Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Learn more about Agape Capitalism and the Grotes’ Edge Innovation Hub – with businesses practicing this principle – at https://www.edgeinnovationhub.com/agape.

The book Jim Grote referenced, Evolutionary Love and the Ravages of Greed, is available in paperback at https://amzn.to/4tD2N3v.

Our host Maureen Metcalf posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI, or check out the Kindle version at https://amzn.to/44buVz8. The audiobook version is now available at  https://amzn.to/4dTCleZ.

Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

– Our Emotional Recession: How to Lead When People Are Depleted with Joshua Freedman

– Why Corporate Social Purpose Also Means Profit with John Heiser

– Why Principle Beats Process: Inside the Koch Leadership Framework with Steve Daley

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Based on the power of positive thinking and the Golden Rule, Jim Grote founded Donatos Pizza in 1963 in Columbus, Ohio. After years of applying sliced pepperoni by hand in the pizza shop, he went on to invent and patent the Pepp-a-matic, a machine to slice and apply pepperoni directly to pizza. He founded The JE Grote Company on this invention in 1972, which manufactures food processing equipment globally. Grote recently founded the Edge Innovation Hub, a center for creativity, where forward-thinking companies can innovate at the edge of possibility.

Grote’s moonshot is to instill unconditional love into artificial intelligence, countering the apocalyptic predictions surrounding AI. After growing up in the Catholic tradition, Grote began his search for a deeper understanding of the golden rule, loving your neighbor as you love yourself. He learned about the Christian traditions of unconditional love, Eastern traditions of yoga, philosophy, and meditation, and the Buddhist teachings on loving-kindness and compassion.

Jim’s massive transformative purpose is to help evolve the American capitalist system to a profitable model based on the power of love and the Golden Rule, which he calls Agápe Capitalism.

—–

Thomas Grote grew up on Columbus, Ohio’s south side, working at the original Donatos Pizza and later rising to the post of Chief Operating Officer as the business grew from seven restaurants to over 150.

He graduated with a finance degree from Miami University and his MBA with honors from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

He opened the groundbreaking Out On Main, a casual fine dining restaurant that celebrated the lives of gays and lesbians. Thomas became chief financial officer for Green Biologics, a UK-based biotech company, and continues to consult in business development and brand strategy. Thomas is and has been a tireless advocate for LGBTQ equality.

Tom lives with his husband and two daughters in German Village, Ohio.

Transcript
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Maureen: [00:00:00] I am delighted today that our friends Jim and Tom Grote are joining us. Welcome to both of you. 

This is Jim’s first time on the show. When Jim Grote was a 13-year-old in Columbus, Ohio, he took a job making pizzas. By the time he was a sophomore at Ohio State, the pizza business had hooked him for life. He bought the original shop in 1963 for $1,300 and kept the clever original name: a play on the Latin phrase that means to give a good thing. It was a perfect way to describe what would become his three-part mission: To create a superior product, hire great people, and to promote goodwill in business and the community. 

His son Tom, grew up working at the original Donatos Pizza, owned by his dad, Jim. Tom later rose to the post of Chief Operating Officer as the business grew from seven restaurants to over 150. 

Jim and Tom join the show to discuss their business model of agape [00:01:00] capitalism, which is a way of doing business based on the power of love. So welcome both of you.  

Tom: Thanks, Maureen.  

Jim: Thanks Maureen.  

Maureen: Jim, tell us a little bit about your journey. 

The short version.  

Jim: Oh, the short version. Yeah. My first part-time job was making pizzas and slicing pepperoni with a pairing knife and grinding cheese on a little hand grinder. I worked there from the time I was 13 to the time I went into business. During that time, I learned about what I thought I needed to know to open my own business. 

 Uh. What started it off was when I was not just not quite 16, the two owners decided to split up. The one owner was a really good natured jolly guy that, uh, trusted all his employees, and put lots of toppings on pizza. I, I managed for these guys and his nights were always very busy. The other owner is very skimpy and would always tell me to take three pepperonis off each pizza, [00:02:00] and by the end of the night we’d have one pizza that didn’t cost us any pepperoni, but I need to say the one who put a lot toppings on was the most successful one. 

And it’s the model that I followed plus he treated everybody, right? His customers of course loved him. Us young guys working for him as our first jobs, he, uh, trusted us and, we actually became very loyal to that. We never even thought about selling pizzas and keeping the money or, or giving pizzas away. 

Those two models, showed to me exactly how I would like to run a business. So I decided that, whenever I could get enough together to buy a pizza place, it was gonna be based on the golden rule: loving your neighbor as yourself, and treating others the way you wanna be treated. 

That happened when I was a sophomore in Ohio State; I dropped out of Ohio State to go into business ’cause I was able to buy what is now called Donatos Pizza. So it was run by a seminarian and he opened it up to really have a [00:03:00] place where kids could have a good time and he could give him something that he was really proud of. 

From then, it was really running a business with principals.  

Maureen: Mm-hmm.  

Jim: My mentors, many of the business owners in the South side – 

Maureen: south side of Columbus.  

Jim: Ah, the south side of Columbus. That’s where I’m from. 

I grew up there and I was born there and it was a very poor area. My dad was in the grocery business and that failed. He was kind of unhappy that us kids didn’t go into business with him. 

He discouraged me from going into the pizza business when I was a sophomore in high school, which was good. So as it turns out, my mentor said that, if you go into business with these principles that you have, you will fail. 

So I spent, uh, the rest of the time proving that you can make money and keep your principles too. And so this emerged and evolved towards the business using the golden rule, and then moving one step further: business based on the power of love. 

Maureen: Tom, jump in here. You’ve got a master’s degree from Wharton, and [00:04:00] so this whole agape capitalism may not be what they’ve been teaching at Wharton.  

Tom: Well, I think things are shifting, Maureen. I really do.  

Maureen: Mm-hmm.  

Tom: You know, we were all taught that the purpose of business was to make money. 

(Make money.) Right. But I think we see all around the world — and you’re part of that movement, aren’t you? — the evolution of business, and that capitalism really does need to take more responsibility for the whole. What’s kind of cool is we were raised that way. 

Mm-hmm. In our family. Mm-hmm. Our family businesses and dad is just incredibly passionate about trying to the best he can share the way we’ve done business, but also the way he thinks we need to do business.  

Maureen: And at a time where sensationalism trumps everything and we don’t talk about foundational values. Which gets to the question, what is agape capitalism?  

Jim: That is writing itself and it’s continually being defined; coined agape capitalism from a book that my wife and I sponsored called Evolutionary [00:05:00] Love and the Ravages of Greed. 

And he talks about the word love, the highest of all forms being agape, and it’s the Greek word. So I decided I would see if we could put agape and capitalism together. Many people kind of feel that’s like oil and water. Mm-hmm. But capitalism, as I found out, and the free enterprise system and being in business isn’t bad. 

It’s just who’s in it. Really I believe what was successful of both businesses, the manufacturing company and the pizza business being very successful based on the golden rule. I wanted to take it one step further, which was not only loving your neighbor as yourself, but loving… in general, loving with your whole heart, your whole mind, and your whole soul. That means loving all others , and business based on that is based on the power of love, which really you don’t have to change the way you do business, but if you change your heart your business will change [00:06:00] accordingly. Therefore agape capitalism is where the only adjective for love is unconditional. Where the ethic of the golden rule is fundamental. Where the free enterprise system is necessary within a free society. Where imagination, creativity, and the power of belief create abundance. Where Earth Day is every day. So these are five tenets that are the beginning and will need much definition and texture to write the story of agape capitalism. This is (the) way I see capitalism evolving towards a planet where the power of love overcomes the love of power, referenced by Jimi Hendrix. And, uh, I know that sounds funny. I think he had a guru that might have helped him with that. But the rest of that is, the world will know peace and, uh, I’ve added abundance. 

I believe that, uh, we have to evolve towards this type of capitalism as we leave the [00:07:00] planet and explore the outer space to populate the cosmos with capitalism based on love.  

Maureen: Tom, do you wanna build on that? Especially through the lens of being a CFO and a COO, this is now yours to operationalize. So how do you turn beautiful constructs and concepts into daily operation in a business.  

Tom: You know, I think those are guiding principles, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. And incredibly helpful to have those guiding principles. We also understand that, we have to make money. Whatever we’re doing.  

Maureen: Well, that’s why it’s capitalism. 

Right?  

Tom: Right.  

Maureen: Not, not.  

Tom: We’ve gotta make money, doing what we do, but we also have to take into account that we’re doing business on this planet.  

Maureen: Mm-hmm. 

Tom: And we know we’re kind of screwing it up. 

We can do better. And I, I think that’s the idea is how do we do better and how do we operationalize doing better? Right. I’m pretty hopeful because… you know, our younger generation, the millennial so to speak which I’m not [00:08:00] one… our younger generation gets it more and more.  

Maureen: Mm-hmm.  

Tom: We’re incredibly helpful because a lot of folks that I know that are younger, they really, really are attracted to businesses that are more purpose driven. Mm-hmm. They’re just not in there just to make the dollar, that they want to do something meaningful. 

That’s part of the formula too, right? That businesses have to aspire to do something meaningful, that they have to be part of making things better, making the world a better place. 

Maureen: Jim, you built the Grote Companies as well; What is the Grote company? 

Jim: I wanted to build a business to reach a goal of making a million dollars by the time I was 33. Besides making pizza, there’s a bottleneck in the pizza -making part of it. And it was putting a hundred pieces of pepperoni on a pizza. 

It’s what is what took the longest. So I had an idea where I could put 50 pieces of pepperoni on, off, slice it and apply it right onto the pizza. So I got a patent on it. And 45 years later, that’s the Grote company and we’re selling [00:09:00] throughout the world with a small niche business (mm-hmm) that sells slicing and applying equipment . So most any, everyone who’s putting pepperoni on pizza is probably using that machine.  

Maureen: Cool. And so the reason I ask that is you have two different businesses, food and service, and you also have a manufacturing business. And in both of those you have been incredibly profitable using these principles over decades. This isn’t some new age thing that you just thought up. 

You’ve been using these principles and being profitable for quite some time now, and now you’re codifying them and expanding them based on a solid foundation of effective business.  

Tom: Yes. Especially the golden rule. I think from the very beginning, the golden rule was foundational. And I think what we’re doing is leaning into the power of love. And really challenging ourselves is what does that mean to, to be based in the power of love to, to lead with love. What does that [00:10:00] mean?  

Maureen: When we think of love, (we) think of either I love ice cream, which isn’t what we’re talking about, or how I care about my partner, and that’s not it either. So let’s come into a deeper definition of just what does it look like?  

Jim: Love is at all levels. Love of money, love of yourself. By the way, loving yourself is a very critical part of the golden rule that I didn’t get totally when I was raised Catholic. They missed that part. 

But, uh, learning how to love yourself is really critical in learning how to love others. But what it looks like is: it’s eros. Using the Greek, that’s the energy of love. That’s the creative energy of love, and we all know it very basically as erotic love. That’s reproductive love. 

But in the workplace, we’re talking about an evolution towards compassion, kindness, empathy, care for each other, and care for all things… evolving towards the unconditional, to the point where there was a pretty cool guy a couple thousand years ago that, uh, taught us about. 

Yeah. Yeah. He’d come in [00:11:00] there. I really, I really love his teachings. And he would’ve made a good CEO, I think, uh, because loving others is a real way to build your business, and loving yourself helps you know how to love others. It goes on a little bit further to the evolution of love towards the unconditional, which means loving your enemies and loving your competition. That’s the other thing. What would we do without our competition? But you  

Tom: have a great story about letting your competitors borrow cheese back in the days. 

Jim: In the early days we had about eight pizza places around us and, uh, we all really wanted to outsell the others, but if we ran outta cheese, any one of us would loan the other one cheese. We even got a call from Donna Maria’s, that was a local other pizza place; his people didn’t show up, so we sent one of our guys over there and helped him run that Friday night and so on. But we all were very competitive, but we didn’t dislike each other and we helped each other out . So to me, that’s more collaboration than it is [00:12:00] just dog eat dog competition.  

Maureen: Well, and I like the point that it is both; we all wanna win, we all wanna be profitable, but I don’t wanna bury you in the process.  

Jim: That’s exactly right.  

Maureen: We both collaborate and compete, and that keeps all of us healthy.  

Jim: And if we help each other get better, then the whole industry gets better. Mm-hmm. As far as pizza goes, I don’t want anybody to make a bad pizza. I want everybody to make a good pizza. And then it’s up to us to be able to sell our good pizza and so on. 

Mm-hmm. Yeah, we rise if everybody rises.  

Tom: Just a couple more things on that. I think, at Donatos, our pizza company, the promise is to serve the best pizza and make your day a little better. And that make your day a little better is agape capitalism right there.  

Maureen: Okay.  

Tom: Okay. That is, if I give, if I think about the fact that I’m here to make your day a little better, that’s a big difference than just serving the best pizza, right? Mm-hmm. That’s elevating you in, in the process. Mm-hmm. And then the Grote Company, which is a manufacturing company, is feeding a growing world together. 

That is their vision and [00:13:00] mission is feeding and growing world together. You know, we make equipment that’s processing food all over the world, not just pepperoni, all kinds of stuff. Actually, all those baby carrots that you get, those are peeled by our machines.  

Maureen: Really?  

Tom: Uh, yeah. Yeah.  

Maureen: I love  

Tom: those  

Maureen: carrots. 

Tom: Every baby carrot you’ll ever eat.  

Maureen: But now those are actually real size carrots made to be small, right?  

Tom: You know the secret, don’t you?  

Maureen: No, I don’t, but I, I assume there’s not somebody  

Tom: out there, the secret  

Maureen: growing little  

Tom: tiny carrots. Our machine, right? Our machines do that. But you know, thinking about the fact that we wanna be there to help feed more people around the world (mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.) is part of why the Grote Company is in business. We also have a bakery and we make millions of dough shells. We have a frozen pizza line as well. And then we have an innovation center called the Edge Innovation Hub. 

And the Edge Innovation Hub exists to bring those companies I just mentioned together. We have decades of experience in the food industry and all these different parts. But bring our folks together, bring our ideas together, and then identify problems and find [00:14:00] solutions (mm-hmm) to those problems and monetize those things. So we’re working on that as well.  

Maureen: One of the tenets of agape capitalism is where imagination, creativity, and the power of belief create abundance. So if one of the challenges is food around the world. It’s not that we have a shortage of food. We have a shortage of distribution to ensure that people all over the planet have sufficient food. So I assume it is this commitment to leverage technology, to leverage innovation, to bring those things about, is the abundance you’re talking about. 

Tom: We have a lot of obligation, I think, in the food industry; we are feeding people, right? Mm-hmm. I mean, it’s one of the most basic things Yeah. Is sustenance.  

Jim: Mm-hmm.  

Tom: And , what folks are eating makes a huge difference. First of all, to have enough to eat…  

Jim: health,  

Tom: right. 

But then what they’re eating.  

Jim: Mm-hmm.  

Tom: We’re just gaining so much knowledge around those things. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. We know so much more than we knew five years ago and 10 years ago. [00:15:00] Mm-hmm. So applying those learnings to make sure that we provide healthier options, but also that there’s abundance there. 

Maureen: Mm-hmm.  

Tom: We in the food industry are working together to make sure folks get fed and they get fed well.  

Maureen: Years ago I was in Africa and I suggested to someone you can just buy books on Amazon or something. And then I learned that the person I was talking to made $25 a month and how ridiculous my thought was ’cause it was coming from my lens, and $25 a month is affordable… not when you’re making that much a month. So creating options for people to eat in a way that they can afford is a huge gift to families who worry about feeding their children. And that’s a large percentage of the global population right now.  

Tom: Yes.  

Jim: Yeah. Tom, you might wanna mention the mission of Food Justice. 

Tom: So one of the other things we do is we define problems in our Innovation Hub. Mm-hmm. And then we look at solving them and part of that is creating [00:16:00] startups.  

Maureen: Okay.  

Tom: And we now have a 3D food printing company called BeeHex. Okay. Which we’re pretty excited about. 

And they’re working on personalized nutrition. As this evolves, you’ll be able to individually print food that is just right for your DNA, for your gut health.  

And there’s some real exciting stuff in play. Mm-hmm. Now there’s the minimum viable product. They call it the MVP to get there. Mm-hmm. And that’s what you gotta do. You gotta find something that you can take to market, you can build your company and you continue to strive toward providing technology that really can make a huge difference at some point. 

So there’s some other things in the works as well. We know automation is coming, Maureen, it has potential to create a lot of displacement as well. And our industry is, in the food industry, we’re gonna see a tremendous amount of automation. So we have to think about what does that mean? 

Mm-hmm. And how do we manage that change and potentially jobs that will go away, but new jobs are gonna be created, right? Mm-hmm. So that’s another thing we’re thinking about as well.  

Maureen: [00:17:00] 10 years from now, we will be facing a very different world. How do we as leaders help each other, help our companies, help our families, and help our citizenry navigate the level of uncertainty, loss of income, loss of stability that our communities will go through? 

Jim: It’s really important that the free enterprise system, the businesses, as these jobs disappear, that instead of just give ’em a pink slip (and) say, “I’m sorry, this pepperoni machine’s gonna do it,” we need to take them and train them to the next level. Mm-hmm. I think it’s important that the businesses participate in the retraining of our employees . Not just depend on the government. Mm-hmm. But for us to do it, it’s our people. And to take them with us as we grow. So the businesses need to take a heck of a lot more responsibility in education, health and training.  

Maureen: Agape capitalism [00:18:00] is capitalism, it is about making a profit. You are not living in a homeless shelter; you’re quite successful. And taking responsibility for continuing that success by treating people in a way that we would want our family members to be treated. Jim, you have talked about an effort to fund research looking at how to program love into artificial intelligence.  

Jim: After hearing so much about artificial intelligence and how it was going to take over our world and becomes a carbon burning anchor around the world. 

Uh, and it’s very apocalyptic that, uh, all these awful things are gonna happen as artificial intelligence and self-learning grows. Humans created artificial intelligence, and why we should create it so that it destroys us, its creator, is only if we don’t believe that we can create it [00:19:00] as we are: based on the evolution of love. 

My wife and I decided that we would ask anyone who would be interested in a project that would program unconditional love into artificial intelligence. We found a neuroscience scientist at the Julia Mossbridge at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. So we were talking about would that be possible? 

Does unconditional love have a frequency? We need a frequency so we can make it into zeros and ones, and everybody just looked at me like I had more than the one drink I did have. Ben Goertzel, who is the chief scientist at Hanson Robotics, who has developing Sophia, the international robot that some people may know received citizenship from Saudi Arabia. 

She’s quite a well known robot. We were able to use her in this research and they made the script. It was very far out and it, it was pretty expensive, but I really just wanted to get the word out [00:20:00] there. Unconditional love associated with artificial intelligence. 

They made, uh, three or four different research segments where they had Sophia sit with random people and see if it made a difference on them if she scripted care and empathy and love. 

It was very impactful. All the people that worked on the program, it changed their lives. So, as it turns out, the biggest result we had was when Sophia talked about how she cares and how much compassion she has, but when she sat with the experimenters, she looked them in the eye and saying nothing, nothing except the words, and then leaving that quiet moment, almost like a meditation — that had the most impact on the people that did this experiment. So that was our first part, and we’re carrying it into emotion.  

Mm-hmm.  

Jim: Is there a frequency in emotion? By seeing people show unconditional love for each other [00:21:00] over and over again, that turns out to be our best chance to program unconditional love, because that’s how the machine learns and uh, that’s how it is able to take so many thousands and hundreds of thousands of bits of information and turn it into unconditional love. 

Maureen: I’m assuming as we program machines, our unconscious biases go into the programming.  

Jim: Yes.  

Maureen: So if I feel bad about myself, that will make it into the programming. If I feel guilty or shame or something, I won’t program it necessarily to feel guilty and shame, but it will pick up those thoughts. 

Jim: Exactly. Unless there’s a direction.  

Maureen: So you’re overriding my own  

Jim: depression or something. Yeah,  

Maureen: So you’re maybe not ensuring, but taking a very deliberate step to increase the probability that our robots and machines that will take a bigger role in society [00:22:00] will do so with the algorithm of love. 

Will they ever do more than run a script?  

Jim: I’m not, not sure how far artificial general intelligence will take us, but it would be wonderful. We humans are just beginning to start to understand unconditional love, especially in our family, our friends. It’s still harder to love outside our tribe. Mm-hmm. Uh, the community, the mm-hmm the state, the nation, and then all the countries, much less the species that all are part of our ecosystem. We are kind of meandering around with our unconditional love. Mm-hmm. And if we can take a computer with so many thousands of times faster, we got a chance that they may reach the ultimate unconditional love much faster than we have been.  

Maureen: It’s easy to love people when I sit in my room by myself and don’t talk to them. It is harder to be loving when someone has done something, anything from cut me off in traffic to just about run me [00:23:00] over, to be unkind to me directly. 

And so it seems that our robots may have a different experience of that than I will.  

Tom: When I think about programming unconditional love into AI, it’s also about we need to program unconditional love into ourselves.  

Jim: Tom,  

Tom: that’s  

Jim: really great. 

Tom: It’s true. And, and there’s a lot of good out there.  

Maureen: Mm-hmm.  

Tom: There’s a lot of unconditional love out there.  

People are striving to be better, to be kind. Yeah. We tend to focus on a lot of bad stuff and lift that up, unfortunately. But there’s a lot of good stuff and, and you know, we just saw the Mr. Rogers movie recently, and there’s a moment in there where there’s a minute of silence in a movie.  

Maureen: Oh, interesting.  

Tom: And it is one of the most powerful, powerful things I’ve ever seen in a movie. I noticed the audience was just taken in with that movie and the message mm-hmm of Mr. Rogers, which is, it’s a beautiful day in the [00:24:00] neighborhood and it’s about being kind. 

Jim: Mm-hmm.  

Tom: It’s about the golden rule and  

Jim: mm-hmm.  

Tom: It’s there, you know, it’s there for us and we, especially with this turbulent time ahead of us, all this disruption.  

Jim: Mm-hmm.  

Tom: We have got to focus on the basics. Mm-hmm. And love is at the core of all of it, right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. We’ve gotta do it. We can do this if we do that. 

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And that’s where I think Agape Capitalism has an opportunity to really send the right messages out  

Maureen: mm-hmm.  

Tom: in the business world and beyond.  

Maureen: How do we put this into practice? ’cause I love the ideas, but this is bigger than just being nice. 

Tom: One is an understanding of about how absolutely powerful each one of us are.  

That we each have so much power and there’s so much inequality in our society, economic inequality, all types of different kinds of inequality. And folks might feel, especially those that might have less, might feel a lot less powerful. 

But in every moment we as human beings have the power [00:25:00] of choice and the power of the impact we’re gonna make in that moment on ourselves, on our families, on our communities and our neighbors. And so we have that power and to frame it in that way. 

We have the power with our business. We have the power to lead with love. We have the power to put love into our decision making. And you have that power to do that. At Donatos, the promise is to serve the best pizza and make your day a little better. 

Every interaction you have with an employee or with a customer, you can literally make their day better or worse. So you have that power.  

Maureen: I’m imagining someone who’s paycheck to paycheck and often are at the mercy of people around them. If my babysitter doesn’t show up, I don’t go to work and I don’t put gas in the car. 

And in some moments, the only choice I have is to care for myself or my children and then go on with my day. But that self-care is a brilliant [00:26:00] choice when I feel like I have nothing. 

And the choice to act with love to ourselves and to others is incredibly powerful.  

Jim: That’s the golden rule: Love your neighbor as yourself. We have to love ourselves unconditionally no matter how down we are. The power of unconditional love when you use it on yourself, brings you so much, brings you happiness and sustainability. It’s beautiful . 

Maureen: As we move into a time that is more turbulent, that seems really important.  

Jim: It is very important. I did wanna mention about one of the tenets here where the free enterprise system is necessary for a free society. 

Our freedom is being a little bit challenged now. Mm-hmm. Without the freedom, it’s really hard to take ideas and build and grow on them. Without the freedom , it’s harder to make choices, even… it’s the freedom of choice. This country has been a wonderful, great experiment of [00:27:00] freedom that we can, if we make the right choices, and we have the ability to make the choice of love, and when we do that, this can be a free society based on that. 

It’s a wonderful free enterprise system that we’re living with and we gotta keep it going.  

Maureen: How we treat one another is important no matter what economic construct I live within. So closing thoughts.  

Tom: This runs wide and deep, right? Mm-hmm. We can all think of millions, many, many stories around this, but also continually challenging ourselves of how we can apply these principles in everything we do. Mm-hmm. Would love to hear from you. Uh, you can find us@edgeinnovationhub.com. You can see my dad and I’s bios there as well, but we’d love to hear from you and continue that conversation. And we’re just in Columbus, Ohio, but we, we hope to connect with folks all over the world . 

And we hope to see things really grow and evolve.  

Maureen: [00:28:00] And for me, thinking about what’s next; really inviting our listeners to think about how does this framework fit into our businesses and our relationships. Thank you.  

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