Lindsay Biebelberg:
Howard has traveled throughout Asia, overseeing business offices and working in Korea, China, Vietnam, and Hong Kong. Most recently, Howard has extended Mercury's operations in Vietnam, where the company now owns and operates two major footwear manufacturing facilities that employ approximately 2,000 people. Howard attended New York University School of Law, practicing corporate and international law for 10 years before moving onto business management. As an undergraduate at Brandeis University, Howard majored in English and American literature, writing his senior thesis on Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow for which he was awarded highest departmental honors. He said, "I began reading avant-garde and its service literature during high school, and always enjoyed the challenges posted by difficult texts. That continuing search for hidden meanings and extended connections, secret agendas, and true narratives serve me well in my business career."
Lindsay Biebelberg:
Mercury was formed by Irving Wiseman in 1979, and the company has always embodied the values and outlook of the Wiseman family. Before I turn it over to Howard, I just want to remind everyone to please stay muted. And if you have any questions, please put them in the chat and we're going to have a Q&A right after Howard is done speaking with us. So without further ado, go for it, Howard.
Howard Wiseman:
Thank you, everyone for coming tonight, it's really been an honor to be invited to speak to the Brandeis community, which I hold in such high esteem. And it's always interesting to review your career experiences with a view towards telling them to others. And you realize just how varied and sometimes crazy that it has been. And so it's been fun to prepare for this as well. I've been attached to the world of business since graduating Brandeis in 1981 and NYU Law School, maybe for first as a corporate attorney and then as an executive. I've had ongoing leadership roles where my actions and business decisions required evaluating specific situations relative to my personal beliefs and my ethical code. I've been very fortunate to work within a business built by our family which has provided built-in values and structures derived from the values of our family.
Howard Wiseman:
The business reflects the morality and ethics that are practiced within our family, they are one and the same. And I personally find it very unlikely that a family can sustain the dissonance of two sets of ethical books. A family that cheats its customers, suppliers, and employees is likely to be very unethical in its dealings amongst themselves. In more pure corporate business organizations, it's often the belief system and the value system of senior leadership and boards of directors that inform the cultures and belief systems of their companies as a whole. But in either case, whether it's a corporate business or business based on family values, the real challenge is distributing the aspirational and personal value systems of leadership into the operational structure of the company and achieving buy-in and compliance from your workforce.
Howard Wiseman:
You can teach the values formally through training with intensity and sincerity and persistence. And this is very important in achieving a cultural norm in your company. But I think the more important aspect of creating a values-based culture in your company is modeling values through your leadership and rewarding circumstances and situations and people who adopt the values that you espouse.
Howard Wiseman:
Now as my life experience progressed and I matured as a person and as a business person, as a human, my values and moral precepts became much more internalized and there was a growing awareness and self knowledge of what my own personal code was. And this kind of self knowledge has been essential in handling the continuous stream of judgments and ethical dilemmas and problems that arise in your personal and business life all the time. And yet even if you understand what you believe very carefully, there are tremendous amount of gray areas where you're called upon to make judgment calls every day. And you don't always get them right, and I'll say that as well. What you strive to do is to get them mostly, right. And when you mess up, you clean up.
Howard Wiseman:
There's an expression making the rounds in the business lingo and in the buzzwords that are out there today which namely, doing business as business is being done. This is a takeoff on the idea of when you're in Rome, you do as the Romans do. The corollary of these expressions is that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. These phrases represent somewhat of a barometer of where we are from an ethical perspective. And they imply that the application of our personal values or our business codes of conduct are variable and situational. And the doing business expression is one I heard from football coach Belichick and it referred to a situation where the referees on the field weren't calling all of the fouls or they were calling them intensively. And in the case where there was free play on the field, it meant that you could extend your conduct beyond the normal limitation of the rules and that if you restrained your conduct, it was likely that your competitor wasn't going to do the same and that you would find yourself at a competitive disadvantage if you didn't do business as business was being done.
Howard Wiseman:
This is a zero sum binary construction, and it might be. So there's some limited truth to it in the simplistic world of sports. But you have to ask the question, should one's personal values down-regulate on a sliding scale to the situation of business ethics? And you have a construct that you have to deal with where you have your personal values, which represent an accountability to yourself for your own personal code of conduct and then you have societal values which represent accountability to others. And these situations they can be within the interaction of your personal values and your societal values, it can be within your own family, obviously, it occurs radically in business. And when you travel into foreign countries, as I often have, it becomes increasingly complex in terms of the interaction of your personal values on the societal values that you encounter. You're dealing with other people's value structures all the time and we can't control the ethical and value structures of all of our partners. We can choose our friends carefully, we know our families, but it's a lot harder to choose your business partners.
Howard Wiseman:
And this is a scenario where I think I have an illustrative example where we do business in footwear in Asia and when the goods are complete, they're presented to our customers for delivery. And they'll often have an inspection process to ensure that the shoes meet the quality standards of the appearance, the cosmetic, the packaging, all of these things are looked at carefully upon the customer's receipt. And this is not the first inspection that the goods receive, we are intensively inspecting before we deliver as well. So we know that the product is in good shape. Our defect rate in our business is under 1%, well under 1%. So we know that we're doing our job.
Howard Wiseman:
Well, in this instance, we were presented with an inspector who demanded a payoff in order to issue a certificate of inspection. And we knew our goods were perfectly fine. And we were faced with the dilemma of do we go along and get along? Do we do businesses as businesses being done and just pay off the small amount of money to this inspector and carry on and allow this corrupt situation to go on unchecked? Or do you reach out to your customer who you believe you have a trust relationship with and a responsibility of truth to and let them know that they have a corrupting influence within their own enterprise? We chose the latter. We went to this customer, we explained what had happened that we had have been subjected to this shakedown, and the person who was inspecting was removed from the job, and problem solved.
Howard Wiseman:
Well, there was immediate retaliation against us by his friends overseas. Perfectly good shoes were being vandalized in the inspector warehouse, the laces were being removed, packaging materials were being damaged, we had a lot of aggravation. And about three months later the individual who was responsible for inspecting our goods shows up at the door and is now in charge again. And what we learned through our far-flung listening intelligence overseas is that the person who we had reported upon was in fact, part of a corrupt syndicate within this company that extended not only just to his Asian buddies, but all the way into the US corporate organization and that there was money being collected and distributed throughout the company.
Howard Wiseman:
And when you have a partner like that, nothing good is going to happen in the long run. And I dare say they are no longer our customer. And they're quite a big company. And there were days I certainly would've liked to have had some business, but in those circumstances, you have to look back and say, yes. And sometimes it costs us money to do the right thing. We didn't think it would, but it did, and I'm not sorry. But in the end, it's very hard to know what the right thing is to do in your business. There are a lot of people on your own team who are relying on the success of the enterprise for their own growth and success and opportunities. You want to create a growing vibrant company for everyone who's there. And so this is one of the internal pressures. Like, well, what are the limits of our behavior to grow this business and satisfy our own internal needs yet remain true to our own internal standards of conduct?
Howard Wiseman:
Doing business on an international scale, the challenges of ethical conduct are really complicated. There's numerous external codes of law and societal norms and cultural behaviors that you have to reconcile with your own beliefs and your own norms. And there are a lot of traps for the unwary, doing business in Asia in particular. One area in the area of local practices and cultural expectations. When you get to the Chinese new years period, it is customary for people with whom you do business, where you are the customer and you're buying shoes from a shoe factory, it is normative to be given monetary gifts at that time of year. And it's an expression that incorporates an expression of gratitude for the business relationship, it's an expression of friendship for the work that you've done together and the bonds that you've created socially by working together. And if that's all it is, we, as a company, look at that as normal culturally acceptable behavior.
Howard Wiseman:
Where you cross the line is that you may be given a small lacquer jewelry box as a gift at the Chinese new year. And that's very nice, it's not a very intensely valuable good. But if you open up the jewelry box and there's a bar of gold inside, you've got a big problem. And because once you cross that line, the expectation from the partner who's giving you this bribe is that in some way that the gift will have a corrupting influence on the way you do business. And we have this conversation with our teams all the time in terms of what is acceptable and what are the norms of our business. And we also explain why we can't allow gift giving and gift receiving to extend beyond really this symbolic kind of activity.
Howard Wiseman:
In the area of local laws and local enforcements here, there are a lot of challenges in Asia as well. We've been involved in a number of construction projects in Asia over the years, and there is electrical inspectors and plumbing inspectors, and fire inspectors, and engineering inspectors, and all of these items require certifications and inspections. And in almost every instance, there's an expectation that the person who shows up to do the inspection is going to receive some money. And again, this turns on an unhealthy situation and an unhealthy value in business that has unhealthy values. This would be an excuse for shoddy work, we'll do this as cheaply as possible, we'll cut as many corners as possible, and then we'll just pay off the inspector and everything will be fine. That is wrongful behavior under our standards.
Howard Wiseman:
But there's a different element to this as well. There is the differentiation between paying a toll and there's bribery behavior. And the difference there is that if you are paying what is known as a facilitating payment for the purposes of receiving a governmental act that you would otherwise be entitled to receive based on your own behavior, you can lawfully make the facilitating payment. And this is incorporated in the US law, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the idea of a facilitating payment. I've had a great deal of experience with that particular statute in my days as a lawyer. So it is a helpful construction for how we conduct our business overseas. Even though we're technically not subject to this law, we behave as if we are.
Howard Wiseman:
The other element of external value systems that you're you're faced with are your customers. And we've been very fortunate to work with some very famous brand name companies throughout the world. And all of these companies are progressive and work very hard to create positive value systems within their business and they have very strict requirements for us to undertake. This is a typical product that we are working on, we do work with Reebok, they are owned by Adidas. And in order to do business with them, you're signing legal agreements with them that tell you that there will be zero toxic materials in any of the materials that go into the footwear, that the factories in which the goods are made will have very well established sustainability practices, there are enforced rules for labor over time, there are safety standards obviously, environmental standards.
Howard Wiseman:
And Adidas in, particular, I would say is one of the most challenging companies that I've ever encountered to do business with from the point of view of the intensity of their standards. But also more importantly is the structural way in which this company enforces its own internal moral and social codes. The people who are responsible for promulgating and enforcing the business regulations that you sign on to as a partner, they are walled off from the operational and executive portions of the business, they have their own authority. You can't, without going through a lot of very difficult procedures, authorize additional overtime merely because the marketing side of the business needs the shoes, you need to get the shoes finished, we need to work more than 60 hours a week in order to do that, we need a waiver. Business necessity is separated out from conduct and compliance in a company like Adidas.
Howard Wiseman:
And the other thing that Adidas has... Adidas is a company where if you went to them and told them that an inspector was trying to behave in a corrupt way, I assure you that this particular company, you would never see that inspector again, you might never see that inspector's company ever again. So the people who do the auditing, the third parties that are hired to do the testing and the statistical analysis, the inspections, the audits of your books and records, these are the most ethical people that we've encountered in Asia working with them. And the reason I go into such length about this is that opportunities exist for us in the corporate world. And as corporate executives, to promulgate and perpetuate good practices into environments that are naive and have longstanding corrupting practices that are unhealthy for the employees, for the environment, for the societies in which these things occur, it's... Again, at the risk of practicing a form of cultural imperialism, bringing these standards to developing economies and countries, I personally believe that there's a tremendous social good that's attached to teaching these ethical practices in your business.
Howard Wiseman:
One of the things that occur is we work... A shoe is composed of a tremendous amount of components. There may be 40 or 50 different suppliers who are involved in the construction of our product. And each of them is subrogated and is obliged to fulfill the same requirements that we are. So not only are we subjected to the business requirements, but we are in a position of providing management consulting and teaching environment for other companies on how to do business in an ethical way. So it's something that we feel pretty strongly about, we feel good about what we've done and it is an expression of our values to do this kind of teaching process.
Howard Wiseman:
There are a lot of risks out there. One of the areas that we worry about quite significantly is child labor. In these societies, it's quite normal for younger children to work, but they are not allowed to work in our environments. And we go to great lengths to make sure that doesn't happen and our partners go to great lanes to ensure that it doesn't happen as well. One of the things that the auditors will do, they'll check everyone's government identifications that are on file with us and that kind of thing. But they will also conduct private interviews with individuals from our staff, where we are not present. And employees, without any threat of reprisal, will be asked a series of questions from the auditor's on what's actually going on in the factory.
Howard Wiseman:
Safety is another area where I think we're creating a positive value system in the countries where we do business. We have a very safe workplace and I'll just share a slide here. Sorry about that. Yeah, this is a factory that we run in Vietnam near Ho Chi Minh City. And it's orderly, it's clean, it's well lit, there's fire protection everywhere you look, industrial hygiene, industrial safety is something that is taught on a regular basis. So for me as a person who is responsible for this business, I feel quite vehement about doing things the right way and being a power of example across the board.
Howard Wiseman:
But crazy stuff happens. We had a situation where we discovered corruption in our senior management at one of our offices. And I went overseas with my colleague and we proceeded to terminate the people who had essentially taken over the office with a view towards corrupting it. Shortly thereafter, a group of local gangsters showed up and started running around and terrorizing our employees. My colleague was grabbed and locked into a room and not released. The local police were of very little assistance in this circumstance. So here you have, this is the ultimate clash of value systems and leading to this kind of semi violent interaction, unfortunately. And the sad part of this story is this occurred during the government shutdown in the early 2010, the US government had shut down and only skeletal services were available from any of the embassies. And I called the US embassy in Beijing seeking help for my poor colleague who was locked in a conference room. And I got the US embassies voicemail that if you have a problem, please describe it and we will get back to you within 24 hours. It's like, okay, thank you very little.
Howard Wiseman:
So, in the end, you are on your own in these environments. You have to use your judgment, you have to use your common sense. We negotiated, we found a local lawyer who could clean up this mess for us. But what's the value of... There's personal value in doing things the right way. There's a sense of not being in conflict with your own moral code, your own sensibility as you conduct business and there's economic benefits to behaving in an ethical way. I think that we're fortunate that we have moved into a world where those two things have become more coherent. That being good, doing good, and receiving good, seem to be more... A more reciprocal environment has seemed to take place.
Howard Wiseman:
Just maybe one last story or a couple more, when we opened our... We were doing business in Asia with a third party who was representing us in China. And there were people who are quite complacent about the fact that there was corruption amongst this organization we had hired, but we were getting what we needed. The shoes were good, that they were on time, they were the right price, no one was complaining. But what we noticed that over time is that the quality started to decline, the performance started to decline. Our customers started to notice that there is ultimately a price for corruption that gets paid. And so we created our own entity in China to take over the business. An organization that would much more represent our own values and how we did business in China.
Howard Wiseman:
And I think there's a story there that if you want your own value system to be respected and perpetuated, that you have to stand up and do it, and no one's going to do it for you. You have to take a stand and you have to be willing to put in the work to teach and to regulate and to build the culture for the kind of company that you want. The long and the short of it is that when we started to form our own company in China, one of the things that we observed is that the native Chinese, the mainland Chinese people, in the shoe business had worked under the supervision of Taiwanese companies for really their whole footwear career. And there was really a glass ceiling for mainland Chinese shoe managers, that they would only get so high up the scale before they would no longer be able to advance in the company.
Howard Wiseman:
And I'm proud to say that the company that we created had mainland Chinese managers from top to bottom. And the payoff for that has been this respect for equal opportunity that has had a payoff. And the payoff for us is in staff development and the loyalty of people who've received the benefits of open-ended opportunity. And there were some people who had been stunted in their growth so badly that they never recovered from this experience and they could only go so far. There were other people who when you took the lid off, went right to the top. And it was very exciting to see. And some of these people today are among the most valuable people in our company and I'm proud to have them as colleagues.
Howard Wiseman:
Having an international business is a challenge and I think I've talked about going and seeing for yourself a few times. But if you sit back and wait for the branch office to tell you the truth, you can be waiting quite a long time. You will always receive a manicured and filtered version of reality that is tailored to someone else's interests other than yours and the company. So we travel a lot and this does create risks and absence from home for our people. And there are some companies that have a lot of travel and hardship for their employees. And the attitude is that, look we were upfront about what this was when you took the job, you're being paid to do the job, that's what it is.
Howard Wiseman:
I think the family values in our business and my personal values is that wherever possible, we work to minimize the destructive impacts on our staff of what it means to be in really a very difficult business to conduct. And this is Hillel and I would be remiss if I didn't really talk about the nature of having Jewish values involved in what we do. The limited hours of work, respecting the overtime rules, and the amount of time that people can work. There's an element that every human being is entitled to rest, is entitled to their own version of a Shabbat rest within their work week. That it is a biblical requirement that the employer not cheat his customer, not cheat his employees, and so there is this coherence of religious values and personal values and personal behavior in all of this. And a sense of behaving like a decent human being, conducting business in a way that respects the societies that you're in, respects the environment where you do business, that contributes to the sustainability of our planet.
Howard Wiseman:
Our new plant is going to have a massive solar array on it, we recycle water, we are buying equipment that minimizes material waste, we use adhesive in our business that contained no organic chemical solvents, they're all water-based. These are the things that you can hold in a certain amount of pride and know that there is this alignment between your personal values and the way you do business. And I would very much finish on the point that if you do not have alignment between your own values and how you conduct yourself in the world of commerce and business, it's bad for you, it's bad for your company, it's bad for your employees. And in the end, there's no path of happiness for you if you live in this kind of divided conflicted world. So, I'll end with that and I hope I haven't rambled on too long. But I'd be delighted to answer some questions.
Lindsay Biebelberg:
Thank you so much, Howard, for speaking with us. Again, if you have any questions, feel free to put them in the chat, we have a couple already. And I will answer them in the order that they... I mean, I will ask them in the order that they've been sent and Howard will answer them. So, our first question, let me just scroll up a bit. Joel Zismore, I'm so sorry if I mispronounced that name, asked there are legal and ethical standards for US businesses operating outside of the US, what are they and how are they monitored?
Howard Wiseman:
That's a very good question. And some of it depends on the size of your business, if you are a large business doing business in the United States, and you're subjected to the securities laws and you have governmental contracts, doing business with governments. You are not allowed to accept anything of value in return for governmental action that you would otherwise not be entitled to receive. The law started in the '70s in Iran where Bell Helicopter bribed the Shah of Iran and his family to buy Bell Helicopters for the Iranian army. This became a massive scandal, it was tens hundreds of millions of dollars ultimately involved and it led to the promulgation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act which is targeted. And its first order of business, it's about relationships between corporations and governments, and the more recent amendments to the law do involve company to company behavior. The jurisdiction for actions outside the United States is somewhat limited, but there are legal ramifications. In a properly functioning government, bribery and corrupting a foreign government or a foreign society is against the law.
Howard Wiseman:
I see Robin has asked about the effect of COVID on our business. And we do quite a bit of business in Vietnam, which has had a very profound lockdown. And through those governmental actions and their control over their society, have been able to have virtually no deaths, virtually no spread of the disease. They had universal mask wearing until the level of infection was down to almost nothing. And even today, mostly people are wearing masks. Since we are operating businesses where you have literally 1,000 people congregated within a building, obviously, a single case can shut down your entire company. So our sanitary practices are escalated, monitoring and such. Fortunately because of the societal reaction in Vietnam, they have avoided having this widespread presence of the virus everywhere you look. So that's been quite fortunate.
Lindsay Biebelberg:
Mat Wiseman asks, adding to Robin's question. Is there fear that some of the ethics standards you've put into place might be violated or ignored without direct oversight?
Howard Wiseman:
Oh, I would say that's certainly true. And these are developing societies and again, in many instances, you're trying to impose an ethical structure and codes of conduct that have been developed within Western societies and you're imposing them onto societies that have functioned in different ways for a long time. So in the absence of strict auditing and oversight and corporate commitments, partner commitments to the standards and to the enforcement and to the teaching... This all can't just be punitive behavior, there has to be a positive rewarding quality to compliance, or else it's not going to work. So you need both the carrot and the stick to get that done.
Lindsay Biebelberg:
Charlotte Meaghan, asks... Well, first she says, I'm greatly appreciative of your thoughts on the ethics of business and the business related practicality of enacting sound values. How do you maintain the balance during these tremendously challenging times?
Howard Wiseman:
The pressure to accept corruption hasn't gone away. In the end, there are trust relationships that you develop with your customers. There are trust relationships that you create with your suppliers and your other business partners. Communicating what your standards are constantly, consistently, occasionally taking an action, a punitive action is unfortunately needed. As one of my colleagues said to me, "If you kill one mouse, all the other mice run away." And so every now and then, someone has to get... The full force of their behavior has to come down upon them. And what I think has become rapidly recognized that if you want to do business on a global scale, if you're looking for the type of success and stability and economic outcomes that come with doing business on the world stage, you have to function from a world based code of conduct.
Howard Wiseman:
And there are a number of certifying organizations that have sprung up that have created various codes of conduct for aspects of their business. And there's one in the UK, or based in the EU that is pretty much a standard requirement that you're a member. And the name of the organization escapes me right this second. But there are these NGOs that are springing up as certifying agencies to bring the world into a common, healthy way of interacting with each other.
Howard Wiseman:
Elena, in your experience of doing business abroad, what is something you have learned in terms of human truth that you can share with us? I would say that people everywhere want to feel respected. They want to feel that their work is recognized and important. The basic humanity of being treated in a humane and respectful way is universal. And I think we have a culture that insists on respect for our teams where if you're cleaning up the facility or you're a senior manager, we are very clear that everyone that works for us is entitled to absolute respect.
Howard Wiseman:
One of the interesting things in Vietnam is that by law, the workers function from a collective basis. And you can have a traditional hostile and competitive relationship with your labor force or you can work from a point of view of trust, of honesty, of communication, and of partnership. And I would say almost certainly the one truth there is that people will go through a wall for you. Their loyalty and their commitment to you and your company and into their work, there's no comparison between a fear-based situation and a respect-based situation. And we function from a respect-based business.
Howard Wiseman:
Giovanna, which one of your personal Jewish values has been the most important during your career at mercury, which has shown you the way forward in times of trouble? That's a good question. I think the sense of responsibility to carry myself as a person of honor and to respect others. This is really part of the healing of the world. By perpetuating safety and health, and the creation of economic benefit to our labor force. I believe that we're advancing the world, that this is tikkun olam. And we're not going to fix every problem. And it leads me to the comment that we're not responsible for perfecting the world nor can we shy away from the effort to do that. And I think feeling like we have been a part of that is important.
Howard Wiseman:
Having been able to be in Asia over such a long timeframe and see societies change through the influence of global interaction and global values that have come into play in their societies. South Vietnam went from poverty and starvation and pollution and poor health into one of the most advanced societies in the world on the basis of the incorporation of global economic and business values into that society. It didn't solve all the problems but... Eastern China, when I first started to travel there extensively in the early 2,000's people were burning garbage everywhere, the air was filthy and gray and horrible. The air pollution problem that I've seen is much, much better in the last 10 years. The government has become much more proactive in enforcing environmental laws in the local society. And the availability of work and advancement in these societies has been transformative.
Howard Wiseman:
Unfortunately, I think that the presence of poverty makes all of the other advancements socially almost impossible. It's really only after your survival needs are met that you can start to think about what's a fair society? What's a just society? What's a safe society? And I think you start to see that in China now. Then you have governments who are saying, well, now that people have had a taste of what it means to be free of these basic fears, they want more from their government, from their culture, from their society in terms of freedom. Those have become political dilemmas. And we're seeing that play out right now.
Howard Wiseman:
Valerie has asked, you to refer to the management consulting and coaching activities that you engage in, is this a common discussion point among corporate peers? I would say not so much. Because people have a contractual obligation as the end provider of a good to accompany like Adidas, they must ensure through their own methodology that all of their participants in their supply chain are compliant. And I'm not really sure how other people accomplish that. I think most people are developing significantly compliant supply chains. I know from our point of view that functioning as a teaching organization is the primary thing that we have to do there.
Howard Wiseman:
How do you communicate values and how do you resolve the ethical dilemmas? That's as I said, obviously you have rules-based situations, codes of conduct, corporate standards that people are taught and are promulgated, and as I said early in the presentation, I think that your entire company takes the lead from your leadership in terms of how they behave around these things. If they see a leadership group that's responsive to worker complaints, that doesn't tolerate harassment or views of any sort on its grounds, that it is putting its money where its mouth is and making sure that its facilities are safe and clean, I think that communicates your values through action, is the primary way in which you communicate your values. You can write all the pieces of paper you want, but what you do and how you spend your money within your enterprise, those are key parts of that.
Howard Wiseman:
But then, survive the highs and lows. How do you survive having to cut back your staff and did it feel good to hire them back? That's the hardest part of my job. We are a small family business and we have ridden the rollercoaster of world trade and have had years of great success and times where I wasn't sure, where our survival certainly wasn't assured. And having to let people go is terrible, but we do it in the most generous way we can economically when people are terminated.
Howard Wiseman:
It's a sign of respect for the contributions that people have made to the company, that they're given appropriate severances when we have to separate them. And yes, one of the people that I hired back has had such enormous growth in the last two years. I can't even believe what a superb job that he's doing for us and how important he is to our company. And in a sense, he was buried under the old organization that we had, he went somewhat unrecognized and now he's a superstar, so that's great. So for him, it worked out even better.
Howard Wiseman:
Question from Achille Combat, expanding on the African continent. Yes, that's a very... Africa is going to be extremely important. And there is no reason to think that the development curve and the positive evolution socially and economically is not going to happen in Africa. There are advantages relative to trade rules from Africa into the rest of the world in terms of duty structures, tariffs, and the like. So Africa is definitely waiting. I know that the Chinese entrepreneurs and investors have come into Africa in a big way. These global Chinese companies are bringing the values that they learned from doing global trade from people like us. And they're going to bring it to Africa. We ourselves have looked in Morocco as a potential factory base in the next coming years.
Lindsay Biebelberg:
I want to be respectful of everyone's time because it looks like we're nearing the end of this wonderful session. So, Howard, thank you so much for speaking with us tonight. It was really wonderful to hear from you and also just thank you for upholding these really important ethical standards and values in the workplace. I know I'm saying that on behalf of everyone, so thank you so much.
Howard Wiseman:
Thanks. And I'm proud of what we've done and I'm not afraid to say that. And so the extent that it's a little bit patting myself on the back. I'll try not to break my arm.
Lindsay Biebelberg:
Well, thank you again. You do have a lot to be proud of. And thank you to everyone for joining us tonight. Stay safe and Shabbat Shalom.