Thank you, David, for your kind introduction.
I'd like to thank Dean Saudagaran, and the University of Washington Tacoma's Milgard School of Business, for inviting me to speak this evening at your Eleventh Annual Business Leadership Awards event.
I'd also like to recognize Jeanne Hillman, Weyerhaeuser Vice President and Controller for Operations, who serves on the Milgard School's Advisory Board.
Good evening everyone -- It's an honor to speak at an institution so vital to Tacoma's renaissance.
This University is a tremendous resource for businesses and nonprofit groups in the greater Tacoma region.
The Milgard School, in particular, has proved invaluable in nurturing talent, and fostering a new generation of business and community leaders--leaders like the three we honor this evening, who have contributed to a resurgent Tacoma, and who have made this city a better place to live, and to work. You can see the city's renewal all around us. I encourage you to come back and walk the campus and downtown.
If you're here during a weekday, be sure to visit Union Station just across Pacific Avenue. The architectural firm, Reed and Stem, also responsible for New York City's Grand Central Station, designed the impressive Beaux-Arts edifice. Union Station is one of the state's architectural treasures.
Just to the east of campus, in a contemporary building that mimics the style of the grand railroad terminal, is the Washington State History Museum.There, you'll discover that Weyerhaeuser and Tacoma are inextricably connected.
Weyerhaeuser was founded here 112 years ago. While our headquarters is now a few miles north in Federal Way, many of our employees still make Tacoma home, and the company continues to invest in the city and the region. For more than 100 years, we've remained committed to our roots.
I too have roots in Tacoma. Earlier in my career, in the late 1980's, I served for a short time as the CEO of Cornerstone Columbia Development Company--a joint venture between Weyerhaeuser and Portland General Electric.
Cornerstone was a pioneer in the revitalization of Downtown Tacoma, with its development of several full blocks downtown, including rehabilitation of some historic older buildings, as well as new construction of the Tacoma Financial Center, the Tacoma Sheraton Hotel (now the Hotel Murano), and the headquarters building of the Frank Russell Company.Then, in 1989, Weyerhaeuser provided a significant grant to support the founding of the UW Tacoma campus.
Over the years, we;ve consistently supported a diversity scholarship endowment, and we've enthusiastically sponsored events like the one where we are gathered today.
In the past decade alone, Weyerhaeuser has donated more than $5.4 million to community organizations in Tacoma and Pierce County, and our employees have donated thousands of volunteer hours in addition to their own charitable contributions to the United Way and so many other local organizations. Clearly, Weyerhaeuser is not alone in its commitment to the city and the region.
The best leaders nearly always have a commitment to serving their communities. This will be especially apparent later tonight, as Dean Saudagaran introduces this year's leadership award winners, and you hear from each one.
First, however, I'd like to provide some perspective on the importance of this award program, and the leaders it honors.
We're a society that is fascinated by leadership. Search the word at the Amazon.com bookstore, and you’ll get nearly 75,000 results. Search Google, and the number of links explodes to 504 million! While the literature is extensive, not one of these books or websites--and many are quite good--offers a perfect recipe for leadership.
To paraphrase management pundit Henry Mintzberg, "leadership is like swimming, it can't be learned by reading about it."
The education that a student receives from The Milgard School and other universities and business schools across the country is an important building block in preparing one for a career, but ultimately, leadership is defined by deeds and accomplishments --that is, what one does with their training and education.
It's not a task for armchair quarterbacks or the faint of heart, but rather belongs to those who step up, and put their reputations on the line--or as Teddy Roosevelt challenged us, for those who take their place "in the arena."
You will find that all great leaders have a few things in common. They have unbridled passion, clarity of vision and consistency of character.
Most important, however, the best leaders pave the way for future generations. This is the legacy of the leaders we honor tonight -- who connect past with present, and present with future. Leadership is timeless, and spans generations.
Let me explain by taking you back in time…
The setting is a little more than 100 years ago, here in Tacoma, where the western terminus of the Northern Pacific Railway connected Tacoma's Union Station with the eastern United States, where East met West, where rail met sail. About 65 miles southwest of this bustling town, a familiar landmark dominated the skyline.
Rising more than 14,000 feet above sea level, Mount Rainier has inspired generations of us – from Native Americans and then early European settlers, to the men, women and children of diverse backgrounds and varied heritage who make Tacoma home today. Mount Rainier so dominates our region that I want to frame my remarks this evening around this iconic part of our local landscape.
The next time you look at Mount Rainier, perhaps on a crisp spring morning before you leave for work or school, or on a late mid-summer evening, when the Pacific Northwest sun refuses to budge from the sky, I'd like you to remember the three individuals we celebrate in this room tonight.
I'd also like you to remember three historical figures who once traversed the slopes of our massive mountain. While no longer household names, their contributions persist.
The first historical leader is John Muir.
Perhaps you've noticed the base camp that bears his name, at 10,000 feet on the way to the summit of Rainier. Muir was one of the nation's first, and most important naturalists.
Biographer Steven Holmes wrote, "Muir… profoundly shaped the very categories through which Americans understand and envision their relationships with the natural world."
Known as the "father of the U.S. National Park system", Muir was the driving force behind the creation of the Grand Canyon, Sequoia, Yosemite--and Mount Rainier--national parks.
A master communicator who could recite the New Testament of the Bible by heart, Muir published 300 articles and ten books that conveyed a deeply spiritual naturalist philosophy. His elegant writing influenced people ranging from Theodore Roosevelt to Gifford Pinchot, the nation's first chief forester. Undoubtedly, Muir's teachings inspired Weyerhaeuser's ongoing commitment to sustainable forestry.
In 1888, in frail health, Muir ascended the summit of Mount Rainier. Later writing about his climb, Muir said: "The view we enjoyed from the summit could hardly be surpassed in sublimity and grandeur; but one feels far from home so high in the sky, so much so that one is inclined to guess that, apart from the acquisition of knowledge and the exhilaration of climbing, more pleasure is to be found at the foot of the mountains than on their tops. Doubly happy, however, is the man to whom lofty mountain tops are within reach, for the lights that shine there illumine all that lies below."
Four years after that climb, Muir would co-found the Sierra Club, which he led until his death in 1914.
Ten years after Muir's ascent, in 1898, Seattle-based photographer Edward S. Curtis helped rescue a group of scientists stranded on Mount Rainier. One of the men was anthropologist Bird Grinnell, an expert on Native Americans. A year later, Grinnell and Curtis would travel to Alaska.
Impressed with Curtis' artistic eye, in 1900 Grinnell invited Curtis to photograph the Blackfeet Indians in Montana. This trek would inspire Curtis' magnum opus, The North American Indian, a 20-volume work containing 40,000 photographs, 20,000 wax cylinder recordings, and interviews with tribal leaders and others.
From 1900 to 1930, Curtis crisscrossed the United States and Alaska, photographing nearly every Native American group west of the Mississippi. Early on, the project garnered national attention. By the time Curtis completed the last volume in 1930, however, he was broke, divorced, and in ill health from years of constant travel. Interest in his life endeavor had waned significantly. Only 272 complete volumes were ever sold.
When Curtis died in 1952, his masterpiece had fallen into obscurity and many of the original photographic plates were either lost or destroyed.
Then, in the 1960s and 70s, anthropologists, scholars and tribal historians rediscovered Curtis. Today, according to the Library of Congress, "Curtis' photographic work is now recognized as one of the most significant records of Native culture ever produced."
In 1918, Mount Rainier National Park Superintendent, Dewitt L. Raeburn shocked the state's climbing community when he appointed Alma Wagen as the first woman to join Mount Rainier's prestigious guide staff. As a woman, she was required to log far more training hours than her male counterparts. And that she did.
Wagen, a math teacher at Stadium High School in Tacoma, had spent numerous summer breaks training in the Olympic Mountains and in Alaska and Montana. In an interview in American Magazine, Wagen said she "wanted to teach other women the joy of climbing."
Over the years, Wagen's fame grew, and her reputation as one of the mountain's most accomplished guides was unsurpassed. Both men and women sought her out to guide them to the summit. At one point, she took John D. Rockefeller Jr. to the top of Rainier.
In a 1923 Tacoma News Tribune interview, she said "I wanted to get up among the clouds and to feel myself as free as the birds and the air, and to be able to shout my freedom as loudly as I liked without having someone point to me sadly and say 'It is not pretty for little girls to climb windmills.'"
Today, hundreds of women summit Rainier, and thousands enjoy the sport of climbing mountains. In many ways, Wagen paved the way. Each of these historic leaders exemplified character, vision and determination. Each had unparalleled communications skills that inspired others. Each, in their own unique way, created a legacy that connects their dreams to the dreams of the people who now call Tacoma and the state of Washington home.
Past and present, from the mountaintops to the waters of Puget Sound, our state and this city are blessed with leaders who continue to make Tacoma THE City of Destiny. With all due respect to Henry Mintzberg, in my experience, leadership is more like climbing mountains than swimming.
Climbing a summit requires a detailed plan, physical conditioning, the proper clothing and climbing gear, adequate food and water, persistence, and--pardon the pun--peak performance. Most important, compelling leadership uncovers the depths of our endurance, and release of our potential.
Like the city of Tacoma, Weyerhaeuser's fortunes have ebbed and flowed over the years. Since U.S. housing production peaked in 2005, we've encountered the nation's worst housing crisis since the Great Depression, coupled with a very fragile international economic environment.
Having been on the summit many times during our long history, today, we've had to dig deep to reinvent ourselves as we once again mount a new climb to the summit.
Doing so has required leadership at all levels, to provide teams with the right tools and encouragement, and the empowerment to take charge of the areas within our control.
We haven't dictated the route that everyone had to tak--but we have made clear that the goal was to reach the summit – safely.
To use a mountain climbing analogy: we've given our teams the right equipment, and tools with which to measure progress. Our leaders have been responsible for leading their teams safely across a challenging economic and competitive landscape.
Now we're regaining strength. We're regaining confidence in the future. Most importantly, we're confident in ourselves. We've mapped our route. Each individual has trained hard, yet is tethered to the team. We've harnessed a healthy competiveness that combines passion with compassion. We've set the metrics to measure progress, both individually, and in each of the company’s business units.
Using another climbing analogy, in contrast to early expeditions on Rainier with large climbing parties, including some who were simply carrying gear and food to support the elite climbing party who would summit, we've also lightened our packs, eliminating any unnecessary weight, turning all members of the party into summit climbers.
We've recognized that we need to focus on speed to get up and off the mountain before other climbing parties or changes in weather--to be faster than our competition.
We've recognized the need for nimbleness to be able to adjust our routes to avoid unanticipated dangers and take advantage of unexpected opportunities.
We've recognized our reliance on all members of our team in the broadest sense--our employees, our customers, our suppliers, our investors, our communities, and our planet.
Regardless of economic headwinds, these actions have challenged our team to crane their necks toward the mountaintop and say, "We can get there. We belong there."
In fact, this climbing analogy is so compelling and appropriate, that leaders of Weyerhaeuser's Wood Products Distribution Business recently introduced a "Summit Challenge" program, which recognizes team progress up their own route to a goal of improved profitability.
One of the key traits we expect of our own "Summit Challenge" participants is to inspire those around them to overcome even seemingly insurmountable market obstacles.
This concept of healthy competition and friendly rivalry is so important that, as a prize for the first team to summit, I've donated my own personal ice axe, which I used over years of backpacking, plus some climbing decades ago.
If you're at all familiar with mountaineering, you know this lifesaving tool. Climbing teams are roped together. A single fall can take down an entire party.
Conversely, by burying the axe in the ice or snow, a team member can arrest the fall of an individual or the entire group.
This ice axe symbolizes preparedness, the importance of the individual, and the power of teamwork.
Like Muir, Curtis and Wagen, the leaders honored here this evening have helped their organizations and this region advance along their own route to the summit.
Tonight's honorees are tomorrow's history lessons. They motivate their businesses, organizations and teams to do more than anyone ever thought possible. In turn, they improve our community and our lives, and the lessons they teach inspire us all.
Now, let's go back to those 75,000 books on Amazon.com. In every story about leadership--both past and present--a single, enduring truth emerges. True leaders don't strive to accumulate followers; the best leaders motivate others to excel at every level of an organization, in every corner of society. They show us that leadership doesn't require a title, or special training. They embolden us to take the reins when given the chance.
Perhaps the opportunity is an informal team at work, or volunteering for community outreach, or coaching a little league or soccer team, or helping your own children make the best of life. This ability to make others shine is the lasting legacy of tonight's award winners. They bring out the best in others.
As I end my remarks this evening, I want to share some wisdom from writer Marianne Williamson. These words were reportedly used in a speech by one of our era’s great leaders, Nelson Mandela:
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
So the next time you see Mount Rainier rising high above the horizon, remember Williamson's words, remember the leaders from our past who have traversed the mountain's slopes, remember the leaders here tonight who have climbed to great heights, and remember that you, too, can rise beyond measure. When you do, you connect past, present and future--and you inspire those around you to soar…
Thanks to everyone for being here this evening to recognize our honorees--and let me offer my sincere congratulations to Luke, Tony and Jack.
