>> Thank you Mariana, and Beth
it's great to welcome you to Envision.
I hope things are going well with you and
your family and everybody at Land O'Lakes.
>> Its going well. We're having
a good start to the year, that's terrific.
Farmers are having a great start.
A lot of positive signals,
and for me I'm having a good time with
my family although a
year-and-a-half with my 16-and-a-half year old sons,
they're working on their driver's license,
so I'm not sure how well that's actually going Andrew.
>> Oh, I wish you well with that. I can tell
you what with cows because
of your background and press a
little bit more of that later.
I was reading about you in the New York Times,
that's exciting in its own right.
Background growing up in Iowa,
you're CEO of a major farming cooperative
and were talking growth mindset,
it's Pride month, you and I part the LGBTQI community.
What does growth mindset mean to you both
through your career and now as a major CEO?
>> Well, growth mindset is about,
and I've been listening to your sessions.
It is about resilience and taking
the opportunity to learn from mistakes.
How do you build
resilience when you have a lot of failures?
Then you understand how you can pivot and grow.
One of the things that I think is most
important from my experience as I've gotten
older and I've had more experience in
different industries and in
this particular business is
understanding how critical relationships are.
Some of the most important decisions you make are
the decisions you make in your life, your relationships,
your partner, but also
the relationships that are critical in business.
One of the things that I tell our interns
every year when they ask me what should I learn,
and I say that you're smart, you'll learn the business.
That's not the issue,
what you need to do is invest in relationships.
Relationships are the key accelerator to
a career if you have the appropriate level of humility,
you will understand decisions or questions you can ask
others that will help
improve your knowledge and help improve their success.
Then to recognize that
success isn't all about you actually,
it's about enabling others success,
and that builds a virtuous circle,
a community that allows you to
elevate and get good results for everybody.
>> Indeed, in that community,
the world we live in, the changing world.
How has growth mindset driven you over
the stages of your career
and perhaps outside of work as well?
>> I think now in my 50s,
I'm a different person than I was when I was in
my 20s and 30s and 40s.
I continue to learn,
you hope you continue to learn.
I tried to take lessons from my mother,
who I now consider to be
one of the best role models for me
about her intentionality raising eight of us,
ask for what you want.
I'm not a mind reader.
Make sure you're showing up every day in a positive way,
and I think that that's translated.
One of the most important things now,
and especially since this is Gay Pride month,
and I'm excited about that
is we continue to encourage our employees,
and certainly I would say myself to show up
as their authentic self every day to do your best work,
to be your best self.
That's the most important thing.
We don't want you to be anybody different,
and I always think when we hire somebody,
we hire the full person, their partners,
their spouse, their families,
all of their issues,
and so when you're investing like that,
when you're thinking of their lives,
their communities, the business in a broader way,
not just what is their functional expertise,
that's not terribly interesting.
It's more, who is this individual we're hiring?
Who is this person?
How can they be part of the culture that to me builds
a growth mindset of
resilience in a business and in a family.
>> As we navigate through
and ultimately out of the pandemic,
this sense of the role of leadership,
this sense of the role of technology,
and the sense of the fact that
businesses have to transform and
continuously retransform.
Could you give us a little bit of
a lens into Land O'Lakes,
you must have one massive supply chain.
>> We do. We start with the farmer.
We are a farmer owned,
this is our 100th anniversary,
and you can sit there and say,
this is one of the oldest professions, farmers.
Farmers constantly are investing in themselves.
We have a reverse ownership model,
so our local retailers and
rural areas are also
owners of the Land O'Lakes enterprise.
So when I think about coming out of
the pandemic and then what about growth?
There are challenges and I so appreciate
the partnership of Microsoft and
seeing this more broadly.
It's not necessarily about the business.
I constantly think these are
folks raising families like all of us are,
and we need to have access to technology.
One of the greatest accelerants
in our lifetime, in anybody's lifetime,
think about the rural electric initiative
and when electricity was made available to everybody,
think about mail delivery.
This should be a right,
and technology is a major accelerant
and it will be for farming, yes.
But more importantly as
a stabilization mechanism for
the communities more broadly,
in which farming and agriculture is present.
So that's the way we're thinking
of it and thinking of the investment.
It's hard to be a great farmer if you're
having to worry about whether
your kid is going to school,
or whether you have access to health care,
or whether you have fresh food.
Seventy-eight percent of the counties in
America that are food insecure are in rural America.
So we're thinking of growth and tying it to technology.
I'm so grateful for Microsoft's partnership in helping us
build technology enablement in
these communities through broadband initiatives.
>> We're exciting to be working with you on it as well.
Now listening to a CEO,
let's talk about authenticity and family and
bringing your entire community to work.
That's been really definitive
of the period of time we've been in right now,
but moving forward, how
will your role continuing to evolve?
Where do you see the role of CEO going
next as we move out of the pandemic?
>> Well, the role of the CEO has changed and I'm sure,
and now I've been a CEO for three years,
so I don't know what it was like 10 years ago.
I think there was a different expectation.
I think the most important thing is to be
authentic and caring about your employees first,
caring about those issues.
Because I do believe that if you have a team,
if you have a business that is
built on a foundation that is tied to,
and we've said resilience but tied to growth,
but tied to their needs,
then you can have success.
During this pandemic we tried to lead with their safety,
their security, investing in their issues.
We had hotlines, we tried to provide
additional wages with time off, all of those things.
As we're moving forward,
it's going to be a different kind
of work environment for all of us,
and we have to continue to stay
attached to our employees,
their needs, the sensitivities that they have.
We learned a number of things during this pandemic about
how effective we could be when we trusted each other,
when we were more able to make quick decisions,
and at the same time allowed for
some space for some
individual to address their own personal needs.
So I think that that's what my priority is going to be.
Technology enablement, something broader.
The impact the business can have in communities,
and then really a focus on
our employees and on our members.
>> Beth, we will continue to learn.
Thank you for all you're doing.
Thank you for what Land O'Lakes is doing.
I hope you and everyone there stay safe and well.
On behalf of everyone at Avanade, Accenture,
and Microsoft, thanks for joining us today, Beth Ford.
>> Thank you.