The Clock Read 9:11. He Built a Company Anyway
Louis Carter didn’t set out to build the world’s most rigorous workplace culture certification. He set out to understand why people fall apart — and how they come back together. Twenty-five years later, the science proved him right.
By Best Practice Institute · bestpracticeinstitute.org
There is a moment in every founder’s story where the true origin reveals itself — not the polished version told at conferences, but the raw one. The one where you look back and realize the whole thing was inevitable, and you couldn’t see it at the time.
For Louis Carter, that moment happened at 9:11 a.m. on September 11, 2001.
He was in his apartment in New York City. His first day at Columbia University — beginning his MA in social and organizational psychology — was supposed to start that morning. He woke up, looked at his clock, and the number stared back: 9:11. Within minutes, he understood why the city outside his window felt wrong. The second plane had just hit. And the world he had woken up into was not the world he had fallen asleep in.
He did not go to class. He went outside. And in the weeks that followed, he did what he knew how to do.
He led drum circles.
"You put broken people in a circle. You give them a rhythm to follow together. And something shifts. People who were isolated, grieving, disconnected from each other — they find their way back. Not because someone told them to. Because rhythm does what words can't."
That insight — that emotional connectedness is not a soft concept but the most powerful force in organizational life — became the seed of everything Louis Carter would go on to build. Not just a company. A body of science.
The pitch that built an institution
Carter was also, at that particular moment, broke. “A drummer without a girlfriend,” as he puts it. “You know what they call that? Homeless.”
So he called his friend Joe — a senior leader at Pfizer — and asked about a Director of Leadership Development role. Joe told him it would bore him in a week. He was right. So Carter made a different offer: let me bring together the most senior executives in the country and build something together. A peer research consortium. Real data. Real learning. Conversations that couldn’t happen anywhere else.
Joe said yes. And he paid.
That was the first seat at what would become the BPI Senior Executive Board. Rick from Corning followed. Brian from Bank of America. Nilou from Volvo. Lou from GSK. One by one, the table filled. And Carter brought them something none of them could find inside their own organizations: rigorous, cross-industry research into what actually makes people want to show up.
Best Practice Institute was born — not from ambition or frustration, but from a drum circle, a borrowed couch, and a question that hadn’t been answered yet.
What the science actually says
Over the two decades that followed, Carter and BPI built one of the most substantive bodies of workplace culture research ever assembled. Executive forums with the United Nations, the Pentagon, and the Federal Reserve Bank. Veteran-to-Fortune-500 career crosswalk programs built with the Department of Defense. Sustainability frameworks delivered through the UN Global Compact to the world’s largest enterprises.
And through all of it, one question kept surfacing: how do you measure the thing that actually matters?
In 2017, Carter answered it. He developed the Love of Workplace Index™ — a validated psychometric instrument measuring the degree to which employees feel emotionally connected to their workplace. That same year, he presented his research at the ATD International Conference and administered one of BPI’s first global assessments for Goodyear: 6,000 employees across Asia Pacific, Europe, and North America.
What came back was clarifying in the way hard data always is. Emotional connectedness was eroding — not at the edges, but structurally. Between an employee’s first year and years three and four, scores dropped. Positive Vision of the Future scored a D+ company-wide. And the pattern had nothing to do with demographics, job function, or individual managers. It was a culture pattern. Systemic. Predictable. And almost entirely invisible to the organization before it was measured.
That was the problem Most Loved Workplace® was built to solve.
These are not survey correlations. They are outcomes — validated across 2.8 million employees at 1,800+ companies, across more than 25 industries and 25 geographic markets. The Love of Workplace Index™ has been validated across 1.4 million employees specifically. The science is real. The proof is on paper.
The framework behind the certification
Every Most Loved Workplace® certification is scored against five dimensions — what BPI calls the SPARK framework. These are not aspirational values. They are measurable drivers of business outcomes, validated across the full research base.
The certification scoring weights employee survey feedback at 50% (via the Love of Workplace Index™), in-depth company interviews and written submissions at 35%, and external public ratings and review platforms at 15%. There is no shortcut. You either have the culture or you don’t — and now there is an instrument precise enough to tell the difference.
What mutual respect actually means
Most workplace culture programs are built on a single direction of obligation: the employer must create a good environment for employees. Most Loved Workplace® is built on something more honest.
Culture is earned by both sides.
Employers must respect the contribution employees make. Employees must respect the opportunities employers provide. When both sides show up — when the rhythm is mutual — that is when organizations achieve the outcomes the data describes. 48% lower turnover. 4× higher performance. 94% increase in measurable results.
When one side stops showing up, the scores drop. Between year one and years three and four. Every time.
"The drum circle only works if the person holding the rhythm keeps showing up. You don't get to build the circle and then walk away from it."
From proof to independence
In 2019, In Great Company (McGraw-Hill) formally launched the Most Loved Workplace® certification. That same year, BPI began building and running Newsweek’s workplace list business — the Americas Top 100, the Global Top 100, the UK Top 100, and the Excellence 1000 Index. Five years of scale. Hundreds of companies. Hundreds of thousands of employees surveyed annually.
In 2024, Forbes named Best Practice Institute as a specialized data provider for America’s Best Companies — one of a small group of research institutions contributing psychometric and culture data alongside Morningstar, Sustainalytics, and Glassdoor. Forbes’ most comprehensive company ranking ever built, and BPI’s culture science was part of it.
In 2025, Most Loved Workplace® went fully independent.
That independence is not a step back. It is the unlock. A media partnership caps visibility at one publication’s reach and one editorial calendar. Going independent means the Americas Top 100 Most Loved Workplaces® is now featured in the Wall Street Journal. The Top 100 Global Most Loved Workplaces® is featured in The Economist. Certified companies gain access to a broader media network — more impressions, more reach, more credibility — with a certification that stands on its own validated science.
Americas Top 100 Most Loved Workplaces® — featured in the Wall Street Journal (2025) · Top 100 Global Most Loved Workplaces® — featured in The Economist (2026)
The dinner that closed the circle
Ten years after September 11th, Carter hosted a reunion dinner. At the site of the World Trade Center. Everyone stayed at the W Hotel, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Ground Zero.
US Army Generals. Fortune 500 CHROs. UN dignitaries. Senior researchers. People who had each, in their own way, dedicated a decade to building something better out of the worst morning in a generation.
Carter gave them a menu. Three courses.
The appetizer: Where were you when it happened? The meal: How did it impact you? Dessert: What will you take from it?
Not a dry eye in the room. They locked that place up that night.
“That dinner,” Carter has said, “was a drum circle in black tie.”
What every founder — and every new team member — needs to understand
If you are new to this organization, here is what twenty-five years of research, twelve books, and 2.8 million data points reduce to:
Build for the problem, not the exit.
Carter didn’t start BPI to create a workplace ranking. He started it to understand why people disconnect — and how organizations can stop it. That fundamental commitment to the science, not the fame or the list, is why Forbes and The Economist trust this data when they could use anyone else’s. Credibility compounds over decades. That is the moat a founder builds that no one can buy.
The premise has to be true before the proof arrives.
Carter spent sixteen years building toward validation that didn’t exist yet. He didn’t soften the claim to make it easier to sell. He built the instrument — the Love of Workplace Index™ — that could prove it on the world’s terms. Most founders abandon the hard premise before the data arrives. The ones who don’t become the category.
Culture is not given. It is earned — by both sides.
This is not a platitude. It is the finding. Emotional connectedness erodes between year one and years three and four — not because of bad hires or bad managers, but because nobody built the system to sustain it. Most Loved Workplace® is that system. Every team, every organization, every relationship runs on this principle.
The hardest lesson is applying your own science to yourself.
Carter spent years teaching organizations to sustain emotional connectedness before he fully applied that discipline to BPI itself. The drum circle only works if the person holding the rhythm keeps showing up. That includes the founder. That includes you.
The drum circle and the boardroom are the same thing.
Both are about bringing people into rhythm with each other. Both rise or fall on the strength of emotional connectedness. When you understand that — really understand it — you understand what we sell, why it works, and why the companies that get certified don’t just get a badge. They get a measurable change in how their people feel about showing up.
It started on the worst morning in a generation.
And it is still the most important work we know how to do.
Best Practice Institute (BPI) is a global leadership and organizational development firm founded by organizational psychologist Louis Carter, recognized for its research-driven approach to building high-performing, people-centered workplaces. BPI is the creator of the Most Loved Workplace® model and certification, grounded in the proprietary Love of Workplace Index™, which has analyzed millions of employee data points to identify what drives engagement, loyalty, and performance. Through its advisory work and platforms including Workplacely™ and Skillrater™, BPI has helped thousands of organizations—from Fortune 500 companies to high-growth firms—translate employee feedback into measurable business results. Its work has been featured in leading publications such as Forbes, Fast Company, Inc., and Investor’s Business Daily, and includes contributions to peer-reviewed journals like Leader to Leader (Wiley) as well as patented innovations in workforce analytics. Today, BPI partners with senior executives and growth-stage organizations to strengthen leadership, culture, and long-term enterprise value.
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