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(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, December 2nd, and I'm Kristen Baird Adams, president of the City Club Board of Directors.

It's my privilege to introduce today's forum, which is part of our health innovation and local heroes series here at the city club.

It also is the annual Sally Gries Endowed Forum in honor of women of achievement through which today, we recognize our featured speaker, Cleveland Native and Laurel alum, Carey Jaros, president and CEO of Gojo Industries.

Ingenuity and innovation have been at the heart of Gojo Industries since it was founded in 1946 by Goldie and Jerry Lippman, with the creation of a one step rinse off hand cleaner for factory workers in Akron's then booming tire and rubber industry.

Gojo, a take on Goldie and Jerry's names, of course, broadened its reach over the years beyond the automotive and other industry segments to the everyday consumer, including the invention of Purell hand sanitizer in 1988.

When the COVID19 pandemic hit, Gojo was thrust into the national spotlight as demand for the cleansing and sanitizing product surged, the demand for its cleaning and hand sanitizing product surged.

Rising to the occasion, Ms. Jaros, who had been named as the president and CEO just in January of 2020, and the Gojo team, invested more than 400 million in capacity expansion and vertical integration, and more than doubled the number of its locations in Northeast Ohio to meet demand and ultimately helped save lives.

A Cleveland native, Ms. Jaros originally joined Gojo in 2014 as a board director.

In 2016, she joined full-time to lead innovation, marketing, and enterprise strategy.

Shortly thereafter, she was promoted to Chief operating officer be before her appointment, of course, as CEO.

Today we'll hear from Ms. Jaros and how she has successfully led Gojo Industries, including during the COVID19 pandemic and beyond, and hear more about what's next for Akron's largest private employer.

If you have questions for our speaker, you can text them to 330-541-5794.

That's 330-541-5794.

And the city club staff will do its best to work them into the program.

You also can tweet your question @thecityclub.

Members, friends, and guests of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming Carey Jaros.

(audience applauds) - All right, let's get organized here.

Hi, it's so good to see you all.

So at Gojo, when we get up on stage after we shake someone's hand, we always sanitize.

So I encourage you all to do that too.

And it's not 'cause I think Kristen's gross, it's 'cause I wanna be clean for the next person, right?

So that's how we roll.

All right, so before I start, first of all, I wanna welcome all of you here today, especially my husband Brett, who's pretty awesome.

My friends who, for lifelong friends who are here, I have many friends in the room who I literally went to nursery school with.

One of my friends is here who's presents I opened at her first birthday.

We were both, I was already one, so I felt like I could do it.

So, I have friends like that here today.

But of course my mom and dad first and foremost.

And my love for this city and the reason why this is such a meaningful thing, comes from them.

I spent my childhood running around Case Western Reserve University, hiding in the closets at the law school.

My dad taught me about the breakup of standard oil while we were running errands in the car.

So this is a lifelong love of this place for generations in our family, so it's such an honor to be here.

I also obviously wanna thank Dan and the City Club for having me, and Kristen for that lovely introduction.

It's an incredible honor to stand up here where people have been coming from 110 years.

I think there have been 5,500 speakers.

Most of them have been famous, a few have been like me, ordinary people who are called to do work in the world and get to get up and talk about it.

So I'm really excited to do that.

I was reading about the City Club, preparing, and I thought the creed was so interesting, and I don't know how many of you know it by heart, probably most of you as good members.

But it says that this is a rendezvous for strong but open-minded people whose watchword shall be information not reformation.

And it promises that prejudice grows less and biased dwindles here, which I thought was really nice.

It also says that informality reigns and that is right up my alley.

So I'm gonna keep with that.

So let me tell you a little bit more about what I'm gonna cover today.

So the program says the topic is 75 years of ingenuity and innovation.

And I promise I'll tell the Gojo founding story, which people love.

I'll hit on the invention of Purell.

I'll talk about our response to the pandemic.

But as I relive some of our history, I also really hope to bring to life our culture and to share two of our values in particular, always learning and bold leadership, which together have really enabled us to remain entrepreneurial well into the third generation, something that's pretty rare.

To innovate prolifically over time, to play much bigger than we are in an industry of consolidating giants.

And generally to just pull off things that seem unlikely at best.

So I really think that comes back to always learning and bold leadership, and I'll talk about that.

And then finally, I'm gonna share some perspectives on what I think it's gonna take for both leaders and organizations to be effective moving forward, and how that's actually really different than what most of us have been taught to believe leadership is about.

I hope you'll leave feeling curious about what that means for you and also the people and institutions that you impact because those are many, given the audience in this room.

So first, a little bit of history.

As Kristen said, Gojo was founded in Akron in 1946 by Jerry and Goldie Lippman.

Jerry had been a cookie salesman before this time.

He had a 10th grade education and when his wife Goldie went into the rubber factories after World War ii, Rosie the Riveter style, and came home at night with her hands chapped because at the end of the day they would dip their hands in kerosene or benzene to wipe off the carbon black.

She complained and he said, "There must be a better way."

So as was typical for someone like Jerry who frequently said, "Everything I know, I learned from someone else," he went and walked the halls of Kent State University, looking for someone who could help him solve this real human problem.

He came across chemistry, professor Clarence Cook, who helped Jerry develop Gojo original cream cleaner.

Jerry made the product in his mother's basement.

He lived in a house with her, and he sold it out of the trunk of his car.

At the time you couldn't get tin cans 'cause it was right after the war.

And so Jerry being the way he was, drove around on his old cookie route and visited deli's, and asked for old pickle jars.

And that's what the product was packaged in.

And to this day, we still have a pickle jar, which we use at the end of every one of our company meetings where we ask people to put questions in and we answer them.

We just did it yesterday, yeah.

Like all innovation that does something new, this waterless soap that removed grease without a sink, Jerry had to actually get people to believe he could solve a problem they had, and get them to spend money on a solution that was totally untested.

Jerry experimented with a number of different approaches to doing this.

And he eventually figured out that if he put some of the Gojo original cream on his palm, and he walked into a service station, which we're sprouting up all over the country at this time, as the automobile was taking off, and he shook hands with the owner of the service station, the guy would frequently look at his hand, realize Jerry had smeared something on him, wipe it on his pants to prepare to hit him in the face, and miraculously see the grease was gone.

Nine out of 10 times Jerry would say he got the sale and the 10th time he got hit in the face.

The business took off.

Goldie was keeping the books and helping Jerry with production in their little house, with many people living in it.

But after a little while, sales started to come down again, and some of these service stations that had loved the product stopped buying.

Jerry being Jerry, he went out directly to ask them why.

And as he made the rounds, what he heard was that the pickle jars that the product came in led to the guys in the stations dipping their big paws in and taking a lot of the product.

And also, they found it worked so well that they were literally putting it in their lunch boxes and taking it home so they could work on their cars on the weekend.

Now, the service station guys didn't wanna be supporting these habits and so they said, "Jerry, it's a great product, but I just can't, you're putting me outta business here."

Jerry being Jerry, he decided to invent the first ever portion controlled soap dispenser.

So he has a patent on it in 1952, first portion controlled soap dispenser in the world and the granddaddy or grandmommy of every soap dispenser we see on the walls today.

That dispenser has a big crank on the side.

And little Joe Kanfer, who some of you in this room know well, his second job at Gojo, was to go to the dump and harvest cranks off of old automobiles for these dispensers.

He will tell you his first job was using the best part of his body, not his brain.

He would sit on the boxes while the glue dried in the basement.

And so, that was his first contribution to the business.

The second contribution was the cranks.

So Goldie and Jerry never used these words, but throughout those early years, the values of always learning and bold leadership were constantly on display.

They lived those guiding principles that we talk about when it comes to always learning and bold leadership.

Those are things at Gojo explicitly that we talk about.

Like one, we courageously take on challenges no one else will, and we inspire others.

Two, we're learners not knowers.

Think about that, we're learners, not knowers.

Who likes to admit that they're not a knower, or even aspire to not be a knower?

But that's the business.

We seek insights from everyone and everywhere.

We ask, "How might we?"

And we are hands on, we experiment, and we keep what works.

I could spend all day giving you other examples from our Gojo history that rhyme with these founding stories in terms of bold leadership and always learning.

But I'll just give you a few more 'cause they're fun, I won't do all of them.

Our sanitary sealed soap dispensers, which were invented after Joe spent an entire trans-Atlantic flight picking the brain of a distributor from upstate New York, who happened unfortunately, to get seated next to him for eight hours.

This guy was complaining when he first sat down, much to his misery later, he was complaining that Sani-Fresh, which is now part of Kimberly Clark through many acquisitions over many years.

But, Sani-Fresh invented the first sanitary sealed soap dispenser, and they used an exclusive distribution model.

And so they picked one distributor in every major city.

And this gentleman on the air airplane was not that distributor in Buffalo.

And so he was complaining about this to Joe.

And Joe got the idea that maybe that meant there were a bunch of other people like this gentleman who couldn't get Sani-Fresh.

And so, he got back to Akron after his trip overseas, and immediately asked the organization, which had never made liquid soap really, to invent a soap dispenser and have liquid soap ready in a matter of months to launch in the market.

I love that part of the story.

And the fact that we got there.

We launched, he took 450 opening orders at his first trade show.

He actually had people dressed up as soap refills, which I think was a huge part of how he pulled it off, and he was offering cruises tickets.

But, that part of the story is great.

The part I like even better is that the direction he gave to the engineer when he got back from Europe was, "I want you to knock this off, I want it to look just like this, this dispenser."

And the engineer, a guy named Henry Orr went and worked on it and at the time, the dispenser, that first Sani-Fresh dispenser had a pull bar.

So you went up to it and you pulled on it and the soap came out.

You've actually used dispensers that still are designed this way.

Henry Orr being an engineer said, "Why on earth, when I'm gonna hang something on a wall, am I then going to build a feature into it where humans are pulling on it?

That seems like a terrible idea."

And so he ignored Joe and he built it the way he thought it should be built, which was with a push bar.

Joe came down months later and said, "Okay, where's the dispenser?

I'm ready to launch."

Henry Orr said, "It's right here."

Joe tried to pull it, Henry Orr said, "No, no, no, no, no, you're not gonna pull it, you're gonna push it."

And Joe screamed at him and swore at him for a while and then he said, "You're right.

Okay, good, this is the new soap dispenser."

Now, that is how things work at Gojo is still today, including the part where there's a little bit of norming and storming.

But, the reality is it was a better idea, it was a better design, and of course it made sense to pivot and do that.

And today, when you're out in the world, the vast majority of soap dispensers you encounter have a push bar.

A second one I'll give you is Purell hand sanitizer.

Now, pure hand sanitizer was originally invented because a fast food customer came to us and said, "I have all these workers whose hygiene is not awesome, who are away from a sink, and I need them to clean their hands."

And so we, this original customer had a, I think, a spouse who had worked in the healthcare industry and said, "I think there's something in healthcare that's like a hand rub, like an alcohol hand rub.

Can we have something like that?"

So, we looked at that product, this product that was called Derma Pro, it was an an isopropyl hand rub that hospitals kept in case their water went out.

And we said, "Oh, that's not a very aesthetically nice product," but we had hired a guy who came out of the shaving industry who knew how to make gel for shaving gel.

And so within about nine months we invented Purell sanitizer, which was a gel ethanol rub much easier on your skin.

And we were ready to launch it.

And we went back to this fast food company and they said, "Eh, cost controls, not that worried about it anymore."

You know, people had changed over.

And so we had this product, this sort of solution with no one to sell it to.

And so years went by, we were convinced, and by we, I mean Joe was convinced that Purell sanitizer was the next big thing.

It's hard to imagine, but back at a time like that, you told someone they should put something on their hands and that it killed the germs.

The first thing they said to you is, and then where do they go?

Right?

And you're like, well they're dead.

And they're like, but they're still on my hands?

I like, it just didn't, people could not even conceive of this idea.

And so they were like, "We'll just wait, let's just see how this plays out before I lean in on it."

But, we were undeterred and friends and family loved the product.

So Peggy Fisher was just telling me a story before I got up here, about using it on the campaign trail back during, I don't know what year it was.

- [Peggy] '92.

- '92 on the campaign trail, sharing this product with others.

She had gotten a sample from the Kanfers and was sharing it around saying, "Look at this."

And fortunately she was a better salesman than Joe, and so she was getting all these other people to use it.

But it's a great example of a product that we believed in 'cause we knew there was a job to be done out there.

You need to clean and sanitize your hands all the time during the day when there's no sink there, for sure.

Probably 10 to one versus the amount of times you're actually at a sink.

And so we knew there was a problem and that we had an amazing solution, and we just needed to figure out how to take innovation that we call, Market Making in a moment like that.

How to get that market making innovation into the hands of people who would experience it, and the light bulb would go off.

The way that we did that at the time, in addition to all this personal one-on-one gorilla marketing, is Joe put sales goals in our sellers plan every year for seven years.

And they got paid zero.

And there's a famous Gojo story where one of the sellers, a guy named, Ron Rudin, who has a huge mustache, was screaming so loudly at Joe across the table about these sales goals that his mustache was waving.

And I think that was the year that we broke through.

And I'll give you one more set of innovations that I think really get at this spirit, this always learning bold leadership mindset.

Our ES8 dispenser with our CRT healthy soap.

We're working on a name change, don't get angry with me.

We had it first, okay?

So this solution is the one that you probably see most out in the world now.

It has a clear top.

So if you see a Purell dispenser where the top is clear with a nice big Purell logo, that dispenser is probably an, it's definitely an ES dispenser, and it's probably an eight series.

What is special about that dispenser is that it's a touch-free dispenser, but you never have to change the batteries in the dispenser.

"How?"

You ask, that seems impossible.

The energy for that refill to be dispensed actually rides along on every refill.

So every time you change the refill, it has a small battery, that battery is sufficient to drain the entire refill and you never have to service the dispenser.

Now you might be thinking, "You lazy people, it's just a soap dispenser.

How hard can it be to change the batteries?

How often must that be required?"

The answer is, if you're a hospital system, and we just finished an install at one that's very close to here, a 55,000 dispenser install.

If you have a fleet of 55,000 dispensers that are all being used a different amount over time, you're gonna be changing batteries a lot.

In fact, you're gonna be employing, I'm not exaggerating, full-time people whose only job is to walk around, check those dispensers, and change the batteries.

And so if the refill can do that work for you, especially now, you're gonna lean into that.

And we patented that technology, we're the only ones who can do it.

The other half of that solution is the soap that's actually in the dispenser.

And we always think about both engineering and formulation, the soap that we just put into Mayo Clinic and now many other big health systems, is also a patented innovation that only Gojo has.

It's the first soap that doesn't require a harsh antibacterial ingredient to remove more germs.

So it's a bland soap.

And we actually figured out that we could use ethanol, alcohol, which we are really big fans of.

I know a lot of you in this room feel that way, especially on, you're probably wishing that the lunch also included a little ethyl alcohol.

But what we realized is that if we used a little bit of ethyl alcohol in this soap, it actually changed the surface tension of the soap.

So when you wash your hands with it, the soap is able to go down into the cracks and crevices in your skin and remove more germs without any chemicals.

And that's pretty amazing.

So that soap and that dispenser have an incredible story around efficacy and safety, but they also reduce battery waste by 68%, and they reduce gallons of water per refill in washing by six X.

So you use six times fewer gallons, six gallons fewer water per refill of that soap when you use that solution.

It is a killer app.

And so that kind of innovation is what you come up with when you refuse to accept that the problem's too hard to solve.

And when you're brave enough to try lots, and lots, and lots of things and accept that, that's gonna come with a lot of failure and also a lot of learning.

All right, so I'm gonna move on and talk a little bit about 2020, which I totally have PTSD about, and I'd really rather not talk about it, but everybody else really wants to talk about it, so I'm indulging you.

All right, so we came rolling into 2020 with the culture I just described, a really robust innovation pipeline.

All the people back there who work at Gojo, were smiling, we were really excited about the future.

Marcella Kanfer Rolnick, who's our third generation executive chair in the business, she and I had just rolled out a set of new strategies that laddered up to a vision 2022, which we had for the business, and we were firing on all cylinders.

So we roar into 2020, it's January 4th, I remember that was the Monday after New Year's that year.

And already I was starting to get emails from people like Samantha who's in the back of the room.

Gojo has a detect and alert team, which runs in the background all the time.

It's a group of folks from all kinds of different disciplines within the business who are paying attention to what's going on out in the world with respect to new illnesses, new potential outbreaks, and making sure that we're way ahead of it.

Because those things tend to impact our business.

So, coming into the year with this incredible plan, I wish I had been playing more Mike Tyson's PunchOut, one of my favorite childhood video games.

Because, I would have remembered, maybe, what he said right before his first ever fight with Evander Holyfield.

You probably know, but I'm gonna say it anyway.

"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."

So, the detect and alert team's telling us this is going on, we're thinking it's really far away and we've seen lots of different kinds of outbreaks over time.

So we had seen H1N1, which had a tremendously huge impact on our business, but we had also seen Ebola, which was a pretty scary illness, but didn't really come to the US, and only had a small impact.

We're sitting in a room and it's now the first week in February and we're wrestling with the data that's coming in.

There's still not really any COVID in the US, and we're sitting around at a big table.

Several of my team members were there who are here today.

And the the topic of discussion is, do we turn on production 24/7 in case this outbreak becomes a major, creates a major demand surge.

So we're talking about it like we do.

And the way we make decisions at Gojo is a lot like the way you would make a hard decision in your family.

A lot of people sit at the table, everyone gives their opinions.

We argue, we take different sides just for sport, and after a while we make a decision.

And so we're doing this and it gets to the point where no one wants to talk about it anymore.

And so they all turn and look at me, and I'm like, "What?"

And they're like, "Well, you actually now have to make this choice," okay?

Like, that's what's changed in the last two weeks, now this is your decision.

And so we had really weighed it.

We said, "Okay, let's first of all talk through what happens if we don't do it and there's an outbreak, and then let's talk about if we do do it, and there isn't an outbreak."

And what it came down to is that if we didn't do it and there was an outbreak, we were gonna be disappointing all of those customers, hospitals, first responders, I now know grocery workers, to whom we had made a promise when we put a dispenser on their wall.

And we were not gonna be living into our purpose of saving lives and making life better.

If we decided to do it and there was no outbreak, we were gonna spend a lot of extra money, we were gonna work our team harder than we needed to, but at the end of the day, we were gonna have too much product that we would eventually sell through.

And so, thank goodness we had a purpose, and we had a set of values, and it was a pretty easy decision.

So we turned everything on.

We knew when we did that, that what would happen is, first of all it would take a little while to ramp up, but once we were going, we were gonna be producing an extraordinary amount of product.

Now I thought it was extraordinary.

It turns out it wasn't good enough, but it was a lot.

And we knew that what would happen pretty quickly is we would start to run out of a lot of the components and ingredients that went into the product.

And so that meeting wasn't the one decision and done, it kicked off what then ran for several months and into a couple of years, which is a process of waking up every day and saying, "Where's our next constraint, and how do we remove it?"

And we did all kinds of crazy things to remove constraints.

In the early days, the biggest constraints after getting labor to ramp up to 24/7, were actually getting components.

So, the bottles that our product goes into, especially the pumps that you see on your tables, or that I have here.

So these pumps become a really hot ticket in a moment like this.

Germany actually shut its borders.

So one of our pump manufacturers is in Germany.

They saw it as an issue of national security to export these pumps during the pandemic, right?

Things you wouldn't imagine.

So we started sourcing those things from everywhere we could.

We worked with companies like Proctor and Gamble in Ohio to get access to their dawn dish soap bottle because we figured out that that was actually a great way to get around the pump situation, 'cause you can turn it upside down and squeeze.

And we had much more capacity in blending the product, making the product ourselves than we did in the bottles.

And so, you may have come across a bottle that looks like a Dawn Dish soap bottle that has a label on it that said Purell emergency response.

We worked with a company in the South, who's an isopropyl alcohol private label manufacturer.

And we figured out that we could use their lines, which are explosion proof, which is important in our business 'cause there's a lot of alcohol that runs through them.

And we could ship them 33 tanker trucks a week of Purell, finished Purell from Ohio, fill it on their lines into these isopropyl alcohol, rubbing alcohol bottles, and distribute it to first responders, in the military.

Went into many of the big government agencies.

So it was a wild time.

We ran out of ethanol in April, so we signed annual contracts for ethanol.

It's the most important ingredient we have.

By the end of April, we had run through those annual contracts and we were on the spot market.

So Purell was buying ethanol on the spot market during the pandemic.

It was pretty important that we got that right.

I think we did a great job.

We rejected a lot of ethanol that came through on spec but didn't smell right.

You may have noticed that some other companies that made sanitizer did not have that same standard.

One of my favorite, we had tons and tons of social media during this time, but one of my favorite posts is the one that says, "Purell is back, I'm so sick of smelling like tequila."

(audience laughs) - All right, so, while the rest of the country was shutting down and quarantining at home, we were asking our 2,500 Gojo team members to spring into action, work around the clock, and come in.

It was a really strange time.

I was driving down to Akron every day and it felt like an apocalypse.

There was no one on the highway, it was dark everywhere.

It was really eerie.

We had to make the decision during those early days to shut off all of our end user markets except for the most critical ones for human health and thriving.

So we did not ship to retail.

And you can imagine some of those companies did not take that real well at the time.

We didn't ship to places that people weren't.

And that seems obvious, but a lot of customers wanted product even though they had no one in their buildings just for security.

And so it was a lot of tough conversations.

In order to do that, we basically had to go on allocations.

So we had to tell people what they were allowed to buy.

Our system within a couple days of us realizing we were in pandemic, had three years of back orders in it, three years of back orders in SAP.

SAP does not like things like that.

And it actually just stopped working.

It's a much longer, and more painful story, and much more boring.

But the upshot of it is, SAP broke.

And so we literally ran allocation throughout the pandemic until April of 2021 in Excel, in Microsoft Excel.

And we had teams who would do the work overnight.

So they would figure out what we were making, look at all the needs across the whole country and around the world, including calls we were getting from health systems, figure out exactly what we had to make, 'cause every refill has to fit the dispenser it's going into, it's not simple.

And then during the day, that product would get actually allocated out to the customers and shipped.

So we told them what they could order, and then they'd order it, and we canceled anything that wasn't on the list.

Every single person on our team gave it their all.

I was in a plant on a Saturday morning early in the pandemic serving lunch before we went to box lunches.

And one of our supervisors, someone told me one of our supervisors was working her 21st day straight.

And I walked over to talk to her.

I think Zach might have even been there with me.

And I said, "How are you doing this?

I mean, 21 days straight working in crazy conditions in the plant?"

And she said, "Nobody else can do it."

Like it was like, "Of course I'm here," you know?

There were plenty of problems to deal with.

I think we showed up with curiosity, creativity, and collaboration.

We never, ever had enough information, ever, to make a decision we felt 100% confident about, ever.

There wasn't a day where I said, "Oh good, we got the last piece of data and now we can make the decision."

But we talked about it for as long as we could.

We got as much input as we could.

And then we just made the call, knowing that if we learned something new, we would change our minds.

And there was gonna be no shame in that.

In fact, the only shame was gonna be in sticking with a bad decision.

All in all, it was 400 million of investment in just over a year.

We pulled forward 10 years of CapEx, which was totally unprecedented in the company's history, and it ended up expanding our capacity by up to 10 X.

So on that ES product I described to you, that new dispenser, a 10 X expansion in our capacity.

I promised at the beginning that I would tell that story, but I don't think the big headline is that story.

It's not really what we did or even how we did it.

I think, it's the so what.

So what can we learn from that time?

It seems logical that before trying to apply lessons to the future, we do well to make some predictions about the future.

But you can ask my team, I'm terrible at that, apparently.

We haven't had a budget that made any sense for three years.

So I'm not gonna try to tell you what the future is gonna be like and then prescribe something.

Instead, I'll tell you that what we've learned over the last couple of years is about how you approach the world, a world that is unpredictable.

Many of you have likely heard of VUCA, it's an acronym for volatility, uncertainty, complexity in Ambiguity.

It was coined by Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus in 1985.

And it was actually adapted by the US Army War College as a way to think about a world that's post Cold War.

So, how do things change when you don't just have one enemy you're focused on?

And there's no question that that VUCAness of our world has only increased in the 40 years since Bennis and Nanus' work.

It's important to note that we humans are actually hardwired, we have tons and tons of cognitive biases and heuristics that we use every single day, that actually make us despise volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

We are hardwired to avoid it, to ignore it.

And I actually think that that's something we need to know.

It doesn't mean we're gonna change the way we're wired, but we have to recognize that our first reaction to those four things is actually not a reaction that's particularly helpful to us as a species, really, or to the rest of the people around us.

Now it's there for a good reason, right?

If you look at the way we walk out in the world every day and the amount of information that we encounter, if we didn't have heuristics and other ways to simplify that information and make good decisions, we'd be paralyzed.

So I'm not suggesting we should all become hyper analytical and think about every single detail all the time.

But, we have to know that these biases actually push us toward looking for some new normal, telling ourselves a story about the way the world's gonna evolve that isn't real.

And that might prevent us from doing the things we need to do to actually be ready for the world that we're facing, which is that VUCA world.

The last model I'll give you before I close comes from a Belgian futurist, a guy named Peter Hinssen, who we actually brought into Gojo back in 2019 to talk to us about these concepts.

We were thinking about them back then, which is pretty funny.

What he says is, "There is no new normal coming.

Wake up, deal with it, there's no new normal coming.

We are in an era where technological, biological, ecological, and sociological shocks are just gonna keep coming."

For a whole bunch of reasons that smarter people can explain to you.

And so he says, "We're actually in a time called the never normal."

It's time called the never normal.

And it is gonna be characterized by constant disruption.

What is true of constant disruption is it actually creates just as many opportunities as it does challenges, 'cause every time disruption happens and the cards are thrown up in the air, there's an opportunity for something new.

And so if you wire yourself and your organization to know that disruption's coming, not to avoid it, or turn your eyes, but to look for it, to look for the things that indicate that it's coming before it even arrives.

And then to figure out how you can have a learning agile posture in the face of that disruption, constantly trying new things, failing, making mistakes, learning from those things and continuing to move forward with that disruption.

You will find those pockets of opportunity and really avoid a lot of the risks that disruption brings.

Hinssen uses this acronym that I actually think is a little trite, but I'm gonna give it to you anyway 'cause I think it's a helpful handle for how to handle this kind of world.

He says you need to have velocity, agility, creativity, innovation.

You need to leverage your networks, and you need to experiment.

The acronym is VACINE, work with It.

I think it probably seemed really cute when he started it, and I think he's right.

The reality is, as humans, we are driving boats that all have holes.

And we are driving them in an environment where we can't see what's under the water.

There are gonna be new holes created every day.

And what we have to do is have the courage to keep going fast enough that the water does not come in and our boats, but also with curiosity so that we're avoiding as many disasters as we possibly can along the way.

I'm out of time and I wanna leave time for questions, so I will close there.

But thank you so much for having me and I look forward to our discussion.

(audience applauds) I stay?

- We're about to begin the audience Q&A.

I'm Kristen Baird Adams, president of the City Club Board of Directors.

Today we are joined by Carey Jaros, president and CEO of Gojo Industries.

We welcome questions from everyone, city club members, guests, students, and those joining us via our livestream @cityclub.org, or our radio broadcast at 89.7 Idea Stream Public Media.

If you'd like to tweet a question for our speaker, please tweet it @thecityclub.

You also can text your questions to 330-541-5794.

That's 330-541-5794.

And the city club staff will do their best to work them into the program.

May we have the first question please?

- Hi Carey, - Hi Leslie.

- Leslie Younger, Akron.

You have made me very proud of saying I'm from Akron, Ohio, home of Purell.

(audience applauds) And LeBron, wherever I go around the world.

You know, as a coach, I have a one-on-one exercise, one thing you would do the same and one thing you would do differently.

So I'm gonna ask you that one thing you would do the same that you learned through this time and one thing that you would do differently.

- Thanks Leslie, it's a great question.

So one thing I would do the same is I never felt like I had to be a hero at all.

My default, whenever there was something I was faced with that I didn't know what we should do, was to get together with my colleagues and talk about it, try to get as much good information as we could, argue, debate, discuss, and make the call.

And I think that that really worked for us.

So I would do that again, over and over again.

And it's much easier than trying to figure it out yourself.

Something I would do differently.

So, one of the greatest sources of pain for us in the year and a half since the pandemic, has been miscalculating the amount of, it's the city club, I shouldn't call it garbage hand sanitizer, but I can't help myself.

The amount of poor quality hand sanitizer that was produced and the effect it would have on the market.

What's interesting is the effect it had wasn't that people, at the beginning people would say, "Are you worried about all these places making hand sanitizer?"

No, it was not great product, it didn't really work, it smelled bad, et cetera, et cetera.

But unfortunately what it did, first of all is it took away raw materials and components from those of us who actually knew what we were doing.

And second of all, once it was out there, it ended up sitting around and really blocking progress toward healthier and safer solutions.

So the FDA banned 250 brands of hand sanitizer for being dangerous, having poisonous ingredients, or not working.

And yet that stuff is still today in our schools, our churches, in nonprofit places that do service for children and the elderly, because it just got in the system and it sat there.

And I don't think people are using a lot of it, but it prevents them then from moving forward and getting the right products.

And we underestimated that grossly.

And I think if we had understood it better, we would've worked harder earlier to help get it out of the system.

We've actually arranged to have lots and lots of it recycled on our own dime, but we would've done that much sooner, and I think we would've had a cleaner exit.

- Could you describe what your leadership style is?

You appear to be very collaborative, so is that what you're comfortable with and are there instances where you shut down data collection and say, "Okay, a decision's gotta be made and I'm CEO, and gotta do it."?

Thank you.

- Thank you for the question.

Yeah, my team's here, I should probably ask them, but I won't.

Thank goodness they don't have microphones.

I think that I am pretty strong.

I am not afraid to make a decision at all, and I always, always, always wanna do that with the very best information and the most possible input from people who have different perspectives and know other things.

So, I think my approach may appear collaborative sometimes because I'm trying to source that information.

People who work with me would say, 'Yes, I think I can be a good collaborator," but I think it was just as important to be really decisive and be able to move us forward during the pandemic as it was to be a good collaborator.

- Hello, my name's Sienna Mashki, I go to Laurel.

I was wondering how you think Laurel has prepared you to be pre president and CEO of Gojo industries?

- That is an awesome question.

(audience applauds) Thanks for that question Sienna.

So I have three girls in the school, I'm deeply involved and most of my best lifelong friends go there, or work there, or have kids there, or work there.

So I am clearly very biased.

What I will say is that I grew up assuming that I could do absolutely anything.

Now some of that came from my parents, my mom in particular.

But Laurel was a place where every single person who did anything that mattered, looked like me.

They were all girls, they all had the same access to the same intellectual training that I had.

There was, I just looked around and I said, "Oh, anything that matters here I can do."

And maybe the self-esteem that I generated there, I think, allowed me to carry that model forward.

So, it just never occurred to me that there were any limitations.

When I came up against them over the course of my career, and it still happens all the time, every single time, I'm shocked.

Like, when I go into a room as a customer or something and someone assumes that I'm there to get them coffee and ask me, I'm like floored, you know?

I just, I can't believe it, you know?

And the more it happens, I don't get used to it.

So, I think Laurel gave me that, just this assumption about my place in the world and the impact I can have.

And I also think very much it was an environment where you were expected to speak up, and share your ideas, and if you disagreed with something and you sat quiet, that was on you.

And that's the kind of environment I wanna be in today.

- Hi, I'm Carrie Zippay with Team Northeast Ohio.

In my travels I've heard something that I think is super cool, and that's that Gojo has worked with Great Lakes biomimicry to understand how nature more efficiently moves liquids.

And I wonder if you could tell us more about that.

- That's a great question.

So we've actually looked at Biomimicry for many, many years.

I think, like many companies we recognize that nature's been experimenting for a really long time.

Like, the whole concept of Darwinism is basically experimentation and keeping what works.

It's not great for the things that don't work from a Darwinism perspective, but it's all about experimentation and keeping what works.

So, we've been looking at biomimicry forever.

The specific example you're talking about, I don't have the details on, I do know that a another example where we really looked at biomimicry was when we were trying to figure out how to keep wipes, Purell wipes from falling back down inside the canister.

There are lots of places where valving technology is actually way better in natural systems than it is in mechanical systems, and the way you think about closures and apertures.

And so I actually won't talk about one of them 'cause it's kind of gross, but really cool.

And we continue to be really inspired by natural systems.

(audience chuckles) Yeah, I heard informality reigns.

You should probably take it out of the creed, okay.

- I have to collect myself there.

Well, hi Carey, I'm Josh from Junior Achievement.

With all of the changes, and innovation, and growth, and everything going on in Gojo, I'd love to know, what have you learned about your workforce needs, either now or into the future?

- That's a great question.

So, I think we're always learning about workforce needs and development opportunities.

We're actually rolling out a program called Grow at Gojo right now, and Taylor Goodman's here and she's really leading that work, it's really exciting.

I think it's in response to our team members actually saying over and over again in lots of different ways, "We want more opportunities to understand where the world's going, and to make sure that we each have our own path to be really highly relevant."

An area I'll talk about is actually automation.

So, I get the question all the time around automation and what it means for workforce size.

For us, the facility that we've automated the most heavily is in Worcester and it's also the place where we need the most talent.

If you know anyone at Worcester, please send them our way.

We have 30 open positions right now, but that's a facility where the skills over time have shifted as we've done things like add vertical integration, where we're injection molding and blow molding our own bottles now.

I skipped over this, but we're literally starting with resin pellets and making the pump, all the elements of the pump, and the bottle in our facility and then filling it.

And the way that we do that requires a set of skills that we never needed before.

Lots of precision molding skills.

To run all the automation requires a different set of skills.

It still takes tons of humans, but it requires a different set of skills.

So I think there's a big opportunity to continue to help our workforce increase their skill sets around those, just different, they're not better or worse, but just really different jobs.

So that we can harness the power of technology and do so much more together.

- Hi Carey, my name's Dave Morrell.

I'm with ES Electric, we do industrial electrical.

And my daughter, about 14, 15 months ago, I was speaking with her and we got talking about who I admire and she said, "What are the top three people as far as you admire?"

Which I had mentioned you.

She went on and emailed you and said, "My dad's in this business, blah, blah, blah."

and I think she wanted you to try to get you to mentor me.

(audience laughs) And so, she sent me this email she sent you, and I said, her name's Shay, I said, "Shay, she's never gonna get back to you."

I said, "They're so busy with this pandemic and everything else."

And I said, "And it's not a down on her, but she's gonna be extremely busy."

And you got back to her.

And my daughter called me and was like, "Yeah, she got back to me," you know?

And you could talk about helping the world all you want and who you help and who you don't help, but what it meant to her and what it meant to me that you got back to us, and you even offered, she said, "I'll help your dad through emails, I'm busy."

Which I never did, I wont take advantage of it.

I know how busy you were, but I just wanna tell you, I think you truly, truly care about people.

And that was like a test and that was a proof, which made me only admire you more as a person, as a human being, and as a businesswoman.

So I just want to tell you that, and tell you thank you.

- Thank you for that amazing comment and for being here today.

(audience applauds) I'll just say I think it takes a tremendous amount of chutzpah to email people, and when somebody does that, I always try to write 'em back 'cause I was the kind of kid who sent emails like that, and I really thought the people who didn't write me back were jerks.

- Our next question is a text question.

"I love that Gojo is a local company.

Can you talk of some of the ways the company is leveraging local talent and skills in their workforce development and distribution?"

- So, I also love that it's a local company and it's really personally meaningful for me to get to live and work in the place where I grew up.

I'm so happy to be here, and I love this work and being in this business.

And when I'm at Gojo, I think of us just as a company.

Now, what I think makes Gojo so successful.

A lot of the things I talked about today, I actually think are easier maybe here in the Midwest or in a city like Cleveland than they are in other places.

I think there are things about our history, the fact that we grew up as an industrial powerhouse and we've had to make lots and lots of pivots over time.

We've had to reinvent ourselves.

We've had to show a lot of resiliency.

The fact that we're in a part of the country where almost nobody agrees on anything here, and yet we live in relative peace compared to the rest of the world.

I think this is a place where we know how to talk about what's important in a given situation, and not let a lot of other baggage in the room.

And I think we know how to be tolerant and respectful of each other in a way that I'm really proud of, being from this area.

So I think those things make it much easier to be the company we are here.

I think our labor is incredible.

I think the kind of attitude that I talked about with that supervisor who was here 21 days in a row, sure, there are special people like her all over the world, but I think there are a lot of them here.

This is a place where we have principles, we show up when we're called.

I think a lot of us who grew up here feel that way.

And so I think those things are all strengths of being in Northeast Ohio specifically.

- Hi, my name's Mattie Friedman, I also go to Laurel.

So obviously the stresses high school students face is different than the stresses you faced, especially during the pandemic, but what do you think is the most important quality or thing to remember in times of stress in order to succeed?

- That's a great question.

I was way more stressed out in high school.

100%, I was a mess.

So, there's hope for you yet.

You know, when we are in the worst moments.

I remember a lot what someone told me.

I worked for Baine & Company for many years and we worked all crazy hours and it never felt like it was good enough, and it was just a real feeling of urgency and intensity all the time.

And I had a senior partner there one day who was sitting down with me and I was relating this, and she said, "Yeah, that's on you, that's a you problem."

And I said, "What do you mean?

Everyone here doesn't feel like this?"

And she said, "No."

So her advice to me at the time was, when you get that feeling to actually step back and look at the facts, your 80% is probably gonna be better than a lot of people's 150%.

Especially if you care that much.

If you care that much, your 80% is probably gonna be good enough.

And so just being able to have perspective in those moments, and step back, and realize that you're doing a good job, and you care, and that's gonna be enough.

And then I think the second thing is recognizing you don't have to be the hero.

Like, there is no way I could have done what's here.

There's no way, there's no way, but we were able to do it.

And having a team around you and knowing that you can always turn to those people, you can always ask questions when you don't know the answer.

That is one of the greatest reliefs that I think you get over time when you go through more and more difficult situations, and it actually makes you so much better, yep.

- Hi Carey, Lee Fisher.

I sent you an email just a minute ago asking if you would, (audience chuckles) if you would mentor me, so I wanna be second in line.

My question is, I've known the Kanfer family now for maybe three or four decades here, and I was surprised when they chose somebody not in the family to be the CEO.

Explain that dynamic.

- I mean, my first instinct is to say, "You should totally call Joe or Marcella."

You know, I think our situation was that Marcella had become executive chair in 2018.

She had a really clear idea of how she wanted to engage with the business and she absolutely is the executive chairman.

She runs the board and she's my boss.

But that was the model she wanted for her version of family leadership in her generation, and that created an opportunity for me to be her partner.

We had worked together really closely for six years before that.

We had been through all kinds of things together and I think they trusted me to be their partner.

One of the things that at Gojo we talk a lot about is molecular leadership.

The idea that good leadership is not a single person, it's a molecule.

And that molecule really is filled with complimentary particles, I don't know, sorry, Laurel.

(audience chuckles) And so this idea that together we could do this in a way that met their family objectives and also was the right thing for the business, I think, made sense to them.

All right.

(audience applauds) Thank you.

- Thank you Carey Jaros for joining us at the City Club of Cleveland today.

(audience applauds) Thank you Carey Jaros for joining us at the City Club of Cleveland today.

Today's forum was part of our health innovation series in partnership with Medical Mutual, and also our local heroes series, thanks to Citizens and Dominion Energy.

It also is the annual Sally Gries Endowed Forum in honor of Women of achievement.

Sally Gries, of course, is the founder and chair of Gries Financial LLC.

As a young professional, Sally Gries entered the male dominated financial field in the late sixties after graduating from Northwestern University.

A decade later, she started her own company and has the distinction of being the founder and the first female owned money management and financial planning firm in Ohio.

She's also a hero to many of us female professionals across the region.

Sally Gries' philanthropic and community involvement also has been quite extensive over the years, and we are honored to have her join us here today.

Sally, thank you so much to you and to your entire family for your continued support of the City Club of Cleveland.

(audience applauds) - We also would like to welcome guests at the tables hosted by Citizens, the Cleveland Foundation, College Now Greater Cleveland, Family and friends of Carey Jaros, Gojo Industries, Laurel School, and Team (indistinct).

Thank you all so much for being with us today.

Next Friday, December 9th, we will welcome Cleveland School's CEO, Eric Gordon, who will sit down for conversation with Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb for a conversation about leadership, their shared hopes for Cleveland's children, and the work ahead for the next leader who will take the baton.

Tickets are sold out for this forum, but you can view the forum via livestream and learn more about other forums on our website @cityclub.org.

That brings us to the end of today's forum.

Thank you once again to Carey Jaros, president and CEO of Gojo Industries, and thank you members, friends and guests of the City club.

This forum is now adjourned.

(audience applauds) - [Announcer] For information on upcoming speakers or for podcasts of the City Club, go to city club.org.

Production and distribution of City Club forums on Idea Stream Public Media are made possible by, PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.