Stephen Butler joins Travis Stoliker to talk about Why Is a Verb: How Well-Managed Teams Turn Purpose into Productivity—the book he wrote with coauthor Karissa Price after recognizing what McKinsey calls the purpose gap: 85% of senior leaders say they’re living their purpose at work, versus 15% of everyone else.

Stephen explains why purpose is a verb, not a whiteboard exercise, a constant cycle of discovery, learning, and impact, and tells the story of the young woman who felt “like a musician who had a great instrument and knew that she knew the music, but couldn’t hear herself play.”

Then the conversation goes wide: what a 250-year-old political philosopher can teach us about AI and institutions, why the 2007 financial crisis was a bigger world-historical event than 9/11, what a Blackberry-era law-firm admin can tell us about disruption, and why AI is “much less a cost-cutting story… It’s going to be a growth story.”

Along the way, Stephen shares what Scribe’s editors taught him (“the real title of the book is not the title, it’s the subtitle”), how a Marriott CHRO came to write his foreword, and how the book unlocked a door he never knew existed — a funded Bay Area platform company where he’s now head of AI. He closes with the line every publisher wants to hear: “I think the world needs more scribes.”

For more information on Why Is a Verb: How Well-Managed Teams Turn Purpose into Productivity, visit https://scribemedia.com/published-books/why-is-a-verb

For more information on Stephen Butler, visit https://scribemedia.com/authors/stephen-butler