Becoming a Principle-Driven Leader | Charles Koch & Chase Koch with Askia Ahmad — Wichita, KS

I would just add to what Pop's saying. I mean, what a cool experience for me to get invited into this. I'd never written a book before. He said he wrote two, he actually wrote five, he corrected you on that. But this is my first one. So it was a really remarkable opportunity and project for me. But just reacting to some of the things that Pop was saying on why we wrote the book. And just being on the leadership team over the last six or seven years and seeing some of that story play out. One of the key inflection points to just put a fine point on that is when, and he's in the room right now, I saw him earlier, Brad Rzook identified the need to change the name. Brad out there. Yeah, these back. So Brad identified that if we, why are we calling it market-based management? We could call it principle-based management. And it seems like a subtle name change, but when you have 130,000 employees and you change what is the articulation of our core competitive advantage and what drives our culture around principles, just to see how people wanted to understand well why did we change it and then what did we change and why, what does that mean to me? What does that mean to my business? I don't want to just gloss over that point because that was a ripple effect into a lot of transformation just beyond that. So I think for all the business leaders, organizational leaders in the room, you change your value system, you keep that fresh and updated, you're going to keep your whole team and your organization like, oh okay, leadership is actually driving transformation of our own articulation of our value system. And so that's a really big deal I think for anyone that's trying to set a culture in any organization.

But the other thing I would say is that Pop mentioned in the kind intro what I focus on for the organization is around origination and partnerships. And I was doing that really all the way back into 2017 when I started Koch Disruptive Technologies. Now I'm focused more broadly with origination and partnerships across all of Koch. But as I was, so it's a very market-facing role and I'm in market a lot, and so customers, suppliers, potential acquisitions, people, founders that we would invest in, all of them consistently ask like what is so different about Koch? How do you do it? Tell me about these principles. What is this principle-based management culture that you have? And they wanted to learn what enabled Koch to grow 9,000x back, going back to the 60s because they want to do the same.

And so just hearing that and understanding that look, every business goes through the rocky road that Pop talked about. Everyone goes through failures. Everyone goes through the upsides and downsides. And if you look at right now like what we're going through, I think everyone would agree that we're in like unprecedented uncertainty whether it's with being concerned about how fast AI is moving and what that means to their employees, to their job, to their strategies, what they need to do differently. You know, divisiveness in our country, economic uncertainty, these are all things that I think every leader, every person worries about. So back to your question of why do we write the book? I think very simply it's what we hope this book is is a framework and a guide if you will to help navigate that unprecedented uncertainty. And what I think we found is that principles give you courage. Principles give you something that you can say, 'Okay, this is going to guide me. They're consistent. I can apply them to anything and everything.' As opposed to floating with the wind and chasing the next trend that unfortunately you see so many people do in society. So if you have a core framework and a core system that enables you to really navigate this tremendous uncertainty that we're all faced with.

That is tough to follow. But what I would say is to break it down into what we each of us can do because it took me a long time to learn what he was talking about, the things that he just said. And he tried to pound this into my head as I said since I was 8 years old. I'm a slow learner. My mom has confirmed that as well. But a late bloomer.

Yeah.

Then one day he woke up and, oh yeah, now I this is obvious. I figured it out when I started really failing badly on things. Then you internalize principles and what he was trying to teach me for a long time. But back to the like why did you write the book and what outcomes are you hoping from this at the end of the day? Simplify, we just hope this helps people.

And these are the stories of failure and transformation that we've learned within a company of now over 130,000 employees but also what we're doing in social change with Stand Together outlines the failures there, the things we screwed up, but what we're learning and how we're seeing stories of people that are transforming their lives with these principles. And so we just want to get this out there to as many people as possible so that they can take even if it's a few principles.

To transform their life. It's daunting when you hear 41 principles. It's like, oh my gosh, this is the way we used to teach market-based management, principle-based management. There's five dimensions, there's 100 mental models, there's all the you got to learn it all. And you don't, I mean, I'm still learning and I've been around this since I was a little kid. I learn every day with these principles. But if you just take a couple of these, two or three, and I back to the what we hope the outcome is. You take one like, you know, that is something that if I apply that principle in my business or my organization, my nonprofit organization, hell my sports team, it applies to everything, right? And if I just take a couple of these, I think everyone in this room, everyone that's going to listen to this will say, I actually see an immediate change. This isn't just high-level arm-wavy principles that I want to go back to my day. It's like, no, this stuff can help me today. So that's what I think we really hope for.

So that's what I think we really hope for.

Oh my gosh. There's so many that I've been a part of. We could tell a lot of different stories, but one that before I came back to Koch, I started at Koch when I was 15. I had a lot of different summer jobs. But I remember the late 90s was a really difficult time for Koch. In the book we talk about two different periods of time: the early 70s during the energy crisis, that was before I was born, but then in the late 90s, I was in college and just from afar seeing what was going on. There were risks of bankruptcy, back to Pop's discussion around the volatility that Koch had. It wasn't an up and to the right story. And I remember just from afar hearing the story of what we were doing in agriculture in the late 90s. I learned a lot from it because then I went into the fertilizer business in 2006. The learnings and the stories of the late 90s, the quick story on that is back to what Pop was saying in terms of wrong leaders in the wrong role with the wrong mindset. I think there was a lot of that, but also one of the principles we have is capabilities. One of the things that has built Koch over time that we've learned through failure is focusing on where you have capability and where you don't. So the story of the fertilizer business in the late 90s is basically getting way over our skis and expanding into way too many things where we did not have capability. So we had a strategy that was called the gas to bread spread.

And yeah, I mean, it hit me viscerally and I wasn't even at Koch at the time, right? Just seeing what was going on. And hearing from him at the dinner table on this, but basically what the gas to bread spread was is pulling natural gas out of the ground, converting that into nitrogen, then distributing that to farmers. The farmers using nitrogen to grow wheat and corn, then ultimately turn that into food and then also package that and put it in grocery stores, gas to bread, pizza crust even. So we got in that entire value chain and thought we could do a good job on everything, right? So it seems crazy now, but that's what was going on. And there were examples where we bought Purina, most of you didn't know Purina like dog food, and so Purina large animal food business without doing much diligence at all on it, only to wake up after we closed the business to be several hundred million dollars underwater because we had out of the money hog contracts that we had just acquired. Wow.

So it was bankrupt like day one.

So when you don't, and this is another principle, the scientific method where you go in and you want to do an acquisition or you want to get into a new area. The principle is disprove your hypothesis as much as you prove it or more. Right? So always ask why not and go through that challenge process. And so we violated so many principles just within that story around talent, leadership, around capabilities, around scientific method. It could go on and on. Later when I was running the fertilizer business, I didn't even though I knew that story, I almost made an identical mistake. So I didn't learn from that lesson. And when we were trying to expand internationally, I was running that business and we wanted to, we had a large trading business and we were trying to distribute all the nitrogen products, phosphate, potash. We were expanding into all these different markets and we wanted to get into all the import markets, Brazil, Mexico, UK, France, Australia, we were in New Zealand. We were in all these small markets and we did all that in about two years, three years. So way over our skis, growing for the sake of growth and just, and then it was in a time where it was a boom market where margins were really high and just assume that these margins would go on forever. Stupid stuff, right? And so I mean talk about scars and thinking about the mess that we created and then thankfully we had leaders that kind of came in and we started applying the principles and we shut down the stuff that didn't make sense and went back to our core capabilities. And you look at what the team has done with the fertilizer business. It's one of our most promising long-term businesses that we have. But we went through two massive failures because we ignored these principles within that.

And let me give the other side of that coin and the pause because we're telling doom and gloom stories here. There's some really amazing stories of learning from that and then applying it. So just to repeat what my father said because I think it's so important and it's one of the most useful things in the book that all of us can apply: our talent model first on values, second on skills, last on credentials. And again, like most companies flip that on its head. Start with a fancy resume, right? And hire the person that has the best network or the best sales figures or whatever. And that's to Pop's point, that's where we've gotten in the most trouble when we focus on that. So hire great raw material, great values. I call it hire the farm team, right? Meaning kids that grew up with strong work ethic, not entitled, that want to just come in and make a contribution and they come in with fire in their belly. It doesn't mean they had to work on the farm like he made me do that when I was 15, but should have done it earlier. Yeah, I definitely should have. But let me give you one example of how that's practically applied within Koch. And I've told this story many times, but I think it's such a good example. Our CIO today, his name's Jared Benson. I don't know if he's in the audience or not today, but you've worked with him, Ski. You know him well. I know him well. He's CIO of Koch today. One of the most important leadership positions that we have at the company. He started at Koch. His first role, not as Koch employee, but being around Koch was striping the lines in the parking lot. And he just wanted to get access and figure out how can I get into Koch, but he didn't go to college. He didn't have a college degree. He had really no credentials. But he demonstrated his work ethic and his desire to get in and prove himself. And he was really good with technology and he came in and very quickly started running circles around our team that someone got him in, got us around the resume process and gave him a chance and then he quickly proved himself and then saw this wave a decade ago on cyber security and how we needed to protect ourselves from cyber attacks. Saw that very early. Built a team, built a capability. He was our CISO, our lead on cyber security and then from there continued to demonstrate himself to be the head of technology for Koch. Amazing. No college degree, right? So that story, if we can apply that at scale, we will have a huge competitive advantage. And I would encourage everyone that's running a business, if you can think that way and think about I'm hiring on raw material. I'm hiring on grit. I'm hiring on values and principles. Like you can teach people the skills and a lot of the stuff that comes in the resume. A lot of that stuff is actually counterproductive. What you learn in college, some not Wichita State of course. Oh, let me just be clear by the way. But we hire a lot from Wichita State by the way. But what we found in a lot of some of the things that and by the way I've talked to the dean a lot about this on whether they're flipping the script. In terms of what college education is relative to when you and I went to school, right? And doing it in a way that is actually you come out of there going, 'Okay, I'm more prepared.' Yeah. And so like a lot of over the years we've had to help people unlearn what they learned in business school and take it back to values and principles. And so that's why the Jared Benson story is so powerful, right, as a talent vision and a talent model.

So it just blows me away. I'll just add because with Koch Disruptive Technologies over the last years I've gotten to work closely with Molex and I still work with them on partnerships and origination and seeing, I think one key point and what Pop's saying here is that had we not made the changes that he talked about both at the leadership level, the cultural level, change paradigms, that's one thing he did not say that's a very key principle in the book is when we acquired them, they were topline thinking, grow revenue, right? Well, if you're growing revenue, but your costs are still high and that's not falling to the bottom line and you're not creating bottom line value, the revenue, that's not the thing that you should solely be focused on, right? So thinking about real long-term value creation. So that took a quite a bit of time to change that paradigm and it took leadership change to do that. But if you fast forward to today and you think about Molex as one of the most exciting, fastest growing businesses at Koch, had we not made those changes and all this AI boom has been huge for the business, we have a data solutions business where because obviously the expansion of data centers, you need more connectors, you need more cables at scale. So that business is growing the last couple years it's grown like 20x. So you think about a large business growing at that speed and to have the ability, the talent models to go hire, they're in the process of hiring 10 to 15,000 more people over the next 8 to 12 months. That's just hard to get your head around, right? To keep up with this growth. But the point I want to make is that had we not made those changes, all this growth for AI and all that, it wouldn't have mattered. We would not have been able to capture it had we not driven those transformations the last two, three, four years. Yeah.

Where I've seen it, Ski, is that only through my own failure on this, as a leader is not really understanding and applying the principle of comparative advantage. And I would say, you know, we all have our top three or four principles that have meant the most to us, but that one for me is number one because I lived it and I failed in it. I misapplied it. And back to kind of the fertilizer story. In 2014 I had the awesome opportunity to be president of Koch Fertilizer only to realize nine months in that that really wasn't my comparative advantage to run and operate a large business where my heart was and where my skills were building, not operating. And so I kind of viscerally learned through, you know, imagine being the boss's son and running the third largest business at Koch only to go fire yourself from the role and walk down the halls for the night. But no, but walk down the halls of Koch with all leadership and everyone knowing that that happened like, well, you know, the boss's son failed. He didn't, he failed at that job. But thank God that I did because it set me on a whole new path of origination and building new things, getting us into new technology, building Koch Disruptive Technologies and now doing what I'm doing now for the company that I'm much more skilled in. If I would have stayed in that role because I should because I was Charles Koch's son, there's no way the fertilizer business would be where it is today and I don't know where it would be, you know. And we got great people to come in and help clean up some of my messes frankly and now it's one of the most, as I said, exciting businesses. So I go back to again, I want to make this practical for everyone in the audience. Imagine if you had a business where everyone was everyone's role and by the way your role as leader was optimized around your true gift and your gift relative to everyone else on the team and you stop doing the things, the responsibilities that you're not good at relative to everyone else and you focus on the thing that is your power alley and that you can go just crush it and then so customize roles based on the team that you have and that you're going to get. I mean, so at Koch scale, 130,000 employees, this is the thing I would be a dream like if you really had supervisors understanding how to apply comparative advantage and help people overcome the ego problems of title and how many people are reporting to me and all the BS that doesn't matter and really think about where can I create the most value to go play the best role and biggest role to advance this vision that we have a one team approach on. If you can do that, you will win.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So what he was talking about with Dave and the leader, the transformation and the restructure of the leadership team, when you lead as a leader by just doing that, making the changes you need to make at the top, it gives everyone else in the organization permission to do it too.

So like a lot of the things like Molex and fertilizer, GP FHR, they saw that there's examples across all those businesses. We're like, well, maybe we should restructure. Are we applying comparative? So

Right? If you do that, you show versus tell, like that it gets into the culture. Yeah.

Don't be looking at me.

No, it's a great question, and I think it goes back to where we started in terms of why we think these principles are so valuable now. No one's seen anything move as fast as AI, and it's really scary for everyone. But we feel like the principles are the answer to deal with the change. So what does that mean? Take two principles: creative destruction, one that we haven't talked about yet. It's this idea of disrupting yourself from within before the market does. Right? That's one principle. The other one is having a learning mindset. I think both of these are hugely valuable in this pace of change with technology that we're dealing with right now. So if you have the mindset of creative destruction and you're open to it, looking at technology as an enabler, an enhancer, as opposed to how do I protect myself from it? I think that's the starting point, right? Just having an open mind. It's like, how can I transform? How do I drive creative destruction? Maybe this has worked for me in the past, but AI is about to disrupt that, and I don't need that process anymore. So if you think about accounting processes or legal analysis, how you look at documents, AI looking at documents, we're doing it so differently than the way we were doing it two years ago. Right? And so that's creative destruction: thinking about your systems, processes, products, structure, all of that, and saying I need to continue to innovate every day. If I had a clean sheet of paper, how would I do it given what I know today and the technology that is available to me? So I think mindset around it is very important. And then also this lifelong learning mindset. If you think about it, not as, I think so many people debate, 'AI is going to take all our jobs. I'm competing with AI for the job.' Instead, flip that and say, 'I'm competing with a person that knows how to apply AI better than me.' And so, if you think about it, I better figure out what my gift is, what my comparative advantage is, and how I can use these tools that are out there to basically win and outcompete someone else.

And so I think again both of those are principles that help you with mindset. But I give my son Charlie, who's here, a lot of credit because he's teaching me about this. You know, I'm stuck in old Excel spreadsheets because that's what I grew up in the last 20 years. I'm pretty proficient in Microsoft Excel. But he grabs my spreadsheets and says, 'Let me put that in Claude for you.' I have this whole exercise treatment that I do, and I had it all in spreadsheets, the reps and all the things I need to do. And he grabs it, puts it in Claude, and builds an app that gives me goal-driven weekly measures and a whole analysis of what I'm doing poorly or what I'm doing well.

And it tells me how to get up off my ass and do my exercises, you know. But Charlie built that in a couple hours. Wow. And I said, 'Ask Claude how much that would have taken two years ago to build: five software engineers, three and a half months, and $30,000, to something that a 13-year-old built in about two hours.' Wow. So that's what I mean in terms of looking at that and saying you've got to get out of your old processes and mental models and say I can do something 90% faster and more efficiently, and stop doing the things that are wasteful with all these new tools. So we're applying that in everything we do. In fact, just another plug for the book. We're not thinking about this just as a book. We're thinking about it as a platform for principles because frankly we've got to meet people where they are right now. Not everyone's reading a 300-page book, especially the next generation. It's different the way they learn, right? They learn five minutes on ChatGPT. So we created an app with AI that is called the Principal Companion that you can download in the Apple store now or on Android platforms as well. You can put any problem in it. It can be a business problem, a nonprofit problem, a sports team, a personal problem, and it helps you think through it through principles. So to me, that's really, it doesn't give you the answer. It keeps asking questions so you start thinking about it differently. Is that fair?

But that's what this is trying to do: it coaches you through thinking through principles. So then you can learn that and apply it to anything. But yeah, it's a five-minute experiment to get you kind of rocking and rolling with these principles. So we're excited about that, and it's gotten great pickup within Coke as well, but we're offering it to anyone and everyone for free.

Well, this is so exciting to me what we're working on. It has brought so much meaning to my life as well. I've spent 30 to 40% of my time on Stand Together and what Pop is talking about. But I would say I'd hone in on two principles. Stand Together, there's a reason it's named that. It's really about understanding that we can do a lot more together than we can alone, and bring a community together of like-minded people. Just like you think about running a business and getting return on investment, you get the highest return on investment of your philanthropy activities or your social if you do things together with more capability and more firepower to actually drive change to help people. So we do that. How do you do that? What principle really enables that? Preferred partnerships. This is a very important principle, and it applies to business, social change, everything. We believe, and we've learned through failure and success, that a preferred partner has three things to have a real long-term partnership that works. One is aligned vision in terms of where you're going together, clear and understood. Two, aligned values in how you do business together, what the relationship is, what values you solve problems with, how you challenge each other, teamwork, respect. And the third is complementary capabilities. Everyone brings something different to the table, and when you do that, you have synergy in the relationship. So that's the way we look at Stand Together, that's the way we look at Koch and the people we work with, acquisitions, suppliers. That's the way I look at marriage. See, mom and pop. So I'm good at abstraction and principles, and Liz is good at everything else. That's right. So I have an improvement program every morning. Yeah, I need to measure up a little better. You know, at 90, you're kind of a slow learner. But with that preferred partnership model, that's what's enabled us to scale so fast with Stand Together. And that's what's enabled us to get a national scale by bringing partnerships in sports, music, entertainment, the whole YouTube creator world. We're bringing something to them that they don't have, right? They don't have a Stand Together apparatus that we've learned from failure over 60 years of social change. And they have something that we don't have: influence and followings and sub communities and social media. If you really want to drive a movement, because at the end of the day, that's what we're trying to do with Stand Together, you have to have all these things to drive change and transform people's lives in addiction, mental health, criminal justice reform, transforming education. You can't do it without these really big meaningful partnerships. And I wanted to highlight Wichita specifically.

We're doing this at a national scale, but national movements start at the local level. Yes. And so I wrote down some notes here of the things that are happening in Wichita due to a lot of the people that are in this room. Stand Together doesn't take credit for any of this. This is bottom-up preferred partnerships where everyone is moving together. I feel like Stand Together is more of a convener, helping people stand together instead of working in silos. Over the last two or three years, largely due to a lot of people in this room, we have worked with over 200 organizations just within Wichita, those that have a shared vision of what we're trying to do to drive progress here. We've worked on problems like addiction, foster care, transforming education here in Wichita. I want to give just a couple examples. Hope for the Hood: we've had over 600 what would have been gang members come to the other side and use their skills productively as opposed to driving gang violence. Care Portal, an amazing organization, an incredible platform to help people and match supply and demand of needs. Over 2,000 people served just since it started over the last two years. The Phoenix, which you worked with, I'm going to steal your thunder. It's one of the highest performing locations, and we operate in all 50 states with the Phoenix, which is about overcoming addiction. Wichita is one of the most valuable and gets the highest results of any location. Over 10,000 served, transforming people's lives just in Wichita. Some of you may have seen the location downtown, but that is transformative. And then Family Promise, over 300 families pulled out of homelessness. And we're just getting started with this. I just want to call out a couple leaders, and this is not a full list. Hopefully some of these people are in the room. Steve Felmire, he used to be my boss at Koch. What he's doing in affordable housing. John Ralph, I went to high school with John, and just seeing what he's doing with his platform and capabilities in restaurants to bring kids in, kind of like taking the Cafe Momentum model of bringing kids that are in and out of the juvie system and giving them jobs and showing them that someone believes in them. And that they're not throwaway kids. It's the most heartwarming stuff ever. John's leveraging his platform and bringing that model in. Ryan Batty's driving all the growth in Care Portal. Gan and Yolanda Camarina have done incredible work on the north end through empowerment. And then movement building, Edom Edi from the Kansas Health Foundation and Ben Hutton on Lead Wichita. I could name 50 other people, but I just want to highlight some of these leaders that are really showing versus telling, back to what we were saying on the business side. And we're doing it together. The leverage we get and the change we can drive and the results we're getting are meaningful. So this is a call to action for anyone that wants to learn more, get involved. Joe Woodward is leading the effort, and I'd say he's a key community leader, but also the glue that's holding all this together. Joe, if you could raise your hand and stand up. Joe's gotten out there so much, he probably knows every single person in this room already. But we need more. We have so much work to do to really drive this community forward. And it's important to all of us. There's mutual benefit. This is a huge principle in getting involved in this. Because that's better for your business, too. If we can help transform Wichita, that's better for Koch. It makes it a more attractive place for talent to come. People want to be here. Got that amazing article written in the Wall Street Journal about how Wichita is on the map for affordability and a great place to live. People are talking about this place. It's awesome. People are sick of the coasts, all the BS and the high cost of living. We got to make it a more and more attractive place to live and build our community and help people transform their lives.

Well, I'd give my father a tremendous amount of credit in keeping us in Wichita and showing me the value of Wichita versus being somewhere else. I left for a while. I went to Texas A&M and wanted to be in Austin, Texas, where there was a great music scene and have a good time. But what I realized back in 2003 was that I was missing an incredible opportunity. Frankly, I missed the culture, the friendships I had here, and I was missing an opportunity to go learn from my father and other executives at Koch, where I wasn't going anywhere in Austin. So having grown up here and then coming back, it's hard to explain to others the value of Wichita, the culture, the people. Back to the whole farm team discussion, this is where I want to be. So I care a lot about this community. But you also match that with what my personal north star is. What I've learned through all these failures that we outline in the book and some of the stories I've told is that given my comparative advantage and where I feel I can stand on the shoulders of giants that have built Koch, built Stand Together, and that's not just the man sitting to my right here, that's all the leaders that have built Koch and all the community leaders here that have helped transform Wichita and been part of our efforts and Stand Together. I've learned from all that and said, 'Okay, what can I uniquely bring to the table?' My north star that I've learned over time is that I love unifying people. I love building community in a way that empowers people from the bottom up but also is highly disruptive, and I say disruptive in a positive way, drive change and innovation and move things forward, but do it in a way where maybe people haven't done it before. That's why I built Koch Disruptive Technologies. I'm cut out of that cloth. So when I think about Wichita and the Y downtown and some of the announcements you've seen, I see the power of music over the course of my life to unify people and bring them together. If you can unify people around something as powerful as music, you can create awareness and get more people involved to drive the social change we need. That's my true why on all the stuff downtown, Somewhere Fest, all these experiments we're running. I view music uniquely as having incredible power that if we can tap into, we can do things in this community that no other community can do because of the capabilities we have. So building a venue and transforming the Starlight and creating a whole new open space downtown, our objectives are to attract more people to Wichita, attract and retain. Musicians, people in the music industry, business leaders, everything. That's going to be a differentiator for Wichita over time to attract and retain more talent and incredible people. That's one. Number two, the power of music to drive social change. We will link all the efforts of what we're building downtown to everything we're trying to do with Stand Together and this community. It's not some grand master plan, but the capabilities will be there to do that. Number three, we have gaps in our community in Wichita. We need to supercharge the entertainment and music scene. There's a huge opportunity there, but also livability downtown. Supply and demand fundamentals: we are short housing, short affordable housing, short apartments. All the expansion that Wichita State is doing at the biotech center is incredibly exciting. So those are the objectives. The last thing I'll say is that I and my team and everyone working on this and the community are approaching this with absolute humility and openness. We don't know, I've never done anything like this before, we're experimenting. We want to learn from Wichita, from business leaders, what are your ideas to make this work and be successful. We're already having lots of meetings with business leaders, local leaders, social change leaders to get the best knowledge to create the best vision and experiment to transform downtown and the city at large. So that's another call to action. You can connect if you are interested and have ideas. We have a gentleman here on the team, Justin Healey. Justin, are you in? He's in the back of the room. Raise your hand again, Justin. Justin Healey is the guy to talk to, to bring in all these ideas and figure out how to make this the best thing possible.

Yeah, for sure. But through it all, I give my mom and my father a lot of credit because it's been a rocky road and will continue to be. And yeah, I'm just grateful. I love this family, love my mother.

Thank God our cafeteria is incredible.

It's not. If you apply the principles, you learn and apply them. The way we think about Koch, a lot of people say Koch is a family business. We don't run it like a family business. We run it like a meritocracy. And if you really believe in the principle of comparative advantage, that's why I, it sucked, but it was the right thing to do to fire myself from being the CEO of Koch Fertilizer to learn where my gift really was and what I love to do. And so we have to apply those principles to the family members as well. Just because the last name Koch is on the building doesn't mean that I should be next in line to run it. If I had those skills and was the right person at some given time, then okay, maybe a candidate, the board would decide that. But for me and where I am today, we have the most amazing leaders at Koch. A lot of them are in the room right now. And if we have all of them in their comparatively advantaged roles, as a shareholder of Koch, I don't want to be the CEO if I'm not the right person for it. And by the way, my incentives are aligned to it. I have no ego around that. I want to be in the role where I can add the most value to the company.

I would just say try one or two of these today, and you'll see the thinking change, and you'll see transformation in your business, your life, maybe even in the community as well.