Building a Company That Honors God

Bill Hendricks: 

Well, welcome to The Table Podcast. My name is Bill Hendricks. I'm the Executive Director for Christian Leadership at the Hendricks Center, and in today's conversation, we want to return to the always important and incredibly vital matter of how one's faith applies in the workplace. Today we're going to take up that conversation at a company-wide level and ask the question, is it possible to build a company that honors God? Is that even possible? Of course, we believe it is, and to show us a beautiful model of how that works, we're honored to welcome Dr. Al Erisman to The Table. Al has not only become a legend in the faith and work movement, but he's also one of my valued friends and mentors, and I don't say that lightly. Al, I've never been with you when I don't think I've learned something from you, so I want to give you a warm welcome to The Table Podcast. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

Thank you so much, Bill, and thanks for our friendship. I really appreciate being with you. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Well, thank you. I'm just so excited about today. Let me just give you a little bit of background on Al and what qualifies him to even speak into this issue. He spent 32 years at the Boeing Company, they make airplanes, and he ended up as the director for research and design for computing and mathematics, so I guess by background, he's a mathematician, but we won't hold that against him at a theological institution. He taught at the School of Business at Seattle Pacific University where he helped lead the Center for Integrity in Business and that leads over into a magazine that he helped to co-found and is the executive editor for Ethix, E-T-H-I-X, Ethix Magazine, which is devoted to issues of business ethics and technology, and he's from Seattle where he has helped to found a group of Christians in business called KIROS. 

Bill Hendricks: 

I know Al from the Theology of Work Project where he is one of the founding members of the steering committee and also the co-chair of the board, theologyofwork.org, a wonderful set of resources to help you integrate your faith in your work. The reason that I asked Al to join us today is that several years back, he began a rather ambitious project to document a company called ServiceMaster and its history, and it eventuated in the book, The ServiceMaster Story: Navigating Tension Between People and Profit, so Al, right there in the subtitle, you kind of put your finger on the nub of a problem that has bedeviled capitalism, at least, since the beginning, really, this tension between people and profit. I know it sounds like an obvious question, but what is that tension? Or better yet, why should there be a tension between people and profit? 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

Well, I think that often people think about profit as the driving goal of a business, and in so doing, people become a utility, or a means by which that profit is generated. Another way of thinking about it is to recognize both of these together, people and profit, as being vital cogs that you don't pit against each other but you work together, intention. One of the founders at ServiceMaster is to say that when you navigate a tension, it can give you a sense that you want to prioritize, is it this or this in a difficult situation? He said, "Think of it like an exercise band. You stretch it out and that tension creates creativity that allows you to address the problem in a new and interesting way," and then he said, "But when you do that, remember, don't let go of either end, or it will hit you in the face," and so holding this tension together is something that characterize the ServiceMaster company and challenges all of us in business today. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Well, and I think just to briefly extract from what you're saying, there are many, many places in our faith where we face these tensions, values in tension, and it's not an either or, but it's some kind of a both and intention, and we talk about that a lot at the Hendricks Center, that there's so many cultural issues we face today, whether it's immigration, or abortion, or gay rights, or whatever those challenges are, and our tendency as humans, I think, has defined those black and white solutions, and so in the case of the business world, you mentioned there's kind of been a default paradigm for probably decades that profits matter more than anything else. What you and ServiceMaster sort of introducing into the equation is, "Well, I hold on, profits matter," and that's a good thing to say on a program like this, because as Christians, we tend to say, "Well, what about the people?" But we do that sometimes at the expense of, "Yeah, well what about the profit?", and so that profits legitimate, but then people also have needs, and so we've got those in tension with one another. 

Bill Hendricks: 

The ServiceMaster story is essentially the history of the ServiceMaster company, which maybe I'm just speaking for myself here, but when I hear about, "Oh, that's a history of a business," on the surface, that doesn't sound terribly exciting, and yet, I know once you got asked, you said you weren't really looking for this assignment, that you went into it with a great deal of excitement. How did you get involved in this project in writing it? 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

I've been friends with the fourth CEO of ServiceMaster and chairman Bill Pollard for many years and I've been involved in a number of projects with him. We were talking about one of the projects that he had been supportive of. Then he said, "By the way, I have another question for you. There needs to be a book on the history of the ServiceMaster Company and you ought to write it," and I said, "Wait a minute, now. I agree there needs to be a book on the history of the company, but I don't think I'm qualified. I don't have the time, but I would help you find someone, and he said, "Well, I have some things for you to read and let's talk in two weeks." 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

When I talked with him in two weeks, I said, "Bill, you stole real estate in my brain. I am so intrigued by this story and I want to do it, but I want to do it under some carefully constructed conditions. One is, you can't pay me because I don't want this to be a puff piece about you or Bill obligated any way in that sense. I'm not sure about my timing. I think this is a big project. You've got to give me room there, and I think I would need the final say and what the book says, because I would want to write it with integrity," and he bought into all of those. I started a process that took about three years. I read 30 books, and I interviewed people all over the world, and I read all their annual reports and hundreds of pages of newspaper clippings from archives and other things, and assembled it in a story that continues to amaze me. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Well, you used the word "intrigued" a moment ago, that you were intrigued having sort of done that preliminary reading. What was it that intrigued you about ServiceMaster? 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

I think it's this idea of managing tensions, which we just talked about, and they're being so forthright about that because you hear a lot of people say, "Well, the purpose of business is to make as much money as you can, and if you do that, you'll take care of all the other things," but it doesn't really work that way. ServiceMaster was honest in saying, "The tensions are real, but they're important," and so that was intriguing to me. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

You mentioned, that I'm a mathematician. As a mathematician, I have to say that I do wrestle with this question of tensions all the time. Five is always bigger than two, so there's never a question about that, but when you're in more than one dimension, when you're two dimensions, you have two points, which one is bigger? You have to say, "Well, it depends. That's the way life is and that's the way this story plays up." Long ago, I learned a nice analogy to this. If you try and compare two things, you fall into a trap because which wing of the airplane is more important for flight? The left wing or the right wing?" All of a sudden you know, "Okay, I've got to hold these together." Throughout their history, they played and talked about, and were intentional about this tension. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Somehow I feel like we've suddenly gone through a door or a wormhole, or whatever analogy you want to use from the tension of math into the tension of ethics, which I know is another field that you're in. You care to make those connections? 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

It's a desire to do the right thing, and that was exactly what ServiceMaster did. In fact, they followed the same philosophy that I have about ethics. Many times people talk about ethics as not doing bad, but I like to think about ethics as doing good, and doing good is a lot different than not doing bad, so it requires having a purpose that's bigger than yourself, and that's what guided this company throughout its history over until 2001, and so they had this intention of doing the right thing, the right thing by people, the right thing by their customers, and in doing that, they were able to navigate the tension really well. 

Bill Hendricks: 

I like that, Al. Ethics is really about doing good, not just not doing bad. It's my perception that in a great deal of business today, as companies make decisions, they sort of work along the ethic of here's a course of action we could take, and everybody looks at each other, and if somebody says, "Well, I don't know about that," somebody else says, "Well, there's nothing wrong with that, and I've never known integrity or character to be built on the foundation of, well, there's nothing wrong with that." 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

Right, right, it's where does this take you, and what is being accomplished, what is the mission? Mission was a really big deal for ServiceMaster. In fact, I'll just mention that later in the company history, they made some acquisitions, and when they would bring a new company into their fold, they would talk a lot about the philosophy. One person I interviewed from one of the companies that was acquired, he said, "I don't get all this philosophy stuff. Why do we talk about this? Why don't we just get on with making money?" He said it took time, but he learned that the philosophy wasn't just esoteric stuff, it affected everyday decisions every single day, and so the reinforcement of this way of thinking was fundamental to the company. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Well, I want to get into that philosophy, but just for our listeners who may not be familiar with ServiceMaster, just give us an overview. What business is ServiceMaster in and what exactly do they do? 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

Okay. I have to say historically, because there were some dramatic changes that happened in 2001, but historically they started in mothproofing. When Marion Wade, the founder, a guy with an eighth-grade education who was really brilliant invented a way to do mothproofing, and he lost his job in the depression and decided he would start his own company, so in 1929, and over the course of time they developed, they went from mothproofing to rug cleaning to other kinds of services like that. Going on into the '70s, they got into the business of supporting hospitals, which was the biggest part of their business for a long time. 

Bill Hendricks: 

So this is cleaning hospitals and that sort of thing? 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

All the maintenance stuff that went into the hospital, cleaning, equipment. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Air condition filters, all that, yeah. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

Yeah, all those things, and even there, you know, might say, "How could that be purposeful work? I mean, that's just grunt work. That's just labor." "Low-cost labor" is the way most markets would say today, and instead they said, How do we help people understand that their purpose is bigger than just this? One of the great illustrations that ServiceMaster had in the seventies was they would bring the doctors and nurses in to talk with their janitors and explain to them, "You're not just cleaning the floor, you're helping the patient get well. Here's the connection between what you do and the health of the patient." 

Bill Hendricks: 

Wow. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

It changed the way every person in that company began to look at their work. 

Bill Hendricks: 

'Cause they saw themself as literally part of the healthcare industry. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

Absolutely. They were not the janitor, okay? 

Bill Hendricks: 

The janitor, right. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

Bill liked to tell a story about one of the people that he met in London. When she found out that he was the chairman, she came up and threw her arms around him and she said, "You've changed my life." 

Bill Hendricks: 

Wow. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

She said, "We don't just clean the floor. We're vital part of the health industry, and in fact," she said, "This hospital couldn't run without us." 

Bill Hendricks: 

Hmm. Wow, which is true. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

It is true, but most people in that position don't realize it. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Yeah. I want to point out, Al, in telling that story, both that woman as well as Marion Wade and mothproofing, I should say, and carpet cleaning and so forth, this is in many ways actually a blue-collar or working-class story. The faith and work movement, as you know, is kind of been accused at times of focusing too much on so-called white collar work or knowledge workers or people that are in the upper middle class and so forth, and of course, that work matters as well. But this is a story of people really doing what we typically think of as the menial work or the lower work, or the drudgery work, as you put it, but what Marion did apparently is help these folks see real dignity in their work, not by puffing them up, but actually showing the connection of how their work actually was vital to the larger enterprise of, in this case, healthcare, or whatever. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

Correct. When they got that understanding, it actually changed the way they thought about themselves, their customers, their work. A friend of mine used to say that if you treat people with love, dignity, and respect, they will work harder, and your company will do better. He always added, "But if you treat people with love, dignity, and respect so that they will work harder, they will see through you in an instant," and so what I think ServiceMaster did is not only did they follow this philosophy, but they believed it, and lived it. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

There's a story of Ken Hansen, who was the second CEO. He had retired, he was chairman of the board, and he was at a restaurant with some friends, and the waitress spilled a tray of food on the floor, and in an instant he was down on the floor helping her clean this up, and they said to the waitress afterwards, "Did you know that this is the chairman of Fortune 500 company?" But it was his way of life and it affected everything that they did. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Do you think part of that ethos came out of Marion Wade's own background? You said he barely made it out of eighth grade, so he wasn't college educated, didn't have an MBA, or anything like that. This is, again, out of the Depression, pull yourself up by your own bootstrap story, and a guy who was just trying to make a living for his family, but it sounds like, again, we started this conversation with lofty talk about ethics and business philosophy and all this stuff. This is a fairly simple man, as I understand it. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

In many ways, that would be true, but I see a wisdom in there. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Maybe I should say he was doing fairly simple work. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

Yeah, but he got this idea of doing mothproofing. He said, "The only way a mothball will kill a moth is if you hit him over the head with it because he had no sense of smell." But he said, in discovery of this, through a series of circumstances, he found himself running a lab at Northwestern University for three months, inventing a new moth-proofing scheme. He later worked at another university for a period of time inventing a new carpet-cleaning scheme. In the course of this, you understand that this guy was not a simple man at all. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Right, not an unintelligent person. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

But he had an encounter, and this really changed the life of ServiceMasters in 1946. He was doing mothproofing in a home. It involved heating a substance and it blew up on him and he was in the hospital in and out of the hospital for almost a year. The doctors thought he would be blinded, and when he began to come out of this, he said to God, "I've been a Christian all my life, but I've never associated that with my life in business," and he said, "I need to build that. I know You have something for me in this accident. Will You change the way I see everything?" When he put that in front of God, that is when the company really began to develop this understanding. They adopted a slogan that said, "To serve God in the marketplace is our vision." 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

Out of that came later, the four objectives that the company held all throughout the 1900s, up until 2001. They had four objectives, to honor God in all we do, to help people develop, to pursue excellence, and to grow profitably. Bill would always emphasize in the course of thinking about these four, the first two were end goals. These were the ones that made the company to honor God and to help people develop and the pursuing excellence and growing profitably were the means by which they did that, so profit became a means to allow people to have an opportunity to grow and develop, and that philosophy grew directly out of the accident over a period of time through multiple leaders. It became codified in the company. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Well, I can't help but notice that those first two, honor God in all we do, and develop our people, they overlay perfectly, of course, with the two great commandments, to love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself, so to build a company on that seems really, really amazing. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

Yeah, and to build a Fortune 500 company and have conversations with Wall Street and Harvard, and Harvard Business School did a number of case studies on them, Bill said, "I always loved the opportunity of talking about that first objective because it allowed me to confront people with the question of God," and he told about the time when someone, I think it was at Harvard, said, "Why do you have to honor God and all that we do?" He said, "Well, it's an important part of who we are as leaders." It's not that we require all of our people to follow or love God. We hire Christians and non-Christians. That isn't the point. The point in explaining to honor God and all we do as it means, we have the very highest sense of integrity that is above what we can get by with for sure. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

But it also means that every person is an image bearer of God, and we value every person. We don't stratify them, and all work has dignity, and so we don't demean any kind of work, and so we can explain to honor God and all we do to the analyst, to the university people, and it's a great thing, but it does confront people with a question of God, and Bill enjoyed that. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate your making that distinction. This ServiceMaster did not present itself to the world as a "Christian company," it was a company that happened to have Christ followers at the core who had a set of values that happened to be biblically based, and it was a way of doing business in a very rough-and-tumble business world. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

Absolutely, and in fact, the pressures were great, they were obviously in the midst of any business negotiation, but they also had this strong sense, and in fact, Bill used to say that it requires a lot of intentionality to hold onto this because it will deteriorate over time, so over a period of years, he would reinvest this, and it would involve at every meeting talking about why we're here before we get into the business. At every board meeting, he would talk about, "Here's why we are here, here's what we are doing, here's our intent," and then go from there to deal with the business issues, so it always was reinforcing that foundation. 

Bill Hendricks: 

So, there was a very intentional sense of passing this down through decades, through generations of workers and employees at ServiceMaster. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

That's correct, and when they began doing acquisitions in the early '80s, you could say, "Well, this is all about growth." But actually, what they had concluded was if healthcare workers and janitors and cleaners could get a sense of purpose and meaning, why couldn't this extend to lawn-care people, to pest control to all sorts of other industries, and so they began acquiring plumbing and lawn care and home inspection, those kinds of businesses because they felt that this would give a new opportunity to invest in a new set of workers that had never seen this opportunity to have purpose and meaning in their work. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Hmm. We almost could make a whole podcast out of this just in terms of the issue of succession, because you talk about how this got passed down and that seems to me one of the more fascinating parts of the story is how over five CEOs, as you pointed out, which literally goes from about 45, 44 whenever the- 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

29. 

Bill Hendricks: 

… Or even 29, even with Marion. 

Bill Hendricks: 

And down to the turn of the century, that's somewhat 80 years or whatever, or 70 years, that's a remarkable consistency. How did that happen and how did they pull that off? 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

Again, it was this intentionality. I'll tell you a story that I think is one of the most fun stories in the book. Bill had gotten to know Ken Hansen through some association at Wheaton College. Bill was a lawyer. He had created his own law firm. He had gone off to Wheaton to be vice president for a period of time. He was looking to go back into law, and Ken Hansen said, "Maybe you ought to consider joining ServiceMaster." This was in '78, and he said, "Well, I hadn't really considered that, but let me think about it." Ken had said, "Well, maybe someday you would be the new CEO." 

Bill Hendricks: 

Wow. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

Bill got thinking about that, and he came into the interview in early '78, and he said he started asking questions, "What is expected of me? What would it take to become CEO?" After about five minutes, Ken Hansen stood up and he said, "Bill, the interview is over," and he led him to the door. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

Later that evening, he got a call from Ken, and he said, "Do you want to know what happened in there?" He said, "Well, I guess you didn't want me," and he said, "Well, it's more complicated. Let's have breakfast." Over breakfast, he said to Bill, "If you want to come for a title, we're not interested in you, but if you want to come to serve, we would love to see you a part of the team." It was interesting that Bill realized he said it changed the way he thought about things. He did come as an executive vice president late in '78, but his first assignment for the first six weeks was to put on a green suit and scrub floors in a hospital. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Wow. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

He said it was a lesson of understanding the nature of the work, understanding how workers are seen as invisible parts of a furniture that people ignore, and he said it gave him a new sense that to be a leader in this company means to be a servant, and it shaped the way he thought about his work. 

Bill Hendricks: 

I guess there's a lot to be said for starting out in the mail room. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

Yeah, absolutely. For many years, the ServiceMaster Company had every executive do some level of service. There was a guy I talked with who had received his MBA, was brought into ServiceMaster in a leadership position, was given an assignment of Scrubbing Baseboards in a new wing of a hospital, and he said as he was doing this, two nurses walked through, and he looked up to them, and said, "Hello," and they totally ignored him. He said, "I wanted to say, 'Look, I have an MBA. My wife is a nurse.'" He said, "I learned more about leadership in that experience than at any other time in what I did, and it shaped who I was as a leader," and so by being intentional with their leadership, it enabled them to not get too far away from what it really meant to serve. 

Bill Hendricks: 

You point out in the book that ServiceMaster had this interesting, what became a pattern, I guess, so Marion Wade decides, "I need a new leader," so rather than just pull them back or selling the company or whatever he brings in Ken Hansen. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

Ken Hansen. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Ken comes in, but there's an overlap. Ken's now the leader, like Marion lets him lead, but Marion's there when Ken needs a backup, when Ken needs advice, when Ken needs perspective, when Ken needs prayer, whatever, and there's a conversation that's going on there. Then Ken has his tenure, and then in comes Ken Westner, and Ken Hansen does the same thing. He's kind of there, but in the background and letting the new Ken make decisions, et cetera, and there's what you call a tiling effect, sort of a shingles on a roof, I think was how you put it. Tell us more about that. That sounds fascinating. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

Yeah, it is fascinating because often when a new leader comes in, there's a tendency for the old leader if they're still around to interfere, and how do you let them go? At the same time, the other tension is for the new person to say, "I'm going to establish my mark. I don't want to talk to them." But they had this relationship that they did call shingles on a roof that actually worked over a long period of time where Ken Hansen recognized that Marion Wade was a whole lot better at persuading a customer, so he would bring in his chairman and say, "Tell us about this business." 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

But Ken Hansen was much better at closing a deal than Marion Wade was. Marion Wade was a nice guy, and he sometimes would be regarded as naive by business people, and Ken Hansen could come in and close the deal, and they would recognize their own gifts. It was a mutual thing. The same thing happened with Ken Westner, the same thing happened with Bill Pollard. In fact, Bill Pollard said that one acquisition that he was doing, it was a very delicate, long journey that they had taken, and right near the end of the deal, he took a call from Ken Hansen who said, "I'm not sure about this deal." 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

A colleague that I interviewed was in the room when that call came in, and he said, "My tendency would've been to say, 'Wait a second. You were way too late. We're all the way down at the end. We're going to go through this deal. I'm responsible,'" and instead, Bill spent an hour with him talking through the deal why you thought it was a good idea, and engaging him in a way that was a long investment, but proved to be very valuable as they together stabilized something. I think it was that demonstrated something else about servant leadership that you serve. You are a servant to the people that you're serving, but you're also a servant to those who have gone before, and how do you navigate this in a way that helps everyone in the long term? 

Bill Hendricks: 

Well, yes, a tremendous sense of responsibility to the legacy that they've inherited. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

Correct. 

Bill Hendricks: 

We've certainly seen plenty of illustrations in the business world of people who have taken a company that has a magnificent name and a history and incredible success, and maybe almost overnight just plunged it into the ground. Obviously, there's other factors in technology and markets and so forth that affect that, but this sounds like a succession of leaders who realized, "Okay, I'm being handed something really, really valuable here, not just monetarily, but in terms of what it does in people's lives, and communities lives, and I need to steward it well." 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

Yeah, and some people might say, "Well, okay, this is great stuff, but what about the profit piece," which we were talking about earlier. Interestingly, from 1970 to 2001, they grew in revenue year after year after year after year. They became a $6 billion company. They'd grown in profits for 29 straight years. I mean, it was astounding what they did financially. But those, as Bill would constantly say, "This is a byproduct of doing the right thing." You have to work at it very hard for sure, but it's a byproduct of doing these other things. It's not one or the other. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Well, I was going to ask, obviously ServiceMaster is, if I perceive it correctly, has been, was, and maybe still is a kind of holding company for a variety of service-based industries. You mentioned pest control and cleaning and so forth and so it makes sense that serving others would be a core value in those kinds of businesses. But I'd be curious what your thoughts are for Christians who work in other sectors, like finance or advertising, or take the whole mining industry where other values besides serving would tend to dominate. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

Well, if you think about it, I mean, I'm probably closest to the tech industry 'cause I've been working a lot with some of the tech companies here, but the idea that what you are doing is enabling someone else to do something well, and when you think about it that way, how do you come together to accomplish this goal? Even in a very large-scale software development project, which might be considered very technical, there are different roles to play, some by finance, some by AI specialists, some by coders, some by database people, and together, if they are recognizing each other skills, they can accomplish so much more than they can if they think that they are the head of the whole thing, and so how do you come together? 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

It always reminds me of the body of Christ where there's a foot and a hand and a eye and an ear, and there's a danger of saying, Well, I'm better than you because you're not like me, or I'm not as good as you because I'm not like you, and neither one is right, but together we can accomplish something under Christ. I think this is true of any business that as you begin to recognize the value and contribution of others, it will really make a difference for the whole company. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Well, both there at the CEO level and then just down through the organization with employees, managers, et cetera. What I'm hearing is this theme of humility, which really means that I'm not thinking about myself first, I'm thinking about what do I have to contribute to the other people, whether they're a customer, a coworker, a vendor, a competitor. What am I contributing here? What am I giving? Yes, I have my own interests and I need to steward my responsibilities well and pay attention to where my career is going. That's all legitimate. That's part of that tension. But what you're saying is, again, we love others is we love ourselves. We have a posture of I'm here to serve these other people. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

Yeah, I think Philippians 2, I think not only on your own interest, but also on the interests of others, and the model of Jesus who set aside his glory to make a difference in our lives. I think that this is a theme of Scripture, and it's something that maybe is counterintuitive in business, but it really makes a difference. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

Sadly, you've mentioned a couple of times, Bill, that, "Well, what about ServiceMaster now?" In 1998, a very tragic thing happened. The fifth CEO, Carlos Cantu, who had come in with Terminex, who had the same model and was operating shingles on a roof with Bill in running the company, he developed stomach cancer. He had to step aside. All through the history of the company, they had been intentional about succession planning and preparing the next generation leader and working in that way. They really were not prepared for Carlos, who had just taken over in '94, to step aside so quickly. Bill stepped in on an interim basis. The board, this was at a time of recession, a time of dotcoms, a time of all sorts of turbulence in the business world, and the board had decided "We need a more modern CEO," and they went outside and brought in someone who didn't really hold the same values. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

The conversation about honoring God and all we do dissipated slowly, fairly, and then accelerated. By 2006, it was basically gone, so it was a very rapid deterioration. It underscored what Bill Pollard had said before, that you've got to constantly be nurturing and maintaining this thing, to the point where ServiceMaster sold a private equity firm. It went public again in 2017. For a period of time it was many of the brands were sold off, and ultimately, I think it was in 2020 that ServiceMaster, all the brands that were left of ServiceMaster were sold to a holding company, and it became Terminex, and then Terminex was acquired by a European company, so in many ways, what was a great company is gone. It's a very challenging end to a wonderful story. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

I told Bill in talking carefully about this that in many ways it makes the story because it says, if you don't take care of these things, they will die away, and this is an illustration because that was the big change that had happened, and so it's a reminder of how important this is. But it isn't that it is without continuance. One of the people I talked with was a guy who ran ServiceMaster of Saudi Arabia. He had left ServiceMaster for other reasons, but he told me that this encounter with ServiceMaster changed his life, and that he now ran three companies in Saudi Arabia. He said, "In everyone, we have four objectives, to honor God and all we do, to help people develop, to pursue excellence, and to grow profitable." 

Bill Hendricks: 

That's great. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

I began see this in other people who had been in the company, who are now in leadership positions who are influencing others with the same message, so the message isn't gone even though ServiceMaster isn't what it was. 

Bill Hendricks: 

So, you're saying this isn't, Service Minister wasn't just an anomaly of the 20th century, a company that honors God and all we do is possible in the 21st-century economy, and it is possible to build a business that honors God. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

Absolutely. In fact, one of the interesting things about the pandemic, which we are coming out of now, is that we learned a few things in the pandemic. We learned about serving others, We learned about the value of frontline workers. We learned about this, the importance of integrity, and what would happen if businesses going forward said, "Why don't we take these learnings from the pandemic and from ServiceMaster and say this is a different way of doing business?" I believe it's possible. It'll look a little different than it looked at ServiceMaster in the '70s and '80s and '90s, but because the culture is different, but the foundational values are the same, and those can continue. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Well, one of the things I want to point out to our listeners here, Al, that you you've raised here, is that quite often we tend to read particularly New Testament passages, Biblical passages in light of our own personal walk with Christ, which of course we should, but we tend to limit it to that. Faith is a matter of personal conviction and lifestyle and so forth. What ServiceMaster did was to take Philippians 2, you mentioned that passage, the Great Commandments, other passages of Scripture that we could talk about, and particularly the message of those passages, which has the values, the kingdom values of Jesus in them, and it extrapolated them to what does this look like in an organizational setting, in an organismic setting, in a management context? How does this flush itself out in the business world? The point being that these passages in God's word are just as relevant to our public life and our way of making a living as they are to our own personal lives. 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

That's well-said, Bill, and in fact, I would extend this to all of the Scripture, not just in the New Testament. I've been struck recently by someone who said to me, "It's really hard to be a Christian business leader in the 21st century because there's so much hostility toward Christianity," and I looked at him and I said, "Really? Do you think that it's harder now than it was for Daniel to navigate His world with Nebuchadnezzar? Do you think it's harder than with Joseph? Do you think it's harder than with Esther? Do you think it's harder than with Ruth? Do you think it's harder than …?" 

Dr. Al Erisman: 

I mean, the fact of the matter is, yes, our culture is not necessarily supportive of all that we do, but we can speak into that culture as all these who have gone before us have done, and I think of Joseph and Moses and Daniel and Esther and Ruth and all these who lived this out in a culture that was not favorable to who they were, and that is what God has called us to do, so rather than live as victims, let's bring the light of the gospel into what we do, and work this out in a way that's respectful. Daniel, Joseph, Esther, they were all respectful of the authority, and yet they brought the light of the gospel into their work. We can do that. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Well, we know we can do that if only because you have documented and just exquisite form the models of Marion Wade and his successors at ServiceMaster. Al, this has been a quick conversation, but just so rich in terms of admonishing us how to live out our faith in the workplace, and particularly those of us who are leaders in the workplace. I can't thank you enough for being a part of it, and I want to thank all of you for listening in to The Table Podcast today. Subscribe to us on whatever platform that you're on so that you can find out about what we bring out next for The Table Podcast. I'm Bill Hendricks.