The Freedom Forum: John Gaidoo, Vice President and Senior Deputy General Counsel at Cummins Inc.

When we talk about DEI, we're not talking about if you do these things everything will be easy and you'll have the best business results. Look folks, I'm going to be transparent with you and I'll lean in again. It's harder. It's more difficult. Transparency is more difficult. Being authentic and allowing everyone to be authentic is more difficult. Diversity and having a diverse team is more difficult. Absolutely, it's more difficult. On the other end of it, it yields a much better result.

First of all, thank you so much. It's an honor to be here. Couldn't be here at a better time, right? Black History Month. I know there's a lot of discussion about that, but that's what I call it. I continue to call it Black History Month and I'm very grateful to be here. So about me, it's a little bit of a winding road, right? So I was born in Ghana, West Africa, and most would say that being born in Ghana, West Africa may not be the most probable start for someone who's in a position that I'm in today. But I'll tell you a little bit of how I got there. So my parents were both what we would now call diversity scholars, right? They both went to Indiana State. My father being born and raised in Ghana, West Africa, my mother being from a small town called Brazil, Indiana, outside of Terre Haute. So my grandparents on my mother's side were deaf, and so my mother didn't have a lot of the traditional upbringing. She didn't play with friends and do a lot of the things that other kids did, but she read a lot of books because she was a country girl. So since she didn't have friends to play with, she read a lot of books. She became really smart from reading books and got a scholarship to go to college, Indiana State. My father was actually sent to school by Christian missionaries that went to Ghana. My grandfather, who had the same name that I have, he was the first Church of Christ preacher in Ghana. And so there were missionaries that came there and met my father and thought that he was pretty smart and sponsored him to go to school in London. And then he came from London and went to Indiana State on a scholarship. So they met there and moved back after they finished their degree programs and I was born in Ghana, West Africa along with my older brother. They moved back to the States and that's really where the journey began. So I was raised in a mixture of places. I was raised primarily in the South, Tennessee and Georgia. I experienced a lot of things that we'll probably talk about today that brought me back to Indiana after my parents got divorced. And I went to Indiana University both for undergrad and graduate school. I got my law degree from there. I was also in the Marine Corps, so I'm a Marine Corps veteran. And so you may wonder, well how does that lead you to the legal profession? Well, it just so happens that when I got out of the Marine Corps, I was planning to go back into the Marine Corps after I got my degree as a fighter pilot. I met this General before I got out. He looked at my academic records and he told me he wanted me to come back in and fly jets. So that's what I was going to do. But then I met my now ex-wife. I met her my junior year of college and we decided going back into the military wasn't the best approach if you wanted to start a family, etc. And I had this interest always in law, so I took some law classes. I was interested in those and I ended up going to law school and from there the rest is history. I worked at a law firm back then called Baker and Daniels, now it's Faegre Baker Daniels. That led me to Cummins. I was outside counsel for Cummins and that was my introduction to the company. Loved the culture, loved the people at Cummins, and I've been at Cummins now, this is my 14th year. So a little bit of a winding road, not the straight line high school, college, law school, but I learned a lot of great lessons along the way. So I'm really grateful for all of the journey that I had to get to where I am today.

Yeah, I'll start with character building. So character building in the Marine Corps, I think in any branch of the military, the first thing that you learn is perseverance. Perseverance, accountability, right? And really improvising. And that's life if you think about it. Because life is going to deal you some blows. It doesn't matter who you are or where you're from, eventually you're going to get dealt a blow. And character is how you respond to that blow. That's when you rely on your character. So I think even from boot camp, from day one, you know, being able to take adversity and not see it as something that's going to spell your doom, but actually see it as an opportunity to say, hey, this is a challenge, right? And so this is a challenge and I can actually gain an advantage from this challenge because most people are going to give up. I'm not going to. I'm going to persevere, right? And I'm just going to use the resources I have around me and I'm going to make the best of this situation I possibly can, sometimes turning it to an advantage. So I would say that was the first thing that I learned. Sometimes it takes a little bit to reflect on it, but that's what I was really learning when I went to boot camp, when I went to the military, and I used it throughout my time there.

Right, you don't think about, I'll just answer shortly, judgment. Right? You don't think about judgment when you think about going into the military. A lot of people have this stereotype that you're just a follower, right? You go into the military, you do what someone else tells you. Nothing could be further than the truth, right? In fact, a lot of people say, and I believe this, before you can be a good leader, you have to be a good follower, right? And there we could go on for hours talking about that. But this idea of judgment, this sense of judgment, it is important in anything you do in life. Whether you're at school, playing sports, raising kids, whatever, every day you make a hundred decisions and all of those decisions have some sort of judgment, right? And so I think that probably using my judgment every day and being accountable for the reaction or the result of using my judgment, I did it every day in the military. So much so that when I began practicing law, it wasn't intimidating for me to make decisions. I was used to making decisions. I was used to dealing with the results of those decisions, learning from those decisions, but never second guessing myself, right? You can learn from something without second guessing yourself. Second guessing yourself is, oh, I shouldn't have done that, right? But learning is saying, you know what, I can understand why I made that decision. It was the best judgment call I could make with the information I had. If I encountered that same situation now, knowing what I know, I would do X. So it's not about self-criticism, right? That deflates you, that decreases confidence. So I would say that's a big... and some people say I'm really confident. I think I am confident and it's not because I'll never be wrong, but I just have confidence in myself that I'm going to make the best call with whatever information is in front of me and I can live with the results.

Yeah, well, I'm going to, if there's one thing that people remember out of everything I say today, I'm going to start with this and I'm going to lean into the microphone when I say it. Merit and being deserving of something, and DEI are not mutually exclusive concepts, right? So we're in this world today and I'm hearing in the news and all this that it's either DEI or it's merit, right? So either you can hire a diverse candidate or you can hire the best, deserving folks. They are one and the same, right? DEI is about providing people opportunities. It's about having a well-rounded candidate pool, rather. So when you do that, you get the best result. So one of my pet peeves is hearing people either directly say it or imply through what they say that you have to make this choice: either you're going to go for diversity or you're going to go for merit-based hiring, right? They're the same, folks. If you do it right, they're the same. So that's the first thing I want to say, right? So Indiana businesses, the best thing you can do for your workforce, the best thing you can do for the economy of Indiana is hire the best people. The best way that you enable yourself to hire the best people is to have a diverse candidate pool. Yeah, guess what that means? DEI, right?

It's all about difference, right? And that's diversity. It's all about difference. It's valuing that difference. What does that difference bring to the table? We can all sit around the table with 10 people who agree with us and we will think about nothing more than what we would have already thought about ourselves, right? That is common sense and logic, right? I think what people get caught up on is there are some circumstances, some, not all, there are some circumstances where they may see a non-traditional candidate who happens to be diverse enter the fray and that candidate gets selected and they say, wait, wait a minute, they're not as qualified as all those other candidates on the panel. By what standard, right? There are traditional standards that we look for, whether it be intelligence, work aptitude, etc. And then there are intangibles. There's the fact that a lot of the diverse candidates, regardless of whether it's racial diversity, gender diversity, whatever you may, there are a lot of diverse candidates that had structural obstacles to getting where they are that the other candidates did not have. Yet and still, they meet those same minimal requirements the other candidates did. So if they had a parachute on their back and they were running that race and they came in first, second, or third, they may very well have come in first if that parachute wasn't on their back. That is the concept. No one is talking about hiring someone who doesn't deserve to have the job or who hasn't earned the job or who isn't qualified. Why would anyone want to do that? That's silly. In fact, that would be setting people up to fail. That's not what DEI is about. That's not what diversity is about. And that's not what the valuable insight, the valuable benefit gained from difference is all about, right? So we all want the same things. Some people really just have to sit back and ask themselves why they're so resistant to this simple concept.

So before you go on, let me, you're confident, I'm confident. There are a lot of people who aren't. There are a lot of people who didn't make it, sure, right? And we had some breaks. We all had some help along the way. I told you earlier that I grew up in the South. Look, I saw racism, I heard racism. I've been called the N-word on more than one occasion. I would say that to some kids growing up today and their mouths would open. No, no, I lived through this, right? I lived in a place where I saw the rebel flag painted on store windows. I saw a poor neighborhood and a rich neighborhood. The poor neighborhood is where the Black people lived. The rich neighborhood is where the white people lived. I saw Black schools, quote unquote, with no air conditioning, five miles from a quote unquote white school that had air conditioning and a great library and a planetarium, even. I've seen all that. So I understand how people could... it's the message that's given to you every day, drip by drip by drip, that you are not as good as or you're not good enough to be deserving of these nice facilities, etc. I benefited from the fact that my father, who I talked about earlier, became an economics professor. And so when I lived in these small towns in the South, he taught at private colleges. I was fortunate enough to be able to go to the schools on the good side of town. You know why? Because my father taught at the university. No other reason. So there was nothing special about me except for I got the opportunities that in those days white people got. Because it was just white and Black. We didn't have a lot of Latinas and Latinos, we didn't have that back then. But that is the only difference. So there's nothing special about me except for I was given the opportunities that back then white people were given. And that's why I'm successful today, I'm convinced of it. So there are a lot of people who I played with, who I rode bikes with after school and things like that, a lot of the other Black kids, they didn't make it. They bought into what they were seeing in their surroundings, these rebel flags, these statues, what they were looking at in their environment in school when the government did not invest in them, and thinking that they weren't worthy of investment. That's the only difference.

Absolutely. And that person isn't always Black. If you're a Black person, if you're a woman, that person doesn't have to be a woman, right? Absolutely. In my life, I've had both white and Black people help me, be mentors, take interest in me. So whoever you are, if you're listening to this podcast, whoever you are, if you see that woman who needs help, the kid that needs help, the Black man who needs help, talk to them. Tell them what they need to hear because they're not hearing it on a regular basis.

And this is, you know what, I'm not, I used to be ashamed of this but I'm not anymore. I'm just sad about it. I didn't think, I used to want to be a lawyer, I used to want to be an astronaut, I used to want to be a doctor. And deep down in my mind, I didn't think Black people did those jobs because of where I was and the things that I told you I saw. I had my parents though as examples in my house. My mother got a master's degree, right? My father had a doctorate degree. Yet I still didn't think Black people did those jobs because when I went outside of the house, I didn't see it. It took them, not only them telling me time and time again, you can do it, you can do it, you can do it, it took those people, those mentors when I went to high school, when I went to college, when I was in law school, it took those people to really convince me over time. And the way they did that was they treated me like everyone else. They weren't afraid to say something because I'm Black. If I needed help, they told me I needed help. If they didn't believe I was applying myself, they told me I wasn't applying myself. And through that, I saw, wait a minute, these people are interested in me and care about me and they know what they're talking about. So if they think I can do something, why am I holding myself back? And I gained confidence over time. So we're digging out of a hole because of many, many, many years of history. We're digging out of a hole. So those of us who are in positions and have a platform to help others believe, I think we are obligated to do it. It's not a nice to have. That's right. You are selfish if you are not helping someone else the way you were helped.

That's right. Yeah.

Yeah, a little bit of context there. So the reason I wanted to become a lawyer is because I realized over time, especially having been in the military, having been in the civilian world, there is a secret language that we speak that makes you successful in this country. You have to sound a certain way, you have to talk a certain way, and you have to use certain words. Those are magic words, what we called magic words and buzzwords. I realized that. I recognize I'm an introvert. I do a lot of thinking, I do a lot of watching. I do more watching and thinking than I do talking, believe it or not. I'm supposed to talk here today. But I do that a lot. And one thing that I noticed was there is this secret language that was spoken. And as far as I could tell, you learned to speak that language in law school. So much so that you could use a law degree and do anything you wanted. Absolutely. And I am not one to limit myself. So I wanted to go and learn that language. I've always been one about platforms. I wanted a platform and I wanted a mouthpiece. And when I got that, I wanted to be able to know what to do with it, right? I wanted to speak well. I wanted for people to understand me, to respect me. And so when I went to law school, that was really what I was there for. Interesting, believe it or not, had a fear of public speaking when I showed up at law school. Had a fear of public speaking. It was based on some insecurities, some of it you grow out of. I hadn't been exposed to the corporate environment. Didn't have anyone in my family who had been a lawyer. I was a little intimidated, I'll admit it. I was a little intimidated. I got over that, right? Because I had to get over that. And the result was I went to a law firm which was, I don't know who's the biggest law firm in the state, but back in the time it toggled between your law firm, I think, and that law firm. So I wanted to go to a big law firm because to me that meant a big platform, right? I wanted to work with big businesses. I wanted to get to know what it was that they had, what the secret sauce was that made them successful. And so I went to, at the time it was called Baker and Daniels, now it's called Faegre Baker Daniels. And so I went to this big law firm and then I clerked, we used to call it clerk, what do they call it, summer associates now. So I was a summer associate after my first and second year in law school. And one of the things that they did that I thought was really cool, I think maybe they still do it, but they let us choose what kind of work we wanted to do. And so I just sampled all the different practice areas. I thought I wanted to be a real estate attorney going in. Now I know I do not like sitting by myself looking at documents and going to 6:00 PM meetings at night to talk to the local people that regulate that stuff. But so what I learned was labor and employment was an area of law that gave me the broadest range. I could litigate, I could do arbitrations, I could train people, I could talk to the CEO, I could talk to the person on the plant floor, right? I could do anything I wanted within that one area of law. And I get bored easily. And so I threw myself into that. That's what I said I wanted to do. And luckily there was a guy named Hud Fifer. I'm not sure anybody else wanted me, but Hud took me. Hud saw something in me and Hud Fifer took me and took me under his wing. And there were a couple other guys there too who maybe still work there, but Hud Fifer, if you're listening, thank you very much. I think you know this, but you were my first legal mentor. But Hud Fifer took me under his wing. He exposed me to things. He sent me off on my own at a pretty early point in my career because I had had the military experience, you know, probably a little more mature than others. But I love labor and employment because it's about people. And it's not about, some people say, oh, labor and employment, when you come along, you're the one that fires all the people. No, labor and employment are the people that put the brakes and say, let's think about this. Let's make sure it's fair. Let's make sure we don't...

have lawsuits not because we don't want to get sued but because it's the right thing to do. So I've always been into people and treating people right, and that's why I like labor and employment, and that's why I did well in labor and employment, well enough to come on to Cummins and then to do well at Cummins because that company has my values. I should add that I'm not here today speaking on behalf of Cummins, but I'm very proud to say that I am a senior executive at Cummins because that is a company that really cares for people, cares about DEI, and has the values that you would expect a person to embody that you wanted to associate yourself with. And that company takes that seriously and infuses it into the way that we operate and do business. So I'm very proud of that. I'm here today though speaking on behalf of myself.

Yeah, so there are a couple things, and I can speak more broadly than Cummins as well. I had a couple other jobs before when I was in the military and while I was finishing up my undergrad degree. However, so let's just stick with Cummins for a minute. First of all, Cummins not only allows but encourages me to be authentic. Cummins knows that's how I add value. We talked about the 10 people in the room that think like you, you're not getting anything different. However, when you allow people to be authentic, that's when the difference comes out, that's when the new insight comes out. So that's number one. Secondly, Cummins has a culture that encourages feedback. So you're giving people feedback and Cummins says, hey, feedback is a gift. And I used to, when I first was exposed to some of that work, I was like, sure, it doesn't feel like a gift to me because oftentimes it's not the stuff you want to hear, it's the stuff you need to hear. But in that feedback process, I realized that I was empowered through that feedback process. And here's why. When I first went to Cummins, I had never been a lawyer before, obviously. I think I had practiced for four or five years only when I went to Cummins, so it was my first in-house job. I didn't know how lawyers were supposed to act, and so I acted the way I thought lawyers were supposed to act. It wasn't me being fake, it was me trying to do a good job and represent my company as an in-house lawyer. I got feedback, thankfully. People said, hey John, you're too rigid, you don't smile enough in the meetings. And Cummins is a relationship-based company, so they want to know who you are, they want to work with you, not quote-unquote the lawyer. I didn't understand that at first. And so I had to think about that feedback, and my initial reaction was, it's because I'm a black man. Because there is a reality that if you're serious as a black man, if you don't smile, you're seen as threatening. I think some of that had to do with the feedback. Yet and still, it was great feedback because some of it didn't have to do with that. Some of it had to do with the fact that they were not working with John Gaidoo, they were working with John Gaidoo acting like a lawyer. And so in this feedback, probably half biased, half true, and half bias, that was valuable. But Cummins allowed me to be in a culture where I was able then to give feedback and say, hey, you know, when you say that I'm too stern or I don't smile enough, etc., I'm doing my job. So sometimes when I'm doing my job, I'm serious and I don't always have a smiling face on. That is just me because I'm serious about what I do. And when I get down to business, I get down to business. I'm goofy, you know me, right? So I can play around, I can be goofy with the best of them, but when I'm serious, I'm serious. So I was able to give others feedback as well and say, not retaliatory feedback, but just absorb it, make some adjustments, and then go back and say, you know what, there is this thing to watch out for because some days I'm not going to be in a good mood because I'm a real person and maybe things didn't go well at home, etc. In those days, it doesn't mean that I'm not being authentic. So just look for that as well. So I think Cummins set up a situation where there could be a two-way dialogue, and it's because of this culture where feedback is accepted and it's listened to and it's taken seriously. And it really allows for some really great conversations where at the end of the day, I was better off. And some of the people, if they didn't have the right intentions implicitly or if they were intentionally doing something wrong, I got to also talk to them and they got to hear me and where I was coming from.

Can I make one point on that before we move on?

So this is another important point, I think, an insight that I learned over time. We're not in the land of happily ever after here when we talk about DEI. We're not talking about if you do these things, everything will be easy and you'll have the best business results. Look folks, I'm going to be transparent with you and I'll lean in again. It's harder. It's more difficult. Transparency is more difficult. Being authentic and allowing everyone to be authentic is more difficult. Diversity and having a diverse team is more difficult. Absolutely, it's more difficult. On the other end of it, it yields a much better result. So no one is in this saying that it's going to be easy. Being homogeneous is easy, right? Not a lot of opportunity for disagreement, etc. Diversity is the opposite. You have to have a culture of respect and you have to be able to really mine the benefit out of that sometimes chaos. Because you will have chaos sometimes. You have to have strong leadership, strong leadership that believes in diversity to be able to mine the benefit out of that chaos.

So I like to look at it this way: Vice President, Senior Deputy General Counsel. So really, to me, those are two things. The Vice President piece, that means I'm a leader of the company. So regardless of whether I'm in legal, finance, HR, etc., if I'm a Vice President, I'm expected to lead across the company. That's where the Vice President comes from. Our Chief Executive Officer, Jen Rumsey, she doesn't want Vice Presidents who only are specialists in their areas. If we go to a meeting and Jen's in that meeting, she wants us to show up as business leaders first, and then we can observe that meeting through our lens of whatever specialty we have and we can add value there. But she wants business leaders. So that's the Vice President part of my title. It means leader of the company. Now, the Senior Deputy General Counsel, that's my legal title. So what that means is we have a Chief Legal Officer and I'm the number two lawyer. So our Chief Legal Officer made a decision that she wants to focus really on the company helping it achieve its overarching strategy. And so she supervises the business unit lead lawyers, and then I supervise the function lawyers, the lawyers who work across the company, or the corporate lawyers you may think of them as. The corporate functions: labor and employment, intellectual property, mergers and acquisition, supply chain, litigation, all of those things. Labor and employment, labor relations, so all of those things report to me. So my day-to-day job, and I'm lucky, I get to work with a bunch of people who are smarter than I am, which is a luxury. So all those five, six, seven different things that report up to me globally, each of those have a very smart, competent, capable leader. And my job is to be a facilitator for those leaders, not to know more than them. They know more than me about what they do, they're great. So I actually learn from them because I need to know enough of what they do and what their goals and strategies are to be able to be a facilitator for them. So that if they have obstacles, they need help navigating the company, they need to escalate things and raise awareness to things, I need to know enough about what they do to be able to help them do that. So my job is to help smarter people than me do what they need to do. In a nutshell, that's what I do every day.

I try to be.

Well, I guess the first thing I would say, my current role is the first of its kind ever in the 100-plus history. I'm the first second Vice President in the legal function in the company's history. I am proud of that. I'm also proud that I started at Cummins as corporate counsel and moved up five different levels to become a Vice President and the Senior Deputy General Counsel. Those are things that make me proud. What make me the proudest are two things. Number one, the way I did it, and number two, that I think I'm bringing people, I hope I'm bringing people along with me. So starting with the second one first, I informally mentor anyone who comes up to me and says, John, I want you to help me figure this out. I will help them. Some mentorships have to be more involved than others, so I'm careful about how many of those I take on at a time. But anyone, there's never been anyone who comes up to me and says, John, I want your help, that I won't sit and meet with and talk about some career planning and some ideas. I try to help everyone I can help, right? Because you never know who that me is, right? Who the person that's going to stick with it and is serious and wants to do something. So I don't want to miss that person. So I'm always willing to sit down, have a meeting, map things out, help people think about things, talk to people about relationships with their managers. If I have a network that can help somebody, I'll try to introduce them to that aspect of my network. And when I say the way I did it, using all those things, the things that I talked about at the beginning: perseverance, you know, just never saying no, innovation. I created opportunities for myself along the way. Other ones were opportunities that were already there, and then other ones were opportunities that I tried at the suggestion of other people. So it wasn't just me or mentors paving my way, it was a combination of everything. And I'm really proud of the way I did that. I listened, I was creative myself, and then I did the old-fashioned way with hard work, all at the same time.

And here's the thing, I don't know what I'm going to do every day when I go into work. I have no clue what I'm going to do. I go where I'm needed, I do what I need to do, right? Which is what I love about it.

I do get bored, right? Well, you know me, Angela, I get bored easily, so you need to keep me busy.

Yeah, I can. I'll just speak, I'll give you an example just related to my own experience. When George Floyd was murdered... give you a second because I get emotional still when I think about it, but because of how the company handled this. But when George Floyd was murdered, if you're a black person, it wasn't the first time you had seen this. And you probably expected the same reaction: people say, oh, that's too bad, and keep moving and leave you there to process it as a black person. Or they say he had it coming and keep moving and leave you there to process it as a black person. Cummins did not do that in that instance. And I think it was a turning point. What Cummins did was stopped, literally stopped, and you had senior leaders calling meetings on Zoom, calling meetings, and whoever wanted to come could come and just opening up an hour of their time and just opening the floor just to talk about it. This happened for a week or two after, on the heels of George Floyd. And then myself, I had been so frustrated about the police, the relationship between the police and black men in particular, right? Minorities, but black men in particular, because this kept happening. And I'm a black man and I've experienced some things with the police that were just unwarranted. Cummins actually found an opportunity for me to work with a group out in Indianapolis and do police reform on a national level. I sat on panels, I did radio interviews, etc., etc. Cummins gave me that platform. I wouldn't have been able to do that on my own, but it gave me the platform to do what I had personally wanted to do for so long. Absolutely. But I didn't have the connections to do it. Cummins did that. So we talk about values, right? And a company seeing a person who was hurting and who wanted to do something and saying, you know what, you want to do police reform? I actually know through our corporate responsibility group, we actually know some people who are doing police reform. We'll allow you to go do that. I didn't do it full-time, but they allowed me to go do that. They knew that it would take away from the time I had for my job, etc. And I did that and was able to make a difference, I hope, not only here locally but on a national level, at least be in the conversation. But that's exactly what we're talking about, finding an organization where those values align such that they helped you heal. I mean, they gave you a platform to address some of those issues, turn bad experiences into learnings and teachings and guidance for the future. And that's exactly how you empower yourself, empower others. And that's why you need people with those diverse experiences. Could nobody speak to it like you could speak to it because you've lived it.

I've lived it, folks. I wasn't on the ground being choked out. I very well could have been on multiple occasions in my life. I've been taken out of cars unnecessarily. I've been put on the side, on the curbs of the street. How embarrassing is that for doing nothing? Absolutely. For being pulled over for having three... one time I had, it was me and three of my buddies. We were in a car, I was a teenager at the time, and we were in a bad neighborhood because that's where they lived. I was just with them in a car. We get pulled over, it was nighttime, taken out of the car and made to sit on the curb with our hands behind our back. All these cars are driving by assuming whatever they'll assume, you know, who we were. We were a singing group, right? There were four of us, right? We were a singing group. So it's near and dear to me. And yeah, values and giving me the ability to do something about that so that hopefully that doesn't happen to as many... I'm realistic, it will happen, right? But as many people, and if it does happen, then people at least know that they have a voice and can speak out against it. I'm proud of that and I thank Cummins for giving me that opportunity.

And you know what the magic of those moments were when we had these open forums? The magic was that people... so for some reason we try to divorce our work experience from our experience outside, right? You cannot do that. You are a person. You live outside and you go into work, you work a lot, and then you go back to the outside. We are the same people, right? And the closer we can get to marrying those two people, the more peace we have in our hearts, in our lives, etc. The magic in those moments was there were people... I told you that some people said, oh, he had it coming, and moved on. Some of those people I worked with every day and they love me and I love them. They just didn't see me as one of these people that they see on TV or as George Floyd, etc. When we're in those forums and I can tell them that I have had that same experience and could have been me, it's the first time a lot of those people realize that their thoughts and their belief systems are something that should be questioned. Because they say, wait a minute, John is telling me that he's experienced the same thing that led to this man's death. And it made people think about their thought process and how they see people. And so I think that that was the magic of the moment, is that it really helped people see that it's not everybody else making things bad out there. It's you, it's me, it's us.

Absolutely. And it also lets people, because people like to compartmentalize, well, he's a big old dude at a bad neighborhood. But when you, Mr. VP of... or I remember one of my black mentors, male mentors at Eli Lilly, telling me, we got stationed out at Greenfield for a while, and I remember him telling me some of his experiences and going back and forth to Greenfield and getting harassed. Because they don't look at you and see Senior VP of Lilly or Cummins. Why are you here? Why are you in these parts? You must be doing something. And that's the bias of it all. It's just immediately that's where their minds go. Versus this could be a major... and not that the treatment should be different either way. It's just the point. Look, I should be safe walking outside my house in a hoodie. That's right. I shouldn't have to wear a sport coat and some dress pants and dress shoes to be safe and to be shown basic human dignity.

Yeah, it is. You're right. Because I mean, my son, you're absolutely right. He's tall. He would absolutely be considered a potential threat, right? And he's just being him, driving his dad's car, being goofy, maybe doing something silly like all kids do from time to time. Probably has his music up too loud, that kind of thing.

So I'm going to answer the second question first. What can we do? Keep speaking your truth. I don't care who's the president. I don't care who at your job likes it, who at your job doesn't like it. If you have truth to speak, speak it. Come what may, speak it. Because I think what you'll find is if you are speaking the truth and it doesn't work out for you where you are, someone else will see the value in you and someone else will get the benefit of all your good insight, your courage, etc. So you have to have some faith at the end of the day. But there are one or two ways to live: expending the energy of trying to be someone else and be someone's favorite, and maybe you make a lot of money but you alienate the people who you're really supposed to be with in the sense of you're going through the same thing, understand you, that's where you get that real safety and comfort. Or you can speak your truth and you can bring those people with you, and all of you can be living the good life, so to speak. So I choose the latter. I choose the latter, and I will always speak my truth. It doesn't matter what happens to me. I will be speaking my truth because I'm speaking it on behalf of my kids. And if I don't say this, if I don't say some of the things that I say that are unpopular sometimes, then my kids will have to say it. And guess what? That means another generation. Absolutely. Another generation of time has been lost. I'm not going to do that. Now, how has Indiana, the business community changed? I will give you a positive because I have seen this: people are more willing to listen in these forums. I don't know what people say behind closed doors, but at least people have the common sense to at least pretend to listen. Because they know that if they don't, they will not get good talent, because we're competing with places, states where people will go instead. Absolutely. And if you don't compete, you perish. That's business, and Indiana is smart enough to know that.

Thank you. Love to do it again.