Business Growth Architect Show

Ep #169: Norman Wolfe: Your Business Is Alive—Here’s How to Lead It That Way

• Beate Chelette • Episode 169

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Discover why culture can’t wait. Norman Wolfe explains why your business isn’t a machine—it’s a living, breathing entity. Learn how leading with intention and building early culture is the key to sustainable growth.


Your Business Is Alive: Building Culture as a Living Organization with Norman Wolfe

In this episode of the Business Growth Architect Show, I speak with Norman Wolfe, the author of The Living Organization and founder of Quantum Leaders. Norman brings a radical and refreshing idea to the forefront: your business isn’t a machine—it’s a living, breathing entity. And just like any living thing, it must be nurtured, guided, and allowed to evolve.

We unpack one of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make—waiting too long to build culture. Norman shares why culture isn’t a “later” thing; it’s the soul of the business, and it starts from day one. The longer you treat your business as an extension of yourself, the harder it becomes to let it grow into something bigger. It’s not a baby you control forever. It’s a child that must be nurtured and allowed to mature.

Norman outlines a new leadership model that moves beyond strategy and operations. Instead, it focuses on building self-maturing organizations where people are empowered to lead, decide, and act. We explore how leaders can create growth by shaping the energy of the business, setting the context, and trusting their teams.

If you’re a business owner or leader looking to grow your team and scale your impact, this episode will shift how you think about leadership, culture, and your role in creating an organization that thrives without your constant control. This is not just a leadership episode—it’s a paradigm shift.

🎧 Listen now and download the first 3 chapters of The Living Organization at quantumleaders.com/podcast.

Let’s raise our businesses right.


Resources Mentioned: 

 Website | LinkedIn | Facebook | Youtube | The Living Organization


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Norman Wolfe:

This is Norman Wolfe. I am the founder of"Quantum Leaders," as well as the author of "The Living Organization" and founder of The Living Organization Community." On my episode for the Business Growth Architect Show," I will show you how to lead an organization from the perspective of it is a living being, not a machine, how it will free you up as a leader to focus on the things that are important for the growth of the organization, not running the day to day details and how to get your people in the organization to take ownership for the success of the collective. Head on over to the podcast to catch the full episode. I'm sure you'll enjoy it.

BEATE CHELETTE:

And hello, fabulous person. Beate Chelette here. I am the host of the Business Growth Architect Show and I want to welcome you to today's episode where we discuss how to navigate strategy and spirituality to achieve time and financial freedom. Truly successful people have learned how to master both a clear intention and a strategy to execute that in a spiritual practice that will help them to stay in alignment and on purpose. Please enjoy the show and listen to what our guest today has to say about this very topic. And welcome back your host, Beate Chelette. Here today with Norman Wolfe, the creator and founder of The Living Organization, and we're going to talk about something very, very interesting today, which is actually a conversation I've never had on the show, Norman, so I'm really excited to have you welcome to the

Norman Wolfe:

show. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you. It's an honor that you invited me. So I

BEATE CHELETTE:

got to ask, what's a Living Organization? Well,

Norman Wolfe:

that's a great question. I created it because I was running into the issue of how difficult it is for owners, founders, leaders of organizations to be able to achieve the results in today's world. If you look at the statistics, McKinsey and Price Waterhouse and all the others run studies, and they say that organizations fail 70% of the time to achieve their strategy, their goals, implement their new initiatives. And as I looked at that, I put that in the context of the fact that we have a wealth of information coming out from academics, consultants, other leaders who have been successful, the 30% who are successful, we know how to lead an organization. Question for me was, Why? Why aren't we being more successful? Why aren't we moving that needle? And what I concluded is we have a paradigm, a framework of thinking of an organization as a machine, takes inputs, goes through this black box and produces outputs. And the role of a leader is to design that machine and to fill it with the right component parts, whether that component as a person or a robot or a new technology. The whole idea is to make that machine efficiently, produce, take the inputs and produce outputs the problem. And that's not be it. I'm not judging it. I don't have any judgments against In fact, in many situations, it's perfect, but in today's world, that's very slow and it's cumbersome and it puts a lot of pressure and demands on the leader. So I took a different approach in my experiences. I found the organizations to be living into these they're alive. They have a soul, a purpose, a reason for existing. And collectives when they when collectives come together for a common purpose, they begin to operate as if it was a single living entity, a person, and that collective has a soul, a purpose, a reason for existing, a personality, style, an interaction style, all the things we attribute to humans. So the living organization is taking the approach that the best way to improve the performance of an organization is to find out how to optimize the performance of this living person called an organization. I really

BEATE CHELETTE:

love what you said. I always tell people that work with me and we, most of the our listeners are not part of a large organization, but they are small business owners, entrepreneurs. But I do believe that there comes a point in when you grow your business where it's becoming its own thing. I would say it's like a baby. You feed it, you teach it, you teach it how to walk, you teach it how to dress, to eat. And there comes a point when you kind of like have to let it go out in the world and have its own experiences. Is it like that? It absolutely

Norman Wolfe:

is like that. In fact, I use that metaphor. In fact, it was working with entrepreneurs like your audience, that helped me understand this notion. I've always heard the entrepreneur and I talk to them about their organizations. They talk about it like it's their child. They gave birth to something. It's their baby. They can't let go of their baby. Well, the problem with that is, if you treat it like a baby, it stays a baby, right? So in the living organization framework, we ask leaders to think about their organization like a child they are racing. I love the way you said it be about. It is to cultivate it, nurture it, help it develop, help it grow so it can sustain itself. In the machine paradigm, we teach leaders to be responsible for solving the problems of the organization and giving guidance to the people in the organization on how to resolve those issues, whether that be strategy or a new initiative, or anything else. If we did that to our children, we'd have children that were living in our basement at the age of 35 and we're wondering, why can't they live on their own? But that's how we treat our organization. So I totally agree with you. The goal of a leader is to think of it in a new way, and to help the organization sustain, what I should say, to develop itself, so that it can sustain its growth as it moves out into the world. So you're 100% spot on. And that's why we changed the wrote the book, and that's why we created the model, is we have to help leaders think of an organization from a different perspective, because they're stuck in that paradigm, and it causes them knowing the problems.

BEATE CHELETTE:

So my next question has to be, then, naturally, how early do I start with this? I mean, if I'm if I'm by myself, I'm the CEO, let's say I have an outsourced team of four or five people, maybe one employee, when is the time for me to begin taking a look at this not as an extension of myself, but as its own thing,

Norman Wolfe:

I would say, almost from the beginning, when my daughter was born, my youngest daughter, I think I was in my 40s, and I remember driving home one day and having this sort of epiphany that I, as a parent, am not responsible for my daughter. She has her own soul, and our whole purpose for living here, my goal is to be steward of that soul, to help her until she can handle it for herself. Right? So it shifted my role. It's almost like what I'm asking leaders to do, from being the one solving her problems for her to constantly be mindful that my goal is to help her solve her problems for herself. So give guidance, and I'm always looking. I was always looking for opportunities that showed up, experiences that she had to make each one a learning experience. So let's apply that to an organization. I've got an organization. I've got three, four or five people, maybe, maybe there's only two of us, right? And something's going to come up right with two of us. It's pretty easy. We have a conversation. Now let's go to four or five people. How do I help those four or five people understand the decision I'm making and why? So the next time they can do that, and then the next experience we have is new to them, and I help them understand how I'm making a decision and why. Now we've got 20 people, and I've just developed four or five people who can make decisions like I do, for the good of the collective, for the good of the whole family, if you will, for the good of the organization, and they can teach their people how to make decisions as they would. So now you've got an organization that's constantly self maturing. I'd like to look at it as a maturation process, because that's really what they're doing with our children, and therefore we're helping the organization as a whole, grow and grow and grow. I can't tell you how many entrepreneurs I'm dealing with the very question you asked, Why can't my people make the better decisions on their own? Why do they always need me? How do I get out from under the day to day stuff? And let me think about the future. Well, if you had kids that weren't living in your basement at the age of 35 you'd be able to do that, so I'd start from the very beginning.

BEATE CHELETTE:

Yeah, I think there's a lot of what you just said that I want to unpack a little bit. What I'm hearing you say is that it's almost like I felt like if I don't do what you just said, I'm going to be detrimental to my growth, because then I want to be in charge. So you are saying that, how quickly can I put somebody else in charge? Am I hearing this correct?

Norman Wolfe:

That's a beautiful way to say that absolutely and I can talk about my own organization with new we're just starting out. I didn't start bringing on other consultants until about a year ago. Over the last year, we grew to 10. I have, from day one, when I started that, been paying attention. How do I get these people that are joining into this community I'm building to be able to understand the depth of what we're trying to bring understand it not just at an intellectual level, but more of an embodied level. So I pay a lot of I take, I take three months to bring somebody on board, to take them through a very rigorous I don't even call it Training. I call it an onboarding process, because it's not about just giving them information. It's about indoctrinating them and having them understand how I think and why I think that way I'm. Dictating it to them. It's an exchange of ideas, but the more they get the notion, the more I feel comfortable letting them run by themselves, right? And that's really what we want to do. So I don't think it's ever too early to start this process. And it's not even a process. It's more of a mindset shift. It

BEATE CHELETTE:

certainly is. I mean, my experience share here would be very simple, is that when we lost our belongings, our house, our cars, my office, podcast studio, in the fires, we were so shocked and traumatized by what just happened that we were not capable or able to make decisions, and what we found is that our kids, given the opportunity of being us, being incapacitated, so to speak, stepped up to The plate. Who knew they have the schedule. They're picking us up. We are having breakfast at nine o'clock here. 10 o'clock we're gonna go pick up the car. I'm going with Gary to go here. You going with Jenna to go here? We're gonna pick up some clothes over there. We're gonna buy underwear and socks over here. It was all like LA laid out we but usually we were the ones that do that. That's right. What is it that shifted? Is it us letting go of control? Or is it something else?

Norman Wolfe:

It's probably a combination of both. First of all, I would say you obviously prepared your children in a way for them to think on the wrong when the now there's a dynamic that happens. And I see this all the time. I can even give you an example of it, where, when you went into relationship, people begin to establish sort of a equilibrium about the relationship. So even if I'm capable of making decisions, if you're always making the decisions, I'm going to let you, because that's sort of the equilibrium of the relationship, right? I had a situation where executives of a company were talking about how the CEO was too micromanaging. So I talked to the CEO, I got him to stop. Next thing the executives were telling me was he doesn't care about us anymore. The change behavior was so disruptive to their way of being that they were uncomfortable with it. He gave them what they wanted, but they weren't prepared for it, right? So obviously, you developed your kids to be able to handle it. The gift to you was the realization to say, hey, I can really let go and they can take care of it, isn't

BEATE CHELETTE:

it? The same thing, yeah, and the same thing. Women,

Norman Wolfe:

CEOs love to have children who can take care of the organization for them. Isn't that what every CEO really wants? That's what

BEATE CHELETTE:

we want. And the same thing happened with the business. I realized that my employees knew what I was going through, and they they literally just went, Okay, the only decision you have to make is this or this, and they were repurposing content, and they were utilizing our tools to create little graphics on social media, So things were still moving forward until I landed and I was like, This is amazing. It just shows you that the power of being in the path of the growth of what you're trying to build when you're trying to make too many decisions on your own, yeah, yeah,

Norman Wolfe:

absolutely. And that's where the machine paradigm, where the leader is required to make all the decisions, just stops everything. Crisis situations force us to recognize where we are on the maturity curve, whether we like it on that,

BEATE CHELETTE:

Oh, I love that. Say that one more time. So

Norman Wolfe:

crisis situations force us to see where we are on the maturity curve. When you are in crisis and people around you step up. You know, they got a higher level of maturity than you may have thought they had. It also tells you where you are on the maturity curve. How much can you trust other people to take care of things like you would normally take care of? I'm sure you've learned through that process that, hey, I can delegate more to my people than I thought before, that isn't that wonderful now it's gone. Now you can follow

BEATE CHELETTE:

because they have proven to me that my over involvement, apparently, is hindering their ability to contribute to the level they're able to contribute. What does this do to the people in your organization? How do I read the room now? Yeah,

Norman Wolfe:

that's a great question. And again, I'll go back to the concept of maturity. One of the things I developed with a couple of professors over the last five years is an instrument that we can measure maturity. What are the attributes necessary that allows us as leaders or as parents to recognize the capable of handling more? The fundamental thing that tells us whether people can handle more is, are they thinking? There's three things. One is, are they thinking in terms of the bigger picture? Are they making decisions necessary with all the right kind of information. And can they deal with uncertainty and complexity in those kinds of attributes? Highly mature people can do that. The other thing is, can they deal with, I hate to use the word conflict, variety points of view. Can they listen to others perspectives and balance their decisions with that of others perspective. And the third thing is, how well are they willing to grow from their own mistakes? Can they reflect that? Can they learn like do they have to protect and defend their ego, so to speak? So those are the three major categories we've identified as what helps us define maturity, if you think about it, if you think about what lets you decide that your kids when they were younger, say, in their teenage years, I don't know how old your kids are now, but when they decided, how am I going to decide I should let them drive on their own? How am I going to let them decide when they when they set their own curfews? That's a way of delegating, really. And what attributes are you looking for? And one of the key ones is, are they looking out for the welfare of the collective over their own individual welfare, not in place of not either or? But do they see how making a decision for the good of the collective the bigger whole, will help them be successful. So those are some of the key attributes we look for when we decide, can I give them more authority? So part of what we've done is broken down that decision making process. From years of experience, from working with professors on, how do we as leaders know how to do that? Because it's a critical question.

BEATE CHELETTE:

This is all part of this methodology you talk about in the living organization that you've developed. Should we talk about this a little bit? And will you give us a little bit more insights? What is part of this methodology you develop?

Norman Wolfe:

I call it the framework. I don't like the word methodology. I think the first part of it is the shift of the paradigm, shift of the mindset. You have to begin to think of your role as a leader, as nurturing, like you said at the very beginning, you're nurturing and developing the capacity, which is the capability and maturity of the organization. That's your role of a leader. You do as you said, you do have to literally set the context. That's another role, right? Yes, we have to define who we are, why we exist. That usually emanates from the founder of the company to begin with, and it just becomes imbued in the living entity we call the organization. But you have to do that, and you have to because it's the thing that brings people together. It's the thing that makes a collective of people more than just a group, and makes it a community, and makes it a living entity, because they're all coming together for the common purpose of this collective. And so you want to make sure you have that well defined we call that the strategic compass. That's the tool we use to facilitate that. And then you want to learn. So those are some of the key skills. We got. Seven core principles associated with that. I won't take up time to go through all of them, necessarily. You want to learn some new skills as a leader, primarily skills oriented with using your instinct and your intuition, your sensing mechanism, to sense what's going around, not just your intellect, not in place of your intellect, don't get me wrong, but we want to add to it, the ability to sense the room, as you say, well,

BEATE CHELETTE:

that's the energy. That's why our show is about merging spirituality with strategy, because that's the intuition, that's the energetic connection, the resonance you're creating, the vibration, all

Norman Wolfe:

of that, absolutely yes. And one of the key skills we teach leaders is, we call it heart centering, but it's really just a methodology to help people focus into how do I sense that energy? In fact, the second principle of the living organization is, everything is energy. Energy can't be created or destroyed. So the creation of results is a process of transforming energy so very aligned. It's all about energy.

BEATE CHELETTE:

You know, I mean it. I'm going to just ask you this sort of an off the cuff question. But have you found, like, I have that people always like, look for all these external things, and then at the end of the day, unless you start an internal journey, the external will not perform absolutely.

Norman Wolfe:

And that not only holds true for us individually, but it holds true for the collective, who there's a saying by Mahatma Gandhi that goes "Be the change you want to see in the world," and people don't really understand what that means. Our state of beingness, which is the energy, the frequency of the energy that our body is vibrating at in any point in time, is what's manifesting the outcomes we experience. It's really that simple. So if you want to have a different outcome. All you have to do is change your state of being. Principally speaking, it's easy. You and I know it's a journey in life. Yes,

BEATE CHELETTE:

I understand exactly what you're talking about. It's been two and a half months since I've lost everything. So my state of being significantly changed, not by choice, but I do believe that things happen for you and through you and not against you. So can we talk maybe a little bit about so let's say somebody's having a really difficult time right now. I just was on the phone earlier today, spoke to somebody, and she had, like, one really big key client, who literally fired her a couple days ago, and it was a main source of income. And, you know, it wasn't the greatest relationship, and they took up all her time. It prohibited her from doing all the things we talk about, Delegate build up the next book of business. What are we telling people that are turning on the news, that are looking at their portfolios, that are looking at the economy, that are looking at their doom and gloom? What are we telling them right now? Where's the opportunity

Norman Wolfe:

that's a tough one, B. I'm sure you, you're living through it like

BEATE CHELETTE:

That's why I'm asking you. So I don't have to answer it.

Norman Wolfe:

I think you've covered two or three points. I want to circle back on. One is what we said about creating from the inside out for an individual or state of being. I think it's important to know that collectives do the same thing. Companies create their outcomes by who they are collectively being in the world. I just wanted to kind of touch back on that. The other thing you talked about is this woman, example, you said something I thought was interesting. It was a client that wasn't really working for her anymore. It drained her, but it provided the sense of security in the income we drive a lot by following that instead of our passion or our calling or whatever you want to call that right, that inner voice, it's comforting, but it's also debilitating. And I have, I have numerous experiences in my life when I didn't listen to the inner voice and how the universe told me, you will follow a different path. And so my suggestion there is, to the degree we can have the courage to follow the inner voice, because it's more wise than our ego based voice, 100% Yeah, doing the right thing is always very challenging. I have yet to experience. It gets easier the more I do it, that when I follow that inner voice, it's scary, but I know it's the right thing, that the answer becomes easier. I'm willing to put through, go through the discomfort it requires of me, but you don't grow if you don't go through discomfort. There's a song I used to listen to years ago. I don't know the name of the song, but it had a it had a verse in the chorus, "Ships are safe within the harbor. But is that what ships are made for?"

BEATE CHELETTE:

Yeah, the other, the other version of that was a"Great sailor was never made in the harbor."

Norman Wolfe:

That's true. That's very true. So we we're meant to go through these difficulties, so why not learn to embrace them as part of our ability to be able to do more in life? The third one I want to touch on was this issue of, how do we deal with what's going on today? And it sort of goes back to the other other two issues as well. I'm a I'm a firm believer in working diligently, and it's not an overnight thing is how the weekend workshop, it's a process of really finding out what you're meant to contribute in this world. One of my, I mean, my calling has become very clear to me, starting back in the 90s. I didn't know how it would look, but I was called to write the book. It was literally something I had no intention of doing. Somebody suggested that I rebelled against it, but the voice wouldn't go away. So I wrote. It took me six years. I wanted to retire when the book came out, I think I was 64 or something in that range. The voice kept saying, No, you got more to do. This is my calling, my dharma, my path, my purpose in life, the more we can focus on that, the more we can navigate through chaos, because I don't care what the rest of the world is doing, I'm doing what I'm meant to do. Oh, what a beautiful message. And it's the same thing for companies. You know, if you go to target, if they stay true to themselves, they. Propagated. Sure they may get bumps and challenges along the way, but they would know how to respond and stay true to themselves. One of the companies that I've always admired is Costco, not because they're there's one of them, a major reason they have constantly rejected stockholders demands that they reduce salaries on their employees so they can make more money. And Costco kept saying, No, that's not who we are. We are here to serve people, and our employees are the key to that. That's what makes Costco successful. And they stay true to that. Time and time, shareholder meeting, at the shareholder meeting, board meeting, after board meeting, they stay true to that, and they stay true to it today and

BEATE CHELETTE:

and the stock price is amazing. I mean, I'm a shareholder and I'm I think that we need to look at these models. I do believe that these models are changing, though, that this more money, more profits for a few shareholders, is giving back way to an overall better experience for everybody. Because we, if the people that are performing for us are not having their needs met, it cannot work. Cannot Work.

Norman Wolfe:

That's right. You know, one of the I wrote a blog not long ago, because I was, I was hearing all this work about stakeholder models, and they always include employees as a stakeholder. And I wrote a blog is, employees are not stakeholders. And the thing behind the blog is this, if you look at who are the stakeholders, and you take away investors, take away customers, take away suppliers, take away everything except a group of people who are committed to a common purpose. You still have a very viable organization. May not be profitable yet, but you still have a living entity that's committed to creating something. Take away the people. You get nothing and nothing. So

BEATE CHELETTE:

that's what I think that this whole AI conversation, AI is a tool. It's

Norman Wolfe:

a tool. Yeah, that's it. It's no different than the PC was, or the computers be the mainframes before that, or robotic or,

BEATE CHELETTE:

yeah, or Microsoft Word or Excel,

Norman Wolfe:

yes, yeah, it's just a tool, and it's not going to replace humans. Humans are unique. There's nothing like humans in all of nature anywhere. And the unique things about human and the thing that the machine paradigm actually destroys is we are creative beings. We create reality through the stories we tell through the meaning we make. If we want to learn how to fly, we're not limited by our genetic limitations. We figure out how to fly like birds. We figure out how to go to the moon. We figure how to dive deep into the ocean like fish. We are phenomenal, creating beings. And when you put people in boxes and say, You're a component part fitting into this machine, you kill that very soul that very slowly

BEATE CHELETTE:

do, yeah. You literally do, yeah. You literally do that. Where can people go and find about, find out more about your work, and to get the book?

Norman Wolfe:

The book is on Amazon, "The Living Organization" by Norman Wolfe, they are willing to go there. Are welcome to go to my website, quantumleaders.com/podcast, and they have access to the first three chapters for free. They can contact me through either the quantum leaders website, which is my consulting company, quantumleaders.com, or they can go through thelivingorganization.com right now, they both go to the same website, but we're, we're launching a new website for just The Living Organization Community within the next few months. Wonderful.

BEATE CHELETTE:

Thank you so much, Norman, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. I really enjoyed the connections that you made with the people and the organization, yes, and being in purpose, because listening to you, it's a trifecta. It all connects with each other.

Norman Wolfe:

It's a integrated, holistic system. It's not a separate piece of components, people over here or business over there. That's a bifurcation that we should eliminate. Yeah,

BEATE CHELETTE:

I love that very much. Well, thank you so much for being on the show. Amazing. It was really fun. Thank you so much and goodbye. So appreciate you being here. Thank you so much for listening to the entire episode. Please subscribe to the podcast. Give us a five star, review, a comment and share this episode with one more person, so that you can help us help more people. Thank you again, until next time. Goodbye.

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Beate Chelette

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Norman Wolfe

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