‘What the World Needs’

February 3, 2016

In the days since my election as your Chair in Fort Worth, I have received many good wishes and thoughtful comments from you, the members. I thank you. Many of you were appreciative of my “persistent leadership” theme, saying that persistence is an elusive quality in our instant-gratification world, and that it’s time for us to return to this unique virtue because it’s so important to the success of any business. We’ve all had the experience of hiring someone who we thought had a promising future in our companies, only to have them walk out the door after the first week because they just didn’t have the patience to learn the job, our procedures, or our business. They lacked persistence.

One very special note, which arrived in my mailbox via the U.S. Postal Service, was from AICC’s first president, Jim Kowall. Jim, 89 years old and long retired, still has a youthful passion for what AICC represents and the value it brings to independent converters in our corrugated, folding carton, and rigid box industries. He wrote of his fond memories of the early days of AICC, saying that the association “represents the finest” companies in the industry.

But he also added a thought-provoking postscript, a quote of unknown origin—perhaps Jim himself wrote it. It was titled “What the World Needs,” and I offer it to you in this column for all who are looking for inspiration in the start of the new year.

The world today needs men who believe that this is a good world and who will work to make it a better one; men to whom honesty is not a policy, but their normal state of being; whose consciences respond to right and truth with the steadiness of the needle to the pole; men who have the courage of their convictions and dare to proclaim them, though the heavens totter and the earth yawns; men who prefer honor to wealth, truth to sophistry, kindness to covetousness, modesty to vaingloriousness, service to recognition, humility to grandeur, usefulness to reward; men who know their places and fill them; who have found their business in life and attend to it; who neither lie, shirk, dodge, nor meddle; who have definite aim, go straight for it, master details, and treat failure as steppingstones to success.

It needs men who dare to think for themselves, to drink out of their own well, and to eat their own bread earned by the toil of willing hands and brains; men who, surrounded by barnacles, bores, busybodies, croakers, fanatics, knaves, pests, triflers, and wiseacres, manage to maintain faith in God, in the high destiny of the human race, and an indestructible sense of humor. — From the old AICC archives of founding President Jim Kowall

To my way of thinking, we could sum up Jim’s quote by simply saying, “What the world needs is persistence!”

From all of us at Richmond Corrugated, our best wishes for every success in 2016 and beyond.