Purpose Before Profit: Author Bruce Piasecki On The Benefits Of Running A Purpose-Driven Business

An Interview With Chad Silverstein

Then write books that challenge the prevailing norms of our dominant culture of science and markets by offering a profound exploration into how we can better align our ambitions with the planet’s well-being. These books can combine lessons from social history, lived corporate experience, and personal narrative.

In today’s competitive business landscape, the race for profits often takes center stage. However, there are some leaders who also prioritize a mission-driven purpose. They use their business to make a positive social impact and recognize that success isn’t only about making money. In this interview series, we are talking with some of these distinct leaders and I had the pleasure of interviewing Bruce Piasecki.

Bruce Piasecki is the author of twenty-two non-fiction books and biographies, including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling Doing More with Less: A New Way to Wealth. He designs and facilitates change management councils and workshops for a third of the Fortune 500 from bp and Merck to Toyota and S&P. His Memoir, Doing More with One Life: A Writer’s Journey is now being developed into a film.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. Can you tell us your “Origin Story”? Can you tell us the story of how you grew up?

My Origin Story: Cracking the Code Thru Reading Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud, a masterful writer, and fanciful thinker, begins his Interpretations of Dreams in a curious and compelling fashion. I read it while an undergraduate at Cornell nearly fifty years ago. As a origin story, please note all this before I met my wife, had my family and work, or established my set of life-long friends. In this way, it shaped me before I became me.

As my attempt to wake up my father as he was dying before me — when I was age 3 — defines the actual originating trauma that made my life, it was in reading Freud’s books about the death of his father that helped me crack the code from trauma to creative narrative. A part of any memoir is rumination, the staying after the hour of panic has passed, lingering after the minute of joy or total shock has expired.

Freud starts this personal narrative by having the reader feel a fearful dream about his father. While the book is scholarly, and detailed, and full of speculation and intellectual surprise, the Interpretation itself has lasted many decades because it consists of a personal narrative. It is the pace of the prose, and the dignity in the narrative fears and joys, that enable us to imagine the feelings of dread and responsibility about the death of anyone’s father.

Freud, like Darwin and Karl Marx, is a fantastic storyteller. I will not quote the Freud passage. Instead, I will convey now how the passage stuck me with an overall creative and life shaping force, while I was discerning if I should be a pre-med student, a business leader, or pursue the more volcanic and impossible route of literary ambitions.

Today there are now 73 vignettes in my Memoir exploring the consequences of this origin story; explaining how a personal obligation to lifelong writing comes with obliterating forces. Here now I simply need to refer you to the passages reread from the Memoir on Mia Funk’s Paris based podcast series on the book called Creative Process podcasts for more on this beginning into the magical clan of writers.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company or organization?

Despite earning my keep in eighteen different currencies, with books translated into Italian, Mandarin, Japanese and Brazilian Portuguese,

the most interesting thing that happened in my life of work and travel was the birth of my daughter Colette. Here is how I write about that moment in my Memoir, “The Discovery of Colette”:

One the night Colette was born, she looked straight into her father that first second of her life.

She felt at home with his voice; this gave him immense pleasure. Infants need words, just as they need warmth, breast milk, and soft but firm swaddling. He could sense that early on. Yet their need for words is immediate, not deliberate.

Adults need words that can last, like a promise. Children can contemplate a vast immediate.

Colette gave him a new reason to contemplate midlife. She was at once glorious, like the fuzzy fiddleheads in April about to burst forth at his home She walked the first weekend before her first year, as if the calendar had been calibrated just for her.

When he looked into her patient eyes, he felt that timing was everything. At forty-two, he was indeed to enjoy childbearing. The ancient Anasazi knew exactly when to plant corn in Chaco Canyon so to collect the right amount of sun and rain in the harsh desert light. The birth of Colette was a similar harvest for him and his wife.

We often learn the most from our mistakes. Can you share one that you made that turned out to be one of the most valuable lessons you’ve learned?

When you run a change management firm based on the smart brevity of lawyers, accountants, engineers, and other professionals, — as I did since 1981 — you know many instances when smart is dumb.

It is not enough to know yourself, as you might while writing books, but when making payroll as I did for four decades, the imperatives to know thyself are not as premiere as knowing how to do more with teams.

After my bestseller, I was given another John Wiley and Sons contract to write a book about Doing More with Teams trying to figure out that puzzle. It is easy to become a slave of passion or think of yourself as the master of client needs — when in the end it takes emotional intelligence and deep roots of empathy to overcome the dozens of monthly mistakes a company owner makes each quarter. This is not original to me, but found in Shakespeare, the ancient Greeks, even in the conquering Persians and Romans. Teams triumph, more than egos.

As Daniel Coleman proves in his 1995 bestseller, Emotional Intelligence, “managing with a heart” usually helps, and the awareness that social capital is the sustaining value in organizations, rather than financial capital. My last six books have been devoted to exploring “what is enough” and what elements matter in liberating social capital in teams.

As a successful leader, it’s clear that you uphold strong core values. I’m curious what are the most important principles you firmly stand by and refuse to compromise on. Can you share a few of them and explain why they hold such significance for you in your work and life?

There is a horrible cost to refusing to compromise. In contrast, my strength came back often to competitive frugality.

I learned how to protect margins and teams with greater reward than the more wasteful competitors. This does not require steadfast certainty; instead, my mantra throughout remained be “adept in the short run, and adaptive in the long.” Much of the Memoir I wrote for the last 17 year explores how to choose the right pond of compromise to thrive in and then to prosper.

This June at the S&P headquarters on 55 Water Street in Manhattan I’ve been retained to bring 55 past clients and leaders to a two-day ten speaker seminar and workshops on “Achieving Results in Business and Society.” Looking over these ten great talks I can point to one to make this point about “thinking beyond simple compromise.” William Throop, the former Provost of Green Mountain College and author of the new Cornell University Press career summary book “Thriving in a Time of Climate Change”, articulates in a beautifully composed and thoughtful way the “skillful habits” of constructive frugality and humility — and other traits — required to thrive in this age of anxiety and stress on climate change.

The values explored and documented in Throop’s book, which will prove lasting for the rest of this century, are the strong values I found worked for me. The book by Throop confirms what I discovered in living and writing my own books, a very satisfying feeling to uncover.

What inspired you to start a purpose-driven business rather than a traditional for-profit enterprise? Can you share a personal story or experience that led you to prioritize social impact in your business?

After 44 years in business, I need to suggest this might be the wrong question for me.

To generate the compounding value in social capital, you need to be driven both by purpose and profit. They are not mutually exclusive. Let’s flip Aristotle’s famous warning about “anger” on its head here. Aristotle said in his Nicomachean Ethics: “Anyone can become angry — that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way — that is not easy.”

There is a parallel when reaching a success that society values in your work. Some call this reputation, but it is parallel in this rephrasing. “Anyone can become purposeful — that is easy. But to be purposeful with the right persons, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right profit, and in the right way — that is not easy.” Hope your readers think past the simple fashions of being declared “purpose-driven” and find the true satisfaction is asking “what is enough” and “What is social capital?”

Can you help articulate a few of the benefits of leading a purpose-driven business rather than a standard “plain vanilla” business?

My new book Wealth and Climate Competitiveness: The New Narrative on Business and Society answers this profound question.

That book took me 4 years and 150 pages to answer. Please refer to that book if your time permits. You can also read the 7 page summary of its value in the book provided by the former CEO of AARP William Novelli.

How has your company’s mission or purpose affected its overall success? Can you explain the methods or metrics you use to evaluate the impact of this purpose-driven strategy on your organization?

Now edging 70 years old, I feel like the old professor in tweed, with pipe in hand, that I received so much instruction from during my PHD dissertation. I remember asking M. H. Abrams, the editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature (my dissertation advisor for almost five years) and the author of two classics in literary and social history, how do you evaluate your own success?

It is worth reading the Wikipedia pages on Abrams before contemplating what he wisely said: “You should not evaluate your own success, Bruce. That is the job of others using and reading your work. There enough to do and read and redo and refine in our thinking and writing each day than to worry about such questions Bruce.” This provided great relief from the anxiety of ambition and provided a longer horizon of effort that lasted in my case thru youth, the long sensual middle years, and now as I strive in old age. The best memoirs offer these prevailing winds that last thru the phases of a life, moving folks in worthy or destructive directions. There is a profound freedom in fate, once you think thru Abrams’ advice.

Can you share a pivotal moment when you realized that leading your purpose-driven company was actually making a significant impact? Can you share a specific example or story that deeply resonated with you personally?

I find third-party objective rankings and market endorsements the most objective measures, not my own assessments or my own sense of pivotal points. It is like in a basketball, where everyone can see the turn overs, the missed free throws, and the final statistics. That set of competitive measures seems to matter to me even early in life.

Here is a specific story. When your book Doing More with Less is number 3 for a month at the USA Today bestseller lists in Money, or when it crosses over into a bestseller in NYTimes non- fiction, you feel good. You may be busy running your life, family and firm at the time, but that good feeling runs along side your days and hours for a while. There is what one of your contributors, Yitzi Weiner, calls a “mighty hum” in having impact.

This feeling of arrival matters. In the end it is what justifies a memoir.

When you begin to feel that the society which raised you, now wants some explanation then arrival descends. It is different than the original feelings of a calling in our religious traditions — as it is purely social and historical. You begin to think that you might have made a few good decisions in designing your work after all, despite the mountains of debts and errors and weekly mistakes.

So many business leaders and writers share clouds of self-doubt. Since so much professional ambition is self-delusional, really, we need these third-party endorsements to keep sane, and productive as business owners and writers.

I do not want to make too much of this sense of arrival, but it is sustaining. Once you get recognized, you can become addicted to seeking the positive “social” response again. This is far more important than measures of profit or purpose described earlier in this article/entry.

This is what Sigmund Freud, in his late life book Civilization and its Discontents, calls “the call of the superego,” the deep response to the calls of civilization. That is much deeper and lasting than pure competitive ego. The reason I gave myself another few years to perfect the Memoir is to explore these more subtle points about arrival.

If you live long and hard enough, please listen for that call in your life, and the signals of arrival. That is the true gift. Of course, it takes family, and friends, and self-determination to start on that path, too.

Have you ever faced a situation where your commitment to your purpose and creating a positive social impact clashed with the profitability in your business? Have you ever been challenged by anyone on your team or have to make a tough decision that had a significant impact on finances? If so, how did you address and reconcile this conflict?

I realize now, in retrospect, that I’ve had a lucky life in business. I have avoided serious conflict, and after months of stress — did win the two legal payment disputes where I needed outside legal support on.

Does this relate to having a general education in the liberal arts, history, and cultural things?

In retrospect, I now think so. It provides what’s beautiful in a global liberal arts education. Where else does one develop an informed sense of caution and judicial ways?

What advice would you give to budding entrepreneurs who wish to start a purpose-driven business?

Cultivate a sense of daily routine; invest in yourself and your teams, and most importantly, be persistent.

Then read widely. Read in many fields, not just your own areas of expertise.

Another way to convert being a budding entrepreneur into one of impact is to exercise your power day by day. I found value in reading Robert Gates book on running the CIA and Department of Defense, called The Exercise of Power. I read several times, across several years (like I reread Coleman’s Emotional Intelligence for decades) because I became friends with his head of communications at both agencies for a short period.

Privately, I was most impressed by the burdens of pursuing the exercise of power outside simple military might. That book helped me think ourside the simple box of my own life, and realize you need to be about being responsive and persistent. Responsive is not the same as responsible in the exercise of power.

What are your “5 Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Purpose-Driven Business.” If you can, please share a story or example for each.

1 . You must understand that your firm exists in a context of competing cultures. There is the dominant culture of law and science, and markets. But there is also a reactionary culture, where folks want to push back time to a prior set of assumptions on their dated ideas of liberty, rights and privilege. And finally, there are the thought leaders of a progressive culture.

Dominant

Reactionary

Progressive.

Your business plan is positioned to be proven of value to elements of each of the competing cultures, otherwise you will not grow like a gazelle, nor last.

2 . Then write books that challenge the prevailing norms of our dominant culture of science and markets by offering a profound exploration into how we can better align our ambitions with the planet’s well-being. These books can combine lessons from social history, lived corporate experience, and personal narrative.

3 . Finally, measure your projects and selected assignments relative to an annual career re-evaluation. Each year in the first two weeks of January, I rewrote my job description in a paragraph.

Those three things are good enough and hard enough that you do not need five “needs” or organizing “stories” as asked. Keep it simple, always keep it simpler than five.

I’m interested in how you instill a strong sense of connection with your team. How do you nurture a culture where everyone feels connected to your mission? Could you share an example or story that showcases how your purpose has positively influenced or motivated people on your team to contribute?

The most aligning thing I did was a 120-minute Wednesday morning Group Zoom. I tried not to dominant these, but instead starting with inputs on our key earners and billables in the first hour, then went to what are the “next big wins” in assignments before us.

I found that a great mid-week recurrent exercise. I did not punish anyone who underperformed during these peak weeklies. Instead, I gave them private calls or emails on what I noticed about them.

Imagine we’re sitting down together two years from now, looking back at your company’s last 24 months. What specific accomplishments would have to happen for you to be happy with your progress?

I would hope that this highly engaging and demanding film crew looking into making a film about my career and work gets done. They say it will take almost a year. That strikes me as painful, even agonizing. My wife wonders why I said yes; and my daughter questions it as well.

For decades now, I wake most morning with an anxiety to get some writing done. When it involves production teams and schedules, it drives me even more crazy — so from two years from now, I want that film out, edited, and sold to lots of affiliates, and done with. Right now I am in the middle of getting release filming forms to over a dozen folks talking about my work, and that also makes me anxious in a new way.

You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

My 2017 book, now out in ten foreign editions, talks about SOCIAL RESPONSE CAPITALISM as a form of global competition that addresses the usual demands of capitalists (price, markets, technology, rules, talent) plus SOCIAL NEEDS. I believe a few of my translators, in Greek, Japanese, and Brazilian Portuguese and Korean, saw a potential movement in that now very old and long book.

How can our readers further follow your work or your company online?

I need to thank the owner of the www.scottmeredith.com talent agency, Arthur Klebanoff, and the owner of www.RodinBooks (the same) for their devotion in representing my work for the new generations of readers.

They made for example a fun cartoon about the key principles in my books called, www.thedoingmorewithlessguy.com I hope you enjoy that.

Of course, the usual author’s page, www.brucepiasecki.com and growing Wikipedia entries help others align with the purpose and reach of the work.

In conclusion, please if under 40 visit the cartoon on my career, www.thedoingmorewithlessguy.com Or for a more serious rendition of my work see the crowd sourced Wikipedia pages. All 22 books explored with comments on www.brucepiasecki.com and my Amazon or Good reads pages. Hope this helps. Thanks for you interest.

This was great. Thanks for taking time for us to learn more about you and your business. We wish you continued success!

About the Interviewer: Chad Silverstein, a seasoned entrepreneur with over two decades of experience as the Founder and CEO of multiple companies. He launched Choice Recovery, Inc., a healthcare collection agency, while going to The Ohio State University, His team earned national recognition, twice being ranked as the #1 business to work for in Central Ohio. In 2018, Chad launched [re]start, a career development platform connecting thousands of individuals in collections with meaningful employment opportunities, He sold Choice Recovery on his 25th anniversary and in 2023, sold the majority interest in [re]start so he can focus his transition to Built to Lead as an Executive Leadership Coach. Learn more at www.chadsilverstein.com