The Inimitable Bob Chapman

(1945–2026)

On March 19, I received the call I had been dreading for several months, bearing the unbearable news that Bob Chapman had passed away. It was a gut punch. A stab in the heart. I knew that the world had changed irrevocably, that something precious had been lost. I also knew that I was not alone. Bob’s passing has released an outpouring of grief alongside a wellspring of gratitude for those of us who were blessed to know this great soul, this unassuming “accountant from Ferguson, Missouri” who has left an indelible impact on the world.

It has taken a week to get my feet back under me to be able to compose a coherent tribute to a man unlike any other I have ever met. I reflect back on the moment when Bob entered my life and fundamentally altered it.

In January 2013, I received a call from my friend Srikumar Rao. I had come to know Srikumar in 2007, when I took his ground-breaking course “Creativity and Personal Mastery,” which had become the most in-demand course at Columbia University’s business school. Srikumar told me that he had recently met a unique CEO named Bob Chapman and visited some of his company locations. He was so moved by the experience that he told Bob, “You must write a book about this and share what you have created with the world.” Bob replied, “I don’t know the first thing about writing a book.” Srikumar said he would connect him with me.

I was about to publish (with John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market) the book Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business. I was busy promoting the book, while also spreading awareness of Conscious Capitalism in my role as co-founder and board member of Conscious Capitalism Inc. John and I were already planning a follow-up book titled The Conscious Society.

I spoke with Bob a few days later. After hearing his story, I responded “Clearly, you have built a wonderful, conscious company, Bob. But there are many great companies in the world. I don’t have time to write a whole book about a single company. Besides, I am already working on another book.” I cringe now when I think back to that answer; it seems insufferably rude and dismissive, though I didn’t intend it that way.

Undeterred, Bob said “Why don’t you come and see for yourself and then decide?” This was my first experience of Bob’s unshakeable positivity and energy. Not knowing how to politely decline, I said I would let him know when a window opened up in my schedule.

So it was that on July 15, 2013, Bob’s private jet landed at Hanscom Field in the Boston suburbs, accompanied by three of his team members. It was my first experience flying in a private jet, my first foray into what I would later affectionately call “Bob’s World.” The team wasted no time. As soon as we were airborne, they launched into a detailed PowerPoint presentation about the history and unique cultural and leadership practices of Barry-Wehmiller.

I learned that BW was a 128-year-old St. Louis-based company that had started as a producer of machinery for the beer industry, which was heavily concentrated in St. Louis. For most of its history, the company struggled to grow and be profitable. The Prohibition in the US (1920–1933) along with the Great Depression nearly killed the company. Nearing bankruptcy, the owners sold the business to Bob’s father for a pittance in the late 1960s. Bob became CEO in 1975 at the age of 29 when his father died suddenly of a heart attack. The company was losing $3 million a year with $20 million in revenue. Bob was immediately confronted with a demand from the company’s bankers that their loans be immediately paid in full. They had no faith that this young kid would be able to successfully lead the company.

After navigating that traumatic beginning, Bob applied his relentless drive, focus, positivity and strategic brilliance to guide the company towards financial stability. Armed with an undergraduate degree in accounting from Indiana University and an MBA from the University of Michigan, Bob used what he had learned in business school, focusing on the bottom line and treating people as a means to the end of making more money. Having rescued BW from the brink of bankruptcy, he started acquiring other distressed businesses because that was all he could afford. Through operational discipline and a crucial strategic pivot (focusing on the aftermarket for parts and service rather than just on the sale of new machines), he was able to turn each of them around.

Then began a series of epiphanies that would forever transform Bob and all the lives he touched through his leadership.

At a company he had just acquired in South Carolina, Bob arrived early and sat in the cafeteria watching employees banter about March Madness and the state of their betting brackets. They were highly animated, the room echoing with raucous laughter. But as it got closer to eight o’clock, the enthusiasm and joy started to drain out of their bodies. Their shoulders drooped, their voices went flat, and a visible heaviness settled over them as they trudged off to “get to work.” The thought occurred to Bob, “Why can’t work be fun? Why does it have to feel heavy and stressful?”

At church one Sunday in St. Louis, Bob listened with rapt attention as the rector Ed Salmon delivered another inspiring sermon to the congregation. As he and his wife Cynthia walked out of the church, Bob thought to himself, “Ed only has us for less than an hour a week, and he is able to inspire us to be better human beings. But we have seven thousand people under the influence of our leadership for forty hours a week! We have a profoundly greater opportunity than the church to uplift and inspire people and to shape their lives by the way we lead them.”

The third and most transformational epiphany came at the wedding of a friend’s daughter. Bob watched the father walk his daughter down the aisle and saw in the father’s eyes something the ceremonial words could not capture: “We brought this beautiful young woman into the world. We gave her as much love and care as we could. And we hope that you keep on treating her with dignity and respect.” The thought exploded in Bob’s mind: “My God! We have seven thousand people, and each and every one of them is somebody’s precious child. Don’t all the parents of our team members hope and expect us to be responsible stewards of their precious children’s lives?”

These three epiphanies became the touchstones of the culture that Bob and his colleagues created at Barry-Wehmiller.

* * *

We landed in Phillips, Wisconsin, a tiny hamlet of 1,400 people. The company Bob had “adopted” several years earlier by purchasing it out of bankruptcy on the steps of the Wisconsin capital employed 600 of them. Today, BW Papersystems is one of the most profitable of the Barry-Wehmiller companies. Then we went to Green Bay, Wisconsin. This company, PCMC, had lost $25 million on $200 million in revenue in its final year before being adopted by BW. The culture had been toxic: fear, insecurity, distrust, micromanagement, frequent layoffs without warning, and a corrosive “us vs. them” mentality that pervaded every corner of the company.

I was ushered into a conference room, where 16 middle-aged blue-collar men with a high school education or less were waiting for me. Bob introduced me and left the room. I looked at the expectant faces and asked what I thought was an innocuous opening question: “Tell me what your life was like before the company got acquired by Bob Chapman, and how it changed afterwards.”

There was silence. I looked around the room. I was startled to see that several of the men had tears streaming down their faces. I thought to myself, “What happened? I just asked a simple question.”

Then the men started to speak. One by one, the stories poured out of them. The first one spoke of what his life had been before the adoption. Ken had been laid off multiple times, always without any prior warning. He would be out of work for months, sometimes a year and a half, before being hired back. He was treated with little respect at work, often with contempt. The last time he was laid off, he and his wife had just had a baby. They had no savings and struggled to afford basic necessities. Desperate to support his family, Ken went to the football stadium on weekends to gather empty bottles and cans so he could return them to the store and get some money to buy diapers and infant formula. I could feel Ken’s shame and anguish as he spoke through his sobs. But then his demeanor shifted as he described his new life after the adoption. He was now paid well, no longer worried about being laid off and was treated with care and respect at work. He had taken leadership courses at BW University and was progressing rapidly in the now-growing business.

Another man spoke of losing his home in a fire, and how his colleagues had pitched in to get his family back on their feet by helping him get a new home and furnish it.

By this time, I was close to tears myself. I thought to myself, “A culture where middle-aged blue-collar men feel comfortable crying in front of each other is something special and rare.” I learned later that company leaders often humorously said of their leadership programs, “We measure our success in man-tears.”

This was the beginning of my life-changing journey with Barry-Wehmiller and Bob Chapman. By the end of the two-day visit, Bob had expanded my thinking on three of the four pillars of Conscious Capitalism: higher purpose, conscious leadership and caring culture.

I had always thought of a company’s purpose as being primarily customer-directed. Bob bluntly said “Our purpose is our people. We measure success by the way we touch the lives of people.” BW makes machines (among many others) that make toilet paper and cardboard boxes—essential products but not necessarily ones that get people excited about coming to work. I realized then that every company should ideally have a dual purpose: one rooted in the well-being of their people, and the other directed at enhancing the lives of other stakeholders (usually customers). If a company has to pick one, the well-being of their people should always come first. It is not acceptable to have a noble purpose for your customers but have a workplace where people are disrespected and burned out.

I used to believe that conscious leadership was about what happened at the workplace during work hours. But Bob said, “The way we lead impacts the way people live. Leadership is the stewardship of the lives entrusted to us.” This framing dramatically expands the scope and responsibility of leadership. It is much closer to conscious parenting than simply “managing” people. Bob drew a sharp, almost binary distinction between leadership and management: “Management is the manipulation of others for your success. Leadership is the stewardship of the lives entrusted to you.” The company refers to its approach as Truly Human Leadership.

Peter Drucker famously said, “Culture eats strategy for lunch.” At BW, culture had been elevated to a high art and a sacred undertaking. It is defined by high productivity, innovation, collaboration, relentless positivity, and frequent recognition and celebration. The company continually shines a light into every corner of the organization, looking for and holding up the goodness of people for all to see and appreciate. As Bob often said, there is an inexhaustible supply of goodness; the more you search for it, the more you find it.

At the end of my two-day immersion in the BW culture, my mind was made up. I said to Bob, “This is a book that must be written, and it would be my honor to write it with you.” Thus was born Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family. The book quickly became a bestseller and has been translated into several languages. In October 2025, we published an expanded and revised 10th anniversary edition with ninety additional pages of new insights. Harvard Business School published a case study on BW that is now taught at more than seventy business schools.

* * *

The defining test of Bob’s philosophy came in 2008, when the global financial crisis hit Barry-Wehmiller hard—the company lost 30 to 40 percent of its orders almost overnight. The board met to discuss layoffs. Millions needed to be saved. The conventional wisdom was clear: cut headcount, protect margins, survive.

Bob refused.

He asked himself a simple question: “What would a caring family do when faced with such a crisis?” The answer came quickly: All the family members would absorb some pain so that no member of the family had to experience dramatic loss. Instead of layoffs, Bob created a furlough program: every employee, from the factory floor to the executive suite, would take four weeks of unpaid leave. Bob cut his own salary from $875,000 to $10,500—his starting salary at Price Waterhouse in 1968. The timing was not mandated; each person chose which weeks to take.

What happened next was extraordinary. People who could afford the time off traded with people who could not. Employees voluntarily took more unpaid time than required to help their colleagues. Morale went up, not down. The company saved $20 million. And because people felt safe—because the leadership had demonstrated that no one would be sacrificed—they poured their creativity and energy into finding efficiencies and improvements that management had never imagined. The company recovered ahead of schedule, and fiscal 2010 was a record year in earnings. Then Bob did something no one expected: he retroactively restored the full 401(k) match that employees had given up during the crisis, making them whole. As far as anyone knows, Barry-Wehmiller is the only company in America that did so.

* * *

Fast forward a few years. I met Bob at a gathering in Wisconsin and asked how he was doing. He said he was leaving for Europe the next morning for a week to evaluate 6–8 potential adoptions. I had accompanied Bob on such a trip in 2014, along with two of his sons. He set a punishing pace, keeping us on the move from 6 AM to 10 PM each day as we visited companies in England, France, Germany and Italy. I asked him now, “Bob, why are you still doing this? You have already adopted 108 companies. I know that you have 26 children and grandchildren. When the number of companies far exceeds the number of children and grandchildren, isn’t it enough? Why aren’t you simply enjoying your life and your family, like most people do at your age and with your wealth?”

I will never forget his response. “Raj, I don’t know how much time I have left on this Earth. I do know that on my deathbed, I will not be proud of the number of machines we built or how much money I made. I will be proud of how many lives we have touched.”

I was deeply moved by his answer. I said to him, “Bob, you are not just growing a business. You are spreading a healing ministry. The more you grow, the better life gets for more people. There are people all over the world who are waiting and praying that you will show up and adopt their companies so that they, their children, and their towns have a future.”

This conversation planted the seed for my book The Healing Organization: Awakening the Conscience of Business to Help Save the World. Bob’s story is front and center in that book.

* * *

One of Bob’s most haunting images captured the invisible devastation that bad leadership inflicts on human souls. He would say: “When I was growing up in the ’60s, they used to show us pictures of paper mills with sludge pouring out and contaminating beautiful clear streams. I wish we had a camera for the souls of people walking out of our offices and factories every day; it would make that sludge look pristine.”

That image never left me. It speaks to the crisis that Bob saw more clearly than almost anyone: America does not suffer from a poverty of money but from a poverty of dignity. Eighty-eight percent of the American workforce—130 million people—go home every day feeling that they work for an organization that doesn’t listen to or care about them. The rate of heart attacks goes up 20 percent on Monday mornings. We are destroying people and killing our culture because we send them home after treating them as objects and functions instead of caring about them as human beings. Bob dedicated his life to proving that this destruction is not inevitable, that a different way of leading is not only possible but also profitable.

* * *

The wake that Bob leaves behind is extraordinary. He took a money-losing company and grew it into a $4 billion global powerhouse that is setting the standard and writing the playbook for sustained high performance through all kinds of market conditions, product excellence and a culture of meaning, joy and thriving. Inc. magazine named him the number three CEO in the world. But what mattered to Bob was not the ranking. It was the marriages.

Over the years, Bob heard from several employees that their marriages had become stronger as a result of the company’s transformation People were going home fulfilled rather than depleted, and their relationships were healing. Children were growing up in more stable homes because their parents were treated with dignity at work. Bob realized that the reach of leadership extends far beyond the factory floor—that how we lead at work shapes how people live at home, how they parent their children, and how those children will one day treat others and parent their own children.

Bob’s wisdom and teachings are influencing countless companies as well as educational systems, teaching people how to care and be great stewards of the lives entrusted to them. Now 150+ adoptions strong, BW has never sold a single company. After all, a caring family doesn’t let go of 40% of its children when times get tough. Under his son Kyle’s leadership, Barry-Wehmiller is poised for continued healthy growth and an unshakeable determination to prove conclusively that high performance and a caring culture are not alternative paths; they must work in harmony for us to create a world worthy of our children and grandchildren.

On a personal note, Bob was one of the warmest, most caring, generous, disarmingly honest, and delightfully self-deprecating human beings I have ever known. He never took himself too seriously, but he was deadly serious about the challenges our world faces and the responsibility of businesses to address them. At a gathering of executives, when someone asked how to get corporate leaders on board with this philosophy, Bob replied: “Since when do you need a memo from corporate that tells you that it is acceptable to be good stewards of the lives in your care?” That was Bob—cutting through every layer of excuse with a single, unanswerable question.

When someone asked Bob what heaven looks like, he paused and said: “Heaven looks like a chance to sit down with my dad, who died trying hard to keep this company alive.” Bill Chapman died at his desk in 1975, working to save a struggling company. His son spent fifty years transforming that company into one of the most humane workplaces in the world. If Bill Chapman could see what his son built—not the $4 billion in revenue but the thousands of lives touched, the marriages healed, the families strengthened, the dignity restored—I believe he would say what every father hopes to say to his child and what every child longs to hear: “I am so proud of you.”

Bob was a beacon, a lighthouse of love and wisdom and inspiration. His memory is a blessing that will continue to guide us even though he was taken from us so suddenly and so soon. Thank you for everything, dear Bob. May we all be worthy to carry your wisdom forward.

The Wit and Wisdom of Bob Chapman

On Purpose

“We measure success by the way we touch the lives of people.”

“Business can be the most powerful force for good in the world, if we simply taught our leaders to care for the people they have the privilege of leading.”

“I don’t know how much time I have left on this Earth. I do know that on my deathbed, I will not be proud of the number of machines we built or how much money I made. I will be proud of how many lives we have touched.”

“We’re in business so that all our team members can have meaningful and fulfilling lives.”

“I believe the greatest charity is what we could do at work every day to take care of the people entrusted to us.”

On People

“When you see them, not as functions, but as somebody’s precious child, everything else changes.”

“Everybody is somebody’s precious child. All the people who work in our company deserve the same care and respect at work as I would give my own son or my friend’s daughter.”

“We have been paying people for their hands for years, and they would have given us their heads and hearts for free.”

“Never look at the people you have been given the privilege to lead as functions—receptionists or engineers or accountants. See each one as a full human being, somebody’s precious child, someone with infinite potential, whose life you have an opportunity to profoundly impact.”

“When I was growing up in the ’60s, they used to show us pictures of paper mills with sludge pouring out and contaminating beautiful clear streams. I wish we had a camera for the souls of people walking out of our offices and factories every day; it would make that sludge look pristine.”

On Leadership

“Management is the manipulation of others for your success. Leadership is the stewardship of the lives entrusted to you.”

“I learned as much about leadership by attending parenting classes as I did at business school.”

“Be the leader you would like your children to have!”

“The way we lead impacts the way people live. Leadership is the stewardship of the lives entrusted to us.”

“Ed Salmon (the pastor) only has us for less than an hour a week, but we have people for forty hours a week. Our opportunity to positively impact the lives of people is forty times greater than the church’s.”

“Since when do you need a memo from corporate that tells you that it is acceptable to be good stewards of the lives in your care?”

“A spreadsheet can’t show you how to treat people.”

On Shared Sacrifice

“It is better that we should all suffer a little than any of us should have to suffer a lot.”

— On the 2009 furlough decision

“What would a caring family do when faced with such a crisis? The answer came to me: all the family members would absorb some pain so that no member of the family had to experience dramatic loss.”

“In the military, they give medals to those who are willing to sacrifice themselves so that others may gain. In business, we give bonuses to those that are willing to sacrifice others so that they may gain.”

— Bob frequently quoted Simon Sinek’s formulation

On Culture

“Everybody wants to do better. Trust them. Leaders are everywhere. Find them. People achieve good things, big and small, every day. Celebrate them. Some people wish things were different. Listen to them. Everybody matters. Show them.”

— The Five Truths

“Our culture is so full of caring and recognition and celebration and holding up the goodness in people that the brokenness gets drowned out by the goodness. There seems to be an inexhaustible supply of it; the more we shine a light into every corner of our organization, searching for goodness, the more we find it.”

“We are big because we are good.”

— A long-serving board member, reflecting the spirit Bob created

“It is far more important to have a safe bus and make sure that the person driving the bus—the leader—knows how to take the people to a better place.”

— Reframing Jim Collins’s famous metaphor

On the Dignity Crisis

“America suffers not from a poverty of money but from a poverty of dignity.”

— A Thomas Friedman phrase Bob made central to his teaching

“We’re destroying people and killing our culture because we send people home after treating them as objects and functions, instead of caring about them as human beings.”

“We don’t say, ‘We’re destroying the lives of fifteen people today.’ We call it downsizing.”

— On the euphemisms of corporate cruelty

On Legacy

“Heaven looks like a chance to sit down with my dad, who died trying hard to keep this company alive.”

“People are our purpose. When you start with that, the business follows.”

— The essence of fifty years of learning

“Caring has no hierarchy. Caring goes to the essence of who we are as human beings. Caring is universal.”

Everybody matters. Show them.