacturer, what are you using and what's that impact? Water is such a critical resource. Right. And lots of wars have been fought. In fact, some are even kind of. There's tensions right now over possibly damning or stopping the flow of the Nile right now. And Egypt is getting a little nervous about that, that being impacted upstream. There's always tension between Israel and Jordan and its neighbors over the use of the water resource, the drawing down of the Dead Sea and the available freshwater upstream in the Jordan. And those are obvious ones, but we have these in the state of California where I live, where there's tension between Central Valley farmers and big urban areas like Los Angeles and so on.

Right, right. And to take that even, you know, you started this conversation about big picture. You know, it said we don't always see the glaciers, we don't always think about Antarctica. Right. We think about. But Antarctica holds some 90% of our fresh water for the world. And right now it is a, it's a free area where no country owns it. You can't drill on it. It's to be used just for kind of science and research. But those agreements will come up here in a couple decades and there are already companies and countries wanting to drill in the Antarctica. If we destroy those sources of water, how are we going to. So it's all connected. It's all converging. It's all the climate and the shrinking glaciers and it shrinks the water. And then if we don't use the smart strategies for our water management, then we won't have it. All of these things are going to start to be issues for businesses on the horizon. Are they an issue? Exactly. Today, maybe not. Maybe for some reason for sure, but they are. You know, when you look outside the windshield of your business to look over the horizon, these are coming at you and, you know, will you get incentivized immediately over having a water management strategy? Of course not. Not today, but maybe tomorrow, maybe, you know, maybe five years from now. But I. Again, if you're destroying the market, your future market that your predecessor needs to operate in, you're not a very, you're not a very conscientious. Right, right. It has to be human centric and it has to be temporal, too. You have to have, you know, Ed Freeman used the, the term which I really like bifocal. You got it. Be looking today and you have to be looking into the future. And you know, I use the analogy of a race car driver. You know, if you're moving 120 miles an hour, yeah, you got to be looking at the dashboard, but you also have to look where you're. You're going. And that's this whole idea of the purpose of your business, who you're serving, that human centric part of it. And then how are you going to really tap into that human system to understand what's coming at you? And then how do you make sure that the technology that you've got, that you're implementing really supports that future, not baking into the past of your organization.

Structure mentioning Antarctica and that bigger picture. Let me remind folks, we did a great show a little over a year ago with Randall Reeves, who while he was sailing around Antarctica and Randall did the first ever figure 8 double circumnavigation. He went around the Americas, down the Western Americas and then around Antarctica and then up the eastern side and then through the Northwest Passage solo in a year. And we did a live satellite interview with him. Lucy, we should get on. I'm speaking to our producer backstage there. We should get Randall on and do a follow up about his thoughts and impacts and things like that. It's interesting, I think, to get this big picture and then to rethink what's the implication for my business right here, right now and my family, my community, etc. Not just the business impact, but that whole thing.

Yeah, I think that's a great idea. I traveled to the Antarctica with the National Geographic in Lindblad and there were two glaciologists on board that were there. And you know, and One of them, M.L. jackson, I have spoken to just recently and she gives speeches to business leaders and tries to get them to understand that, you know, that connection. And some get it, a lot of them don't. But we got to keep trying to bring that and make it closer to their heart so that they understand that responsibility.

I think that it does lead to a greater sense of security and protecting the investment in the business and that kind of thing. It does some secondary effect on your actual brand value and that kind of thing increasing anyway, to be seen as that. I don't think it's a primary driver yet. When we did our jewelry and created a whole practice of clear, conscious jewelry, it wasn't the primary reason that people bought it. It was a secondary kind of a thing. They felt better about the decision because of it. And the same thing. True. If you're any other kind of business, you can enhance rather than detract that thing being seen in a positive way. But people are also sens to it because sometimes when they do something and talk about it, they're attacked for not doing enough versus if they keep their mouth shut and, you know, stand to the radar. I hear that a lot. Like, ooh, I don't want to get into that because people just start to blast me.

Right, right. You know, and it's sad. And I talk about this in the book. It's not, you know, I've been asked, you know, are you, are you against capitalism? Absolutely not. I am a capitalist. I am pro. I am. Businesses need to make a profit. But it's an. And what I'm advocating though is to look inside your business, be prepared that this is. There's going to be more and more of this kind of stress. You're not going to make everybody happy. You've got to know what that purpose of the business is so you can communicate it. But inside your organization, there are things that you can do today to transform more to a human centric organization. One, understand that there is this human system out there that is a very powerful source. It has many voices, many different perspectives. You need to pick and choose which ones you're going to pay attention to and which ones you're just going to let go. You can't make everybody happy. But you do need to stand for something. You need to understand that there is a growing chasm, if you would, from the purpose of what your, you know, what business used to be and expected, which was shareholder, maximizing shareholder profit to more broader stakeholder, whatever that means. Right. In the largest sense. And so, you know, your organization has been optimized around that first performance and now you have to optimize around this other, which is stakeholder, which means the decisions that you're making inside, even the minute decisions are really optimized around a past model of business not being for the future. You know, think about inside businesses what their dashboard is today. It's, you know, it's profit, loss, revenue, ebitda, you know, backlog. Not necessarily. Are we working towards a water management? Are we thinking about how we will plan for if we have to report our carbon footprint or our progress on achieving net zero so we can get started today? We don't have to, we don't have to wait. We shouldn't wait. And we don't have to maximize that transformation today either. It's starting with the little things. And that first one is to realize that this is happening.

Well, I think one of our friends has spoken to this, the notion that it doesn't have to undermine your business. One of our friends, Dan Price, Gravity Payments Seattle area, decided one day that the pay thing was a little out of whack. And so he raised everybody up. He heard one of his employees was working a second job in fast food and he's like, that's just crazy. And so he raised everybody to a minimum wage of $70,000 to live in the area. And Fox News and other people said, oh, you're just a communist socialist, blah blah blah. And they blasted him. And now some time's gone on and there was a great deal of controversy, that kind of thing, but he's actually done remarkably well. And another shout out, Lucy, let's get Dan Price on Gravity Payments and do a follow up conversation with him about how that because he's had some great business results and I think it bodes well. You've summarized so beautifully. But the idea of balancing all these things, taking the longer view creates both something you can feel good about and know in your heart is right, but also something that has greater sustainability. There is profit, opportunity and all of that and the convergence of those things represents an opportunity for something. Let me tell folks if they want to learn more, they'll go to deborahwestfall.com and we will put that in the show. Notes in the link there as well. The book convergences here convergences here.com so it's awesome. Been a great conversation. Hopefully folks see something a little bit bigger picture than some of our more practical in the minute kind of tactical things, a bigger picture. I love diving into that. It's been a great pleasure to talk.

Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. This is it is big picture but I've spent a career and doing this and it is unfolding right before our eyes. So thank you.

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