[Music] welcome to view from the top we're excited to have beth ford the president and ceo of wendell lakes join us today beth's 35-year career spans six industries at seven companies since joining wanda lakes in 2011 she's held a variety of roles leading the farmer to fork business offerings today she's a passionate advocate on behalf of farmers in rural america with the goal of connecting people
particularly in urban areas to the farmers and rural communities who grow their food a native of sioux city iowa beth holds a bachelor's degree from iowa state university and an mba from columbia university she sits on the board of directors for the business roundtable the fortune 150 company pacar and numerous other industry non-profit and university boards beth has been recognized by fortune magazine
as one of the world's 50 great leaders and most powerful women and was named to fast companies most productive people and best leaders list among other honors we're really looking forward to hearing more about beth's story in today's conversation with adrian negros nba21 thank you beth thank you so much for joining us today at the gsb by zoom and we're really excited to hear
what you have to say beth it is so great to have you with us today well it's so terrific to be here as i said i wish i could be there but i'm happy to be with you all this will work um as we chatted a second ago i grew up in indiana and i was living in minneapolis before coming to school it's not often that we get a leader from the midwest talking to my classmates the campus is just thrilled again so thank you
i'm happy to be here and what do you mean you don't get a lot of people from the midwest this is where it's all happening people this is where it's happening we'll convince them very shortly okay i'm sure of it there's a number of things i want to talk about beth including your experience growing up in iowa leading a fortune 200 and some broader topics like the food supply chain and rural broadband access
but let's start by going back to sioux city iowa it's your home it's where you grew up it's a town of about 80 000 people and you have a large family there's eight brothers and sisters including yourself you've had a room which you shared with your three sisters and got one drawer all to yourself what was it like growing up in your household well as i said you know you had to have a drawer because you needed
the place to put the handy down you know so there it is um you know i was number five of eight i had two older brothers two older sisters a younger sister two younger brothers um and my dad was a truck driver we were very much a working class family um but no different than any other working class families there um education was important to my parents um my mom who is still with us my father has passed
uh my mother was i think has been the most significant role model to me in my life an incredibly resilient woman left in an orphanage when she was five by her parents with her brothers with her brother and then um was adopted eventually at age ten and here's a woman who became a nurse and then became a minister at the end in between she was a psychologist a therapist she would say she worked on
their their body their minds and their spirits and so she's she's been an incredible role model and so during that time what's it like growing up in a family of eight kids when you're working class and you're kind of in a room with your three siblings it's noisy um dinner is a you know killer bee killed exercise you know ate a lot of chicken necks and wings that since i didn't know there was
white meat on a chicken until i was at least 17. and my older brothers were out of the house um you know it was it was very much a um a moving kind of a target in our um in our family uh my siblings have achieved um you know good professional careers that went to college um but you had to kind of work your way to college so to your your point you know the first jobs i had were de-tasseling corn it was a
babysitter now i'm going to tell you i still i haven't told you adrian i've saved this for you so i was probably 12 or 13 i was babysitting because you know you make some money i was making like two dollars an hour i got like five kids the oldest of the kids was probably about my age he grabbed the keys to the car that they had and he floored this thing and he went through the house
i never got any babysitting jobs after that shocker you know i was like oh my gosh i had to call my mom i was like oh mom this is not good um but i did all of those kinds of jobs the the detasling corn i worked as a night cashier i cleaned toilets in college i i mean i had all sorts of jobs and it was very much a working class uh family that the expectation it was if you wanted to achieve something you had
to invest in your education and yourself and as well you had to work hard to get what you wanted makes a lot of sense to me beth and you mentioned of course the two dollars i want to make sure the audience and us are on the same page because adjusted for inflation this is a rough estimate because i passed my finance class i didn't crush it but it's something like 10 or 11 in
today's terms so it's like not too shabby but it was hard work you're up at 5am right up at five got onto a bus with my siblings um you put in long long pants and um you know long sleeves so that you can get eaten up on details on corn um and it was hot and it was you know it was it wasn't appealing work perhaps that was there was a little strategy there like you need to work harder on your brain
so that you aren't having to do this for a living going forward but you know it again it taught me so many lessons in my life all of those jobs that were not glamorous that involved manual labor wasn't just the i didn't want to do this it was the value of hard work it was the value of these people um every day and so i i'm grateful for that and in fact i almost feel concerned that my i have three children and of
course they've never had to deal with any of those kinds of challenges where you have the wrong clothes or you know you don't get to go somewhere because you can't afford it they don't ever have to deal with that and i kind of think that they're missing out i imagine that these experiences though help you connect with your farmers in a very personal way you can relate to working hard being out in the
corn fields so i think there's a positive there and i'm sure your kids learn through the stories that you and your partner jill share with them i think so i mean jill my my wife uh we've been together around 28 years and she's a peoria illinois native she her family came from farming as well and um uh you know our came from the midwest and and we're in farming and she was uh one of the first class of women at west
point and then we met at columbia her at the law school minor the business school um so you hope that they they take away this value of hard work which both of us obviously um have have had a central to our lives but you know it's hard i think sometimes it's harder for me just to say no because i can remember what it's like to not have something but i need to do better make sure i tell
them no make it hard for them i would say hard work wasn't the only lesson you got growing up you got what you called and you mentioned your mom carol and you got what you called the most important leadership advice ever from her when you were young so could you take us back to that conversation or a moment what did she say that stuck so closely are you talking about don't be afraid to want you
to ask for what you want that's exactly what it was was i was probably 12 or 13 i was having a tantrum about something i don't even remember what it was but i you know i'm tall my mother is a smaller woman she's probably five two or five three and i'm six feet tall obviously take after my father who was a big very big man and he and i'm you know i'm having that tantrum i can't believe you didn't do this and
she said um she said do you think i'm a mind reader i am not a mind reader if you want something you ask for it and for whatever reason i can see her face i thought that that made such good logical sense to me she you know it stopped me cold and through my life i've i've reflected back on that where there are times i think in your professional career and those of you
who've already had the career now you're back at mba school and and you'll go back out um i think sometimes we're reluctant or we think gosh i'm a great performer they're going to just notice me that just doesn't really happen um it really doesn't and you can't be you know you don't want to be a braggart or you know you want to have humility but you can't be shy to make clear to your supervisors your
leaders remember what your aspiration is what your ambition is to to achieve otherwise people aren't going to just guess nobody i promise you cares more about your career than you do nobody and um you have to remind yourself of that and do do what you need to do to position yourself to me that means you enable others success you don't want to be the guy or the gal that nobody wants to work with because
they're you're all about yourself um and instead you should enable their success um and and then you'd be surprised that kind of it's a virtuous circle everybody wants to to be part have you part of the team when you when you care legitimately about somebody else i think it makes a ton of sense you know thinking about me and our audience listening i think we all go in with like we need to be humble
respectful and that's all true but that doesn't mean you can't be confident yourself and a self-advocate and say hey i deserve this i work hard i drive results and i think that's just an incredible message that your mom gave you and i'm glad you shared it with all of us yeah i don't i don't even say i deserve it what i what i generally say is um this is something i aspire to what do i need to do
do you see me in that role first of all and sometimes people will tell you no they don't they don't see you as achieving something and to me that's a gift it is a gift but you have to get yourself the my right mindset to hear that it's a gift because then you can ask why why isn't it what do i need to do and if it's not they don't ever see you that way that that's not your right place
you know and that's a gift to me that's not a oh it feels bad even if it might feel bad for a moment um you have to say boy what a gift i'm so glad and grateful i learned that so i usually just say you know this is what i aspire to is this possible do you see me in that way what do i need to do to position myself what are the other investments i need to make what do i need to learn um to be put in that position i love
that i think it's something we can all use moving forward in our professional careers beth i want to ask about post college so after iowa state so that's go cyclones right you're not a hawkeye fan i assume no i'm not a hawkeye i'm a cyclone got it um after iowa state you go to oil and gas you mentioned your dad worked on the truck so i think similar industries you were on the tanker right you
described it as you and the dudes on the night shift well i you know so out of undergrad i got this job interview no you need to understand okay again i'm kind of a working-class kid so i had like one suit one dress this is back in the day you know so i was like wearing a blue button-down thing and i had like this gray suit and i got this this job interview with mobile oil and i
went to their headquarters in virginia and i remember this so vividly because we were staying at a hotel and the doors were on the inside you know this was a motel no this was real stuff there was real food there so i was like okay this is fancy so i go to the interview and i really liked the company and so they said okay great you're going to los angeles you're going to um you're going
to go through operations training so my background in a lot of my career i was in line operations yes i managed tanker barge trucks trucking facilities i was in the refineries there was a manufacturing facilities i did some time on the trading floor um i you know so i had probably nine different jobs in nine years with them um so this the me and the dudes yeah it was constantly me and you know 50 men or a hundred men or
you know me in training in south padre with 50 guys or 20 guys and that story i tell that you may be referring to is when you're running a terminal for an oil industry or a trucking facility you have to go through you have to go to reno to learn how to put out a fire and then you're in south padre to learn about what do you do if there's an oil spill so i was down in south padre and
it was me and you know 25 guys and um part of the training is you're going up in a helicopter you got a chart where this might be so i'm i'm there at the the place we're going to depart and the guy yells out he's like having y'all out your name and i need you to tell me what you're waiting so i was like what this is off the hook i'm not doing that we're not we're not i went over i said what are you talking
about he said oh we need to make sure we balance the aircraft i said i'm going to write this down on a piece of paper i'm going to give it to you this is between you and me so i'm standing there and he puts it in the computer and it's five pounds everywhere i said that's five pounds heavy because every woman lies about their weight you know it's great those are great fun
jobs i mean i had to call i had to tell one of the guys that worked with me on the dock to bring his teeth to work he kept showing up without his teeth that's like tommy it's super distracting man you've got to bring your teeth in okay you're killing me with that i mean those jobs though um it's wonderful and i never was uncomfortable there and the reason i think is because i kept thinking this
could be my father my uncle my my cousins um this was not abnormal for me and i felt pretty clearly based on what i saw from my father when he would come home from work or from come off the road you know the most important thing i needed to do was show up every day in a consistent positive forward-looking manner as a supervisor or as a manager and help them understand how much their work was valued
you know it's you what is your job today your job is to put out this many on the line or you have to make this many stops and there's real value to that work and unfortunately i think we minimize it now today of course during the pandemic everybody who's a driver or who's doing that kind of work and food production for instance are highly valued because we see that um but i learned that lesson pretty clearly that
i needed to make sure they understood i respected them um i respected the hard work they did every day and um and i think that that was a real benefit for me that's incredible beth and i think kind of looking back on what you've spoken about just great values you know being a self-advocate hard work and determination what you just mentioned being a good team player even when your teammates ask
you what your weight is still be an advocate for them um you know to me it's no surprise you've had such incredible professional success seven companies six industries ending atlanta lakes i want to talk a little bit about your first couple roles there so chris polisinski the former ceo had lots of faith in you within a few years being in arden hills minnesota you led multiple p
l's that drove the business so how are you able to drive such high confidence from chris and you being there so quickly yeah um well i'm going to talk about that but i also want to talk about one other thing that i think is important for the wide land of lakes and thus why i think i also was able to accelerate my career there um in the interim between mobile and then atlanta lakes in those other industries
i one of them was in publishing i was in publishing scholastic you know clifford the big red dog harry potter and his little brown books um the twilight series and what i learned about myself in those jobs was why would i do that well because um the job at landlady all right uh scholastic was about literacy in children and so there was a power of meaningful work to me i enjoyed for instance
being on the trading floor for mobile oil but i didn't love it intellectually i understood it it was fun but it didn't speak to my soul the way the mess as i say the mess of the human condition speaks to me and this opportunity to deal with something like literacy and children atlanta lakes when i went there i had first thought i'm not going to do that i was living in new york city jill was running a hedge fund
i was traveling around the world we had our three children i'm like oh you know we're pretty good here in new york city and then you know something about the structure of the company about um feeding a growing world population about farmers that spoke to me when i started so to your point i started as chief supply chain officer and i was running all the operating functions and it's a pretty big platform
it's about 300 you know plus manufacturing et cetera facilities chemicals food processing you name it um and then i picked up uh r d and then i picked up i t and then i started running the businesses and then i picked up the last business and i became ceo um during that time i go back to being an advocate for yourself i did meet with chris quite a bit um i of course got a lot of visibility to the board and
i talked to the chief human race resource officer and i was pretty clear with chris that my ambition my aspiration was to take over as ceo of this company now i had been in position in two other companies to be considered for ceo and i made the definitive decision that was not my right place that i could do it but i there were others that were actually going to be better than me i thought in like in publishing
i think if you're in publishing you love that you know all the editors the publisher i mean you just know it and i thought it was interesting but it didn't speak to my soul so atlanta lakes what i think that they saw was my in my conversation with him was an about the ability to continue to stretch me active dialogue with him and then of course you always in those situations
have to deliver results otherwise you know you're not going to be you're not going to be given that next um next step in your career absolutely and you of course drove incredible results throughout your career atlanta lakes last friday super amazing q3 earnings so congratulations from us i want to ask about the structure i think you mentioned it briefly the co-op structure it's not super familiar to everyone on
the west coast the silicon valley types so could you tell us about what that means for you as ceo yeah the cooperative so i've worked in a small private i've worked in private period i've worked in large corporations public trade companies i'm on public hub boards in a cooperative structure the members or the owners own you okay so i report to a board right now that has 28 board members
um they are elected locally so there are maybe five out of california for instance in the central valley which is one of the most productive food production areas in the world um and from that they it's almost like think of it as like the house of representatives but i i say to them when they're elected once you step into the boardroom it's governance it's you're not the house of
representatives you're not there to worry about whether joey had some animal husbandry issue okay your a board member of a fortune 200 company and that's a big responsibility um the structure then we hold back when from our earnings um and that earnings the earnings are generated from either milk for instance we have dairy producers most people know lando lakes for our dairy production we also own purina
animal nutrition we own them build technologies which works with growers on the aquarium trutera sustainable um production business and then we also have an ngo venture 37 which does work around the world with the gates foundation and others on smallholder farmers etcetera so this structure is interesting because really we collateralize based on the assets and based on the holdback from these members we do have a
preferred tranche so it acts like equity on our balance sheet but i'm not out in the market selling shares right so you really have to you know it's a skinny margin business in food production because you have some part this commodity some part that is differentiated or value-added or cpg-like but you have to you really that margin is so critical because it's reinvested in the business um and
then there's hold back from the members for our for what we earn some of it goes back almost like a dividend we call it patronage back to them some of it is held back at the corporate level so you know there's been great growth because let's think about it debt financing right now i mean money is pretty cheap um and we've got this private equity trunk so we haven't been held back
in our aspiration for growing these businesses but we also don't access um you know capital markets in terms of of um putting out in different shares we do report we go through the whole sox compliance that everybody would be familiar with we i meet with the rating agencies i meet with investors kind of a similar situation so it is different this company was started in 1921 by upper midwest dairy farmers
trying to get power in the channel and get their sweet cream butter into the population centers in the east so they formed a marketing cooperative that was successful so additionally they formed a supply cooperative the supply cooperative would be the animal feed side or your goods or the other things so it's a fully integrated platform literally we go right from the farm we have to take our members milk i can't
say no we don't want it because there's too much of it no that's our job is to find a home for it um and you know the cows are milking two or three times a day so you've got to figure that out um all the way to retail right beth you mentioned your board and back in july 2018 they named you a ceo reading the news release i love it they focus on metrics you drove great performance in your
multiple roles let's put the people that do the best work in the highest positions but more personally to you and i'm sure this decision is made over a number of weeks but can you take us back to the email or the phone call the moment it became really real to you i'm about to lead a fortune 200 company what were you feeling well we had been talking about this for a couple of years obviously and then
really these processes start early if you're in a company and you're in um the top level if you're in the c-suite or even before that generally like as soon as i took over a ceo i started to look at who's could take my job in the future so it's really fairly early because you're working on developing them um what i did is and what they did is not on um dissimilar to other companies in
which i'm sitting on the board on their comp committee or elsewhere you go through a whole process i did business cases think of it just like mba school i did interviews the exec committee which were there were eight gentlemen who were on that committee ran the process there were other internal candidates there was another gentleman candidate and and then they made a decision up front
that they weren't going to be external now most companies will say if the performance of the business is what is expected has been expected will stay inside if you want disruption um you want to go outside that's kind of a general rule of thumb i've made it pretty clear and i think most people in my position would if i've been there seven you know six or seven years at that point i'm cool i've run everything
i'm running everything and you go outside that's a vote of no confidence right and i said that if you do that that will be a vote of no confidence and i will not stay and they said no we're going to go inside there are a couple of other candidates so you go through a whole process they bring in an external firm to interview you as well you've got interviews multiple times with this exec committee
they're doing background checks they're checking any board i've sat on they're doing you know they're looking at my if do i have any legal issues so it's a multi-week process actually multiple months and towards the end what they did is they uh called and said we want you to fly into denver where the whole board will be and during that time um i met with the entire board 28 of them
i stood up and i gave them my strategic vision for the company um and then i stood up there for probably three hours and they could ask me any question and i would answer those and then i left the room and when i left they voted and they made me ceo and i came back in so um then you know i said congratulations then i went down the hall and started doing press they had already set up um you know i think kim is on the phone
uh my head of communications had already set up interviews with wall street journal and with um some of the local uh publications here and then it was very funny because my assistant said well you know do you want us to put a plane over there and i was like well i'm at the airport i'll just go and then you're kind of by yourself so now you've done the interview you're kind of hanging out
my you know jill my spouse was traveling with her mother to the west coast all my kids were at camp so it's like just me and so i guess i went to the bar at the airport and had a beer and then i got home and it was just me and the cat for god's sake i'm like this is kind of an anticlimactic moment actually you know who's checking out the outfit for tomorrow when they make this
announcement i guess you are madge the cat because even the dog's gone i wanted to ask i wanted to ask where do you celebrate in the twin cities after being named ceo apparently you celebrate madge is what i just apparently it's like yeah i guess i get to have one good glass of wine um and you know now he's home now you know it's it's very funny of course i called my family um i called you know my
my siblings and my mom and um they they were aware and um and it was joyous and and then eventually my family came home but the first few days of course that wasn't the case and it was probably fine because there's so much that happens on that first day when you step back into headquarters and you tell everybody okay um that you know it was me who was selected as ceo and we talked about what's next and
do constant rounds of interviews or talking to customers or talking to shareholders i want to talk about a couple broader topics beth that you work very hard and your team also first on real broadband access so i think simply put tens of millions of americans are online and we sit here and it's wonderful we can chat via zoom but there are kids right now that they just don't have any form of education
and i know you've partnered with the public and private sector to address this what do we all need to do better so private public people listening right now to this to help students get online well the first thing you need to do is be aware that there is this gap that there are 18 to 20 million americans that lack broadband access many of them lack any access to you know cellular at all
and a majority of them are in rural communities now they're also in underserved areas so i'm i'm working two things one i'm part of the business run people i'm on their board of directors i'm right now on a committee with jamie dimon and robert smith around you know a wealth creation especially for underserved communities for for the black african-american communities so that's a portion and there's a like a third
over a third of african-american black households lack access to broadband in rural communities it's equally startling and i think people don't understand they think it's somebody else's problem i keep saying listen this is an american problem the fact of the matter is that um food security is a national security issue look at the presidency in uh our chimney in china what is he saying food security
is a major issue for them um i could talk with you at length and probably your eyes will place over about what we have going on over there but um uh but it is a national security issue so it's not somebody else's problem it leaves us less secure as a nation the second thing is yes the kids there 95 of farms are still family owned and so they have families these are you know young children and at the same
time they're having to make a decision do i run some of the equipment with whatever bandwidth i have or do the kids go to school teachers are having to drive out to these farms and get paper homework the families then drive an hour to next to sit next to a school bus where they've got hot spots so they can get enough bandwidth to finish their homework on their cell phone it's just not acceptable there's a
shortage of forty thousand doctors in rural communities there's uh you know over a third of children are growing up in growing up food insecure there's a surge of housing so there are so many issues here what i say you say what can we do the first thing you need to do is be aware that this is really a major issue we can talk all we want you're in the valley and i go so many
times in there and i talk to entrepreneurs and they've got the greatest tech and i say none of it can be used in these communities unless we get some technology in there some broad but basic wiring this should be a right like electricity like mail delivery and um and otherwise all of this innovation which these this technology that is now under development um can help us solve climate climate change
we just started a partnership with nori which wants to be the ebay of carbon credit trading we're doing something else in in iowa right now where we're connecting um on water quality these farms and we're giving the score with our trutera inside engine it's got over a trillion data points where they can help improve their decision making on the farm which will improve water quality and seepage into this
into this um water these these rivers and from that they get a certain amount per acre we've got to think of other incentive structures for these farmers we can't have what it is this year 40 billion dollars of subsidies from the government farmers don't want to be on the dole they want you know open access to markets and we have to think about what will likely be this transition leveraging technology that will
accelerate in the ag sector for many many other pressure points that we you know again i don't want to have everybody's eyes blaze over about why electrification of the transportation sector is going to have a deleterious impact on the farm community i could go into multiple issues that if you really looked at it you'd say wow wait a minute we got to pay attention to this this is going to be
transformational moment in our society right now i have concern i'm sure all of you are looking at this looking at the concentration of covalent cases in the upper midwest where i am and where many of our members are and we saw this in february we started what's called our american connection project it's got over 125 different companies now we are partnered very directly with
microsoft i spent some time with satya we announced a a partnership a on tools development b but be on also closing this um this digital divide um and one of the things that we saw was that since there's a shortage of doctors what's going to happen when this goes into the dakotas where it is right now and um and so what we did was we uh i i called all the governors and sent out letters to the governors to the
speaker majority leader all of them to say you need to change your regulatory framework to allow for prescriptions to be written if you know if we see you on a zoom you don't have to be in person and to allow reimbursement rates to be supportive of funding a doctor or hospital and with that there's been an acceleration in health care of telemedicine uh the mayo clinic who were also
partnered with the cleveland clinic and others tell us that there have been more telemedicine appointments in one day than all of last year so it's a long answer when you say what are you doing and what can you do but any of you who are looking at your careers i can tell you all of these things are different vectors on this transformational moment in our in our society and the opportunity is to recognize how enabling
technology is and if we do not have it in these communities it leaves us less secure as a nation that's why job creation has lagged in those areas and we can go on and on it's incredible beth and i think you know i imagine you've enlightened a lot of people listening and also invigorate a lot of people listening that we can do more and it's a group effort here it's it's so clear to me
how much you care about communities in the rural midwest farmers kids you often are the only one like yourself in the room whether that's on the tank or with the dudes whether that's running a 14 billion dollar business that's more than airbnb and lyft combined if anyone's tracking in the audience beth i know that the press loves their headlines they like their clicks and their views they like to put us into boxes when i
researched for this i couldn't find an article that didn't have in bold triple underlined first open the gay female ceo and except actually your press release from their own company right the board focused on results so there was one um but you've talked about authenticity and identity in a matter-of-fact way it's who you are it's in your dna you want your members your employees to
bring their full selves to work so you want to do the same i think though by doing that by being you it means a lot to a lot of different communities and for those of us that are part of the lgbtq plus community 10 of the stanford class is for women working in male dominated industries or for the little kid in iowa who can look at you and say i could be the next fortune 200 ceo you're making a major difference and i
just want to say thank you well that's very kind of you i you know i again it's i i don't find my life that interesting i guess you know it's probably that whole thing might when i talked to one of my sons today who's like oh what are you doing i said oh i'm going to talk with these uh students at stanford and he's oh that's great you know blah blah blah he's thinking about college
and he's like why do they want to listen to you you know because in real life um and i'm like there's a lot here honey you know he just he just laughed but i think but i appreciate you saying that what i recognize is all of us look for moments of help of hope or for some this possibility that this is possible i've told these stories about people who've kind of i've had literally thousands and thousands of
people connect with me to talk about the uh you know leading your authentic life and thank you because that's so um helpful including parents of young children who have come out as gay um but but one of the ones that was most touching to me was i was at an event in uh it was here in the midwest somewhere and i was waiting to go speak to this to the speaker who was going to come off the stage and
and there was a big man and a big gentleman i'm six feet tall so if i'm telling you the man's big that's a big man um and he's you know he's down there i thought oh well i'll go over introduce myself i said hi i'm i'm bath uh ford he goes oh i know who you are and i was like okay great um i'm thinking what does that mean and he goes i just want to say and he he stood there and he he's he's
he started to cry and his you know his lip was moving and i went over to him and i said it's okay it's it's gonna be okay he said no it's my son my son is gay and i said i said he goes and i'm just so proud of you and i'm so grateful for your courage and i just i just held him i said he's so fortunate to have a father like you because all of us just want to be i guess valued seen um you know that that to me was
with such a profound moment i can literally see it i i can feel it i you know i just told you and saying i just you know i'm grateful that you took the time to say that to me and he goes i just i you know it's it's so hard but i'm so grateful that you you've been so authentic about this it's it's really that pain and that's why i say most of the time when i'm contacted like that i feel that pain
the pain of the journey it it's not really about me at all it's about the pain or the emotion that hope for their themselves or their children that of course all of us understand i understand i've got three children i hope everybody values them and they think they're good people you know and so most of the time i don't think it's me at all so when you say that i'm grateful it's not me it's a reflection of this moment
of in what level of concern pain joy happiness pride is present um and so it's i'm grateful to be there with those people at that moment to to to tell them they'll be okay that it's gonna be okay that's incredibly touching and powerful thank you so much beth i have one last question before we turn to audience q a it's something we'll ask all of our speakers this year it's obviously been
an incredibly challenging year what principles do you rely on as a leader when facing these tough moments um calm is contagious calm is contagious i i kind of gave everybody a minnesota and you'll know this view uh you know in the snowstorm in the car you don't jerk the wheel you pump the brake just don't drink the wheel for god's sake we're going for the ditch and then the priority is always your
people your people your people people now i've said i felt like i was pretty engaged with my team before but not nearly now i'm really reflecting back and saying maybe i really wasn't as present because there's an intimacy here you're sitting here i'm doing this for my home office i've had multiple situations i've done you know i'm doing live interviews with washington post or something in my
where my sons is low crawling in here in his underwear to get his technology out of my office you know you see people the whole person you don't see beth who's the ceo you see beth she has these kids oh we're gonna have to go we're going camping i'm not really a camper but now we're doing that um you know there's the dog there's the cat i mean it's there's almost this um this joy of this
moment this intimacy and there's been a flattening right there's not this hierarchy really it's this flattening i do lunch with beth breakfast bath i do all sorts of things and um and so the principal of the people first and i tell them and we have a hotline we have thousands of calls i say you know you're not going to hear me say aren't we just looking at that you have a job because i don't know i'm not living
their journey you know i don't know what's going on in their home i don't know what the pressures are i don't know what's going on with their their parents their children whatever um you you know you can't sit there and say well you should just be grateful no it's hard it's emotional this is a marathon and um and so the principle of the people first and second and third is is what i live with and then like say keep calm
all this contagious make don't jerk the wheel let's stay let's stay in the lane here wonderful message to leave us all with beth thank you so much um that'll conclude the main part of the interview i will invite ed and nba2 to ask our first question right now he should be on in a second hey ed hey beth hi beth i'm ed uh second year mba student at the gsb um thanks so much for being with us here
today uh my question is related to the black lives matter movement and the call for racial equity uh your headquarters is only 15 miles north of where george floyd was killed last may and i guess my question is how did you manage your staff in the days and weeks that followed them listen that was a painful awful time still this is a fraud environment let's all agree and it's not just here
in the twin cities it's elsewhere around the country um you know it was painful to see somebody basically murdered in front of us right and um there are a couple things that i would know there there are 17 fortune 500s here in the twin cities that are headquartered here and um it is an expectation kind of the midwest you are involved in multiple organizations as a ceo or as a senior leader
if you're on the c-suite you you know 85 percent of our of our team volunteers so this is an active involved community but the fact of the matter is there are disparate outcomes from an educational perspective for minorities in this community and let's agree education is a foundational issue for wealth creation for job opportunities for all sorts of things but we're like 49th out of 50. it's just it's
stunning not because there's not investment or well-meaning people but clearly we're not listening so would you say what did you do how did you handle this as a leader well the first thing we need to do is step back listened to our team we had listening sessions as did many of the companies in town it was led by our erg our black african-american arg they shared their fear for their own children things
that had happened to them um it was really eye-opening and painful frankly they asked then um you know for more transparency about our you know about uh progress that we're making on diversity and what i was quite honest with is listen we attract good talent uh minority talent we don't retain well we're clearly not connected we need to do better um this is going to be a journey so the
first thing we did is listen we did put in place some other trend we tried to be more transparent and then outside the community because what i recognize is when we when people leave it's one thing to say you're safe here you're engaged inside the four walls of the company another thing to say you're safe in your community or you should feel engaged in your community and welcome
and so we uh have been trying to work in the in our community and in the communities in which we do business to you know to again say we will make investment we want to make sure that there's opportunity we want to make sure the policies are are appropriate we'll work with government officials all sorts of things so it's a both an internal and external thing and then it's really saying it's not oh we did that session
now we're done no no this is going to be an ongoing thing here minnesota business partners has the ceos of all of the major corporations in town and then i sit on the business roundtable board of directors and the ceos there of over 200 of the largest corporations um you know that once led by w walmart is we're all working to say what are the investments we need to make to make a change
thank you beth thanks ed one more question beth that's from morgan who's an nba one hey morgan i'm oregon cast in at gsb my question is around the future of the industry um so how will the agriculture industry evolve to meet greater demands for food with higher sustainability requirements and how do you prepare existing companies to meet this challenge well it's like you're in my head morgan
and you probably said it more articulate than that um you know the the fundamental issue is that we're going to go to 9.5 to 10 billion people by 2050. you almost have to double food production in that time with less land less arable and less water right freshwater is always already a problem where's most population growth going to occur africa india and some of those areas are are water scarce anyway and their
technology let's say if our yield for corn production for instance on average is 176 bushels an acre they might get like you know 40 or less so you know when you say what are we going to do now and then let's think about the transformation i get this a lot i met an event and somebody say what do you think about plant-based path that's what do you think about uh cell base what do you think about and i'm
like yes i am an advocate for innovation i'm gonna go have a regular burger you have your plant-based okay i have a bird um but i don't need to be too equip about that because your comment is really one that i spend a lot of time with my team on i mentioned this these other pressures the electrification of the transportation sector let me just say 40 of corn produced goes into ethanol
biofuels now california you know governor newsom i've met with him personally i mean he's a thought leader what did he say by 2035 all have to be you know electric vehicles right so biofuels which have been central to the profitability of farmers in addition to exports we're next net exporter um same thing for dairy producers what happens when biofuels are no longer necessary how quickly is that going to happen of
course we could get into a lot of those discussions what's going to happen with the geopolitical environment then when that transitions out of the middle east i mean there are so many factors here so um when you say how do i think about it or what are we doing what i have to do is what i did initially with the um with the covet crisis is i said i've got to protect the enterprise i
immediately checked liquidity i had my cfo running all sorts of models i talked with our bankers i mean i was looking at every scenario okay can we withstand how long can we stand what does this imply so i'm when i'm thinking of this i have to protect the enterprise and i have to protect the members these are families they have their entire life's investment in this if the sector is going to transition in
in different ways that we just discussed whether it's biofuels whether it's different types of food production and let's all agree i'm a big believer in biodiversity for instance we basically have three main crops that feed us and they're what thirty thousand plant varieties or something i mean we need to do something and there's been a significant destruction of biodiversity on the planet
so we know we have to do something and what i have to do is think about it from what is the member what are the what is the enterprise and then how do we set up different incentive structures to allow different revenue sources for farmers as this transition occurs or as we work towards this this because the technology is there to feed this world's population i can tell you that already
how do we know that there's excess supply yet we also have a billion people that go to bed hungry every night there's a distribution in economics and an equity issue and with that then there are multiple ways i can answer your question morgan what i think it takes is fundamentally in the capitalist society here is to come up with different incentive structures whether it's in carbon capture whether
it's in you know as i said carbon credits there are other ways that incentives can be put together for farmers um and in this sector that will stabilize them and allow us to move to this transition but is also better for society and for other bigger problems like climate change thank you thank you so much to ed and morgan for those awesome questions i've got great classmates on my path i'm very
lucky to be yes you are they're smart wanna end with our lightning round beth it's a tradition here on view from the top i know you have experience so the expectations are fine i'm gonna do my best too okay i'm gonna have you finish some sentences from the perspective of a few different people okay the first one's simple you are yourself i think you can do that all right so i'm beth ford
over the past few months i've been binge watching uh yellowstone okay i thought maybe that'd be a problem like i don't know what i've been watching i like it no no no i was thinking yellowstone but then most recently i was going back to something i watched a few years ago newsroom with jeff daniels i like that one so most recently i've been watching that and then i really want to get into this
what is it the queen's gambit oh we just finished that amazing is it good love it okay gotta do that okay i'm a columbia mba and i love that heart nyc go lions but if i could have gone to any other business school it would be well of course stanford but i'm not sure they would have taken me so you know if you say what is the presumption the presumption is that they would have wanted me right
i think i'll tell you i'll be very honest and transparent why i went to columbia um i had met jill and she was going to columbia law school and i was actually going to go further south for my mba and she told me she thought it was a good idea if i went to columbia and i was kind of smitten so i said of course i'm going to go to columbia and there it is 28 years later great okay i'm a stanford mba
and i hope one day to be as incredible a power couple as beth and jill to do that number one thing i must do is marry the right person that that was i was thinking too you got to find somebody first there's a lot of singles in our class so well i mean you if there is that is the most important career decision you make i'm not that's no lie and we in my career and her i mean she was a lawyer she was she was a
she went to west point and then she was coming out she went to law school she would scout and then she became went into banking and then she became the ceo of a hedge fund and um but we make life decisions about careers right life decisions because it's never individual you're hiring the whole person we have three children um we've got a very busy life so uh it's who you marry that
is critical for your career i love that makes sense last one beth so i'm the ceo of landa lakes and i try to eat dinner as often as possible with jill and my three kids my favorite kid is you know only if you want to but no you know we asked my mother that one time we said you know you have a favor we know who it is because there's eight of us and she goes no i don't but then we gave her like half a glass of wine which
is her max and she told us and we knew it was my older brother michael now michael we're like of course he's the best of us he's the smartest he was a navy captain you know he's got like he's got his phd and like something smart nuclear engineering or something is teaching at harvard and we're like of course you love mike best we all love mike best he's so much smarter than us he's a good guy
so uh you know but i will not say i have a favorite i love them all that's that's the perfect answer thank you so much beth for the time today thank you for all you do for farmers for rural america and the great state of minnesota well thank you and thanks for the invitation to be with you i'm wishing all of you the very best um good luck on your journey please stay in touch be happy to help any way i can you