#213: Jodi Berg, PhD (Vitamix) Pt. 2 — Resilience, Succession, and Purpose

Jodi Berg [00:00:00]:
We're all on this planet for a reason, and we're only on it for a finite period of time. We want to give people, I would think, as much joy in this process as possible. And joyful, happy people. They're not only they're just so much more fun to be around one, right? Like they want to be the bottom reason for doing it. But you can actually have a significant impact on people's lives. And as a true leader, why wouldn't we want that for the incredible people around us? So in order to help bring life satisfaction as leaders, the only thing we have to do is to have a relationship with those people that work for us and understand what makes them tick and help them connect their superpowers, the things that they're good at, and how they can make a difference while they're on the planet.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:49]:
Welcome to the Lay of the Land Podcast where we are exploring what people are building in Cleveland and throughout Northeast Ohio. I am your host Jeffrey Stern and today we are continuing with the second part of my conversation with Jodi Berg, the former President and CEO of Vitamix. In part one of our conversation we explore Jodi's career, the history, evolution and family legacy of Vitamix and her leadership journey growing the company into the global brand that it is today. In Part two, we pick up with her reflections on stepping away from the business and and step deeper into her philosophy of Purpose, the dance framework which she is developing to help others lead more intentional lives and wisdom that she's distilled from decades of research, teaching and applied leadership and entrepreneurial experience. It's a wide ranging, deeply thoughtful conversation on what it means to live and lead with purpose. Not to mention it also being a ton of fun and I'm very grateful to share it with you today. So please enjoy Part two of my conversation with Jodi Berg. Lave the Land is brought to you and is proudly sponsored by Roundstone Insurance, headquartered in Rocky River, Ohio.

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Jeffrey Stern [00:02:56]:
Don'T normally have the luxury, I would call it of reflecting on an interview across a couple of days before continuing the conversation. So this is a first for me and so far the focus of what we have discussed has been what I would call reflective kind of working through your personal, your family, Vitamix's really kind of fascinating history. And in this time between I spent a little bit of time thinking about infomercials and stuff like that. But you mentioned that your family moved the company to Cleveland ultimately because of people, something about the culture of this place. And I wanted to use culture as a bridge to the second half of our discussion, knowing you've spent a considerable amount of time reflecting on leadership, purpose fulfillment, these kinds of topics. But before we get to those explicitly, I did want to just pick up on the story of where we left off by rounding out your CEO chapter at Vitamix. And if you could just kind of take us through your thinking, what it took to prepare the organization to pass the baton, what the conversation looks like to discern whether that baton is handed to a fifth generation leader or someone outside the family to steward the organization and how the company ultimately evolved through the centennial over that time.

Jeffrey Stern [00:04:32]:
If you were the author of this.

Jeffrey Stern [00:04:33]:
Chapter, what would you outline as the this, this time at Vitamix for you?

Jodi Berg [00:04:40]:
What's interesting because you talk about culture and I clearly anyone that knows me knows I, I just love culture. I could talk about that all day long. But culture has such a key role in succession regardless of whether this is a family business or not. But if you talk about family businesses, family businesses on just on average outperform non family businesses. That's just something that they've tracked data over the years. And so some of the reasons that that happens is because there is this, this continuity from one generation to the next of, of the why it matters. And we talked previously about, you know, what is purpose. Purpose is why does it matter.

Jodi Berg [00:05:17]:
It's meaningful, it means something to me personally. So therefore I'm going to give it my all. I'm going to, I'm going to focus, I'm going to have the energy and the drive to push things forward and I'm going to overcome obstacles because at the end of the day, the true north is what I'm heading for. Not Necessarily all the other things in between. Right. So oftentimes in family businesses that that purpose of why the business exists can be passed from one generation to the next. Does it always happen? No. You've heard of like the third generation downfall, that type of thing.

Jodi Berg [00:05:51]:
And often you can get to a next generation and the reason for wanting to make the company successful is, is maybe not as strong or it didn't pass on, or there's all sorts of reasons family businesses or all successions don't work. It could be the. The prior generation doesn't want to give it up, the next generation doesn't want to take it, you know, but one of the things that matters is this is the succession of a purpose of, of why does the company exist. So VITAMIX being over 100 years old at this point, we, and me being fourth generation going into fifth generation, it had grown pretty significantly and we didn't have somebody yet inside this fifth generation that would be prepared to, to lead it just where the Vitamix was. So in order to bridge us, and the hope is that someday somebody from the fifth generation, we have several, several cousins and other family members that are preparing and working towards it. So the hope would be that it can be back in the family as far as the leader of the company someday. But in the meantime, we had this time that we needed to bridge. So we collectively, as a, as a family unit, we have something called our owner's council.

Jodi Berg [00:07:07]:
And that's where you have representatives of. It's not uncommon, right. When you get a cousin consortium, family business with lots of different branches. So we had what we called our Vitamix Owners Council that came together and said, how do we support this succession and this transition? And our thinking was to really focus on this culture that we had created, the culture of really empowering employees because we're all aligned on a shared common company purpose, but also really releasing that internal purpose inside and what mattered. We set out to hire somebody that could potentially be the next successor of the president and CEO. And we brought in somebody from the outside and wanted to take a couple years to just, just really get them involved in what Vitamix was doing and really understand who we are. And we had found that person. And then we went through Covid, and Covid was, um.

Jodi Berg [00:08:13]:
Actually, I believe Steve joined Vitamix just a couple of months before COVID hit. Like, this was his.

Jeffrey Stern [00:08:20]:
Wow.

Jodi Berg [00:08:20]:
Yeah, it's like, welcome. And so we navigated through this really intense period of time together that was Covid tested all of us on on what we're made of, not just our grit. Right. But also why we make decisions and who we are. It kind of put a lot of us to the test. So it was through that time that we had an opportunity to really understand who he was and whether he would be a good person, to kind of bridge us as a family. And it was also during that time that we got to the end of a pretty significant strategic plan and it was time to create a new one. And then Covid being just as difficult as Covid was.

Jodi Berg [00:09:05]:
I got through Covid and I thought, you know, it just feels like I need to step back and, and now is probably a good time for somebody else to step in. So I was already thinking about those thoughts. And then my father, being a third generation, he stepped in and, and he just said, you know what? Let's. Let's do this and move things along. So it actually succession is, is always difficult, particularly in a family business, I would say, because you don't just have the succession of the business, but you have the succession of family. And it was really important that our new leader able to be very family oriented, be able to share the same values as the Barnard family that owns Vitamix, and be able to carry that torch. Not just family, I'm sorry, not just carry the torch, not just for the business, but also for the family.

Jeffrey Stern [00:10:05]:
Were there parts of that transition that were most surprising to you that kind of like, in reflection, felt, you know, what I would be interested to understand is, I mean, this transition has happened a few times in the history of the company. And if there were kind of lessons learned, advice kind of handed down to kind of set the stage for what you might expect as you began to navigate it, and maybe how it deviated from what you thought it would be like.

Jodi Berg [00:10:39]:
So there's a lot in that particular question, and I would say very few things are like what you think they're going to be like, because you'd never done it before, right?

Jeffrey Stern [00:10:49]:
Yeah.

Jodi Berg [00:10:50]:
So as far as the mechanics of engaging the right shareholders and when you're making a purpose driven decision, once you know what your purpose is for that decision, then it's really important to align your world around it, which is to say, who are all the stakeholders are involved in this decision, who has a voice, who's affected by it, who should be involved in the conversations. So the mechanics of knowing that our purpose was to find a successor that could bridge us into the fifth generation, and that in our case, the stakeholders were not just the employees, but also family Members and our community. We've just been in the Olmsted community for just decades. Right. And Northeast Ohio. But to engage all of those stakeholders. And so I'd say the mechanics were pretty straightforward. What I didn't anticipate was how much I personally would miss.

Jodi Berg [00:11:51]:
I mean it was so we were so busy and all the employees were doing an incredibly strategic work in their own mind and bringing all of this together and it just created this energy and this drive. And you've probably heard this with a lot of people when they step back. There was a conscientious decision made that I would step back completely and not continue to be involved. I think that in hindsight was, was the right decision, but it was hard because all of a sudden you're just, you're not involved. Like I used to, I used to be able to impact decisions that were made and now it's, it's not my role and it wouldn't be appropriate for me to step in and try to influence anything. So that was, that was probably personally harder than I anticipated. But I think the other thing that's hard is we. This, this combination of community and, and your family and, and how you're associated and who you talk to throughout the day when you're, when you're very, very involved in your role as in whatever that role is within an organization where, when that changes, whether you retire or you choose to leave or the organization downsizes like that, that big change.

Jodi Berg [00:13:13]:
I think there's, there should. There's an opportunity for more research on how, just how to help us as, as tribe people to figure out how to transition. That what helped me tremendously is because I'm a very purpose driven person and my purpose is to. Has always been for a long time to help people find their wings and give them a chance to fly right by, by being very purpose driven. I wasn't defined by my role. At Vitamix, I was able to step back and say I still get to do that every single day. How do I do that now? And it bridged me into other things that I chose to get involved in or chose involved in. So to me that even though I missed very much the people that were part of my tribe, if you will, at Vitamix, I was able to bridge myself emotionally and intellectually into other spaces where I could still get fulfilled and feel joy because I was following my purpose.

Jeffrey Stern [00:14:16]:
Yeah. So let's talk about purpose. As you step back from the organization, you created this kind of liminal space for you to explore what to Focus your time and attention on going forward. And, I mean, you've devoted it to purpose and exploring purpose. You have conducted doctoral research, worked on a PhD centered around it. You're an adjunct professor over at Case. I'd love to understand how you navigated what to focus your time on in the space that you created for yourself as you stepped away. And why was it purpose?

Jodi Berg [00:14:54]:
So I don't remember if I talked about the life and death incident that I had when I was 30. I don't remember if I talked about that earlier or not.

Jeffrey Stern [00:15:05]:
I don't think so.

Jodi Berg [00:15:06]:
So. So I have, in my lifetime, had two autoimmune diseases. First one, Crohn's disease. Got that when I was 10. And that I had a life and death experience with that when I was 25. But I was 25, and I'm stubborn. I'm like, this is no big deal, right? Well, hindsight, yeah, it was a really big deal. But you don't think about that when you're 25.

Jodi Berg [00:15:24]:
So when I had the second one at the age of 30, and there was another autoimmune disease, and I had deteriorated to the point where I was no longer working. I wasn't a Vitamix at the time, but I was no longer able to work. I was no longer able to take care of myself. I moved back in with my mom. I was bedridden like this was. This had gone down in about an eight month period of time. And my mom took me to a doctor's appointment and wheeled me in in the wheelchair. And I ended up having a seizure in the doctor's office.

Jodi Berg [00:15:57]:
And the doctor, you know, hit the button for all the lights. Code. I don't remember which code it is, but get this person in the hospital soon. So all this activity is happening. And he says, linda, we need to take Jodi into the hospital immediately. And mom says, well, I gotta run home. I gotta get her, you know, a phone charger and clothes or whatever she's gonna need. So how long is she gonna be in the hospital? Perfectly logical question.

Jodi Berg [00:16:24]:
The doctor turned his back to me, and he says quietly to my mom, he says, linda, he said, you have to prepare yourself. I'm not sure we're gonna get her back. I'm not sure we're gonna get her out. I was having a seizure, but I could hear him. And I. In my seizure, I'm thinking, I. I can hear you. Like, no, I'm 30 years old.

Jodi Berg [00:16:43]:
I haven't even. I haven't even had a chance to start living Like I'm still trying to figure out who am I, I'm, I should figure out, right? All these incredibly smart people that are in this room, every single room I'm in, how do I fit in? And at some point I want to be smart like them. And at some point I want to be making a difference like they're making a difference. And now you're telling me that at the age of 30 I may be done that split moment when already I was in an acute state because I was having the seizure. But when you hear that comment, it was like an electrical shock just went through my life. And my first response was, well, I'm not done yet. I'm fighting this with everything I have. And fortunately there was a doctor in our own Metro Health is where I went.

Jodi Berg [00:17:32]:
And Dr. Jeffrey Runston, who I will think of him fondly to this day, was the one that figured it out and got me on track. And spoiler alert, here I am. But at the moment when I was recovering, I didn't know if I had, did I have a minute? Did I have a day? Do I have a month, do I have a year? Like how long do I have? How, how much longer am I going to be on this planet? Because it was, it was, it was that moment where you realized that everything could be wiped out just like that, right? And so I decided at that moment that I wanted to make a difference. I didn't know what that was, but if I had a minute, if I had a month, a year, I wanted to impact people. And I knew that the impact I wanted to have that was personal, meaningful to me was people at an individual level. So I set out to say, how do I make a difference? And every day I wake up and I said, what can I do today to help people? What can I do today have an impact on the people? And I realized that some of the, I call them superpowers, but some of this, we all have our own superpowers. There's things you're good at, like clearly this, that others couldn't be doing the interviews like you're doing and pulling out relevant information, right? So you've got a superpower of being inquisitive and asking questions and exploring.

Jodi Berg [00:18:46]:
And one of my superpowers is that when I'm talking to people for whatever reason, I can put together their non verbals plus their words, how they're saying it and I can connect it. And I, it's almost like I have this ability to see something about the person I'm talking to. That, that they don't even necessarily recognize in themselves. And I thought, I realized that I've been doing this since, since college. Why don't I use that superpower? I didn't call it a super at the time, but why don't I do that to, to help people? It seems. So I did. So I started doing that. And at first, the only reason I did it was to help other people.

Jodi Berg [00:19:25]:
And after a little while, I realized that, that, that moment when, when you're having a conversation with somebody and you say, well, you seem to have this strength in being able to do such and such. Have you ever thought about such and such? And sometimes when it, it, it's nails it, their eyes light up, they. There's this sparkle, there's this, there's this moment of, of revelation, right? That moment fills me with such unbelievable deep joy that I'm. I'm on fire for I don't know how long after that, right? So that's what I decided that my purpose should be, something along those lines. And eventually I phrased it as helping people find their wings. These are things inside them that they don't even know they're good at, that they don't even know it's a strength. They don't even know that they're doing it. Help people find that and then give them a chance to fly with it.

Jodi Berg [00:20:21]:
So because that you take a purpose like that and a true purpose in my mind, transcends every aspect of your life, right? So I wasn't running Vitamix at the time. I was at the Ritz Carlton. And I started to every day just say, well, how can I help people find their wings? Give them a chance to fly. And it, it transformed how I looked at anyone that was working with me or for me. It helped me, it transitioned how I looked at the purpose of the organizations, the purpose of the department I was in, everything I did and focusing on that, I, I kept. Eventually when I left the Ritz and I came back to Vitamix, I said, why don't I create? I came back to set up an international division. Why don't I create an international division where that's our purpose is to help everybody, whether it's the people on the manufacturing floor, whether it's the distributors in our different countries, whether it's a vendor, suppliers and co employees, whatever. Let's help them find their wings and give them a chance to fly.

Jodi Berg [00:21:24]:
Under the space of setting up the international sales and marketing for Vitamix, it just, we just found the most incredible Distributors. We had the most wonderful relationships and it, everybody, it just started to grow. So I applied that and that had a lot to do with my leadership. The question about, well, what do you do with that? Well, it wasn't just about work. My thinking was, how about with my daughters? I was a mom, why don't I help my daughters find their wings and give them a chance to fly? Like make that my purpose as being a mom. And it transformed how I became a parent. Now when we'd have difficult conversations or the kids would do something, my mind would go to, how do I take this moment? As much as at this very moment, the fact that I just discovered this makes me want to just scream and like sometimes pluck my eyes out. Any parents out there will understand what I'm talking about.

Jodi Berg [00:22:26]:
But when you look at it through the lens and say, how do I take this moment that sits seems unsurmountable to get through? And how do I say, how do I take it to help my daughters discover their wings? Something about them and how do I help them use it for them to learn how to fly? And then, okay, so it applies to work, it applies to home. Well, how does it apply to the decisions you make and the things that you get involved in? I thought, well, when I retired, people would reach out to me and say, would you like to be on this board? And I would look at the opportunity. I say, by me being on this board, will I find the joy and fulfillment of being able to have a platform, to have one on one conversations with people that will help them in a way find their wings and fly? And if I felt like that situation, whether it was board work, whether it was consulting, whatever it was, if I felt that that was something that I could accomplish, then I would consider it. And if I couldn't, I walked away from it. So I walked away from a lot of things when I first left Vitamix because I thought, I'm not sure. Am I just making myself busy because I'm feeling a gap? Or is this, or is this the new platform that I can truly make a difference?

Jeffrey Stern [00:23:42]:
Yeah. Well, thank you for sharing that. That's quite a powerful story. I felt a bit of the electric shock that you mentioned. You know, I got some shivers there.

Jodi Berg [00:23:54]:
Well, wouldn't it be great if every person could, could discover the and have the electric shock of wow, I why am I here and what difference can I make while I'm on this planet without having to go through this life and death situation? So oftentimes I have opportunities to do public speaking. If, If I can share that message, if I can somehow help. Help somebody discover joy and fulfill fulfillment without having to almost die, I feel like it's a good day.

Jeffrey Stern [00:24:25]:
Right, Right. Well, there's. I love Mark Twain quotes and there's one that he has which is. There are. I'll butcher it a bit. But the two most important days in your life are the day that you're born and the day you understand why.

Jodi Berg [00:24:41]:
Yeah. And so many people don't. They just. I want to get that message out there because so many people don't realize that they have, they have the opportunity to, to mean something, like to be on this planet for a reason. They. It. Their life can matter. You know, I, I know I got to take us off track for just a moment because when, when we were looking for employees at Vitamix and when we're interviewing people, there was different groups of people that would come through for an interview.

Jodi Berg [00:25:12]:
And if you, if in that interview process, through conversations, it was clear that you were a very purpose driven person and part of your purpose was to make the world a better place. I personally tried to find a place for you. Right. Because you, you are. They already know that they matter and they're going to focus and they're going to have drive and they're going to overcome different cult situations and make good decisions. Then the second group was people who. Nobody's ever talked to them about their purpose before, but when you start asking questions, it starts to come together. So they had, they had a, like a subconscious awareness of it.

Jodi Berg [00:25:49]:
And in the, in the interview they'd be, wait, no, I. And you could just see it was just popping. It was coming together. The third group was people who would say, nobody has ever indicated I can have a purpose. Wow. Wow. I just love that concept. And they would start to grab onto something and many times they'd say, I love the purpose of Vitamix, so maybe that's a great purpose for me.

Jodi Berg [00:26:21]:
And they would kind of grab onto that purpose and eventually we would help them find their own personal purpose. And all three of those people and those buckets, I wanted to hire them immediately. Right. But there's this other bucket of people who like, yeah, no, there's no purpose. I'm just, I'm just here. I just got to get through the day. Just got to get my paycheck, you know, there's just no purpose. Unfortunately, there is a group of people out there that kind of fit into this category and probably not the best employees, but it doesn't mean that they, they can't have an experience or a moment or a conversation or something that could help them understand that yeah, they do personally matter and that they can experience joy and they do have superpowers that can make a difference.

Jodi Berg [00:27:13]:
Yeah, but yeah, different, we kind of fall into different categories.

Jeffrey Stern [00:27:17]:
I love the kind of meta purpose of helping people find their purpose as kind of the guiding, you know, helping people find their, their own wings to, to fly. What have you learned about purpose in your academic exploration of it that has been beyond what you, you know, kind of intuited from your own experience about what you went through to, to discover purpose and think about it?

Jodi Berg [00:27:45]:
Jeffrey, that is such a great question because most of what we learn and understand comes through our lens, right. And we, we often assume that that lens is everybody's lens. Right. And it's hard sometimes to understand the difference between how we process things or see things and the next person. So I'm a very aspirational, optimistic, can oftentimes be energized person. Right. And I'm thinking why isn't everyone like that? If they, if people could just understand their purpose and it can be aspirational and big and, and then it's going to be inspirational and motivational and everyone's going to run towards it. So that was the lens that I was looking through.

Jodi Berg [00:28:26]:
So I go back to get my PhD. This was while I was still at Vitamix. I was getting my Ph.D. and I did a. The program at Case is absolutely spectacular. They walk you through the different types of research. The first body of research that we did was qualitative where you interview people and then you synthesize all of the information that you get into. Are you going to discover something or not? So I, I set out to understand how what makes, what makes somebody purpose driven and somebody who's not purpose driven.

Jodi Berg [00:29:03]:
And my theory was a purpose driven people were very aspirational and they time wasn't didn't matter that much because it was a matter of achieving this goal that like almost a true north, if you will. And that, and that if you're focusing on the true north, well then you could ebb and flow through every situation that comes your way because you're just like, okay, it's a mountain. That's where I'm heading. So I just have to figure out how to get over the mountain, onto the mountain, through the mountain, like what do I do to address this big issue? And, and I'm not worried about little goals along the way because I'm very focused on where I'm heading. So that was my premise as a overly optimistic kind of driven purpose person. So what came out of the research though was that there's two very distinct, but both are purpose driven categories and nobody's people are. Some are at one, some are the other, but there's this whole continuum in between. And although I might be kind of at the extreme of the continuum of like overly optimistic, true north aspirational, I can connect all these what appear to be disparate dots because they make sense to me for something that's bigger out there.

Jodi Berg [00:30:16]:
There's this other group of leaders that are very purpose driven as well, but their purpose is to accomplish the goals along the way. So this the second group of purpose driven people, so you call the aspirationals, which I'm probably a poster child for that not all, neither one's all good, neither one's all bad. Right? But very aspirational. And then you have another group that are very their goals drive their purpose for whatever they're trying to achieve. And they, they, they can understand the true north, but then they're going to break it down to say in order to get there we need to go to A, B, C, D, almost like if you will. I, the analogy would be I see something three stories up that is this incredible opportunity. I'm like, if we could just build this beautiful thing three stories high, it's going to accomplish all of this. Well, there's the goal.

Jodi Berg [00:31:10]:
Focused person is going to look at that and say it's three stories high, there's no possible way. And in their mind they're going to put all the rungs in the ladder. They're going to say I can, I can see that we have the first five rungs, but we're missing the sixth and the seventh rung. We got the eighth and nth. So we're missing about four rungs. That can't happen. And I'm the aspirational group of us say well let's just climb up to the sixth rung and figure it out. We can figure this out, right? So the biggest aha that I had in purpose driven research was that it takes both kinds of people.

Jodi Berg [00:31:47]:
And at the time we had a coo, Tony Sepiel, another amazing leader in the Cleveland area. He accomplished so much before he came to Vitamix. He helped truly helped us transform the organization. He's gone on to achieve other amazing things, but he is one of these goal purpose type driven people and I'm the aspirational one so we'd have conversations and he would look at me like I had three heads, like, I don't even understand what you're talking about. And we'd go back and forth until finally he would see what I was talking about and he would be the one to put the rungs on the ladder. And immediately he's brilliant. He'd go in his mind and he'd say, we can get here, but we're not gonna be able to do this. We can do this, we can't do this.

Jodi Berg [00:32:31]:
And now we were able to have the conversation about, okay, how do we fill in the gaps in order to. I've got the idea of what it's gonna look like. I'll work on creating some form around that. And Tony would work on all the steps in the ladder in order. Once we got to the point where that made sense, we'd have the rungs in the ladder in order to tie together. So that was my biggest aha. Because when I went into it, I'm thinking to be purpose driven, you should be aspirational. You should always be able to focus on the true north.

Jodi Berg [00:33:04]:
You should be incredibly flexible with the path, how you get there. Why? Because that's how I'm wired. And I realized that I couldn't do this alone.

Jeffrey Stern [00:33:14]:
Yeah.

Jodi Berg [00:33:14]:
Because I'm too aspirational. And I need to be balanced out by these amazing people that are purpose driven, but much more in a short term step process of getting there.

Jeffrey Stern [00:33:30]:
Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:33:30]:
Did unlocking this vocabulary of goal driven, purpose versus aspiration, vision driven purpose.

Jodi Berg [00:33:42]:
Would.

Jeffrey Stern [00:33:42]:
It have been helpful to know that when you were running the organization and like, what do you think it unlocked?

Jodi Berg [00:33:49]:
Actually, so I, fortunately we, I got my PhD while I was running the company and while Tony was there. So it helped me tremendously understand how to have these conversations. And if it also helped me understand that when I'm talking about a, a big audacious true north that I see as possible, that I need to, I need to change, I shouldn't say change my language, but I need to make sure I incorporate in my language an appreciation and understanding for the amazing people around me that are, they may not, they may not see my vision as clearly as I do, but they see all of the, the steps and the hurdles clearer than I do. So it, it gave me an incredible appreciation for, for the people that I worked along with and understanding how they, where do they fit in this, this continuum? And we, we talked about that a lot with Invitomix to help people realize that, you know, this person is not a polyana. There's something that they're seeing that maybe others aren't seeing. And this person isn't Debbie Downer. There's something that he or she is seeing that the, the person who's looking at the vision isn't, isn't recognizing yet. And it helped us realize that there we weren't, although we were very different, opposite side of spectrum, we needed each other.

Jeffrey Stern [00:35:23]:
Are there components of this whole idea space of purpose when you think about culture, strategy, employee engagement, other aspects that are important that we haven't introduced even as concepts and to how you think about this broader set of topics.

Jodi Berg [00:35:47]:
So personal purpose affects us on a personal level, into a team level, but also at a company level. And so I'm going to talk specifically about the impact that personal purpose has on company culture. So most of the research that's been out there about purpose will talk about a company higher purpose. There's lots of data to demonstrate that companies with a higher purpose outperform companies that don't have a higher purpose. So that exists. So we recognize that being purpose driven within an organization is helpful. And if you have a higher purpose within an organization that is going to be a part of your culture. The AHA that came through the research I did is I was specifically studying this personal purpose.

Jodi Berg [00:36:30]:
So with the help of Richard Bryatzis at Case, he was the chair of my committee and also another unbelievably brilliant human being. He helped me realize that if I, if I recreate this, the research on company purpose and demonstrate that there's consistency with the research that was done before with also what I'm getting. And then at the same time I layer in the same impacts on engagement and company commitment when I'm, when we're studying personal purpose, then I'd be able to see between the two of them which one had a bigger impact on those particular variables. And right before I did the quantitative part of this research, we added a third variable which was this life satisfaction. Because I said I want to understand why for me it gave me so much unbelievable joy and sense of meaning to be living with my personal purpose. Is there something there or is this just me? Right. So I we layered in a life satisfaction as far as a variable as well. And what came out is company purpose absolutely impacts employee engagement.

Jodi Berg [00:37:44]:
That's been demonstrated before. My research did the same, but the impact on engagement was almost double if the person had an individual personal purpose. And it didn't. It's not saying in addition to the company Purpose. It's just saying that if you have, if you have a purple personal purpose and you understand what that is like why you exist, your engagement in whatever you're doing, including your work, is going to be significantly higher than if you don't. Right. I mean, it's hindsight. It seems logical.

Jeffrey Stern [00:38:19]:
Right, sure, that makes sense to me.

Jodi Berg [00:38:22]:
Right. You think about like sports teams, the player that is in it because they're part of this team and they want to win and they're, they're going to get a medal or whatever the case might be, like they're so much more engaged in what they're doing. So what this did is says take that and leaders, if you want to increase the engagement of your workforce, having a company or a team purpose will help, but you will get more of an impact if you just take the time to connect with each and every person on your team and understand what drives them, what's their purpose, help them understand their purpose. And if they can understand their purpose, their, their engagement will be. It's just, it's almost an easier route than a company higher purpose, if you will. Right. So the second piece of it was the company commitment and the company commitment for people with a having a higher purpose within your company was good and. But personal engagement helped with that as well.

Jodi Berg [00:39:21]:
Fairly similar, they weren't too statistically different, but they're both up there. And then. But the third one, this life satisfaction piece, I remember when I got the results right, I'm looking at it, having a company purpose had zero impact on that and any person's satisfaction with their life, like no impact having a personal purpose, the impact on their life satisfaction was extraordinarily high, unbelievably high. I mean, in hindsight, again, it makes sense, but if you then take that and say, so what do we do with that information? It means if as a leader, something that matters to you is the relationships that you have with the people that work for you, if it's giving them joy, if it's, we're all on this planet for a reason and we're only on it for a finite period of time, we want to give people, I would think, as much joy in this process as possible and joyful, happy people. I don't you break it down, they're not only, they're just so much more fun to be around one. Right. Like they don't want to be the bottom reason for doing it, but you can actually have a significant impact on people's lives. And as a true leader, why wouldn't we want that for the incredible people around us? Right? So in order to help bring life satisfaction as leaders, the only thing we have to do is to have a relationship with those people that work for us and understand what makes them tick and help them connect their superpowers, the things that they're good at, and how they can make a difference while they're on the planet.

Jodi Berg [00:41:04]:
Boom. Like, imagine at the end of the day that we can say, wow, did I, did I make a difference when I was on this planet? I had, I was at, I went into the union club. This was before I was a member. And there was a gal that was the concierge. And I walked by and she says, Jodi Berg. Dr. Jodi Burke, she was Dr. Jodi Berg.

Jodi Berg [00:41:28]:
And I says, oh, yes. And I, I, I said, I'm so sorry, do I know you? And she goes, no, I, But I heard you speak 10 years ago, and you told me, you told all of us this concept of if I could just understand my own personal purpose and why I'm on the planet, that it would bring me an incredible sense of life satisfaction. She goes, I have been following you for a decade. I, I saw that you got your PhD, you're now studying it, but you, that changed the trajectory of my life. Like, are we on this planet to make a difference? I'd say yes. And I hope everyone gets that moment where someone looks him in the eye and said, you, you, you made a difference in my life. And if we could do that for one person, we matter. Right? The fact that we are here matters.

Jodi Berg [00:42:23]:
And I just love to give everybody on this planet that opportunity. So then you say, well, what does that mean? I can do that? When I was running Vitamix, I can do that with the opportunities to speak and in organizations that would like to have somebody come in and help just open up this understanding for, for their employees. I just, it brings me unbelievable joy.

Jeffrey Stern [00:42:47]:
Yeah, it's a beautiful sentiment. As you've reflected on your own superpower of helping people to see within themselves perhaps what they are unable to or don't, for whatever set of reasons. What have you learned about what it takes to help people see that within themselves?

Jodi Berg [00:43:11]:
Well, that's such a great question. So how people are, are wired so differently? And very early on, when I was working for the Ritz Carlton, I had the opportunity to travel internationally and experience all these different cultures. And it was, I think, because I was going through that experience when I was young enough, I, I saw and I'm, I'm A bit of a optimistic person. Right. I pulled out of all these different cultures, the things that made that particular culture special. Right. And what makes the Japanese culture so special, and then the Chinese culture different, special in their own way. And European cultures, even within Europe, all the different cultures that exist in there.

Jodi Berg [00:44:03]:
And I know this is categorizing and it's generalizing, but it really, if you take it up to that generalization level, there are certain cultural elements that we share as cultures. And so I think I had this amazing opportunity to recognize early on that people are different. So then as I. As our journey in life takes us different ways, my journey took me to this deeper understanding of purpose. And I realized that taking the time to understand how people learn, how people process information, how they communicate, how they don't communicate, what's their family situation, what are their. As much as you can, that helps you bridge the. The conversation in a way that you can, that you can. That we can help somebody open up their ears enough to hear something differently.

Jodi Berg [00:45:10]:
Like, I can't force somebody to hear something. I can share observations when I'm having a conversation with people, but I can't force them to hear what I'm saying. So my purpose in those conversations isn't to be heard. My purpose in those conversations is to. Is to observe something that is already existent and meaningful in the person that I'm talking to. So that when I start, when I talk about that, it's already meaningful. It's already in them. I'm not.

Jodi Berg [00:45:46]:
It's not asking them to change something. It's not asking them to do something differently. It's just bringing something up that already exists. So people, if you, if you're able to have a conversation and not put up boundaries or barriers that they can, that they're open to hearing, and then you, you share with them something positive and real about who they are. It's. I don't know. I. Somebody can break that down for me, I suppose is.

Jodi Berg [00:46:20]:
But. But once you start talking to people about something that is really special about who they are and you haven't created barriers that they can trust you in. The fact that you're being honest and open about that observation, you're not just making it up, It. It becomes personal. Right. And. And they can, once again, they can. We can connect to things on a personal level, and if they trust me enough, then we can engage that conversation to explore it further.

Jeffrey Stern [00:46:51]:
But what are you most excited about today with your optimistic disposition?

Jodi Berg [00:46:57]:
I am finally, finally writing a book that I've Been wanting to write for a very, very long time. And I found a company that's a publishing company that's going to help me accomplish that. So, so, and I, and the way they do it is very structured, which works delightfully well in my world. Like if, if somebody can structure something for me. So I'm, I'm in the process of writing, writing my first book. I got, I got about three of them in me and this is the first one.

Jeffrey Stern [00:47:25]:
What is it that you would like to say?

Jodi Berg [00:47:27]:
Well, this book, one of the. I talk about purpose driven cultures, but I also have figured out how to apply. First I started just applying it to me and that was how to make purpose driven decisions. To make sure that the decisions I was making were, were going to be effective, efficient, correct, helpful. Right. All those things. And I can engage the right people. And I realized that I had this process that I followed to do that.

Jodi Berg [00:47:57]:
And at one point when somebody was asking me what the process was and I was explaining, explaining it, I realized that I was losing them in trying to explain it. So I created an acronym to help explain the steps that I follow when I, when I make decisions, small decisions or big decisions. And it's that I realized that acronym for making purpose driven decisions was relatively easy to understand. And when I talked to people about it, it could res, it resonated and they could remember. So I'm, I'm hoping that by writing this book I can get it out to that many more people who can maybe think about how they make purpose driven decisions differently.

Jeffrey Stern [00:48:37]:
Yeah. What is the acronym?

Jodi Berg [00:48:40]:
Should I keep you in suspense? So it's really simple. It's dance, which I also love the word dance. Right. When you think about what is it that people tell you when you're out there on the dance floor and everyone gets all nervous and they say dance as if no one is watching. Right. So somehow, if nobody's paying attention to us, we have this freedom to dance however we want to dance. Well, in my mind it's dance because the world is watching. So if, if your dance is your purpose of what you're trying to achieve, then you want as many people involved in your, in, in your force to help you get it accomplished.

Jodi Berg [00:49:19]:
So this concept of, of dance and the D, I could tell you them really quickly.

Jeffrey Stern [00:49:26]:
Yeah, absolutely.

Jodi Berg [00:49:27]:
You may not be able to apply them right away, but that's where the book comes in. Right. So the D stands for determine what your purpose is for every single decision that you make. Even simple decisions like we get up in the morning we think, gosh, should I shower? Should I not shower? I don't know. That's the decision I make. My purpose of that decision is to say, well, the reason I would make a decision to shower or not shower is because it's going to affect my day and, and it's going to affect the day of everyone else around me. So my purpose is to make, to help me be as effective as possible today and to, for me to be effective, I need to like, not offend everyone else around me. I'm really simplifying this down, right? But so a simple decision like that, the A is align your world around that decision.

Jodi Berg [00:50:11]:
And that's what I talked to earlier about who are all the stakeholders that are affected in this particular, particular decision. Do I take a shower? Do I, do I change the direction of my organization? Do I, do we bring in a non family member to bridge until we get to the fifth family member of our company? Do I, do I go out with this person? Do I like whatever the decision might be?

Jeffrey Stern [00:50:35]:
Right.

Jodi Berg [00:50:36]:
So why, why does this decision actually matter? And it, the purpose for the decision is often bigger than the actual decision that you're making. So if the purpose for the decision is bigger, then you can step back and say the actual decision I'm making about whether I choose A or B, if I, if the purpose is greater because if I choose A or B, what I'm ultimately trying to do is achieve something up here. Then you look at this purpose and say, who needs to be involved? Who are all the stakeholders? And align your world so that those people have a voice, those people are part of it. When I was running Vitamix, that meant if, for instance, when Covid hit, we put together a council that had members across all the functional areas, but also the different levels within the organization because they were all, everyone was being affected differently. So it wasn't this leadership coming together and saying, we're just so brilliant, we're so smart, we're going to make decisions for everyone else. It was bring everyone that has a stake in this together and let's decide the foundation of how we're going to make decisions for our organization. In which case this council said, we're going to prioritize our employee health, we're going to prioritize being a sustainable business. Second, we're going to prioritize our customers.

Jodi Berg [00:51:58]:
Third. And so when anyone throughout the organization makes a decision, you know, how does this help keep the employees safe? How does this help us be sustainable and how does it help our customers and Once this council picked those three things we said, and what's our role as a counselor? Our role is to allow every employee to make every single decision they needed to make to be safe. And our job is to give them the resources or the help or figure how to make it happen. So that when you think about COVID hit people are making decisions. How do I keep my doors open? They're making individual decisions. And we try to pull all those individual decisions together and say, what's the bigger purpose of all these decisions? It was those three things. Top one being employees. And now you didn't need smart leadership, people making all the decisions.

Jodi Berg [00:52:52]:
We rolled it down. And individual teams or pods that work together on the production floor, they got to make their decision. What do we need, the three or four of us in our workspace in order to feel safe? What do we need in order for our families to feel comfortable that we're going to be safe? So it helps you align it, get all the stakeholders. The third one is create a network of people that will help you make that decision. These are the people that you know, they trust you or they, they care for you deeply, they care for the decision. So if you're making a bad decision, they're going to look you in the eye and they're going to say, jeffrey, what are you thinking? Like, right, you don't trust everyone to do that for you?

Jeffrey Stern [00:53:32]:
No, but you need some people.

Jodi Berg [00:53:33]:
You need somebody who's going to really kind of give you the yes or no without an ulterior motive. And this particular dance has two ends. The second one is a net, and that's what I call the safety net. Because if you're going to empower your team to take risks, then, and if you're going to power yourself to take risks, then you're going to want to make sure you got a net to catch you if you fall. And if you don't give people a net, you can't ask them to, to walk a type rope and take risks when the, the risk is just too high. They're not going to do it, right? No, no. Very, very, very. There's a couple people that would, but most people would not do that.

Jodi Berg [00:54:14]:
So give them a net. And oftentimes with our employees, that means take the risk, make the decision, and if it fails, it fails. We got your back, we'll lift you back up and we'll try it again. So figure out how to create that safety net, even for ourselves. Find those people that if it all falls apart, they're going to just take you in their arms and say, it's going to be okay, we got this. I will hold you until you can stand up and walk again. Like that's the net on a personal level or company level. And then the third one is C stands for care for yourself.

Jodi Berg [00:54:54]:
If it's your vision, if it's your purpose, then you got to stay healthy. Because as much as you think all these other people that are helping you achieve it, they believe in you and they're looking to you for that inspiration of the ultimate vision. Right. They need you to. To stay healthy. The ultimate. What do they say on the airplanes? Put the safety mask on yourself first before you take care of somebody else. Right.

Jodi Berg [00:55:20]:
Doesn't do you any good if this is your purpose. To be passed out in the aisle and everyone stepping over you trying to figure out what. What is it that she wanted us to do? Like, what's the vision? So that's in care. And then the E stands for just do. Just enjoy the process. Life is just way, way, way too short to think that the only time you can celebrate is when you achieve your ultimate goal. So just a reminder to say just moments matter.

Jeffrey Stern [00:55:46]:
Well, dance is kind of a wonderful acronym then because I think it's also just fun that I think people who dance are generally happier people.

Jodi Berg [00:55:55]:
I know, you're right. Absolutely. They're allowing themselves to be free. Right. And move and in different ways.

Jeffrey Stern [00:56:03]:
As you've applied the dance framework to yourself, what have you learned in auditing your purpose decision making process? Like what, what. What has been unearthed by the application of this framework? And what do you hope people get out of it?

Jodi Berg [00:56:20]:
Well, one of the things that happens when you. We are. We're so programmed that when a decision comes to us, it is, it is this decision. And our job is just to make it like the. The P or finding the purpose of the decision that the D of the dance is hands down, the hardest. Right. So what it's done for me and what I'm hoping you'll do for other people is when a decision comes to you, take a moment to step back and put the decision into perspective of the bigger picture. And there may be that this decision may have, nothing may have.

Jodi Berg [00:56:57]:
I'm sorry. Everything to do with something bigger that ultimately needs to be achieved. My mom used to say she called it her quarter turn theory. That is we make different decisions. We don't realize it, but that particular decision sends us a little bit this direction. Next one might a little bit more and a little bit more and Next thing you know, if you're on your trajectory of going forward in whether this is your business or your personal life or your family life or parenting, whatever the case might be, if your decisions aren't consistently taking you towards. In my case, it was, how can I raise my daughters to be strong, confident, purpose driven people that feel really good in their own skin? Like, that was my vision for my daughters. So every decision that came up, how I handled a situation that was happening in school, or conversations that they had with me, or what sports were involved in, or how we handled dinner conversations, or every single little teeny parenting decision along the way, if you just looked at those individual decisions and made it, and then you make the next one, you make the next one, you might realize that what you've done when you weave all these decisions together, together is you're actually raising.

Jodi Berg [00:58:14]:
You don't mean to, but you're raising your children to, to be dependent on you for making decisions and maybe insecure in their own skin because of how you chose to make the individual decisions along the way. So I think the, the biggest thing that I've learned is one, just start. If you do nothing else, think about the decision that's in front of you, simple as it is, and pull back and say ultimately, for, for these people, for this situation, for whoever's involved kind of in making this decision, what, what are we, where's the true north of this? Where are we going? And allow that to define how that decision gets made before you like. And think about midlife crisis, right. Why do a lot of people have midlife crises? Because they get. They lift their head up 3/4 the way through their life and they go, what the heck? How did I even get here? I don't even know where I am. I haven't done this. I haven't done this.

Jodi Berg [00:59:12]:
I haven't done this because we made little decisions along the way and we weren't paying attention and all of a sudden we're like, that's not where I wanted to be at this age of my life. But if we early on would say, who do I want to be at this age of my life? And then you make those decisions, then we're more apt to actually get to the purpose of that really matters with whatever those decisions relate.

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:38]:
Yeah. My old English teacher described that phenomenon as, you know, we're brought up in education to become good hoop jumpers and just kind of like with acquiescence, jumping through these hoops. But they're always to the expectations of other people and to Society at large. And it's. Until you ask of yourself, what are your expectations?

Jodi Berg [01:00:01]:
Right?

Jeffrey Stern [01:00:02]:
That's like kind of the awakening moment.

Jodi Berg [01:00:04]:
She's. She's defining something called my ought self and my ideal self. And my ought self is I ought to be this. I ought to show up in school, I ought to study, I ought to pass my exams, I ought to become an engineer. Out to everyone tells us what we ought to do, and we're like, okay. And that's where I was when I. When I was 30 and I had this life and death moment. I was in.

Jodi Berg [01:00:28]:
I was in my ought self. I ought to be this for all these other people. I have no idea what I am, but I ought to be. This is what everyone else wants. And when you discover that what's my ideal self? And that some of the frameworks of what we ought to do maybe made sense at the time, but we're still hanging on to them like they still matter and they're not really making us our ideal self, which. Imagine if everybody could be their ideal self.

Jeffrey Stern [01:00:55]:
Right? That's such a powerful purpose, the meta purpose. What do you wish I asked you about this? The set of topics that we haven't talked about yet that you would want to explore.

Jodi Berg [01:01:07]:
That is great questions. Well, I wish you had asked me. We wouldn't have had enough time. But I would have loved to have taken a moment and shared some of my observations about what your superpowers are. And we could have talked. That's a whole conversation itself is what is a superpower? And how do you discover those superpowers within you? And then how do you use this understanding of what my superpowers are in order to figure out the. What I could achieve in my purpose? When you think about it, the reason superpowers came up is think about a super. All these superheroes, right, They've got certain powers, and because they have powers, they are able to achieve a certain purpose as a superhero.

Jodi Berg [01:01:53]:
And all of a superhero's powers are usually positive. The superheroes are positive. There's also superpowers that they're not. What's the opposite of the superhero?

Jeffrey Stern [01:02:04]:
The super villain?

Jodi Berg [01:02:05]:
The villains. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. So the villains have superpowers too, but they use them for bad. So if you can figure out what your superpowers are as a person, the things that you are better at than most people, we take it for granted when we have a superpower, we think everybody's good at that. Right? I'm good at it. Clearly everyone's good at It.

Jodi Berg [01:02:23]:
But in reality, I'd love to have conversations with people say, no, no, you don't understand. You are really, really good at that. And if we could figure out those superpowers, then we can figure out maybe what our purpose is in life and hopefully we could just open up joy in a way that people have never experienced before.

Jeffrey Stern [01:02:42]:
I would certainly love to take you up on that, but we can put a pin in that for another time. I want to attempt to bookend our conversation here with a few kind of fun questions as we make our way to our traditional closing question, which is for. Kind of a hidden gem in Cleveland. But to tie Vitamix back into the story a bit, if you had to start this organization from scratch today and you could reinvent the blender, like ignoring all the historical design decisions that were made, how would you approach that, that problem?

Jodi Berg [01:03:26]:
I.

Jeffrey Stern [01:03:27]:
Or you can even reject the premise, you know, like.

Jodi Berg [01:03:30]:
But how would you approach it because. Not reject the premise. The one premise I want to reject is that. As if that is a big decision. And our, our engineering teams who work very closely with our suppliers and their engineering teams, incredibly talented, smart people, they are always looking at it to say, how can. So marketing comes in and said, this is. This is what people need. And engineering is always looking out outside of the blending industry to say, what are the other variables? What are the other factors? What else is coming down in regards to material or processes that we didn't have access to in the past, that we now have access to, that could.

Jodi Berg [01:04:25]:
Could that could make our product better, possibly perform better? Could it be faster? Could it be quieter? Could it be. So we are constantly within Vitamix figuring out how to apply new understandings of how the world is changing to make high performance blending better. The Vitamix will never be, I should say, inexpensive, because it can always outperform itself in the future. If that's what people need, right? If. I mean, there's no point for us to be able to achieve something if that's not what people want. But when we were working, we worked with. We still do. But early on in the 19, late 1980s, 1990s, we were working with chefs to say, what if you could dream anything that you would like to do, what would you like to do? And their responses were, there's.

Jodi Berg [01:05:31]:
There's consistencies that we can't achieve because we can't break through cell walls or seed walls or release things. There's. We want to be able to break into the cells differently than we can today. So we created the next generation of Vitamix to break through those cell walls and release. And we ended up releasing a lot of nutrients within those cells. But you also released things within the shells that allowed. Allowed you to think about food and how it interacted differently. The chefs figured out how to make.

Jodi Berg [01:06:11]:
Would make a creamy soup, which traditionally had butter or milk in it. Right. They figured out that if you. If you broke down certain. Certain starches in the Vitamix, you're able to break it down at such a small, minute cellular level that those starches could be mixed in with the other elements within your soup, and you could create this incredible silky mouthfeel with an amazing consistency without using dairy or milk in a cream soup. So you don't have to. Cream soups, the traditional cream soup always had some sort of cream in it. Now you can have an incredibly rich, creamy soup without a drop of butter or milk in it.

Jodi Berg [01:06:56]:
Because the chefs figured out, if I'm able to break down things to a smaller molecular level, I can infuse and homogenize them in a way to create something that we've never been able to create before. So the premise is that that's a big step. No, it's how you have to look at life every single day. Every project is, what could I do today that I couldn't do yesterday that could make something possible tomorrow that nobody's imagined every day. Think about that.

Jeffrey Stern [01:07:29]:
What is your favorite product to be blended? What's your, you know, what's your ideal smoothie?

Jodi Berg [01:07:37]:
I ask people that question all the time. All the time. Well, hands down, I love making fresh peanut butter with just raw peanuts and not adding anything else to it and then eating it right out of the container when it's still warm. Love that. But probably my also favorite is making hot soups and adding ingredients in that to change the flavors that you can't get any other way. For example, the premise of a hot soup is that you were. You cook it for a while, and when you cook things, it changes the flavors. Well, if you're.

Jodi Berg [01:08:07]:
If you're taking and making hot soup in the Vitamix, you're putting all the ingredients in. Well, I take a fresh apple, and I do different apples because they don't have different flavors. Right. And I can throw a fresh, raw apple into my hot soup, and it will pulverize it so quickly that it still has the flavor of the raw apple in my hot soup. And. But it's pulverized. It's not pieces of apple. Right.

Jodi Berg [01:08:32]:
It's. It's the sweetness of the apple that's been infused into my. My either squash soup or sweet potato soup or potato soup. Sometimes I'll put apples in there just to add that little bit of sweetness. I love doing that. That's when people are eating it. Well one, it's so enjoyable for me, but I used to, used to make soups and then I. I'd make a big container, spread a whole bunch of stuff, make a huge container, and I just walk around and give people little cups of soup until I ran out of soup.

Jodi Berg [01:09:00]:
And I loved people saying, whoa, what's in this one? And you'd explain what's in. Like, no, no way. You did not put raw carrots in my soup. Yes, I did. Right. It's raw Tara carrots, raw apple, spinach, kale, these things that you wouldn't normally think that you could get the flavor profile in a creamy soup. So I love that.

Jeffrey Stern [01:09:22]:
Love it. This one is. Well, it just comes from my curiosity about things, but I've noticed that the blenders overall and the products have become more technologically enabled over the last few years. And as someone who's built companies here, I'm curious, are the people, literally the people within the organization that have designed the systems of 10, 20 years ago, how do you think about software, which seems to be a larger part of it? Does AI matter to Vitamix? How do you think about technology in the context of the business?

Jodi Berg [01:10:06]:
So if you put it back in this decision framework and say, what is your purpose? The purpose of a Vitamix product is to help people successfully change the way they eat. And how do you do that? Well, you have to make it super simple and you have to make it taste absolutely fantastic. And you have to make it so that they can make it a part of their lifestyle. So there is some technologies that, that help do that and there's other technologies that it would just add complexity or expense and doesn't help anything. Right. So. So the technologies that are behind the scenes inside the motor that, that tell the interact between the, the blades, what you're putting into the motor, the. The speed of the motor, that type of thing, there's a lot of technology that's, that's been developed to make that possible.

Jodi Berg [01:11:01]:
So for instance, the Vitamix Ascent has a technology in it that if you to blend, you have to have a really, really fast speed and a high torque. If you want to put something in a food processor, you need to have a slow motor that is able to just process differently motors. They're not intuitive enough to know, am I supposed to be fast or am I supposed to be slow? You turn me on. The only thing I control is the speed. Until technology came out that allows the container that you have on it to communicate with the motor that say, when I have this container, I need you to perform this way. When I have this container, I need you to perform this way. So that the technology of being able to communicate between the container that you're putting on the machine and the motor to communicate how it needs to perform was revolutionary. And that allows the same blender base that can literally pulverize anything you put in it.

Jodi Berg [01:12:15]:
That same base can take and slowly. It can chop and it can grind, and it can do things that a food processor can do. It took us decades of working on that before we found somebody that could help us figure out how to solve that riddle, that puzzle. The other one was there's a lot of blender containers out there now that are BPA free. Right. And very, very early on would have this been, I think, Even in the 90s, when people started to become aware of the dangers of some plastics and elements and components that were in it, we started working with organizations to help design a form of a plastic that didn't have the bad ingredients in it, but was still strong enough, durable enough to withstand. Believe it or not, if you take frozen bananas and frozen strawberries and you put them in your Vitamix, the power of them being hit by that blade and smashing against the container is a lot. Right? That's a lot of force.

Jodi Berg [01:13:27]:
So we needed to make sure. And then one of the things that the BPA was doing was making the container stronger. So we worked and said with a chemical company to say, how can we create one without something that's problematic, that can have the same components in our container? We collectively, between that organization and ours, developed that. They asked us if we wanted to, to hold off and not allow that particular material to be used outside of the blending, I mean, in the blending industry, outside of us. And we said unequivocally, absolutely not. If this is better and people can be safer and other blender companies can use it, then it's out there, like, use it. And now you'll see that exact material in a lot of different blender jugs from different blender companies. So that type of thing, we just always are thinking, what can we solve? And if the solution isn't out there yet, who can we work with to figure out what this solution, whether it's technology or AI or How can we, how can we solve the problem versus applying a technology to something if we don't know what the purpose is that we're trying to solve? Or you end up just making something more expensive or more complicated, but you haven't done it.

Jodi Berg [01:14:51]:
You're not just. Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [01:14:53]:
Solve a problem and grounded in purpose. Totally.

Jodi Berg [01:14:56]:
It's all about the dingo.

Jeffrey Stern [01:14:59]:
It's a perfect way to round it out here. So with that, I'll ask you our closing question. I love kind of framing it in that Vitamix is here because of the people and this kind of hidden gem culture of a place, if you will. But the question is for a hidden gem in the area, something that other folks may not know about, but you think they should.

Jodi Berg [01:15:27]:
So clearly, the people. Right. The people of Northeast Ohio. Unbelievable maze. I don't have to talk about that again. But, you know, that's one of my top answers. The other one, though, that I absolutely love about Cleveland is Playhouse Square district. I mean, I know people know about this.

Jodi Berg [01:15:43]:
This is not hidden in any stretch of the imagination. But what, what the Playhouse Square organization is doing for our, our downtown area by creating a whole district of space and connecting people and working with, and very closely with, with Cleveland State and, and because their campus is right next to Playhouse Square, what they, they work with all of the, the universities that have any sort of performance programs. And, and they're just, what they're doing for our community is so much more than just bringing us entertainment. And it's just an unbelievable organization. And we have so many of them. Like, I'm just mentioning Playoff Square because I happen to be a bit of a hidden thespian, if you will. I just, I love it. I love theater.

Jodi Berg [01:16:34]:
I love what it does by transforming us out of us, transporting us out of a place. So that's the one I want to mention. But I've listened to so many of your programs, and they're all wonderful. And thank you so much for doing what you're doing. And I love this question because I've actually thought, oh, I'm going to go try that place. Oh, I didn't realize that was happening in our amazing little epicenter of Northeast Ohio. So it's a great question.

Jeffrey Stern [01:16:59]:
Thank you.

Jeffrey Stern [01:17:00]:
You know, and if it's up to Craig Hassell, who runs Playhouse Square, it won't be a hidden gem for much longer as his, his aspirational vision is to surprise and inspire the world.

Jodi Berg [01:17:13]:
So I kind of. And so many of them, I mean, he, he is the perfect person to step into this role when he did because his. His vision is. And his purpose is big. And it's also a perfect example of an organization that. That they. They do have this big vision and all of their decisions that they make about how to get into real estate and. And where to expand and how to grow and what to invest in every one of them.

Jodi Berg [01:17:38]:
If the decision was made by itself, it may not have been made, but it's part of this bigger. Like, how do we just create a community within this area of Cleveland that connects all of Cleveland from our organizational perspective, a people perspective, a transportation perspective, how do we break down the. The barriers that are separating us? Like, it's. Yeah, he's a perfect example of the dance.

Jeffrey Stern [01:18:06]:
Totally. Well, Jodi, I just wanted to thank you for coming on basically twice to share a bit of your story. Really, really amazing to just listen and learn and. Yeah, very much appreciate you taking the time.

Jodi Berg [01:18:23]:
Well, it's my pleasure. Thank you so much. I had a lot of fun.

Jeffrey Stern [01:18:28]:
If people had anything they wanted to follow up with you about, they want to learn more about the book or anything else, where would you point them?

Jodi Berg [01:18:36]:
So that's a great question because one of the things I wish I'd brought with me when I retired from Vitamix was administrative support. Not the greatest at it, and I get caught up in the moment of where I'm at. But I do have LinkedIn. I do encourage anyone to reach out a couple of times because I tend to completely forget to check. And you can also track down, probably send me an email, jlb240case.com but. But mention that it was through your program that you're reaching out to me, or else it may get, you know, unintentionally swiped the wrong way.

Jeffrey Stern [01:19:16]:
Yep.

Jeffrey Stern [01:19:16]:
Yep. Cool. Well, thank you again, Jodi. This was awesome.

Jodi Berg [01:19:21]:
Thank you very much. Take care. Stay warm, stay healthy.

Jeffrey Stern [01:19:26]:
That's all for this week. Thank you for listening. We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's show. So if you have any feedback, please send over an email to jeffreyofthelandfm or find us on Twitter oddleoftheland or Sternfa.

Jeffrey Stern [01:19:41]:
J E F E. If you or.

Jeffrey Stern [01:19:43]:
Someone you know would make a good guest for our show, please reach out as well and let us know. And if you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on itunes or on your preferred podcast player. Your support goes a long way to help us spread the word and continue to bring the Cleveland founders and builders we love having on the show. We'll be back here next week at the same time to map more of the land. The Lay of the Land podcast was developed in collaboration with the UpCompany LLC at the time of this recording. Unless otherwise indicated, we do not own equities or other financial interests in the company which appear on this show. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of any entity which employs us. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.

Jeffrey Stern [01:20:30]:
Thank you for listening and we'll talk to you next week.