12 Leadership Lessons from a Fortune 500 CEO - Bill Foote, former Chairman and CEO of USG Corporation

This is The TechEd Podcast, where we feature leaders who are shaping, innovating, and disrupting technical education and the workforce. These are the stories of organizations leading the charge to change education to rethink the workforce and to embrace emerging technology. You'll find us here every Tuesday on our mission to secure the American dream for the next generation of STEM and workforce talent. And now here's your host, Matt Kirchner.

Welcome into The TechEd Podcast. I am your host Matt Kirchner. Been looking forward to this episode for quite some time. This week's guest is not only a former Fortune 500 chief executive officer, chairman, and chief executive officer, I should say, also former chair of the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank.

He has served on the boards of some of America's most recognizable companies. Super excited to welcome in Bill Foote, who not only has done all of those things, but is also one of my absolute dearest friends. It's been a long time coming, getting this together, Bill, but it's an absolute honor to have you with us here on The TechEd Podcast. Thank you, Matt.

I'm really thrilled to be here. You're kind to go through the high points of my resume, but it's our friendship that's most important to me, and I really appreciate our chance to have this chat. Likewise, and I have to hit the high points, because the truth of the matter is that things that you have done over the course of just an incredible career really super impressive, and our audience is going to learn about that over the course of this discussion, but if all we did was highlight the amazing things that Bill Foote had done over the course of his career, that's all we would get to on this podcast, because it is a really, really long list.

We will hit the high points, you know. I want to start, I think Bill talking a little bit about your experience at USG, and you know, you think for our audience's benefit, and you'll describe the company even better, but building products, I mean, if they're sitting in a room right now, the drywall, the wall board, the ceiling, I'm a really good chance that that product was manufactured in a plant that you had responsibility for. Again, as a Fortune 500 chairman and CEO all those years, talk just a little bit about USG, and then I want to dive into, I know, definitely one of the more challenging and ultimately rewarding periods of your career, which was working through some of the asbestos claims, and so on.

A decade or two ago, so we'd love to hear all about that. I had the great privilege of being with USG, and in the 27 year arc of my career, I sort of moved through the chairs for 12 years, and then became chief executive for another 15 years, so it was really quite a remarkable run. It is one of America's great companies. We are now well over 100 years old.

We invented wall board in 1917 We were the largest North America with operations in United States, Canada, and Mexico, and the company was really quite innovative throughout its life. I came in at a time when we had been diversifying away from Gypsum, and, as is often the case, I refocused us on the businesses that we were uniquely good at, and we were very successful, awesome. So, and I love the fact that you talk about refocusing on what's on, what's important, you know. I'm a big believer in whether it's Jim Collins' hedgehog concept, the idea that let's figure out what we can be the best in the world at, let's do that over and over and over again, do it really, really well.

You know, grew that company, led that company in terms of total revenue, remind me at the time, so when I took over as chief executive, we were 2 billion plus or minus, and at our peak we were 5.6 Yeah, amazing. Then in the recession, it was highly cyclical business tied to construction. We came back to the mid threes, but I was in like the 2008 era.

Yeah, we more than double the size of the company in my, the time my team and I were there. Absolutely incredible. And you know, it's one thing to take a company, as I have done, from a million to 2 million, or 2 million to four, or four to eight, or whatever, whatever the number, even 25 to 50, to when you start adding numbers that start with B's in the billions, to double the size of a business like that, that's no, no small fee. We could probably talk, Bill, the whole episode, just about the growth and the strategy there.

I want to dive in. You know, I love talking about experiences that people have, stories of success, but it's really, you know, those time periods in our careers where sometimes the hardest things that happen to us, the most challenging, ultimately become the most rewarding. And I know that you had a bunch of these legacy claims during your period of time leading USG, through no fault of your own, nothing that you did, but you know, here you are leading this organization, and you have this, this asbestos issue that is, that is chasing you, and all kinds of stakeholders to weigh when you're going through something like that.

I should mention, and we'll get into it in more detail. One of the absolute most ethical people I know is Bill Foot, so you'll never compromise your integrity. I'm not just saying that for the benefit of anything, that's just core to who you are. So, you've got all these different stakeholders to balance through that challenge.

Talk about what that issue was from the asbestos standpoint, and then maybe we'll get into a little bit about how you alleviated it. Sure, sure. I'd be delighted, and you've already mentioned Jim Collins and Hedgehog. I've read his book through and through, and I'm going to refer to Malcolm Gladwell, because he is one who thinks that opportunity presents itself in interesting places, and this asbestos challenge was just that.

What was an existential challenge became actually an opportunity for my team to excel in what they're best at. We're just running a wallboard business, and I'm very proud of the team that helped me on the restructuring side find a really novel and unique solution to the challenge. The problem, in a nutshell, was a legal exposure that came from our adding asbestos into joint compound, not wall board, but the mud that used to finish the joints, and asbestos at one point in time was sort of thought it was a magic mineral, right, long twisty fiber that unfortunately also is cancer causing, and and under the, it was really a systemic failure of our tort system.

A cousin of mine was a bankruptcy court judge, and we talked philosophically about what was going on, and the legal system really couldn't deal with a mass tort claim very well, and the way it was resolved is plaintiff's lawyers would come after company after company after company, and take them in a challenge, them, and oftentimes force them into bankruptcy. So that's the root of the issue. How we dealt with it is really quite an amazing story. So, just to go a little deeper on that, so you know, I'm an individual who, for whatever reason, has been exposed to asbestos, maybe I was in a building, maybe I worked in that industry, and over the course of time I end up with this, you know, this chronic problem that causes cancer, and now I've got a legal claim against whatever entity may have been responsible for that exposure, and so here's USG sitting on the other side of this, with again, through no fault of yours personally, all of these potential claims, and you're really looking out for I've got a group of shareholders that are invested in this business.

I've got employees whose families are relying on these jobs that they have and working in our industry. We've got customers and we've got business partners that are relying on the success of our business, and we have these plaintiffs who have a real legitimate problem, right? So, so you're trying to balance all that you mentioned, talking to a cousin who was involved in the bankruptcy court. Take us through the next step now.

How do you, how do you remove yourself from that, that litigation, or from that claim? Well, the issue with asbestos, as I said, goes back hundreds of years. Asbestos is still used in many parts of the world. Sure, it's a naturally occurring mineral, and it's fire proof.

We actually, it was an additive to joint compound, not because it was fireproof, because the long fiber made the joint compound more buttery, it would go on more smoothly. Interesting, it was a minor additive. We stopped using it in the late 60s, and this all came to a head in around the year 2000 Okay, so it was a long brewing tort claims such as this are dealt with in usually state courts, sometimes federal courts, but mainly, and every state has a different set of common law practices.

I'm not a lawyer, I almost became to sound like one, I almost became one through this experience, but yeah, so my team and I actually recognized that there were people that were legitimately injured by this mineral, right, whether it came from us or the many, many, many other companies was very hard to prove, sure, and that was the dilemma that plaintiffs lawyers represented these people that were either sick or potentially sick, and we're saying, "Hey, we understand that there's a real health issue and have we bear some responsibility.

The question is, how much or how little, right? And that's what the fight was about, understood. And so, so you end up making a decision to reorganize the company was that under Chapter 11, or how did you go about doing that? So, what we did is we actually, before we filed the company, did a couple of test cases, okay, to see how we would stand up in front of a jury, and the case I most remember was in Beaumont, Texas, and there were two or three plaintiffs who had already recovered under they worked in a refinery, had already recovered under the tobacco litigation, millions of dollars, and we got slammed.

It was a favorable jurisdiction for the plaintiffs. We got slammed, their only known exposure was walking through the office. Where they clocked in in the morning, and they remember there was some wall board going in, and we were on the hook for, I think, 10s of millions for each one. Wow, and we said there's no way we're ever going to have a fair hearing.

So we then used our footnotes. We're a public company. We used our footnotes to talk down the stock price. The more we disclose, the market would get more and more concerned.

It was very intentional to your financial statements, right? Disclosures in the literally talking down the stock price, we're disclosing more and more, right? You know, as the news developed as to what might happen. So the stock came down, and then we actually preemptively filed Chapter 11 under the bankruptcy code is to protect the claim, the company from asserted claims.

Okay, so we filed to protect our other stakeholders, our shareholders, our bond holders, our employees, our customers from these asserted claims, so that we could get to a fair forum, which would be federal court. You know, I think a lot of times when people who maybe aren't as familiar with, with some of these topics, hear the word bankruptcy, it's like, oh my goodness, this company, you know, became financially insolvent, it was mismanaged, you know, what have you, and you, in this particular case, quite the opposite, you're being proactive, you're recognizing that you have an obligation to a lot of different people, and you want to make sure that you're keeping that, that obligation, but, but you're still, you know, while all this is going on, Bill, you're responsible for running a going concern, you're responsible for all the same things you were responsible for, plus working through this, this reorganization.

So, go into what happens next. Sure, it's a great question, man. It's a terrific question, because it really brought out the best in our company. Yeah, so we took the company in, and to protect ourselves, right?

Because, as you just pointed out, we're responsible to, you know, shareholders are sort of at the end of the equation, customers, right, employees, suppliers, bankers, and what's leftovers for shareholders, right. And you know what, we were a robust, really successful company, right, growing, making more and more money, quarter by quarter. And it's like, what is going on? So I'll never forget this.

We took the company in, and the next board, I mean, the board said, okay, now the wind bill, how the hell are we going to get out? Yeah, and I said, don't worry, we got a plan. My CFO and my general counsel and I had sat around a week or so before the board. We said, let's be very clear as to what we're trying to accomplish.

We had five goals that guided us for six years. Wow, first is to keep the company operating to maximize the value of the company, right, to make sure it was humming. Two is to keep the key people that made it work in place. Three is to take care of all of our creditors, suppliers, bankers 100% in full.

Awesome. And fourth was to get it done in what I said at the beginning was as fast as possible, right? That was amended based on a discussion with one of our directors in a reasonable time frame. Okay, speed was not our ally.

Interesting, we needed time. Yeah, and lastly, to make sure there was a meaningful recovery for our shareholders. Those five goals guided us for six years. Amazing.

Took six years, and what I then did, and I learned this from my predecessor, who'd been in the Navy. You, you focus your teams on things that they can control and keep them out of things they can't, right? Every now and then have someone doing collateral duty, moving across between the two. I divided the team into the operating team, it was running the business, right?

They couldn't control anything with the bankruptcy. Yep, and that often it was called the Office of the President and the Office of the Restructuring, and the Office of Restructuring was my general counsel, my money guy, and my people guy, the CFO, and the head of HR. Yep, and I was the bridge, and I met your CFO, by the way. Yeah, absolutely, Dan and Brian, and I lived more with the restructuring guys and the operating guys, but my operating guys did a fantastic job.

We actually, I don't think this has been done often in bankruptcy, went back to the judge who was supervising our case, I think two or three times, and asked for hundreds of millions of dollars of capital to continue to grow the enterprise, because the goal, when in a bankruptcy, when the music stops, they divide up the pie, right, and the bigger the pie, the bigger the pieces, for sure. So our goal was to maximize the value of the enterprise. What that meant was growth in sales and earnings, so we kept investing to stimulate growth, continuing to reinstate, and we literally had our most sales ever in Chapter 11.

I mentioned that, yeah, huh, and we, we, we also accumulated an amount of cash, the Office of the Restructure. 19 was there to keep the money and people engaged to make it happen, right, and to resolve the problem, which was a legal problem. It wasn't a business problem, right. And in breaking down legal parlance, either legislate or litigate, we had to change the rules, sure, to get to a resolution.

So, what we did is we weren't going to roll over with the trial lawyers, they wanted, they kept calling and saying they wanted all our stock. I said, excuse me, expletive deleted, right? You don't own the company, my shareholders do. We're arguing over a claim, right?

We think it's small, you think it's big. Yeah, we have to fight that out. So we did two things from a legal perspective, one is we started a legislative coalition, which I was one of the founders of, and I was one of the.. and this sounds immodest..

I was one of the first to say to the other defendants, 'Look, guys, this stuff kills people, right? We got a problem, yeah, we can't keep trying to say no, right? We got to actually own it. Yep.

Secondly, is to litigate, legislate. We crafted some legislation, actually went a long way in the, in the Congress. Didn't get passed similarly, so we then fell back on litigation, and we actually went after the, not the victim, so much as the doctors, because there were doctors manufacturing x-rays, turning out 1000s of x-rays per month that were just not create claimants that were claimants, some were probably real and some were not. Yeah, but we challenged that process.

Got it. And at one point in time, as my general counsel widely said, there's going to be a point where the plaintiffs' lawyers feel they're at risk. Yeah, and they're going to want to settle. It took five years, yeah.

We finally settled, huh? And we came up with a very novel settlement. It was only dollars, it was $3.95 billion Wow, it's a big number, which is a lot of money.

But along the way, a year or two before I took the company in, Warren Buffett invested in the company because he liked what we were doing, and he became an incredibly helpful partner in solving this problem, because what we did was we quantified the amount, and then we had to figure out how to finance it. Given how successful we were with the business, we'd accumulated a billion dollars in close to a billion dollars in cash. Wow, we would have a tax deduction on the 3.95 of about two, so we're a billion short, but the company was doing so well that we could go out and raise that equity in what's called an equity rights offering.

We went to our existing shareholders who had the chance to reinvest. Sure, that that deal was struck in January. We weren't going to close because of the legal process till August, so we needed what's called a backstop. Okay, what Wall Street would do would underwrite it.

Yep, but we went to Warren. He backstopped the whole thing, Berkshire Hathaway, Berkshire Hathaway, okay, put up a billion dollars in an escrow account for seven or eight months, and for fortunately, all the shares are taken up our shareholders. Yeah, we actually never drew on the backstop. So, is it like it seems like a standby investor where somebody's standing by to..

it's like an underwritten securities offering that's delayed. Got it? Yeah, it's a fascinating model. It gives everybody the certainty, and because it's Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway, that's standing behind it.

It's not, I mean, who doesn't know who that is. Well, we actually, you know, it's always good of options. We had Warren as one option, and we had investment bank come up with another option. It was more expensive.

We just had to go with Warren, Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway, and and we got it done. It's amazing, you know. There's a couple things in there, though. The number one of them, and you know, I've never actually almost years ago went through a Chapter 11 reorganization because of a capital structure issue with the business, and this was back in the 1990s Ultimately, I found a different way through it, but considered the possibility of Chapter 11.

Fortunately, I haven't had to go through that, but as you were talking about having your leadership team focused on it, was tough to operate this business. We still have our restructuring team. Some of the best advice I ever got on the M and A side was when an M and A attorney told me, he said, "I've never, and he used more colorful language in this case as well, but he said, "I've never watched a company either buy or sell another business and not screw up the operations in the process.

And so, having that, you know, having that in that group of individuals focused on the day-to-day operations of the organization, super important. Also, you know, as you mentioned, Bill, and it doesn't surprise me at all that you were one of the first to stand up and say, "Look, we do have an obligation to these individuals who were, you know, who are harmed over the years by this asbestos exposure, and let's not run away from that, let's, let's own it. So then that's absolutely quintessential, Bill Foote, you can live with yourself and sleep at night, and then just making sure that every one of your stakeholders got, you know, was treated fairly, and you know, when the plaintiffs' lawyers came, or came after the stock, and to be able to say, look, I mean, they're not any better either, you know, if you can grow that business through this process, you, the plaintiffs are going to be.

Better off, too, right? You know, the plaintiffs ended up with a $3.95 billion trust fund that the plaintiffs' lawyers took their fees off the top, of course. Our banks got, and our creditors got 100 cents on the dollar, plus accrued interest.

Yep, and we came out with an investment grade balance sheet, amazing, out of the blocks, out of a bankruptcy, and our investors double down. Yeah, they're reinvested, and that's when you know they're on board, right? And that they trust you, or they're willing to put their money where their mouth is, and to double down on the business. You know, tying this back to Malcolm Gladwell, opportunity strikes in funny places, and I never would have expected this to happen on my watch.

It sort of, my first five years, we were getting the organization sort of set strategically to grow as we did, and build a team that I thought could take it there. This issue cropped up, and so the next five years we fought this battle. In the last five years was the great recession, and I had to sort of take it back down to survive that, but when you focus people on what they can control and appreciate that and encourage them and support them, and and then you get others to focus on things that they're uniquely good at, like our lawyers and bankers, and then over communicate.

Yeah, we got the Office of the President, the Office of the Restructuring together all the time to say, what are you doing? What are you doing? Let's share, so everyone's in the loop. Everyone knew the hand we were playing and what we're doing.

There were no surprises, and we never lost someone we didn't want to keep. Yeah, in fact, we put together a high potential program in that five year period, and all the people that were on the bench, one or two levels down, all got promoted. So, these are folks that are working in the organization, and they're sticking by you, and you're putting them in their highest and best use for communicating day in and day out, and that all ended up being great opportunities for them as well.

Human capital is the most important capital. Absolutely, yeah, there's no question about that. So our audience is learning a little bit about the person Bill Foote is, without going into all the details, this ultimately became a case, a Harvard Business School case, right? That's correct.

Yeah, I didn't mention, by the way, in the, in the intro, but Williams College undergrad, and we will get into that when we talk about some of your board work in a Harvard Business School graduate as well. So here you've got now students going through the MBA program at Harvard that are literally learning about this incredible turnaround that you did at USG in the in the in the process that you went through. Well, it, you know, I've had the chance to teach that case study at several schools, and I mean, I think the lessons are all or ones I brought out, you know, accept the reality in front of you, get your team focused on what they can control, and then try to be as creative as you can.

Absolutely, see, seek to maximize the value, the enterprise, and I'll.. there's something that is important when you're in bankruptcy, it's almost.. you got to go to the judge regularly, you can, you can sort of take a short run perspective, but I never did. Yeah, we of course we knew what daily, weekly, and monthly results were, but we were building the value of the enterprise over time, and that really resonated with my team, building new factories, developing new products, and building market share, and the legal team brought in experts, my general counsel, my CFO, my head of HR.

Can't I think the world of them, right? But they were only, you know, three folks in their teams. We brought in experts from the legal world and the financial world and the HR world to help us. We just did all we could to come up with a unique solution.

There's something that I've shared with you, Matt, that also reminds me, and would come out in these discussions with MBA students, and that's the notion of rising. I think that that when you're in charge, and there's a great Norman Schwarzkopf, one in charge, take charge, and I also think of servant leadership and being number ones among equals, but you've got to rise above whatever the problems are and get perspective over those problems. I never thought that I would be leading a company through a bankruptcy when I came to USG, right, or go back to when I was in graduate school, or at any point.

Sure, it's not what you sign up for, right? Exactly. Here I am. Yep, you know, here we are with this problem, and and you just have to keep getting above, and you know, you get above mountain pox, mountain peaks to see what what the landscape looks like, and how you can navigate it.

And so I think the idea that one of the things I've shared with with MBAs and share with you and others is right to rise to get above the problems, to get perspective and understanding, and have people around you that help you see what needs to be seen. No question, and our audience should know, you know, there's you've been a mentor to me for a number of, number of years, you know, a decade or. So ahead in your career, and always somebody that I look to when I ran into a ran into an obstacle or a hurdle in a business that you know the further you get into leadership, the you know the fewer people there are around you, and that's one of the things I tell folks when they're when they're becoming, you know, chief executives or they're becoming vice presidents of companies, they're becoming presidents of companies, you end up in a situation where you don't necessarily have those, that group of colleagues that you did before, and some of the people that you would otherwise be confided, confiding in, or asking for help, which, not that, say that you can't do that with your leadership team, you should, and you should be vulnerable, but you also have, you have to be the leader, right, you have to be the one that has shows confidence, so here's the question.

When you know, when you talk about rising above, when you talk about getting up above the landscaping landscape, in I mean this in the, in the rosiest of terms, but that's easy to say. It's harder to do. How do you, how do you think about that? How do you get yourself in the right mindset to rise above the problem, and and see what others don't?

Well, well, I'll answer that in two ways, you know, the answer I think you were expecting is, you know, when you rise above, you're trying to get perspective, you're trying to get understanding. I read, you know, talk, you know, go to conferences, get as much perspective on whatever the challenges. If it's legal challenges, try to understand that. If it's operating challenge, I mean, I was sort of schooled in strategy and ops, but I wasn't schooled in the legal stuff, so I just listen and read and ask as many questions I could, but the other part arising, which you may not expect, is I think fundamental to being a good leader is to stay grounded.

It's sort of at opposite ends, for sure, staying grounded and rising. Yeah, but I think there's an important linkage. What's your line be of the earth or something? Yeah, yeah, I think you know we're all, and you know when you become the head of a business, right, big or small, right, it can go to your head totally.

You're dealing with these big issues, little issues, you're successful, and you know every joke is five times funnier than it really is, because I will never forget the day it was january 1, january 2, I guess, my first day, 1996 The overnight I became the CEO. I'd been appointed by the board in September of 1995 and I became CEO, effective january 1. And I get in the elevator and ride in the elevator, it's like people step back, it's like all of a sudden they're talking to me differently, like you know.

Oh, there's the boss, right? Like, I didn't.. I was the same guy yesterday, yeah, I was the same guy yesterday, but they're treating me differently, right? And, and, but I was the same guy, and..

and I think you know, humility is a really essential quality in a servant leader, for sure. And if you're not humble, it catches up with you really quick, you know. We're all mortals, and you need to get above it, but you also have to stay grounded at the same time. Absolutely.

So, speaking of getting above problems, and we could talk, I mean, there's so many over the years, so many great Bill Foot stories. One of my favorites is, and you've already mentioned the recession in 2008 2009 that that that period of time, 2010 brought about by the, you know, subprime mortgage crisis, and the mortgage-backed securities, and the, in the bottom, I mean, if people didn't live through that, or, or weren't familiar with it, the bottom just absolutely fell out of the mortgage market, and housing values were, were going down, and we had all these, these, these securities that you know that were no longer worth what people thought, they were created a huge liquidity crisis in our financial markets.

All of this going on as if running a company like USG, through bankruptcy and through its reorganization, wasn't enough. As you are the chair of the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank, kind of like the same period of time, right. So, talk about how did you end up in that role, and then I want you to touch on you had a really interesting conversation that I hope you can share with our audience with the with the Fed chair, while all that was going on. So, so tell us about that experiment.

So, yeah, there are two parts of the question: one is how did I get there, and two, what was it like? How I got there was each of the 12 district banks has a board of, I think it's nine outside directors, class A, B, and C directors, or maybe 12, I forget the number. A directors are drawn from industry, B directors are of the community, and C directors are bankers. Okay, and the 12 district banks have these boards.

It was Chicago Fed, and of the 12 banks, the New York Fed president is always on the FOMC. Charlie Evans, who was the president of the bank in Chicago, would rotate in and out of the FOMC. Federal Open Markets Committee, correct? Who sets monetary policy?

The directors are there to provide perspective. What's going on in the district, and so they came to me because I had a window on the construction market. Sure, others at the time on the board, there was an insurance executive, there was a private equity guy, there was a head of a big healthcare company. Fascinating process, sure, and we were there to.

Share with the staff in Chicago what the was going on in the upper Midwest Class A directors also over time rotate, not always, but I was chosen to be the chair. Okay, and in the role of chair of the Chicago Fed, I would go to Washington several times during the year to meet with the chairs from the other 12 districts with the chairman of the Fed at that time and other members there from see Kevin Wars is I got to know Kevin, yeah, who's now the Fed chairs, now the Fed chair in that time frame because he was, he was a governor, so the first answer, the question is, you're a member of the District Bank Board to share perspective on the economy, and you go to Washington to understand what's going across the country and what the thought process is on monetary policy.

I will tell you that in the latter regard, the thing that was most wonderful about that experience is, as opposed to a participant in the economy looking from the outside in, wondering what the Fed is going to do. I got to look at the economy from the inside out. Yeah, because the Fed is populated with hundreds of PhD economists, and each of the 12 districts has their own research staff. The Fed in Washington has its own research staff, and these folks are servants of our economy.

Awesome, they work their tails off to understand what's going on and what should be done with monetary policy. And so I really changed my perspective. I'd studied economics as an undergraduate, but it was a really unique privilege to be in the room in Chicago and in Washington to understand how they were thinking about the dual mandate, right, which is full employment and low inflation. Yeah, absolutely.

So it was, it was quite the privilege, and I did have a chance to chair the board for two years, and it was actually during the financial crisis, so in itself was quite something. Yeah, so let's go into that a little bit. And I should, should mention, I mean, just the bill, the person that Bill Foot is, you still could go back to one of the local high schools, and you, you guest lecture to high school students about, you know, about economics and about financial policy, and so on.

And then they get exposure to this person that literally, like, lived through it, certainly in my lifetime, one of the greatest financial, if not the greatest financial crisis. Scary times. I mean, I remember, if memory serves, it was right around Labor Day, ish, in 2008 when you know it was Thursday, Friday, and nobody really knew what the world was going to look like economically on Monday. You're right in the middle of that, talking to people like the Fed chair, who's seeking your input, any more details you can kind of give about that?

Sure, crisis. Well, let me, in a nutshell, tell you what happened, and I'm not an expert, but I will tell you, layman's fair enough, you, I have a, your level above me, so you're as far as I'm BA in economics and a PhD in Walboard, so through, there's no degree for a PhD in Walboard, it's just acquired taste, understood. It's an honorary degree, right. So, what happened is, you know, the investors lost confidence in the financial markets, and there's incredible flight to capital, people selling stocks and bonds, trying to get to a safe harbor.

It was triggered by excesses in, in, in the capital markets, particularly the bond market, and some synthetic securities supporting the mortgage market, and the ultimate catalyst was the failure of Lehman Bank. At that point, Ben Bernanke at the Fed and Hank Paulson at the Department of Treasury were in full on emergency mode, sure. And Paulson led an effort to create a stimulus package that George Bush ultimately approved. It was a nip and tuck, George W, and then quickly with the FMC took interest rates to the lower bound, zero to a quarter percent.

Yep, money couldn't get any cheaper, right, but again, money's flowing out of the economy, and the only thing that makes the economy work is liquidity, right. So they came up with what I thought was a novel thing at the time, called quantitative easing, using the Fed's balance sheet to expand the money supply. Ben had been.. Ben's a very brilliant guy, very quiet, introverted, and I said it with great respect.

I was with him many times. I can't say I know him really well, but they decided to use the Fed's balance sheet, and they wouldn't want me to say it this way, but we were the Treasury, which is not the Fed. The Treasury is part of the executive branch, was printing money, and the private markets couldn't buy it, so the Fed bought it. The Fed became the bank for the Treasury, and bought all that printed money, and it was its own balance sheet from 700 billion to where we are.

Well, it peaked, and it's now come down, but we've lived off of the Fed balance sheet for the last 15 years, right? Yeah, and we could go into detail about that, and have privately, for sure. That's a whole separate conversation in terms of monetary policy, but it actually helped save the US economy. I had a dinner, and I think this is in Ben's book.

I can say this at the time, it was sort of off the record, but if you look at the 515 largest financial institutions, five largest commercial banks, five largest investment banks, and five largest insurance companies, all of whom have deposits or policy holders. They've invested financial assets at one time more than I think the number was like 11 or 12 were at risk of imminent disillusion. Crazy, we were very close to an edge. We were very close.

It's not the Great Depression, but it's the Great Recession, and it was a very.. and I applaud the Fed and Ben, and for what they did. Now I know Kevin has come on and wants to change some of the things, like forward-looking statements, and that's fine. My sense of Kevin, he's a brilliant guy, and and he's the new man in charge, but..

but I credit Ben with within the in the governors and the Fed presidents for saving the economy back in 2009 and 10, amazing story, and you were right in the middle of it and having phone conversations with individuals that were responsible for making these decisions and seeking your expertise, and it's a great way for our audience to recognize how you know how well respected you are in that in that space as well, so certainly in the, in the, in the realm of construction, and in leading a public company, you've got the whole financial and economic aspect to it, all of these experiences, and you talked a little bit, Bill, about some of these brilliant people that were working in the Federal Reserve, both in the district and in the districts, and at the federal level, and how much you learned from them, and it's a good way for me to transition into a question I have about something you and I have talked about many, many times.

I serve on a lot of, a lot of boards of directors, some of them nonprofit, a handful of them for-profit companies, certainly with a zero or two or fewer on the, you know, the revenue or the balance sheet numbers than what you're accustomed to. But I think a lot of the same principles still apply. One of the things that you told me, and this goes back probably 15 years ago when I was considering joining a board, and you said three things. You said number one, you have to make sure that whoever you're working with, or whoever you are, whoever's organization you're becoming a part of, that their integrity is impeccable, and if you get the even the slightest instinct that it's not, turn around and run away as fast as you can.

The second thing you said is never join a board unless you can add value. You don't want to just sit at the table and collect a check and not be able to feel like you're actually adding value to that organization. And number three, make sure you can learn something. And I've always carried those three things with me.

Now, I can't mention all of that. I can't probably remember all of them, but you served on as the lead independent director for Walgreens Corporation, who among our audience doesn't remember, doesn't know Walgreens Kohler Company, so plumbing fixtures in your kitchen or your or your bathroom, and elsewhere. Time on the board at Williams College, just this incredible experience serving on boards of directors. Talk a little bit about how you use this expertise that you amassed over the course of your career to go back and then assist other organizations, other people that were leading organizations, making important decisions, and the value of this board work that you've done later in your career and throughout your career.

Matt, you've got a great memory, and those three points that you said it, I think, are right. You got to really trust the organization you're with. Two, is you've got to add value, you've got to figure out how you can do that, and, and thirdly, you want to learn and grow, and those things happen simultaneously. Sure, you know, over the arc of a time on a board, you know, you've come in and you, you try to listen and read and learn, right, understand truly how that company works, and one of my favorite sayings with you is to learn the profit economics.

How does this organization, not the P and L and balance sheet, but I was actually creating money value for our audience's benefit. If Bill Foot and I walk up to a food truck, his head is saying, how does this, you know, how does this food truck make money? It, you can't be at the table without him in any, any organization without him trying to mentally dissect the business model, which I do that, and it's something I learned over the course of my career, whether it's in graduate school or banking or my years at McKinsey.

It's really, you need to understand the profit account. How do you make money? Where are they trying to go strategically, and what's the team that's going to lead it there? Can you try to, you know, in a really, in a granular level, understand operations and the money making side, where they're trying to take this, this group of assets, and who are the people making that all happen, right?

And you know, boards typically are populated with with people with an outside perspective who are successful in their own right and bring a lot of skill and perspective, so it's really important to listen to management. It's really important to listen to your fellow directors, and then as that conversation happens in the boardroom, in between meetings, one on one phone calls, you then see where you can offer perspective, it's. Best, ask thoughtful questions, right, and challenge them with, with, with, with questions, and then, and at the right time, you can say, you know, I've got an observation here, I'm often prefaced my comments by saying I'm going to make a statement, then ask a question, I'll ask a question and make a statement, because I think it's a conversation, sure, where you're pushing each other, and you know it's very important for a board member to realize that they're in the governance process, they're not managing it.

It's a gray line between the two, but I think you want to obviously connect well with your board colleagues, but really trying to understand the CEO and his or her team, and where they're trying to go, and challenge them appropriately to stretch their thinking, and it's, it's really fun, it's really fun, it's not always easy, but, but I've had some great experiences on boards, and, and for privilege to have been able to sit in a room and offer my perspective, and no doubt offered tremendous, tremendous value.

I love, I love the touching on, and another mentor of mine once told me that you get a lot further in leadership by asking the right questions than you do by giving the right answers, and so you know, seek to understand, then to be understood, as I think the way Stephen Covey put it, that's something I've always followed as well, but, but super, super important, and then you, you gain the respect over the course of time with the individuals who are leading that organization, and, and then they, you know, they learn to value perspective and come back over and over and over again for inputs.

So, all of this has led to a group of tenets or principles that you have about leadership. You mentioned some of them already, Bill. Sure, sure. So, we've talked about things, I'll see how many of them that that I can recall, but you talked about the importance of staying grounded, you talked about the importance of staying, you know, of having a course, but also be willing to course correct when you, when you need to.

You're, you know, everybody can tell already you're an optimist, but you're also a realist, and so I know that that's important, really, really important to you, a lifelong learner, having a learning curve, but also recognizing that if you're starting to flatten that learning curve, it's time to step up and learn even more, I mean, there's just all these.. think there's a dozen of them all together. I could probably recite them from memory, but I won't bore my.. won't bore the audience with that.

But let's talk about that a little bit. What are some of these life lessons that you've taken out of leadership, and what should our audience.. sure, sure. Well, these reflections put together for this purpose, for discussion, but they actually reflect my thinking that's developed over a long 50 years in business, and many of them were lessons I learned at home from my mom and dad, some are lessons I learned from peers, people I respected, some are from mentors, some from from books I've read, so why don't I quickly go through it?

Yeah, and we can talk about whichever one. Love it. It's in three groups: fundamentals of leadership, style of leadership, and then timing. And the timing one, I think you might find very interesting.

Fundamentals of stay grounded, have a prepared mind, be informed, and develop peripheral vision. Yeah, it's not just being informed of the faction for me, but absolutely set a direction strategy, but course correct is needed. We're both sailors, we know what course directions we're about for sure. Keep rising and rising to stay above the fray.

We've already talked about, and then a view of servant leadership is you're really number one amongst equals, it's really about the team, but when in charge, take charge. You sometimes need to just grab the ball and make a decision, but you're really best when you're working collaboratively. Wise man once said, if you want the he who wants to be first needs to be last of all, and that's what that's what servant leadership is all about, and that first one, really quick, before you dive into, into that next group, Bill, you talk about staying grounded, and then I forget your, what your phrase is, but it's found on that.

What do you mean by, yeah, that's really almost a spiritual feeling. We got to keep our feet on the ground, and, and, yes, we got to get above it, but I'll tell you a really funny story that brings this point to home. Awesome. My mom said to me one time, I'd been the chairman and CEO of USG for a year or two, so you know, Billy, you may be the chairman of the board now, but I was the chairman of the board for a long time, and my job is to keep your feet on the ground now.

Don't forget that when you're doing what you're doing. Yeah, awesome. I love that, and that's the kind of input you can get from a parent and take it in exactly. And humility is something that can get away from you.

I think you have to constantly think about where you fit in this big world of ours, and we are all of this earth, for sure. We'll return to this earth when we're, when we're no longer here. A funny story here that you just reminded me of. I have a really dear friend who is somebody that I've worked with.

He's several years older than me, but that I've worked with through business for a number of years. For a long time, he was in, he was in consulting, and you know, you were with McKinsey, you mentioned that already, but he was doing a bunch of consulting work, had a whole variety. Of clients, and his mom didn't really understand exactly what his job was, so he's in a blue chip consulting company, working with, you know, huge companies, and, and somebody said, so his name is Jeff, and somebody said, so, so what is Jeff doing with his career now, and his mom said, well, the best I can figure, he just has a bunch of part-time jobs, that's what she said, so it's funny, absolutely, so continue.

The next four points are under leadership style. I think it's really important to be realistic, but err on the side optimism, for sure. You know, there's the other way, they live in the past, present, or the future. We got to live in the moment, right?

We got to deal with what's here in front of us, but let's keep an eye on the horizon and have some optimism in human nature and in yourself and your team. It's a lot easier to come in when you got something to be excited about, for sure. Well, and it reflects on the rest of the group, right? I mean, if the leader of the group, either subconsciously or consciously, is down in the dumps and not positive and is too realistic, and isn't selling.

I shouldn't say selling, but isn't painting a picture of the future that's bright and exciting, you know. People lose confidence. Well, Colin Powell is a famous quote, and I will confidence is a force multiplier. Confidence, optimism, it's a force multiplier percent.

The second is to say centered. I think it's really important, you know, when you're running a business, you want to control all that you can. There's only so much you can control. Stay centered, control what you can, work around what you can, because a lot of things are like asbestos way beyond my control, right?

But I finally figured out how to harness it, exactly what I could. You can't control the plaintiff's attorneys, but you can control what, and you know, what's inside your purview. We can control how big our pie is, and we can control a creative solution. You bet.

The next is consensus is nice, collaboration is more important. Yeah, go deeper on that. I made a mistake early on. I was, I think, I had five or six direct reports in my first couple executive committee meetings.

I kept trying to get everyone to be in agreement, and one of the wise guys on my team, Kevin, said, "Bill, you know what? You don't need consensus. What you need from us is for all of us to collaborate and work with you, right? If you don't have consensus, just make a decision.

So, in a much smaller company, I had an experience a number of years ago when we were restructuring a business, and, and it was actually our CFO that said in a meeting of our senior leadership team, so when we make a decision, and I was the CEO at that time, when we make a decision, does it have to be unanimous or is it just a majority vote? Then I said, actually, we're going to reach, we're going to look for consensus, but we'll get the input, and I'll make a decision if we need the exact same thing.

Yeah, and I learned that it wasn't the hard way, but it took a few meetings for me to say, you know, because these were all had been my peers, I mean, now boss, and I really respected them, but, but, yeah, it's great if you have consensus, but collaboration is the 100% manage your learning curve, I've said this to you, and I say it to all the kids and students and aspirants I talked to manage your learning curve. When it begins to flatten, it's time to start thinking about something else, totally either a new job within the same company or another venue, because you know you've got to be a lifelong learner every day.

Your life, you try to learn something. Yep, if it starts to feel like Groundhog's Day, then you're just going to get stale. Absolutely, absolutely, it makes life much more fulfilling and rich to be always learning something new. The last two thoughts of this list of 12 are on timing, and I think these are interesting, hopefully for our audience.

The first is, and I learned this very early on as a CEO, because I'd always reported to someone, this is the first time that I was at the point setting the pace for the entire organization, right, and I never forget coming in my first day, january 2, 1996 sitting down behind this big beautiful burled mahogany desk and holding, and said, Okay, it's now me. What am I going to do? And I thought about pacing, and it's very natural for someone who's been rising and is successful and striving to want to quicken the pace.

You do, you naturally, Matt, you know what I mean. Sure, run at a fast pace, but set a pace that's faster, but sustainable. You don't want to outrun your team, your supply lines, your backup. I'm still learning this, by the way, but it's crazy.

It's, it's, it's, you know, the other axiom is it's not how you start, how you finish, right? And you want to finish as a team. Yep, you know, you don't go out and run a state record for 40, you train and you train and you train and you train, or in your relay you go faster and faster and faster, but set a sustainable pace that all of you can can rise to. Absolutely, lead that, but bring people along and get to a pace that the whole.

Team can sustain, that's where you really unleash incredible energy. Absolutely, Ken, I'm still learning that, but it's a good reminder. The last one, and I learned this from my predecessor, Gene Conley, who was a real mentor to me. He said, only make a decision when it's time.

The instinct is to make you know, particularly those who are on Wall Street got to decide now, now, now, now, right? You only have to make a decision when it's time, when you've got the facts and circumstances, and you think it's the time to make the call. When you've got the information that you're confident of your decision, you can hurry a decision, you can slow a decision, but you decide when it's time to decide, absolutely, and it's a little counterintuitive, right? Because you do think in business that you got to make all the decisions right now.

So I want to keep, keep your notes out, because I'm going to have you quiz me here, because I'm a student of Bill Foot. There's 12 tenets there, and by the way, we will, we'll link some version to that up in the show notes for our audience, so we'll at least the summary of what those are, so that they can go back and, and review that, but give me, give me a number between one and 12, and I'll see how close I can get to what's on your, on your number seven. Okay, number seven, number seven is be be realistic and air toward optimism, which I, which I absolutely, absolutely love that one, because that's that's the way that I go through business, and it's you have to be glass half full, you have to be positive, you have to have that energy.

So, love that one. Give me, give me two more. Okay, before I say that, man, I just got to say, you've now proven what I always knew. You have a photographic memory notes for those who aren't watching on YouTube and are on Spotify or Apple Notes.

You've got a very good host, folks. This guy knows what he's doing. Number three, number four, yeah, number four is set a direction, but then be willing to change course, and I think you know, as you talked about your experience at USG, and the idea that we know we have to get done here, we know what our goals are, we want to grow this business, we want to create a world class, or continue to build a world class organization, but you don't always know what's going to come at you, and that's one of the things that you know I learned a long time ago in business is that you, you can't control, you can't control everything that happens to you, what you can't control is what you do about it, and so that was one of the things that resonated with me on number four, throw out one more number, and think about 11, number 11, yeah, so that, and that's the one where I need the most, most advice, and have to follow.

I am always moving at a fast pace. You mentioned that, and I get frustrated when the whole organization doesn't necessarily move at that pace. And now, also, people know that I'm not a detailed person, right? And so you get yourself in trouble if you're just, you know, way, way out moving the organization too fast, and not sweeping enough of that up enough of the details, and you can really quickly find yourself alone in an organization if you're out sprinting and everybody else is running really hard, but maybe, and they're all like, "Look, we're working like crazy, you can lose them really, really quickly.

So that's another great example. Share with the audience some advice I gave you on a cheer lift. Matt and I have the joy of skiing together. We do indeed, and thanks to you, by the way.

Yes, I know a bit about Matt's business. I don't know it well, but I know that they sell these technical learning systems in both academia and industry, and and it's all about personal relationships with the people buying these systems, and I said to Matt, you know, you need to leverage your time, and you do that by hiring really smart people to work for you, and and when you start doing that, the pace will change. Absolutely, they're not all Matt, right, but they're all really good people.

Absolutely, so as you build your organization and bring in new hires, you get as many race horses as you can, but it's a collective pace. It's not you set the tone, but it's a collective pace. Absolutely, and that, and that, that, that extends that whole idea of leverage. And I've written a magazine column, I think, and I, and I referenced that a conversation we had extends not just to the people on the team, but also to the business model itself, and kind of thinking about where you can generate leverage in the business model itself, so that could be a whole separate podcast as well.

You mentioned skiing, we both have a love of skiing, we, you know, you introduced me to just an incredible paradise spot in Idaho, and have fallen in love with that particular area, thanks to you. I have to first, are you okay with me mentioning your age? So, as you sit here and you listen to Bill, he's an incredible shave. He's 75 years old.

We just celebrated his 75th birthday, which just blows me away. Just this last year, so February, I think it was March or February, I think it was February of this year. We had a day on the mountain in Idaho where we skied 36,000 vertical feet in the day, and it wasn't even a full day. I think we cut out an hour early.

For anybody who's a skier, I mean, that a good day on the mountain can be 15,000 feet and. And we skied 36,000 feet, we, if you don't mind me mentioning, we just spent a week together in Europe, and stitched together a bike ride after bike ride after bike ride, day after day, for five or six days in a row. You're 75 years old, you have the not just the mental fitness, but the physical fitness of somebody literally two decades younger than you are, me being the example, how do you do it, Bill?

Well, you know, I don't know how long I'll be here on this earth, or you'll be here on this earth. None of us know that, but I do know one tenant I said earlier is to keep learning. The other thing you got to do is keep moving. Yeah, you just got to keep moving.

I am blessed with good health, touch wood, and my dear wife, Car, and I believe in physical fitness. I think you know you got to have a good diet, stay in shape, and get enough sleep to let your body repair itself. And I've been a - I don't know if I'd say a lifelong athlete, but I've been athletic, I've played sports all my life. Well, you're in a movie doing crew.

Yeah, I'm in a movie doing crew, the way we were. Yeah, and and I just think that, that honestly, just keep moving. I am no longer able to run. I did run, my wife is a was a marathon runner.

I did run one marathon with her, yeah, in 1998 I tried to protect my knees and hips, so I can keep skiing, which is a lifelong love. My brother and I started skiing at the age of 10 or 11, and we've skied together essentially every year for for over 60 years, and and so I shifted to biking. So my routine now is I bike in the summer, I ski in the winter, and in between I see a personal trainer, I swim, I go the days I'm not doing something aerobic, I walk, and my wife introduced me to yoga, which is wonderful to sort of find some balance in your body and harness your breathing and, and your body, and so you know, in a word, it's just keep moving, just keep moving.

Find something you really enjoy, or find some sports and activities you really enjoy, and go for it. Love it. Just keep moving. It's a mantra for fitness, it's a mantra for running business, it's a mantra for life.

Two more questions for my dear friend Bill Foot before we close up shop here on The TechEd Podcast. Haven't talked a lot about your, you know, your.. we talked about your education background. You served on the board at Williams College, which I know is just something that was tremendously, tremendously rewarding for you, if I'm not mistaken.

Was that a 10 year term or 12 years, which is.. which is awesome. So, so you.. you know, you were a student, you've worked around education, you went through your master's program, and then, and then got on the other side of it, serving on the board of an incredible institution.

Is there something that you believe or think about education that might be a little bit different, or might surprise our audience a little bit? Well, first about board service at your alma mater, and then about education more broadly, so I viewed that board opportunity as being a steward, you know, a college is a not-for-profit enterprise, and there are lots of stakeholders, there's there's the faculty, there's the students, there's the parents, and there's the alumni, and they're financed with donations from alumni for the for the students of today and tomorrow, and it's the faculty that makes it all work.

And so you're really a steward of an institution. Williams is over a couple 100 years old and a wonderful place. The education I received was a liberal arts education, which was truly a gift for me. It may or may not appeal to some.

It's an indirect way to a job, because you're the liberal arts, or the liberal arts. I mean, you can study sciences, you can study humanities, you can study languages. Sciences in this day and age with STEM lead you more directly to something. I was studied economics, and I went to Wall Street for a couple years to learn banking.

What you really, what I really learned in college, it was two things. One is I applied myself across 32 courses over four years, and I learned how to work with and study with my peers. The academic side, I think, was about learning how to learn, how to read, write, analyze, ask good questions, listen, speak, and, and it was a real gift. The other thing I learned is how to, to, you know, you're, you, you're no longer home, you're living in a residential setting with, with, I think, there were 400 or so in my class, and you learn how to work with and live with other people, and what I really gained in college was not only an understanding of a basic understanding.

Of economics and art history, and all the courses I took, but I actually gained a lot of self-confidence that I could actually work with and succeed in a pretty competitive environment, so it helped my self-confidence a great deal. Awesome! Yeah, what an incredible experience. And I'm a product, by the way, I mentioned it from time to time of a liberal arts education as well, and there's, you know, in as much as we're advocates here on the podcast of making sure that students recognize what the career path is and they make the right educational decision for themselves, whatever comes after high school, whether that's continuing their education, going direct to workforce, going into the military, what have you, lots of options, but I can tell you from experience that the, that the, you know, what I learned in courses like theology, I went to a Jesuit university.

What I went, what I learned in courses like philosophy, English, history, as valuable in some cases to my career, maybe even more than some of the more technical things I learned while I was studying business, and it's super, super example of, and I think, as we, as we even probably, this is the deepest we've gone into a podcast without talking about AI, but as we, as we go into the age of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and, and all these ethical questions that are going to come in terms of the world of work and the, in the future of the planet on which we live, really, really important to have that grounding.

So, I love the way that you teed that up and talked about that importance. I think Bill, one more question for you, it's a question we love to ask every one of our podcast guests, as is the last one. It takes us back in time, and so we go back to when you're a 15 year old sophomore in high school. I admit that I know more about your history than I do about a lot of our guests, but you're a sophomore at Whitefish Bay High School in southeast Wisconsin at that at that particular age.

Obviously, a number of decades have passed since then, but if you could go back and give that young man one piece of advice, Bill, what would it be? You know, I've, you've, you mentioned you are going to ask me this question, and I don't know if I have a profound answer. What, what, what I think I would say to my younger self is, is go out there, work hard, play hard, and be open, be open to opportunity wherever it strikes. I was lucky to go to Williams and onto Wall Street.

I didn't really know what my path would be, and just keep, keep searching, believe in yourself, stay humble, and be curious. So, essentially, you would tell yourself exactly what you managed to do over the course of these last year to say, yeah, absolutely, so, and a good way for us to wrap it up, because it is, I mean, Billy, I mean, I know our audience now has the understanding and the appreciation for the human being that you are, the same appreciation that I've managed to gain over the course of a 20 year friendship, but what you've done in your career professionally, the example that you've set in terms of integrity and ethics, doing things for the right reason, being an amazing family man, and just a great example for anybody listening to this podcast of a life continuing to be incredibly well lived all the way to 75 and good lord willing, for another many, many decades to come.

But really appreciate you coming in, sharing your expertise, sharing all of your knowledge and wisdom. It's been a pleasure, Matt. Thank you. And to your audience, you're lucky to have Matt.

I know your regular is probably listening to this podcast, but Matt is a guy who really cares deeply about educating people and helping people understand. And if some of what I've shared today is helpful to you, it's my privilege and pleasure to do so, and if there's another opportunity to help in some way, please call. We will, you know, I will. We appreciate the offer.

I appreciate the kind words. Appreciate the audience joining us on this episode of The TechEd Podcast. Lots of great stuff. Bill talked about his 12 principles or tenets of leadership.

At some point, that's going to become a book. I go to almost, I would almost guarantee it, but we'll put some of the resources that we talked about here on the podcast up in the show notes. You'll find those at TechEd podcast.com/foot and that's pay attention to the spelling, that's TechEd podcast.

com/f O O T E. When you're done there, checking out those show notes, please check us out on social media, you will find us all over. We are on YouTube, we are on Facebook, we're on Instagram, we are on LinkedIn. Wherever you go to consume your social media, you will find The TechEd Podcast.

When you do, reach out, say hello. We can't wait to hear from you, and can't wait to see you again next week on The TechEd Podcast. Until then, my name is Matt Kirkner. I'm your host.

Thanks for being with us. Bye.