MARIL MACDONALD:
Do you have you learned through the years that there are certain signals you see that give you a sense of where you can let go more than others?

AL CAREY:
It depends on the situation, but you know let’s just take if business is tough — your natural inclination is to, is to pull it back in. And I’ll give you one example. At Frito Lay a couple of years ago, we had a tough ah, the economy got difficult in the end of 2008 and we didn’t like the business trends, the economy was slowing up, the retail business was slowing up a bit. So our natural inclination was, let’s pull everything, the decision making got pulled in to the center in Texas where the headquarters is. And I know we sat in a room on a Friday afternoon, even though I was saying we’re an empowering, servant leadership organization, when the pressure gets on, you start pulling the reins back in and you feel like you’re in a better position to make lots of decisions at the center. As you see — you know better.

And I remember being out in the field in Los Angeles one time with our CFO and we had given them a couple of instructions for the balance of the year and while I was talking to the general manager of the market ah, I realized the direction we gave him was the absolute wrong direction for, for that particular market, it was probably an okay idea for some other places in the U.S.

But by not empowering them and by trying to be a command and controlled environment, I think we gave them the wrong direction. And we got back in a room after that and I said you know there’s an example of where even though the — it’s difficult times — we should be empowering the people even more than trying to make the decisions out of the center. And so, we gave him a chance to ah, the person out in California to — well, then what do you need? What would you do to improve the business in this situation? And he came up with a very logical thing that worked in that market. So, it’s — it was kind of a shock for me. … even though I’m so inclined to be a servant leader and to empower people, I found myself in the trap of business gets bad, you pull in the reins, that is maybe the time you should empower people even more.