Well, welcome for another How Conversation on Moral Leadership. I'm so looking forward to the conversation today with David Kohler, who is the CEO and chair of the board for Kohler Company. So, David, welcome to the How Conversation. It's so great to see you again.
Well, thank you, Dana. It's a great honor to be with you today, and I really respect your leadership and your moral leadership. So, it's an honor to be able to have this conversation.
As I mentioned, David is the chair and CEO of Kohler Company, and it's a global organization with more than 150 years of history and one that's navigated a lot in that time frame, as you can imagine, with a really strong commitment to doing the right thing. Very aligned with the How Institute for Society. We've appreciated the fact that David, your path came not from the top, but worked up from the bottom of the organization through the foundry and into operational roles before becoming the CEO in 2015 and then the chair of the board as well in 2022. How you lead is so aligned with moral leadership in terms of focus on people, about trust, innovation, and grounded in purpose, values, and humility. So, let's jump right in and talk a little bit about we all have these life journeys. Our founder and chair, Dov Seidman, calls it the zigs and zags, and we learn so much and our values come from that journey we've been on. So, who mentored you? Maybe tell us a little bit about where your values come from and your framework for how you lead.
Yeah, I think we're all so fortunate to have different mentors at different life stages, and I'll share a little bit about that. Early on, obviously it's your parents, and my parents were really important factors in who I am. I think my mother really shaped me as a human being, and she really instilled values like integrity, honesty, work ethic, and equality. She always used to say, you can tell a person by how they treat the elevator operator. And in her day, it was very equalizing. We went to public school. And then for my father, he was really about work ethic, courage, backbone, and you saw that level of determination and ethic that he led by. Then, throughout my history at critical junctures, mentors have really helped shape decisions. When I would think about career steps, I would talk to mentors outside the business like retired executives or friends outside the business. And then certainly inside the company over the years, I've learned from everybody around me, the associates I work with, peers, and people I've worked for. I've had the great fortune throughout my history to learn from so many excellent, amazing Kohler associates. And then in the last 30 years, my wife has been an instrumental factor in my coaching and development on the business side as well as a leader. That partnership has been an incredible part of my success, I think, over the years.
Well, wonderful. And I love hearing about you're still a learner leader. And that's—
I think that's so fundamental. Growth is a big part of what I think about all the time. We think about 1% better every day and how can we continue to learn and grow as a company or an organization every day.
So, you talked a lot about family, which I know you also consider the whole Kohler company family. You're the sixth in the family to lead the organization, but you've accrued so much experience learning up through the ranks from foreman to corporate business analyst among many positions. Maybe speak to us a little bit about that experience of what you learned along the way in terms of leadership and values as you rose through the ranks.
I think that experience has been so important in my life starting on the front lines. I actually first started working in the Kohler stables before I was old enough to work in the factory at 18. Then I worked in the factory in the summers when I was home from college. I worked one summer casting toilets. And then after college when I came back to Kohler, I started on the front lines working in all the different manufacturing divisions including the cast iron foundry, our brass or faucet manufacturing facility, engine manufacturing facility. In that rotation and working on the front lines, I gained so much firsthand knowledge of how the business works, how our manufacturing processes work, all of the equipment and technology, but more important, the culture and the people of Kohler Company. Not only did I take away from that working and learning from all the people I worked with and learning their history and the culture and the tradition, I also was able to instill, I think, a character of who I am as a person and to dispel the notions that this is just some little rich kid here on the front lines. They really saw that there's a real person there who's earnest with integrity that wants to learn the business and has the best interests of this company at heart. So I think it was really a two-way learning, if you will. I took so much from it, but I was also able to shape the authentic reputation of who I am as a person. So I learned and grew as well as created the foundation, I think, that still exists today of a person with work ethic, integrity, humility, and drive. We think a lot about that when we think about our culture today, we think about will and we think about humility and that combination. That was really learned on the front lines across the business. It's amazing even today when you travel around the world and you visit the front lines of our company and all the organizations around the world, how much the culture is consistent. That culture of work ethic, integrity, is consistent around the world.
Well, I have so many questions to follow up with that, and I had not heard about your time in the stables, and there's certainly a lot of humility you build in that kind of job. Your father, your grandfather, I mean, so many generations, you're fourth generation, didn't really pressure any of you to get into the business. What was it about the organization, the culture that made you want to choose this path?
You know, it's interesting and it is very true. We were never pressured to come into the business. Our parents always wanted us to just choose a path that was most compelling to us individually. But we all ended up coming back eventually, and I think it was just this natural interest, growing up in and around the business. We understood the business. But for myself as a marketer, I went to graduate school and studied marketing. I really looked at this amazing company that had been built over 100 years and it had a strong brand, strong distribution, a company that lived on the leading edge of design and technology, focused on innovation, a company that had courage and ambition, and all the things that a marketer would be interested in. So, very selfishly, I was interested from that aspect of my professional career. I thought it was a perfect fit, and obviously as a private company, a family company, it made a lot of sense. I came into the business, and the passion just continued to grow as I worked through the company and learned the company from the ground up. First on the front lines, but then in marketing, then in sales, then in general management, then global general management, and then expanding across all the businesses. You develop a deep understanding for the people, for the culture, for the history, for how we do business, how we compete, our customer base, the entire industry, and that further increases your passion as well as your competence and your capability.
Wow, and you've been there several decades, and the company's been around since 1873. So, you've seen a fair share of challenges, and that includes 18 recessions, two depressions, a lot of global disruptions, and the pandemic.
Yeah, two pandemics in history, actually.
Exactly. So, what do you think made Kohler so resilient during and enduring 150 years?
