speaker-0: Welcome to Doing Good by Doing Better, the podcast for world shapers, not spectators. I'm Margaret Rogers, CEO of Parivada, a professional services firm that helps make potential possible for our clients. On the show, I talk with founders, executives, and innovators who share hard lessons, bold ideas, and real strategies for purpose-driven growth. This episode will offer practical insights you can use this week to solve forward. Because at PartyVeda, we know that doing good only endures when we keep learning how to do better. In a Bonnie world that's brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible, companies can create cohesion through purpose while still making a profit. Today, I'm joined by Tiffany Lentz, head of purposeful profit at Pariveda, where she leads our B Corp journey and helps shape how we bring purpose and profit together, both inside and out. In this episode, Tiffany and I get into what it looks like to run a purpose-driven business. where you're constantly balancing short-term performance with long-term impact, and where that tension is very real day to day. She also impacts the reality behind B Corp certification, the rigor, the trade-offs, and why that level of accountability matters, and shares a practical perspective on how leaders can move from talking about purpose to actually operationalizing it inside their organizations. Let's jump in. Hello, everybody. I am excited to be joined today by Tiffany Lentz, our VP or head of purposeful profit at B Corp. Today we're going to be talking about purposeful profit, a real passion of ours here at Paraveda Solutions. Purposeful profit is part of a social impact at B Corp work, and Tiffany has spearheaded our B Corp certification journey and continuing to evolve. I want to talk to you about your journey and what led you to Parvata. Because I think when we talk a little bit later about purposeful profit, it's really going to click for our audience about why this is a passion of yours and how we became a magnet for you to come over here and help us in that journey.
speaker-1: Yeah, thanks for asking. is a part of my story that I really enjoy telling. I don't have your standard background of being an HR professional or even a licensed DEI professional. It's been, I'm a, I am a corporate consultant for almost 20 years. So it's been a bit of a passion project experimenting with corporate America and solutioning, and then having an opportunity to taste providing technology solutions and excellent. strategies to nonprofits and finding that that actually provided me as a human with a lot more satisfaction in my work because I did start squarely in corporate America. So one of my earliest projects that I had the privilege of both sponsoring and then being the project manager on was Rock the Vote. Do you remember Rock the Vote app? Many, many years ago.
speaker-0: I remember Rockavote.
speaker-1: That's right. I just dated myself. It gave me so much satisfaction to see solutions that were necessary in corporate America be translated over into nonprofits and how the needs were so real, but they were so solvable. That was the first taste I had. And going back then to sort of standard corporate America technology solutioning, little by little became less and less satisfying. And I found that I had to have that balance in my career, which led me to then spend a number of years working in healthcare for developing countries because it was just more satisfaction of taking these great solutions from one space to a space where the benefit was so tangible and so real for people. The draw to Paraveda actually was quite unique in that the firm appealed to me greatly because it seemed to take up a notch. the expectation. So many companies, including the one I came from, had great ideas and great sort of soft expectations of people to be engaged and be bringing their best selves to their community. But part of AIDA's expectations being it's factored into our development plans at every level of the company. And there is a very clear expectation of giving your best skills. That's a quote our founder would have given, that we're bringing our best selves to a solution. And If you're not developing that part of yourself as a human, as a strategist, as a consultant, you're actually missing the expectations Parabeta has for you in black and white. That was one of the big selling points for me. Not the only one, but that was one.
speaker-0: I was curious about one thing you wish people really understood about running a purpose-driven professional services business, like in general. Because you've seen it from different organizations. I've seen it from different organizations. There are a lot of organizations out there that say people are our most important asset, and yet they don't really execute that way. What do you want people to know about what we do here in terms of running a purpose-driven services business?
speaker-1: That's a great question, and it's a hard one, I think, for people to hear my answer. My answer would be, you have to be very comfortable sitting in the tension. You have to be incredibly comfortable with being uncomfortable and challenging one another, agreeing to what your North Star is. It's crystal clear at Paraveda what our mission is, what our purpose is, what our North Star is. But you can't see always short-term benefits immediately on that. You have to balance short and long term. And I was talking to a CEO early this morning, he's in Finland, so I talked to him very early this morning. He leads a group called the Culture Factor Group, and they help cross cultural boundaries of multicultural business solutions, all different types. He was sharing a statistic with me that was both was affirmative, not surprising, but it was affirmative around how Americans, we are very short term focused. Now that's changing a little bit with the generation that is 40 and under, but we are just as capitalists, I'm a proud capitalist, make no mistake, but there's something about our economy, our sociology, our training, where we're very focused on short-term benefits, solutions, profits, everything. Those are important. But when you're talking about purpose, it has to be measured much more like education systems are measured. It has to be measured in generations of time. So we have to find a way of striking a balance and showing progress at a short-term level inside Parvata. to our employees, to our board, and externally as well, but we also have to find a way of staying true to that long-term goal, which is creating a company that stays true to who we are, that outlives us both, that outlives our generation of management.
speaker-0: I think that's really one of the things why leaders really feel that tension between purpose and profit in performance overall in organizations. mean, we see it all the time where a non-for-profit, they bring in a corporate leader and they'll say, ⁓ they don't understand the mission. They're too profit-driven. And we tend to live in a very binary world when both can coexist actually at the same time. And you have to manage it, like you said, between that tension space. But if you can do both. then it's so much better and we know that this incoming workforce is really tied to purpose quite a bit. And at the same time, in order to get to that performance, you have to demand a level of excellence and in order to have excellence, you have to have standards. So being able to have those conversations and show how they're all connected together to the purpose is really important, but difficult. It's not an easy thing to always balance.
speaker-1: Agreed, agreed. And I have the privilege of having these conversations with you often about the microtensions, the macrotensions. I would love it if you could share some of those signals that you see on the regular when we're actually integrating purpose into strategy instead of just talking about it and we feel it in our own leadership team.
speaker-0: Yeah, I think a lot of our organization, of course, we make so many decisions based on the purpose. I think sometimes when we get lost or we get feel the high amounts of tension, we always go back to what are we here for? We're here to develop the talent, right? Resilient talent essentially unlock potential in each and every one of us who are here at Parvata for the benefit of our clients, right? They become amazing solutioners. thought leaders, partners, servant leaders, they really help because they care. They care about the whole project and the person, not just about the transaction of the project. So when I think about the investments that we're making in 2026, I mean, we just did a whole revamp of our proprietary expectations framework. And that expectations framework is huge for us because it determines It basically talks about what are the behaviors we're expecting to see as you get more mature in your career. And being able to have that clarity for each and every person and know that you're not being judged against another person, but rather to the standards has created an environment that allows people to have more, in many ways, more say in how they're, an understanding of how they can develop to become those leaders that are great partners. I think the other thing for us, especially in 2026, is while we are investing in technology and AI, we are trying to think about it really from the people perspective first. Because in everything that you do, yes, everybody's jobs are going to change. But what's really important is to know that right now, we really believe that we want people to co-create that solution and co-create what that future job is going to look like. Because when we embrace that, then we can come out with such amazing creativity, the sum of our parts is so much greater than when we are as individuals. So I don't need to tell somebody what their job looks like. I want people to feel like they can evolve that with this new horizon. And so some of the investments we are making are talking about our mindset, doing experimentation, and figuring out what is the right fit so that we're exercising proper judgment and using things like AI responsibly, but starting from the people first.
speaker-1: That's a great response to some of the fear that certainly younger employees everywhere feel because it's counterculture to what they are seeing in the news and what many of them are experiencing at companies they maybe used to work at. So very inspirational. Thank you.
speaker-0: It's amazing that also, I mean, you're still seeing the layoff rhetoric that's going on and now it's being more transparent in that people are laying off so that they can redirect the money towards AI investments. it really is a shame because there are definitely long-term repercussions from the workforce standpoint. And what you said, to do what we do, we're looking at generations, right? And so if you're making these kind of short-term judgments, then you're going to end up missing on the longer term. generational impact. I will ask you this interesting thing because since you talked a little bit about your background and what brought you here, what are some of the more meaningful shifts you've seen since you started here?
speaker-1: builder of things. You've known me long enough to know that. I love to build things. There were so many great pieces of material that had been built at Paraveda, either into the DNA or programs that had been started and sort of dreams that had yet to come to fruition of how we could marry purpose and profit. Those weren't even words we were using six years ago. But I could see the pieces there that looked like they just needed you know, someone who liked to build things with the right kind of experience across corporate and nonprofit to pull them together. And that was a challenge I was very, very interested in. I think the meaningful shifts have been the enjoyment and the productivity of seeing one local office's investment in nonprofits create space where we could have annual hackathons for broader nonprofits. messaging that is consistent internally that resonates with our employees, but also externally resonates with the market. A brand new partnerships with people like AWS and their nonprofit arm, where they understand that our purpose is aligned to the message they want to take to their clients and we actually can deliver for people who need our solutions most. Those things are quite meaningful because they take shape into something that is again more than the sum of its parts. It's sets of programming that feed off of one another.
speaker-0: One of the things that you have been talking about last year and of course continuing on this year of course is the purposeful profit equation. And it's such a simple way to be able to express the types of things that you need to have in place in order to really have a purposeful profit organization. Can you talk a little bit about that idea?
speaker-1: Sure. So, unbeknownst to you, when interviewing you about what B Corp meant to you as a CEO, you were quoted, and I quote you regularly in different speaking engagements, you were quoted as saying that purpose and profit can work together at scale. And that's part of what B Corp meant to you. As I thought about that, I believe it's true. I'm witnessing it across the globe and also at Parvata. But it occurred to me that I hadn't really seen a model that other people could follow. We could speak to it, we could tell stories about it, we could intuit it and design with our own experiences. But we needed a model that could show people a few steps they could follow to design for their purpose and then sanity check themselves or find their North Star and test their offerings and their services against that purpose all along the way. So that's what inspired me to create it because I thought it could help other companies. do what we were doing no matter what position they were in, if they were starting or if they were larger.
speaker-0: Yeah, there are lot of really great consumer brands out there that are doing very similar things. They talk about greater purpose and what they're doing. You know, we're not just making shoes, we're helping to save the planet, right? We're not just creating amazing clothing, but we're eliminating waste. And so I think those places have huge longevity in terms of the employees who are really connected to that purpose and offering something to the consumer. They kind of embody that purposeful profit equation.
speaker-1: With those examples in mind, how do you think about balancing all the competing polls? Margaret, this is a minute by minute exercise for you that feels different for me because full disclosure, I work for you. So your decisioning impacts my decisioning and my execution. So I'm wondering, how do you think about that and process on the day to day?
speaker-0: Broadly, first on the macro, I always talk about how the reason why profit is important for us is several fold. One is it's an evaluation of what people are willing to pay for our services, which tells us how well we're actually developing people and fulfilling our mission. Because if we do talent development well, people are willing to pay for the experience and the thought leadership and that partnership that we bring to the table. It should feel special. It should feel different. And so for me, profit is one, a measure, a third party measure of how are we doing in our job to be compelling and feeling like that we're creating talent that is highly valued. The second piece to me is it's 100 % an enabler to our mission. And I think non-for-profits, again, who get this right, who know that you can't have mission without margins are usually more healthy. You know, I was talking to the leader of the institute that does bone marrow matching, they realized that they had to get off of grants. They couldn't rely on this handout that was supporting a lot of their business. They are a non-for-profit. So what they did was they started to create a business model so that they could be self-sufficient. In that case, that enables the mission. They don't have to worry about federal cuts and spending within their area. They could keep going and thriving. and providing the service that's really needed to frankly save lives. When I think about for us, it's very, very similar. So you're always managing to the business because you know the business is the thing that's going to enable what you have to do day to day. The investments that we make, of course, always go back to what are we trying to achieve? How are we impacting people? And frankly, there's a lot of, I call it intellectual humility that you have to have. Because you know you can always do something slightly better or differently and you don't want to get caught up in your own echo chamber or else you're never evolving and innovating. And so to me, one of the foundational things is beyond the purpose is making sure that we have strong culture, clarity on what good looks like, clarity on how we need to be the best versions of ourselves. And then you can enable a lot of people to do that together or on their own supporting each other. There's a huge human component to us from a community standpoint. And frankly, our employees spend how much time with us every week? I mean, they spend anywhere between 40 hours to more than that. And they commit a lot of time for themselves to develop themselves, to develop others. And so you got to create a great environment for people to thrive and help fulfill our mission. And when everybody believes in the mission, then we can always make those choices and it helps direct us to continue on that North Star. I think you're always going to be making those choices. And if you can anticipate more and more about what might be coming ahead, hopefully you don't have to make the sacrifices. And then finally, I'll just say, I think appropriate transparency whenever you can is really important. I think one of the things that I've learned as a leader is being able to share more and more of the thinking. And even though people may not like the decision, At some deep level, they usually understand what's going on so that we can preserve what we can and adapt how we have to. I'm just going to circle back to this because I got this question this week where somebody said, B Corp, why are you B Corp? You're a professional services firm. And again, it was kind of the third party thing, right? Where we don't want to be looking in the mirror and saying, oh, we love ourselves. We do such great work. We want somebody else to say, hey, we're holding you accountable on your words. and you're not pretending, right? You're being held accountable by somebody else on the outside. If you were walking another firm through this idea of becoming a B Corp, what would you tell them to pay attention to in the process?
speaker-1: That is
speaker-0: It's small. This is a huge effort, by the way, I'll say.
speaker-1: The V-Corp certification is one of the most exciting things I've ever done in my career, by the way. The idea of bringing in something of this significance that is meaningful to even our most junior employees because they see the logo on items at the grocery store. They know what it is. Bringing that into our firm and self-identifying with that, but also having the privilege of sitting with our board and presenting a business case for why this is good for our company long term. And to your point, this third party verification of having someone say who you say you are, validate that what you're saying is true. The process is heavy. It's a very heavyweight process, but it should be. So what I would say to another company is be very prepared for the level of rigor and proof points that will be required of you. Because what B-Lab, the certifying organization, does not allow you to do is just make claims. You have to be able to back up every claim that you have. And something that both surprised me along the way, and we learned to get very accustomed to answering such questions, was where are the policies? Where do you have this documented? Where's the proof, not just a report that you can run, but something that your employees can look at and say, yes, this is how we operate? That in and of itself is both difficult, but it also creates the stickiness that one would be looking for. in terms of meaningful certification. We all know companies that have certifications, but they're sitting at some leadership level or the marketing team owns them and they steward them well, but they're not meaningful from the inside out and outside in. And B Corp certification for us over the last three years has become meaningful on all fronts because we have leaned into pulling through, pulling an idea or a practice into policy. into other parts of the operations of the organization. And I think that's necessary actually for keeping the certification.
speaker-0: Yeah, I think one of the things that we realized, of course, I mean, we're pretty new at this, right? Where we've only gone through the certification ones, we're in the process of getting our second round of certification. And I think one of the interesting things is you are trying to make yourself better. You want to score a little bit better in some of the categories in the future years. So that three year, it's not like you get certified and you kind of squat and go, well, okay, now it's the third year, we got to get certified again, right? We're all trying to move ourselves forward in some way to become more mature. into the pillars of what the B Corp certification provides. What surprised you along the way in getting certified?
speaker-1: It was actually the rigor, the accountability, the proof points we had to provide, and it required partnership through the whole organization. The number of times I was reaching out to our legal team, our finance team, our marketing team, our HR team, it required the entire organization to come together and say, yes, we want to do this. And so we're going to make whatever proof points visible and transparent we need to do to prove that we, frankly, we deserve this certification because we were designed for it. It takes a whole team effort, actually.
speaker-0: you had some good foresight here because we knew that they were going to be changing the standards from when we first got certified. And you raised your hand and you're like, hey, we want to be part of the pilot or at least be on the advisory group that allows us to have some influence hopefully, or at least provide feedback on the new standards. What for you has been interesting in the new standards and what is tricky about the new standards?
speaker-1: The way they have divided up and sort of segregated thought and casted a wide net around worker rights is quite interesting and intriguing. In the past certification, there was one category for this. And the new certification, there's human rights evaluation for one's own employees, sets of policies, procedures, protection, ways that they have safe anonymous spaces for escalating issues. And of course, you have to prove each one of those. But they've added an entire layer of corporate accountability for all subcontractors, contractors, any external workers that one would interact with. That is really important when you think about lowercase s, sustainability for businesses. What the triple bottom line stood for, people plan at profit, people cannot just be our people. It has to be people we interact with and we have to be willing to take as corporations take accountability for the way that we interact. with people for the subcontracting firms that we choose to partner with because we're helping their revenue as well. And knowing that they have human rights laws, that they're operating by strong human rights policies is important and it's not something we should turn a blind eye to. So I was surprised and also encouraged to see that broadening of the aperture there around workers. You said tricky, something that makes it tricky. I think for a professional services firm, we continue to learn and be pushed and challenged on our environmental footprint. Years and years ago, in times when you and I both remember, it was easy for a services firm to say, well, this is not my problem. We don't have factories and we don't produce any goods. So it's not our problem to worry about what's happening to the environment. And B Lab has challenged that fully. and asked for services firms to be accountable for scope one, two, and three for themselves. Also, to look at what they can in their offices and also to ask thoughtful questions of their clients so that we're, again, broadening the aperture of accountability so that everyone is accountability for the good that we bring to the environment or the negativity we bring to the environment.
speaker-0: What have you learned about measurement and accountability? Like what to track, what not to track? How have you gone through that process in figuring out what makes sense from a B Corp perspective?
speaker-1: It is perpetual learning, I will say that, which is tricky with metrics because the longer you can run them, the more you learn from the data. I've learned that we should evaluate data in its context and then be willing to stop measuring or start measuring because I tried and true understanding around metrics is you get what you measure. So if we're measuring one angle on diversity, we're going to accomplish that, especially very driven people like We're going to accomplish whatever we set forward on those metrics. So what my team and I feel constantly challenged around is, from a metrics standpoint, is making sure that the metrics are appropriately representative so that we're looking at what are we actually trying to drive in a behavior change as opposed to a piece of data as it is in its stagnant form today. The accountability angle is a very different one because what I've seen in Paraveda over the years is a willingness to stretch accountability beyond just my team, who is responsible for DEI and B Corp and all of the social impact components into the other parts of the firm and allow them to have accountability for how they respond to our metrics or contribute to them. Or sometimes if there's an inhibitor, to your point about transparency, I feel very comfortable in our executive team bringing up attention and inhibitor. of one team's metric to mine so that we can openly discuss what unintended consequences we may have. That is pretty rare, and it is a continual learning for me that then I'm able to take back to my team. So the goal is that we have healthy performance, not just performative on paper.
speaker-0: We have to be, we're just constantly learning about how to go about having the conversations. We've identified a couple of places where we've had to have some pretty, I wouldn't say they were confrontational by any stretch of the imagination, but there was, it's a tension that you feel because it feels sensitive, right? And everybody's just trying to figure it out. So I think we're continuing to learn and we'll get better as we go. And everybody comes out. in agreement, which has been pretty remarkable to date for us.
speaker-1: Indeed, indeed. I'm really interested in you talking a little more about what you say. You have lots of interactions with other executives, conferences, speaking engagements, and I know you get questions about our choice to identify as purposefully profitable and identify with b-crop certification. How have you seen your leadership evolve, your messaging evolve when you're asked about these things?
speaker-0: I think over the years, so I've been in this role for about three years now, for me, it's been clear and crisper in terms of being the champion of that message and realizing how much it does resonate, not just with the younger generation, but there are many businesses out there that may not discuss it. And frankly, I'm not sure if they know how to yet. They tend to be some family-owned businesses or smaller businesses, mid-market businesses. They really believe in a lot of the things that we do too, but they've never had to operationalize it. They've never had to scale it. And so the idea from a leadership perspective for me is just the consistent messaging and becoming more of an amplifier of the idea that purpose and profit go together hand in hand and can go together hand in hand and will create a lot of positivity in the community around us and globally. how we serve our clients and how we influence those clients to believe in the same or align to those kinds of aspirations within our community. So I think for me, it's just that huge amplification of the leadership side of the house and making sure that I'm representing the message to the market in a way that is very authentic to who we are, very much so similar to when we did all of our rebranding message and talked about. how we make potential possible. It's how we talk about making the potential of others possible. And it's how we deliver, again, our work when we partner with clients is making sure that we're developing all people, not just our people, we're developing their people and we're developing each other. And so all of that becomes interwoven. And I think I realized that the more you can weave it in together, the more aligned and comfortable it feels. your mission to be very effortless in how you describe it and how you live it in a way where it doesn't make you think so hard. It's kind of the core of human-centered design, which is like, don't make me think, make it very easy for me to understand. And that's basically how we are continuing to grow and evolve.
speaker-1: That's good. can imagine if we have to get that right internally as well as externally.
speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. I would say that we've always talked about from the inside out, like you have to start with your employees. And there are a lot of corporations that do espouse this saying that you have to make sure that your employees are taken care of, that they understand and they're aligned with what you're trying to achieve, not just on a big macro level of our mission and our purpose, but also on what we're trying to achieve year to year. That's culture, what, strategy or devours strategy. And so you have to make sure that when we're doing any sort of internal changes that people understand how it impacts them, hopefully in a good way, and that they see the benefits and that it helps energize and continue to fill that cup such that they can serve the clients that we work with externally, right, how they show up every time, even when you're off the clock. you're part of an organization, you're always representing the organization in some way, or form. I think historically you've seen people learn that the very hard way. In a world where digital is on all the time, you're always representing the organization which you work for. So to me, like getting this right internally and having a home for people, feel aligned to the values and the mission and understand the kind of environment that we're building to bring the best development opportunities that we can to our people is really, it's gonna be ongoing. I don't think three years ago we knew about Gen. AI, of course, and so it's gonna continue to evolve. Our mission stays the same. How we do it might slightly change and the tools we use will definitely change. So yeah, I get it right internally. You're gonna do amazing things externally. I do believe that the results will follow if you get it right inside. When you think about purpose-driven growth, what does great leadership look like, especially in the messy middle, right? Like everyone always can talk about the big aspiration. You, as one of the leaders in our organization, have to take Margaret's big aspiration and our collective big aspirations and bring it down to reality. How do you think about the priorities that might compete in especially right now when the outside world is just so crazy from an economic standpoint.
speaker-1: That is a piece of our discussion that our team tackles on a regular basis very intentionally. So in order for purpose to be real, passing through our team, the first thing we have to acknowledge is, as you've mentioned before about the importance of profit, profit is our oxygen. So as a team, as a small integrated team, we cannot look at the profit needs. as something unimportant. We have to be doing things in service to that. Maybe that's creating interesting fodder for conversations with clients, interesting marketing material, interesting articles that will get people's attentions. We have to find our own ways of contributing because profit is our oxygen. Without profit, there is no purpose. Another way we look at that messy middle is through the messaging that we create and co-create with other people, our internal comms team, our marketing team, the messaging we create has to resonate with our employees at every level. So there's an element of storytelling, there's an element of thinking about various scenarios and what people need to hear from us to understand how they should experience our purpose on a regular basis, how they should see it, taste it, touch it, look at its manifestation. So we try to... double-click into some of the larger strategic elements and come up with multiple ways where they can be integrated into the firm and experienced by every person. And that requires a lot of thinking about even the age groups of our employees, what they're looking for, what they're excited about and not excited about. It's not just me talking to my peers in my age group, it's people 20 years younger than me who are looking for something a little different. That's a lot of the time we spend is sometimes doing that translation and often listening to people's fears when they come through around, what about AI? Well, what about job performance? Am I getting better at my job? Am I at risk? We often hear some of that feedback coming through that then we can help craft responses to so that there isn't fear in our system. There can be fear in the global economic system, the national economic system, but there shouldn't be fear in our system because as you well know, when people feel safe, they actually produce better. So there's elements of that. that we continue to work into our narrative as well.
speaker-0: When you're looking ahead, how do you see expectations changing for companies that are claiming to be purpose driven?
speaker-1: The expectations I have is that with a younger workforce continuing to age, their goals, their priorities are very different than the group that is aging out at this point. And that actually gives me a lot of hope because we're going to see companies needing to center around some type of mission and purpose and be true to it and be held accountable to it, maybe on social media, maybe through whether their employees vote with their feet and leave or stay. We're going to see companies have to respond whether they want to or not. And that's good for the globe. It's good for workers. It's good for healthy, sustainable profit. So that excites me quite a lot. What about you?
speaker-0: I'm in agreement about you really have to look to the younger workforce and the upcoming generations that are coming because I think those folks are going to have the largest voice and the largest impact in holding people accountable. mean, they always talk about how you vote with your dollars, right? And how you interact with the consumer is going to matter. I also think that There's this interesting trend right now that's happening, especially in the younger generation, where they're almost rejecting certain levels of technology. And I think as companies are trying to figure out exactly how to depress costs so that they can increase their profits, they're going to turn to technology and I suspect going to be using it in ways that are not very human centered at all. The experience can get a little bit more probably degraded. because we're using the technology instead of a human on the other side. There's a company that makes bread and you can mail order it and they will answer the phone on the first ring. Like I don't even know how that works really and how many people they have answering the phone or maybe they don't have that many people answering the phone all the time, but they have a mail order catalog and you call them up and they will answer the phone and then they direct you to the department. that you're looking for. And so in this case, I was looking for bread. I was ordering some bread for my nephew who has food allergies. And I said, hey, I just need to know, does this chocolate chip sourdough bread actually have dairy in it because you can't have dairy. They ran off to the bakery to talk to the bakers, came back and told me about it and said, no, you don't. And I was like, great, let's order some. But I will tell you that experience changed significantly my perception of that organization. I think Companies likely will accidentally overindex on the technology side, forget about the people side, and forget that people really want to interact with people in many instances. So it's about applying the technology in the right use cases rather than using a peanut butter spread blanket approach to it. All right, we always like a lightning round. What is a book you often recommend?
speaker-1: often recommend The Secrets of Consulting. It's an old one by Gerald Weinberg, who's no longer with us. is old school. It's a good one because it's about human interaction. It's actually less about consulting than just about understanding humans. What about you?
speaker-0: Well, see right now I'm reading The Art of Happiness. So the Dalai Lama book kind of revisiting that. I think I got a little bit inspired by the fact that the Edelman Trust barometer came out and talked about how the world is so insular. And I was like, you know, I'm going to read about the art of happiness. And of course, it's in this interview mode with the author's name is Howard Cutler. He's a psychiatrist. So he's talking to the Dalai Lama and the Dalai Lama, course, is very spiritually driven. And so it's a very fascinating book. Favorite quote.
speaker-1: Trust is a big mission point of mine. You I used to have a podcast called the industry of trust. So my favorite quote is actually trust comes in on foot and out on horseback. It takes a long time to gain it and you lose it overnight, immediately.
speaker-0: That's like the life of consulting. All right, what about a habit you live by?
speaker-1: Great. That's right. Well, what I try to live by is seeking first to understand. I think the more experience I get in my career, I often show up thinking I know the answer. It's always proven best for me when I pause and ask more questions before forming a solution. Even if my solution before was right, it's better to ask questions first.
speaker-0: So what's giving you hope about the future of purpose-driven businesses?
speaker-1: It is going to be that younger workforce watching the shift in what people expect of a company. To your point earlier, how much time people spend with a company, they now have very clear expectations and they're willing to hold them accountable. I'm increasingly encouraged by the increase in the number of B Corps because B Corps is not perfect, but it's one of the best assessments we have right now to say that people are holding true to their purpose. So those encourage me.
speaker-0: I love that. And where can listeners connect with you or learn more about your work?
speaker-1: Well, you can find me on LinkedIn. You can also find me on Parvata's website. You can find articles I've written on Parvata's website. And I actually have a book coming out later this year that I've been working on for years in my free time called The Seven Deadly Leadership Sins. So it's fun kind of tongue in cheek about how the seven deadly sins from the Bible apply to the workforce and then how you get yourself to the good place as leaders. So. That's been a fun passion project, so be on the lookout for it.
speaker-0: like that. And what's one final takeaway you want leaders to carry into their next decision this week?
speaker-1: I would say go back and evaluate what your purpose actually is and make sure that the work you are doing is aligned with that. Otherwise, it doesn't have staying power.
speaker-0: Yeah, I think that's a really good pro tip. I am a big fan of evaluating both the individual purpose, your personal purpose, and making sure it overlaps really well within your organization. Otherwise, it's a pretty painful career to have. with that being said, thank you so much for joining me today.
speaker-1: Thank you for having me. This was really enjoyable.
speaker-0: Thanks for listening to Doing Good by Doing Better. I'm Margaret Rogers, CEO of Pariveda, and I hope this conversation offered you a new way to take your ideas to impact. Follow on Apple or Spotify and join us every other week as we keep learning how to do good by doing better.
speaker-1: Yeah, thanks for asking. is a part of my story that I really enjoy telling. I don't have your standard background of being an HR professional or even a licensed DEI professional. It's been, I'm a, I am a corporate consultant for almost 20 years. So it's been a bit of a passion project experimenting with corporate America and solutioning, and then having an opportunity to taste providing technology solutions and excellent. strategies to nonprofits and finding that that actually provided me as a human with a lot more satisfaction in my work because I did start squarely in corporate America. So one of my earliest projects that I had the privilege of both sponsoring and then being the project manager on was Rock the Vote. Do you remember Rock the Vote app? Many, many years ago.
speaker-0: I remember Rockavote.
speaker-1: That's right. I just dated myself. It gave me so much satisfaction to see solutions that were necessary in corporate America be translated over into nonprofits and how the needs were so real, but they were so solvable. That was the first taste I had. And going back then to sort of standard corporate America technology solutioning, little by little became less and less satisfying. And I found that I had to have that balance in my career, which led me to then spend a number of years working in healthcare for developing countries because it was just more satisfaction of taking these great solutions from one space to a space where the benefit was so tangible and so real for people. The draw to Paraveda actually was quite unique in that the firm appealed to me greatly because it seemed to take up a notch. the expectation. So many companies, including the one I came from, had great ideas and great sort of soft expectations of people to be engaged and be bringing their best selves to their community. But part of AIDA's expectations being it's factored into our development plans at every level of the company. And there is a very clear expectation of giving your best skills. That's a quote our founder would have given, that we're bringing our best selves to a solution. And If you're not developing that part of yourself as a human, as a strategist, as a consultant, you're actually missing the expectations Parabeta has for you in black and white. That was one of the big selling points for me. Not the only one, but that was one.
speaker-0: I was curious about one thing you wish people really understood about running a purpose-driven professional services business, like in general. Because you've seen it from different organizations. I've seen it from different organizations. There are a lot of organizations out there that say people are our most important asset, and yet they don't really execute that way. What do you want people to know about what we do here in terms of running a purpose-driven services business?
speaker-1: That's a great question, and it's a hard one, I think, for people to hear my answer. My answer would be, you have to be very comfortable sitting in the tension. You have to be incredibly comfortable with being uncomfortable and challenging one another, agreeing to what your North Star is. It's crystal clear at Paraveda what our mission is, what our purpose is, what our North Star is. But you can't see always short-term benefits immediately on that. You have to balance short and long term. And I was talking to a CEO early this morning, he's in Finland, so I talked to him very early this morning. He leads a group called the Culture Factor Group, and they help cross cultural boundaries of multicultural business solutions, all different types. He was sharing a statistic with me that was both was affirmative, not surprising, but it was affirmative around how Americans, we are very short term focused. Now that's changing a little bit with the generation that is 40 and under, but we are just as capitalists, I'm a proud capitalist, make no mistake, but there's something about our economy, our sociology, our training, where we're very focused on short-term benefits, solutions, profits, everything. Those are important. But when you're talking about purpose, it has to be measured much more like education systems are measured. It has to be measured in generations of time. So we have to find a way of striking a balance and showing progress at a short-term level inside Parvata. to our employees, to our board, and externally as well, but we also have to find a way of staying true to that long-term goal, which is creating a company that stays true to who we are, that outlives us both, that outlives our generation of management.
speaker-0: I think that's really one of the things why leaders really feel that tension between purpose and profit in performance overall in organizations. mean, we see it all the time where a non-for-profit, they bring in a corporate leader and they'll say, ⁓ they don't understand the mission. They're too profit-driven. And we tend to live in a very binary world when both can coexist actually at the same time. And you have to manage it, like you said, between that tension space. But if you can do both. then it's so much better and we know that this incoming workforce is really tied to purpose quite a bit. And at the same time, in order to get to that performance, you have to demand a level of excellence and in order to have excellence, you have to have standards. So being able to have those conversations and show how they're all connected together to the purpose is really important, but difficult. It's not an easy thing to always balance.
speaker-1: Agreed, agreed. And I have the privilege of having these conversations with you often about the microtensions, the macrotensions. I would love it if you could share some of those signals that you see on the regular when we're actually integrating purpose into strategy instead of just talking about it and we feel it in our own leadership team.
speaker-0: Yeah, I think a lot of our organization, of course, we make so many decisions based on the purpose. I think sometimes when we get lost or we get feel the high amounts of tension, we always go back to what are we here for? We're here to develop the talent, right? Resilient talent essentially unlock potential in each and every one of us who are here at Parvata for the benefit of our clients, right? They become amazing solutioners. thought leaders, partners, servant leaders, they really help because they care. They care about the whole project and the person, not just about the transaction of the project. So when I think about the investments that we're making in 2026, I mean, we just did a whole revamp of our proprietary expectations framework. And that expectations framework is huge for us because it determines It basically talks about what are the behaviors we're expecting to see as you get more mature in your career. And being able to have that clarity for each and every person and know that you're not being judged against another person, but rather to the standards has created an environment that allows people to have more, in many ways, more say in how they're, an understanding of how they can develop to become those leaders that are great partners. I think the other thing for us, especially in 2026, is while we are investing in technology and AI, we are trying to think about it really from the people perspective first. Because in everything that you do, yes, everybody's jobs are going to change. But what's really important is to know that right now, we really believe that we want people to co-create that solution and co-create what that future job is going to look like. Because when we embrace that, then we can come out with such amazing creativity, the sum of our parts is so much greater than when we are as individuals. So I don't need to tell somebody what their job looks like. I want people to feel like they can evolve that with this new horizon. And so some of the investments we are making are talking about our mindset, doing experimentation, and figuring out what is the right fit so that we're exercising proper judgment and using things like AI responsibly, but starting from the people first.
speaker-1: That's a great response to some of the fear that certainly younger employees everywhere feel because it's counterculture to what they are seeing in the news and what many of them are experiencing at companies they maybe used to work at. So very inspirational. Thank you.
speaker-0: It's amazing that also, I mean, you're still seeing the layoff rhetoric that's going on and now it's being more transparent in that people are laying off so that they can redirect the money towards AI investments. it really is a shame because there are definitely long-term repercussions from the workforce standpoint. And what you said, to do what we do, we're looking at generations, right? And so if you're making these kind of short-term judgments, then you're going to end up missing on the longer term. generational impact. I will ask you this interesting thing because since you talked a little bit about your background and what brought you here, what are some of the more meaningful shifts you've seen since you started here?
speaker-1: builder of things. You've known me long enough to know that. I love to build things. There were so many great pieces of material that had been built at Paraveda, either into the DNA or programs that had been started and sort of dreams that had yet to come to fruition of how we could marry purpose and profit. Those weren't even words we were using six years ago. But I could see the pieces there that looked like they just needed you know, someone who liked to build things with the right kind of experience across corporate and nonprofit to pull them together. And that was a challenge I was very, very interested in. I think the meaningful shifts have been the enjoyment and the productivity of seeing one local office's investment in nonprofits create space where we could have annual hackathons for broader nonprofits. messaging that is consistent internally that resonates with our employees, but also externally resonates with the market. A brand new partnerships with people like AWS and their nonprofit arm, where they understand that our purpose is aligned to the message they want to take to their clients and we actually can deliver for people who need our solutions most. Those things are quite meaningful because they take shape into something that is again more than the sum of its parts. It's sets of programming that feed off of one another.
speaker-0: One of the things that you have been talking about last year and of course continuing on this year of course is the purposeful profit equation. And it's such a simple way to be able to express the types of things that you need to have in place in order to really have a purposeful profit organization. Can you talk a little bit about that idea?
speaker-1: Sure. So, unbeknownst to you, when interviewing you about what B Corp meant to you as a CEO, you were quoted, and I quote you regularly in different speaking engagements, you were quoted as saying that purpose and profit can work together at scale. And that's part of what B Corp meant to you. As I thought about that, I believe it's true. I'm witnessing it across the globe and also at Parvata. But it occurred to me that I hadn't really seen a model that other people could follow. We could speak to it, we could tell stories about it, we could intuit it and design with our own experiences. But we needed a model that could show people a few steps they could follow to design for their purpose and then sanity check themselves or find their North Star and test their offerings and their services against that purpose all along the way. So that's what inspired me to create it because I thought it could help other companies. do what we were doing no matter what position they were in, if they were starting or if they were larger.
speaker-0: Yeah, there are lot of really great consumer brands out there that are doing very similar things. They talk about greater purpose and what they're doing. You know, we're not just making shoes, we're helping to save the planet, right? We're not just creating amazing clothing, but we're eliminating waste. And so I think those places have huge longevity in terms of the employees who are really connected to that purpose and offering something to the consumer. They kind of embody that purposeful profit equation.
speaker-1: With those examples in mind, how do you think about balancing all the competing polls? Margaret, this is a minute by minute exercise for you that feels different for me because full disclosure, I work for you. So your decisioning impacts my decisioning and my execution. So I'm wondering, how do you think about that and process on the day to day?
speaker-0: Broadly, first on the macro, I always talk about how the reason why profit is important for us is several fold. One is it's an evaluation of what people are willing to pay for our services, which tells us how well we're actually developing people and fulfilling our mission. Because if we do talent development well, people are willing to pay for the experience and the thought leadership and that partnership that we bring to the table. It should feel special. It should feel different. And so for me, profit is one, a measure, a third party measure of how are we doing in our job to be compelling and feeling like that we're creating talent that is highly valued. The second piece to me is it's 100 % an enabler to our mission. And I think non-for-profits, again, who get this right, who know that you can't have mission without margins are usually more healthy. You know, I was talking to the leader of the institute that does bone marrow matching, they realized that they had to get off of grants. They couldn't rely on this handout that was supporting a lot of their business. They are a non-for-profit. So what they did was they started to create a business model so that they could be self-sufficient. In that case, that enables the mission. They don't have to worry about federal cuts and spending within their area. They could keep going and thriving. and providing the service that's really needed to frankly save lives. When I think about for us, it's very, very similar. So you're always managing to the business because you know the business is the thing that's going to enable what you have to do day to day. The investments that we make, of course, always go back to what are we trying to achieve? How are we impacting people? And frankly, there's a lot of, I call it intellectual humility that you have to have. Because you know you can always do something slightly better or differently and you don't want to get caught up in your own echo chamber or else you're never evolving and innovating. And so to me, one of the foundational things is beyond the purpose is making sure that we have strong culture, clarity on what good looks like, clarity on how we need to be the best versions of ourselves. And then you can enable a lot of people to do that together or on their own supporting each other. There's a huge human component to us from a community standpoint. And frankly, our employees spend how much time with us every week? I mean, they spend anywhere between 40 hours to more than that. And they commit a lot of time for themselves to develop themselves, to develop others. And so you got to create a great environment for people to thrive and help fulfill our mission. And when everybody believes in the mission, then we can always make those choices and it helps direct us to continue on that North Star. I think you're always going to be making those choices. And if you can anticipate more and more about what might be coming ahead, hopefully you don't have to make the sacrifices. And then finally, I'll just say, I think appropriate transparency whenever you can is really important. I think one of the things that I've learned as a leader is being able to share more and more of the thinking. And even though people may not like the decision, At some deep level, they usually understand what's going on so that we can preserve what we can and adapt how we have to. I'm just going to circle back to this because I got this question this week where somebody said, B Corp, why are you B Corp? You're a professional services firm. And again, it was kind of the third party thing, right? Where we don't want to be looking in the mirror and saying, oh, we love ourselves. We do such great work. We want somebody else to say, hey, we're holding you accountable on your words. and you're not pretending, right? You're being held accountable by somebody else on the outside. If you were walking another firm through this idea of becoming a B Corp, what would you tell them to pay attention to in the process?
speaker-1: That is
speaker-0: It's small. This is a huge effort, by the way, I'll say.
speaker-1: The V-Corp certification is one of the most exciting things I've ever done in my career, by the way. The idea of bringing in something of this significance that is meaningful to even our most junior employees because they see the logo on items at the grocery store. They know what it is. Bringing that into our firm and self-identifying with that, but also having the privilege of sitting with our board and presenting a business case for why this is good for our company long term. And to your point, this third party verification of having someone say who you say you are, validate that what you're saying is true. The process is heavy. It's a very heavyweight process, but it should be. So what I would say to another company is be very prepared for the level of rigor and proof points that will be required of you. Because what B-Lab, the certifying organization, does not allow you to do is just make claims. You have to be able to back up every claim that you have. And something that both surprised me along the way, and we learned to get very accustomed to answering such questions, was where are the policies? Where do you have this documented? Where's the proof, not just a report that you can run, but something that your employees can look at and say, yes, this is how we operate? That in and of itself is both difficult, but it also creates the stickiness that one would be looking for. in terms of meaningful certification. We all know companies that have certifications, but they're sitting at some leadership level or the marketing team owns them and they steward them well, but they're not meaningful from the inside out and outside in. And B Corp certification for us over the last three years has become meaningful on all fronts because we have leaned into pulling through, pulling an idea or a practice into policy. into other parts of the operations of the organization. And I think that's necessary actually for keeping the certification.
speaker-0: Yeah, I think one of the things that we realized, of course, I mean, we're pretty new at this, right? Where we've only gone through the certification ones, we're in the process of getting our second round of certification. And I think one of the interesting things is you are trying to make yourself better. You want to score a little bit better in some of the categories in the future years. So that three year, it's not like you get certified and you kind of squat and go, well, okay, now it's the third year, we got to get certified again, right? We're all trying to move ourselves forward in some way to become more mature. into the pillars of what the B Corp certification provides. What surprised you along the way in getting certified?
speaker-1: It was actually the rigor, the accountability, the proof points we had to provide, and it required partnership through the whole organization. The number of times I was reaching out to our legal team, our finance team, our marketing team, our HR team, it required the entire organization to come together and say, yes, we want to do this. And so we're going to make whatever proof points visible and transparent we need to do to prove that we, frankly, we deserve this certification because we were designed for it. It takes a whole team effort, actually.
speaker-0: you had some good foresight here because we knew that they were going to be changing the standards from when we first got certified. And you raised your hand and you're like, hey, we want to be part of the pilot or at least be on the advisory group that allows us to have some influence hopefully, or at least provide feedback on the new standards. What for you has been interesting in the new standards and what is tricky about the new standards?
speaker-1: The way they have divided up and sort of segregated thought and casted a wide net around worker rights is quite interesting and intriguing. In the past certification, there was one category for this. And the new certification, there's human rights evaluation for one's own employees, sets of policies, procedures, protection, ways that they have safe anonymous spaces for escalating issues. And of course, you have to prove each one of those. But they've added an entire layer of corporate accountability for all subcontractors, contractors, any external workers that one would interact with. That is really important when you think about lowercase s, sustainability for businesses. What the triple bottom line stood for, people plan at profit, people cannot just be our people. It has to be people we interact with and we have to be willing to take as corporations take accountability for the way that we interact. with people for the subcontracting firms that we choose to partner with because we're helping their revenue as well. And knowing that they have human rights laws, that they're operating by strong human rights policies is important and it's not something we should turn a blind eye to. So I was surprised and also encouraged to see that broadening of the aperture there around workers. You said tricky, something that makes it tricky. I think for a professional services firm, we continue to learn and be pushed and challenged on our environmental footprint. Years and years ago, in times when you and I both remember, it was easy for a services firm to say, well, this is not my problem. We don't have factories and we don't produce any goods. So it's not our problem to worry about what's happening to the environment. And B Lab has challenged that fully. and asked for services firms to be accountable for scope one, two, and three for themselves. Also, to look at what they can in their offices and also to ask thoughtful questions of their clients so that we're, again, broadening the aperture of accountability so that everyone is accountability for the good that we bring to the environment or the negativity we bring to the environment.
speaker-0: What have you learned about measurement and accountability? Like what to track, what not to track? How have you gone through that process in figuring out what makes sense from a B Corp perspective?
speaker-1: It is perpetual learning, I will say that, which is tricky with metrics because the longer you can run them, the more you learn from the data. I've learned that we should evaluate data in its context and then be willing to stop measuring or start measuring because I tried and true understanding around metrics is you get what you measure. So if we're measuring one angle on diversity, we're going to accomplish that, especially very driven people like We're going to accomplish whatever we set forward on those metrics. So what my team and I feel constantly challenged around is, from a metrics standpoint, is making sure that the metrics are appropriately representative so that we're looking at what are we actually trying to drive in a behavior change as opposed to a piece of data as it is in its stagnant form today. The accountability angle is a very different one because what I've seen in Paraveda over the years is a willingness to stretch accountability beyond just my team, who is responsible for DEI and B Corp and all of the social impact components into the other parts of the firm and allow them to have accountability for how they respond to our metrics or contribute to them. Or sometimes if there's an inhibitor, to your point about transparency, I feel very comfortable in our executive team bringing up attention and inhibitor. of one team's metric to mine so that we can openly discuss what unintended consequences we may have. That is pretty rare, and it is a continual learning for me that then I'm able to take back to my team. So the goal is that we have healthy performance, not just performative on paper.
speaker-0: We have to be, we're just constantly learning about how to go about having the conversations. We've identified a couple of places where we've had to have some pretty, I wouldn't say they were confrontational by any stretch of the imagination, but there was, it's a tension that you feel because it feels sensitive, right? And everybody's just trying to figure it out. So I think we're continuing to learn and we'll get better as we go. And everybody comes out. in agreement, which has been pretty remarkable to date for us.
speaker-1: Indeed, indeed. I'm really interested in you talking a little more about what you say. You have lots of interactions with other executives, conferences, speaking engagements, and I know you get questions about our choice to identify as purposefully profitable and identify with b-crop certification. How have you seen your leadership evolve, your messaging evolve when you're asked about these things?
speaker-0: I think over the years, so I've been in this role for about three years now, for me, it's been clear and crisper in terms of being the champion of that message and realizing how much it does resonate, not just with the younger generation, but there are many businesses out there that may not discuss it. And frankly, I'm not sure if they know how to yet. They tend to be some family-owned businesses or smaller businesses, mid-market businesses. They really believe in a lot of the things that we do too, but they've never had to operationalize it. They've never had to scale it. And so the idea from a leadership perspective for me is just the consistent messaging and becoming more of an amplifier of the idea that purpose and profit go together hand in hand and can go together hand in hand and will create a lot of positivity in the community around us and globally. how we serve our clients and how we influence those clients to believe in the same or align to those kinds of aspirations within our community. So I think for me, it's just that huge amplification of the leadership side of the house and making sure that I'm representing the message to the market in a way that is very authentic to who we are, very much so similar to when we did all of our rebranding message and talked about. how we make potential possible. It's how we talk about making the potential of others possible. And it's how we deliver, again, our work when we partner with clients is making sure that we're developing all people, not just our people, we're developing their people and we're developing each other. And so all of that becomes interwoven. And I think I realized that the more you can weave it in together, the more aligned and comfortable it feels. your mission to be very effortless in how you describe it and how you live it in a way where it doesn't make you think so hard. It's kind of the core of human-centered design, which is like, don't make me think, make it very easy for me to understand. And that's basically how we are continuing to grow and evolve.
speaker-1: That's good. can imagine if we have to get that right internally as well as externally.
speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. I would say that we've always talked about from the inside out, like you have to start with your employees. And there are a lot of corporations that do espouse this saying that you have to make sure that your employees are taken care of, that they understand and they're aligned with what you're trying to achieve, not just on a big macro level of our mission and our purpose, but also on what we're trying to achieve year to year. That's culture, what, strategy or devours strategy. And so you have to make sure that when we're doing any sort of internal changes that people understand how it impacts them, hopefully in a good way, and that they see the benefits and that it helps energize and continue to fill that cup such that they can serve the clients that we work with externally, right, how they show up every time, even when you're off the clock. you're part of an organization, you're always representing the organization in some way, or form. I think historically you've seen people learn that the very hard way. In a world where digital is on all the time, you're always representing the organization which you work for. So to me, like getting this right internally and having a home for people, feel aligned to the values and the mission and understand the kind of environment that we're building to bring the best development opportunities that we can to our people is really, it's gonna be ongoing. I don't think three years ago we knew about Gen. AI, of course, and so it's gonna continue to evolve. Our mission stays the same. How we do it might slightly change and the tools we use will definitely change. So yeah, I get it right internally. You're gonna do amazing things externally. I do believe that the results will follow if you get it right inside. When you think about purpose-driven growth, what does great leadership look like, especially in the messy middle, right? Like everyone always can talk about the big aspiration. You, as one of the leaders in our organization, have to take Margaret's big aspiration and our collective big aspirations and bring it down to reality. How do you think about the priorities that might compete in especially right now when the outside world is just so crazy from an economic standpoint.
speaker-1: That is a piece of our discussion that our team tackles on a regular basis very intentionally. So in order for purpose to be real, passing through our team, the first thing we have to acknowledge is, as you've mentioned before about the importance of profit, profit is our oxygen. So as a team, as a small integrated team, we cannot look at the profit needs. as something unimportant. We have to be doing things in service to that. Maybe that's creating interesting fodder for conversations with clients, interesting marketing material, interesting articles that will get people's attentions. We have to find our own ways of contributing because profit is our oxygen. Without profit, there is no purpose. Another way we look at that messy middle is through the messaging that we create and co-create with other people, our internal comms team, our marketing team, the messaging we create has to resonate with our employees at every level. So there's an element of storytelling, there's an element of thinking about various scenarios and what people need to hear from us to understand how they should experience our purpose on a regular basis, how they should see it, taste it, touch it, look at its manifestation. So we try to... double-click into some of the larger strategic elements and come up with multiple ways where they can be integrated into the firm and experienced by every person. And that requires a lot of thinking about even the age groups of our employees, what they're looking for, what they're excited about and not excited about. It's not just me talking to my peers in my age group, it's people 20 years younger than me who are looking for something a little different. That's a lot of the time we spend is sometimes doing that translation and often listening to people's fears when they come through around, what about AI? Well, what about job performance? Am I getting better at my job? Am I at risk? We often hear some of that feedback coming through that then we can help craft responses to so that there isn't fear in our system. There can be fear in the global economic system, the national economic system, but there shouldn't be fear in our system because as you well know, when people feel safe, they actually produce better. So there's elements of that. that we continue to work into our narrative as well.
speaker-0: When you're looking ahead, how do you see expectations changing for companies that are claiming to be purpose driven?
speaker-1: The expectations I have is that with a younger workforce continuing to age, their goals, their priorities are very different than the group that is aging out at this point. And that actually gives me a lot of hope because we're going to see companies needing to center around some type of mission and purpose and be true to it and be held accountable to it, maybe on social media, maybe through whether their employees vote with their feet and leave or stay. We're going to see companies have to respond whether they want to or not. And that's good for the globe. It's good for workers. It's good for healthy, sustainable profit. So that excites me quite a lot. What about you?
speaker-0: I'm in agreement about you really have to look to the younger workforce and the upcoming generations that are coming because I think those folks are going to have the largest voice and the largest impact in holding people accountable. mean, they always talk about how you vote with your dollars, right? And how you interact with the consumer is going to matter. I also think that There's this interesting trend right now that's happening, especially in the younger generation, where they're almost rejecting certain levels of technology. And I think as companies are trying to figure out exactly how to depress costs so that they can increase their profits, they're going to turn to technology and I suspect going to be using it in ways that are not very human centered at all. The experience can get a little bit more probably degraded. because we're using the technology instead of a human on the other side. There's a company that makes bread and you can mail order it and they will answer the phone on the first ring. Like I don't even know how that works really and how many people they have answering the phone or maybe they don't have that many people answering the phone all the time, but they have a mail order catalog and you call them up and they will answer the phone and then they direct you to the department. that you're looking for. And so in this case, I was looking for bread. I was ordering some bread for my nephew who has food allergies. And I said, hey, I just need to know, does this chocolate chip sourdough bread actually have dairy in it because you can't have dairy. They ran off to the bakery to talk to the bakers, came back and told me about it and said, no, you don't. And I was like, great, let's order some. But I will tell you that experience changed significantly my perception of that organization. I think Companies likely will accidentally overindex on the technology side, forget about the people side, and forget that people really want to interact with people in many instances. So it's about applying the technology in the right use cases rather than using a peanut butter spread blanket approach to it. All right, we always like a lightning round. What is a book you often recommend?
speaker-1: often recommend The Secrets of Consulting. It's an old one by Gerald Weinberg, who's no longer with us. is old school. It's a good one because it's about human interaction. It's actually less about consulting than just about understanding humans. What about you?
speaker-0: Well, see right now I'm reading The Art of Happiness. So the Dalai Lama book kind of revisiting that. I think I got a little bit inspired by the fact that the Edelman Trust barometer came out and talked about how the world is so insular. And I was like, you know, I'm going to read about the art of happiness. And of course, it's in this interview mode with the author's name is Howard Cutler. He's a psychiatrist. So he's talking to the Dalai Lama and the Dalai Lama, course, is very spiritually driven. And so it's a very fascinating book. Favorite quote.
speaker-1: Trust is a big mission point of mine. You I used to have a podcast called the industry of trust. So my favorite quote is actually trust comes in on foot and out on horseback. It takes a long time to gain it and you lose it overnight, immediately.
speaker-0: That's like the life of consulting. All right, what about a habit you live by?
speaker-1: Great. That's right. Well, what I try to live by is seeking first to understand. I think the more experience I get in my career, I often show up thinking I know the answer. It's always proven best for me when I pause and ask more questions before forming a solution. Even if my solution before was right, it's better to ask questions first.
speaker-0: So what's giving you hope about the future of purpose-driven businesses?
speaker-1: It is going to be that younger workforce watching the shift in what people expect of a company. To your point earlier, how much time people spend with a company, they now have very clear expectations and they're willing to hold them accountable. I'm increasingly encouraged by the increase in the number of B Corps because B Corps is not perfect, but it's one of the best assessments we have right now to say that people are holding true to their purpose. So those encourage me.
speaker-0: I love that. And where can listeners connect with you or learn more about your work?
speaker-1: Well, you can find me on LinkedIn. You can also find me on Parvata's website. You can find articles I've written on Parvata's website. And I actually have a book coming out later this year that I've been working on for years in my free time called The Seven Deadly Leadership Sins. So it's fun kind of tongue in cheek about how the seven deadly sins from the Bible apply to the workforce and then how you get yourself to the good place as leaders. So. That's been a fun passion project, so be on the lookout for it.
speaker-0: like that. And what's one final takeaway you want leaders to carry into their next decision this week?
speaker-1: I would say go back and evaluate what your purpose actually is and make sure that the work you are doing is aligned with that. Otherwise, it doesn't have staying power.
speaker-0: Yeah, I think that's a really good pro tip. I am a big fan of evaluating both the individual purpose, your personal purpose, and making sure it overlaps really well within your organization. Otherwise, it's a pretty painful career to have. with that being said, thank you so much for joining me today.
speaker-1: Thank you for having me. This was really enjoyable.
speaker-0: Thanks for listening to Doing Good by Doing Better. I'm Margaret Rogers, CEO of Pariveda, and I hope this conversation offered you a new way to take your ideas to impact. Follow on Apple or Spotify and join us every other week as we keep learning how to do good by doing better.
