Leadership, Engagement, and Why Purpose Matters with Bob Gappa

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
We are live and last time, we went to press the button with our guest. I think we broke the Internet. Everything went down and I'm glad it didn't go down like 10 minutes into the conversation or 15, because we'd have to start all over again. But hopefully, holds tight in the show. Welcome back, everyone, to the show where we explore how empathy, purpose, and consciousness drive business transformation from the inside out. I'm Stephen here again with my co-host, Mike, and today's conversation with our guests centers on a principle we talk about often, but see it all too rarely operationalized, and that's purpose. So according to a 2023 study by McKinsey, companies with a strong sense of purpose experience 30% higher levels of innovation and employee engagement, yet many leaders still struggle to translate values into action. Mike, introduce our guest today that we're going to be hitting this topic on.

**Mike Liwski** (1:17)
Yeah, I'm excited for our conversation today. Favorite topic of mine and we have a great guest. Our guest today is someone who has been helping organizations to do just that for over 40 years. Bob Gappa, he's the founder and CEO of Management 2000 It's a consultancy that's worked with more than 1,400 organizations on building purpose-driven leadership models that will be able to scale. Bob has decades of insights on leadership, as well as franchise systems and employee engagement, which we know is a key element of leading with purpose. We're thrilled to have him with us here on the show. Welcome to the show, Bob.
Maybe to help us get started. Bob, what originally inspired you, I guess, to start Management 2000? Tell us a little bit about that and how has your definition of purpose evolved since then?

**Stephen Sakach** (2:29)
Bob, I think your mic is not on or he's pulling a fast one on us. We have more technical difficulties with it.

**Mike Liwski** (2:37)
Yeah, I really hate it when guests do this. They just sort of mind.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:41)
And I think we can't hear him. We're still nothing.

**Mike Liwski** (2:49)
Oh, interesting.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:50)
We're breaking the systems again.

**Mike Liwski** (2:52)
I know, right?

**Stephen Sakach** (2:52)
It's these technical glitches.

**Mike Liwski** (2:54)
But Bob, something, some force out in the universe is holding you back from not being able to talk about purpose with our... How about this one? Is that... Oh, yes.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:06)
All right.
I thought you're pulling a joke on us because I was like, oh, this is a good joke, Bob, but you're stressing me out. Because last time we were trying to get this to work.

**Bob Gappa** (3:17)
I thought I had a headset on.
What I was saying is, I never really wanted to start Management 2000, but I was working for a wonderful company, a boutique consulting company, and our clients were very focused on the Fortune 1000, and the job of COO came up, and I said I'd like to apply for that. The president, he and I were very close to each other. He said, well, I've got somebody else who's really qualified, who was General West Merlin's aide in Vietnam, and went to West Point, and I think he's going to be the guy. I brought him in, and he was a disaster, and he didn't like me at all. He said he was going to find ways to fire me, but I always achieved over my goals, so he couldn't. And then he stopped inviting me to meetings where other vice presidents were, and so I got the picture that I should leave. And I was working on a series of, this is 81, I was working on a series of courses for 20 years from now called Management 2000 And so I went to the president and I said, I have to resign because this guy is not living your purpose and core values, and I can't do it anymore. It's too much of a conflict for me. And I said, since I never signed an NDA, here are the two clients that I've got in Houston that I'm going to take with me. And if you want to call them and keep them, that's okay. But I'm afraid that he's going to bankrupt your company, which he did five years later. So I went to Houston and really cloned the company I was working for. I loved it. So I was kind of a non-franchise franchise, because franchising really means replication. It's the only way to understand Star Wars as a franchise or other things. So I've spent my life living our mission statement at Management 2000, which is to give people what they expect and more. And the reason that's such a great challenge to me and to our team members, is that the first thing you have to do is find out what people expect. And it's incredibly challenging to ask the CEO of a client to write down what he's paying you for as a consultant. Because saying it and writing it down are two very different things. So I always required as part of the agreement when I was a consultant, still him is write down on paper what you're paying me for. And then I know how to get it done. Otherwise, I don't. And I also learned that when you consult, you only have one client, that's the CEO.