Most guests come with a resume. Mark Whitacre comes with a Hollywood movie.

Before he was building faith-driven cultures at a Fortune 500 company, Mark was the highest-ranking corporate whistleblower in U.S. history. His story was extraordinary enough to become a major motion picture, The Informant!, with Matt Damon playing him on screen. He served 8.5 years in federal prison. And then, rather than disappear, he rebuilt and spent the next two decades turning that story into a mission.

Today he’s the Executive Director of t-Factor at Coca-Cola Consolidated, the largest Coca-Cola bottler in the United States. This week on the podcast, he joined us to talk about what most companies never say out loud: that culture isn’t a soft metric, it’s the entire engine of the business.

Why this conversation carries real weight

It’s easy to talk about “culture” in the abstract. Mark doesn’t have that luxury; he’s been building it at scale for almost a decade, inside a publicly traded company with real shareholders and real numbers to hit. 

A few things worth knowing about who’s sitting across the mic:

→ Executive Director of t-Factor, Coca-Cola Consolidated’s initiative to help other companies build God-honoring, purpose-driven cultures

→ 20 years in the faith-at-work movement, 8 of them leading culture at the largest Coca-Cola bottler in the country

→ Oversees culture across 17,000+ employees and over 100 plant sites nationwide

→ Built and scaled the LEADS framework — Listen, Empathize, Advocate, Develop, Self-reflect — now used to train the company’s entire leadership pipeline

→ Helped operationalize a purpose statement that Chairman and CEO Frank Harrison established because he believed a faith-friendly, purpose-driven workplace was the right thing to do

→ His story has been featured at national conferences and by organizations

This isn’t theory from a consultant who’s never run a P&L or reported to a board. This is a man who lost everything, rebuilt his life from the ground up, and now helps one of the largest companies in America turn its purpose statement into daily practice; not a plaque on the wall, but chaplains at every plant site and a benevolence fund that helped nearly 700 families during COVID.

What we talked about

We started with the question every leader eventually has to answer for themselves: are you leading to serve, or leading to be served? Mark calls these two paths selfish leadership and servant leadership, and he doesn’t soften the distinction. Selfish leadership, in his words, is when the real question driving your decisions becomes, “what can I get out of it for me.” Servant leadership is the opposite bet entirely — and he says it’s the only one that actually pays off. As he put it, “the best leaders are the ones that are serving.”

From there we got into LEADS, the framework Coca-Cola Consolidated uses to train every single leader in the company, whether they have one direct report or fifty. It stands for Listen at a deeper level, Empathize with your team’s whole life — not just their output — Advocate for the people you lead, Develop them beyond your own ceiling, and Self-reflect every week so you’re never stagnant. Mark was clear that this isn’t a poster in a break room. It’s a training every leader goes through, and it’s tied directly to how the company evaluates leadership.

Toward the end of our interview, Mark shared something that’s stuck with me since we recorded: “show me your mentors, I’ll show you your future.” In a world where so many people — especially younger leaders are picking up their mentorship from social media algorithms instead of real relationships, that line hit hard.

Why this matters for you

If you lead people; whether that’s five employees or fifty thousand, this episode is a mirror. It asks the question most of us avoid: is the culture I’m building intentional, or is it something I’ve just stumbled into? Mark’s story is proof that redemption and purpose aren’t just personal journeys, they can become the operating system for how an entire organization runs.

🎧 Listen to episode #67 today and leave your favorite takeaway in Apple to show your support for Mark’s story.

If this resonated, share it with a leader in your life who needs to hear it and let me know where you think most leadership falls short today?