Walk the Talk Show with Waylon Lewis presents:

In this episode of Elephant’s long-running, award-winning podcast and video series Walk the Talk Show with Waylon Lewis, we’re sharing a classic, yet unreleased episode from a 2018 interview with Waylon Lewis and his mentor-from-afar Bo Burlingham, author of one of Waylon’s two most-recommended books ever (the other is Pema Chodron, Buddhist author). 

Bo Burlingham, journalist, business writer for Inc. of many years, is the author of Small Giants, which Waylon calls one of “his favorite Life-Helpful ‪‎Mindful‬ Books.”

Bo: “I wound up going to work for Inc. magazine and that was my introduction to entrepreneurship—a whole world opening. Inc. was fantastic. It was exciting. We had this sense that there was this incredible stuff going on in the economy and that we were the only ones really looking at it, back then.”

Waylon: “I was watching some YouTube videos and you said that at the time entrepreneurs had this sort of sketchy reputation.”

Bo: “Right. That word was not a romantic word, like it is now.”

~

“What led to Small Giants was basically trying to see: are there other companies out there that have other goals they consider more important than getting as big as possible, as fast as possible? That’s more common today than it was back when I was writing Small Giants.” ~ Bo Burlingham

Our conversation: 

*Sadly, the audio is rough at moments in the video above. We’ve included captions.

Listen to a clip of the conversation on the podcast: 

“I had the view that social responsibility grows from the inside out. And that your focus has to be on your people. If you focus on your people, you’ll have a good business and you’ll do more good.

Other people felt, no, no. Business is a tool for social change. You have, as part of the mission of the business, to produce this social change. And I said, I don’t have any problem with doing that as long as you got your sh*t together internally.” ~ Bo Burlingham

Waylon asks Bo what a Small Giant is:

“It comes down to leadership and relationships and a lot of what small giants do is that they. They put those relationships, which are, you know, when you have a small company you have a lot more control over the relationships that you have with employees, people who work in the company, relationships with your customers, relationships with the community. The challenge is: as the company grows, how do you keep that special magic?” ~ Bo Burlingham

~ 

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Want more? Check out last week’s
Walk the Talk Show episode:

https://www.elephantjournal.com/2024/01/chef-vasta-on-vegan-plant-based-mindful-cooking-tips-recipe-with-waylon/