Lewis Green is the founder and managing principal of L&G Business Solutions. He is also the author of the blog, bizsolutionsplus Featuring Solutions to Grow Your Business. Lewis has three decades of business management experience and is the author of five books. Lewis took some time to talk to the Buzz Bin about his most recent book, Lead With Your Heart.
BB: You make an impassioned plea to executives and entrepreneurs to change the way do business. How many businesses are conscious of their motives?
LG: Geoff, I think most business leaders and managers believe that their first responsibility is to make a profit. And that is the first and foremost motive for everything they say and do within their company. I wrote Lead With Your Heart because while I understand the importance of profits, without which there can be no business or business growth, I also believe that measuring success based on profit, or winning as it is called by Jack Welch in his book, limits a company’s ability to maximize their potential and creates an environment where greed and corruption can thrive. In Lead With Your Heart, I urge a business model where our ultimate motive is driven to create a world in which happiness supersedes profit and a company’s primary motive. By doing so, we create a company culture in which people come first, starting with employees. Such a culture creates a passion for our work because ultimately it is about making people’s lives better, inspiring and motivating employees to become the best they can be, resulting in customers who are touched positively by those employees, often turning those customers into brand evangelists.
BB: Lead with Your Heart focuses a great deal on strategy and 
business plans before marketing. Why?
LG: People do better when we have a clear sense of mission (why we are doing something) combined with a road map (how we will achieve that mission) and a destination point (how we know when we are achieving the mission). I believe with all my heart that marketing cannot exist in a vacuum or in an environment wherein the only charge marketers have is to get products and services noticed and ultimately sold. Like all functional areas within a business, if marketing understands why the business exists and where it wants to go (the business plan), we can then create annual strategic plans that lay out the tactics for supporting the company’s existence (values = brand), and the goals to achieve annual growth. With the Strategic Plan built each year atop the Business Plan, we provide a culture of growth wherein all employees are striving for and contributing to the same goals. In that scenario, which some call alignment, we create a business where everyone begins at the same start line and all finish together (or not at all) at the same finish line. As for marketing, the pressure it taken off a single department for brand development and sales leads because the entire culture is charged to achieve the same measurable goals, at least one of which will be a sales figure. With everyone pushing in the same direction, marketing can spend more time focusing on customer happiness than what we often find marketing spending most of their time on today—packaging, loud advertising, PR spin and exaggerated marketing claims, which hurt more than help the brand and sales.
BB: You mention that companies that place principles before profits perform better on Wall Street. Can you share some of your research?
LG: Those of us who have read Built to Last or Good to Great can’t help but notice one of the commonalities of businesses such as HP, 3M, Harley-Davidson or NASCAR in that each has created incredible value. How did they do it? They build incredibly tight bonds with their employees and their customers. In each case, the business is built upon a foundation of strong values where people come first. They work diligently to create great people experiences, creating happy customers who become loyal. Each company’s logo represents trust and credibility. In the ‘80s and early ‘90s Wall Street was slow to recognize that passion for values could create the same or better profits for a company than say a company such as GE during the Jack Welch years. Here’s what I mean: Welch built an incredibly successful plan for business growth that was tied to valuation (top line revenues) and shareholder value. But it wasn’t the kind of company that put people first. Through sheer force and conviction, Welch’s GE succeeded on Wall Street. Meanwhile, Howard Schultz led Starbucks to even faster growth on a percentage basis. But he did so believing all along that people, not profits, came first. I was in on some of the analyst’s calls and heard Wall Street’s cynicism and disbelief when Howard talked about values and people instead of ways to cut costs. Did Starbucks stock do better than GE’s? It depends on how one views better. Both stocks did exceedingly well, but the primary difference is that Starbucks has such loyal employees and customers that productivity is high, turnover is low, and margins are good. Starbucks never makes a sale due to price. And Starbucks spends very little on marketing and advertising. I don’t think GE can say the same
BB: Tell us about your experiences with Starbucks.
LG: I joined Starbucks in 1996 as its first internal communications employee. At the time, the Communications Department was but a few months old. My work area was about 15 feet from Howard Schultz’s office. The Starbucks business model and the executives who created it and led it impressed me so much that it changed the way I thought about business. To begin with, this was the first company experience I had where employees came first, ahead of customers, because without great, passionate and happy employees we cannot have great, passionate and happy customers. I took a demotion to work for Starbucks, and it was the best thing I ever did in my career. Serving as an executive speechwriter as well as eventually leading the group that built brand through internal communications, I learned more about how to treat people and how to run a business than ever before.
BB: What other socially responsible companies do you admire?
LG: In addition to the ones mention above, I am a huge fan of Wild Oats, but one wonders how they may change under Whole Foods ownership. I also respect Southwest Airlines, Timberland, IBM and Microsoft for their willingness to reach out to their communities. Most of all, I admire all those small businesses that touch so many in so many good ways but never get the headlines.
BB: You are using Facebook to market Lead with Your Heart quite a bit. How do you think it’s going?
LG: I think it’s too soon to tell but in the first day after creating the group we had 83 members. I like using social media because it allows me to build relationships with people who think alike. My goal for the group is to create a grassroots movement through which we can make a difference in people’s lives.
BB: What’s next for Lewis Green?
LG: I continue to run my own marketing and communications firm, L&G Business Solutions. My immediate goal is to spread the word about what we can do to make business and the world a better place to live through the book, social media, presentations and workshops. The seed for my next book has already been planted, which will take the Lead With Your Heart business model and apply it to education.
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