The Homeboy Way: A Radical Approach to Business and Life

Summary

Breaking the Rules

Leading with heart, authenticity, and purpose, Thomas Vozzo provides a clear path to a new bottom line—including 55 rules to break—bringing the Homeboy Way to life as the perfect antidote to the massive tidal currents of social injustice and inequities.

By every traditional measurement of success, Vozzo was a clear winner. In his world of billion-dollar revenues and million-dollar profits, he knew exactly what shareholders wanted and how to get it for them.

Then, through a series of fateful events, Vozzo landed as CEO of Homeboy Industries, the most successful gang intervention, rehabilitation, and re-entry program in the country, founded by Jesuit priest Greg Boyle. “I arrived at Homeboy at a time when I needed to learn more about myself and my life’s journey,” Vozzo writes. “And after 8 years of working with the poor, forgotten, and demonized people of our society, I’ve come to learn that I didn’t really know as much about life as I thought.”

Vozzo’s enlightening journey leads to his recognition that a radical approach is needed in business and in life: “What Homeboy has taught me is that we need to do business differently. … We need to bust up the system, swim upstream, avoid herd mentality.”

Blending personal stories of his day-to-day with Fr. Greg and the homies along with counterintuitive business ideas that are changing lives for the better, Vozzo shows you how you can live, lead, and shake things up with kinship, determination, compassion, and grit.

That’s the Homeboy Way.