 Bern is the president and chief executive officer for the National Information Solutions Cooperative. NISC provides billing, accounting, and engineering software solutions to more than 800 rural utilities and telephone companies and 14 million hand users in 50 states, American Samoa, Halu, and Canada. The office is in Mandan, North Dakota, Lake St. Louis, Missouri, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Chihuahua, Wisconsin. NISC has more than 1,100 employees throughout their system. Mr. Dosh is a lifelong resident of Bismarck Mandan, holds a bachelor's degree and a master's in management degree from the University of Mary, and resides in Bismarck with his wife, Lynn. Vernon and Lynn have three grown children, Zachary, Brittany, and Jordan, and five beautiful grandchildren. So with no further ado, Mr. Dosh, thank you. Thank you. What a pleasure it is to be here and I look out over this group and what a great group. I mean, I see cooperative employees from around North Dakota. I see directors of rural electrics and rural telephones. I see the North Dakota Farmers Union Statewide Association. And then I see the students of NDSU. And while I have a tremendous amount of respect for the co-op people in this room, many of you, we've had conversations before. I will tell you the majority of my remarks this morning are going to be directed to the young people. Because the whole purpose of this BloomQuist series is to help the students of NDSU understand and perhaps appreciate and consider the cooperative business model. I got to tell you as I went through my formal undergraduate and graduate classes, and I came out of that with a degree in accounting and business. And two days after I graduated from the university, I was hired by Capital Electric in Bismarck, a cooperative. And I remember sitting down with the office manager and he explained to me that, well, this, we're a cooperative. So at the end of the year, our bottom line, we take that profit, that margin, and we allocate it back to our members. We give our profits back to our members. And I'm sitting there going, what? You're kidding me. That's not what I learned in school. That's not the way business works. And so I will tell you, it took me a couple of months to really understand what that cooperative business model was about. And today, I look over my shoulder at 43 years, and I say, how fortunate am I that two days after graduation, I had an opportunity to begin working in this industry. And that's really what my message is going to be about this morning. The question is this. Many of you students, you're thinking about what life is like after NDSU, what job opportunities you might have. Is a co-op in your future or not? And so we have to ask the question, are co-ops still relevant? Are they still relevant? Is that something that you want to bet your career on? Is that a business model that makes sense for you? Now, 80 years ago, when Cass County and Varendry and Dakota Central and a lot of the egg co-ops and the credit unions were getting started, the co-op model made all the sense in the world because it had to be local. The only way that we were going to electrify 75% of the land mass in the United States, which was rural, was to do that with cooperatives. Local people pulling themselves up by the bootstraps saying, we're going to do this. The only way to bring telecommunications to rural America was to say, I guess we're going to have to form co-ops and do this ourselves. The only way to make certain that the farmers were getting a fair price for their crops and their work was to say, well, let's put our heads together and form a co-op to make sure that that happens. And all we have to do is look at the history to know that that has been very effective and very successful. But the question that we hope to answer during our discussion this morning is, what about the future? I look out here and I see a lot of millennials. What do you think about working for a co-op? What do you think about investing your time and talents in a member-owned cooperative rather than a big corporate entity? There's a huge difference and we're going to talk about that. So in the time that I have with you, really just three things that I'd like to touch on. First of all, I'd like to tell you a little bit about NISC. It's kind of a stealth company. You probably haven't heard about it. I'm hoping that there's a few computer science graduates in this class because we're recruiting and business students and accounting students because we're recruiting. So I'll talk a little bit about what NISC is and about our history and then we'll talk about the history of the cooperative business model. I think if we're going to answer the question, is it relevant for the future? We have to understand where we've come from and how we got to this place today and then we're going to touch on the question that I asked earlier. What about millennials? What about you? How do you feel about co-ops? Do your values and priorities, do they match with the cooperative business model? We're going to explore that. So NISC is a 50-year-old technology company. And that's almost a bit of an anomaly. A 50-year-old technology company. I mean, Microsoft and Google and Amazon and Intel, none of those companies have been around 50 years. But NISC as a technology cooperative has been around for 50 years. I see Josh here, head of the North Dakota Association of Rural Electric Cooperatives. Basin Electric is represented here. Those two organizations back in the 60s said, you know what? We've got these rural electrics around the state. We've got these rural telephones. And they're pretty well running their businesses manually. They're doing their accounting manually and engineering manually and their billing manually. And computers were coming on the scene. And the task was this, how do we automate these co-ops? How do we make these rural electrics more efficient? Well, we've got to embrace technology. We've got to embrace the computer technology. But back then, mainframes were large and very expensive. They were a million dollars. Tim Sandin, a megabyte of disk, was a million dollars. How do you do that? How can you deliver technology to these co-ops when things were so expensive and programmers were non-existent? How do you do that? Well, all I know is there was a group of directors that sat around the table in Mandan, North Dakota that probably didn't know a whole lot about technology. But they understood the unmet need of deploying technology to rural America and they believed in the cooperative business structure. And I marvel when I think about these directors, many of them farmers and ranchers, had the wisdom so many years ago to say, we're going to form a co-op to serve co-ops. We're going to collectively put our resources together and we're going to develop software once that can be used by many co-ops around the state. That was the vision. And no one had done it. There was no precedent. There wasn't another organization that they could go to and say, how did you do this? Because these directors that believed in cooperatives were literally inventing a wheel. So, our roots are the rural electrics and rural telephones in North Dakota. That's who began, who believed in this organization, who signed up before the software was ready. It was a vision. It was a dream. It was, we hope we can do this. We're not sure. We've never done it before, but let's give it a try. And I look to the first three co-ops that signed up with this organization. Mr. Dabrowski is here from Vrendry. Vrendry was one of the first sites, Chem Electric. My grandfather was an original incorporator of Chem Electric and Consolidated Telephone. These three organizations came together and said, let's do this. And you know what, 50 years later, these organizations are still a part of NISC and have been with us that entire journey. So, we respect our past and our roots and where we came from. And if I look at the map of where our members were in 1970, you can see there's a consolidation of them kind of in North Dakota. That's where we got started in Mandan, North Dakota. That's where our offices are today. And we started sprinkling out throughout the country. Other co-ops said they were noticing what was happening in North Dakota. And they said, can we sign up? Can we be a part of that? And the organization started to grow. Today in 2017, this is what our footprint looks like. And I get to tell you, as many times as I've shown this slide, I get a thrill up and down my spine when I think about the vision of those directors, the commitment of the verendrys of the world, of the Cass counties of the world that have helped build NISC. And it all started based on the cooperative principle and it all started on that windswept hill in Mandan, North Dakota. Today, 800 systems around the country, American Samoa, Palau, Canada. By the end of this spring, our recruiters are out right now. By the end of this spring, we'll have 1200 employees, computer scientists, data scientists, database administrators, app developers, project managers, usability testing folks. That is the staff of NISC. Offices in Mandan, about 500 employees on that campus, about 460 employees in Missouri, and then campuses in Cedar Rapids and Shawna, Wisconsin. And those campuses are located in those locations, number one, for disaster recovery, in case something happens, that we can fail over to another location. But more importantly, we're located in those areas for recruiting purposes to be close to universities that are developing the talent that we need to keep moving NISC forward. So we develop the software, the infrastructure that these rural electrics and rural telephones need, billing, accounting, engineering, technical services. We take care of about 2,400 servers around the country. We have a cooperative cloud infrastructure that serves our members that has about 800 nodes and coming up on a trillion messages, a trillion records in this cooperative cloud that we are accumulating on behalf of our members. We have a printing and distribution facility where we're printing bills, about 20 million bills a month. The post office comes to our office with two semis to pick up the mail. And in e-commerce where we process credit cards, about $6 billion worth of credit card payments on behalf of rural electrics and rural telephones around the country. And to serve us that we call utility bill pay where we manage the utility bills for companies like JCPenney and Walmart. Every one of the 2,400 Walmart facilities in the United States, the Sam's Clubs, the Super Centers, their headquarters in Bentonville, every one of those utility bills gets processed in Mandan, North Dakota. About $5 billion worth of utility bills. And this organization is built on the cooperative business principle and the software and the intellectual property of NISC is built by the imagination and the innovation and the dedication of what I think are some of the brightest, most dedicated technicians in the business. And they come from campuses like NDSU. We even get a couple from UND. I graduated from UND, I'm sorry. So what I'm saying is, guys, if you want to be a part of a movement and this cooperative industry is a movement, if you want to work in a job where you can do extraordinary things, I consider myself to be so fortunate. I was employee number 32. And to see NISC grow and to be a part of that and to know that we're doing some really important work, for those of you that are trying to figure out your career path, I'm telling you from my perspective, it doesn't get any better than that because not only are you going to be able to do exciting work working for these cooperatives, you're going to be able to live where you want to live. I mean, come on, you don't think of Mandan, North Dakota as a hotbed of technology, right? If you're getting a computer science degree, you probably have designs of going to Silicon Valley or San Jose or Boston or Redmond, Washington, maybe not Mandan, North Dakota. But I wouldn't trade where I live for anything. I love the phrase that Doug Burgum always used during his days at Great Plains. He would say, we're building a Class A company with Class B employees from Class B schools around the rural North Dakota. Some of the smartest kids, the most dedicated kids, that's how we have built NISC. The cooperative business model has a very rich past and I'm not going to take the time to walk through this, kind of the sequence of events, first credit unions in the 1850s, telephone cooperatives in the 1890s, rural electrics in the 1930s. You know, in 1930, 8 out of 10 households did not have electricity. 1930 wasn't that long ago. 8 out of 10 households did not have electricity and they weren't. They weren't going to get electricity under the traditional investor-owned model. The only way that that electric service and telecommunications service could be rolled out to rural America was with that cooperative model. And so cooperatives began springing up, meeting unmet needs, and they became the fabric of our communities. Today, 29,000 cooperatives, 2 million employees, $652 billion in revenue. This is big business. In North Dakota alone, there are over 200 cooperatives. This is big business. We have representation in this room of some of the largest co-ops in the country, based on electric, is on that top list. This is big business. Now, when I went through school and I read the case studies and did the practice sets and was involved in the lectures, and they taught us about for-profit stock companies and limited liability companies and proprietorships, and what was drilled into our heads as a business student was this. You're in business to improve shareholder wealth, period. That's why you're in business, to improve shareholder wealth, to improve shareholder wealth. And then two days after I graduated, as I said, I came out of school and I'm sitting in Del Warren's office at Capital Electric, and he says, no, we're in business to serve. We're in business to improve the quality of life in rural America. We're in business to bridge that technical divide. And I walked out of his office and I thought, what about improving shareholder wealth? And it's a totally different focus. And I gotta tell you, as I travel around the country and talk to other CEOs of technology companies, they go, it can be really rewarding working for a for-profit stock technology company, but it can be really hard because we can't make long-term decisions. Everything is about the next quarterly analyst call that I'm gonna have to be on to explain what our earnings are and what our stock price target is gonna be. And everything we do is governed by that and throttled by that. And they say, I can't make long-term decisions anymore because it's all about the next 90 days. And I listen to that and I say, I'm so grateful I work in an industry and work for a board of directors that is willing to make long-term decisions for the good of the membership. And over the years ago, we ventured into a new software product, rewriting our software, embracing new technologies. Big project, several hundred people working on this project. It cost $300 million. And we went into the board meeting and presented the business plan and we said, this is gonna be tough and it's gonna hurt our financials for a couple years, but it's the right thing to do for our members. I'm so grateful to approve it and the board approved it unanimously and I'm here to tell you that most software companies, even the very biggest, would not have made that decision. They would not have approved something that was gonna negatively affect the bottom line for a couple years, even if it was gonna be the right thing to do for the future. They couldn't survive those two years. I'm so grateful for an organization that is more focused on the customer than it is some invisible shareholder. So we have a problem as NISC. Most computer science graduates, most business accounting graduates, they have dreams of working for a big company and making a ton of money and maybe living on the coast or whatever. And how does NISC go to campuses like NDSU and recruit the best and brightest to come to work, to stay working in our state and to use their talents and skills and abilities to continue building NISC? And oh, by the way, we're a co-op so you're probably not gonna see stock options. How do we convince you to stay here? We do by leading with culture. We do by saying the cooperative business model is a business model that you can believe in and that you can trust. And so we wrote a book and called it Why Are Differently? It's a different kind of technology company. It's a technology company that's a co-op and so we talk to our employees about that and we use this when we recruit and when we're at the job fairs and we say we want you to read this because it's a different way to think about your career. Plato said necessity is the mother of invention. And the cool thing is in this cooperative business model most often cooperatives are founded and established because of an unmet need. Credit unions were founded to allow rural people to have sources, access to sources of funding. Farm cooperatives were put in place to protect the farmer. Rural electrics were put in place to meet that unmet need of bringing power to rural America and telephone cooperatives. And that's the cause. It's not just to return shareholder wealth. It's to improve the quality of life. You've seen the numbers. These co-ops, whether you're a credit union or a farm co-op or a rural electric or a rural telephone, it's a tough business because the economy, the economics of making this work are difficult. You've seen the numbers. When you talk about miles of line for consumers that's the way a lot of electric companies are measured. Municipalities have 48 customers per mile of line. Investor-owns have 34. Rural electrics have 7.4. And if you're in Slope County in North Dakota you have .7 customers per mile. It's hard. It's expensive to get those services to rural America. The typical return shareholder or increased shareholder wealth doesn't work very well. When you have to string miles and miles of line to get to a single customer. But the cooperative business model, the cooperative business model works in these situations. And it isn't just electricity or telecommunications or farm cooperatives. I'm always fascinated to see that cooperatives work in healthcare, in the citrus industry, in farm co-ops, dairy co-ops, financing. Scott Handy is in here. I'm so glad to see Scott Handy again. Do you understand where to Scott? You know you were my mentor before you cashed it in and retired. I appreciate you, Scott Handy. But Scott was on the board of CFC, a cooperative to finance cooperatives. ACE Hardware. We have an ACE Hardware not too far from my home. We all sell out of Lowe's and Menards. I love going to ACE Hardware. I feel like I belong at ACE Hardware. This is a great saying from Simon and you've probably read a couple of his books, Leaders Eat Last. He says, people don't buy what you sell, but they buy why you sell it. Think about that. They don't buy what you sell. They buy why you sell it. Why are you in business? To fill an investor's pockets or to fill an unmet need and to serve the members. I tell you what, it feels really good when you're an employee of a co-op and you know that you're a part of meeting an unmet need in your community. Culture really matters and culture in the cooperative business environment is really important. Really important. It's not about fluff. Sometimes you think culture, well that's something that HR does. But culture is a mindset because you say we are in business to serve our members and that feels really good. Keep calm and do the right thing. NISC has a bunch of policies just like most organizations and just about every policy I can go back and say, I remember when that policy was put in place and generally it was because of an abuse someplace and now we have to penalize all the employees. And for about 20 years at NISC we've been saying the policies are important but just do the right thing. You work for an organization that will honor your individuality and will honor your judgment. Do the right thing. Take care of each other. Take care of our members. Do what it takes to take care of them. And when you do that, when you're doing the right thing you're never going to get in trouble. It may not be, turn out right all the time but you're never going to get in trouble. And in that cooperative environment where you try to instill that in your employees that we're here to serve that we want you to use your common sense and do the right thing, it's powerful. I hope that if you go into the campus and anyone of NISC's campus and you would tap one of our employees on the shoulder and say, what's the most important thing about working here? What's the mantra of working here? I hope they would say, do the right thing. Do the right thing always. I tell you, that's a philosophy in a culture that the young people coming into our organization embrace because they've seen so much bad behavior in the corporate world that they just want to work for a place that they can believe in. I happen to like Wells Fargo. I think they're a pretty good bank. I think they've had a little tough time in the last couple months. Has something to do with culture. They are a hard charging organization. Their CEO, probably John Stump, probably one of the best banking CEOs in the country. Their retail, head of retail was viewed as one of the best female bankers in the country. Hard driving, returning shareholder wealth, returning shareholder wealth. And the employees felt this incredible pressure to meet the numbers, make the numbers. And you know the story. You know what happened. Some of them decided to create fictitious accounts. They were under such pressure that they felt this is what they had to do. And those couple million dollars of fictitious accounts generated about $400,000 in revenue. $400,000 in revenue. That's a lot of money for any business. But Wells Fargo is a $1.9 trillion company. Wells Fargo's last quarter was about $22 billion. You know what $400,000 is to $23 billion or $22 billion? It's .00017. I mean, it's a rounding error. How important is culture? What if the employees of Wells Fargo, what if that notion of doing the right thing was drilled into their heads and they were ready to try to open up a fictitious account and it was like do the right thing? I can't do that. Doesn't that make all the difference? Isn't culture powerful when it's used appropriately? 5,300 employees lost their jobs at Wells Fargo. The CEO lost his job. The head of retail banking lost their job. They've clawed back one point, whatever, $150 million in bonuses for .00017 of their revenue. Come on. Culture is important. I used to believe that it was just soft and fluffy and something that HR took care of but I'm absolutely here to tell you that the appropriate culture will engage the employees and will show up on the bottom line. And you talk about customer engagement. I think the silver bullet of NISC is the fact that our members, the Cass counties, the Verendrys, the Dakota Central, the Cirrus River Telephones are engaged. I left a meeting yesterday in Mandan. 70 employees from rural electrics and rural telephones around the country gathered together on their own time at their own expense to help NISC design the next level of software. I mean that engagement is magic. When you match up the technicians of NISC with the practical boots on the ground knowledge of our customers, our members, it allows us to do great work. And when that is missing, technology fails. A couple of years ago, Google, right? Deep pockets, incredible talents. Google said we're going to do a project in an app called Power Meter. And it's going to show the end consumer how many kilowatts they use by the hour or by the day or whatever the case. And they did this big contest where all these app developers working on this project around the country and they were going to develop and deploy this app. But they forgot one thing. They're a great technology company but they forgot to engage their customers. At the same time, oh, by the way, Google Power Meter was pulled in decommission. It no longer exists. At the same time, NISC is gathering their members together and we're designing a thing called Smart Hub that today is used in millions of accounts around the country because it was developed by the users using that cooperative business model. The question is this. Can co-ops compete? Can Cass County, can Dakota Central, can the credit unions, can the farm cooperatives compete with big business? I'm here to tell you that the answer is yes. Today, some of the largest co-ops in the country are using software from SAP and Oracle. In the last five years, a good share of NISC's growth, almost 50% of our growth, has come from taking these cooperatives, these electric cooperatives, off of SAP platforms, off of Oracle platforms and moving them to NISC software. Come on, that's crazy. SAP has 120,000 employees. Oracle has 60,000 employees. NISC barely has 1,000 employees. How do you compete? You compete by staying focused on the customer, by having some of the best and brightest employees. And yes, even at those large international levels, modestly sized, dedicated cooperatives can compete. Succession plan is one of the strengths of cooperatives, right? I mean, use Cass County, right? I mean, you go from Scott Handy to Marshall, major change in leadership, and Cass County doesn't miss a beat. Cooperative business model allows us to continue serving our members even during major transitions like that. The cooperative business model means that you're going to make some different decisions, decisions that may be frowned on by others in the industry. In our business, no one writes their own software. SAP, Oracle, a lot of the big competitors design their software products, and then they take those specifications and ship them offshore to India or China or Indonesia to have the software written at about a third of the price. Why would you want to go into computer science? When corporate America is shoving all those jobs offshore, and I say, come to work for NISC because we will not ship those jobs offshore. Our cooperative business model says we will hire locally, we will develop these people, we will grow our own, and we do not send a single line of code offshore. The software is designed, developed, installed, supported by NISC employees. Now, that's swimming upstream. Technology companies aren't supposed to be able to be successful doing that. But I'm here to tell you that it works very well. One of the best pieces of advice that I received in my career was from an old director from South Dakota. And at the time, we were buying large million-dollar mainframes and we'd go marching into the boardroom and say, time to upgrade our mainframe again. It's going to be a million dollars and they'd roll their eyes going, where are we going to get a million dollars? And we'd be making the proposal and that old director would stop me and say, if this were your co-op, what would you do? Would you buy this mainframe? And this became the litmus test for all the business decisions we make at NISC. When a vice president comes in and they want to start a new project or build a new building or hire another group of employees, the question to them is, if this were your co-op, would you do that? If you own this. Because that's one of the hard parts of working for a co-op, because you don't own it. This isn't Verne's software company. It isn't Marshall's utility. We're stewards of these organizations. It's our responsibility during our watch to protect the assets and to protect the members. What about the millennials? What do you think about working for a co-op? Does that make any sense to you? At NISC in Mandan, the average age is 34. So there's a couple of old guys like me that are ruining that curve. But I'll tell you what, I step out of my office, 10 steps, and I'm in the middle of a service center that is full of 20-something and 30-something employees, and they're working hard and they're focused on taking care of the members, and I love working in that environment. Millennials have gotten a lot of bad press. Front page of time, magazine, cover of time. Millennials are lazy, unmotivated. They live in their parents' basement. But I tell you what, maybe there's... I'm sure there's some of that going on, but that's not the millennials that I work with every day. They inspire me. They are dedicated. They are focused. They're asking why they want to make a difference. They want to work for a purpose greater than themselves. And that is electrifying to work in that environment. This is what a lot of the millennials feel, and I love this quote from Steve Jobs. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do the great work is to love what you do. If I would give any one of you that are at NDSU and getting ready to start your careers a bit of advice, I would say be very careful where you go to work. Make sure that your employer is going to allow you to do great work, work that you're proud of. Make sure that you get to a place where you say, I love my work. I love my work. Now, not every day is good, not every day is fun, but when I look over my shoulder, I love my work. Don't you dare invest your life and your time and talents in anything less than that. It was about 1986 where I first heard about this concept of servant leadership, and it was like, that's lame. Servant leadership sounds weak. I thought leaders are supposed to be decisive and courageous, and servant leadership is like, what? Milk toast. But I've come to understand in my career that when I sit in a room, for example with our vice presidents, I will tell you I'm not the smartest person in the room, and there are some bright people sitting around that table, and if I don't learn to serve those people and to create an environment where they come and they stay and they're engaged, well then our organization just can't be successful. At NISC we have a saying that says, if leadership, if serving is below you, if you think you're too good as a leader to serve your employees, well then I don't think you should be a leader here at NISC. Not going to work. If you don't come with a mindset of serving your employees and serving our members every day, well then you probably don't want to be a leader here at NISC. There's some great examples of cooperatives. Have you ever been in an REI? We don't have one in North Dakota. I love REI. It's a cooperative. Bikes, canoes, backpacks, hiking boots, anything outdoors is REI. You know what, those are retail employees that work for REI and they probably aren't going to get rich working for REI but they love their jobs and they're not selling boots and poles and things like that. They are selling a way of life and they're passionate about it. It's catchy. Two years ago, Black Friday, the biggest retail day of the year, REI said we're going to shut our stores on that day. We're going to say to our employees and our customers, go out and enjoy the outdoors. Opt out was the phrase they used. Now conventional, traditional business said REI must be out of their minds. I mean that makes as much sense as not outsourcing your coding if you're a technology company. But it's the right thing to do and you know what? That was brilliant because they were doing the right thing. They were encouraging a new lifestyle and a lifestyle change for many people and I will tell you if you went into the REI, the Saturday after Black Friday, it was wall to wall and they had a record quarter and did they do the right thing and did they benefit financially from doing the right thing? Did their members benefit? Absolutely. In our community, and I know that's happening in Fargo also, we've got a traditional grocery stores in Sam's Club Walmart Supercenter and all the grocery stores you could want but you know what's going on right now? They started a food co-op. A food co-op. I went to the first annual meeting and I'm looking around and I'm the oldest guy in the place. The young people are saying, I want to buy locally. I want to own my grocery store. I want to know where my food is coming from and in order to do that, I guess we're going to have to form our own grocery store. Is the cooperative business model still relevant today? I would submit to you that in that aspect, it's more relevant than it was when I was going to school. The electric co-ops have done a great job bringing electricity. Telephone co-ops in North Dakota, for example, highest per capita deployment of fiber, most connected state. Thank you telephone cooperatives. We're seeing situations now all around the country where areas about 35% of the land mass where telephone co-ops don't serve, but they're served by big investor-owned telecom companies that are saying we're not going to bring broadband to rural America. It's too expensive. It's not a good business proposition for us. And you know who's doing it? All around the country. Rural electrics. Partnerships with rural telephones. They're saying, look, we've got to get this done. We've got to bring broadband to rural America. Necessity is the mother of invention. So what about cooperatives and millennials? I can't help but see some things, some priorities for millennials that align themselves so well with cooperatives. Let's look at some of these trends. Eating locally, thinking globally, our food co-op. That's a millennial mantra, but isn't that what co-ops have done for a long time? Fair trade. I mean, I have a sense of conscience, right? The millennials are saying this. I want to make sure that the cup of coffee that I'm drinking, that that farmer was paid a fair price for those beans. And if that means that I need to pay a little bit more, I'm gonna, because it's the right thing to do. And that's what the Farmers' Union has been saying. And that's what farm co-ops have been saying. There's a sense of corporate responsibility. I think these millennials want to be proud of who they work for. This isn't just about a paycheck. This is about being proud of who you work for and saying the corporation that I work for has a sense of corporate responsibility of giving back to the community, of taking care of its employees, of, yes, being concerned about the bottom line, but first and foremost, being concerned about doing the right thing. What about sustainable development? Look at what Basin Electric is doing with wind. Look at what Cass County is doing with solar in their community solar project. Who's leading this idea of sustainables and renewables? In many cases, in many parts of the country, it's the cooperatives because it's the right thing to do. There's this great book out right now called The Membership Economy. It's written by a lady who has spent her entire career in Silicon Valley, the bastion of capitalism, of startups of Steve Jobs starting Apple in his garage and becoming fabulously wealthy, of Mark Zuckerberg. And you know what they're saying in Silicon Valley? They're saying, think about this. What if our customer wasn't just a customer, but what if they're a member? Think Netflix, think Sam's Club, think Amazon Prime, think AARP, think Costco, where you become a member. That's what we've been doing as co-ops for 80 years. We don't have customers. We have members. They own us. They're a part of our organization. And the people in Silicon Valley are saying, I've got this great idea. I think that we should engage our customers, call them members, give them a piece of the action. And they think it's a revolutionary concept. And we're saying, yeah, it works quite well. Thank you. And you know what? This resonates with the millennials. What about the sharing economy? Isn't that what co-ops are all about? Saying, we can't do this on our own. We can't electrify rural America or bring telecommunications or finance or ensure fair crop prices. We can't do this alone. We have to bind together. We have to share our resources. And now you have Uber and Airbnb and Amazon Web Services and VRBO and NISC has the cooperative cloud where we say, does it make sense that all of you have your own servers around the country? Or should we cooperate and bring that together and do it together? And that's what co-ops are. And that's what makes me so proud to work for a co-op. And it isn't a new idea. Silicon Valley may think it's a brand new idea. Millennials are looking at a shared economy and said it makes sense. I love Uber. Last year I spent $2,500 in cab fees as I traveled. This year I'm spending $250. All the rest is Uber. Do I believe in the shared economy? Absolutely. Is that at the heart of what cooperatives do? Absolutely. This is about getting that message out. As co-ops we're pretty modest and we kind of kick the ground and we look down and we go, we've been working pretty hard and I think we're doing some good. But this is an incredible movement and as you're thinking about your careers, about who you're going to hit your wagon to, you think about this cooperative business model. You think about working for a place that you believe in and it does good. And for us it's about winning the hearts and minds of our employees and the members we serve and to answer the question, is this model sustainable? I think this is the key. The electric industry is a very complicated industry. Should I be doing solar? Should I be doing, you know, a smart home? I need someone to talk to. I need someone I can trust that can get me through all of the nonsense and the carnival barkers at Home Depot trying to sell me a solar panel. I want to come in and talk to someone I trust. Financial markets are really complicated. I want to talk to someone I can trust. There's so many options in entertainment. I just want to go into my telephone co-op and be able to talk to them about what makes sense. If cooperatives are to be relevant in the markets we serve, we must become the trusted partner. The trusted partner that our members can count on us to do the right thing. I'm back to the original question. Are we relevant? Do you want to invest your careers in a cooperative? Now, I'm biased because I've done this for a long time, but I am so grateful to have the opportunity to invest what skills and abilities I have in a movement that at this stage in my career I look over my shoulder and I go, I'm proud. I'm proud to work for NISC and I'm proud to be a part of this cooperative movement. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Are there any questions? I'm curious about servant leadership. Could you talk a little bit and give an example or two within your co-op, specifically what that means to you and how you demonstrate it to your employees? You know, it's a great question and I would say it's in very little subtle ways that, again, maybe are contrary to corporate America. Servant leadership means that you're always going to be an advocate for your employees, that you're going to protect your employees, that you're passionate with your employees, that you're going to understand that sometimes they say, you know, things at work and at home you need to keep those separate, but as we go through this circle of life and you're single and you have kids and the kids grow up and then they go off to college and sometimes we run into bumps, right, in our personal lives and for that leader to be so in tune with their employees that they understand what they're going through and they're going to cut them a little slack during that time. Servant leader means when you have an employee event that truly the employees eat first and the staff eats last, the staff serves the employees, the meal. Servant leadership means no assigned parking closest to the door for the CEO or the vice presidents. Servant leadership means the executives are parking in the far end of the parking lot and making those spaces available for the employees. I mean it's little things, it's subtle things and you may think that it's a little foolish or corny but it makes a difference and it makes a statement to the employees that they are unique and they are valued and we see that and recognize that and honor that.