I can no longer be accused of being a crazy idealist if what I imagine exists in reality. That's how I felt after I met Bob Chapman and learned about Barry-Wehmiller. 16 years ago, Bob saw my TED talk and sent me a letter claiming to have built the company I described. I was skeptical but met him for lunch, and we spent three hours together. He told me story after story about his culture and how his company outperformed the S&P. I visited his factories and was blown away. Barry-Wehmiller had a culture that kept people safe, didn't lay off during the recession, and won't replace people with AI. Bob built something that proved business can be a force for good. I wrote about him in 'Leaders Eat Last,' and we became close friends. In September 2025, I returned to his factory in Phillips, Wisconsin, with a camera crew to make a documentary. It became one of our most popular episodes. Six months later, Bob passed away. I miss him every day. I made him a promise to carry his torch, and I'm releasing this full conversation so the world can hear his message. Thank you, Bob. I miss you and I love you.
Bob, what a treat. Oh, there's a big bean. Big wasp. Let's move the wasp.
He wants to be in the show. He wants to be in the show. Wasp. Wasp gone.
Bob, when I walked back in here, back in Phillips, Wisconsin, the flood of memories, the flood of emotions. I've been here a few times over the years, but I haven't been back for probably six or seven years. And I remember when you and I first met and whatever it was 15 years ago, you told me about what you'd built, this amazing business where people care about each other. And it's such a treat to come back and talk to you in the very place where you took me on my first tour to see it. I'm so curious like when you meet people and they say to you sort of, Bob, what have you built? What's your business? How do you talk about this?
Well, as you know, my first half of my career was very traditional about management, financial results and growth. And through the series of revelations I went through were the lens through which I saw people because I saw them as machinists, labor, union members, office people, people working on the floor, all the traditional ways we talk about. And the lens was reversed and I saw them as somebody's precious child that's been placed in my care. Everything changed for me. So the lens through which you see people affects the way you treat people because I was raised that you need people to achieve results and when you don't need them anymore you let them go. So the revelations I went through that change the way I see people. So the lens was clearly seen if you see people as somebody's precious child it profoundly affects your leadership style. My major responsibility to people in company is to give them a grounded sense of hope for the future they can trust in my care. I take that incredibly profoundly seriously.
I know you and I have talked about this about sort of how being a parent and being a leader are very similar. You talk about how being a parent, this child is brought into your life and you're responsible for its growth and its upbringing. And in business, a person is brought into your office and you're responsible for their growth and their upbringing. I appreciate that the lens for you changed where you stopped seeing people as line items and mechanisms for your success, but rather that you are now responsible for their growth, their success, their happiness, their well-being. But how did you learn leadership? It's one thing to say it. It's one thing to read it in a book and be this leader who just sort of views people as items on a spreadsheet. How did you make the conversion to being the leader you are now? Because a lot of people, you know, especially people who sort of either listen to this podcast or read my work, they're on that journey. You went through that journey. What was it that you were able to make that conversion to be this heartfelt leader rather than just all head and all numbers?
It was a journey as you said. And when I realized that day at the wedding that all 12,000 of our team members around the world are not functions for my success. There's somebody's precious child who I have in my care for 40 hours a week. It changed everything. And a young man asked me about that time, what is your greatest fear, Bob? Now you know me, I'm an internal optimist. And I had to stop and think and I said my greatest fear is that we were blessed with a message of the way the world was intended to be where people would genuinely care for each other and would be dependent upon me and I would leave this company, this earth, and what I had built would fall apart because I've seen that happen in churches and companies all over the world. So my greatest fear is that this blessing we've been given would not live beyond my time. So we began, I had an incredible team around me called the empowerment team, you know some of those members, and I said how do great religions survive all the time? You know, this is how we devour from great religions and we said they articulate their beliefs which we have in the guiding principle of leadership and then they have disciples who carry this message forward beyond the founder because it's not Bob, we all believe this is the way we should treat each other. So we said how are we going to do that? We can't send people back to universities to learn to be truly human leaders. So this eclectic team at the whiteboard said, 'Well, we're going to create our own university.' And they came up with three powerful classes that in hindsight we were blessed with because empathetic listening, which is the most powerful of all human skills, recognition and celebration. How do you let people know they matter in thoughtful, appropriate ways? And then culture of service, serving from it's all about me to actually care about you. So seizing the afternoon. So, you know, it was just kind of this journey and this eclectic team and we started teaching it.
So, give me some of the principles that you teach and I know all of the classes that you teach are voluntary. People choose to go through it and if they don't want to go through it, then that's fine, but people can see the impact that it has on their co-workers, their colleagues and friends when they do go through these classes, which is why I know that there's a good long waiting list for people to get into your classes. What are the core ideas that you teach in the empathetic listening class, for example?
Well, first of all, one of the things I've learned in teaching this, because again, it was our team member David Viner who came up with the idea because when somebody said if we're going to start a university, we need to teach people to listen. I thought why would we need to teach adults to listen? We all know how to listen. Okay, that is the biggest revolution we realize that we don't know how to listen. Okay, we're taught to speak and we're taught to debate or we're not taught to listen. Okay. The divide we have in this country in the world is because we have a lot of people 'I'm right and you're wrong.' Okay. That's the world we see it in politics between our countries. And so this team came up with this idea that we would teach empathetic listening. Okay, which is the most foundational human skill that you can possibly have because you validate the worth of others when you listen to them without judge. Not listening to debate, not listening to respond or judge, simply listening to validate the other person. And when you do that, it still amazes me, Simon, that this eclectic journey we've been on, we were simply trying to change managers into leaders into disciples, people who would carry this forward well beyond my time. 95% of the feedback, 95% was how it affected their marriage and their relationship with their children.
This class was built to help people function better at work, right? That they would communicate better at work.
Right. Right. I thought when you hire somebody the pay and the benefits was the exchange for the present and as long as you needed them you would pay them but when you didn't need them you'd let them go and this changed everything because what we realize is what people want to know is that they matter. Okay, we have a very prosperous economy but we do not have a healthy economy because we have depression, anxiety because people don't feel valued, they feel used. So this listening class still amazes me 20 years later that we've taught all over the world. This is not an American issue. This is a global issue. When you teach people to listen, they tell you the stories of how it improved their marriage and their relationship with their kids. So when we say what's wrong with kids today,
they say where did they come from?
It came from families where parents probably came home from a job where they don't feel valued because of that stress and anxiety and concern about the future. Probably don't treat their spouse as well as possible. And what do our kids see? They see the behavior of our parents who don't know how to care for each other. They may be in love, but they don't know how to listen to each other. And so it was unbelievable the feedback we got. If your listeners could have heard the thousands of people I've heard around the world who have taken this class from India to Serbia to China, it's a universal truth. The healing power of listening is profound. This is such a, you know, we've bifurcated the world, right? It's like you have your home life and you have your work life. And we forget that it's not two different worlds. It's one very integrated world because the people who are going to work go back home and vice versa. And so if they go to a place of work where they don't feel like their work matters or they don't feel like they matter, they don't feel like their leaders care about them as human beings, they only see them as means of production, that stress that they carry of course has to go somewhere. And it comes in the form of lack of sleep, high blood pressure, it comes in you're grumpy, you're short-tempered, and that affects one's own health, but it also affects the health of the family unit. As you said, you know, you come home stressed from work just because you have a shitty boss, you know, not a toxic person, not somebody who's screaming and yelling, just doesn't make you feel like you're mad. They just care about your productivity. That stress comes out at home and that affects kids' grades, kids' self-confidence. And it's an amazing concept. The logic is so simple and the logic is there which
it has to be simple because it's occurred to me it has to be simple
which is if you're teaching these people how to listen, empathetic listening, so that they can better communicate at work. Those skills are the skills they're going home. Not only do they feel better at work, they're taking those skills and they're raising their kids better. It's having a, I mean that a good job and a good place to work is good for my family occurs to nobody,
And that a company would say come work for us. It's good for your family. Other than just the money we're going to pay you because that's usually how we measure if it's good for your family. How much can I provide?
In my education, undergraduate accounting, MBA, Price Waterhouse, then running a family business. I was never taught, never told, never made aware that the way I would run this company would affect people's personal lives other than the compensation and the benefits. We think that is the exchange. You give me your gifts, I'll pay you fairly. But the most powerful thing we do to people is validate their worth. And the greatest source of happiness is a good job doing meaningful work for the people they enjoy. Back to your point, I get in front of CEOs all over the world and I say, 'You're all worried about the cost of healthcare.' You are the problem. 74% of all illnesses are chronic. The biggest cause of chronic illness is stress and the biggest cause of stress at work. Jeffrey Feifer at Stanford wrote a book 'Dying for a Paycheck.' And he doesn't mean anxious to get it. He estimates 120,000 people a year die of work related stress. Okay? These things I was never taught, never met with because it's really about creating economic value. Okay. And we thought the pay was human value.
The real value is feeling value.
Can you imagine if we taught in our MBAs in our MBA classes that how you lead will directly affect someone's health and that if you're a bad leader, there's a very short chain of logic that you're actually killing somebody. Increase in cortisol hurts the immune system. You know, this slow steady drip of cortisol because of the stress at work. I mean, to your point, which is people don't feel responsible for the lives of the people in their span of care because nobody's connected the dots for them. One of the things I find so remarkable about Barry-Wehmiller, which is all of your leaders understand that it's not just this mushy mushy hippie-dippy stuff that you're doing, that there's a deep sense of responsibility to the lives of the people whose parents gave you their children to look after.
Yeah. I mean, seriously, Simon, when you look at the feedback I've had all over the world again, it's so foundational to the world. We just don't know how to care for each other. And what we've learned
is you can't, as the CEO round table did, you can't ask people to care. You have to teach them how to care.
You can't ask people to speak Chinese. You have to teach them how to speak. We found that caring is a teachable skill. And the good news back to your MBA program is that with your encouragement and support and the evolution of this, we are working with a number of major universities now to transform business education to create tomorrow's leaders who have the skills and courage to care, to bring these human skills in with academic skills so when they leave our educational system they're ready to live in the beauty of diversity not the conflict of diversity. They're ready to be good stewards of the lives at home, in their community, at work. But it's a teachable skill and we have always felt academic skills are the key to success and we forgot the human skills.
What was the second class? So the first class was empathetic listening. The second one was
recognition and celebration.
Okay. So what are the core tenants of recognition and celebration? Why did the company make that class?
Great question. Cynthia and I had the blessing of raising six kids. Cynthia who? My wife, had a blessing to raise six kids because nobody teaches you how to be a good parent. We went to classes and I'll never forget this one class where this gentleman said, 'A key to raising healthy kids is you need to compliment them five times more than you suggest things they could do better.' Okay, that really made an impact on me because we tend to, you know, why didn't you get your whole school work done? Why didn't you get home in time for dinner? And said, boy, thank you for being down here. Thank you for cleaning up. So it really impacted me and I realized in my journey that adults are no different. A gentleman in our plant said to me one time, 'You know, Mr. Chapman, I get 10 things right and I never hear a word. I get one thing wrong and I get my ass.' And everybody every time I say this, you just see like this in the audience because we have a world where we focus on the brokenness, not the goodness. Okay? So what we do through our recognition and celebration program and again it's not about five years service, you get a plaque. It's about shining a light in the organization, looking for the goodness, holding up and saying thank you in a thoughtful way. There's a skill in recognition. It's not that a boy pay raise. It is feelings, behaviors, and impact. And there's a skill and we're teaching that skill in universities. We have people for 40 hours a week and when they leave our care, they're inundated with the brokenness of the world. But I've got them for 40 hours a week while they feel valued, if they feel heard, if we recognize the goodness because when you recognize the goodness of Mary or Bill and you do it in a thoughtful way in a group, everybody feels good. So our key to our culture is continually looking for the goodness and holding it up and saying thank you.
I've heard you say so often we catch people doing things wrong. You teach people to catch people doing things right. Right. What are some of the specific ways that you do recognition in the company? I mean in a place like this, it's a factory environment. It's manufacturing. How do you do recognition here?
It's very personal. We have basically called the 'Shine a Light' the word and people can submit to us somebody who they feel embodies the spirit of our culture that they want to say thank you to. And it didn't occur to us at the time, but when you actually say to 12,000 people in the world, why don't you write and let us know if somebody you think lived these values, all of a sudden you get these notes from people all over the world. I mean, from Serbia to China, whatever. And the beauty is they have to stop and think about the goodness of somebody else. Okay? Not the number of years of service, not the top sales award, just their goodness. Okay? The ramifications when people see recognized for their goodness, you just feel good. Okay? Our goal is when you leave our care for 40 hours a week, you go home with the energy to deal with the brokenness of the world because you've seen 40 hours a week you saw the goodness in the world. So it's a skill again it's feelings, behaviors and impact. We actually teach a class on how to do and quite often
how to give someone a compliment.
Quite often we do. Yes. How to recognize the goodness in somebody. So quite often we surprise the person and their family members come to witness it and it is profound the impact because for a son or daughter or mother or father to see their child recognized for their goodness in front of organization, you can't even measure that. This cadence of constantly looking for the goodness in the world which I wish our media did. Remember the expression in journalism 'what bleeds reads'? So what do we inundate our country with every day? The brokenness of the world because that's what they feel creates leaders which creates income for their media. And so where do we see the goodness in the book?
Let me jump ahead a little bit, which is, you know, I'm sure there are some people who buy into what you're saying, but there are some people who are cynical that this is all fine and good and hippie-dippy when the economy is great, but when the economy dips, you got to tighten the belt and focus on the numbers. You know, and we see it all the time. Even well-intentioned companies, as soon as something dips the numbers, the first thing to suffer is the people. They cut the recognition programs, they cut the spending on the leadership programs, they lay people off, right?
You know, it's the first thing we do. So, it sounds like these things are all nice to have if you're thriving.
What do you have to say to those companies that that's the first thing they cut people and programs? I mean, what does Barry-Wehmiller do?
Well, it starts with we have a constitution of our culture, the guiding principle of leadership. Yeah. And the vision is we measure success by the way we touch the lives of people. So we kind of have a constitution that guides us like our country does in terms of the responsibility of leadership. So if you embrace that and you end up with an economic situation, which we did in '08-'09, which you've talked about for many years, it opened our mind to a totally different way. So it was shared sacrifice. So, as you know in '08-'09 because our orders dropped by 30%. And I was taught well you know what you got to do is you got to let people go because that's just what you do. It's not personal. It's just what we do. I once as you know in the air force asked some of the generals how do you teach these young men and women to kill? They said we don't. We teach them to take out targets that made bad decisions. They try to dehumanize the hurt they're going to inflict in dropping bombs. We do that in business. We rightsize the company. You know we reorganize the company. We gave the shareholders what they want.
