And so most of my career I spent on uh risk management. I always found that incredibly intriguing and risk is always relative to the rewards. And so with people saying, "Well, I like to take risks." In fact, when I'm interviewing people, that's often one of my questions like, "Do you consider yourself a risk taker?" And I've gotten a whole spectrum of answers. Some people are going, "No, I hate risk. I hate it." Okay, you're probably not going to be a good fit for what I'm looking for.
And at the other spectrum is, "Oh yeah, I go down to the racetrack and bet every Saturday morning." you know, we got, okay, that's probably not going to work for us because it's got to be relative to the rewards and doing our homework to give us a competitive advantage um to understand what's going on. And still we get the markets wrong sometimes, but at least we're trying to do it from a fundamental standpoint, understanding what the weather, the farmers, the crops, the production, uh the demand, you know, the politics that enter in, how grain flows, and how we're feeding the world.
Uh I found that incredibly intriguing. uh just the really the I'll call it the raw economics you know in terms of uh how the how the world operates from a from a commodity standpoint and uh so I think the whole risk element was very intriguing to me um and I uh was involved with athletics in grade school high school and college I played uh four years of basketball at the University of North Dakota and this is probably as close as I could get to having you know a team you know getting ready for you know things that happen in a team or in business the weather it doesn't rain it rains you weren't expecting it to rain etc and u close I get it without wearing tennis shoes I mean because it it really is has that excitement so I really enjoyed the adrenaline uh working with teams uh you know you always got a scorecard in terms of how things were operating and the how we did things was also very important you know
so how do you teach people to keep the ethics in line how we're going to operate with customers what's our brand and how we're going to stand for and what we stand for and what we won't stand for. Uh and so really to operate along those lines gave me a huge amount of comfort being in the risk arena and also in the global world where you got most areas uh it's not black and white. Very few things are black and white.
So you're operating in gray areas uh a lot and you'd have and all we asked people was if in fact you're not sure probably means you shouldn't do it. And if in fact you're not sure, get your hand up. If in fact you've done something and you're not sure that was the right thing to do, just come and talk to us, you know, so we can do it. And often what gets people in trouble with ethics uh is the fact it's not necessarily what they do, it's what they do after they do it.
And once that's when they that's when really things really become very um difficult for everyone when you got to start digging and retracing and trying to get the truth out.
