Values-Based Investing and the Post-Christian Marketplace

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Bob Doll
The money we have is not ours. You know, it’s not how much should I give? It’s how much should I keep? It’s all God’s. And that’s not just our money, because generosity, as you know, is not just about money. It’s about life, it’s about time, it’s about relationships. What are we doing? How are we stewarding all those things? And you know, if we really believe it’s all gods, the brains he gave us, the bodies He’s given us, well, then it’s easy to be generous.

Collin Hansen
Sometimes I get questions from friends in the workplace, tough questions. And not long ago, a friend confessed that she didn’t make time for spiritual disciplines, or even really for church, because she faced pressure to work every moment of every day. She dreaded waking up to 100 emails that demanded her urgent attention, and she knew she couldn’t keep up this pace, but she worried about 1000s of people who would suffer if she didn’t complete her work. She couldn’t just walk away. She couldn’t resolve this dilemma any other way. So what should she do? I didn’t know the answer to that question, but I knew who to ask. My friend Bob Dahl, is president, CEO and CIO of Crossmark global investments, which is a faith based investment firm offering values based strategies. Bob is a highly regarded investment professional who has held leadership roles at several global asset management firms. And prior to joining Crossmark, he was chief equity strategist and senior portfolio manager at Nuveen Asset Management. His previous positions included serving as chief equity strategist at Blackrock President and Chief Investment Officer at Merrill Lynch investment managers and chief investment officer of Oppenheimer funds. But I mostly know Bob as a seriously dedicated Christian who has long encouraged me and many others in ministry, and chances are he served on the board of a Christian organization that has blessed you, either directly or indirectly, and I invited him to join me on gospel bound now to discuss several topics such as sharing faith in an increasingly hostile to faith world, moving the work of the church out of its four walls, and stewarding everything God has given us, including our wealth. Bob, thank you for joining me on Gospelbound.

Bob Doll
My privilege, Collin, right back at you. You’ve been an inspiration to me and an encouragement and a great example in lots of ways, it’s a privilege to be with you.

Collin Hansen
Thanks, Bob. Let’s just start with your testimony. When and how did you become a Christian, Bob?

Bob Doll
Yeah, so I am one of those guys cannot remember a day would not say that Jesus was my Savior and Lord. So I grew up in a Christian home, which, of course, does not make one a Christian, but the probabilities go up. And so I can remember many times as a child recognizing Jesus as my Savior. And of course, as you mature as a human being, you begin to understand a little bit more what that means. And so the walk has been a joy. It’s never a straight line. There are dry periods, but my testimony is, thankfully, I didn’t have to go through hell and back before I recognized Jesus was worth following.

Collin Hansen
Now in that journey, how did vocation come into play? Did, did you always know this is what I want to do with my life. I want to work with investing. I mean, a lot of times, Bob, when I’m working with people like you, they’ve seriously considered pastoral ministry. Did? How did that process of discerning a call workout.

Bob Doll
Yeah, so let me comment on the last part. First, I grew up believing that if I wasn’t a pastor or a missionary, I was a second class citizen, which, of course, is alive from the pit of hell. I think we are all called by God to whatever it is he’s called us to do professionally, vocationally and in all kinds of parts of life, which it took me a bunch of years to recognize that and feel like not a second class citizen. The investing part, I my family didn’t have a whole lot of money, so I didn’t know what investments were. I worked in public accounting for a couple of years before going on to grad school, and it was in that period I was dating a girl, and I fell in love, not with her, but what her father did for a living. He was an investor. And I said, Wow, this is pretty exciting. The interdisciplinary nature of it. It’s economics, it’s finance, it’s psychology, it’s a business cycle. There are politics involved, and you can read your score in the newspaper every day. It’s like a sport. So I put that all together. I said, this is for me, and I haven’t never looked back.

Collin Hansen
Where did that moment of understanding that you weren’t a second class citizen? Because. You didn’t go into pastoral ministry, so you must have felt, I don’t know, was it guilt or shame for not going into that, or where did that turn around?

Bob Doll
You know, it was a process, not an event. But, you know, I grew up in a church that, you know, if somebody decide they’re gonna be a pastor, go the mission field, they were, they were crowned as it were, and the rest of us, we just kind of offended for ourselves. And I think understanding faith and work and that movement over time helped me to recognize that, no, we’re not second class citizens. We’re all ministers at the end of the day, we just not. May not have a seminary degree to prove it, as it were, but as Tim Keller, one of my mentors, and I know an important person in your life, said to me, many times, Bob, you’re going to meet not more non Christians doing what you do than I am as a pastor. That’s a holy and solemn calling. Go for it. So it was a process, Collin.

Collin Hansen
Yeah, you you serve at cross smart president, CEO CIO, and I just ran through a pretty impressive list of other places and jobs that you’ve held. But I’d love for you to explain what’s different about your current job compared to these previous SEPs.

Bob Doll
Yeah, the easy way to put it is, all the other ones I’ve had in my career were secular investment management firms. This is a faith based one. You know, it’s our goal in our little firm, is to help people line up their investments with their values, their faith. And we’re finding more and more individuals, financial advisors, institutions, wanting to do that. I sort of came to the realization I don’t want to get to heaven and meet the Lord. And they say, you know, come to my office at two o’clock on Tuesday afternoon. I have a question for you, and I show up, and God says you did okay down there, but I have a question, why did you invest in all those companies that make products that maim and kill people? I don’t have that conversation. So excluding the bad, promoting the companies that are doing good, while still focusing on the good, secular characteristics necessary has been a real joy, and it puts the various parts of my life together. I have, in the three short years I’ve been at cross mark, looked in the mirror from time to time and say, Bob, what took you so long?

Collin Hansen
Well, I mean, what did take you so long? Was it the conditions in just there wasn’t an opportunity for it, or you didn’t recognize the need for it, or there weren’t the recognition, recognition from the investors themselves.

Bob Doll
For a long time, Colin, I didn’t know it existed. In fact, it didn’t for a long time. The part of the investment management business that is faith based is relatively new, still very small, but growing. So, you know, 20 years ago, there was nobody in the business. Might have been a little, you know, financial advisors over in the corner here and there, but it’s only become a little legitimate business in the last decade or so.

Collin Hansen
Okay, yeah. Well, love for you to expand on that too as we continue along with this, with this interview. But let’s talk about the posture toward Christians in the workplace. Workplace, of course, now is different from where he had been before. But have you seen that change over the years? And if so, how?

Bob Doll
Yeah, sadly, so in some sense, very quickly, and not just in the workplace, but in life in general, which includes the workplace. You know, in my early days, many decades ago, there was an encouragement to be a Christian. You know, yes, go to church. Focus on who God is, read your Bible. People did that. Were, you know, kind of thought of as good folks and rising in the society. And then I woke up one day, sort of middle years, and it was tolerated. We’re kind of put up with. And sadly, at some point and recently and today, it’s kind of well, who are you? You’re off in a corner. You’re a wacko. So the world has changed in my short life, from encouraged here in the US to we’re shunned. We’re doubted. I lost my job at one point, as you may know, for sharing my faith, not even on company premise, not on company time. So the world has changed, both at the workplace and more broadly.

Collin Hansen
Well, I do know that story, but not everybody listening or watching knows that story. I would be happy for you to share whatever you want to share on that and I’m wondering connected to that Bob, if you can. Identify. Were there particular turning points or issues that emerged through those two progressions? You said so shifted from positive to neutral, neutral to negative. Were there certain events or circumstances that contributed to that, but, but yes, please. Please share whatever you’d like about how that happened?

Bob Doll
Yeah, so, so the the general comment from positive to neutral to negative is they’re all process. It’s a process. It’s not like one day the world turned neutral and then turned negative on us. It’s a process, just like anything in life. And maybe you wake up thinking, oh my goodness, what happened? I’ve had those, those moments. But the particular you know, my the firm I was working for, found videos of me sharing my faith. There were four of them. And the line was, you were introduced as a senior marketing market the firm I was at at the time, and you’re talking to your church people, they called it, and we don’t do that here. You will resign. And it hit me between the eyes a spiritual I had a lot, lot to learn. I transfer some identity to my to my job. Colin. So you know, who am I now that I don’t have my job. So it was 2012 a year that I would never want to repeat because it was painful. But a year I wouldn’t trade for anything, because I learned so much about myself, about God, about my relationship with God, and sometimes we have to go go through these things. And you know, it’s in the valleys, of course, where we typically get closer to the Lord.

Collin Hansen
I would say that we’re dealing with a number of long term secularism, even anti Christian trends. They’re not brand new there. There been undercurrents for a long time, but I would identify the period between 2005 and 2012 as a particularly challenging time, a time of major transition. And you can certainly see it in politics, and from politics into social issues, and from that also into how people regarded Christians in general. And I think in a lot of ways, then 14 and 16 were transitions into different kinds of of kind of new realities. But the gospel coalition’s origins were in 2005 and I began work in 2010 and and we really did see a lot of those changes. And I think that’s one reason the Lord brought the Gospel coalition about. But going back to just that, that moment in there, did did you have any inclination that the company had begun to shift in that way, or does this just come completely out of the blue?

Bob Doll
So look, you know, unless you when you’re senior at a place, which I was, unless you have your hand in the cookie jar, which, thankfully I didn’t, it’s generally a process and a series of things, rather than it culminates in all of a sudden, an event. So, yeah, I felt, I felt things coming. I felt ostracized, they probably wish I had just resigned and moved on to something else, and they used the films, as it were, as the excuse to move me up for a whole bunch of reasons. I didn’t grow up at that firm. I wasn’t the founding, one of the founding partners. I didn’t have the faith that that firm, particularly had. So there were, there were some issues there. So, yeah, when it happens, it’s, it’s a surprise, but when I look back, you know there were, there was handwriting on the wall that I didn’t read real well, probably.

Collin Hansen
In the post Christian West, I mean, what we’re talking about here, a lot of the confrontation between faith and skepticism, as we’ve been discussing, as you mentioned from Tim earlier, it happens outside the four walls, the institutional church, and certainly within the workplace. In many cases, your when you were growing up in your work, as we’ve been describing, very different than how it is now, how would you and I knowing you, how do you counsel young Christians who are seeking to practice, and I’d go further to even promote their faith in the workplace. We understand that there are limitations on that, restrictions on that, but as evangelical Christians, it’s not enough for us to just practice our faith privately, but we also believe this is a public truth that we testify to. How do you counsel these young Christians?

Bob Doll
All well said. First of all, I love the older I get, the more I realize counseling and mentoring is a huge opportunity and responsibility. Me. One thing that encourages me is the number of 20s and 30s, sometimes into their 40s, who want to do life well. And so they say, Bob, I know you’re Christian in the workplace. Help me. Help me. Help me go through so I just love when that happens. And I would say anybody who’s old like me should be mentoring people in this regard. So what do I tell them? I start with, you’ve got to be moving along in the discipleship route. If your if your faith is shallow and the same as it was, you know, 10 years ago, I sometimes put it this way, if somebody asked me about the stock market, I could go on for hours. That’s what I do for a living. But if somebody says to me, hmm, what do you think about euthanasia? What do you think about abortion? What do you think about a long list of things, and if I only have two sentence reply, my faith is shallow. So I encourage these people to be in the word be discipled. I urge them to be in a cell of other believers, so you can strengthen each other. You can compare notes. And maybe most importantly, and we see this every time somebody of faith, a pastor falls, have accountability in your life. Doesn’t have to be the same person all the time. I have to be about all of life, but on particular issues where you might have issues or you might be weak, make sure you’re accountable to somebody. So the things I suggest that I think have been helpful in my life and unhelpful when I haven’t been doing them well.

Collin Hansen
I opened with an illustration along these lines of somebody who was looking for help from other Christians in the workplace. And I turned to you and another one of our friends for some counsel there. But many people who are successful in their careers, they struggle to balance work family, faith could be investment banking could be professional sports. I mean, we’ve got a lot of options there of how that affects us. And one of my favorite questions to ask for counsel, especially from an older Christian, is, looking back, would you change anything that you did in that regard with that balance, work, family, faith.

Bob Doll
Great question. I certainly wasn’t as mature of a person or more germane to our conversation as a Christian in my 20s and 30s than hopefully I am now. So I didn’t get it all right? Yeah, I think I worked too hard, I spent too many hours. I sometimes say to people, my wife, what a mom and what a half a dad and I’m the other half of dad. I just wasn’t around enough, traveled a lot, climbing the ladders, etc. So, you know, I say to folks, it’s never too late to get serious about your about your faith and to practice, practice it. You know, we say Jesus is first in our life, but do we really act that way? So to your character you mentioned in the introduction, it’s easy to crowd out faith. It’s easy to crowd out family. It’s easy to crowd out everything as you’re climbing the ladder and looking for success. I mean, God wants successful people in all fields, but he wants balanced people as well. So I wouldn’t say I got it all right, Colin, but the journey has moved me in a direction where I can look to the Lord and say, continue to help me, where I need some help.

Collin Hansen
Do you think, Bob, that you could have heard and heeded that advice if you’d gotten it earlier, or is the pull to climb and to do what is necessary to climb? Is it just, just too strong?

Bob Doll
I don’t know. It is very strong. And you know, particularly for Type A’s, as I am, and I pretty sure you are too you want to, you want to do well. You want to succeed. You want you want to climb the ladders and to repeat. There’s nothing wrong with those things, but it’s got to be in perspective. And as I became more serious about my faith, got more involved in things outside of work that I was able to be more balanced in that sense, you got to have some examples, back to the mentoring. Got to have some people you look up to that have gotten that balance right and counsel with them. Otherwise, the lure, the temptation of just spending all my time working and climbing the ladders can be very, very it’s almost like a drug.

Collin Hansen
Now, Bob, you’ve had an opportunity to work closely alongside many of our council members, these pastors who govern and lead the gospel coalition and. And if, if I brought you into one of those colloquiums, we have all our pastors there, and not necessarily just these pastors, but who make up our council, but pastors in general. What is the message you have for them? What is it that you want them to know specifically from your position as a business leader. What’s that message to them?

Bob Doll
Yeah, so you may not know. Years ago, I did go to The Gospel Coalition andaddressed the council, and I found my notes. You prepped me here. Oh, really, seven things to say. Oh, that’s perfect, yeah. So I’m just gonna read them if you want to dig deeper into any of them. Happy to do it. Number one, teach us to depend on God. Two, teach us to integrate our spiritual life with our work life. Three, teach us prioritization. Four, encourage us to be in an accountability relationship or two, five, help business leaders understand that their work is a holy calling. Back to my second class citizen comment from, from, from earlier number six help us understand that the nine to five window, ie, the workplace, is every bit as important as the 1040 Window in terms of winning people to Christ. I quote Billy Graham all the time. The Marketplace this century is likely to be what the medical profession was last century in advancing the gospel. And you know, we know our church history, and we know how many health care workers did make a huge difference for the growth of the gospel in places far flung. Well, we got to do that in the nine to five window. And the seventh thing I teach us how to be generous, so that was my message in that speech.

Collin Hansen
I’ve not heard that line from Billy Graham before.

Bob Doll
Isn’t that a great line? What it does for us, guys who are marketplace folks, it gives us an opportunity, but it also puts a monkey on our back if we’re going to be serious about it. And we got we got to be about it. We just had the Lausanne conference in Seoul, as you know, and of the 5000 plus people that were there, about 2000 of them deliberately were from the marketplace. So we can encourage them, develop them, so they can understand some of the things you and I are talking about, and hopefully do something about it.

Collin Hansen
Yeah. So again, this is not just abstract advice or something that had been discussed, but by God’s grace, Bob, it’s something that the Lord has used you to be able to help bring about for the good of the global church, which is so amazingly encouraging to see. And I think about what, what Graham said there, of course, he would be very closely connected to the medical missionary movement, through his wife Ruth and through Nelson, having seen that be successful, and now seeing how that would would transition going forward, you already brought this in With your last point. Coordinated well with me here. How did you develop your approach toward generosity?

Bob Doll
Bob, two things stand out in the early years that got my wife and I on the generosity journey. One was in junior high and high school, from seventh through 12th grade, I served a daily newspaper, went and put it in people’s mailbox and I’ll never forget we had Fourth of July and Christmas day off. So 363 days a year, got to deliver the newspaper. I made a few bucks from it, and my parents said, You will take 10% of those profits, the tithe, and give it to the church. I didn’t like that idea much at all. Colin, it was, it was not fun, but I developed a habit, and the joy of giving came later, but that was a starting point. The second thing is, I remember early in my career getting advice from an older couple. I said, Bob, you work on Wall Street. You’re probably going to make a bunch of money. Think about when God prospers you, that maybe he’s encouraging you to increase your standard of giving, not your standard of living. No, and my wife and I did just that. Now, you know, we’re not, we’re not paupers, and I’m not suggesting anybody should be an ascetic, ascetic, or anything like that. And we have, you know, we take nice vacations, have a nice home, etc, etc, but we could have a whole lot more. But instead, we give it away because it’s not ours, which is the other principle I’ve learned over time, the money we have is not ours. You know, it’s not how much should I give? It’s how much should I keep? It’s all God’s. And that’s not just our money, because generosity, as you know, is not just about money. It’s about life. It’s about time, it’s about relationships. What are we doing? How do we stewarding all those things? And you know, if we really believe it’s all gods, the brains he gave us, the bodies. Than us? Well, then it’s easy to be generous.

Collin Hansen
What happens to your peers? Bob when they don’t do that, when their standard of living just increases along with their amount of money. What happens to them?

Bob Doll
Yeah, well, you know, it’s mixed. Obviously, some people just thrive on that. I, you know, I have, I have five homes, if I could only get a sixth in my business. I obviously deal with lots of wealthy people, and whether they’re really wealthy or just somewhat wealthy, or not wealthy at all, it all boils down the same. They never say it this way, but all, all of them, if I only had a little more, just a little more. So. So people are just never satisfied. That’s the common refrain. There are exceptions, obviously, Colin, but that’s the common refrain. They just want more,

Collin Hansen
Yeah, what was the old saying, How much is enough? Just just a little more, just a little bit more. I mean, I have to say, as somebody who did not grow up with a lot of money, I would have thought myself to be immune to those concerns. I would have thought, well, I’ll never feel that way about a home or a second home or a car or anything like that. But it is amazing what your head will rationalize through your heart’s desires. You should never, never underestimate that ability to adjust to a new normal and to think and there’s always somebody out there who has more who makes you feel better about yourself, like, wow, I’m not as bad as someone. It’s amazing what we can do to rationalize.

Bob Doll
It is. One of my kids said to me recently, Dad, don’t you want anything else? So what do you mean? Well, you have a closet with just a few clothes in it. You have a bunch of books, and beyond that, you have nothing. You drive an old car. It’s, you know, it’s, it’s, it all depends where we’re storing up our treasures. I guess is another way to say it, Collin.

Collin Hansen
Yeah. The way that certainly Jesus told us to think about it, I don’t know, Bob, you might have just given a new tagline to gospel bound listeners and viewers in here, few clothes, lots of books, basically, could be the motto.

Bob Doll
Problem is, most of those books are unread somebody. I’ll read them.

Collin Hansen
Just a couple more questions here with with Bob Dahl. He’s president, CEO CIO of cross mark, Global Investments. You and your wife, Leslie, you guys make these decisions on generosity together. What does that process look like?

Bob Doll
A lot better than it used to be. It used to be, you know, a battle. My wife would say, I feel like a check writer. And as we’ve gotten involved in ministries, the generosity gets a whole lot easier. And then between the two of us, I’m going to exaggerate to make the point, Leslie would take, you know, all the money and give it to one or two places. Me, I’ve never met a minister. I didn’t think was good. So I’d give, you know, a zillion places. We end up donating more than 100 different places. Some of it’s, you know, small amounts, some of it’s bigger amounts. The more involved we are, the bigger the amount tends to be. And one of the things we did is we take 20% Leslie gives, 20% I give, and the 60% in the middle, we do jointly. Now we have, we have veto power above a certain amount on the 20% so neither of us get gets crazy about it, but that’s how we’ve tried to make it a whole lot more fun.

Collin Hansen
That’s a that’s a real process. I mean, that’s something that can be replicated with other folks who are here. I mean, that’s not, that’s not an easy situation to be in. And that’s leads to my last question, which is simply, is generosity difficult? You can take that question wherever you want, but is generosity difficult?

Bob Doll
It’s difficult if you don’t realize that it’s not yours, it’s all God’s. You know, if I really think it’s my money, then it gets really hard. They want. How much from us? We’re thinking about giving this much to them. Wait a minute, that’s our money. But if we turn around and say, but it’s not ours, I come back to how much you’re going to keep and the rest, we’re just going to be smart about how we give it away. So the generosity difficulty, I think, is most observed through the lens of whose Do you think it really is?

Collin Hansen
This might be just kind of a dumb question, but you’ve been alluding to this. So basically what you’re saying is you set a standard for keeping and then basically beyond that, it doesn’t matter how much you make, because you’re gonna be given away. Is that the principle?

Bob Doll
Exactly, and I go further, we. Have already given our kids their inheritance, and we have money in a Family Foundation, and we we hope our last check bounces, other words that we’ve given all the way in our lifetime. Of course, we have no idea when the Lord is going to take us home, but that’s sort of the mentality that we have the rest, that rest is to be given away, and there’s so many, so many great causes, like the gospel coalition. It’s just doing great work here in the US and around the world that that it’s, you know, we want to see those deposits in heaven.

Collin Hansen
Yeah, that’s a great place to end. My guest and friend here is Bob Dahl, President, CEO CIO of Crossmark, global investments, faith based investment firm offering values based strategies. Bob, thanks for your support of so many different ministries, including the gospel COVID and seriously being testifying to Christ wherever you go, and by being an example, not only in your generosity, but also in in the workplace and your leadership. Thank you, Bob.

Bob Doll
My joy and privilege. Great to be with you, Collin.