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The greatest strength of Union Pacific is its franchise, its physical footprint that we've
had for 150 years,
and then we continue to find new ways of leveraging, finding new ways to
to take advantage that franchise by serving our customers
and making them happy which allows us to collect our
freight bills and reinvest the network and
hire more people and it's kind of how it all fits together, but it's a
it's a great business model. I've moved all around the company
that was hugely beneficial to me personally
because I was able to see lots of different aspects
of our company, work with a lot of people, work with different customers,
different suppliers, depending on what the situation was,
so I think that wide variety of experiences really
has benefited me and as a look back on it, I tell young people this all the time
I never, my advice to young people starting out is, don't
over think your career, don't sit here and try to have a road map, or expect that someone
is going to hand you a road map of what your careers is
just go in and do the best job that you can, be willing to be a team player,
be willing to challenge the status quo, listen to others,
help solve problems, help identify problems and then help solve those problems,
be willing to take assignments that nobody else wants. I took a couple assignments
along the way that nobody else seemed to want, and it wasn't a popular thing to do,
but I'm glad I did it because it it offered be new
opportunities and new challenges that as I now look back on it
I think we're very beneficial for me. Be careful thinking you know more than you do,
I think be humble, be open-minded, be willing to learn,
because I will guarantee you, in a large company like ours, there's somebody who
knows
no matter what the subject is, there's somebody who knows more about it then you do
and you just got to accept that and learn as much as you can from them.
I would say that one of the things that,
and my kids were all extremely active all their lives,
I always try to make time for them. I wasn't always able to make the ball game,
but I was not afraid, and I tell people who work with me today,
you know if I had to leave at two o'clock to go to a baseball game,
and I could do it that, and I could do the work, you know, in the morning or after
work, or after the games, or on weekends, or whatever, I would do that and I would
do everything I could to make that ballgame at 2 o'clock as an example.
So I tried to make time and again, my wife did the bulk of it
but I
I did, as I look back on it, I did a fairly good job
of being pretty active, and not an absentee
not an absentee father by any stretch and the kids, it's interesting because I also
tried to expose them,
I didn't push it on, but I did try to expose them to some of the
business issues that I was dealing with. In fact, as they got older, like high school,
I took each of them with me on a business trip
where they could sit there and listen to me interact with shareholders of Union Pacific.
I think I was
I think that kind of thing was beneficial for them as I look at now
what they're doing and
look at now how they think about the business world
think about their own careers. I see sort of a reflection of some
other things that they
were able to experience.