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

I'm super excited and humbled and privileged to be here and connecting up with you all. So, let's dive into the book. Let's get into it. Charles, you've written a couple books.

My bad. I don't want to shortchange him. Five books, including New York Times bestseller. So this book, why write this book?

I would just add to what Pop's saying. 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 put a fine point on that is when 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 why we changed 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 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 and 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 organization like, 'Okay, leadership is actually driving transformation of our own articulation of our value system.' And that's a really big deal for anyone 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 all the way back in 2017 when I started KO Disruptive Technologies. Now I'm focused more broadly with origination and partnerships across all of KO. But as I was, it's a very market-facing role and I'm in market a lot, and customers, suppliers, potential acquisitions, founders that we would invest in, all of them consistently ask, 'What is so different about KO? 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 KO to grow 9,000x 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, what we're going through, I think everyone would agree that we're in unprecedented uncertainty, whether it's 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. 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 we wrote the book, I think very simply, what we hope this book is is a framework and a guide 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.

Yeah. So I assume as we look at business leaders and organization leaders throughout in this audience, what would you say is a key takeaway after reading this book? What would you hope that they would go take away when they read this book?

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

Yeah.

Then one day he woke up and, 'Oh yeah.'

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 why we wrote the book and what outcomes we're hoping from this, at the end of the day, we just hope this helps people.

Well, then let's dive in. Let's take a deeper dive into some of these principles. One thing I like about the book is that it's framed through the lens of failures, not just successes. Charles, maybe you could kick us off with what are some of the failures that shaped the 41 principles that you write about.

Yeah, for sure. What about you, Chase? What failures or patterns of failures?

Oh my gosh. There's so many that I've been a part of. I could tell a lot of different stories. But one that before I came back to KO, I started at KO when I was 15. I had a lot of different summer jobs. But I remember the late 90s was a really difficult time for KO. 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. In those two periods, there were risks of part of bankruptcy, back to Pop's discussion around the volatility that KO 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 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 KO over time, we've learned a lot through failure, is focusing on where you have capability and where you don't. 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 called the gas to bread spread.

And basically, I'm triggering him. I'm triggering him a headache. And yeah, I mean, it hit me viscerally and I wasn't even at KO at the time, 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 package it 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. So it seems crazy now, but that's what was going on. There was one example where we bought Purina, most of you didn't know Purina like dog food, and 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 get into a new area, the principle is disprove your hypothesis as much as you prove it or more. 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, capabilities, 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. When we were trying to expand internationally, I was running that business and we wanted 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 or three years. So way over our skis, growing for the sake of growth. And 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. So talk about scars and thinking about the mess that we created. And then thankfully we had leaders that 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.

Yeah. Well, I mean, so as I listened, these principles aren't just some abstract thing. These are real. And to your point, if you shirk these type of principles, you'll eventually feel the consequence. It might be good in the short term, but over the long term, you'll end up feeling it.

Yeah.

No doubt.

And let me give the other side of that coin, 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, most companies flip that on its head. Start with a fancy resume, 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, meaning kids that grew up with strong work ethic, not entitled, that want to 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.

Yeah, I definitely should have. But let me give you one example of how that's practically applied within KO. 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 KO today. One of the most important leadership positions that we have at the company. He started at KO. His first role, not as KO employee, but being around KO was striping the lines in the parking lot. And he just wanted to get access and figure out how can I get into KO, 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. Someone got him in, got 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 KO. Amazing. No college degree. 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 hiring on raw material, hiring on grit, hiring on values and principles, you can teach people the skills. A lot of the stuff that comes in the resume is actually counterproductive. What you learn in college, some not Wichita State of course. 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, and doing it in a way that you come out of there going, 'Okay, I'm more prepared.'

Yeah. And so 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 as a talent vision and a talent model.

Now I can attest because I was going to go there with Wichita State. We were just here with our son on a visit to Wichita State last week and I was sitting there thinking, my wife and I were thinking, they're doing a lot of applied learning here at Wichita State across it doesn't matter what department or discipline. So shout out to Wichita State. I saw it firsthand last week. All right. So let's maybe continue this thread around successes. So a lot of the book is framed around some failures and the principles that were learned through failure, but almost everybody in this room thinks of KO as a great success story. So maybe we can start with you, Charles, on success stories. Where have we seen applying these principles change the trajectory of a business or business unit?

Wow. Yeah. Really?

So it just blows me away. I'll just add because with KO Disruptive Technologies over the last years I've gotten to work closely with Molex and I still work with them on partnerships and origination. Seeing, I think one key point in what Pop's saying here is that had we not made the changes 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. When we acquired them, they were topline thinking, grow revenue. 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 is not the thing you should solely be focused on. So thinking about real long-term value creation took 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 think about Molex as one of the most exciting, fastest growing businesses at KO, 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 of the expansion of data centers, you need more connectors, more cables at scale. So that business is growing the last couple years it's grown like 20x. So 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 hard to get your head around 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.

So I think that's, for everyone that runs a business, you have that opportunity and the market's there or whatever, but if you're not set up to capture it, that opportunity will be gone.

Yeah. So as I hear that, I'm sitting here in amazement. But if applying these principles gets those type of results, then why do leaders go wrong in applying any mix of these principles? Maybe start with you, Charles. Where do they go wrong?

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. I would say 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. Back to the fertilizer story, in 2014 I had the awesome opportunity to be president of KO Fertilizer only to realize nine months in that that really wasn't my comparative advantage to run and operate a large business. My heart and my skills were in building, not operating. And so I viscerally learned through, imagine being the boss's son and running the third largest business at KO only to go fire yourself from the role and walk down the halls of KO with all leadership and everyone knowing that happened. 'Well, the boss's son failed. 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 KO 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 was Charles KO's son, there's no way the fertilizer business would be where it is today. And we got great people to come in and help clean up some of my messes, and now it's one of the most exciting businesses. So I go back to, I want to make this practical for everyone in the audience. Imagine if you had a business where 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 you're not good at relative to everyone else and you focus on the thing that is your power alley and you can just crush it. Then customize roles based on the team that you have. At KO scale, 130,000 employees, this would be a dream 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 play the best role and biggest role to advance this vision. If you can do that, you will win.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I think one just one more point on this, it's the show versus tell. So what he was talking about with 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.

There we go.

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

That don't underestimate whether it's a you have a business of 10 people, a hundred, 10,000, it doesn't matter,

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

That's that's how you drive transformation.

So So as I listen two things that stood out to me there, right, to your point, Chase, on modeling, like it's important for a leader to model, right? whether whether it's in business in in you know uh in the social sector you got to model the type of culture and I think you may

And then my my the winningest NCAA coach of all time was Jack Clark the coach of Cal Rugby and it's hard to believe my body shape is but I played rugby so I I got to know him and I said how did you do it you you won 30 national championships no one else has ever done that he said because I didn't give a damn about how talented they were or so on, but I taught we're you're going to only play if you're a leader. And what is a leader? A leader is someone who makes those around him better. Now, let that sink in. If you're not, I don't care whether you're the boss or if you're not making those around you better, you're not a leader.

You're a destroyer. You're undermining the ability to everybody else to contribute the maximum.

Yeah. No, great, great, great point. And to learn more about comparative advantage, it's in the book. One of the principles in the book. Um, so, so, so let me shift gears just a little bit and bring this to more kind of present day and and I'm thinking about AI.

You know what? I did I did look over but I mean you know quite a bit about AI. These are experts. But I mean, but but I'm thinking about like the application of these principles cuz somebody might look through this list and think like, oh, well, these are old time principles. They don't apply in this, you know, everchanging world driven by AI. So, uh, so Chase, I mean, what are your thoughts about these principles applying in this?

No, I mean, it's a great question and, um, I think it goes back to kind of how where we started in terms of why we think these principles are so like valuable now. No, no one's seen anything move as fast the technology move as fast as AI and it's really scary for for everyone. Um but we feel like the principles are the answer to like deal with the change. So what does that mean? So take two principles. Um creative destruction, one that we haven't talked about yet. It's this idea of dis disrupting yourself from within before the market does. Right? Um 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 we're dealing with right now. So if you have the mindset of creative destruction and you're you're open to it and like looking at technology as as an enabler, an enhancer as opposed to how do I protect myself from it? Um I think that's the starting point, right? Is just like having an open mind. It's like how can I transform my how do I drive creative destruction and maybe this has worked for me in the past but AI is about to disrupt that and I don't need that process anymore right so if you think about accounting processes or um legal analysis how you look at at doc you know 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 like 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 I think mindset around it is very important. Um and then also this like lifelong learning mindset and if you if you think about not as I think so many people the debate around um well uh AI is going to take all our jobs. I'm competing with AI for the job. Now, instead, flip that and say, um, I'm competing with a person that knows how to play apply AI better than me. And so, if you think about like 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 to basically win and out compete someone else.

Yeah.

And so I think again both of those are like principles that help you uh with mindset. But um I give my son uh Charlie who's here um a lot of credit cuz he's teaching me about this. You know, I mean 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." Like I had a u I've got this whole exercise treatment that I do and I had it all in spreadsheets and the reps and all the things I need to do and um he grabs it, puts it in Claude and builds an app that is that gives me goal driven weekly measures and a whole analysis of what I'm doing poorly or what I'm what I'm doing well.

Yeah.

And tells me how get up off your ass and do your exercises, you know. But Charlie built that in a couple hours.

Wow.

And I I said, "Ask Claude how much that like the cost and the time that would have taken um two years ago to build five software engineers, uh three and a half months and $30,000 to something that a 13-year-old built in about two hours."

Wow.

So, but that's what I mean in terms of looking at that and saying you've got to get out out of your old processes and mental models and say I can do something 90% faster and more efficiently and and stop doing the things that are wasteful with all these new tools. So, um we're applying that in everything we do. In fact, um uh we you know 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 the next generation. It's it's it's different the way they learn right they learn five minute five minutes on chat GPT. So we created an app with AI that is uh it's called the principal companion that you can download in the Apple store now or in any of the platforms Android uh platform as well that you can put any problem in it. It can be a business problem, a nonprofit problem, a sports running a sports team, a personal problem and it helps you think through it through principles.

So to me that's like really

It doesn't give you the answer. It keeps asking questions so you start thinking about it differently. Is that fair?

Yeah. No, that's right. It's not a, oh, here, ask the app. And this is to me one of the problems with with some of these models like chat GBT. And it's like I can turn my brain off and just get an answer as opposed to to teaching you critical thinking.

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

No, that's outstanding. Well, so everybody go download the app, Principal Companion uh app. That's good. Well, uh with the time that we have left, I'd love to pivot a little bit. I mean most of the examples that we've talked about are on the on the business side of you know side of the house and you know I know I mean there's a ton Charles that you've done down through the decades and Chase your involvement with stand together that uh where you're focusing on the the social sector and the the philanthropic side and so I' I'd love to you know hear uh from you know from you like so what's kind of the broader point that you're looking to try to make with Stand Together and and these principles out in society beyond business.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean so like these principles are like unifying.

Right. Like so being able to bring people together unified around these principles. Chase I mean what have you seen or experienced?

Well, I mean, this is so exciting to me what we're working on. It has brought so much um I guess meaning to my life as well. Um I've spent 30 40% of my time on on Stand Together and what what Pop is talking about. Um but I would say I'd hone in on two principles. Um you know, stand together there's a reason it's named that. Um, 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 where you can get 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, you're going to drive the most change if you do things together with more capability and more firepower to to actually drive change to help people. Um so prefer um and so we do that. How do you do that? What principle like really enables that? Preferred partnerships. This is a very very important uh principle and this is business social change applies to everything. Um and we believe and we've learned through failure and we've learned through success and failure on this that a preferred partner is three things have to be present to have a real long-term partnership that works. Uh, one is align vision in terms of where you're going together and it's clear and understood. Two, um, align values and how how you do business together, what the relationship is, what values you you solve problems with and how you challenge each other, all those things, teamwork, respect. Um, and then the third is complimentary capabilities. Everyone brings something different to the table because when you do that then you have synergy in the relationship. So that's the way we look at stand together. That's the way we look at coke and the people that we work with acquisitions. We do suppliers. That's the way I look at marriage. See mom and pop. So I'm I'm good at abstraction and principles and Liz is good at everything else.

So I have an improvement program every morning.

But but with that preferred partnership model, that's what's enabled us to scale so fast and stand together.

And that's what's enabled us to get a a national scale um by bringing partnerships in sports, in music, in entertainment, in 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 of social change. And they have something that we don't have. They have like influence and followings and these sub communities and and social media that 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 and addiction and mental health, criminal justice reform, transforming education. You can't do it without these like really big meaningful partnerships. And I wanted to just highlight Witchah specifically.

Yeah. Go ahead.

Um uh I talk we're 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 Witchaw due to a lot lot of the people that are are in this room. Um but you know and stand together doesn't take credit for any of this. This is this is bottom up preferred partnerships where everyone moving together. I feel like stand together is more of a convenor and and st helping people stand together instead of working in silos. But um over the last two or three years largely due to a lot of people in this room we have worked with uh over 200 organizations just within Witchaw. and stand together because those that have a shared vision of what we're trying to do to to drive progress here. We've worked on problems like addiction, foster care, um transforming education um here in Witchaw. And I want to give just a couple examples. Um hope for the hood. Uh we've had over 600 um what would have been gang members come to the other side and use their skills productively as opposed to driving gang violence. Uh Care Portal, which is an amazing organization if you're not familiar with it. Um incredible platform uh to help people and match supply and demand of needs. Over 2,000 people served just since that started over the last like two years. uh the Phoenix, which you worked with. I'm going to steal your thunder. Um and you know this well, it's one of the highest performing locations and we operate in all 50 states with the Phoenix, which is about overcoming addiction. Witchaw is one of the most uh valuable and and gets the the highest results of any location. Over 10,000 served, transforming people's lives just in Witchaw. Just in just in Witchaw. um some of you may have seen the location um downtown, but that that is transformative. And then Family Promise, over 300 families um pulling them out of homelessness, right? And then we're just getting started.

Yeah.

With this. And I I just want to call out a couple leaders, and this is not um this is not a full list. Um hopefully some of these people are in the room, but uh Steve Felmire, he used to be my boss actually at KO. um what he's doing um in affordable housing. Uh John Ralph uh I went to high school with John and just seeing what he's doing with 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 and giving them jobs and showing them that they have um uh they they someone believes in them.

Yeah.

And that they're not throwaway kids, right? I it's like the most heartwarming stuff ever. And John's leveraging his platform and bringing that model in. Um Ryan Batty's driving all the growth, you know, a lot of the growth in care portal. Gan and Yolanda Camarina done incredible work on the north end uh through empowerment. Um and then movement building, you know, Edom Edi from the Kansas Health Foundation and Ben Hutton on on Lead Witchah. Uh again, I could name uh 50 other people, but I just want to highlight some of these leaders that are really they're showing versus telling back to what we were saying on the business, right? And we're doing it together. And so the leverage that we get and the change that we can drive and the results that we're getting that I just went through, it's meaningful. So this is a little bit of a a call to action as well for for anyone that wants to like learn more, get involved. Um, Joe Woodward is leading the effort and I'd say he's a a key community leader, but also like the glue that's really holding all this together. Joe, if you could raise your hand and stand up.

Yeah,

Joe. Joe's gotten out there so much. He probably knows every single person in this room already. Um, but we need more. We have so much so much work to do to really uh drive this community forward. And it's important to all of us, right? There's mutual benefit. This is a huge principle in in getting involved in this. Um because that's better for your business, too. If we can help transform Witchaw, that's better for Coke. 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. I don't know if you guys read that about how Witchaw is on the map for from an affordability and a great place to live. People are talking about this place. It's it's it's awesome, right? People are sick of the coasts, all the BS and the high cost of living. It come you we got to make it more and more attractive place to to live and uh and build our community and help people transform their lives.

Yeah, I think that's amazing. And and and and thinking of thinking about Witchaw as a comparative advantage. Um you you you touched on it, Chase, and and and and so I'd like to maybe kind of talk maybe bridge a little bit to the things that you're building, you know, downtown and investing in in downtown. So, in a lot of ways, I mean, you touched on a little bit, but I'm thinking about like like why Witchaw and make make all this investment and you know, what is it? What's your vision?

Well, I mean, I I'd give my father a tremendous amount of credit here in keeping us in Witchaw and and showing me, you know, the value of Witchaw versus being somewhere else. And I left for a while. I went to Texas A&M and I wanted to be in in Austin, Texas, where there was a great music scene and have a good time and all that. And uh what I realized was um back in 2003 that I was missing an incredible opportunity. And frankly, I missed the culture. I missed the friendships that I had here. And I was missing an opportunity to go learn from my father and other executives at KO where I wasn't going anywhere in Austin, right? And so um I so I having grown up here and then having come back and um just like it's hard to explain to others the value of Witchaw and the culture and the people and just the I you know back to the whole the farm team discussion. It's like I I that's this is where I want to be. So I care a lot about this community. And um but you also match that with what my personal northstar is. What I've learned through all these failures that we outline in the book and some of the stories that I've I've told is that given my comparative advantage and where I feel like I can stand on the shoulders of giants that have built Coke, built Stand Together, and that's not just the man sitting to my right here. That's all the leaders that have built KO and that's all the community leaders here that have helped transform Witchaw and been part of like our efforts and stand together. Um my I've learned from all that and said, "Okay, what can I uniquely bring to the table?" And what my northstar that I've learned over time is that I love unifying people. I love building community um and empa 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 Coke disruptive technologies. I that's just that's I've kind of like cut out of that cloth. Yeah. And um and so when I think about Witchaw and the Y like downtown and some of the announcements that you guys have seen um you know uh I I see the power of music over the course of my life to to unify people and bring people together. And if you can unify people around something as powerful as music, you can create awareness and you can get more people involved to then drive the social change that we need. Wow. So that's like my true why on all the stuff downtown Somewhere Fest, all these experiments that we're running is that I I view music uniquely as there's incredible power there that um that if we can tap into, we can do things in this community that no other community can do because of the capabilities that we have. So what so building a venue and transforming the Sherk mirror and those those you know creating a whole new like open space um down um in that area in downtown Witchaw. Um why um like our objectives in in doing that is one of like we want to attract more people to Witchaw attract and but also retain. Yeah. And this this is musicians. These are people in the music industry. These are business leaders. These are everything, right? I feel like um that's going to be a a differentiator for Witchaw over time that we can attract and and retain more more talent and more incredible people in this community. That's one. Um the other thing is I talked about it. Number two, the power of music to drive social change. So we will link all the efforts of what we're building downtown to everything that we're trying to do with stand together and this community and so many people in this room don't know exactly how um that's not is not some grand master plan but the capabilities will be there to do that and number three is we have gaps in our community in Witchaw. Yes, I think that we have we don't we we need to supercharge our the entertainment and the music scene and all that. I think there's a huge opportunity there, but just um livability downtown. You go through the supply and demand fundamentals, we are short, we're short housing, we're short affordable housing, we're short apartments, all the expansion that Witchaw State's doing at the biotech center, it's incredibly exciting what what's going to happen downtown. Yeah. So, that's the why that those are the objectives. But the last thing I'll say is that um um I and my team and everyone that's working on this and the community, we're approaching this with absolute humility and openness. We don't know like I've never done anything like this before or we're experimenting. And so we want to learn from Witchaw. We want to learn from business leaders and like what are your ideas and the things that we can do to really make this work and and make it um successful. And we're already doing we're already having lots of meetings with with business leaders with um with with with local leaders with social change leaders to get the best knowledge to create the the best vision and experiment to see what what we can do to to help you know transform downtown but just overall you know the the city at large that we all love and and live in. So um that's but that's another um call to action as well. And so you can practically like connect if you are interested and you have ideas and you want to weigh in on that. Um we have a gentleman here that's on the team. Uh Justin Healey, are you in? Justin's over here. So he's in the back of the room. Raising raise your hand again Justin so everyone can see you. Um Justin Healey is the guy to to talk to that where we can we can bring in all these ideas and figure out how to make this the the best thing possible.

It's so so it sounds a little bit like bottom up. one of the principles here absolutely around around what it is that we're trying to do. So, are you proud of your son? I mean, let me the things that he's doing, right? I mean,

Let's see what he says here.

Yeah. Right.

Yeah. Absolutely.

Yeah. For sure. but through I mean just it's I give my mom and my father a lot of credit because it it's been a rocky road and will continue to be and um yeah I'm just grateful I love this fan love my mother

Well, I mean on on that note and and what what might be a question on everybody's mind, Charles, I mean, you're 90. You're

Got another 30 years.

Well, I'm a young um I mean, but but but you're not slowing down. I mean, every time I interact with you, I mean, it's you get more and more energy uh as you go. But but I think about the fact that you've just written a book with your son, you know, with Chase. And so, you know, is this, you know, kind of like a like a handing of the baton? Are we looking at the next CEO of of Coke, Inc.?

Thank God our cafeteria is incredible.

Right.

Yes. A lot of people would think that that question is an elephant in the room.

It's actually not.

Is it not?

It's not. If you apply the principles and you you learn and you apply the principles because like the way we think about Coke and you're a Sorry, my kids are probably calling me. Um uh the um you know a lot of people say well coke is a family business. We don't run it like a family business. You you run it like a meritocracy. And if you really believe in the principle of comparative advantage, that's that's why I, you know, that's why I was it it sucked, but it was the right thing to do to fire myself from being the, you know, CEO of Coke Fertilizer to learn where my u my gift really was and like what I love to do as well. Um, and so I we have to apply those principles to the family members as well. Just because the last name Coke is on the building doesn't mean that I should be next in line to run it. Now, I mean, if I had those skills and if I was the right person at some given time, then okay, maybe a candidate, the board would decide that, right? But for for me and where I am today, it's like we have the most amazing leaders at KO. 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 KO, I don't want to be the 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 I want to I want to be in the role where I can go add the most value to the company.

Yeah. And so I think that is a you think about especially if there's family-owned businesses here or that are listening to this that is a very tough one to because the paradigm is uh you know like you asked me is like well is Chase like next in line? Um the paradigm is well you know Chucky Jr. of course he's going to take the reigns or whatever but but if you apply comparative advantage that not might not be true. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, that's good then. Well, uh so so we're wrapping up and uh thanks everybody for uh you know for for being here and and listening. Thank you Charles Chase for uh you know just sitting down for a talk and you know sharing more about your your why and and and the book and these principles. um you know so any any any parting parting words that that you all would have for this audience as uh as they as they leave out?

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

Yep. Go be a model. Hey, give it up for us al too. Great job. Ready to go skiing.