COLUMN | NEWS | FEATURE
LOOKING BACK
PRESIDENT’S COLUMN BY DAVE CHRISTIANSEN, MKC PRESIDENT AND CEO Through my 40-plus year career in the cooperative system, I have had the opportunity to write numerous newsletter articles on an array of topics. While it may not be that apparent, at one point in my career, I was even the editor and attended a newsletter school to sharpen my skills. However, through all of my commentary, I have never written one like this, so bear with me. It was with a mix of emotions that I recently announced my retirement. While some start the countdown and desperately look forward to the day they picked on the calendar as their date of retirement, I haven’t looked at it with that much eagerness. Over the past year, with each event that passed, the thought would cross my mind that this is the last one of these events I would have the opportunity to attend. As I was thinking about retirement, I realized that if I am fully engaged in performing my role to the best of my ability, there was never going to be the perfect time to step aside. If the team at MKC is executing on our intent statement and driving hard every day to achieve our objectives, then we won’t ever have a slow period. If we’re waking up every day with the intent of making our customers more successful and raising the bar on what good performance looks like, then I don’t anticipate there being a perfect time to step aside. At the end of that discovery, I had to pick a date. I was comforted by the knowledge that our team would execute the plan as well as ever, and the Board of Directors had the skills and foresight to select the new CEO. I was also constantly reminded that while managers have a retirement date, the cooperative never does. Those of you who know me know that I don’t spend much of my time looking back. Possible exceptions would be to remind myself of what not to do again or to make sure we still have alignment. Nevertheless,
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Connections
generally, I’m forward-focused and the company is today. On this occasion, I am making an exception. I invite you to join me as I reflect on what I’ve observed as the movement of the cooperative system in my career. It has been fascinating to me over the years to watch the local co-op morph from basically a warehouse for growers, a place to aggregate their purchases and a place to store and collectively market their grain, to what it has become today. The most influential and most successful cooperatives have positioned themselves to be an integral part of the operations that many of you operate today and to make that required massive investments in infrastructure, technology and talent. Our value propositions of the past simply were not going to get it done regardless of how tightly we hung on. Our structural anchors no longer had the same value to your operation. Our core values did, but not the tools, talent and infrastructure of yesteryear. We had to realign and reshape our business to reconnect with yours. The tools we have adopted today are the differentiator for our customers. Even
An archived January 2004 newsletter announces Dave Christiansen as the incoming general manager.
