Latest / Letter to America / Just Business

Transcript

Just Business · Letter to America

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: As I may have mentioned before, the first seven years of my career were with Leo Burnett Advertising, first in Hong Kong, then Jakarta, and finally at 35 West Whacker Drive in a Chicago Loop high-rise that was unusually owned by the company itself.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: It was a monolithic testament to the company's extraordinary success at turning packaged goods into much-loved household brands, with famous critters that embodied them, from Tony the Tiger and the Green Giant to the poor, lonely Maytag repairman.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Leo had started the company in 1935 in his early 40s during the Depression.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: He left a bowl of apples on the reception desk every day for the delivery people and visitors that came by.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: A cutting newspaper editorial about the foolhardy timing of his entrepreneurial endeavor joked that it wouldn't be long before he was selling those apples on the sidewalk, rather than giving them away.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: Almost sixty years later, in our Leobernat offices in Hong Kong, the bowl of apples sat prominently on the reception desk.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: Before he died, he gave a farewell speech at the annual company breakfast in December 1967.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: It was entitled When to Take My Name Off the Door.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: He emphatically stated the conditions under which he would reappear from the grave to personally scrape his name off the door.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: In short, when the company worships money more than the work and the hardworking people who do the work.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: In his own words, when you stoop to convenient expediency and rationalize yourselves into acts of opportunism for the sake of a fast buck.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: He closed, gripping the lectern with a quivering lip and threatening to materialize from the grave and throw every goddamned apple down the elevator shafts.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: Earlier that same year, he had already placed the company in trust, transferring all of his voting stock to a charitable foundation built to protect the agency's character and its employees' futures.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: What got me thinking about Leo Burnett was that going into America's long birthday weekend, I had been somewhat preoccupied with thoughts about a new company that I'm preparing to launch and how to structure that in a way that protects the principles that I have as a founder at Inception.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: Values can be harder to hold on to if and when that corporation exceeds your wildest expectations.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: In the course of my meandering thoughts, I remembered a fact that I had not thought about since high school American history class.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: That America itself was in a way founded as a private corporation.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: A company before it was spun off and taken public as a country.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: In 1629, King Charles issued a charter to the Massachusetts Bay Company, a joint stock company with shares, investors, a board, and shareholders' meetings.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Standard practice was that such incorporation documents specified a location in the United Kingdom for the entity to be based.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Conveniently for history, someone either forgot or made sure that the location was left blank.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: A group of twelve Puritan shareholders grabbed this opportunity, and the blank line in the charter to stipulate that they would only invest and emigrate to America if the charter and the company's government went with them.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: The people already living on that land do appear in the charter as souls to be converted, nowhere as owners.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Puritans owning property in the new England on a parchment drafted in London for soil no shareholder had ever set foot on, and the people living on it never got a vote.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: Later that year, the company voted to move headquarters offshore and reorganized so that everyone holding shares would have to be physically in America, working in the venture.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: In 1630, 700 odd colonists, shareholders, and the first employees set sail with their charter documents and ledgers on board.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: The charter called its voting shareholders Freemen.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: Within a year of landing, the company began granting freemanship to settlers who owned no stock at all.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: Membership in the venture, not money in it, became the qualification to vote.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: The Massachusetts Bay Company became the Massachusetts colony.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: The shareholders' meeting kept convening and simply became the legislature.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: And the corporate word for stockholder quietly became the word for citizen.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody announced the change.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: The ledger just started measuring something else.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: By 1776, the corporation, the colony, and twelve others had done very well for themselves, and some began to chafe under the legal jurisdiction of the crown.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: Large shareholders felt stifled by limitations placed on where the corporations could do business, how much taxes they paid, and importantly, geographic expansion.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: The Crown was limiting the American colony's trade and growth.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: The spark of the revolution was, in fact, the destruction of a shipment of East India Company T from a ship in Boston Harbor.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: Two hundred and fifty years ago, major shareholders declared their grievances and voted to spin off the company and take it public.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: Those who didn't agree fought back and lost.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: Many moved north to Canada and stayed with the parent company.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: The American company men founded a federal republic with each colony becoming a state.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: The branches of government and the legislative process built on the framework the joint stock companies had already established and had been living under for over a century.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: The ledgers of our history are filled with interesting entries.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: Case in point, the Capitol building itself, America's HQ.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: The cornerstone was laid in 1793.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: The seat of our self-governing democracy was built in large part by enslaved laborers leased by the government from their owners, and is capped by a monumental statue of freedom.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: By the 1850s, we had outgrown our original dome and commissioned a far greater cast iron dome that still stands today.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: The statue was designed by the American sculptor Thomas Cromford in his studio in Rome.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: His first drawings featured freedom holding a liberty cap, a soft hat that freed slaves wore in Roman times and that had become a symbol of the French Revolution.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: Jefferson Davis, the Secretary of War who would lead the South's slaveholder rebellion, struck the freed slave symbol from the freedom statue.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: The cap was changed to a helmet.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: A plaster model was sent from Rome to a sufficiently large foundry on the outskirts of Washington, D.C.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: Philip Reed, a man born into slavery and purchased by the foundry owner, became a critical asset needed to overcome the challenges of casting such a huge bronze statue.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: The model had arrived in five sections, and when it came time to move it to the foundry, the Italian sculptor, hired to assemble it, refused to reveal how to take it apart, not without a raise.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: Reed worked out the answer.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: With a block and tackle and a gentle pull on the lifting ring at the top, the seams revealed themselves.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: An enslaved man working to cast a nineteen and a half foot tall, fifteen thousand pound, colossal figure of the very freedom he wouldn't have until 1862.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Reed was paid$1.25 per day, seven days a week, but he was the only worker whose pay went to someone else six days a week.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: The whole statue, excluding installation, cost twenty-three thousand seven hundred and ninety-six dollars and eighty-two cents.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: Philip Reed received forty-one dollars and twenty-five cents.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: His pay for thirty-three Sundays, the one day of the week that was technically his own.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: Construction on the Capitol Dome continued through the Civil War, and Reed was finally granted his freedom in 1862 under the DC Compensated Emancipation Act, which freed the district's enslaved people by compensating their owners.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: Freedom still stands on the dome.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: When the man who assembled her died, he was buried within view of her, then moved and moved again to clear ground for a metro station, his marker lost, his remains placed in an unmarked mass grave.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: A memorial was finally installed in 2014, 122 years after his death, on Emancipation Day.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: America's gradual incorporation of business into government came not only from Congress under the Capitol Dome, but across the street at the Supreme Court.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: In 2010, in Citizens United, it ruled that corporations have a First Amendment right to unlimited independent political spending.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: Are corporations people?
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: Are shareholders their masters?
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: Or was everyone who ever touched the company a stakeholder?
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: And if so, who's been keeping our ledger?
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, Leo's speech held his corporation together and the private partnership stayed intact with his name on the door for 30 more years.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: It was even expanded by a merger with DMBMB, Darcy, Macius, Benton, and Bowles.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: The holding company was called BCom 3.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: In 2002, Publicis offered BCOM 3 shareholders$3 billion, and after a vote, BCOM 3 dissolved.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: The top four executives split roughly$240 million.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: Just last year, Publicis folded the company into a business unit and shortened its name to Leo.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: Back in 1993, during a move of the Hong Kong offices, the Leo Burnett's signature graphic in our lobby was taken down to be replaced with a new logo.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: I saw his name, Leo, leaning on the wall in a pile of construction rubble that was being thrown out.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: Something made me pick it up and take it home.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's been with me ever since.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's still in my basement, like an old battle flag, that might be dusted off and raised someday.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: This is Handalane from Istanbul.