(upbeat music) - Welcome to Forum 360, for a Zoom edition of our Global Outlook with a local view.

Let's say the good news is your life's work has just been rewarded by you being made CEO.

Let's just say it's gets even better.

You are made CEO of an international company with a global footprint, decisions you make are going to matter around the world, and it gets even better.

One of your categories of products is like the most popular product in the world.

Everybody loves your product.

Now the bad news, you are named CEO in November of 2019 and you officially start January, 2020, the same time as we learn the words pandemic and COVID.

The global company and the product is Purell.

A product that everybody knows and loves.

Now you have just a tiny look into the life of our guest today.

Carey Jaros, CEO of GOJO that makes Purell, good news is she's announced as CEO maybe the not so good news, but we're going to find out.

So stay with us as she become CEO at the start of the pandemic.

Welcome Carey, and thank you so much for joining us today.

- Leslie, thank you for the introduction.

I can't wait to chat with you.

- Thank you.

So you are named GOJO's new president and CEO in November.

You start in January.

Normally that information would not be terribly interesting to the general public, except that the same month we learn about this thing, at first Corona, half of America thinks it's a beer and and the other half can't really pronounce it.

As you look back, what of your life experiences best prepared you for something that in many ways was not possible to prepare for?

- Yeah, so I'll start, Leslie, really near in.

I think that the prior several years at GOJO really prepared me for that moment.

And it's for a couple of reasons.

I think the first reason is that what's really special about GOJO is that we lead the business with this concept of a leadership molecule, this idea that no hero can do everything.

And so the whole way we lead the business and that I participated in leading the business for several years before I took the seat of CEO was really to work a team where a number of different folks each brought their own competencies and we worked together.

So I think that was great preparation because it meant that on January 20th I didn't believe I had to be a hero and do it by myself.

So I think that's the first thing.

The second thing I'll say is what I love about GOJO is we are really values based and one of our values is always learning.

And again, that is founded in the idea that we don't know everything, we're always learning.

And so to be in such a dynamic environment over the last year required constant learning and constant acknowledgement that we didn't know everything we had to sort of keep our eyes open.

We had to keep learning from everyone and everywhere and making sense together.

And so those things really prepared me for that moment better than any life experience could have.

- Now let me ask you it was like January, in fact, the second to the last event that I went to which now seems like so foreign, but it was the end of January and it was an event at the Knight Center and Joe was there and kind of I remember him saying something about the something or other in China, but you know, again 500 people were all there and we were just beginning to hear about it then, but when did you first hear about it?

And when did it become something more than just Ebola that fortunately didn't really touch us, you know, when did you first hear about it and when did the consequences of it really hit home?

- Sure.

So I'll take you through a little bit of a timeline at the beginning of the year.

So we at GOJO have a team called detect and alert and it's a team that's always running in the background almost like background software.

And the detect alert team is always paying attention to what's going on around the world, looking for stories about something that might turn into an illness outbreak, or in this case a global pandemic though that is obviously very rare.

And so the detect and alert team was doing their work and in December they were paying attention to what was going on in China.

And so as we all came back in January from the holidays we were receiving alerts from this team saying, hey there's something going on that we need to pay attention to.

So that was sort of early January.

I would say by the beginning of February a lot more information was coming out.

We were starting to hear about really significant undertakings in the Wuhan province around trying to contain the virus.

And then fast-forward in through February and March really rapidly, a number of events happened.

So we had the first cases in Europe.

We have the first cases in the US, the WHO declared at first a global illness of concern and then a pandemic.

And so that all was accelerating through the spring.

And so this was running in the background and then were making decisions at GOJO.

So the couple of big milestones for us in February we made the decision to turn all of our production on 24 seven, which was a huge step for us.

We didn't know at the time if there would be demand for that product, but we wanted to make sure that we were ahead of it in case it came.

And then in March and April, we moved on to allocation really ensuring the product was going to the places where it was needed the very most on the front lines, really controlling the flow of product to make sure that it was sort of getting where we wanted it to go rather than just taking a chance.

- Now, whether it's your executive team or whether it's the people actually making the Purell everyone can kind of double down for a while.

They can either work longer hours or extra shifts, but how do you look ahead and figure out how you're going to manage that when you realize that it's not just gonna be a couple of weeks it's going to be the foreseeable future?

- Yeah, so it's easy to look back and say we should have known at some point that it was not that it was not going to stop that there was no amount that was going to be enough.

It didn't feel like that at the time, day to day we didn't know if this would look and feel more like H1N1, where there was really a huge surge in demand, but then a pretty big drop-off, or if it would be something else.

And so we put together a team in house to literally manage this day in and day out to constantly take in new information from what was going on out in the market, what we were doing internally to maximize our output and sort of taking those two things every day and saying how can we really optimize and maximize the impact we're having out in the world.

- Well, one thing I'm curious about and I can't wait to ask you whether it's good or bad and I don't know, I'd like you to weigh in on it, but you know, breweries.

And it seemed like every craft person was figuring out how to make hand sanitizer when you know, the the stores were bare.

Tell us first how is something that someone made in a week or two or three or four, and again, on one hand, I congratulate them for their resourcefulness but then I look at it and go it took you guys a long time to make it and can someone just really just make it in a week?

What is the difference between Purell and something that is made fast and without people that you know, may not have your expertise?

- Yeah, so the first thing I'll say, Leslie, is our our GOJO purpose is saving lives and making life better through wellbeing solutions.

And so in line with our purpose when we saw this flood of product out into the market I think our first instinct was if we can't supply everyone we're so glad that others are pitching in.

So I want to say that first we didn't have a reaction like, oh, like I wish these guys weren't doing what they're doing.

I think that that's first but it is really important to understand and still to understand, because there's still a lot of that product out there that hand sanitizer is an FDA regulated over the counter drug.

And it's an FDA regulated over the counter drug because it has the safety and efficacy requirements.

And that has to do with the ingredients that go into the product it has to do with the way that it's manufactured, with all the testing that happens.

It has to do with the way it's stored to make sure that the the alcohol doesn't evaporate before you use it.

And so we invented the category in 1988.

We have over 30 years of experience really developing the standard ways to to manufacture this product to ensure both safety and efficacy.

And so nobody who's just coming into the market overnight could possibly hope to replicate that.

I think there have been some really negative consequences here.

So there are 230 companies right now whose products have been banned by the FDA, many of them because they were actually made with ingredients that are dangerous, like methanol which is a wood alcohol.

Many of these products were banned because they actually don't have the required level of ethanol to be efficacious.

And so I think it's a complicated territory.

We applaud people who are trying to save lives and make life better with us.

And I think it's really important in a category like hand sanitizer.

That really is, it's a healthcare product.

We have to make sure that people are following a very rigorous framework laid out by the FDA.

- Now I, as an executive coach, I tell my clients no matter how smart you are, your crystal ball doesn't work but I have a feeling your crystal ball does at GOJO.

So I'm gonna ask you we don't know for sure how long we're gonna be wearing masks or you know, socially distancing or whatever, but when it comes to hand sanitizer and Purell do you think that using it more is going to be something that is gonna continue long after the pandemic, after everyone's had a vaccine in their arm will people still be, will it have become a habit to use it even more than we used it before?

- You know, we, we believe it will.

I think that's the short answer.

And we have invested hundreds of millions of dollars to build up our capacity because we believe that that demand is going to stay there.

And we want to make sure that we can produce the product that people want.

Now, will it stay at the same level that it's been over the course of 2020?

I don't know that it will.

I think there will be some amount of shifting there but also you have to remember that during 2020 lots of public places weren't open, buildings weren't open, traffic wasn't out in these restaurants.

And so we actually believe that hand sanitizer of all the things we did to stay healthy and well it is one of the easiest things to transfer from our lockdown days into our public days.

And it really is a very low friction way for us to keep ourselves healthy and well.

So we think that sanitizer unlike masking and social distancing, and some of the things that will clearly start to dissipate, we think that hand sanitizer is something that people can take with them back out into normal life that will really allow them to engage in a high touch world rather than the opposite - And it does something also, I think it helps us feel like we are doing something that we are being proactive and we can take this additional step.

Now, last March and April things like wipes and hand sanitizers were being sold for unbelievable prices.

Well, they were being offered.

I'm not sure if they were sold, but they were being offered for unbelievable prices on eBay or Amazon.

You know, what role do you play in setting a retail price?

- Sure.

So again, the simple answer is none.

We don't sell directly to consumers.

We sell through distributor partners into business environments or healthcare environments and then we sell through retailers, but we don't set the price.

During the pandemic I can tell you going back to our purpose of saving lives and making life better, and our values around things like caring for ourselves and others.

We did not raise one price one penny over the course of the entire pandemic.

And we did all the things that are in our power in terms of communicating with our distributor partners and with retailers, working with local authorities who were investigating price gouging to show that we absolutely in no way supported those activities.

And in fact that we believe that these products should be made available to people at reasonable prices so that they have access.

- I want to take just a moment to reintroduce our guest and our topic today.

We are fortunate today to talk to Carey Jaros.

She is the CEO and president of GOJO Industries which makes Purell.

And I don't know about any of you, but anywhere I travel or used to travel anywhere in the world and people ask me where I was from.

My answer was always Akron, Ohio, home of Purell and LeBron James.

But I want to turn from Purell a little bit from the specific product, you were named, a year ago you were named as CEO.

Do you think of yourself as a female CEO or as a CEO?

- I think of myself as a CEO and I'm really proud of being a female but I think of myself as a CEO and as a female.

- Now, I imagine that there was some kind of overall strategy at GOJO.

But how much of an impact have you been able to have or will you have on the overall direction that GOJO will go in the next few years?

- So I think enterprise strategy in the very best companies is something that doesn't change all the time, I think that it's really important to have enduring strategies that companies work over time and that by doing those things in a sustained way they actually create real advantage, sustainable, competitive advantage, and that changing strategy all the time does the opposite.

So that's sort of just philosophically I think it's good to have enduring strategy.

Now, I've gotten to participate in the process of really setting the enduring strategy and then also bringing a emergent strategy into that that sort of determined strategy over time as part of the leadership team.

And we will continue to do that work, of course.

And this has been a moment of tremendous disruption.

So we are having conversations every day around those determined strategies that we've held that have really worked for a long time and the places where it makes sense to continue with those strategies, and then places where they're really new opportunities.

So for example we launched Purell Surface Spray a couple of years ago, really our first foray into the surfaces category.

We think that we have a really unique value proposition around safe and effective products that you can use on surfaces.

You touch that don't require you to rinse them, they're food contact safe.

And so that's an area where we're doing tremendous work to figure out how to take this innovation that we think is so powerful out to people who really love, love Purell, love what we stand for and have a really elevated need to have clean surfaces now especially in this new normal.

- Yeah, I have a saying, because from from what I observed kind of in a bird seat outside of formal leadership, culture always comes from the top.

Can you give me an example of where you can cite that you've been able to be an example for people below you on the organizational chart for the rest of GOJO, what do they look to you for?

How does leadership start at the top for you?

- So you promised me that I could say if I didn't exactly agree exactly with some language, so I'm gonna use this as one of those moments.

So the first thing that I would be remiss not to say is at GOJO, we're really intentional about not thinking about our work structure as having a top and a bottom.

We're really a network.

So we think about this network of GOJO team members.

And, but I agree with you that leadership plays an essential role in culture.

I think being a third generation family enterprise and especially Marcella Kanfer Rolnick's role as our executive chair and her vision for GOJO has played a critical role for many years.

But I think this year in particular so some things that Marcella and I have done together to really try to make sure that we are walking the walk and talking the talk the kind of culture that we believe GOJO can and does have starts with our values.

So we have five GOJO values.

I'll give them to you quickly.

'Cause I think they're worth citing.

So they are better together.

People at the core, uncompromising integrity, always learning and bold leadership.

And each of those values has five guiding principles underneath them.

I won't go through those, but we literally look at those values and those guiding principles.

I look at them almost every day.

And I think about the decisions that we're making about how we're communicating.

And I go back to those values and say am I doing that in a way that's aligned to these values?

How can I better align to these values?

And I have found over the last year, using those values as a touchstone, talking to Marcella about those values when we're making hard decisions has really helped us live the values and really role model the culture.

- Is there an example?

'Cause I'm also a believer that sometimes big bold moves are necessary.

Is there an example of bold that you can can cite in the last year when something, a bold move was made or or necessary to make?

- Yeah, I'll give you two, Leslie.

The first is we made the decision to essentially stop selling product outside of what I would call our highest priority frontline markets in April of last year.

And we did that because we knew that hospitals, for example you know, where Purell is on every single wall had to have Purell hand sanitizer to be able to do the work, the critical frontline healthcare work.

And so we made the decision to focus on healthcare to focus on first responders, to focus on grocery workers.

And that meant that there wasn't enough Purell to go everywhere else.

That was a hard decision, but it showed uncompromising integrity.

It showed caring for ourselves and others and it it was bold leadership.

The second one I'll cite was spending $400 million on CapEx.

That's 10 years of our typical capital spending.

We pulled that forward and did it without a whole lot of ceremony because we wanted to make sure that when the world needed Purell, we'd be there to supply it.

And we're already producing on a lot of that equipment because we took those steps so early.

- Now I'd like to turn for a few minutes, you know, I mentioned to you in in talking one time that I have read and I've actually heard people say that Kamala Harris is inspirational to young women and to girls that whether it's because she's a female and the first vice president, or she's Asian or Jamaican, but it's inspirational.

And that it says that there are more possibilities than perhaps young girls thought they were.

So I'm going to name you Northeast Ohio's Kamala Harris, that you can make, and you are inspirational to young women.

Do you think of yourself as inspirational to a next generation of female leadership and was there someone that might have been inspirational to you?

- It's a great question, Leslie.

It's hard, I don't think I can answer the question of whether I'm inspirational.

I would hope, I would hope that my work is inspiring because I want every single person whether it's a little boy or a little girl no matter what their background is to feel like he or she has the opportunity to fulfill his or her potential and really better the world.

And so if I can do anything to reinforce that that's a possibility for someone, I want to do that, for sure.

You know, it's easy for me to say I can give you one example for me that was truly inspirational, which is my own mom.

So I grew up in a family with a mom who always worked.

That was not the norm when I was growing up.

My mom was one of I think eight women in her law school class.

She was the first woman to ever take maternity leave as an associate from a law firm in Cleveland.

And she wrote the policy for maternity leave.

So all that did for me was reinforce that I could do whatever I wanted to do.

- Now, if we would have met the five or 10 year old Carey and said, okay cute little girl, what do you want to be when you grow up?

How might you have answered that question?

- I will tell you that when I was five, I definitely wanted to be president.

- Of GOJO or of the world?

- I'm not gonna tell you that.

- I think being president of GOJO, you probably have more influence on all of us than president of the world.

- That's right.

- In the remaining minutes, I'm gonna ask you for some one or two, three word answers.

I like our audience to get to know our guests both as a person and as the professional that they are.

If I was to listen to your iPod or whatever you've downloaded on iTunes what might you be listening to now?

- So, Leslie, I am a huge Ashtanga Yogi.

So I practice this form of yoga called Ashtanga.

That's a really disciplined form of yoga.

And I listened to podcasts about Ashtanga yoga.

That is what I listen to in my free time.

- Now, what is one thing that might surprise us about the last 12 months at GOJO?

And then I'm gonna follow it up with what is one thing that may have surprised you?

- So I'll pick the same thing, which is we had, I cannot think of one time that one voice was raised inside our walls over that 12 months.

And that surprises me because I think under stress most have moments when they raise their voices and that didn't happen.

- No door slamming.

Well, you don't have doors, do you at GOJO?

- We don't.

And most of us were working half in and half out, but it was amazing how collegial we all were and how in it together we all were.

- I think that COVID was started by dogs everywhere who wanted their owners home more, the cats did not get a vote in this, number one, is there a dog at home?

And what have your children learned from this past year?

- Yes, there are two dogs at home.

One of them is actually sleeping in this room on the chair and the other sleeping downstairs and is 16.

And what my children have learned this year.

So they actually go to a school called Laurel, and Laurel moved many of the children to outdoor school.

And so my two eldest have been really in full year outdoor school.

They have learned that their expectations about what third and fifth grade could be, were not met.

And that in many ways they're having a better different year.

They're learning things they never thought they would have learned.

And while they miss what they expected, I think that they're, I think they would make the trade again.

- The next time you pump twice, you may think of a wise word our guest today shared with us, Carey Jaros, CEO of GOJO Industries has shared her professional journey as well as some of the challenges of producing perhaps the most popular category of product in the world today.

Carey has helped us look at the pandemic from a different perspective, a business perspective.

Somewhat lost in the drama of the last 12 months has been the story of GOJO naming their first non-family member as CEO.

Thank you to Carey and our listeners and viewers for joining us today.

I'm Leslie Ungar, your host on Forum 360, your Zoom edition.

to our global outlook with a local view.

- [Narrator] Forum 360 is brought to you by John S. and James L. Knight Foundation the Akron Community Foundation, Hudson Community Television the Rubber City Radio Group, Shaw Jewish Community Center of Akron, Blue Green, Electric Impulse Communications, and Forum 360 supporters.