Kick Butt. Do What's Right. Go Home.

But the world is not always black and white. It’s washed in shades of gray.
MM  You’re right, you operate in the gray all the time. But you have to decide where the line is, and you have to be really consistent about it. And there are times when it hurts like hell. I’ve taken beatings in terms of the market, the stock price. Half of the time, something happened in the marketplace that we didn’t anticipate. So shame on us. It’s our job to be all over that stuff. Sometimes, however, we made a mistake. But rather than compromise since you can’t deliver, you suck it up, take your pain, and move on. If you don’t do that, you create an unclear sense of how people are supposed to make decisions.

Did you have a mentor?
MM  I’ve had a whole string mentors—why am I so lucky? I’m fundamentally a learning person. Most people want to share and teach. So if they find someone who embraces those lessons, they’re even more generous with what they have to share. For instance, Tina McKenna, my first boss at Pillsbury. Or Rob Hawthorne. I worked for him twice at Pillsbury. He was the person most responsible for transforming me from just a great ‘gut’ manager into a classically trained analytical marketer.

Another mentor was Dale Olseth. When I first joined the Graco board, I realized that I knew how to run a business, but I didn’t know how to be a director. I went to Dale and asked for feedback after every meeting. I asked him to tell me ‘where I might have screwed up, and where I had made a difference.’ He took it a step further, and by the time I got back to my office, his assistant had put breakfast on my calendar once a month for the next year. It was a wonderful generous act of investing in me.

How can a board of directors facilitate an ethical culture?
MM  As a general rule, boards are not as proactively invested in culture as they need to be. Fundamentally, how does a board trust that everyone is making good decisions, that management is not stealing? Yes, there are controls in place, which is necessary. But in a culture where everyone knows what is right and everyone is empowered to do what is right, you are much more likely to hear about problems. Management should very intentionally state what their beliefs and values are—a cultural statement. And once a year, the governance committee should evaluate the company’s performance relative to its cultural goals.