Bethany Andell & Jackie Dryden on “Leading with Purpose” Part 2

Savage Brands’ President, Bethany Andell and Chief Purpose Architect, Jackie Dryden were recently interviewed by PKF Texas for their series, “The Entrepreneur’s Playbook®” in a series of conversations on Using Savage Thinking to Lead with Purpose.

In the next video of the series, host Karen Love speaks with Bethany Andell on why now was the time to publish our new book, Get Your Head Out of Your Bottom Line: And Lead Your Brand on Purpose.

Karen: This is the PKF Texas Entrepreneur’s Playbook; I’m Karen Love, Host and Co-founder. I’m here with Bethany Andell, President of Savage Brands. Welcome to the Playbook again.

Bethany: Thank you Karen.

Karen: Well we had you here the first time to talk about the book Get Your Head Out of Your Bottom Line; I’m going to pick up the book now and put it so that our audience can see it. And we had talked about the Savage Thinking and the purpose, but what I was wondering if we could talk about is why now? Why the timing of this book?

Bethany: Sure. It’s actually – this type of methodology, this type of thinking – it’s perfect timing. Companies really have an obsession right now over the short term and you can blame it on Wall Street or whatever is going on, but we’re thinking more about long term success. And why this is happening is if you’re so short term focused and short term decision making, you’re not thinking about the inter-dependence of all of your stakeholders and what it takes to get them engaged and loyal with your company. And so some of the big problems we’re seeing is internally with culture where you’ve got very low employee engagement, they say about 30% of employees are engaged which means 70% are coming to work every day not that happy.

Karen: Which means turnover.

Bethany: Absolutely. There’s a distrust in leadership, I think it’s 18% of the American workforce trusts their leadership.

Karen: That’s scary.

Bethany: And then a huge opportunity is what we call the perfect storm where you have Baby Boomers that are looking behind and saying what’s the legacy I’m leaving; what’s the positive wake that’s going to be there behind me? Along with the Millennial workforce that’s coming in where money is not the priority, right? They want to make sure that their values are aligned with the company, that they’re making a contribution to the world. And if you can be a company that brings people along towards one common purpose, something they’re really contributing to the world, then you’re going to find yourself in a better place. We like to say that “purpose drives performance and performance drives profit.”

Karen: Well I love that and that’s Savage Thinking.

Bethany: That’s Savage Thinking.

Karen: And you can help companies do that?

Bethany: Yes ma’am.

Karen: Fantastic, well thank you for sharing that with us.

Bethany: Thank you Karen.

Karen: This has been another Thought Leader production brought to you by the PKF Texas Entrepreneur’s Playbook.