Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast
“Biblical Business: Navigating Profit and Purpose in Modern Society"
October 16, 2023
Jeff Van Duzer
Intro: What is the role of business and profit in our society from a Christian perspective? Well, today on episode number 359 of the Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast, my guest is Jeff Van Duzer. We'll dive into the intersection of theology and business and discover how a healthy understanding of our purpose and vocation can be an essential force for good in the world.
Welcome: Welcome to the Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast, your home for open, honest, and insightful conversations to help develop your leadership, your team, and build a flourishing workplace culture.
Al Lopus: Hello, I'm Al Lopus, the co-founder of the Best Christian Workplaces and author of the 2023 Christian Book Award finalist, Road to Flourishing: Eight Keys to Boost Employee Engagement and Well-Being. And I'm passionate about helping Christian leaders like you create engaged, flourishing workplaces.
I’m delighted to welcome Jeff Van Duzer to the Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast today. You know, Jeff had a 20-year career as a lawyer and managing partner in a large law firm here in the Seattle area, and then served as the dean of the School of Business, Government, and Economics at Seattle Pacific University.
Throughout our conversation, we'll hear Jeff talk about the intersection between the Christian faith and business. And first, you'll hear Jeff talk about the original purpose of business, outlined in the Genesis creation account. Yes, it's there. Then, Jeff outlines the two principles, two key principles, for any Christian business leader to focus. Jeff reflects on the role of business after the fall and how it changed. We discuss the role of profit in the purpose of business and from a biblical perspective, and how it's like the role of blood in the human body. He addresses the question, how much profit is enough? And then, we finish with why business will be the dominant institution to solve the world's problems in the future.
And I think you're going to love this interview with Jeff Van Duzer. But before we dive in, this episode is brought to you by the Best Christian Workplaces Employee Engagement Survey. You can sign up today to discover the health of your organization's culture. This fall would be a wonderful time to listen to your employees, with our easy-to-administer online Employee Engagement Survey by going to workplaces.org. Being a certified best Christian workplace improves your ability to attract more talented employees and keep them longer.
And by BCW’s new leadership and group coaching. We help you transform your leadership effectiveness with our stakeholder-based coaching process. And learn more by going to workplaces.org/coaching. Check it out today.
Well, hello to our new listeners. And thanks for joining us as we honor your investment of time by creating valuable episodes like this.
But let me tell you a little bit more about Jeff Van Duzer. Jeff was a partner in the international law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine, where he practiced for more than 20 years. He served for nearly a decade on the firm's executive committee and was the partner in charge of the firm's largest office. Then, in 2001, Jeff became the dean of the School of Business, Government, and Economics at Seattle Pacific University. He focused on how Christian theology is relevant to business practice and how business can be a force for good in the world. The result was the launch of the Center for Faithful Business at SPU. It was originally called the Center for Integrity in Business. And Jeff wrote the book Why Business Matters to God (And What Still Needs to Be Fixed) in 2010. Jeff has since retired from SPU and is an active consultant-mentor and is involved in church leadership roles.
No matter what sector you work in, I think you're going to love this conversation with Jeff Van Duzer.
Jeff, it’s great to have you on the podcast. I've been looking forward to this.
Jeff Van Duzer: No, thanks. It’s a real treat for me.
Al: So, Jeff, let's start with your own background. As I mentioned in the intro, you know, you're a trained lawyer. You practiced for many years. You actually were the managing partner of your law firm. Then, you moved to Seattle Pacific University. And you've mentioned in the past that you really never took a business course or a theology course, but you've landed in this space. How does this focus on the intersection of business and theology grow for you over the years?
Jeff: Yeah. It's actually kind of an amusing story as to how it all got started. I was interviewing for the position of dean of the Business School, which itself is a weird phenomenon. But in the course of the interviews, everybody that goes into an interview should know this. There's going to be a moment where they turn and say, “Do you have any questions for us?” and you're smart to prepare something. I didn't have a prepared answer to that question, so I was kind of scrambling around, and I just blurted out, “So you're a Christian business school. How does that make any difference?” And the answer that I heard, which I will say in retrospect didn't really do justice to the amount of thinking they had already done, but the answer I heard was some version of, “Well, you know, we teach sort of basic business principles, but we try to make our students want to be ethical.” And it was like, “Well, yeah, that's nice. But I wonder if there isn't anything deeper to it than that.” And so we said, “Look, let's do a literature review, and let's gather together in a symposium and just explore what people are saying,” particularly at a kind of higher level of, you know, how does God think about the institution of those kinds of questions?
And what was really surprising to us, and this was probably about 2001, 2002, was that we couldn't find hardly anything written on that topic. And we searched for a while. And so from a standpoint of an academic institution, to discover what seems like maybe aversion field was pretty exciting. And so for the next decade after that, we gathered together, and various people would write papers that we would critique to amongst each other. We would hold broader symposiums. We just sort of constantly debated and massaged these ideas.
And near the end of that, sort of around 2008, 2010, I sort of went away and tried to put those together into this book. And there's no member of the faculty would sign on entirely to “I agree with everything in that book,” but it is fair, I think, to say that it really grew out of the energy and the thoughts of the faculty as a whole. And so, writing it down was almost easy after we had sort of wrestled with it for so long. And that's what drew me into it.
Al: Wow. Yeah, that's a great story of what's the distinction of a Christian business school and—
Jeff: Yeah.
Al: —you know, and then finding kind of a dearth of material and research behind it, but—
Jeff: Yeah. I should jump out and say that since that time, all over the world, literally, there's been a lot popping up on this broader theology-of-business topic, not spurred on, at least in any obvious sense, from the work we did. It’s just like God was doing things; we just got lucky to be on the front end of some of that stuff.
Al: Yeah. Wow. So in your book Why Business Matters to God, you frame the discussion in a grand narrative of scripture, and yeah, well, what a great place to start, right, Jeff? So how do you relate the concepts of business and work to the story of creation and even the fall as we look at the first three chapters of Genesis?
Jeff: Yeah. So, the broad outline of the book is to say there's these four great movements—creation, fall, redemption, and new creation—and what do each of these movements have to say about business? And when we were looking at the question of purpose of business, we found ourselves drawn to the creation account. And even though that's very short, I think the reason underlying that instinct was if you want to get a glimpse of what God intended from the beginning, before sin got in and messed everything up, that's where you look. And so in a kind of real cursory way, I’ll say we went through—we did this in depth, but I'm describing it in a cursory way—we looked through and looked at sort of obvious principles that you could draw out of Genesis 1 and 2. Like, God created human beings in His image, which means that God created human beings in part to engage in work and work like God engaged in meaningful and creative work. That work grows out of relationship. It's subordinate to relationship and is intended to give back to relationship. That material world matters to God; that He created things and He said, “Those are very good.” And that the Garden of Eden as God designed it was not perfect in a final sense; it was perfectly resourced with the expectation that from the beginning God intended human beings to work the ground, to cause the crops, the innovations, the growth of all of that He had sort of perfectly resourced in the garden.
And so when we put all these bundle of things together, we came away with two key—we would say first-order principles or purposes of business. First is business exists to provide opportunities for individuals to engage in meaningful and creative work. And second, business exists to provide goods and services that will enable the community to flourish. And so those are the two markers of purpose that we put out there.
When we get to the fall, which is really a Genesis 3 account, what we're reminded of is that at the very center of the garden—and I think that location is important—there is this tree that Adam and Eve are forbidden to eat from. And so at the very center of their existence, there’s a limit. And the question is, would they respect the limit, or would they respond to the serpent's temptation, “You can be like God; you can be without limits”? And of course, we know the story. That's what they chose. And that kind of wrecks everything. It wrecks their relationship. It wrecks their relationship with God. It wrecks their relationship with the created order.
And so as we thought about the fall, it got us thinking about, even as businesses pursue these godly purposes, what are kind of the sidebars, the limits, that business should respect along the way? And so then, this got us into thinking about the limitation of respecting people made in the image of God and the notion of sustainability, which actually runs all through Genesis 1 and 2; and what does it mean for a business to be sustainable across all the different dimensions of what it takes to bring a business together? So that would be kind of what we gleaned at a very high level from the creation story and then subsequently from the fall.
Al: I know our business-leader listeners, even Christian leaders in other sectors, yeah, two purposes: provide meaningful and creative work, and enable the community to flourish. Wow. That’s a great summary, and having written a book on the road to flourishing, I like the second one very much. Yeah.
Well, you know, Jeff, that’s a great foundation for thinking about business and theology. So how about the next phase? You mentioned there's four phases: creation, fall, redemption. You've talked about creation and fall. So how about this idea of redemption? What do you see as the role of Christians in business as we participate in God's redemptive work in the world?
Jeff: Well, so, the first question that we asked when we moved into redemption was, given the fall, did God change plan? In a sense, was there a Plan B? God had an original Plan A in the way He set the world up, but sin messed everything up, so now we'll take Plan B. And of course, the answer is no. There is no Plan B, that God's redemptive work is intended and will eventually get back to what God intended and designed from the beginning. So that was one thing.
We did note, though, that there would be a change in the kind of work that would be done. In the garden, before the fall, it was all in a sense additive, if you like. Somebody once told me that business leaders do one of two things: they either build, or they fix. And in the creation account, it's all about building, because there was nothing to fix. I mean, there would be probably factory managers in Genesis 1. It's less clear to me that there would be doctors and lawyers, because there isn't anything that needs to fix or be adjudicated. But now, post fall, the call for business to both do the building work and do the fixing work. So we explored that a bit.
And then, the other thing that we really spent a fair bit of time on, looking in this redemptive phase, is something we've come to call the messy middle. And this is the reality that all of us are living in, in the sense that we are living on this side of the cross and the resurrection, this side of the new Kingdom breaking into our world, but yet not already here. So it's the “already/not-yet” tension that runs through the New Testament. And what that has led us to conclude is that there are occasions, not always, but there are occasions when a business leader, or any leader for that matter, has to choose among a variety of options that are available, but has to choose, really, sometimes the best of imperfect choices. And that's a pretty profound theological reflection because it suggests that doing the best we can, choosing the most closest to alignment with God's heart, we still may come up short and in a sense be engaging in sin. And how do we deal with that? And then, once you're in the messy middle and you're choosing between, “If I do this, then I won't be able to do this,” those kinds, what are some spiritual practices that one could engage in that would facilitate drawing closer to the heart of God in that?
Al: And so there's no easy answer to that, how to navigate in the messy middle.
Jeff: No, no. In fact, people will tell you that if you try to prescribe when these two values come in conflict, “This is the one you should choose,” they do you a disservice because it’s at that point you're in the hands of God. So it's a matter of listening and—
Al: Yeah. Discerning, you know, yeah.
Jeff: —discerning and acknowledging also that you're in a messy setting and not a clean one.
Al: Gosh, we don't like that, Jeff, when the answers aren't clear.
Jeff: No. That's true.
Al: But we all know that's reality.
So, you know, as I mentioned earlier, we both use this idea of flourishing in our core messages, and at Best Christian Workplaces we focus on helping organizations grow and the factors that create a flourishing workplace. You talk about how businesses can help communities flourish, which, again, I just love that image. So share with us how your view on the purpose of business and the role it serves in human flourishing. You know, what good is profit? You know, there's kind of a theme going around that business is even bad, that free enterprise is bad, that profit’s bad. So what good is profit, not just for business, but for the community?
Jeff: Yeah. So I think, at least, I hear two questions in that. And one is the question of, how would we think about flourishing? If you think about flourishing within the institution, among your employees, I think our purpose of business highlights that the employees will flourish when given meaningful and creative work to do because that's the way they were designed. There's a variety of other things, of course, that you need to do to provide for your employees, fair wages and so forth, but the central purpose is to give them opportunities to express meaningful and creative work.
As it relates to the broader society, business exists to provide goods and services that will enable that community to flourish. And it was once pointed out to me that, and I think there are some little exceptions at the edge, but really business is the only institution that creates material wealth or material capital. It's the only business that can take x and add it to x and get something more than 2x. And that isn't to say that business is particularly special, because other institutions have their own kinds of capital—intellectual or social capital, spiritual capital—all of which are critical for a healthy society. But business’s particular role is it makes things, and the things it makes and the services it provides can be used to enable the community to flourish. It can also be used negatively, but can be used for enable the community to flourish.
Your question about profit is often the one that generates the most energy around the ideas I put forth in the book, because neither of our two stated purposes say anything about profit. And there is still, it's certainly under much more scrutiny than it once was, but there is still, I think, a predominant view that business, really, its fundamental purpose is to make as much money as possible for shareholders. So I want to say that by not including profit as a purpose does not mean that I denigrate profit or that I somehow think running a profitable business is easy. I have huge regard for folks who can run profitable businesses, and particularly over the long haul. It’s not easy at all. Profit is absolutely essential for a business to do what it's supposed to do, which is to serve in these two key ways. You don’t have profit, you won't be able to attract the capital that you need to achieve these objectives. And so for me, profit is critically important, but not a purpose. In one sense, it's a means to the end, which is an interesting reversal of what we often hear. What we often hear is that the purpose of business is to make as much money for shareholders, and as a means to an end, you should probably be nice to your employees because that will reduce turnover and make more money. And you should probably do products that are good because that will build brand loyalty, increase sales. But in that case, your employees and your customers become means to serving the shareholders, and our model suggests turning it the other way around, that shareholder capital is what enables the businesses to thrive.
The analogy that I have found most helpful in this is the idea of profit is like blood in your body. If you don't have blood circulating in your body, we don't have to have a long discussion about your purpose, because you're dead. And a business that doesn't have profit circulating in it, we can just decide that’s bankrupt, and its purpose isn't relevant. So profit is critically important. But which of us gets up in the morning and says, “Today, today I'm going to live to pump blood”? We don’t do that. It's not the purpose. It's fundamentally important, but not the purpose of why business is being used by God to enable the community to flourish.
Al: I love that analogy, Jeff. You know, profit is like the blood in your body. It's not the purpose for life, but, boy, it sure is essential. And even for Christian nonprofits—margin might be the word we use here—margin is like blood in your body. No margin, no mission, as we’ve heard many times. And it’s not the purpose, why we're doing what we're doing, but it certainly does make things work. Yeah.
Jeff: I was actually thinking of a not for profit, just imagine a big one like, I don’t know, American Lung Society or something, and you found the executive director and said to her, “Why does your organization exist?” It would seem really weird, I think, if she said, “We exist to raise money.” You know, you’d expect, “We exist to cure lung disease,” or something like that. And you could ask a second question, which is, “What do you spend most of your time doing?” “Oh, we always have to be out raising money.” And I think the same is true. You have to focus on the bottom line because it doesn't come naturally or easily, but it's not the purpose.
Al: I trust you’re enjoying our podcast today. We’ll be right back after an important word for leaders.
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Al: Welcome back to my conversation with Jeff Van Duzer.
Yeah. And I like your comment. I often, you know, the means to the end. I oftentimes find myself rationalizing having a flourishing workplace culture because, yeah, that's going to cause your employees to be more engaged. It's going to cause less turnover. It's going to reduce your cost structure. And those are all a means to an end, not the other way around. Yeah.
Well, let's move on, because when you talk about profit, you know, is there a difference between Christian-led businesses versus marketplace businesses? You know, what about the issue of, how much is enough? You know, that's what we hear in our Christian circles quite a bit. Is there a point where there's enough? You know, where should the profit and business activity flow?
Jeff: No. Well, I would say at the outset that I think the difference is not so much between Christian and non-Christian businesses. I would say it's, what is your underlying sense of mission as a business? And if your underlying sense of mission is to maximize the return on shareholder investment, then realistically there is no limit. I mean, if you can squeeze another dollar, then you should do so. If you have a model that suggests, is that I have suggested, and then the answer is that you need enough profit to attract the capital that the company needs to do the work that it's trying to do. And I usually describe that as a reasonable level of profit. I think a lot of people see the role of their business is to sort of exceed the reasonable level and, thereby, grow and stand out in the marketplace. And, you know, I think sometimes that happens. But I do think that the focus is seeing profit as a means to the end and making sure, in order for the business to be sustainable, that you can generate a reasonable level of profit rather than a maximum level of profit.
And I mean, I think one sort of example that might be useful for Christians in business to spend some time thinking about is the Old Testament practices of gleaning. Remember, the farmers were told, in effect, go through your fields, but at the edges and the corners, don't go all the way to the edge. Leave a little because that's how the poor and others who didn't otherwise have access to food could come along behind you and garner up what they need. And so it's, yeah, get a reasonable return from your farm, but don't maximize it by going all the way to the edges of whatever it is that you own. And I think that's not a bad parallel for the approach to profitability that I would encourage.
Al: And I know our business leaders are going to say, “Now, Jeff, now, is that a 15% return, or is that…?” But you really can't be that specific, can you?
Jeff: No. But you know, I actually was seeing a video of a guy who runs a company that builds apartment buildings. And he was saying in this video that our usual return for investors is 17 to 19% or something. And then he said, “But, you know, it's more expensive to make these available at affordable or, you know, our returns are less if we make available affordable housing.” But he says, “All that means is I'm going out looking for investors who are willing to get 14 to 15% or 13 to 14%.” It's not like I'm walking away from a business model. It's just that I'm looking for investors who share my desire to not squeeze every last dollar, but to maximize some other values as well.
So, I mean, I think it's doable. I think it's being done, and I don't think there is a set number.
Al: So let's talk a little bit about character and integrity in the workplace setting. You know, how can Christian leaders encourage the development of Christian character in the workplace? And I know that's a topic many are thinking about as I go to business’s mission kinds of meetings. So what do you see, you know, in terms of a discipleship component in a workplace setting? I know in a for-profit business we can't talk about discipleship exactly, but we're doing a lot of training and development. We’re sending people to programs like, you know, business schools. What are your thoughts?
Jeff: Well, let me say that I'm happy to answer this question sort of out of my background from the various different leadership settings. It’s a little bit outside the scope of the book. But for me, maybe linking back to the book, I think that you develop character if your first order is—and I'm thinking of employees—is to seek to provide opportunities for them to engage in meaningful and creative work. I really am beating that drum because I think so much work is not meaningful or creative, and I think that cuts against the formation of Christian character.
But then, other things that I think are, maybe I would encourage, is that you pray for your workers. And I encourage you to do that privately so they're not feeling like, “Oh my goodness, my boss is praying for me.” But I think prayer is critical. I think you yourself need to work to model Christian character. I think demonstrating care for the whole person of your employee, not seeing them—as a famous Henry Ford quote that, you know, all I need is hands, and I get the whole person that comes instead. But I think Christians in particular should be conscious of the unity of the individual that God has given them to let them work with and care for the whole person. And then, I think this I would just say in general is I think leadership is more effective and, in this case, more effective in developing Christian character if it's vulnerable. And so I would invite—and you have to figure out what appropriate means are. It’s not somebody yelling it out at you at a stockholder meeting—but you would invite, without penalty, employees to question the integrity or the mission focus of the particular decision that the company is making, in part because it validates them as a member of the organization, but also in part because they often will see things that you've missed and give you an opportunity to go, “You know, that's a good thought. I want to take a step back and rethink that. Thank you for that comment.” I think those kinds of things could go a long way toward developing Christian character.
Al: You know, Jeff, you're talking, we're using different names. My eight keys to employee engagement in the Christian workplace, we call it life-giving work, your definition there of meaningful and creative work. Let’s create life-giving work, work that gives people life. And demonstrating care for the whole person, that’s a great concept. Being vulnerable, we oftentimes call that healthy communication, where we’re seeking suggestions from our front-line workers. We're able to, willing to listen, to learn how to improve things, because they're the ones doing the work on the front line and are the experts in it. So that's fantastic. Really appreciate it.
Jeff: You know, Al, it's not unusual to hear Christians talk about being servant leaders. And there's a friend of mine that's done a lot of writing on this and has got a book coming out soon. And his emphasis is, you know, we should be lead servants because it's more of the focus on serving that needs to be attended to as opposed to leading. I mean, there's clearly a role for leadership, absolutely. If you kind of go in thinking, “My main job is to serve,” you changed the paradigm a little bit. And I think that contributes to the modeling of Christian character that, hopefully, you get.
Al: I love that. Are we the, not the CEO, but are we the lead servant? Yeah.
Jeff: Yeah, yeah.
Al: I love that. That's great.
Well, you know, Jeff, you've been in key leadership roles, both in business and in Christian higher education. You’ve been involved in organizations that promote faithfulness and business. You know, Christians in business, you know, have to interact in our contemporary culture. All of the leaders listening on our podcast, they're involved in their contemporary culture. And sometimes there's a conflict between Christian values and business or societal norms. But just from your own leadership experience, how should Christian business leaders interact with culture and find their way forward as we might be in conflict with just the underlying values that we find in our society these days?
Jeff: Yeah. Tough question, because there is so much of that at work. And we live, I think, many people have characterized it, and I think fairly so in a kind of post-Christian environment, and so you ought to expect that there will be cultural misalignment in places. I'm a little skeptical about a lot of efforts by churches to get as close to culture as they can as a means of kind of staying relevant. But, I mean, that's at least one piece of it, is to see where there is some ground for common beliefs, common aspirations or actions. So I think sometimes Christians make the mistake of making everything an absolute, and this is a to-die-for issue. I think one piece of this is to minimize the absolutes. There are some. But don't make more than you need.
And then, I would say, when you find people who believe differently than you do, don't turn them into demons. We ought to be best at modeling, as Christians, what it means to disagree in love.
And then, sometimes these cultural tensions, they put you in a place of real tension. And nobody likes to sit in tension. And so we tend to gravitate toward one side or the other and just either grab it or fight it. And I think Christians need to stay in the tension as long as they can, just to hold these competing pools, without getting to a quick resolution, because sometimes the Spirit does some amazing things in that place of tension.
Then, in the end, if it really is an absolute and it's one you've got to hold true, then I think you hold true to the end and without regard to the consequences. If you're that sure that crossing this would be to violate, you know, the holiness of God and what I'm called to, then you got to cling to it.
I would say this topic gives me a little connection back to something that I'm seeing more of these days, and that is there is this recurring theme in some of the Christian circles that I'm running into that says, if we do business God's way—you know, we're not going to go with the culture. We're going to do it God's way—then God will reward us, and we will be successful in business. And there is, you know, particularly in Proverbs, you find some kind of teaching along these lines. It's not illogical. If God designed the universe to work in a certain fashion and you align your behavior with God's intentions, it seems like it ought to work easier. But it is also, I think, very true that the answer is not always. And you have to look any further than Jesus’s life is the most obedient person ever, and His reward was the cross. And so sometimes staying faithful to what God has called us to, God will honor that with business success—or I don't know if you need to call it honor it—God, it will be coincident with business success, and sometimes it won't be. And I think as Christians, our first allegiance is to God. And so that, I guess, that's what I would say.
Al: Very wise. Well, thanks, Jeff.
And now, let's, you know, as much as we look ahead to the future, you've said that the institution with the greatest impact on culture for the next 50 years will be, in fact, business. So why do you see business in the area that will impact culture? You know, here at Best Christian Workplaces, we are Christian business leaders. But what are some of the practical ways that Christian business leaders can continue to stay engaged and relevant in the future? Professor, speak to us, if you will.
Jeff: Well, so let me say why I have made that statement that business will be the dominant institution. And basically, it goes back to if you look out at the world today, we've got huge problems. I mean, that can be overwhelming, the polarization, climate issues, running out of water, the intractable sort of fights and wars that are leaving huge populations as refugees. I mean, you can just go down the list and identify big challenges in the world. And places like United Nations and NGOs and government are all doing a lot of work in these areas, and a lot of it is proving to be successful. But the problem is that they're just not, they can't scale. They’re just not big enough. Put it bluntly, business just owns too much of the world so that if business is sitting on the sidelines, and it's basically kind of keeping its nose down, staring at that bottom line, it's not looking out and saying, “How can my business contribute to the solution of some of the world's biggest problems?” And I want to emphasize that I mean that as a business. I mean, some businesses build schools in, you know, Third World or developing-world contexts. And, you know, that's a good thing. I mean, nothing against it. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about if businesses would ask, when they have some, knew they're going to go into a new venture, and they're considering a variety of options, if their first question wasn't, “Which of these will maximize my return on investment?” but if their first question was, “How do I take the assets that are under my control and deploy the workforce and the expertise that I have in ways that as a business, that means running a profitable business, can nonetheless begin to make a dent into some of these world's big problems?” you can, as a second question, ask, “How will we stay profitable?” those are all fine, important questions. But if your first question is, “How can I enable the community to flourish? How can I enable the world to flourish?” I think it will make a huge difference. I think the questions you ask lead you to—different questions lead to different answers. And so I do believe that a business is going to play a significant role. Or if it doesn't, we're not going to solve many of these problems.
I recently saw a CNN interview with Ajay Banga, who's the president of the World Bank, and he was saying that there are trillions, tens of trillions, of dollars just to address the climate change and the issue. And they walked him through the different sectors that were working on it. And in the end, he said the only way forward is to get the private sector to believe that this is part of their future. And just too much money is needed to make sure the assets are in the hands of business.
Al: Yeah, yeah. And I like your point. How can we solve the needs of the community and help it flourish? I mean, that's the role of business, to help that be accomplished. Yeah.
Well, Jeff, we've learned so much from our conversation today. And, you know, I just go back to your introductory comments. I love the two key points of business and the purpose, and that is meaningful and creative work for people and to enable the community to flourish. And I think that's just a great foundation point. And, you know, again, we just talked about so many aspects. We talked about the flourishing in terms of the purpose of business, to make meaningful work and creative work, to really provide the goods and services that help communities to flourish. And you know, the role of profit, and how profit’s not the purpose of a business, but it’s kind of a means to an end. And your thoughts about what is the purpose of business and making sure that we keep that in mind. And I even like the gleaning example, how we should have a reasonable profit. But to go back to that Old Testament example of gleaning and how it should be reasonable so that others can actually survive, those that are poor and less fortunate. Great example. And your points about character and even the point about how we should be lead servants. Just a great discussion and really appropriate for our audience.
Let me ask, Jeff, is there anything you'd like to add to what we've talked about?
Jeff: No, Al. I think that you’ve kind of drained me of whatever I know. So nothing, nothing further from me.
Al: Yeah, well, again, well, thanks, Jeff. This has just been a great conversation. I encourage our listeners to find your book and to read it. And I just so much appreciate your deep thinking and how, again, as you say, there's been a lot of research and a lot of discussion about business’s mission, the role of business in society, the importance, and the distinctives of being a Christian in business. And you've been on the forefront of that conversation. So thanks for your contributions today, Jeff. And most of all, I appreciate your insight into how Christians can live out their daily lives in the marketplace as faithful followers of Jesus. So thanks for taking your time today and speaking into the lives of so many listeners.
Jeff: No, thank you. It was my pleasure. Really, really appreciate the opportunity to talk with you.
Al: Yeah. Thanks, Jeff.
Thanks so much for listening to my conversation with Jeff, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.
You can find ways to connect with him and links to everything we discussed in the show notes and transcript at workplaces.org/podcast.
If you have any suggestions for me about our podcast or have any questions on flourishing workplace cultures, please email me, al@workplaces.org.
And leaders, if you want to improve your leadership, expand your organization's impact for good, and see greater faithfulness in our broader culture, help us to achieve our goal to see more Christian-led organizations flourish. To help, please share this podcast with another leader, or write a review. And if you're interested in our free resources, go to workplaces.org.
Outro: The Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast is sponsored by Best Christian Workplaces. If you need support building a flourishing workplace culture, please visit workplaces.org for more information.
We'll see you again next week for more valuable content to help you develop strong leaders and build a flourishing workplace culture.
Al: Next week, you’re going to really enjoy my conversation with Robb Wilson, the CEO of Wilson Lumber, as he shares about organization disciplines that lead to a healthy workplace culture.