Leaders and Legends - Amos McMullian

Thank you very much, Dean Dumpty. Appreciate those kind remarks. A few years back, Senator Paul Coverdale from Georgia was honoring Dr. Henry Kissinger in Atlanta, and they asked me to chair the meeting and make the introductions, which I did. And when Dr. Kissinger got up to speak, he said how pleased he was that I had made the introduction. And I thought, my goodness, here's a man who's heard thousands of introductions, that surely must be high praise. So I puffed up a little bit. And then Dr. Kissinger went on to say that the reason he was so pleased is that now he wouldn't be the only one speaking with an accent. Praise indeed. I am aware that I do speak with a mouth full of magnolias. It's a function of growing up in the deep South. But we have our good friend Ben Griswold here to interpret for us if necessary. Ben is bilingual; he speaks both English and Southern. Understandable. I told my remarks 'Wisdom for Grandchildren,' and the reason for that is these are the things I want my grandchildren to know. Now, since all of you are someone's grandchild, I want you to know them too. I cannot tell you everything you need to know, but you need to know everything I'm going to tell you. And so we'll get started with it. The students here today are in business school, so you want to be a manager, and that's great. The world needs more good managers. But you need to be aware that there's a rumor going around that God created the business enterprise to teach mankind about humility, because just about the time you think you've got everything figured out, bound you're fixing to learn a new lesson. Now 'fixing to learn' translates into 'you're about to learn a new lesson.' That's Southern. The first thing you have to know if you're going into business is about people. You have to know about character. Now, people who lack character would have you believe that character does not count. Don't believe it. Not only does character count, it counts above all. Character is the man. Do not associate with people who lack character, because they will always cut a corner, get themselves in trouble, and take you with them. When you get high enough into your organization and you start picking your own team, do not choose someone who lacks character. But first, before you get that high, you're going to have to be chosen to be on somebody's team. And the question is, is your character such that someone would choose you? Never compromise your personal integrity, no matter how attractive the gain may be. The cost will always be greater, I promise you. You need to learn that opportunities come disguised as problems. You need to know the difference between being bold and being reckless. And after you've learned that difference, learn to be bold. You need to learn the difference between being stubborn and being steadfast. Stubborn is when you are wrong and you will not change your mind. Steadfast is when you're right and you will not change your mind, even though the whole world is screaming and hollering at you and beating you over the head and telling you that you're wrong and you ought to change your mind. How can you tell the difference? Only the wise can tell the difference. How do you get wisdom? Well, what you learn in the business school, what's in your libraries, what's in your textbooks, and what you get from professors is knowledge. Wisdom is what you get when you start applying that knowledge. Sometimes you will be successful, sometimes you will be unsuccessful. But there is a certain nobility to failure. Failure, after all, is one of the greatest learning processes there is. You just have to be careful and not be reckless. Learn the difference and risk it all on one throw of the night. You don't want to risk your entire enterprise. Now, Kipling says in his poem 'If,' 'If you can risk it all on one throw of the dice, you'll be a man, my son.' I'm not sure I buy that, but even if it's true, it's a lousy way to run a business enterprise. You want to do pilot programs, risk a little to gain a lot. You don't want to be like the commodity trader who risks it all to gain just a little. From that standard, the thing that you will have to understand is business is a team effort, just as much as lacrosse is at Johns Hopkins. It takes a team. When John Donne penned the words that no man is an island unto himself, he was not talking about the business enterprise, but he certainly might have been, because it is true. It takes a team. And I can tell you what most successful companies have. There are a few exceptions, but they have a management team that has character, has competency, and is compatible. Now, you're beginning to hear a little more about character today, and you're certainly in these times hearing about competency or lack thereof, but you do not hear so much about compatibility. And I don't care how talented you are or how brilliant you are, if you are a disruptive force, you're not likely to help your organization achieve its maximum potential, because even if you are focused on solving the problems and exploiting the opportunities, others will not be. They'll be focused on your disruptive behavior. So when you get out of business school, you're going to be a salesman. Oh no, you say, 'I'm going to be an executive, I'm going to be a manager.' Even so, you will be a salesman. It may not be your title, may not be your job description. You may not be selling a product or service, but you will be selling concepts and ideas. You will be selling yourself upward to your superiors and downward to your subordinates. Yes, you will be selling yourself to subordinates, and you will be selling policy. And the trick is selling policy that's unpopular with the people but the right thing for the business enterprise. That will be a challenge for you. A good salesman has to have good people skills, has to understand human nature, has to have good communication skills. And you will have to keep your people motivated. And the challenge is you don't know what's going on in an employee's personal life. He may have a son that's on drugs, or a daughter that's unmarried and pregnant, or a spouse that's an alcoholic, or he may have financial problems. And your job is going to have to get him off of that and focus on the objectives of the company. To do that well, how do you motivate people? Some people use fear, and fear can be a right good motivator in the short term, but only for the very short term, because you can't sustain it. It's no good for the long pull. Some people use money. Certainly money can be a good motivator, but not for the very long pull, because money has a diminishing return. The best long-range motivator is love. Yes, I said love. Man is tribal by nature. He wants to belong to some group, some organization, some band of brothers. If you're smart enough to find the way to create the atmosphere where your business enterprise can meet that need, you will be astounded at the power of love and the loyalty of love. You can have people who are offered twice their salary but will not leave the organization, because they care about the people that they're working with, they are pleased to be associated with that company, and they love the business. Love is a great long-term motivating force. But you will need free friends in the organization to help you achieve that. You know the best way to make a friend? Right, do something for them. Wrong. If you do something for somebody, human nature being what it is, you tend to expect gratitude. Gratitude can be a heavy burden for people to have to carry around with them for the rest of their lives. And human nature being what it is, the gratitude is never expressed with the frequency desired or the intensity desired. Gratitude can be a tiresome thing. No, the best way to make a friend is to let him do something for you, because then he has an investment in you, and he is going to work like the dickens to be sure that his investment is successful. A moment of personal, if you will, to further establish credentials. I've been a director in a public company for 34 years. I was chief executive officer for almost 23 years. Average tenure of the top 1,000 companies today is three years, shows you the remarkable difference. I served on five New York Stock Exchange companies' boards, turned down five other companies because I simply didn't have the time. In 1996, some Belgian sugar beet farmers sold their refinery to some German investors for a billion dollars, took that money, set up an investment vehicle in Luxembourg, hired a man whose mother was Lebanese and his father was French and he was educated in California to head up that investment. They joined him with us, Flowers Industries at that time, a baking company in Thomasville, Georgia, to buy Keebler Cookie Company, crackers in Chicago, Illinois, that was owned by United Biscuits, based in the United Kingdom. And the deal was financed with American, Canadian, and Japanese banks. Now that's a pretty good snapshot of what a global economy is about. Corporations do not exist in nature; they're created by some government official, and therefore they have to be regulated by government. But if you teach a man to use a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. So if you teach people to regulate, they have a tendency to over-regulate. Now that was burdensome enough to the American business community when it was pretty much domestic companies competing against domestic companies. But in a global economy, there are over 200 nations in the world out there. So you've got corporations that are incorporated in 200 different countries with different rules and different regulations. We have to be careful that we don't trigger the law of unintended consequences in our regulatory process that gives the American business community competitive disadvantages. Let me give you a couple of illustrations. Of the top 25 industrial developed nations in the world, 24 of them healthcare is paid for by government. Only one of them is healthcare paid for by business. That one is the United States. Now we're talking about healthcare is one-sixth of the largest economy in the world, so you're talking about a huge cost burden to the American business. Now in the past, the American business was able to compete on a worldwide basis because our productivity increases would absorb the costs that we had to carry. But the rest of the world is catching up with America. The Japanese have shown that they can not only produce cars as well as America, they can do it better. So if they have a productive advantage and a cost advantage, then we might have some trouble. Of that same 25 countries, the United States is second with the highest corporate income tax rate. Now let me give you a little story from history that might help shed some light on that. The year is 1200 AD. A man on the outside of the Gobi Desert in Mongolia takes a long strip of rawhide, ties a loop on one end, a loop on the other end, throws it over the neck of his horse, ties a knot in the mane, gets up on the back of his horse, puts his big toe in this loop, big toe in that loop, discovers that he can ride his horse at full speed without falling off, without using his hands. Big deal, you say. Well, if you said that, you would be right. It was a big deal because man had been fighting on horseback for thousands of years, but they had to hold on to the horse with one hand, which meant they only had one hand for a weapon, and they used swords or axes or maces. But the soldiers now with the stirrup had two hands available. The best two-handed weapon was the bow and arrow, and the Mongols had a wonderful bow and arrow called the compound bow. It was not curved like this, it was curved like that, and the outer edge was laminated with horns, so it took a lot of force to pull it, but when it was released, it was a formidable weapon. The English longbow was only effective up to 150 yards. The compound bow of the Mongols up to 350 yards. Now you think about if you're fighting the Mongols with a one-handed weapon, you've got to get within a few feet of him to do any harm. But if he can start killing you at 350 feet, you see the difference. The Mongols took those two competitive advantages and built the largest land empire the world has ever known. It's about 2,000 miles from Jacksonville, Florida to San Diego, California. The Mongol Empire was 6,000 miles, three times as great. Think about that. When historians studied that, they are not surprised that the opponents of the Mongols lost, because they had a double whammy competitive disadvantage. Now here's the American business community with a double whammy competitive disadvantage with healthcare and corporate income tax. Should we be surprised if we lose in this global economy? Now when our partners in the Keebler transaction sold, they paid zero capital gains tax because they were incorporated in Luxembourg, and there are no capital gains taxes in Luxembourg, just like there aren't in Germany and not in Japan. If we had done the same thing that they did, we would have paid a 38.5% corporate tax rate, and then when we dividend it out to our shareholders, they would have paid up to 39.6% at that time. So the capital would have been dissipated just there. Another example from history. Years 1805, Napoleon had defeated all his enemies on the continent of Europe. It helped England. Napoleon was getting ready to invade England. He was building transports and landing barges on all the ports there. He told the French fleet, 'If you'll give me control of the English Channel for six hours, I can conquer England.' And he probably could, because their army was far superior to the English army. But in order to get that control, the French fleet had to defeat the British fleet. And so Napoleon had already conquered Spain, so they had a combined fleet of French and Spanish ships. Napoleon fully expected to win that battle because he had a superior number of ships and a superior number of guns on ships. But the French lost that battle, and they lost the battle because they had inferior firepower. At that time, you had the cannon, and you had to load it at the muzzle, not at the breach. And the cannon was sticking out from the sailing ship, so he had to lean over the outside of the ship to put the powder in, the wadding, the shot, and the ram, and all that. The French and Spanish could get off one round every five minutes. The British, because one man's creative innovative thinking had put their cannon on a truck or a carriage, when you fired it, they could run it back, get it inside the ship, and reload. They could get off, through training and discipline, three rounds every five minutes versus one round. They had superior firepower, they won. England will say now, if America has inferior financial firepower in the world of capitalism and global economy, should we be concerned about that? Manufacturing jobs in this country have gone from 40-plus percent of the workforce down to the last number that I saw was 17%, and still headed down. Now these are the wealth-creating jobs. Manufacturing are the jobs that create wealth. Now those jobs didn't go overseas because people were unpatriotic. They went overseas because they had competitors who had a cost advantage, and they had to find a way to get that cost to manage or become bankrupt. Those jobs are not coming back until and unless reforms happen in this country. Am I optimistic that reforms will happen? Not yet. The reason for that is not only are our political leaders not focusing on the answers, most of them are not even aware we have the problem. And the reason for that is over the last few decades, government has evolved into an adversarial relationship with business. I suggest to you that is something that America can ill afford. In a global economy, we're going to have to have a government cooperating with business to start up new industries, to build new plants, to train employees for the workforce, so that we can compete on a global basis. Otherwise, our standard of living and our quality of life will head down. If you're going to be in senior management, you have to understand economics. It's just that simple. First thing you have to know about economics: for every credit expansion, there will be a credit contraction. And when it comes, it will catch somebody off guard. It will come with wailing and gnashing of teeth, because there are always, always somebody out there thinks this time is going to be different. This time it's a new paradigm. Trees really are going to grow to the sky this time. They do not. The lesson for management here is you prepare for the hard times during the good times. If you wait until the hard times come, you have a tendency to overreact and cut muscle along with fat, because fear magnifies everything. Next thing, you understand that in the free enterprise system, you really do have to have freedom of entry and freedom of action. What causes freedom of entry? Margins. That's what attracts competition. It's good margins. And when you fail, when the business in the marketplace pronounces you on life support and you've failed, those jobs really should be gone, those companies should be gone. Our political leaders have evolved to the point that they're trying to save jobs. It is a huge burden on taxpayers to try to save a job that the marketplace has already voted out of business. The government would be far better advised to spend their money on creating new industries, new jobs, new things that can compete in the marketplace. And the thing that's wrong with that is if you prop up the people who are unsuccessful and keep them there, they do competitive things that make the other businesses less profitable than is desirable, and sometimes unprofitable, and therefore you don't attract new entries into it. The thing you have to understand about economics is there is no increase in standard of living without increases in productivity. No, it doesn't happen, doesn't exist. One thing the media does not understand that I would like for you to understand is you see it all the time. The media says the Fortune 500 is not building jobs, they've had no jobs growth over the last decade or whatnot. All the job growth comes from small business. The media presents it as bad news. It is not bad news, it is good news. Large companies have capital, they invest the capital to get productivity increases, so that they are not in fact adding jobs. But it is those productivity increases that you have to have to have standard of living. Small businesses start up in many cases to serve large businesses. They do not have capital, so they hire people, and that's where the jobs are created. That's the way the system is supposed to work. Come understand, you have to understand economics. To understand people and human nature, you have to have incentives. I believe in incentives. Adam Smith taught us that when man is free to choose his choice of what he wants to do to provide a living for his family, it adds to the prosperity of everyone. The entire nation grows. But when the will of the individual is subordinated to the will of the government, when the individual loses that sense of self-reliance, life loses its charm. And I can give you a great example of that today in Russia. Russia has a declining population, and it's not going to get better because they have a negative birth rate. And the Russian workforce is filled with absenteeism and alcoholism. Life does lose its charm when man is not free to choose for himself. Russia in a global economy exports nothing except raw materials and military hardware. Not too bright a future from that standpoint. If you're going to be in senior management, you have to be involved in politics. Now you should be involved in politics anyway because politics is a duty as a citizen, but you especially need to be if you're in business, because those politicians, the political hack that jokes becomes tomorrow's policy maker if he's elected. And that policy maker is going to determine the rules and regulations that you're operating your business under. Now 97% of the people in America say their life is influenced or impacted by sports. I confess I'm one of those. They know what the score of last night's game is. But only 7% of the American people are involved in politics, involved in the politics to the extent that they will run for office, encourage somebody else to run for office, work for somebody who's running for office, give money to somebody who's running, or raise money for somebody. That other 93% thinks government is irrelevant in their life. Nothing could be further from the truth. Those government policies are going to determine their standard of living and quality of life. From that standpoint, they know the score of last night's game, but they don't know the philosophy of the candidate. They don't know how he feels on major issues like healthcare and taxes. If they know anything at all, it's from a 20-second sound bite on television, which has nothing to do with what the candidate really believes. It has all to do with what his pollster said he had to say in order to get him over the top to be elected. That's why when people say we've got to have a get-out-the-vote campaign, I say no. Don't go vote. Get involved, get informed, then go vote. And it'll make a world of difference. Now history is full of examples of people who lost their liberty and their lives because they chose the wrong leader. Durant says the study of history is the study of inflation. And why would he say that? Because in economics you have to understand that government debt is never repaid. Not any government, not any debt. They'll borrow from Paul to pay Peter, but the aggregate debt keeps going up. And it continues to go up until it's eliminated by bankruptcy, like Zaire, Russia, or Nationalist China, or the Confederate States of America. Or it's eliminated by a fiat, like Argentina told the World Bank, 'We're not going to pay you.' Or it's inflated away. One and a half to two and a half percent inflation every year over two generations, and the debt's gone. So Durant is right: the study of history is the study of inflation. Be advised and be aware. You can't talk about politics without talking about government. Government is necessary. You cannot have civilization without having rules. You cannot have rules without having someone to enforce them, and that's government. You cannot have government without taxes. So people who won't pay taxes are always going to be disappointed. The trick is to keep the balance, the right vehicle for investment, and the right level. Money was invented to pay taxes, because it was so much more convenient than hauling the grain to the capital city. Writing was invented to document the fact that you had paid your taxes, because tax collectors, either through ineptness or dishonesty, had a way of coming back and collecting the second 30% of your wheat crop or the third 30% of your wheat crop. Writing was invented to document the fact that you could prove you had paid. Whenever you hear a government official say the citizens are going to have to make sacrifices, you can be assured of one thing: that government has failed, that government's policy has failed. And when government policy fails, you can be assured of one thing: they're going to look for a scapegoat. And when they look for a scapegoat, you can also be assured of one thing: there are going to be some businessmen out there who lack character, who insist on playing offsides and out of bounds, and they will be caught up by the government with great fanfare to show that but for these profiteers or obscene profits, their policies would have worked. In our country, in the court of law, you're innocent until the government proves you're guilty. In the court of public opinion, the opposite is true: you're guilty unless you can prove yourself innocent. Now government has unlimited power to reward its friends or to punish its enemies. Socrates and Jesus Christ committed no crimes, and yet they were both put to death by their own government, because they were perceived to be a threat to the status quo. Now translated, that means those petty government bureaucrats said, 'If we don't stop these guys from rocking the boat, we're going to lose our jobs.' That's what it's about. Now because government has this unlimited power, our nation was founded on the concept of limited government. The Constitution itself is a document that limits the power of government, what it can do. And as much as I am grateful to our forefathers, I'd have to say they didn't go quite far enough. They didn't put in there that government could not discriminate among its citizens, and they should have. Now we have a law in this country that says individuals can't discriminate and companies can't discriminate, and that's good. But they can do very little harm in the total, certainly to individuals. But it's when government discriminates that great harm is done. Ask the Kurdish population in Iraq or the Jewish population in Germany in the '30s. We should not allow government to discriminate one against another. Government and electricity are very similar. If you control them, they can provide wonderful services, beautiful services: light your home, cook your food, heat your water, defend your shores, administer justice, and enforce contracts. But when government and electricity are out of control, the result is always death and destruction. Always. When people study government, they always come back to studying the Roman Empire. Gibbons said he thought the Roman Empire fell because of Christianity, but others say it was far more complex than that. Some say it was because of confiscatory taxes, and the tax rate got high because people quit serving in the military and they had to hire mercenaries. The welfare rolls grew, and they had to have more and more taxes. Durant said it was because of excessive regulation, that there were so many imperial decrees and regulations from the states and the Senate and the emperor that no fortune could buy it and no mind could digest it. Nobody had any idea what all the rules were. From that standpoint, they failed because they subordinated the will of the citizens to the will of the government. They were great at discriminating one group against another and occupying them with bread and circuses, which we ridicule today. But I wonder when historians study America, if food stamps and football might not look a whole lot like bread and circuses that the Romans used. Things got so bad that when the barbarians finally overran them, a large number of citizens welcomed them because they thought anything would be better than what they had. Julius Caesar was perhaps the first man of importance enough to do something about it, to recognize that not only could Rome not be saved, it wasn't worth saving. I wonder if we will ever come to that point of thinking of our country in this nation. So the lessons from history are: it's not so much that history repeats itself, it's human nature repeats itself. It's not so much that people forget the lessons learned. One of the lessons is government, by and large no matter how well intended, destroys both liberty and wealth. The trick is to keep that at acceptable levels. That when respectable citizens are more interested in security than they are liberty, they will lose both. That when nations eat their financial seed corn, they will starve. That when citizens are more dependent than they are independent, they are more suitable for slavery than they are citizenship. That the defense of a nation is not the guns and the bombs and the planes; it is the essence and the will of the people, in addition to the guns and the bombs and the planes. Without the first, you might as well not have the other. That torment, when you study the 22 civilizations that failed, said once you lose the concept of individual responsibility, you start down that slippery slope from which no civilization has ever returned. Are we in danger of doing that in this country? And so your assignment today is: you've got to reform healthcare in this country, true reform. You've got to change the corporate tax code. You've got to change the adversarial relationship between business and government to one of cooperation. You've got to pass an amendment to the Constitution that prevents government from discriminating one citizen against another. And you need to know that there will be a test on this assignment, not by me and not by your professors, but by the toughest taskmaster there is, and that's life. And I want to finish by some advice to my precious grandchildren, and therefore to you who are grandchildren. Will you be successful? It's a question. Yes, absolutely, I guarantee it. All it takes to be successful in this country is to be reasonably intelligent and be willing to work. You've already demonstrated you can do that. And you will make more money than it takes for you to live. It's what you do with that surplus that will help define you as an individual. But remember, money is not the measure of a man. Relationships is the measure of a man: his relationship with his maker, his family, his neighbor. Will you be happy? That's a tougher question, and one I cannot guarantee. But there are three points I want to say that I can guarantee if you foul them up, you will be unhappy. One is who you choose for your spouse. That's the most important decision you'll ever make in the secular world. If you foul that one up, you're going to be unhappy. The second one is can you save money? There's always the unexpected in the financial. Those who can save money have something to fall back on. Those who cannot will have a life filled with anxiety. And the third is spiritual satisfaction. Money and success are important, but the spiritual things will always be secondary, or the material things will always be secondary to the spiritual. The self, the soul, the psyche, the inner man will never be at peace until he's satisfied spiritually. Now that will mean different things to different people. There's nothing more personal than your spiritual satisfaction. One size does not fit all. Do not let other people's actions determine the kind of person you're going to be. Human nature being what it is, it's easy to be kind to people who are kind to you and ugly to people who are ugly to you. But if all you're doing is responding to external stimuli, people will never know who you are or what you are, and you won't either. And finally, I wish for you, my precious grandchildren, the vision to see the kind of person that you ought to be. And then I pray that you will find the courage to become that person. To Johns Hopkins University, to Dean Dumpty, to Ben, to you ladies and gentlemen, audience, for your hospitality and your courtesy and your attention, I thank you very much.

Spend its energy on developing and supporting businesses that are, as opposed to businesses that have failed and sort of the bailing out, right? Looking forward, supporting and working cooperatively with businesses that we need and are sort of the future. Do you have some businesses in mind when you've said that? Well, clearly not a specific industry, but clearly the thing is that the government would be so much better retraining those people and training people for tomorrow's jobs, not yesterday's. Now unfortunately, we have the world's greatest university system in America. Fortunately, we have a secondary school system that's not the best, and the product that that school system is turning out is not very good. The United States Army has to educate their recruits when they come in because the bombs are smarter than the soldiers. Business has to do the same thing. But if government through its universities and trade schools could use that money to train people for tomorrow's jobs rather than just subsidizing other jobs, so clearly we need to go to industries where America has competitive advantages. Saudi Arabia doesn't really need to learn how to grow wheat. We don't need to spend our money trying to grow bananas in this country. But technology, where we have a competitive advantage, we need to advance that. Healthcare, where we have competitive advantages, advance that. So tomorrow is more important than yesteryear.

I am rich. The reason I know that is the federal government notifies me of that every year once a year on April 15th. They only tax the rich, you know. And since I'm paying a lot of tax, I must be rich. Smart? No, just experience. The scriptures say a crown of gray is a wise man's reward. Now translated, that means if you've lived long enough to have gray hair, you've been just smart enough to not do some dumb thing that would kill you. And from that standpoint, as you go through life, even the most dim-witted will learn something. Even the most dim-witted will pick up gems of wisdom. These are the things I want my grandchildren to know. They need to know a whole lot more than that, but I want them to know this: people get the kind of government they deserve, and responsible citizens have to act. And I tend to put people in one or two categories: you're either a productive, responsible citizen or you're not. And I want my children and my grandchildren to be that. And that's what I've always told them. All I ask of you is be a good person and be a responsible, productive citizen.

Well, we have multiple incentives. For our route men and selling, the more they sell, the more money they make. It's on a commission basis. From that standpoint, for all of our people, all the way down from the CEO to the last employee, gets a bonus in the year if the company met its goal. Not just supervision, but the line employees, everybody. The management team has stock options, restricted stock. We have annual cash rewards, four-year programs on restricted stock, multiple-year programs on stock options. So they need to be motivated to have the company be successful so that those stock options will be worth something.

Well, a business has to be socially responsible, there's no question about that. And the first social responsibility you have is you've got to make a profit. If you don't do that, you're not going to be around, you're going to be gone. But you have to do that in the context of what's going on in the rest of the world. You have to be aware that there's an environmental movement out there. And in our bakeries, the water that we put back into the sewage system has to be cleaner than the water that comes out of the city water system, because that's how things revolve. If you're selling somebody a house or a used car, you might sell them once in a lifetime, so you might be able to trick them or step out of bounds. Our consumers, we're selling them 200 times a year. You can't trick them. You've got to give good value, you've got to have good quality. What's in there has got to be what they perceive is in there. If you say one thing and do something else, it's going to be discovered. And when you're building a consumer franchise, you can destroy it overnight what it took decades to build. So you have to have the Boy Scout approach: be straight, no tricks, no deception. You've got to be what you appear to be. So that's true of any business, but when you're in the food business, people are really particular about what they want to put in their body. It's doubly that. You have to adhere to their rules and standards. Now you always have somebody who's out of bounds on all sides, like the peanut problem, peanut butter problem. The management of that company was clearly wrong, but the people that inspected and regulated those companies were even more wrong to allow that to exist.

I have a young daughter who's married and has a child and has a job, and we've discussed this balance in her life all the time. And it's tough to be a wife and a mother and an employee and a housekeeper all at the same time. I have to confess, I don't know the answer to that. I know that the average housewife, when they go in that supermarket to shop, they spend somewhere between 14 and 20 seconds in front of the bread rack. So they're not there studying. Many times they have already learned what brands they can rely on, what they like, and so they'll repeat. Now you will see exceptions, you will see people stand there and take the bread and read every ingredient code. But basically, I love to go to the supermarket. To me, it's like going to the circus. I like to see what's selling, I like to see the people. But to most shoppers, it's a chore. They've got to get it done, get it over with, because they have other chores to do. So finding balance in your life as a real child, we're all lifetime students, or we better be. And that's something I have not yet learned very well myself. I'm better at it than I used to be, but not as good as I want to be. Sorry, someone else had a question somewhere. Did I miss? Yes, this lady back here.

Thank you. You know, Confucius said that the man who makes a mistake and doesn't correct it has made two mistakes. The best way to not have a bad employee is don't hire him in the first place. But if you made a mistake and you did, then correct it. The way you find out about character is you put people to the test. In fact, I think that is the definition. Character comes from the Greek which says you have been tested and you passed. From that standpoint, in our business, there are so many operating decisions that have to be made every year, every day, every week, that the pace is so intense that if you do not love the business, if you're not doing it right, it will soon tell and show up in your performance. You have to be like the baseball manager. I know you won 30 games for us last year, but this year your arm is sore and you've lost 10 games for us. We've got to take you out of the lineup and put somebody in there who can win some games for us. Now sometimes we have been successful, but sometimes we have moved people up in the organization beyond what their abilities should be. And when you do that, you've got to correct it. Sometimes we have been successful in bringing them back down. A guy that was a great plant president, wonderful, great president, got promoted to regional vice president and simply failed, simply could not get the performance there. But we were able to bring him back to be a plant president and keep his esteem, such that he went back to being an outstanding plant president again. So you can't tell about people by listening to what they say, because they're going to tell you what they want you to hear. You've got to see what they do. Talk is cheap, whiskey costs money. It's performance. And you can't go on. So we give early responsibility and early accountability. We try to weed them out early on where the errors are small and the cost is low. So by the time they get to the senior level in our company, they have been put to the test many, many times, and we know what they are and where they're going. And we know that they will do the right thing, that they will not be dishonest, that whatever they do, whatever their decisions are, if it's printed on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, we'll be proud of it. Does that mean they're infallible? No, they'll make mistakes. When you're making thousands of decisions a year, they're not going to all be good. They will make a mistake, but it will be an honorable mistake, not a dishonest motivation. Thank you again. Thank you.