Executive Chairman, Valero Energy
Valero Energy's CEO, JOE GORDER, address to the Alliance of Men in San Antonio
In an early October 12, 2017 morning address to San Antonio's Alliance of Men, Valero Energy's President, CEO and Chairman tells the assembled audience of ~300 men of his sometimes difficult walk with the Lord Jesus until reaching the pinnacle of his working career. His is an abiding tale of Faith without reservation.
About Joseph Gorder
In an October 2017 address to the Alliance of Men in San Antonio, Valero Energy's President, CEO, and Chairman Joseph Gorder spoke about his Christian faith and its role in his career. He described his relationship with the Lord Jesus as a constant in his life and recounted periods of spiritual and professional difficulty, including a "dark period" when he felt he was not being spiritually fed. Gorder attributed positive changes in his circumstances to events outside his control, such as Valero's acquisition of Ultramar Diamond Shamrock, which he said altered the company's culture, and the appointment of a new pastor at his church. Gorder also discussed his leadership philosophy, stating that his job is to serve everyone in the company and that he cringes at the behavior of CEOs who think they are above it all. He advised the audience to avoid isolation, to be accountable to other men, and to treat every day as game day. He described email as "terribly disruptive" and recommended putting it in a junk folder. Gorder concluded by saying that when he trusts God, his path is straight, but when he does not, he "zigged and zagged and bounced off the guardrails."
Transcript (41 segments)
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Joseph Gorder0:13
So I guess, hey, do you know it's truly an honor to be here with you and Dwight, thanks for the kind introduction. Bill, thanks for the wonderful prayer. For all of you that have been praying for me here for the last several days, thank you very much for that. You know, we're all in this together, and what I'm going to do this morning is talk to you a little bit about really how God's intervened in my life. And you know, I'm going to get naked, so this is one of those interesting times that none of us probably are particularly comfortable talking about.
One constant in my life, one, and that's my relationship with the Lord Jesus. He has walked with me, he's had his hand on me, and it has been an incredible journey together. And as I go through some of these events that I've experienced, I think you'll see very clearly where either he hit me with a stick or just put his hand on my head and pointed me in a different direction, and we end up where he wants us at the end of the day. Now, I haven't lived a life that's been defined by tragedy, okay? I haven't been destitute, I haven't had terrible illness.
Through this, I think you'll see that you can try to figure out how these pieces all fit together, but let me describe myself. And you guys may not believe this, but I am an introverted person, okay? I tend to be a little bit reclusive. And I see people smiling that know me well, but you know, the facts are I don't get energized by being in large groups of people. I prefer to be in smaller groups of people, and I think that's what kind of defines an introvert. I've always been a very hard worker, I've tried to overachieve, and I've been strong-willed. You know, I think you'll see that as we go through this story. I have absolutely never been the smartest guy in any room I've ever been in. I wasn't the best athlete as a young man. I have been married to the same woman for 35 years, my first and only.
Many of them are here today, and I thank you guys for being here with me. And I've made a ton of mistakes and bad decisions, and I am an absolutely flawed human being. So a lot of you could probably relate to some of this, okay? But that is in fact the case. So let me take a minute. I'm going to walk through some of the events of my life. And really, you know, you could say, well, Joe's telling his story. This really isn't my story, this is God's story, all right? I've been there, but this is his story. And who knows, all the events that took place previously in my life didn't lead up to this very moment, and who knows what comes next. But this is what he's done in my life, so let's just keep that in mind as we go.
My grandmother, my aunt and uncle lived downstairs. My grandmother lived downstairs, and we were upstairs, and then there was another family in the fourth apartment. Very cramped quarters. My dad worked shift work as a police officer. There would be months when I wouldn't see him awake, okay? We would get up, go to school, he'd be asleep. We'd come home, he'd be at work. And this cycle continued for a long, long time, and it led to a lot of frustration in my parents' marriage. And there was a lot of arguing and a lot of drama and a lot of chaos in the house that I grew up in. And my mother used to tell us all the time, be good, don't make your dad mad, you know, be obedient, and so on. And so my sister and I kind of grew up trying to be pleasers.
An event for me took place. I was eight years old. My mom got pregnant. The school that she taught at was a private school where my sister and I attended. She had to stop working to take care of my little sister, and so we went to the Lutheran school. This was the third grade. So Nancy and I, my older sister and I, transferred to the Lutheran school, and it was there that this transformation took place in my family. We started going to Sunday worship, my dad, my mom, all of us, and the Lord just started to work in our lives. And so, you know, that's one of those things that you don't think about at the time, but when you reflect back on it, you know, this situation changed from a very stressful, uncomfortable situation.
I thought I might be a pastor, but that call never came. So I went to the University of Missouri St. Louis. I studied business, and while I was in the university, I worked full-time. I was a terrible student, I will confess. I was immature, and I think I had ADD, which they didn't diagnose then. And so, you know, I just wasn't a very good student. But I kind of muddled along for a couple years, and then I started dating a girl, very nice girl, very smart girl, and a competitive spirit kicked in, and I started to get serious about school. And our relationship continued to develop, and during my senior year of college, we got engaged. And so that relationship progressed. I graduated.
I'll tell you the thing that is relevant. One week before that was supposed to happen, I got a call from her, and she didn't want to get married. And I will tell you, that was brutal. Because I was away from home, away from my family that I'd grown very close to. I never had an interest in leaving St. Louis. Found myself out of town, away from home, and now not with the relationship that I expected I was going to have. So the company I worked for, really good guys, and they immediately transferred me from Columbus down to Dallas. And that was a second major event in my life, the fact that that relationship ended. Because what I didn't tell you about that relationship was that the lady that I was going to marry was not a Christian person. In fact, she was...
Well, obviously against my will, God decided that that wasn't going to happen, at least I wasn't going to be involved if it was, and he moved me on down the road. And so I was working for ETS in Dallas. I left ETS and went to work for Price Waterhouse, and then I met Lacey. And that was one of the best things that ever happened in my life, because I was living pretty fast and loose at that point in time. And I ended up meeting a good Baptist girl who actually was worshiping regularly, and she and I ended up getting married. That was in 1982. It's funny because the pastor that married us, he was a Baptist pastor. We got married in Natchez, Mississippi. His name was Oh Dean Puckett.
We can duke it out later, but you know, the joke about the Lutherans is they will greet each other in the liquor store, okay? So anyway, you know, Lacey's mom said to Oh Dean, is it okay that Lacey marries a Lutheran? And he said, well, I'd rather that she marry a good Lutheran than a bad Baptist. I guess that puts us in our place, huh? Okay, anyway, so we got married. And you know, it was a challenging time because at Price Waterhouse, I was traveling all the time. And so for the first two years that we were married, I was gone all of it, every day of the week. And it was very uncomfortable. We weren't...
We had a newborn son in a new location with a new job that was really a terrible job. And during that period of time, Occidental Petroleum made a play to buy Diamond Shamrock. So not only was I a new father in a different place, but I was going to be unemployed. And so that was a pretty stressful situation. I was working every day to try to get out of that situation and get to a better situation. And we prayed about it very aggressively, and the Lord delivered by letting us move to San Antonio. And when we got to San Antonio, being a Lutheran, we decided to test different churches. And we went to Concordia, and we sat in the pew, and I listened to Dr. Murkin's. Those of you that know him...
We talked about it, you know, after Sunday, and you know, should we go back there? Well, being the man that he was, he didn't mess around. He called. He called us on Tuesday. He said, oh, I saw you were a visitor. Can I initiate your letter of transfer? Okay, I was too afraid to say no. So anyway, we started going to Concordia, and this was a true blessing for us. It was at this point that God connected the dots in my life between his word, church life, and my profession. And it was the first time I ever had it. I grew up in the Lutheran Church, and I could tell you about the Scriptures, but I had no idea how it applied to what I...
For many years, I was close to him. And you know, whether it be a formal office or teaching Bible study, we were involved in it. And God blessed us at that period of time with some very calm waters. During that period, our daughter Allie was born, and that was a true blessing. My career was progressing. I ended up getting my MBA, and spiritually I was at a very high point. And then in 1995, Dr. Murkin's retired, and we called a new pastor. And I was on that call committee because I was chairman of the congregation at that time. And Concordia's ministry was very vibrant and moving forward. And the new pastor we called came in, and things continued. We continued to grow the church. We ended up moving from the Bassy...
To have in your life, but the church was doing well, and I'd been so active in it that I felt like, okay, that phase of my life's over. Dr. Murkin's transitioned over, and I felt a little... in my job, maybe things weren't progressing as quickly as I liked. And it was at that point in time that I got a call from a former boss who said, hey, you know, I'd like you to come to work for me. And so we set up a time to visit, and we visited, and I ended up accepting a job with Anderson Consulting. The issue was I'd have to leave San Antonio and move to Houston. So that was the plan. I took the job and was working for Anderson. The dilemma there was that it was a traveling job again. And so I was...
Contented where I was. So we went ahead and did it. As I mentioned, the travel was extensive. And actually during this period of time, my kids were absolutely miserable. My wife was miserable. I wasn't serving the Lord in any way because I was gone all the time. Come back to San Antonio on the weekends, and we'd worship. And this is another what I consider to be a life-changing event for us. In March of 1996, after worship, I went up to the altar. And we do prayers for people that have prayer needs at the end of worship. And I went up and I talked to our pastor. And he and I were friends, 'cause I'd been on the call committee and had been active. And he said, how things go? And I said, really not...
He directed me to go to Houston with these feelings of contentment, so on and so forth. I don't want to frustrate his plan for my life, and so I'll probably tough it out for a while. So anyway, we left and went home. I packed and headed to Milan, New Jersey, where I was working at that point in time. And a sequence of events happened that's pretty interesting. So our pastor that day went out and played golf. It was on Terra. He ran into my old boss, Bob Becker, who I was very close to at Diamond Shamrock. Bob Becker went back into the office on Monday, told Roger Hemminghaus, a good Lutheran man, a fine Christian man, he was the CEO of Diamond Shamrock, told him, hey, Joe's not happy, maybe we should give him a call. They called, we visited.
And what's really interesting is that...
We were house hunting. And so at dinner that night, she was talking about all the places we're going to go look at on Friday and Saturday. And before we finished, I told her, you know, there's something else we need to talk about. And I said, got a call from Roger today. He offered for me to come back. You know my kids, I told you they were miserable. They were absolutely on point in this conversation, and they were 11 and 9. You know, those kids don't pay attention to anything, right? These kids were on point. And so they listened, and we finished the dinner. And she said, what are you going to do? And I said, oh no, we're going to pray about it. So that night was one of...
This is one of the few times I've experienced this. It was like the light went on in the room, and I could hear this voice. It said, what don't you understand about this situation? You're miserable, your kids are miserable, you're not serving in any way. What don't you get? I had this guy call you and ask you to come back. What don't you get? That's the way the Lord uses the 2x4, right? And so I all of a sudden felt that peace that comes when you know the right decision. I woke everybody up at 5:00. I said, we're going back to San Antonio. I went in that morning, quit, and we moved back. And I spent the next several years with...
Friends like Rich and Chris and others. And it was an interesting period of time. I left in '99 because the culture just didn't fit with me, and there were a whole host of things that were taking place. And I went to work for a company here called Duncan Smith. I was partnered with some great guys. We were doing middle-market investment banking here, and it was a lot of fun. I had a client, though, that wanted to go public, and they needed help. And so I ended up leaving and going to work for this client in late 2000. And the business was blowing and going, and things looked great. And then 9/11 happened, and the wheels came off the cart. If you guys recall at that period, it was a dark period, and everything slowed down materially. And that's what happened. So our business...
Spiritually, because Concordia was in a crisis also. We had an issue with the pastor, and I would tell you I almost feel like, you know, I was not being fed. Now maybe it was me because I was in this dark period. Maybe the Holy Spirit was as present as possible. I know I really don't understand this, but I do know how I felt. And it was a very dark period spiritually and professionally. And so we prayed about this aggressively. I started looking for a job, and I talked to men. You really find companies here in town, and I wasn't having any success.
The thing that took place was that Bill Tucker was called to be pastor at Concordia. And that was another thing that I didn't participate in because I didn't feel like I did so well in the previous call committee, so I stayed out of this one. But the guys that did participate in it did an outstanding job. And so those two things came together to work in a very interesting way in my life. So Bill became my friend, and we used to pray a lot. He'd provide me really good counsel on the professional side. You know, I knew Bill Greehey not well, but he had gone to Concordia, and so he was being pastored by Dr. Murkin's still at this point in time. He had changed churches, but Dr. Murkin's was pastoring him.
And Doc immediately picked up the phone and started calling Bill Greehey. And for those of you that know Dr. Murkin's, I told you what happened when he called me. I rolled over like a dog getting his belly scratched, right? So Bill Greehey, he was tougher than that, okay? But Doc just kept badgering him and badgering him and badgering him with phone calls until finally he agreed. He said, okay, okay, okay, I'll talk to him. So anyway, I got a chance to visit with him. He described the company, and frankly, it was a company that I felt like suited me very well, and hopefully I would be good for them also. So I interviewed, and I got to talk to my dear friend Mike Siskowski. And I didn't hear anything for a long period of time. Maybe it wasn't that long, but it sure seemed...
I was scraping and screaming at God at the top of my lungs with praise music in the background. And I told him, I said, I am at my wit's end on this. I need you to get me out of this situation because my kids were going to be going to college, and we depleted our financial resources. I mean, I was in what I considered to be dire straits. And I went into the office, and I sat down, and doggone it, the phone rang immediately. And it was Mike Siskowski calling to offer me a job at Valero. Mike, you've never heard this before, but your voice sounded like an angel, and you'll never hear it again, but...
Guys like Chris Quinn, who invited me to speak here today. And you know, I was able to send my kids to college. You know, I learned a lot about how to adjust to a new work environment. I had a lot of friends helping me along the way. And then Bill Greehey retired. And when Bill retired, Bill Klesse took over. And Bill Klesse is a fine man. I was promoted to a new job, and things were continuing to go very well. But as Bill Klesse got closer to retirement, we went through a succession planning process. And that was a traumatic process for all of us. It was traumatic for the entire leadership team at the company. And you know, it's the kind of thing that a board of directors needs to do just to be sure that they dot the i's and cross the t's, but it's very disruptive to an...
People were saying to me, okay, you need to watch out for this person because they're trying to outmaneuver you and outflank you in this and that. And the one thing that I would tell them, and it's one of the things I learned throughout the course of my life, is that, you know, my full belief is that if it's God's will that it happen, it's going to happen. And if it's not his will, he's got something better for me to do, and I'm going to go do that. And that was my perspective throughout the whole process. And I know a bunch of these guys in this room heard me say that more than once. And so you guys know how all this worked out. Here we are today. I got a challenging job. I've got a great team. I am on a great team. You know, I tell everybody, we played different positions, but we're all on the same team.
We have five grandsons. We have a little granddaughter that will be born in five or six weeks. How about that? When my daughter told me, I couldn't even get in my brain what it was going to be like to have a girl. I'm so used to the chaos of five boys running around. And you know, from this job that I have today, I have the opportunity to do things like this and hopefully to help other people as we go. Now, I'll finish this little storyline here with just a comment. You know, in 1996, I think God winked at me. And this is something I don't talk about, and I frankly never thought about for years and years and years, okay?
I was sharing my consulting experience and how the Lord intervened and how my pastor played a role in this. And so after that service, an older gentleman came up to me, and his name was Bill Canepa. And Mr. Canepa was like a founding member of Concordia Lutheran Church. He was a head son that was a pastor. He was just a fine Christian man. And he came up to me and he said, Joe, I had a dream about you last night. And I said, really, Mr. Canepa, what's that? And he said, I had a dream that you were going to run Valero. And I said, can't be. I said, I work for Diamond Shamrock. And I said, you know...
He said, no, I'm sure it was Valero. No, was that coincidence? Was that prophetic? I don't know. You guys can decide. But it happened in 1996, and I took this job in 2014. So you know, when I think back about this path, okay? And you guys are wondering, okay, what's the deal here? Well, what would have happened in my life if the Lord had let my parents divorce, okay? Or what would have happened if I'd have married the wrong woman? Or what would have happened if Dr. Murkin's hadn't called and asked for our letter of transfer? Or what would have happened...
Think about our lives. We think about we're going to plan all the activities in our lives, we're going to make all these decisions. I'm going to tell you guys, life is way too complicated for us to plan, okay? We can't do it. We cannot control what happens in our lives. Where you think you're going today may not be where you're headed tomorrow. And whose hand do you want on the wheel, okay? I told you I've had a walk with the Lord for 60 years. And when I've grabbed the wheel, I have bounced off of the left guardrail and the right guardrail. I've made bad decisions like crazy. And I don't know where he wants me at...
The wheel, and the ways of the world will try to guide you, and they'll try to shape you, and they'll try to affect your self-esteem. And you guys just need to be sure that you don't look at the world for direction on how you're going to live your life, because it's skewed. You need to look to one place where you're going to get that direction in your life. And then the one thing I hope that's very clear is that God has blessed me with great relationships all along the way. He gave me a wonderful godly wife. He gave me dear friends who happened to be pastors, and dear friends who pastor me that aren't pastors. And my relationship with these men hasn't been casual. It's been intimate and transformative in my life. And they have not let me get isolated. They have not let me get down and...
You will get into a period, one of these as I described, dark periods where you're vulnerable. And if you're making decisions for yourself, you're going to go the wrong way and make a bad decision. Stay close to men of faith that can provide you with wise, honest counsel, and you're going to be much better off. And these guys need to be Christian men, and they need to be prayer warriors. And I think all you probably have to do in this room is look to your left and look to your right, and you could find somebody to help you with that. So you know, I would tell you that doing what I did in the church, serving as chairman of the congregation, teaching Bible class, and just being actively involved, prepared me for my career.
It prepared me for the things that I'm dealing with now. The other thing by being involved in church work and really being close to our Lord is that you learn that the greatest leader in the world, in the history of creation, led by serving. And it's not about me. My job is to serve everybody in the company and on a broader sense, the people in the community. We're here to serve. We're not here to be served. And that's why I cringe when I see some of the behavior of CEOs of companies that think that they are above it all. We are not. My job is to be sure that these guys that are so incredibly talented and these ladies have the tools and the resources that they need to do their job. And you...
What I would tell you is that I think God deserves our best. We have these phrases that we're using in the company right now, and I don't want them to get trite, so we'll probably change it here at some point in time. But you know, you got to plan a day that leads to excellence, and you need to be sure that you do what's important in eternal terms. And you know, there's been different methodologies around this, right? Some people say you don't want to focus on doing what's urgent, you want to focus on doing what's important, and so on. But you know, take it a step further and think about doing stuff that's going to be with us eternally and not temporarily, okay? And I think that'll help you make better choices also. They sure have with me. This other phrase we've got that we...
For anything, you want it to be fresh and 100% right. Going into that, you didn't want to shank it. And so if you treat every day like game day and you behave properly the night before, you're going to come in and you're going to be able to give your best, and it's going to be wonderful. And then the one thing we need to guard against, because this is happening in our days every day, is that there's a tremendous amount of static and interference that comes into you. And it might be emails. You know, I find email to be terribly disruptive most of the time. I don't know how many hundreds of emails you guys get in a day. How many of them do you really need to act on? Five percent? Three percent? I don't know. I love those ones that I get that say, Joe, sorry we didn't get to connect just yet, but we'll be calling you again right...
To check my ego, because everybody's got one, and I got one. And humility is the greatest gift that God can give us, I think, as a personality characteristic. And you know, when you think about the people that you've responded well to in your life, it's really those that you thought cared more about you than they cared about themselves, right? And that takes humility to do that. And so we just need to be sure that, you know, if you are the smartest guy in the room, definitely don't tell anybody that you're the smartest guy in the room, not if you want to work with them. It's a lot better for them to determine that on their own than for you to share that with them. So it...
You know, during that succession planning process, there was tremendous frustration, and I really wasn't dealing with it very well. And so I was mad. I mean, I'd be angry all the time at watching the activities that were taking place. And Lacey and I would be out planting flowers in the garden or something one Sunday morning, and I'm thinking about all this stuff right now. I'm getting madder and madder and madder. And she'd say, you weren't going to have lunch. Let's say, not leave me alone, right? It was one of these ridiculous reactions, okay? This went on for a good while, and I didn't share with her what I was dealing with and the frustration I was having because I didn't want to hurt her.
She wasn't the kind of woman that she is. She probably would have told me to hit the road, but you know what, she didn't. And one day when she was crying and asking me why I'm always so angry, I realized that's when the light went on. And I realized that I was hurting her. And so guys, because we all care about each other, tell your wife what's going on. We're not that strong, and they're probably a lot stronger than we give them credit for. Tell them what's going on, because if you don't, they might think it's them. And for you young guys, you've heard me say that before. And for you, you'll get a wife, and you need to be sure you tell her what's going on. By the way, very eligible bachelor here, in case...
The way that a man treats a woman, by the way, it treats your wife. And finally, you figure, those of you guys with daughters, tell her how much you love her every day and that she's the most beautiful thing in the world, because she's going to get the love of a man somewhere, and you want it to be your love and not some 16-year-old guy's love. Tell her every day how much you love her and how special she is, and I think that will help preserve her. So I'll wrap up here. But you know, God provided each one of us with a unique set of gifts. That's his gift to us, okay? Now, the gift that you can give him is to...
You know, trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he'll make your paths straight. And so I think when I've trusted him, my path has been straight. When I haven't trusted him, I've zigged and zagged and bounced off the guardrails. So my prayer for you would be that you do better than I did and that you stay with him closely all the time. And just to wrap this up, you know, one of the things I think, cards on the table, you guys cannot let yourself get isolated, because things will get distorted, and the world will lead you down a path you don't want to go. You need to have men you can talk to, and you need to be accountable. And you need to be sure if you care about somebody else that you hold them accountable. I have...
This card, it provides them access to the... of this event, and you want to yell at him. What else do they do if they felt this card? I mean, they're not going to get badgered by Dr. Murkin's anymore, but okay, okay. But anyway, guys, don't be alone, okay? And if there's anything I can ever do to help, please don't hesitate to ask. And with that, I'll stop and turn it back over to Joe. Thank you, guys.