Novus International Sponsor - Thad Simons

Speaker A And now I'd like to call on Thad Simon. Novus is sponsor of the conference and especially the reception. And I'd like Thad to say a few words. He's one of the longest, has been using Requisite for many, many years at Novus and has been a great sponsor for the society over all that time.

Speaker B All right, thank you, Ken, and thank you everyone. I haven't been here since Thursday, but already we know with Ken it's a very dense program, so I'll try not to keep you too much longer, but it has been our privilege at Novus to be on this journey over these 23 years. And it was very interesting how it really first started when we were part of Monsanto and we were being spun out 23 years ago, being acquired by two Japanese companies, small group. We couldn't really quite say we're in startup completely because we already had about a 200 million dollar business. It was already a fairly global business, but we were having to build a lot of things as we were going. We were about 70 people starting out and had to build all kinds of systems into the organization. And Joe Privet, our founder, our first president, went to the Levinson Institute, met Elliot and came to understand he was a scientist himself, a PhD chemical engineer, and he really liked this process, this systematic process of how you could build an organization for the future. And he came to know to Nancy and we had a first anniversary party at Novus and we were all outside playing games. Literally, we were playing games. And here was this consultant that shows up and everyone thought, my God, we're only one year old and we're already going to have some kind of a restructuring and reorganization. What's the consultant doing here? And on top of it, she had laryngitis, so she couldn't speak a word. I remember she was sitting next to me at the picnic table. I was general counsel at the time. I didn't know anything about HR, I couldn't manage even my secretary. And it was just a question of what is this lady really here for? But over time, we built a huge trusting relationship. Nancy is a personal friend and she's done so much for novice and done so much for me over all these many years, in all the ups and downs and the long journey that we've had as Novus. We've talked a little bit at this conference about culture, and I think quite often this is the part in Requisite that we don't spend enough time thinking about. I have actually attended some of the conscious capitalism programs and I say there's an interest and a value there. But I don't take it away from being the story of love that they try to preach so much. I put it much more in terms of the trust relationship that Requisite organization leads to. That relationship between the manager and the subordinate has to be founded upon that communication and trust but also it needs to be built into a context of the culture. So in that first year, as we were starting to build requisite into our organization, we also as a management team worked on our purpose, which we called our vision. And it was to help and is to help feed the world affordable wholesome food and achieve a higher quality of life. And if you think about from where we started from, with just about $200 million of sales in the middle of the United States, selling just a few products, going into poultry feeds, not even selling feed, not selling chicken. Not selling anything any consumer directly consumes. For us to have the audacity to say we're going to help to feed the world affordable and wholesome food was something I think very inspiring to all of us as a young team. We established a little bit later after that a mission to make a clear difference in sustainably meeting the growing global needs for nutrition and health. So already putting it into a broader context of what we mean by those words, of helping to feed the world affordable and hostile food. And we also spent time on thinking about how. So what was the context we talked about parameters or what is the process we're going to follow? So the how our core values and these core values are the same core values we've had for 23 years. Maximize long term customer satisfaction, provide products with a demonstrable value, act with integrity, protect our employees, the public and the environment and seek excellence from all our employees. And each one of these five values has a deeper, longer explanation that we actually go with in our management training with our employees, onboarding of our employees. And as we go through over the years continuous education and training programs with our managers. And if you think about it, there's not one financial metric in the way in which we're talking about what is the impact we're going to have as an organization. It's not because we don't care about making money, we definitely want to make money and we have actually done quite a good job at doing that. But the reality is what makes a difference for people is where they think they're doing something if they can see how their role is making a difference and they can understand that. Before we talked about the five stakeholders, we were already identifying those stakeholders. So it was important to us to have a strong supply chain, important to us to be focused on our customers, important that our employees were a part of that and understanding how all that worked together. Important that we were respecting the environment and we were a part of our local communities and trying to work with that and providing opportunities for growth. And we were a science based organization. All those things were very important and continue to be very important to Novus as an organization. And we knew we had to have this kind of a structure because to achieve that kind of long term goal, we had to have something like requisite organization that gave us the ability to grow, to build an organization, to grow globally. In St. Louis we have more than 20 nationalities in our headquarters and we sell into more than 100 countries and we have employees in more than 50 countries, but we're only 800 souls. So with only 800 people to be able to reach that far around the world and have one common language, to have one common way in which we're going to work together to achieve that vision. So we had to go from being basically a partial business unit inside Monsanto to being a Stratum Six organization. And we had to do that in six months. And we had to do that because our Joe Private told us we had to do that. So fortunately we had Nancy Lee and sometimes we had the privilege of having Elliot Jackson to be there with us as we started on that journey. But everything doesn't always go according to plan. As we know, there are such things as business cycles and so business cycles came to affect Novus as well. So at the end of the 90s, things were going well, we'd had very good results, but then the Asian financial crisis hit and so a lot of our growth plans were put on hold. Joe retired and the board decided to promote the head of the marketing department. Seems like a natural selection, but unfortunately it was not a very good time for the organization. And after a couple of years he was asked to leave and I was asked to become the interim COO as the board was looking outside the company for a new CEO to take the company forward. So what do you do as the interim COO? There is no CEO and the board is in Japan. So it was a time to think about how do you reset the communication with the employees? I ate a lot of pizza that time because every week I would sit down basically on the floor and we would talk to the employees about what? It was little I knew about the process, but what do we have to do going back to those fundamental purpose and core values, keeping the focus externally, keeping the focus to the customers, keeping the focus on our business. And in that same year we went through a major restructuring. Most of the original executive team decided to leave the company and in the process we were able to upshift the organization. That was my theme for the evening. We upshifted at the beginning as we left Monsanto and we had to have an upshift again because we had a downshift for a period. And as we upshifted the organization back to Stratum Six and we had that long term aspiration we're able to regrow the company and go from sales. And that's only one metric I understand, not even the most important one. But we went from sales of about $300 million in $2001 to $1.3 billion now. So it was a huge growth we had over the past decade. So I have just stepped down as being CEO at the end of March. Then it's time for the next phase of nois's growth and also time for my next phase of my growth. And I've been very impressed by this conference. I think I've actually enjoyed this more than any other Ro conference I've been to, because now I no longer have that responsibility of worrying about that particular organization and how I have to go about and take these. It's much more now about what I can do myself to help others. So my focus today, as many of you have heard already, is to start working with entrepreneurs to thinking about how we can more rapidly address the growing needs for food by bringing more technology and helping entrepreneurs to be successful in bringing those technologies forward. We always just assume the food is going to be there. But I can assure you, if we're going to find the way to feed 9 billion people by 2050, we have to produce as much food between now and then as we produce in all of human history. And we have to do it with the same earth and the same water. And so we have to be able to do it with new technologies. So it's great to meet people. Like Jason has great new technology for being able to reuse water. Fundamental big data, as we heard, transforming agriculture very rapidly. But our education systems aren't keeping up. They're not keeping up in the US. They're not keeping up globally. The agriculturalists we're graduating today are not data ready. And so we need to work in terms of education to make sure that they are going to have the skills that we need to have to be able to meet those goals. So what I'm committing myself to now is to work really towards how to achieve helping to feed the world wholesome and affordable food and working back in terms of how can we grow those education systems, those curricula that we need, and how can we support those entrepreneurs that will bring those technologies. They'll allow us to do that. So, in closing, I think Ro has a huge opportunity that no one else has really recognized, but I think came out of our session today to really be able to raise the ODS of success, of technology development and success. So I would ask each of you to think about how we, in our practice of Ro, can make sure that we're working out and sharing and being able to help feed the world. Thank you.