AMTALK #TẬPĐẶCBIỆT | HÀNH TRÌNH DI SẢN | DOUG DEVOS - ĐỒNG CHỦ TỊCH HĐQT TẬP ĐOÀN AMWAY

Thank you, sir. Absolutely good to be here.

Excellent. Yeah.

Oh gosh, I love it. I love it. So, this is my sixth trip to Vietnam, but it's been quite a while since my last trip. I think it's been nine years. And the city, the country, you can just tell it's growing and developing and moving quickly, so it's so fun to be back.

Sure, I'll do my best.

Well, and you're exactly right. It's the way they lived, you know. And so, before we even started to talk about those words, you just saw them being lived out. Dad always encouraged us to make our own decisions, to make our own choices. It was up to us. He gave us agency. What do you want to do? Where do you want to go? What are your aspirations, your goals? He always would talk about that. He would encourage and created a family unit. In a funny way, the way we created that, we were neighbors with the Van Andel family. So business and family was always connected. So they were our neighbors. So the Van Andels would be at our house, we would be at their house. We all grew up together in a very rural area in Michigan. And so basically we had each other and creating that family atmosphere. He never allowed us to feel like we were stuck. If there was something going wrong, you're always going to work your way through it to get to a better place. So hope was something that he would always encourage. You had a bad test in school, you had a bad result at a sporting event, whatever the case may be: go practice, go study, go do something else, you'll work through it, you can be better, move on. And then there was always the rewards, the encouragement, the congratulations: "Great job," you know. And we think of reward only in a financial sense, but there's so many other rewards you get in life when somebody just encourages you or says, "Well done," whatever it can be when you have that sort of interaction. That was the experience I had growing up my whole life in every aspect. I grew up as part of the Amway business. I went to events and those sorts of things, so I certainly saw them there, but I saw them in everything that he did.

We always did things together. And to a certain extent, being in a rural area, there weren't a lot of other people, so you did things together. Your family became your best friends. The first person you would go to to find somebody who could take care of you, who was cheering for you, who would support you was your family. And so he created that atmosphere. He and my mother created that atmosphere. We took time to do things together, to have meals together, the simple things. If we had a chance for vacation, we would do that together. We would learn together, we would talk about things in the world, we would talk about business things, we would talk about personal things, but they were around the dinner table. It wasn't like dad went to work and that was a different world; that world came back. And so, as a family, you always felt like you were part of something, and that the unit, when we were together, that we could work our way together through any challenge that came our way or maximize any opportunity that came our way.

I remember once when I was younger, in elementary school, maybe I'm eight, nine, ten years old, and I didn't think I could make friends. I didn't think I could make a friend with anybody and I didn't have any friends, or this sort of thing. And my father just became aware of that and he said, "Let me drive you to school." So we were in a rural area, so he would drive to school. And the whole trip he just encouraged me, "You can do it. You can make friends. Just go out there, just have courage. Just go introduce yourself." And he gave me a lot of things to think about and to go do. And I remember him dropping me off at the school, and I'm walking to the school, and from the car he yells at me, "Go get 'em, Mr. Happy!" You know, wow, encouragement. And I remember going to school that day feeling different. I remember saying, "I can make a friend. I can do something different. I'm going to introduce myself. I'm going to step out. I'm going to have a little courage," put that idea of hope—that we're not stuck, that you could move through it—into action. And it impacted my life.

Yeah. I think it's the culture that mom and dad set for us in our family. So the enduring, most impactful thing for me is that I lived every day watching him demonstrate those values in action, and then I could start to learn to do that too. And one thing he said, even as I got older, he said, "I'm always going to be your father. Even though I was an adult with children of my own, I'm always going to be your father. I'm going to tell you what I see you doing well, what I see you doing poorly, and I'm going to keep coaching you, keep being a father for you." And that never ended up until the day he passed away. He was always thinking about that. And so that's the enduring legacy, is that he taught me about life and how to be a good person, and he demonstrated it himself.

Yes, exactly. I'm always going to be his son.

Sure.

That statement, look at where it starts. It's about people. It's all about people. It's always been about people. The Amway business is about people connecting with people. It's about people helping people. It's about building relationships with people. So, that's where it starts. And like the discussion we were just having, it's not just a business. It's not just about making money, although making money is important. It's not just about developing customers, although developing customers is important—all those elements. It's about living a better life, right? And let me unpack that a little bit, because there was never anything prescriptive about Amway to say, "This is what a better life means. This is what you have to do. If you want to be successful in Amway, you have to do this and this." Now, like I said, there's elements that you have to do to be successful. But we were never going to make the choice for somebody. So somebody's purpose for having a business of their own, for starting their own family business, was going to be their decision. They may have had a situation where both spouses worked, they had a family, and maybe one wanted to come home and do that. They may have had a choice they wanted to make as a family. They needed the finances to maybe move to a different location or do something different, but it was going to be their choice. What's their goal? Because then they will do what's necessary to work to achieve what's important to them. So we never defined what better was, and we never do. It's not our goal—it's not a corporate goal that we need to achieve this and so everybody has to go to work to make that happen. It flips it around the other way: what can we do so that you can achieve your goal? So we want to help people live a better life, and that definition of better is always up to the individual.

In one respect, nobody could fill his shoes. My father was bigger than life, and Jay Van Andel, they're bigger-than-life characters. You could never fill their shoes. But I never felt pressure because, again, I was given a choice: do I want to do this or not? Do I want to join Amway and be part of the Amway business, or do I want to do something else? I was given a choice. It was never put on me, and it was never said, "You have to do it the way I did it." Now, there was a set of principles: the Founding Fundamentals and our values. There was expectations about how we would apply those principles, but they always left room for us to apply our own style and a new generation understanding for what was happening in the marketplace. So I never felt pressure. I never felt like I had to do it. I never felt that they were saying, "This is what you must do and this is how you must do it to carry on the family name." It was never done like that. It was, "Here's an opportunity, and you have the opportunity to take it forward. You have the opportunity to build on what we've started. You have the opportunity to make it and shape it, in some sense, in your own way." And that then connects in for me and my siblings and the Van Andels in the second generation to say, "Well, we have to think that way about the next generation as well, and we have to create opportunity. We don't want to create pressure. We just want to say, if this feels right for you, if you believe that you can add value here and you can make a contribution here, then come join us and help us. But you don't have to do it our way. What's the new way? What's going on in the generation that you're part of? How should we think about meeting the needs of that generation? Because that's the rising generation, and we'd better be prepared for that." And so, I think about that often. That's a great question, and it's one where there could be, and there's lots of examples of, one generation passing on pressure to another, but that was never the case in ours. I'm very thankful for that. It was always about opportunity.

Yeah. Maybe I just was too blindly listening, you know, but I never felt I had a disagreement. I never felt I needed to prove anything different. Everything he said and they lived made sense to me. When I was in school, I'd have different friends that you would meet, you make different experiences as you grow. You go to university, and you start meeting friends and a wider audience, and you just kind of observe people, and everything that they talked about and that they lived made sense to me. And I began to kind of see it in other people's lives. And you would see when people would behave a little bit differently than the things that we were taught, you would see a result that I didn't really like. I didn't want to go that direction; I liked this direction. I never felt like I had to argue with them, I had to question. I had to find it out for myself, right? But I was given the opportunity to test it. Go out in the world, go experience things, go make your own decisions if this is what you think is right. They always stood for what they believed in, and they gave me the chance to identify it and believe it myself. But I never really had a chance where I was fighting or I said, "Oh, I don't think I'm going to take that one," because I would just take it, but test it in my own life. And that made it more powerful for me, because I made my own decision to choose it, as opposed to feeling like it was forced on me.

It's a great question again, because when Dad and Jay started their relationship when they were young and in high school, they built this relationship for many years before they started Amway. But these were the elements they talked about all the time when they were kids: "We want to be in business for ourselves. We want to be able to make choices—freedom. We want to choose our own future. We want to have that ability to do that, right? And we want to do it together as friends." They were kind of one family. Like I said, they decided to live next to each other and start their own families, and the families were connected, so that was important to them. And hope: we're going to work through tough times. They grew up in the Great Depression in the United States. They had very significant challenges when they were young, and they saw their parents work through it. So they knew that there was always light at the end of the tunnel, if you will. There was a better future if we could just work through this tough time to get there. They were never going to be stuck. And then reward: they wanted to build that in there. Obviously, they wanted to achieve success; that was who they were. So I think of it sometimes like Simon Sinek, right, and Start with Why. They started with who. So the Founders Fundamentals kind of represent who they are and why they did what they did. And then the values kind of go from there. And so when you take the values and you start to say, now, this is how we're going to work every day. We're going to work in a spirit of partnership. We're going to be full of integrity. We're not going to take shortcuts. We're not going to do things that are going to embarrass us later down the road. We're going to have that right up front. We're going to be responsible and accountable for our actions, and when we make mistakes, we're going to step up and say we've made mistakes. But we're always going to put the person up front: the personal worth, the value of each and every individual in the act of the sales organization of sponsoring somebody or meeting somebody. This is a business opportunity that's available to anybody. And for years, people have tried to say, "Well, you might want to segment that a little bit. You only want people with experience, or you only want people that have education." And Dad and Jay always rejected that. This is a business for everybody. And so that's important, that every day when we go to work, we're thinking about people first, right? We're thinking about working together with people. We're thinking about maintaining the standards of integrity that we hold ourselves to. And we think about the responsibilities that we have to be thinking about others, to be acting and planning and preparing for the future, to be adjusting for the market, to be developing new products and doing all the things that we need to do as a good business to be successful for generations to come.

Yeah, well, it was important for our generation because in many ways in conversations, we would talk about these things and use these words, but it was important for us to say we want it written down so that we know we're getting it right, so we have the confidence that when we articulate these ideas, we have the words that fit for our generation that make sense to us and so that we're able to communicate with others. This was a time when the business was growing dramatically. We were opening in markets around the world and expanding. And while we were taking over in our generation as their health was diminishing and as they were passing the torch, if you will, it was important for us to have these meetings and to write these words down and to talk about what they all meant so we clearly understood, so we could have the confidence to communicate them with future generations and with new people who were joining Amway. As the business was small in the beginning, it was easy. We all saw each other every day. It was a small geography, so you could do that. But as it got bigger, we knew we would need to find the way to communicate more broadly and more consistently. And that's why we wanted to sit down and say, "Okay, how do we do this?" And this is a similar exercise we're going through with the third generation. Even at this point now, they're saying, "Well, here's what that means to us. Here's how we would articulate it to the new people who are joining Amway today." It's the same principles, the same ideas, but how would we talk about it so we continue to have that discussion, so we can continue on for future generations.