 Welcome back to The Creative Life, produced by the American Creativity Association's Austin Global Chapter in creative partnership with Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Phyllis Bleece. Our guest today is Jeff Westphal, founder of MeaningSphere.com. We're going to talk about creating the Meaning Sphere and learning how to create deeper meaning in work. Aloha, Jeff. Hello, Phyllis. Good to see you. So thank you for being our guest today and for introducing us to the Meaning Sphere. But before you do that, we would like to know a little bit more about what got you here since you're the founder and it's a rare opportunity to hear what the founder did to bring about a creative endeavor like the Meaning Sphere. So to hear your story, where would you like to start? Well, Phyllis, really it starts when we had a major failure in my family business. I had joined the family business as a 29th employee, a company started by my father and we had had some pretty good success in the first four years I was with the company going like a bullet out of a gun, just going, going, going and we had grown fourfold in just four years and we had introduced then a new product offering for a different kind of taxation. We're in the tax software business or so we thought at the time and it failed. And we had to pull the product from a dozen major clients who had prepaid hundreds of thousands of dollars each and it was an incredible humiliating experience and it really shook my foundations of what I thought work was about and what I thought my role was in it. And really for the first time, I started to question, what the heck was I doing? And it turned out to open my eyes to the idea that maybe the things I had assumed weren't really what was most important. Wow, wow, those first four years and that complete reversal. So tell us what it was like sitting in your seat and what was most important? Well, you know, I was director of marketing at the time. Okay, so I didn't have my father had founded the company, my father was CEO and president of the company and I had a great deal of influence along with a group of peers. The business wasn't the first work I had had from college. I had worked in the ad business previously for a number of years and had some significant success. And here we had to pull this product from the market and as it turned out in the months afterward, we came to realize two things. Our clients appreciated the fact that we didn't try to sell them a snow job and somehow make it good that we actually gave their money back. That was a surprise. We also realized that we had taken our eye off the ball the main business we were in and if we hadn't had the failure, we wouldn't have seen that we were actually at great risk of losing the lead in the industry that was our primary business. So there was a couple of silver linings that developed and it was in that time where I was starting to recognize that what I thought was a crisis was turning into a bit of a gift of a benefit that I met a former senior executive from the DuPont Corporation of all things, a very straight-laced, very conservative organization. And this man, Jim Patton, gave me a book called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. That proved to be a real turning point. Hmm. So, you know, when you talk about what you, you know, what you faced and what you did about it, one was not intuitive that you paint everybody back and that you went first to support relationship. And I don't think, what years were this roughly? Oh, this is back in 1992, 1990 to 1990 in 1992? You know, that's before this meaning-filled curve, I think, where people are talking about deeper purpose and meaning. And I wonder if you're putting so much focus on relationship help you see that what could have been a crisis was really an opportunity. So I wonder if the feedback you got from the customers made you feel like this is a we problem, not a me problem. And then what happened when, so I really, so when I'm failing and if I tell the people, the last people I wanna tell that I'm failing and they don't disappear or blow up, I become a different person in managing that crisis. They help me wake up the next day. But if I try to hide it, I'm all alone and I'm in my head and I'm not in my heart and I'm fighting, I'm just reflecting back for you. It was so powerful that you did that. And I'll leave it for a minute. And then how did reading Stephen Covey's, is that Stephen Covey's book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, how did that weave in to where you were with respect to your team and your customers? Well, you gave me a little too much credit that I actually was aware of relationships during this whole episode where we had the product failure. It wasn't until my mentor, Jim Patton, gave me The Seven Habits and I read the book and it talked about seeking to understand before being understood that I had just another giant wake up call because one day on a Friday I came home from work, I'm standing in the kitchen and I say to Jennifer, my wife, we have small children, an infant, a two-year-old and a four-year-old and I'm like, let's go camping in the mountains. I had a pickup truck and it's like beautiful weekend and she's looking at me like, are you kidding me? Like we have no plans at all. I'm thinking, we'll get this to work out. And she is just not hearing it, not one bit. There was this chopping block. I had gotten her for Christmas that sits in the middle of the square kitchen that we had. And I remembered that I had just read this book and I thought, right, I've got to think about what she's thinking. And so I kind of set aside my desire to persuade her to go away to the mountains. And I just was like, I wonder what she's thinking. I had never done this before, actually focused on I wonder what the other person is thinking and I'm still not good at it. But in any event, all of a sudden it hit me. I'm like, she's worried about the kids. She's worried about like what they're gonna eat and all of these other things. And I'm just like blowing right by all that. It seems so simple, but it changed my whole life. It changed everything. And it started to accelerate and my next thought was, what about everybody at work? What did they think? And so literally everything changed in that instant. And I went from being just a complete, like I said, shot out of a cannon sort of just completely driven working maniac to trying to listen and trying to understand what people needed, wanted, what their perceptions were. And what I found was that people had very different understandings of things I thought were obvious. And with the help of Mr. Patton who kept asking me why I started to realize most of us are running around like crazy with very little idea as to why we're doing what we're doing and why the other people are doing what they're doing. And it caused me to slow everything down and really get in touch with what our people were wanting, what they cared about, what our customers cared about, what they genuinely wanted from us. And then ultimately I realized that we didn't sell tax software. That what we did was effectively making it possible for people to eat, to have the houses they wanted to have the world, to have everything that they needed and wanted was dependent upon the ability of our customers to build cars, sell cars, build ambulances, build hospitals, build the ability to get food from farm to market. I mean, all of it is tax processing and the world doesn't see it. They don't know it's there, but it's there. And without the automation to make that work, none of it happens. And it just changed everything. It literally just changed everything. I went from caring about what the next month's sales number was to thinking about how do we completely redesign the whole way taxation works so that people can have more of what they want and less of the hassles of unnecessary tax complexity. And it sounds like a sales pitch, but compared to where I was, compared to how simple it all seemed to me, just sell more, do more, sell more, do more. And that's all life has to offer, that's all work has to offer. And instead it was like, wait a second, wait a second. Like the whole world needs this stuff. And man, I thought if tax software, corporate tax software can have greater meaning, what else are we messing? So you started coming back and you had a journey over a number of years and meaning was starting to come into your awareness, into your field. I mean, what I heard was listening. So where you started was this listening and that that shifted where you were, how you were approaching work. Is it rushing you too much on your story to ask? So how does listening, how does the ah-ha come about that shifts into even deeper meaning? Well, you know, in hindsight, so I was 33, 33, 33, 34 when I was going through all this and that's 27 years ago. Well, I have now the benefit of hindsight and what I realized happened was I shifted from basically doing what I thought I was supposed to do, but I wasn't really aware that that's what was going on for me. I was just doing it. It was just, I just did what next seemed most important. I didn't have any awareness of why I was doing what I was doing. And so I was really reacting. Even though I thought I was driving forward in the future and all this stuff, I actually was just reacting to a bunch of conditioning I'd had about what success was, what manhood was, what leadership was. I didn't actually think about any of those things. I was just operating on kind of autopilot. And that moment across that chopping block with Jennifer turned that react automatic life into a life of wonder. It was just, it just changed everything because all of a sudden it was like, oh, if I was wrong about that, what else am I wrong about? And so again, I slipped back into automatic mode all the time, all the time. But the mainstream of my work and my life was about curiosity around what are we actually doing together? What are we actually creating together? And what job isn't? I started to look at all the people that we employed. Who wasn't a part of creating this thing? Who was just doing something that was meaningless? And then I started having conversations with all of our new employees. When they would come in and a few months later we'd have these meetings, right? Where I would sit with sometimes six, sometimes 10 new employees all different ages, all obviously a diverse group of people and say, why are you here? And they would just look at me like, because it's a job. I'm like, okay, yeah, it's a job and I know you need to make money. But if you got a job here, you could probably work in a lot of different places. Why here? And they look at me like, is this a trick question? And then I'd ask them about, let's talk about the clothes you're wearing. Let's talk about the car you own. Let's talk about the house you live in. What do they mean to you? Oh, and then people would light up. Well, and why did you choose those? Why did you choose those boots you're wearing? Well, because they had reasons. Everything in their life had meaning, but they never connected the simple dot from everything that was meaningful that they needed and wanted in life, the material things, not the love, obviously not a sunset. Nobody's paying for that. We get to have that just by being humans, right? But all the other stuff, and they're like, right, all that has tax software in it. All that is like possible because there's that and you can see the light bulbs go on. And then I'm like, so look, I'm not gonna tell you that you should find making the corporate tax software that goes into all this stuff meaningful. I'll never tell you that, okay? And I'll definitely never tell you that you should be motivated to make the shareholders richer because I'm a shareholder and I would not be excited to work for that reason. I would never expect you to be excited for that. All right? But I would invite you to think about now that you see what we contribute to the world, ask yourself, do you wanna spend the next year, five years, 10 years of a third of your life contributing to this? Or would you rather do something else? And if you'd rather do something else, life is short, please go do it. And I did that meeting with small groups of new employees for 20 years. Every single new employee participated and we talked about why we were there. And three people came up to me afterward and said, at some point after and said, you know what? I don't wanna be here. And I'm like, go, you know? We'll find someone else to write software. We'll find someone else to call customers. We have to do all this, but if you care now and you realize there's something else you wanna do with this huge chunk of your life, like please go do it. And in the end, we wound up with 5% turnover for 20 years in an industry that averages 17% turnover. Even though I tried to get everybody to leave to find something to care about more. It was just such a joy, such a gift. You know, maybe just being asked that question by the CEO makes you feel that you have a stake in co-creating what the meaning is for you to being in the job. You aren't, it's not being taught that. It's being in conversation. And even inviting them to leave, I have a quote from Robert Thurman on my mirror and it says, don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. And you would operationalize this quote with that one here and it makes me feel good and it gives me direction. So are these some of the, are these some of the themes that make their way into this whole universe that you've co-created and MeaningSphere.com and I might be hopscotch-ing a little ahead because I know we need to talk a little bit more about this whole new endeavor. So you sold the company a year or so ago and now you're launching. No, the company went public. Went public. I retired as CEO in 2016. I became chairperson. You went public in 2020 led by my successor, David DeStefanow. And I resigned as I intended. I actually had to wait a little longer because of the public offering but I then resigned the board almost two years ago in order to focus all of my energies in my semi-retirement on the development of MeaningSphere and basically MeaningSphere is my effort to pay forward the support I got to discover and develop what I learned on this journey to lead an organization. We grew 20-fold with no invested capital, with a historically low turnover rate. We did a lot of things nobody thought possible against world-class multinational, mega-corporate competition, et cetera, et cetera. And so my dream along the way is I saw people light up and I sensed even though I could never prove it because it's so intangible. But I saw people light up. I saw people work more effectively together. I saw breakthrough creative solutions that came from collaboration around why are we here and what are we trying to do ultimately rather than who gets what and what's in it for me. And we paid competitively. We had a fully professionalized board. And in fact, of the two first board members that we ever had at the company, and this is salient to how MeaningSphere came into being, was the former chairman and CEO of Harley-Davidson, man named Rich Chirlick. And Rich, long story I won't share right now, but a serendipitous circumstance led me to meet Rich and he asked me to tell the story of what we were doing as a culture and he said, if I can help, call me. He joined the board of directors when we were only a $200 million company and he served on our board for almost 15 years. And as my personal mentor during that time and as I was planning to retire, I said I was gonna write a book based on my experience about the meaning of business because we had learned so much together. And you're right, we co-created the vision of the business. It wasn't my vision, my vision was that we could create a vision to guide us. And so we involved every employee in multiple iterations of dreaming about what type of impact we wanted to have in the world. And Rich was my silent partner and mentor through that entire second phase of the journey. And he says to me on a gorgeous day in Milwaukee, the sun glinting off his eyes and he looks at me smiling with this mischievous grin and he says, why are you writing a book? Right, and he smiles and I knew what he meant. Which was, you're not really wanting to write a book. You think a book is the way to do what you really want to do. You just haven't really thought about it. And so I retired and I went on a long trip with my wife, Jennifer. And part of that trip was sailing off of the Maldives in the Indian Ocean. And at anchor in one of the most beautiful and serene and remote places in the entire world off of an atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean, I'm starting to write this book and I'm making some diagrams and all of a sudden, bang. It's like came to me completely developed, right? If social media can connect everybody on the, for everything about a child's birthdays, et cetera, et cetera, why can't we connect the entire world and everyone in it on the basis of the purpose of what they're doing to contribute to the betterment of the world through the work they do? Because it all adds up. It all adds up. No tax software, no car, no car, no trip to Iowa to see our children's grandparents, right? And so in that instant, I knew that, I know a little bit about software. I've been ridiculously fortunate financially. I'm young and healthy. And what people really would benefit from is a safe place to really consider why they do what they do and what's meaningful about what they do. So many people switch jobs just because they feel empty inside, but they don't know why they're really searching for something. Yes, more money, money is meaningful. I have no argument with the meaning of money, okay? Money is what's making this call possible. It's what made this technology possible. It's the fuel, but it's not the fire, right? And so we set out to design a platform where we would have services and community for anyone like me who realizes, you know what, there's gotta be something more to all the work we're doing than piling up more, the world's piled up $42 trillion of assets. Is that all this work is for that purpose? When the world has so many opportunities to improve. So in any event, it's really meaning sphere is a simple place with some easy to use tools that have all been researched, supported and backed where anyone can develop a way to create deeper meaning in the work they do, whatever that work is. And perhaps along the way, gain confidence, make better decisions from that clarity about why am I here and what do I really care about? Make a bigger impact and perhaps access a deeper source of inspiration and opportunity to have greater creativity. And could you imagine, could you imagine what the world be like if we all were aware of why we're doing what we're doing and we were choosing to do what we really care about, what we really want? Imagine that world, we could have the world that we all really want. And you know, it's the best thing I can think of to do given the good fortune that I've had and I've been fortunate to attract a collection of 30 or so collaborators in Europe and the US and we'll be officially open in the next few weeks. Oh, we're part of your launch. This is great. This is my first external statement to anyone anywhere. It's a pleasure to share it with you, Phyllis. Yeah, well, it's a pleasure to hear it. You know, in this time of the great resignation, I think that people are coming out of the closet to have the kind of conversations that you, it sounds like meaning sphere is a platform to say the thing you can't say, I'm not really happy at work. I mean, family wouldn't understand it. It sounds like your two mentors sort of appear base along with the mentorship you must have gotten with all those conversations, those co-conversations with your team members and new members were all home mentoring each other. Are you recreating a setting like that where it's safe to talk about, maybe this isn't what I was meant to do or maybe it is and maybe the only place in the only audience that would really have a receptivity and a positive reaction to your having these hard conversations. And you can do it if you, so it's meaning sphere.com. So this is a dot com platform and you would sign up, you would have, I've got about a minute and a half to hear a little bit more. If that's what you wanna describe or you wanna tell people to log on in two weeks and if there's anything else you wanted to make sure that this audience heard about the meaning sphere or about your journey. Well, since you mentioned that it's a dot com, I will just mention that if tax software matters and if all of the trucks and air conditioning systems that make it possible to get fresh food to our tables matter and they're all for profit, then as a matter of principle, we felt even I don't need the money, right? I don't need to do any of this. As a matter of principle, we needed to be an economically sustainable profit creating for purpose business that helps people realize that it doesn't mean if you're not nonprofit and for purpose or for profit and have no purpose, there's purpose in all of that for profit business that just needs to be economically sustainable. So we're dot com for a reason and it's not because I need more money and I'm the sole funder, okay? Secondly, what people will find, all right, are small groups that operate in confidentiality to share perspectives with each other as peers about the meaning of work and trained guides who are trained to be completely confidential, to allow someone to in fact, share whatever they feel like they need to about the meaning they're finding or not finding in the work date and help them use the tools on the meaning sphere, including a survey instrument that's based on the world's only peer reviewed research about the meaning of work. So it's really a multifaceted resource center and we're excited that feedback has been incredible so far. Oh, it does and we don't have time on this show, we might do another with you. I remember talking to you saying, Phyllis, we're not meaning sphere incorporated, we're meaning sphere dot com and that was really intentional and that's why I was focusing on that. I'm glad you had a chance to help us really understand where we are in this moment in time and to have a resource to go to, to have the kind of conversations that you just can't always have anywhere else unless people are looking for deeper purpose and work. That's right. A deeper meaning in work and at home. So I'm going to have to leave it there, Jeff and let the audience know that you have been watching the creative life on Think Tech Hawaii. Our guest, Jeff Westball is the founder of meaningsphere.com and he has taken us on a CEO's journey, learning how to answer the questions of tragedy, challenge and even destiny through meaning. We use that answer to access resources for advancing transformational change for deeper meaning and work and life. So for all that, Jeff Mahalo and Mahalo to you our viewers for tuning in. I'm Phyllis Bleece. We'll be back in two weeks with another edition of the creative life. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.