Chase Koch and Demario Davis on Principles Over Politics, Leadership, and Real Change

And I think the third reconstruction is about ownership from the streets to the suites. And the color is not black or white or red or blue. It's green, economic green. And the country once again is having, on the 250th anniversary of America, an identity crisis. One huge colonic. You audience, you guys are really tough. This is some good stuff I'm giving you. And it's one huge family fight and we're going to get through it. We're going to be better together. We're going to stand together. But I think we got to come back to each other after we've gone so far out. Come back to each other with some common sense principles to help people prosper together. I guess the question is if this is a third reconstruction, if this is a moment in history, and if the only way we succeed to be the light on the hill, the biggest economy in the world for 50 more years, because if we don't get this act together, we're speaking Mandarin in 20 years. You get that? Like everybody wants to be an American, but Americans... and no one can win in a fair fight. We got to give this away. So, we got to stop arguing with each other and stand together and find some common ground and build an economy together with all groups of people. I guess I want to know because Koch had 9,000, it's some crazy thing like 9,000 turns of growth since 1960. It's unbelievable. But defined really these values, defined more from his failures than his successes. What people don't know is that the family had a huge blowup and fell apart and sued each other and had to come together. And your dad was not feeling good about that for a few years because it was personal to him. But these values rooted, and I think if we can find some values from these 41 that Deario and I and everybody here, you know, Phil Ward over here who's running a business, all these businessmen and women, if we can find a way to root ourselves in shared values that even when the tree, when the storms come, we're still rooted in something that brings us together and keeps us together. What jumps out from either of you from this book that are things that are practical and literally, and I, you know, I have a book out right now that's a bestseller, but I wasn't smart enough to do what he did. If I was going to reprint this, I'd steal his idea. Um, what page is this where the graph is? This thing is amazing.

I think it's 21, 22, something like that. I mean, this is, here we go. This is just brilliant. Literally all 41 principles just laid out and I don't, you know, and there's not one of these I disagree with, by the way.

Can I grab one of those principles? Sure. Grab a couple. To your question, and this speaks to how we think about talent. And by the way, as you're saying this, Chase, I want both, I want to tell people how can they become as massively successful as your family has so they have the resources to do good in the world. That's why we wrote the book. Amen. We want that. I mean, an amen now. Amen. Okay.

A lot of people ask like, this principle-based management framework, why would you offer that externally? That's Koch's biggest competitive advantage. Why would you take all these principles, organization, you solve problems with it? Clearly, if you grew 9,000-fold, it's a huge competitive advantage. And I would say this is our secret sauce. It's the principle-based approach. This is it. And the reason why we wrote the book and why this is my dad's fifth book, this is my first, is because we want to help as many people as we can. We certainly didn't write a book to make money. We wrote a book to get these ideas and tell our stories of the failures that we have. Right. I think that's one thing that's different about this book is that we talk about, there's sure, I mean, it's failure turns success, but we want people to see themselves in these just day-to-day failures that you go through in business, whether it's having the wrong vision, picking the wrong talent, having the wrong culture, all of those things. And it only takes one or two principles to transform a business, transform your life personally. I've learned that myself, right. And so what I would say, I'll just pick one principle in here. Contribution motivated.

What is it? Contribution motivated. And so we've learned this through a lot of different failures. Having the wrong leaders in the wrong roles. If my dad were sitting here and you asked him like, what's your biggest failure at Koch? He would say leaving, promoting the wrong leaders into like the big job and then not moving fast enough to get them out. Because, well, because one, they look great on paper, you know, or yeah, they've got a great resume, they've got a great network, but they don't have the mindset of what I'm going to go back to sports here a little bit. What Jack Clark, I don't know if anyone in the audience has heard of Jack Clark. He's the most winningest coach of any sport of all time and he was the coach of Cal's rugby team. He's won 30 national championships. And his thing about leadership is it's very simple. It's making those around you better. That is your job as a leader. And so I've watched my father do that, you know, over the course of time. And then he sets the example for others. And through, back to contribution motivated, it's the idea that, well, let me back up. Our talent model is very simple in terms of who we hire and who we don't hire. We want someone that wants to come in and make a contribution and has a very unique skill that we need. Two things. The opposite of that is someone that comes in more deficiency motivated. And so deficiency motivated, and we see, I'm sure many of you business leaders have seen this where they've got a fancy resume, 40, Ivy League school, whatever, and they come in and they feel entitled to a certain role, certain title, a certain salary without coming in and actually earning it, right. And one of the reasons why frankly we like being in Wichita, Kansas, our headquarters, and why we like being in Atlanta and why Georgia is our second largest employer state, is because we can hire kids with values, right? So our whole talent model back to this contribution motivated is hire first on values, second on skills, last on credentials. A lot of companies flip that completely upside down, right? And you know, being a Kansas boy, I call it the farm team. I want the kids that grew up, you know, that have that mindset of working on a farm with grit, work ethic, and just want to come in and like make a contribution. And then I would say, and to that is on top of contribution motivated is preferred partnership. And so I've been able to live out both of those principles. And guys, just get the book. And if you don't do anything else, just go to the back where it goes through all the principles one by one. Yeah. If you don't have time to read the whole book, if you just go and sit with a principle a day, it's going to change your life. But two of those, so contribution motivated and preferred partnership. So for me, I was contribution motivated at the time when I started Devoted Dreamers. It was how can I contribute to society something that doesn't exist and then there was this word around innovative education. And then when preferred partnership, what preferred partnership is is someone that has shared values, shared vision, and complementary capabilities. That's where Stand Together has 10x and close to 100x our work with Devoted Dreamers where all we wanted to do was holistic development around students and now we have the ability to reach the entire country just because of different schools. We're all over the country. My wife is traveling more than me now going and visiting with different schools. We have an app that's getting ready to come online that are teaching kids this five-strand model that we started in 2013. If we didn't have the preferred partnership, we wouldn't be able to do that. So, you have to be okay with working with people who don't look like you, people who don't have the same things as you, a different skill, and be able to make those connections. And when you do that, it allows you to accelerate your impact at rapid, rapid rates and have more influence or affluence that you would have originally thought you could have imagined. And so, thought or imagine, and that's what I would say is the key for our country going forward is people having a contribution mindset. How can I contribute to society but then forming unlikely partnerships with people on different sides of the track. And if you can create that, it's going to accelerate and it's going to bring our country together.

See what he just said? There's no difference between running the business and also what we need in society from our views. I mean that's why it's at the principle level. These are not detailed business rules that top down you want people to follow. It's empower people with these principles and let them run. And if you're contribution motivated like Deario is to go build his own organization and look what he's doing from a leadership standpoint within the NFL and helping so many NFL players, like you know, there's beyond the game, what are we going to do? How can I help you succeed whether it's in business or in philanthropy? What do you want to do with...

Yeah, that's what has happened is we become friends. We hang out now and so we get a chance to connect and we co-create. So that's what's happened with the Philanthropic Locker Room. We co-created that, Stand Together, and us and other athletes, we co-created this. How can we serve athletes of today? Well, athletes can't sustain their impact most of the time when they're done playing if they don't put the right system, structures, and partners around. And so we put together complementary capabilities again and we came up with something. But that was a principle from bottom-up empowerment and this understanding that those closest to the problem aren't the problem. They are the solutions. The leadership team at Stand Together, we have more that are here today. They sat down with athletes, got on phone calls and said what are the issues? What are the pain points? How can we fix them? And that humility allowed for vast change to happen in our game and what we're doing inside the NFL is looking to be modeled in the NBA, the MLB.