Becoming a Principle-Driven Leader | Chase Koch with Salen Churi — Austin, TX

It's awesome to be in Austin, Texas. I lived here from 2000 to 2003 and it's just such an incredible city, incredible culture, incredible vibe. You know, I'm an Aggie, so for those of you... Yeah. Yeah. And I see Jason in the back. I see you back there, buddy.

But somehow Austin accepted me right out of school. And one of the reasons I wanted to live here was because I love music and I love the power of music to unify people. And I missed this place a lot. I will tell you a quick story. So you can imagine graduating with a useless marketing degree in 2000 when the tech bubble popped, trying to find a job here. And so the only way I found a job... I was bound and determined to not use the Coke network. I wanted to do it on my own. I should have used the Coke network. But I was literally cold calling trying to find a job. I went to this little marketing firm called EQ Strategy here in Austin and I knocked on the door. There's this great guy. He's like, "Dude, I'm not hiring. Nobody's hiring, especially with a resume like yours. It's not happening." So he sat down with me anyway. I told him about my job experience as a kid. He's like, "He must have some work ethic. He's worked every summer almost all the way from 15 all the way through college." And I said, "Roger, I know you're not hiring. I will work for free because I'm not gonna sit on my ass and do nothing. I started getting jittery not doing anything. I was having a lot of fun and partying at night. I wasn't working." So he called me back two weeks later. He's like, "You got the job and I'll pay you $28,500 a year. But you got a job." So anyway, I have so many great memories of Austin, but that's my first real job in the corporate world after all my internships at KO. And I just want to say it's badass to be in Austin, Texas. I really love it here. You guys have an incredible community.

Well, yeah. I'm sure a lot of people are asking, well, this is your dad's fifth book, how did you earn the right to be part of that? And I was so excited to be pulled into the process. Just a little bit on the why we wrote it. We just want to help people. It's that simple. We've learned so much within the business over 60-some years through a lot of failures, almost two bankruptcies, of when we didn't apply principles we failed and when we did we were able to dig ourselves out of the ditch from those failures and transform ourselves. If you look over the course of history back to when my father took over the company in 1961, it's grown 9,000-fold because of those principles. At its most simple, what is different about Coke? It's the principle-based approach and principle-based management and how we try to empower people with these principles. We've had a lot of learnings. We wanted to help our own employees first so we can continue the growth and help them learn from past failure and apply principles so that they can not only transform their own lives as individuals and self-actualize and live great lives but transform the business and get results over the long term. We have a lot of stories on the social change side and the philanthropic side. Same principles apply across that. My father and I have our own personal stories that we share of where we failed and how principles pulled us out of the ditch. So back to the core question of why did you guys write this together? Why did you do it? We want to share those principles so other people can transform their lives with them at the most basic level.

But to your point on what's going on right now, unprecedented uncertainty, disruption with AI at a level we've never seen. Divisiveness in our country, all of those economic uncertainty, too. We kind of got lucky with the timing honestly. Because these were just going to be stories that we shared with KO employees and Stand Together employees. But with my role at KO, which is I had been focused on disruptive technologies and trying to invest in and help the most interesting and disruptive founders in the world. That's why I started KDT. But now I'm doing that basically broadly on any kind of partnership across KO. I'm very externally focused. I'm in market. My job is to build relationships and open new doors and get us into new areas and new flow that we haven't been in before. I talk to a lot of people and a lot of people ask the question, how did Coke do it? What's the Coke story and what's your secret sauce and all of those things? And so, people ask for it. That's why we're like, let's just make this public. And we think we can be helpful with these principles, but we got lucky with the timing. So that's why we're more excited than ever. And the last thing I'll say on your question is that without principles, what do you have to navigate all of this uncertainty? Some people just blow with the wind and like whatever the fad or trend is. Our approach is more of like whether you're in a real shitty time or whether you're in boom times, stay true to these core principles because every time we've abandoned them it's put us in the ditch. So we have such pattern analysis on this that these principles really provide that navigation tool to say no matter where the wind is blowing or how hard it's blowing, we are going to stay true to these core principles. And they also give you courage. It's hard to have courage when everything's going against you. So when you have conviction with your principles and courage to do them, you're going to stay consistent to them.

When you look at the long timeline you see the 9,000x. When you're in it though, you're up and you're down. Yeah.

This isn't the first time we've had uncertainty. Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay. So who is Coke and what is Coke? Today we are a private company based in Wichita, Kansas. We touch the majority of the economy with the various businesses that we're in. A lot of people have a misconception that Coke is an old industrial company and that's all we're involved in. It's actually a smaller and smaller portion of the classic industrial term part of Coke. We've really transformed ourselves from being an industrial company to a technology company. Yes, we're in energy, fertilizers, agriculture, but we're in wood products as well, and consumer products like toilet paper and paper towels, glass manufacturing, but also software, ERP software, and technology with Molex for example with connectors and cabling that's making all of this AI stuff work. So we're very broad. We touch the majority of the economy. We're in close to 60 countries and over 130,000 employees now. Significant scale. I think the thing that's interesting if you tie this back to principles is where Coke started relative to where it is today. There are so many stories within that. But one big takeaway to understand the business and why it's grown the way it has is that people ask, you started as a small southern Oklahoma crude oil gathering company and then all the things I mentioned, all these industries, how did you get to that? Because it doesn't really make sense if you just look at it that way. The simple way I would describe that is one of our 41 principles in the book, and that's having a capabilities focus. So thinking about things from capabilities and what you've demonstrated you're good at doing and adding value to customers, as opposed to thinking that I'm in one industry and I just want to grow market share in that and that's how I grow. A lot of companies... and being private has a huge advantage to do that because we don't have analysts down our throat all the time saying you need to focus and you need market share in this industry. If that were the case, we would have just stayed in energy and tried to grow from x% to y% and make the analysts happy short term. But we flipped that whole model on its head. We look at the world horizontally instead of vertically by industry. We say what are the core capabilities that we've demonstrated that customers will pay us for and keep building on those capabilities, and then point those at industries where maybe we can get in and add value. Those capabilities early on were running large physical plants like refineries and fertilizer plants. It was also trading and logistics. So we were good at pipelines and barges and trucking and moving product from point A to point B. And we had a lot of engineering frameworks and mindset too. So when you take those three capabilities starting in energy, we said where can those capabilities be applied that we can create value and grow that way. So that's taken us from starting in pipelines, to getting in refineries, then maybe chemicals, then fertilizers, and from there to wood products. You need those core capabilities in wood products too. So when opportunities come along you say can our capabilities add value and bring synergy to a company? Does that make sense to acquire or not? And along the way you pick up new capabilities.

On that Georgia Pacific example, we started in the building product side that we felt very comfortable with. We almost didn't get the branded products with it. We bought that back in '05 and thank God they made us take the whole thing because building products, no one was building anything anymore, so that was in the red. But the consumer products which were paper towels and toilet, all the necessities that everyone still needs even in down markets, that was ripping and doing great. So the capability that we picked up was consumer products and branding. Then we started taking branding and applying that to fertilizers. So it's that if you have a collection of capabilities and you have multiple businesses or different things you can operate in, then you can have another principle, the republic of science, where you share learning across all these businesses and then all boats rise with the tide if you can operate in a way that really is one Coke instead of a bunch of siloed companies.

Um, if my father were here he'd say I'm damn good at failure, which is a great line. He says that all the time. He sees it a little bit like a stoic philosophy: thank God for those failures because you learn a hell of a lot more from failures than from success. He talks about his personal failures, his business failures, failures in social change. And I have plenty of my own. Maybe I'll pick one business for an example from a Coke standpoint, but I can share some personal failures too. There are so many younger folks in the room, I'm sure you're looking at what your next job is and your opportunities. Just to share my personal story: I started in agriculture and spent more than a decade in our fertilizer business. But it started when I was 15 years old in the feed yards. My first job at Coke was when I was 15. I had a really bad attitude. I was a good tennis player, but I wanted to quit and party with my friends. My dad said, "You either give 100% on the tennis court or I'm going to get your ass a job." I said, "Get my ass a job then." So the next morning he had me in a pickup truck on the way to Syracuse, Kansas to work at one of the largest feed yards in the country. I went from country club rich kid to shoveling cow [manure] in 12 hours. A lot of people would say how unfortunate. But as much as I despised him at the time for forcing me to do that, I think he saved my life. I have no idea where I'd be had I not done that. The reason why: my grandfather wrote a letter to my father in 1936 when my father was three months old. He put it in his safety deposit box that when he passed away, he wanted my father and his brothers to read. It went something like this: "You're going to get what seems to be a large sum of money when I pass. You can do one of two things with it. You can either let it destroy your life and be a bum with money, or you can apply yourself and use this money to go grow and build and add value to other people's lives. And if you do that, you will feel the glorious feeling of accomplishment." That gives me chills because I feel like that feed yard experience that he sent me through did the same for me. I really felt the feeling of accomplishment by digging post holes and shoveling cow [manure], because I went from not feeling that at all to actually feeling like I earned something. I worked with a team, I proved myself. I became addicted to that feeling. I don't want to be a typical third generation rich kid. I want to add value. So from that point on, I worked every summer all the way through junior year in college across all these manual labor jobs.

So fast forward to a business failure. One would look at that as well you failed, you quit tennis, you were nationally ranked. But again that failure was a blessing in disguise. Fast forward: I had a lot of different jobs when I came back to Coke. I left Austin in 2003 because I wanted to go back to Coke. I saw such an incredible opportunity to learn from my dad, from leaders like Dave Robertson who's in the audience, co-CEO with my father today. I wanted to feel the feeling of accomplishment again. So I went back into the fertilizer business. I spent 10 years in that business. But in the late '90s, we got ourselves into a lot of trouble because we violated a principle around experimental discovery. We went all in on a vision of trying to control an entire value chain that we called the gas to bread spread. We tried to do everything from pulling natural gas out of the ground, turning it into nitrogen, applying it to farmers, turning it into wheat and corn, and then also the consumer product side with food. We got into pizza crust, for God's sakes, and ended up on shelves and wondered why we were failing across the whole thing.

We violated with that strategy, we violated all 41 principles in the book.

You have to read the book to know how bad they were at this. So we totally violated the capabilities: 'we can own the whole thing, we can do everything from consumer to pulling natural gas out of the ground to running operations.' When you think back on it, it was crazy. We violated the scientific method, which is disproving your hypothesis as much as you try to prove it. We were buying companies through that value chain just to grow without asking, 'I wonder if we should do due diligence on these hog contracts that we're buying through Purina?' Only to realize the day after we close they're out of the money by several hundred million. Something as simple as driving the scientific method can completely bankrupt you if you don't do it. That's why one of the 41 principles is experimental discovery: try a lot of things, but don't do it in a way that sinks the company if you're wrong.

No, we picked these 41 not because there's a magic number. Why wouldn't you do 40, a nice round number? But these are just the 41 that when we went through all the different learnings and principles, these were the ones that helped us most.

Well, I mean, first on your comment on culture: a lot of companies have their value system on the wall, but what you do is quite different. Employees pick up on that in the first three minutes if it's real or not. My father says about parenthood: if you don't lead by example, how do you expect your kids to? It's the same with leadership and driving a real culture based on values and principles. Living up to that, hiring based on that, firing based on that, incentivizing based on that, promoting people based on those principles. That's the only way you have a sustainable culture. The other important principle that I see as overarching is bottom-up versus top-down. Here's how I think about Coke's culture: imagine if you had a business where everyone knew what to do without being told. That's the vision. With a principled approach codified and innovated to connect with people, you get the best talent and empower from the bottom up with these principles. The alternative is top-down with the smartest guy telling everyone what to do. Our vision is to be as bottom-up as possible. That's the only way. I look at my father and Dave Robertson: they never say you shouldn't do that strategy; they ask how can I help you succeed? What barriers do you have? Are you applying the principles? That's how Coke has scaled to operate in 60 countries and take on new acquisitions, which is very hard because you're buying a different culture and trying to plug it into our culture. But to your core question, if you can apply a bottom-up approach with clear principles and lead by example, that's the competitive advantage.

Can I say one more thing? I think this is really important especially for the younger folks here. One of our principles is contribution motivated. Back to who you hire and how you empower people. So much of it is about people selection. I was talking to Carlos about how they select students here, and there are a lot of similarities. We hire first on values, second on skills, last on credentials. Most companies flip it upside down: start with credentials, Ivy League school. We don't give a damn about that. What gets results are hiring contribution motivated folks. I call it the farm team. They come with the mindset of 'I've been working since I was a kid, I'm coming with grit, I want to make a contribution.' The opposite is deficiency motivated or destructively motivated: victim mindset, entitled, 'I have this resume, therefore I'm entitled.' Or seeking just power and control.

But also that sort of entitlement mentality versus contribution mentality.

So, we bought a company called Georgia Pacific based in Atlanta, a wood products company, that most of you hopefully use their products, whether you're building a house or paper towels and toilet paper. By the way, it's Angel Soft if you're... But Georgia Pacific was the largest acquisition we've done to date. We did that in 2005, a $21 billion acquisition. And so, 55,000 new employees coming on overnight. And one of the first things that was so striking about that was in the Atlanta office. It's a 51-story building right in downtown, beautiful building and setup. All the presidents and executive vice presidents had their own floor, the 51st floor, and it was a private elevator to access that and only they could access that. And if anyone wanted to visit, they had to wear a coat to come up there. So clearly, they had a top-down, bottom-up kind of culture. And so the first thing we did was disable the elevator and come in and say, we have to send a signal that we live by these principles. We live by this and this is bottom-up empowerment. Now, I will tell you, that's one example, but it also took a long time, I would say. Dave can correct me because he was right in the middle of this, but probably a decade to get it to where we really felt like the culture was driven by principles and we were really applying it. A lot of leadership changes. A lot of things I could talk about there, but yeah, the 51st floor elevator is a great example. If you want to drive a culture where everyone has dignity and everyone's on the same level and everyone is respected, you have to take those kinds of actions.

We're all in here in Austin. Most people in our Austin are in Austin because they want to be in Austin. I think it's a town where I've been here nine years and people are like, 'Wow, there were people here nine years ago.' But it's also the kind of place that people come to because they want to build. And it's the kind of place that people come to which is sort of like chewing what is in the echo chambers on the coasts. And so you guys built this massive company. You never left Wichita, Kansas. Talk about the farm team and some of the intrinsic advantages of building out of the fray and not being drawn into the thing of the moment.

So yeah, and so like Wichita and the Midwest and that type of talent access has been absolutely core to our success. And then the trick is if you're a global business, how do you do that on a global level? That's just through talent selection and having a really high bar. I want to tell one story. You've heard me tell this before, but just to make this really concrete. Our CIO today, his name is Jared Benson, did not have a college degree and he started 25 years ago by striping lines in KO's parking lot. And here's a guy that wanted to work at KO so badly. He was working for some vendor or whatever and he was doing his projects, but he's like, 'I want inside that building.' And so he had a few friends inside the building that were in the IT group or something and he said, 'I can do that. I don't have a college degree, but I can do that.' That was back when we were hiring based on resumes and probably throwing out anything below a 3.0 or whatever. But he somehow got in and was running circles around everyone. And then years later he kept getting promoted to bigger and bigger responsibilities. He was a leader and supervisor and he saw it was like 10 years ago this cyber security attacks coming and he saw that we needed to build a capability. He built that up and saved us from a lot of threats. And when that first cyber security wave came, from there he earned his way to be CIO of KO, one of the most important. So that story alone goes back to contribution motivated but also the talent model that I described. Had we not disrupted our own talent model and thought about that, Jared would never be where he is and KO wouldn't be as successful as we are. And so the trick is how do you do that at scale? How do we have every leader and every supervisor thinking that way? Because we're still trying to disrupt that paradigm internally about stop worrying about the credential.

Depends on the kid. And I mean that. I think my answer to that question speaks to at least how we think about education more broadly. We have a broken system, whether it's K through 12 or higher ed, that is a teach-to-test model, teacher at the front of the classroom, one-size-fits-all, as opposed to thinking about each human kid as an individual. So how do we go from that broken model of one-size-fits-all to an individualized education model where every kid can discover their gifts in any means that makes sense for them? And so my answer to your question about my kids would be, Charlie, he just turned 14 years old. I could see him wanting to go really deep on AI, and so maybe that's the university. Maybe he says, 'Look, I can go build a business today.' He's doing an internship right now at KO. So he started at KO before I did.

Yeah. No, I want to... Calvin's going to Syracuse. I'll get to my second child. And Calvin knows he's going there, by the way. So but my 11-year-old, there's no rule he hasn't broken and he's very disruptive mindset. So he might be better just go work. And then Clementine, my youngest, she probably will. I don't know, that's my prediction today. But who knows what it's going to look like by the time they actually get to that phase. But my approach with them is I'm not telling them they need to go to college. I'm gonna say what's best for you? What's your personal vision? Where are you today? What are you most excited about? And what motivates you to go learn? If it's not college, go start a business or go get an internship or go work. Then maybe four years down the road, maybe you know what you want to do and then come back to school. But just on this whole education thing, there's so many... I mean UATX, let me just give UATX its flowers based on what I know about it and my experience today here.

I wish UATX existed 26 years ago, when I was in school. I love Texas A&M University, don't get me wrong, but it is a very large institution. And what's different about UATX that I've learned is that the student is the customer, not the professors. The student is the customer. And it's about practical real project-based learning. I was sitting in a teach-to-test model doing multiple choice tests. That's not motivating, at least for me. Some people it is, but not for me. So I look back at whether it's what Joe Lemon's doing in Alpha. I went to a great school in K through 12 as well, one of the best schools in the Midwest, but we weren't doing anything. It was still a teach-to-test model and I was not motivated in half the subjects.

I think we are now at the most exciting time and maybe the most important thing that we can do as a country is transform our education system and it is so ripe. I don't need to tell anyone here because here we are at one of the most disruptive universities in the country and I've got Joe Limont sitting in the front row that's completely transforming K through 12. But for me, what we're working on with Stand Together and what we're leaning in on, education is the most exciting movement potential that we have because we've done all the research. We looked at pre-COVID, only 20% of families and parents were open to a different model for their kids. Now, if you look at it post-COVID, since everything was so exposed and how bad it was, 80% are open to a new model. So when that is happening from the ground up, you have to pounce and take that opportunity and go with it. I look at it as, you know this from building trust ventures, it's like do you want Uber or do you want a taxi cab? And if we're still stuck in protectionism world and we want to give out medallions to a protected class of taxi cab drivers, well guess what you're going to get? You're going to get poor quality at a high cost. And once Uber came in and disrupted the game, they continue to innovate and they offer better and better. So it's no different in education. And that's why I'm really excited about the future of education because of that. But the work you're doing at Stand Together in partnership with many of the folks in this room, I think is also really important because like that Uber model, if you just told people about Uber, if you're just like, you're just going to get in this stranger's cab and they're going to drive you somewhere and it's going to be fine, it sounds really scary.

But like what was important about that was you just showed people the kind of the better product, right? And COVID was this moment where people saw how bad it really was, like they weren't seeing it up close. And so I think it's so important to actually build those better models and put them into people's hands, which is really one of the things that's so exciting that you're doing at Stand Together. I'd be remiss if I didn't bring it into the conversation for a couple reasons. One, Stand Together and in particular Stand Together Ventures has played such a large role in my life and I think it's just one of the most unbelievable organizations I've ever seen. But in large part it is that because everything you just said about principles with respect to KO and this incredibly successful business, I have known you all to apply equally to Stand Together. It's not the typical model where a successful business leader makes a bunch of money and then writes checks to put their name on the side of something. It is very different. Can you talk about how those principles kind of come over into your societal change work also? Same principles, and that's the beauty of principles is that they apply to everyone and everything. It can apply to your business. It can apply to if you're running a sports team and you're trying to figure out who's in what position, who you want on the bus, who you don't want on the bus. I play in a band. I apply these principles to my band as well. They go nuts a lot. But instead of a consensus approach, we have an ownership model approach and accountability and that sort of thing. It applies to your kids. How do you teach kids? So I see the same thing. So anyway, with Stand Together, all of those principles. We talked about some of bottom-up empowerment. That's core of what we're trying to do with Stand Together is believe in people, bet on them, instead of looking at it from the top down and say their problems to be solved. We look at it as the people that have the problem are actually the source of the solution because they know that problem better than anyone. I tell this story a lot, but it's so powerful, especially for the younger folks here. What do I mean by bottom-up and betting on people? We found a guy that battled addiction most of his life. His name was Scott Strode and he found that the power of exercise plus a mentor was what got him to crack his addiction problem. And then he said, 'Okay, wow, maybe it worked for me. Maybe I can help others with this.' So he was the one in the problem, right? And then he was the source of the solution that said, you know what, the power of exercise plus the power of community and getting people together so they're not alone and other people believe in them and are helping them, maybe I can create something. So he started a gym called the Phoenix. When we met him nine years ago, he had three gyms in Colorado. We supercharged him with capital and principles. And he's gone from being in one state to all 50 states, going from helping a couple thousand people to over a million people this year. That's a movement.

That's a movement based on bottom-up empowerment by betting on and believing in someone that's in the problem and that they want to go help because they know what helped them and they have the model to go help people at scale. So we're doing that across as many problems as we can, whether it's kids that are stuck in the juvenile system or criminal justice reform or mental health issues. We're just trying to find Scott Strodes out there. This is not top-down philanthropy. This is bet on people and then let them go build, just like what you do in venture capital.

The principle of — and we coin a lot of the principles, sometimes we just stole and repackaged from Joseph Schumpeter, creative destruction, you got to disrupt yourself from within before the market does. So that's not something we just apply, it's part of our 41 principles. But one that we learned through failure is one that we coined called preferred partnerships. And so what preferred partnerships are is where three things are present. You can have a long-term preferred mutually beneficial partnership when one, you have an aligned vision in terms of where you're going as a partnership and it's very clear north star and well-defined. Two, you have aligned values and how you're going to get there, how you solve problems together, how you capture opportunities. Are you willing to be challenged by me to help improve your decision? Do we have teamwork, humility, intellectual honesty, all those type of values? And then number three is synergistic capabilities and complimentary capabilities. So if you have complimentary capabilities and you and I are a partner, you're good at one thing, I'm good at something else, and the combination of us one plus one can equal three or more, then you have synergy. So you can apply that to business, you can apply that to acquisitions, you can apply that to your girlfriend or spouse. Does it meet that test? Are those three things present or not?

I bring this back to Stand Together because the way we've built partnerships and the way Stand Together has really turned into this national movement is that we have selected partners. My father used to work on up until 2003, he was in a silo just plugging away and he realized, 'I'm not making the progress that I want. I can't do this alone.' And if we really want to drive movements and social change in this country and work on the problems that we're talking about, I need lots of partners. So we created the network effect of Stand, that's why it's called Stand Together. But it's through preferred partnerships and everything is looked at through that lens: aligned vision, aligned values, and complimentary capabilities. And so Joe Limont is a great example of that. We talked about education and our vision there, we see them as a key long-term preferred partner. Joe Lonsdale who's chairman of UATX and maybe Drew Odin his partner, he's also been a partner of Stand Together. Both amazing partners that meet that test where they bring something to the table that we don't have. We bring a Stand Together platform they don't have and we can go do great stuff together. So I think that it's almost like if you've heard nothing else from this discussion, that model and how who you work with and who you don't, boy is that important. And I could go through a hundred failures where we screwed that up too.

Yeah. I mean I am optimistic about a lot of things. I'm worried about a lot of things as well. So I'm not just a glass half full type person. We have significant problems in this country, but the more and more preferred partners coming to the table, it's so interesting. The nature of my role is to be in market and talk to a lot of different people. So many people want to look at the world through this right versus left lens, which I think is bullshit and very tribal and very toxic. Because what I'm learning is that people that would consider themselves left before or far right and conservative are finding themselves ideologically homeless. I stole that term from you. I love it. Because both of that is failing us. But they're looking for a team. They're looking for a home of 'I really just want to help people and do good things.' Who are my team and partners to go do that? So I'm seeing a tidal wave of people. I think this is even though there's a lot of problems, it's creating that opportunity where we can stand together and work together to do amazing things. And you don't need a million people to drive change. You need leadership. You need several leaders. We keep picking on Joe, but look what one leader is doing to disrupt K through 12 and help kids go from failing students to A students because he's solving the motivation gap. So think about that across all these problems and these entrepreneurs and these disruptive opportunities. And now we have one of the most powerful tools in the world, AI, to do it faster and empower more people that have considered themselves at the bottom that don't have resources. Now we can democratize knowledge and give them the knowledge of the world in their pocket at incredibly low cost. That's exciting. If you have the right mindset and you're contribution motivated and you want to go make something happen and add value to the world, we're going to move in the right direction.

That's a great question and the answer is absolutely yes. We've walked away from a lot of great businesses where we just thought there's no way we can turn the corner on culture. So that is factored in. Now, we've also bought businesses where it needs a lot of work from a culture standpoint, but we can do it and we have the talent that we can inject that we believe in that can go in and really lead by example and help shift a culture. And I think one of the things we're learning is how to do that more effectively and faster to shrink the cycle time from something like GP that took us 10 years to a handful of years. Hopefully we can continue to improve that because what you're asking is going to depend on can KO continue to grow effectively, and it all comes down to how well we apply our principles.

Yeah, that is a great question and a hard one. We have a very practical hiring process that is like a 360 review. So if we have a role where we want to hire a sales leader as an example, we would have seven to ten different folks from across KO interview that person and we have different techniques. We have one called the SBO process where we ask them different situations they've been in, what was their behavior in that situation and what was the outcome. If you go through that process, you learn a lot about how someone thinks. If it's all about them, if they're really about helping other people, especially if they're a leader, where do they come from? Was it all them? Were they out as a salesperson just trying to go get the next deal, or did they have a sales team of 20 that they spent all their time empowering to do a lot more than just them getting the credit? So we miss a lot in all humility, but we're trying to get better and better at that because that's one of the competitive advantages that we feel like we have. Back to the whole talent discussion. I was on the phone with someone yesterday that's helping us think through how you use artificial intelligence to assess contribution motivation, which is incredibly subjective. But we're trying to take all this technology and figure out how to do that at scale because we operate across 60 countries. If we can figure out how AI and technology can help us go from operating at a score of five out of ten on that one question and enhance that to a seven, the marginal uplift would be absolutely bonkers. So it's a great question, I'm glad you asked it. And then the last thing I would say on that is the importance of not only the 360 process on the front end when you're hiring someone, but having that on a continual basis, at least once a year. We try to do it three or four times a year where you're constantly getting feedback, not only from the peers in the business, but their customers, their suppliers, and what they're like to work with. And then we follow that up with rewarding people not only on the results of the business this year because if you're just focused on short-term results, they're going to focus on what got them those short-term results that year as opposed to investing for year three, four, and five. So we incentivize based on short-term results, but also what are they doing to innovate and transform long term, but most importantly, what are they doing? Are they accretive to the culture or are they subtractive from the culture? And that's a big lever in terms of overall compensation at the end of the day.

So 360 approach on the front end, throughout the year, at the end of the year, it's ongoing. That's how you get feedback. I would encourage you guys here at UATX too, ask your professors, ask your peers, ask anyone around you: 'How am I doing? What do you think? What do you think my comparative advantage is? What's my gift? What are my skills?' Because maybe I have a blind spot, maybe I think it's one thing, but everyone else thinks it's something else. That feedback is absolutely gold. So more than you wanted, but that's the practical how we do it inside the business. And frankly, we do it across 1300 employees within our philanthropy as well. Again, these principles apply to everything.

Thank you.