Interview with Donnie Smith

Yeah, great question. So I spent the first week or 10 days screwing up all my technology. You know, I had learned to live by Brenda Kendrick doing pretty much everything for me, spoiled me rotten. And so, you know, when I got my phone changed out of the Tyson network and just got my phone, well, I messed all that up. And then, you know, half of me was on Microsoft and the other half was on Apple, so nothing talked to each other. So it took me about 10 days to figure out how to get emails and texts and get my calendar straightened out. Right after that, left and went to Africa for about two and a half weeks. That's probably been the biggest thing. I'll talk about that in a second. And then last week, had the opportunity down in Orlando to speak to a group of laymen and pastors at an event sponsored by RightNow Media. So that was a lot of fun, talking about activating faith at work and servant leadership. But the big deal has kind of been Africa. So two things to talk about there. I spent the first two or three days when I was there with a group of incredible missionaries from Pioneer Bible Translators. I don't know if you know them or not, but they are really at the tip of the spear, taking God's word and translating it for not just Bible-less people groups, but unchurched people groups. I'm so impressed with their work, and I'm a big sponsor. By the way, they're having their annual banquet on April 21st, Friday night. I'm keynoting that for them. And so I really just wanted to go meet their people out in the field doing the work and just get into their work with them. And they're amazing. So anyway, spent two or three days with them, and God really started working on tenderizing my heart there. Then I went over to Rwanda, where our foundation does some work around sustainable agriculture. And God has opened up an opportunity about a year, year and a half ago for us to get a matching grant, or the potential for a matching grant, from USAID. And so it took a while, but I don't want to chase a rabbit or two. So I was talking to Steve Graves yesterday, and Steve told me something very profound. It was, you know, God cares a lot more about timing than he does time. So I was really, really frustrated with how long it took the government to say yes to what I thought was a no-brainer project. But it took that long so the timing would be perfect. And so God was really gracious through that. Anyway, our project is, so Rwandan, the average Rwandan lives on about a dollar and a quarter a day. And our idea is to kind of take a little bit of the integrated chicken model. So build a coop and equip it for a small farmer, which that's the capital investment that they can't make on their own, and then help them get a microloan to buy the chicks and the feed and start their own little broiler operations, 100 chickens at a time. They can turn that, it'll cash flow in about 60 days, pay off that microloan, and go again. And if our model's anywhere close to right, we'll somewhere between triple and quadruple their income. Wow. So, you know, and yeah, we're going from a buck and a quarter to four or five dollars, but still, how would you like your income to be quadrupled, right? So we think it's got a great chance of helping a lot of farmers and become a model that then USAID can go stamp out in other regions. So that's been the biggest effort so far.

Yeah. Yeah, I tell you, the last couple years have been incredibly busy at work, and I probably entered this year here in probably the worst physical shape I've been in in a decade. And now I've got no excuse, right? So yeah, I've been hitting it pretty hard.

Yeah, I've done five. Now my knees are shot, so I can't do that anymore. But no excuse not to get on the elliptical trainer or the bicycle or, you know, me and Tony Horton do P90X every day now. So, but yeah, I'm going to get in crazy healthy shape. And then sometime maybe late this year or next, I want to do Kilimanjaro. Me and my kids, and however many of them want to come, I want to go climb Kilimanjaro. So that's on the list.

It's in Africa. And you know, I just don't know why, I don't know how Africa stole my heart, but it did. And you know, just finding these physical challenges to put out there to strive towards keeps you focused. And I'm, you know, it was easy to stay focused at work. Now that I'm not at work, I'm a little bit afraid I'll start chasing too many rabbits and I'll look up and won't have accomplished anything. So I'm getting really focused on what I think the Lord wants me to chase hard after. And I think getting in great physical shape and going to do something crazy like climb Kilimanjaro is part of it.

Yeah, so I think God gives us people in our lives to help us get through different phases. I can look out and see some faces of folks that have helped me do a lot of things along the way. Steve Graves has been really instrumental over this last few months in helping me kind of get a plan around what to do. So in the finishing up at Tyson part, our plan was, look, don't start trying to plot out the rest of your life. Focus on finishing well. You know, they're paying you to do a job. You stay hooked up and engaged, and you do that job till you're not there anymore. And so that's what I did. So I didn't really spend much time thinking about what am I going to do after Tyson. I just stayed focused on doing my job. Now that I've transitioned out, I consider this year, 2017, to be like an intermission. I don't know if I'm between act one and act two, or act two and act three, or act three and act four. I don't know where I'm at in the play, but I know I'm at intermission. And intermission is important. And so I don't want to miss the messages and miss the meaning of what I'm supposed to be accomplishing now. You know, I've said it often, CEOs get way too much credit for the good stuff that happens, and they often get blamed way too much for the bad stuff that happens. But it is a demanding job. And often for folks with demanding jobs, and actually I'm thinking about you in the last two years as the president of the SBC, there's a lot of people that benefit from the impact of your job, but there's also those that pay a great price. And that lady right there paid a huge price, particularly in the last seven years, for the impact that I believe God wanted me to have at Tyson in the workplace and for the kingdom. And so I've dedicated 2017 to paying her back for all of the sacrifice that she's made for more than seven, but particularly in the last seven years. We've rolled Italy for three years, we've rolled Alaska for three or four years, we've rolled Israel for the better part of six or seven years, just because I never had, you know, two weeks to go do those. Well, guess what, we're going. And so I want to spend this year really doubling down on my relationship with God and really doubling down on my relationship with Terry and spending a lot of time with her and paying her back for all those years of sacrifice. So that's the mission for this year.

I think she's pretty happy about it, pretty excited about that.

So I think probably the best indicator would be our stock price. When our team sat down, we were trading at about $12.50 a share, something like that. Now that was frankly up from about $4 and something, you know, from a year before. We had decimated our capital structure. We had to add probably a billion three to our capital structure between September of '08 and April of '09 to keep the company afloat. So a lot of debt, our cost structure was not good, our customer relationships had faded. And so what we really needed to do was just get really focused on fixing the fundamentals of our business. And that's what we did. You know, our team came around, and I remember my first strategy meeting, because, you know, everybody, first thing your new CEO comes in, you're going to talk about strategy. So our first strategy meeting, I said, 'Okay guys, here's our strategy. We are not talking about strategy for at least a year. We don't need a strategy. We need to execute. We need our customers to take our phone calls. We need people to fall back in love with us. We need to improve the quality of our food. We need to improve the safety of our operations. And we really need to improve our cost structure. So let's just go to work. If all that works, then we'll need a strategy.' So a year later, we had our second strategy meeting. Not hardly yet, we're going to wait six more months. Then we started talking about it, but we just got to work fixing the fundamentals of the business. And yeah, and so now seven years later, you announced that transition, I believe in November, December, something like that. So talk to us about where the company was when that decision was made by you.

Yeah, so I pray that prayer every day. You know, if you think back in the Old Testament to the story of Esther, I'll blow through a lot of the details, but the queen was deposed. Esther became the new queen. Her uncle, Mordecai, had a mortal enemy that ended up creating a decree that would have basically wiped out the Jews in what was then Medo-Persia. Esther was the answer. So Mordecai goes to Esther and says, 'You need to go talk to the king. We got to work something out.' And her reply was, 'Look, that's a dangerous thing. People just can't walk into the king. If he doesn't hold out his scepter, I'm pretty much dead.' And Mordecai said, 'Look, how do you know that you weren't made queen for such a time as this?' Now, how do any of us know what our 'for such a time as this' moment or moments is or are? I don't know. There's no reason I can think of for me to be the CEO of Tyson Foods. There's no reason for me to think of why God would save me spiritually. I mean, I haven't given him any reason to want to do that. But he did. And how do I know that all of that happened, again back to this timing thing, for such a time as this? Because something's going to get said today that impacts somebody that's here that really wasn't planning on being here, but they just thought, 'Hey, cheap lunch, I'll show up.' I don't know, who knows. But I think every day as Christians in the workplace, you know, sometime between the time we get out of bed and the time we walk in the door or get in the truck or wherever our work starts, we need to pray, 'God, if this is my for such a time as this day, don't let me miss it.' And so every day walking into work, you know, I prayed, 'God, whatever impact I'm supposed to have, don't let me miss it.' And then, you know, God just kept revealing all these great leadership lessons. You know, one of our phrases was, 'The answer's in the room.' And look, nobody comes to work and says, 'You know what, I think I'll go in and screw up today. I want to be miserable. I want to be unclear about what our objectives are. I just really want to be miserable and make everybody around me miserable.' Now, you may think they think that, but they don't. It happens in the environment. They really don't think that. But what rarely happens is leaders actually ask the people, 'Look, what are we good at? What are we not good at? And how would you fix it?' And you know what, people will tell you, because they don't want to come to work and be in an environment where you can't win. That's right. So I spent a lot of time asking three questions everywhere I went: 'What are we good at? What are we not good at? And what would you do?' And the answer is always in the room if they'll tell you how to fix the business. You know, people, I don't know who said it first, everybody claims it, but the phrase is, 'People don't care what you know till they know that you care.' Not only is it biblical, it unleashes power and goodness in an organization if you will just care first without expecting any return of care. You can go back and look at any speech, any recorded video, whatever, for seven years. I never asked anybody at Tyson to trust me. I never said, 'Y'all trust me.' I never said that once, because trust is earned. What I needed to do is be the leader they needed me to be, believe in them, care about them, and get them involved in fixing the business. You get 115,000 people focused on the right thing, something's moving. You better be right what the right thing is, because something's going to move. And that's what we did, and we all did it together. And I think those are the big leadership lessons that I look back on that I learned about the impact leaders can really have. It's more about turning people loose than it is about giving people orders.

So, you know, leaders get results. Period. I mean, you know, we knew, not early days, because early days, and I look around, I see a lot of my Tyson friends in the room, you know, there are some early days when we didn't know exactly how good we could be. But once we sort of surprised ourselves a time or two, we built up a head of steam. And not, I wouldn't say we ever got cocky, but we became pretty confident about what we would be able to accomplish. But there were a lot of hard decisions that had to be made. You know, I don't know how many times I said, 'Look, I'm not paid to be popular, I'm paid to be profitable.' Because you got to rock the ship a little bit, and you got to give people permission to mess up, to take a risk, and then know that if, okay, it didn't work out, look, now we know one way it won't work, let's go find a way that will. And I think creating that environment, creating the right culture, leading with a heart, but none of that, I think all of that is the secret formula to success. But if it doesn't play out in the results, you're not going to stay, right? You know, we had a phenomenal run. And I tell you, you know, you're right, I don't want to sound like a wimp, but it does take a toll on you. I read Joel Manby's book, Love Works. Joel had a part in there where he talked about how much is enough. And I remember I read that about three or four years ago, and that question just kind of lingered back in the back of my mind. And so I think God, who is our sovereign, look, he's the creator, he made the world and everything in it, so he gets to do what he wants. He made it. And so the creator has shifted me into this period of intermission leading to what's next. Now, there's so many lessons I've got to learn during the intermission that I don't have the clarity that will come about what happens later. Sure, that's not necessary. What's necessary now, double down with him, double down with her. I get it, I can do that much, right? But anyway, back to your question, results. That's pretty clear. You kind of have a scoreboard, don't you?

Oh yeah. But look, nobody's perfect, and there's some decisions that I wish I could unwind. But I'll tell you, all of those, you know, the Bible says in Romans 8:28 that all things work together for good to those that love God and are called according to his purpose. And so I love God, I'm committed to my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I know what God's purpose has been for my life in the last seven years. So if you really believe what he says, then you can't get all wigged out about the stuff that didn't work, because it's going to work together with all the good stuff that did work out for good. So yeah, I'd probably rewind a few things, but I'm not too sure that the lessons learned through those mistakes weren't part of the decision-making that went into some bigger and greater things a little bit further down the road. So God really does work all things together for good.

It's a good question. It's a great question. A great question is a good question is one that you give a good answer to. A great question is one that stumps you. This is a great question. So a couple things. Let me focus on moving the vision forward. I would say we need to have a book club, and we need to get you and your cabinet together, and we need to study Patrick Lencioni's book, The Advantage. Because Patrick in that book talks about the difference between smart organizations and effective organizations. And it really boils down to four things that, by the way, we proved right at Tyson. Number one, you need to put together a cohesive team. So President Trump, you need to surround yourself with a great cabinet, and they need to be able to work together as a team. Second thing, we need to create amazing clarity about what we are going to accomplish. So don't chase rabbits, get focused, and decide what those big rocks are going to be and stay focused on that. Then we need to over-communicate that clarity. So look, I don't need you to, this be kind of the smart aleck part, I don't need you to tell me one more time that the media is mad at you because you beat Hillary. Election's over, right? Now you're the president. What I need you to do is to communicate with great clarity around what we need to accomplish. And then the last part then is to build in systems that reinforce that clarity, that clarity of mission. I think, look, America is the greatest social experiment that's ever been tried, right? There is no other country on earth like America. There's no other country as great. Yeah, we can talk about all our problems, but we are still by far, I travel all over the world, we are by far the greatest nation on this planet. There's a lot to be grateful for and a great future to look forward to. Now, do we have issues we need to fix? Yeah, we're 20 trillion in debt. Keep going, right? Get a great team around you, get focused on a small group of things, and create great clarity around that, and don't talk about anything but that. Don't get distracted. And then get stuff, get systems in place that reinforce what you're going to go do. That's what I'd tell him to do.

Get your head up. You know, and this is one of the dangers about social media. And I'm not, you know, stuff happens, and we can't unwind or change social media, it is what it is. But everybody becomes an authority on social media, whether they know what they're talking about or not. And somehow it seems to me that we have fallen prey to being victims instead of taking responsibility for our choices in this country. Now, hey, there's a lot of people that don't get to make the choices that everybody in this room gets to make. That's right. And some of them need help, and we need to help them. Right. So, but as Americans, we need to get our head up, and we need to start looking forward, and to quit talking about all the stuff we don't like, and start agreeing on the things we do like about this country and how we can move it forward. That'd be my message. I'd probably clean it up because I didn't have much time to think about it, but the basic message would be, look, America, get your head up. Yeah. The rest of the, I was over in London during Brexit, and then I was back in Europe not long ago, just before the election, and frankly, we're freaking them out. I mean, the whole world looks to America as being that common sense place where things get done. They're going, 'Are you kidding me?' We got to get our head up, and we got to get back to that leadership position, because the rest of the world is looking to us to be that beacon of hope for the planet. That's on us.

So, what you do matters. You matter. I think so many times we get caught up and we see ourselves as cogs in the machine, and we don't need to view ourselves as leaders, as cogs in the machine. We need to, and we all interrelate with people, but we need to view ourselves as Christians on mission for God in the workplace. There's people all around you that are hurting for one reason or another, and you know what, they may or may not make it to church on Sunday, but they're going to bump into you on Thursday afternoon. And they should get a chance to hear a caring question about, 'Hey, how you doing?' And if you've been a good witness, or if you will just be one that shows people you care, they'll open up to you, and they'll give you an opportunity to minister to them. We need to do that in the workplace. We don't need to hope that they show up to church on Sunday. Since they're in the cube next door, we need to build that relationship, and we need to be God's light, and we need to minister to them right then and right there. You know, you control the environment that the people around you at work will spend a third of their lifetime in. Some of you seem to be bent on making them miserable for a third of their life. I wish you'd stop. I really do. And I bet the people around you would really wish you would stop. And I bet what they would really like you to do is to say, 'You know what, I am responsible for how the people in my group spend a third of their life, and for that environment, I'm going to make that environment awesome to where they just jump up out of bed every day and just want to run to work. They want to get a speeding ticket on the way to work, they love it so much.' What would happen in Northwest Arkansas if everybody here left with that frame of mind and went back to work and infected your workplace with the love of Christ and with caring? It'd change the place. That's on us. Everybody here can do that. Everybody here can love. Everybody here can care. We just need to get real intentional about doing that. So, as we consider our role in the kingdom, you know, and I don't want to, the whole interview has been about me, but God purposes us individually, uniquely for seasons. Go back and read through the Bible. You know, Moses was the guy that led them out of Egypt. Moses spent a lot of time in Midian, in the desert, then God called him to lead the people out of Egypt. But then he chose Joshua to take them across and do all the battles. Right. And you can go on and on and on about leaders for seasons. Just look at all the judges, leaders for seasons, purposed in a unique way. You are purposed in a unique way to be right where you are for this season. Man, use that opportunity to make an impact for God wherever you are. I'm done.