Ep 88 Kind Business: Dr David Cooke on How Values Create Value

Here's your host, Carolyn Butler-Madden.

David's had a remarkable career spanning more than 35 years in the corporate world, including senior roles at Xerox, Canon, and as Managing Director and Chair for Australia and New Zealand at Konica Minolta, where he became the first non-Japanese leader in the company's history. In this conversation, David shares how he transformed Konica Minolta into a company that truly cares, one that embedded purpose, kindness and human rights advocacy into its culture and operations.

He tells powerful stories of how that shift not only inspired employees but also drove commercial success, with clients choosing them not just for product or price, but for who they were as a business. We also explore why leadership is about the shadow we cast, what it means to build a kind business in today's world and how leaders can navigate the tension between doing good and delivering profit.

This is an inspiring, deeply human conversation about authenticity, courage, and the power of values to create real value. Here's my interview with Dr. David Cooke.

Dr. David Cooke, welcome to the For Love and Money podcast.

If you don't care for all of the people in your business's ecosphere, then you won't have a thriving business in the long term. It'll just be a transactional business, and I would argue it won't survive very long.

So I'm really curious to learn about your background, David, and the key moments that have brought you to where you are now but including the key moments that brought you to where you were heading up Conica Minolta in Australia and taking the position you did, which I hope you will be going into.

scanners, printers, and also medical imaging. So, anything that captures an image. And so, in the document and business area, the main competitors, which everybody would know, are their Xerox, their HP, their Canon, and so on. Now, in Australia, Conic and Malta, for 40 years, had been run by Japanese people. The managing director would be sent from Tokyo. They'd be on typically a four-year visa, and they'd be replaced with another Japanese person at the end of that time.

But at a certain point after 40 years, something very strange happened, and that is that I was appointed as the first non-Japanese managing director of Konica Minolta, and in fact at that time was the first person in the Konica Minolta world globally to report straight to Tokyo, and not through any kind of, you know, layered system of an Asian president or anything like that. Now, on that particular day, it was announced at a conference.

I was the only one in the room other than the people who'd flown out from Tokyo who knew.

It was announced. I was invited up on stage, and I turned to the audience. There were about 300 people, and I said, I want us all to work together to build a company that cares, that cares about the people who work here, that cares about our customers, and that cares about our community. Now, The next day, I walked into work for the first time as the new managing director. I'd previously been the general manager and head of sales.

And of course, that's where the rubber hit the road. It's all very well to have a vision statement, but that's just the starting point. So I wrote to everybody in the company on day one, and I said, look, unfortunately, you couldn't all be at the conference, but you probably know by

Everybody pays deference to you. Nobody would ever question anything you said. And it's a hierarchical, respectful system. But what I'd done is I'd come out and I said on day one that I don't know how to do one of the key strategies that I want to implement.

So I showed vulnerability and maybe to some degree, some humility. And I said to everybody, I need all of your ideas. I want you to buy into this, but I need you to tell me what's got to change in this company. What aren't we getting right? What do we need to do more of? What do we need to do less of? And we used a survey tool from a small company called Market Culture. They have a tool called the Market Responsiveness Index, the MRI, sent that out to everybody in the company.

And we got something like a 95% response rate to a survey, which if you've ever done surveys, you'll know off the Richter scale.

I had these gold nuggets of ideas. And what was really starting to change culturally is that instead of everything being top-down in a hierarchical system, the ideas as to what we were going to do as a company came percolating up. And then when we implemented things, I could say to people, we're going to do this, this, and this over the next couple of months. And just to remind you, they were your ideas. We did listen and we're implementing because some of these ideas are fantastic and so on.

Now, just to talk a little bit about, I guess, what's the link between that approach to running a company. And, you know, the whole discussion of profit and purpose. And what happened is that the majority, we could group those ideas into categories. And the number one thing people wanted was better communication from top down and between departments and so on. It was low hanging fruit. Communication was poor. And it wasn't that hard to fix, to be honest.

The next most requested category was people wanted more purpose. We didn't have a CSR program. and this is 2013, we were way behind most other companies. So they wanted charity partnerships and they wanted volunteering days off and salary match giving. They wanted us to make a contribution to the community. And so we started to implement those kinds of things. And we actually moved beyond what I would call fairly standard corporate social responsibility initiatives.

And we ended up moving into a whole area of human rights advocacy, which I think was more cutting edge than necessarily supporting charity partners. And it came about because we had a conference in Cambodia and we needed a keynote speaker and a woman was recommended to me who had been trafficked into the brothel systems of Cambodia when she was a very young teenager.

She had got out of that system. She married a French man, moved to Paris and said, my life's just unbelievable now, but I can't stay here. Convinced him, he was from Médecins Sans Frontières, so probably a pretty good guy, They convinced him to go back and they started an NGO, non-government organization, to rescue, rehabilitate, and reintegrate young women who were in the same situation as her. So we really had a broad portfolio of the work we were doing.

Now, we did that because it was just the right thing to do to support them. We supported them through educational scholarships. Some of those young women who'd been deeply traumatized actually sat university entrance exams, seven of them qualified, but there were just no funds in a small charity for them to go. So we made sure they went to uni and kids went to high school and so on.

Now, interestingly, a short while after that, I asked everybody in the company who'd worked there for 25 years or more to Come to Sydney. And I said, I want to take you out to dinner as a group. Thank you for your loyalty to the company. They'd been there a lot longer than me. And we did that just in a cheap and cheerful restaurant, no private dining room or anything. And at the end of a meal that lasted a couple of hours, one man said, could I please say something?

Now, interestingly, every one of the people who were stayers, 25 years or more, some were 35, they were all field service engineers. So, you know, when you're printing to your multifunction device and it jams or whatever, you can't get it to work, you kick it, still doesn't work. You ring up the 13 number, somebody runs in with a branded uniform, those people. There are about a dozen of them. And this man stood up. And the interesting thing is that he hadn't said a word all night.

Very quiet man. And he stood up in a public restaurant and he made what I imagine was the first speech he'd ever made in his life. And what he said was, I've worked here for more than 25 years. That's why you invited me tonight. And for that entire time, I never told anybody where I worked. I just didn't see the point. It was just a job I went to to do a fair day's work for a fair day's pay. And that's how I fed my family.

And he said, but now I tell every single person I meet that I work for Conica Minolta. And why would I do that? I do that because I feel so proud to work for an organization that would care about young women on the other side of the world who've been trafficked into a life of sexual slavery.

Now, that's kind of the purpose piece. Okay, where's the profit piece? And that's another short story, if I may tell it. And that is that we just started to win all of these big contracts, big national contracts. And we typically, through the tender process, were not very successful with the very big companies. They just went with what they thought was a safe bet.

And I mentioned some of those brand names earlier, but then we started to win their business and I would always go to those companies and I'd say to them, thank you very much for making us your technology partner. We think you've made a very wise decision because we think we're a good company and we'll fulfill the contract well, we believe. Can you please tell me, how did you make that decision? Because for 40 years, you've never spent a dollar with us. I'm just intrigued.

That all say the same thing. But one man in particular, I thought summed it up beautifully. He said, look, we would always assess these tenders in the procurement department, basically on three criteria, the product, the price, and the service levels. And in your industry, you're pretty much all the same. and so we just stick with our current supplier. But we're obliged to go to market every four years according to our governance processes. So we do.

He said, but now our governance has tightened up and we're being asked to also assess not just what it is you're trying to sell us, but to assess who you are. I thought it was a beautiful statement and he used the analogy of a car. He said, we don't just look at the bright new shiny cars that you all have anymore.

We lift up the bonnet and we have a look inside and he said when we looked inside your company we saw differences he said you're all fine but he said we saw big differences with Conica Minolta in terms of the initiatives you put in place for your people but also the contribution you're making in community particularly around your efforts to end modern slavery we've done a lot to work in our supply chain, but also the kids in Cambodia who were slaves up until, you know, they were rescued.

And this particular guy said, we realize that your values and our values align, and we're a really good fit for each other, and that's why we've awarded you this contract. And some of those contracts over their period were worth millions of dollars to us, but we won them because we were just trying to be a good company and it was recognized.

And this man was number two. He was responsible for, you know, all the sales and marketing, the revenue, the profit and so on. Didn't really get involved in much of the head office stuff. The president had a secretariat and he had direct reports that did that. But this man had to drive the business in every country. He'd previously been the company's president of the US. So he had a bit of a Western bent to him. And he was a bit of a maverick.

It's unusual in Japanese business circles. You don't get away with that too often. But I used to call him the rock star because he played in a rock band.

But what he was alluding to was that he had to justify that further up the food chain. And

Like showing up, actually, you know, standing up and saying what you did, that you wanted to build a company that cares, and then actually speaking to your people and showing vulnerability by saying you didn't know how to achieve it. That, I mean, that's a departure from the normal corporate world. And as you said, very un-Japanese corporate world as well.

And sometimes it was talking to very big printing companies about big digital presses and things like that. They're very technical, Not that I'm a technical person, but, and sometimes I'd come to the conclusion that, you know what, I don't think we've quite got the right product for you. And I'd recommend who did. Or they'd be three years into a four-year lease. And I'd say, why are you looking at upgrading? Because you're going to have to pay out 25% of the lease.

And they'd say, well, we're just aware that, you know, technology's moved a bit and we just want to stay up to date. And I would sometimes come to the conclusion, my advice is don't. pay out that lease. The advances are not that great that it warrants doing that. And if you do take my advice, would I be able to come back in nine months and have this conversation again? And people would buy product from me because I was the only person who didn't try and sell them a product.

And you can't connect to a meaningful purpose unless it connects to who you are because purpose isn't powerful unless it's personal, you know, and that comes from really connecting it to what's important to you. But that who piece is... Yeah, I think you kind of underplay that, but I think it shows real courage for a leader to show up wholly as themselves. So congratulations.

And, you know, they kind of all knew me up there and they'd probably get handed a file, you know, whatever. And he just cut straight to the chase. He said, look, you've just got to stop doing all that stuff that you do.

And, and anyway, you know, I could see that I wasn't going to get very far with him. He'd just been waiting to have this conversation with me. And, and so I said to him,

The best and brightest in the industry don't want to come and work for us anymore. If all of those things happen, I just want you to go over to that lift. He was on level 14. The president had a floor on level 15. I said, press the button. And when the lift doors open, press 15. Go up and tell the president it was your idea. I've got goosebumps.

I got rid of the, it took a while, but I got rid of offices for managers and we had open plan and, you know, I'd try and remember as many people's personal circumstances as possible, you know, how did Johnny go, you know, with, you know, football on Saturday morning, just all that connecting kind of stuff, which people super appreciated, you know, and yeah, you know, it was tangible, it was palpable. Wonderful.

And look, you know, there was, when we started to push heavily into human rights advocacy and we were advocating with the Australian government, this would have been 2016, 2017, so I'm about three years in, we were advocating for an Australian Modern Slavery Act. Would compel every large company in Australia to report to the government via the Attorney General's Department what they were doing to eliminate forced labour and modern slavery from their supply chains.

So every company in Australia used stuff in their business and that stuff had to be made somewhere and it typically is not Australia. Uniforms for staff, laptops, office furniture, all that stuff. So it gets made by another company overseas. And in those supply chains, in those factories, those other companies' factories, there were human rights abuses. And sometimes it wouldn't even be in that factory. Sometimes it would be in the component manufacturers.

So if you can imagine how many different companies make a bit that goes into an iPhone. That's it. And it's across different countries and regions and all that kind of stuff. But in those supply chains that flow into those Australian companies, Significant human rights abuses. So very, very poor, vulnerable people Are either sold into slavery or they're coerced or they're tricked. Sign this contract will give you a great job in a beautiful air-conditioned

factory in a large city. You'll be able to support your family for the rest of their lives by just coming and working for one or two years, you know. Oh my God, you know, particularly after disasters. These labor hire companies trawl through places where there've been floods and earthquakes and so on, signing people up. And of course, it's a giant trick. They get there, and it's nothing like what they expect.

They're told that they have massive debts to the company, which might account for half of their wage. They're told that the company they're working for will charge them the other half for the accommodation and the meals that they're giving them, and they're being asked to work for zero. And they're just devastated. So we wanted to take a stance against this, and we felt that the Australian Modern Slavery Act, which would compel companies to report to the government,

what are you doing to get rid of this? A good way to do it. And one of the catalysts for that, and I loved telling this story to our people, and it was a big kind of cultural contributor, I guess, is we're on another one of these overseas conferences. This time it was in Thailand, and these were sort of annual end-of-year awards presentations for the top performers and so on. It's like an incentive reward for them. And one night we're on an old clipper ship, an old sailing ship.

And for a gala dinner. And at the end of the meal, there was an opportunity to hear a talk from the cruise director, I guess you'd call them, about Thai culture and Thai cuisine and things like that. And it was held in the ship's library. Now, I have to be absolutely upfront and say, I did not go to that talk. Fortunately, my daughter was attending it with me.

People could take their partners, my daughter came, one of my daughters, and the next morning Nina said to me, Dad, you really should have gone to the talk in the library. I said, oh yeah? She said, yeah, it was about slavery, because she knew we'd started to move down this path in Konica Minolta, down the anti-slavery path, and she said, When they went to Q&A, the first question from the audience was, we're in the middle of the ocean, it's pitch black out here,

you can't see a thing, except there are lights dotted all around us in the ocean. What are the lights? And the woman said, oh, it's interesting, you should ask that question. Every light is a Thai fishing boat, and they shine the light into the water, and that attracts the fish, that's how they all fish.

And she said, what's interesting about the question is that just last week, during the day, we went out in a little dinghy, pulled up at one of these fishing boats, explained to the captain that we run tourist tours and things, could we come on board and ask about the sort of fish they catch and life at sea and all that? And he said, sure.

And this woman stepped on board, and the first thing she saw was the emaciated figure of a man sitting on the deck of the boat, had a collar around his neck, and the collar was chained to the deck of the boat. And the woman, in shock almost, said, who's that? And the captain looked down, and he said, oh, it's a slave.

And she said, but you can't have slaves. And with a sweep of his arm indicating all the other boats, and it's thought there's about 50,000 fish those waters off the coast of the Asian countries, he said, Most of us have slaves.

He'd come from Myanmar, he'd been promised a great job in Bangkok in a lovely factory, but he'd been sold at the docks as a slave, never saw a factory. And what she would not have been able to realize, or probably wasn't that relevant, was that that captain would have paid no more than a hundred US at the docks, so he'd made a good profit. So you can buy a human being to work for you for the rest of their life until they collapse and die for a hundred bucks.

And very rigorous research tells us now there are something like 50 million people trapped in modern slavery. So when I came back and I said to everybody in Conica Minolta, I used to routinely go around branches for monthly updates and things, and I would tell this story.

And I said, my light bulb moment was if seafood caught by slaves can find its way into the supply chains of the biggest food companies in the world and into our restaurants and into our supermarkets and into the Sydney fish market, then what products or services made by slavery might be finding their way into our company. Could it be the products our parent makes? No, but components that go to a chronic mineral factory, yes.

And so I said to everybody, I hope you'll join me in doing whatever we can to advocate for these vulnerable and voiceless people Once people are all on that same page with a cause, they're still doing their jobs, but there's something that's just been woven into the fabric of what they do every day, then, you know, it just moves mountains.

to generate profit. Real simple. So what people interpreted that to mean was don't get distracted by the noise. And in, you know, in this era, as opposed to necessarily 1970, that noise would be seen as being, you know, ESG, environmental social governance initiatives. It would be seen as DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion. You know, don't worry about any of that stuff. It's just noise. Just stick to the knitting and generate profits.

Now, that statement in 1971 was seized upon by the captains of industry, people like Jack Welsh, who was the most famous CEO at the time. He ran General Electric, I think at that point was the biggest company in the world. They're an aeronautical engineering company, owned Boeing and so on. And he just went hard on that mantra of just cut to the chase, short-term, derive profits, make the shareholders happy. But the way he did it was to devastate entire swathes of the United States.

Entire towns, virtually states, were devastated as he moved all the manufacturing offshore because it was cheaper. You make more

Now, the interesting thing is, I really like this, and I will sort of refer to notes here because I'll get the stats right. McKinsey Consulting, who many people will have heard of, they wanted to answer the question, we can see that that short-termism will have devastating effects at times in the community. So the only winners are the people who are wealthy enough to own shares in those

companies. But might there actually be Longer-term, a negative impact on the company itself pursuing that agenda. And this is what they did. They undertook research which was into the consequences of short-term thinking. And it was called the McKinsey Longevity Report. And it's fascinating. They looked back to 1958 to the 500 companies sitting on the big US stock exchange, the Standard and Poor's, the S&P 500, at that time in that year. And they had a look at what their average lifespan was.

So how long had they been around? And on average, they'd existed for 61 years. They then had a look at the year of the research, 2023, to see, you know, the new set of, in some cases, companies in the 500, how long on average have those companies been around for? And they found that the lifespan of the company was now less than 18 years. Companies were disappearing at a rapid rate and then they extrapolated out, well, what will the S&P 500 look like in 2027?

And they determined that 75% of the companies on the US exchange today, 2023, will no longer even exist because business has just got it wrong. And they don't realize it. It's as if capitalism is eating itself. Surge to generate as much profit for the shareholder as possible before the next AGM is actually sowing the seeds of the company's own destruction, and they can't even see it.

Now, the fascinating thing for me is looping back to Milton Friedman, who in a funny kind of way started all of this.

It may reduce the wages bill and have other desirable effects for the company. And Jack Welch, who ran with the short-term mantra for decades, when he retired, he looked back and it was just post the global financial crisis. He looked back with the wisdom of hindsight on how he'd conducted his career. And his quote is, a focus purely on maximizing shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world.

And then he said, by the way, you might want to include something in the latter part of that Friedman article and he sent me the quote.

What people are starting to understand with the aid of thinkers like that is that it's not a linear spectrum. It's basically a virtuous circle. The more profit you can make, the more good you can do in society. The more good you do in society, the more profit you make. People come and work for you. People want to buy your products and services. And it just keeps going around. And, you know, it's kind of a beautiful thing once you get it happening.

And one of the great things about when people do feel psychologically safe to speak up, then they will challenge the leader from time to time. And that's just a blessing because you don't get it right all the time.

So I deliberately didn't, you know, look at figures or anything, ASIC figures, you can get all that stuff, but I chose not to. And the short answer is a lot of the initiatives continued, but I was replaced with a Japanese person and culturally it's just different. And largely their role is to do what their boss in Tokyo tells them to do. It's not a role where you're asked to think or show initiative or come up with new ideas yourself. That's not what that role is. So some stuff's been diluted.

But, you know, a lot of it has been embedded and it's there. And one reason it gets embedded is you can change the person at the top, but we still had 500 people in that pyramid that really bought into all this stuff. And, you know, not every single person, some people didn't quite get it or whatever, but, you know, absolutely en masse wanted to work for that sort of company, wanted to contribute more to the purpose of the company and so on. So, that's pretty unstoppable.

Because you've talked about some of the concepts here, but I'd love listeners to be able to understand what they could get from it.

And if you had to do a pitch to a board with, you know, crusty old chair who didn't get any of this stuff and came through a different era, you know, Love Jack Welch's approach or whatever, and you had to pitch to them, I would pitch via what the ROI will be. I bring it back to, what are the main objectives of the company? Well, as you know, they're to hit this profit number. Okay, great. Let's talk about how we're going to get that number.

And then you start talking about the financial returns of being a good business. And you talk about people want to work there. People will stay longer. I had people constantly come up to me and say, oh, David got tapped on the shoulder by, you know, ABC company the other day. I'm sure you know they pay more than we do. Yep. Yeah. I used to work there myself, whatever. And, but don't worry, David, I'm not going anywhere. I just love being a part of what we're doing.

Or I had that multiple times. So there's a strong ROI. You know, I gave you the example of us winning contracts for the first time ever. So there's a very strong business case for being a good business. So the book covers both. It covers the heart aspect, and it also covers the business case, if you need it up your sleeve.

And most of the work I do is not classic consulting, as in come in and transform our company or whatever. But if somebody wanted to build a social impact program, sure, I can help them with that on site. But what I do a lot of is public speaking.

So I get invited to speak at conferences and also I run workshops and it can be on those things like, you know, having social impact, changing corporate culture, those sorts of things, you know, how to build high-performing teams through, you know, engagement. But one thing I do a lot of is ethical decision-making workshops. So you're a senior executive or you're a management team. How do you know what the right thing to do is?

Complex world that we live in. And there are all sorts of ethical models around that. And I reach back to the great philosophers of Aristotle and Plato and Socrates because that wisdom is just as relevant today. And those workshops often are based on hypotheticals. Imagine you don't work in this company anymore. We're going to transport you into this. And all of a sudden, you find yourself having to make this decision. What do you think you'd do?

Now, why would you do that? Who else in the room would do that? And we get a lot of dialogue and discussion going. Around how to make more ethical decisions in the business world or the organizational world. So that's the kind of field I play in and I enjoy it. And hopefully I make a contribution to other organizations.

And I would just request everybody to do as much due diligence as you can, on where are those things made, you know, whether people paid a living wage, and more and more you'll see companies putting the sort of, that sort of information on their websites, usually in the sustainability tab,

They'll say that, I don't know. But if enough people ask enough times, it gets back to head office and people see it. Oh, there's this groundswell of people asking now, we will sell more t-shirts if we go and find out. And if the answer isn't the answer that will sell more t-shirts, then we will start to implement programs with those factories.

And we'll say to them, if you don't lift your game and no longer use forced labor and pay people properly and treat people properly, then you'll lose our contract. And they start to leverage the muscle they have, probably not for humanitarian reasons, for commercial reasons. I'm a pragmatic former corporate guy. I don't care why people do good stuff.

So, I mean, the landscape I'd like to see in business is businesses earning strong financial returns on the basis of treating people well, treating the people who work there well, being honest and transparent with their customers, not bullying their suppliers, but treating the suppliers well in their contract negotiations, and finding some space to contribute to the community and to society as well, and not having what is more common today, a blanket attitude,

which is, yeah, yeah, I know there's homelessness. Yes, I know there's cancer, a disease in society. Yes, I know there's all these bad things, but it's nothing to do with me. Government's supposed to sort that out. Charities are supposed to sort that out. Get rid of those blinkers and just say, hey, we're actually all a part of the same ecosphere. We're all on the same planet. We're all in this together.

And, you know, businesses just has such massive resources, You know, trillions of dollars worth of capital and some really smart people running these businesses and in these businesses, you turn just a fraction of that power that the corporate world has into doing good in society, outside their businesses, and you know, you can transform the world. I'd like to see the world looking like.