Barry-Wehmiller's former Chairman and CEO, Bob Chapman, challenges the way we define success in corporations, urging leaders to place people—not profits—at the heart of business. He shares how Truly Human Leadership, grounded in empathy and community, can spark a cultural shift that organizations and society desperately need.
The ROE podcast is dedicated to the late Bob Chapman, former CEO and Chairman of Barry-Wehmiller and co-author of Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family.
Learn more about The Empathy Collective and how we are helping Bob's visio...
Questions asked in this interview
2
2:08How do you build that type of culture to the point where it's sustainable beyond just one person at the top?
6:37How do you change people and get them to come on board with this approach?
The flaw in the society we have today is that we thought success would be a society with a great deal of abundance. Health care, vacations, nice homes, nice communities, good arts. But we forgot one critical component in the industrial revolution, which is the human revolution, where we see people as our purpose. If we saw the industrial revolution as a chance for people to be who they're intended to be and appreciated for that, and that these opportunities we created and these companies were growing would give them a chance to grow and be a part of a team and share in the benefit, it would have been great. But we saw people as a function, and the more people we could hire because we needed them, and we didn't pay them well because we cared about them. We paid them well because that's what we had to pay them. If success is money, power, and position, why today with the most prosperous economy in our history do we have the highest level of depression, anxiety, and suicide we've ever had? Because we forgot that when we come together in communities, in companies, in organizations, we need to learn to care for the people that we have the stewardship of for 20 hours a week, 40 hours a week. And that is the key thing that we missed. So I started talking about we need to care for the people we have the privilege of leading. The lens through which I saw people, the way I was educated and the way I experienced the world, I saw people as functions, not as somebody's precious child. That is the revelation that led to truly human leadership, that led to our book, People Are Our Purpose. And people simply want to know that who they are and what they do matters. The foundation of truly human leadership is a focus on the people we have the privilege of leading. Making sure that when they leave our care, they go home feeling valued, so they can treat their spouse, their children, and behave in the community. To me, it is the key to solving the issues we face as a society around the world.
Clearly this is deeply rooted in our society, this mentality that we're treating people like functions rather than human beings. It's hard to undo something that's so integrated into the way we treat people in the workplace, which is probably why leaders are having such a hard time adopting it. This type of people-focused leadership really leads to a very strong organizational culture. And I've seen in my experience working for different companies how culture is this very touchy-feely subject. You can sense when it's good, you can sense when it's bad, but you can't really pinpoint what's driving it. But you can tell when there's a change in leadership at the top, you feel the shift in culture. And I imagine when you step down as CEO at Barry-Wehmiller at some point and someone else takes your role, because you've deeply integrated it into the DNA of Barry-Wehmiller, it will stay. How do you build that type of culture to the point where it's sustainable beyond just one person at the top?
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Chapman, B. (2025, August 31). The Forgotten Human Revolution with Bob Chapman [Interview transcript]. The Empathy Collective. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1040418/
MLA
Bob Chapman. "The Forgotten Human Revolution with Bob Chapman." The Empathy Collective, 31 Aug. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1040418/.
BibTeX
@misc{chapman2025_1040418,
author = {Bob Chapman},
title = {The Forgotten Human Revolution with Bob Chapman},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, The Empathy Collective. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2025},
month = {aug},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1040418/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
