90. Cindy Moehring - Business Integrity Leadership Initiative

May 22, 2023 Robert Wagner, CPA, Advisory Partner

Cindy Moehring

Cindy Moehring is the Founder and Executive Chair of the Business Integrity Leadership Initiative at Walton College. Before joining Walton College, she had 27 years of leadership experience, most recently at Walmart, Inc. where she spent the last 20 years collaborating with the Walmart Board of Directors, four of the five Walmart CEOs, C-suite executives, and other senior leaders to drive global, technology, culture, risk management and governance change across the enterprise.

Moehring spearheaded the transformation of Walmart’s global culture of integrity in the wake of Walmart’s foreign corrupt practices act investigation. She developed and implemented a global ethics program in 27 countries for over 2 million employees.

In this episode, Cindy takes us through a history lesson on how business ethics and integrity became part of the core principles of an organization. She also shares how her career in this unique field started and the impacts it had on her.

Additionally, Moehring discusses how the Walton Business Integrity Leadership Initiative came to be and takes us through how they have incorporated business integrity into Walton’s curriculum.

 

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INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

Cindy Moehring:

At that point, regulators and others started thinking more deeply about what are the expectations of business beyond just profits? And it really started with General Electric. It's one of the main ones. Back in like 1961, they had a big price fixing scandal with Westinghouse and they were fixing the price of electrical equipment and involved 27 other companies. They were indicted by the Department of Justice. 45 individuals were found guilty. It was one of the largest anti-trust cases. That's price fixing in US history.

Robert Wagner:

From Hogan Taylor CPAs and Advisors, I'm Robert Wagner and this is How That Happened: A Business and Innovation Success podcast. Each episode of the show, we sit down with the business and community leaders behind thriving organizations to learn how business and innovation success actually happens.

Our guest today is Cindy Moehring. Cindy is a recognized global leader in the field of business ethics. Currently, she is Founder and Chief Executive Chair of the Business Integrity Leadership Initiative at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. Cindy gained much of her experience during her 20-year career at Walmart, where she held many positions in all aspects of business and operational management. She served Walmart as a Senior Vice President, Global Chief Ethics Officer, US Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer, and a senior member of the Walmart US leadership team. Cindy reported to the Walmart Audit Committee and worked for four different Walmart CEOs during her tenure.

She lives in Bentonville, Arkansas, where her husband Barry, serves as the Benton County judge. They have three children, two of whom are graduates of the US Naval Academy and are serving our country as officers in the Navy, and then one who is attending the University of Missouri. Cindy, welcome to the How That Happened podcast.

Cindy Moehring:

Well, thank you Robert. It's a real pleasure to be here today. Thank you for having me.

Robert Wagner:

It's a great treat for us as well, and you just have such a very interesting background and the work that you do I think is very interesting and very applicable to our listeners. So thanks for joining us. And I want to just get started with just a contextual question for you. You had a very successful career and you're doing, I think something very interesting, which we'll hear more about as we go along here. But you were going to be successful at anything you did. I could clearly tell, but you've chosen business ethics or maybe it chose you, I'm not sure, but why does such a career even exist?

Cindy Moehring:

Yeah, well that's a really great question and I think to answer that more clearly for the audience, it's worth taking a little trip back in history, in time, to really understand why we are where we are today. And really the need for business ethics and careers in that field exist because the expectations for business changed over time.

So if you go back and take a look early on 1920s through basically 1950s corporate deviance, if you will, it really wasn't taken very seriously and it certainly wasn't considered criminal. Pillars of the community and business, well, members of the business community were seen as pillars of the community. And because we were coming out of a World War during that time and you were really seeing the industrial revolution pick up, they were really seen as leaders and pillars of the community and people were sort of afraid to knock them in any way or hold them accountable.

They really wanted to support this new vision of business. But then things started to change a bit in I'd say the sixties in terms of awareness of issues. And at that point, regulators and others started thinking more deeply about what are the expectations of business beyond just profits? And it really started with General Electric. It's one of the main ones. Back in like 1961, they had a big price fixing scandal with Westinghouse and they were fixing the price of electrical equipment and involved 27 other companies. They were indicted by the Department of Justice. 45 individuals were found guilty. It was one of the largest anti-trust cases, that's price fixing in US history.

And then we went on, and there were others that started coming up like the Chiquita Banana foreign bribery scandal in the seventies where you had the chairman of what was then United Brands actually paying the Honduran president over a million dollars for reduction on banana exports and went on from there to the Ford Pinto case, which a lot of people are very familiar with. But Ford Pintos was the type of car, as you may remember, at least you and I would-

Robert Wagner:

We owned one at our house.

Cindy Moehring:

I loved the cars. The engine was in the back and it would cause engine fires with a rear end crash. And then there was the discovery that within the company they'd actually done a cost benefit analysis, which is kind of really hard to say these days that they did. But they decided that paying the damages from those cases would cost less than re-engineering the car for safety reasons. And that just really struck a cord, I think, with the American public on those kinds of issues. And then you also had things happening in the environmental space where you had essentially chemical companies just kind of dumping large amounts of toxic waste into our waterways. Big example was Hooker Chemical later became part of Occidental Petroleum, and they dumped a lot of toxic chemicals into the Love Canal up by Niagara Falls in the forties and fifties.

And later a housing community popped up there in the seventies. And then there was a big variety of serious health scandals and issues that arose. And so the US government started passing laws like the Superfund Law and others to help clean up and require clean waterways and other things. So that all happened and around that same time, then in the seventies, foreign bribery really became a big issue. And that was mentioned in the Chiquita Banana example. So we passed something known as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and actually criminalized bribery. So think about that, between the 1920s and fifties, we are holding these folks up as pillars of the community, and we're not really looking at anything bad they may do to within a few decades it then becomes criminal, that kind of behavior. And then late seventies white color crime became the top priority for the DOJ.

And then the eighties, you may remember we had this, the government officials were being tough on crime stance. And then you fast-forward to the two thousands, more recent history where I think we're all familiar with the Enron scandal, which happened, which is still one of the largest bankruptcies ever in US history. At the time, it was like the world's seventh-largest company. And then all the way to startups like Theranos with Elizabeth Holmes out of Silicon Valley that was supposed to have the medical device that took a prick of your blood and could tell you if you had two hundred different diseases. The only problem was the device didn't work and it was a huge scam. And so again, we've moved from it not even being criminalized or seen as unethical to laws being passed, but yet we still have people that are violating those laws and regulations and ethical standards and norms.

So why did the profession arise? I think it's because, again, there's been a change in expectations, but yet we are still in a world of humans that are fallible and are going to push the limits and don't do things perfectly and don't always follow the regulations and the ethical guidelines. So out of that was born this need, if you will, for ethics and compliance officers to help companies stay on the right side of that line. More common in public companies than private. Certainly in young companies that are just startups, you don't see that as much, but those companies are starting to take a harder look at things like culture and values, which actually help drive that ethical culture.

Robert Wagner:

Yeah, wow. So much good stuff there. And you really got into another area, or just an extension I guess, of this that I was thinking about and I actually asked ChatGPT this question, has something changed? When did this come about? And its answer around when the concept of an officer of ethics came about from the savings and loan crisis, the Exxon Valdez, those things are touchpoints for me because that's when my career was getting going. But to your point-

Cindy Moehring:

Also kind of borne out of that, the ethics industry in particular was really borne out of the defense industry. And the Defense Industry Association was one of the first actually that had codes of conduct, you think about government contracting and those kinds of things. And so that was really where the industry was more specifically kind of draws its roots to other than these large corporate scandals we've talked about and that you just mentioned. But the defense industry is really the first industry that picked up that ball and said we got to have codes of conduct. And then with Enron and WorldCom, then we had Sarbanes-Oxley. And very shortly after that, all companies, at least public companies were expected to pick up that mantle.

Robert Wagner:

And I go back to, again, an experience that I had in not the two distant history, a public company buying one of my clients. So billion-dollar company making an acquisition of less than a hundred million. So kind of sizable, but not huge in the grand scheme of things. But they were very focused first on safety, it's in construction industry. So we had to deal with safety and prove that the client thought safety was very important and behave accordingly before we could even get to talking about a deal. And before they would close the deal, they did a round the world trip to talk to all the sales agents of this company related to Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which you mentioned just a minute ago.It's so important, particularly in the public company world as you mentioned.

I want to talk about something else in this space, and this is a around the intersection of technology and ethics. And I read something that you had written that really interested me. You had talked about six fundamental core principles around this topic that cut across all industries, and we're not going to go into all of them, but number five is that you should create and use technology that is ethical in it's design and execution. And I want to set aside artificial intelligence for now. Everyone's talking about that and the potential ethics issues. But the here and now, what does this mean to applications that we use and think about today in our daily lives?

Cindy Moehring:

So setting AI aside for the moment, I think the most recent example of this and where it really, in hindsight, we saw how important it was, unfortunately not on the front end, was the whole rise of social media and all of the applications of just consumer applications that have arisen around that. And so some of the most recent ones, you think about Instagram and how it has really been tied to the poor mental health of young girls. And part of that has to do with how it serves up the pictures and the content, all the way to TikTok. And just was reading an article yesterday about journalists that had set up some fake TikTok accounts and portrayed themselves as a minor, young individual, just to see what kind of content would start popping up.

Now, yes, there are algorithm rhythms that drive that in the background, so that starts to get into AI. But way before that we had just basic Facebook kind of start there with the beginning of social media and then it is a huge outgrowth from there. But what has happened at Microsoft with all the systems that they have created for us in this world and others, but what you think about when you think about what does it mean to design technology ethically, it really comes down to, and I'll get real practical here, thinking at the front end, not just what is this product that we want to design, but what could be the ethical worst outcomes of this? What could be your ethical nightmares and how do we want to go about avoiding that? And then building, if you will, a cross-functional team. I think back in the day we thought all of this was just the purview of the IT department. Nobody else was really involved.

And that's absolutely the wrong way to look at it. So you really need very practically when you're developing technology, a cross-functional team with all departments represented. Of course you got the IT folks. You've got the business folks that are wanting whatever this technology is that's going to be developed by the company. You've got HR that needs to be involved there and sat at the table, you've got legal, you've got kind of ethics and compliance in small companies. Those are going to be the same. Maybe finance, but those kind of risk management parts of the company as well as the technicians and the business owners all need to be represented in a cross-functional team so that they can actually work through for each separate application what's at risk between what do we want to develop, what's the outcome that we're hoping for, and then what do we need to make sure that we avoid and how might that play out and what we're developing.

So thinking beyond just the buzzwords, although it does have to start with that because that's what grounds you in terms of what are our principles or our values. For example, like Microsoft is defined six that they do for ethical design in it's inclusiveness and fairness and privacy and security and transparency and reliability and accountability. They bucket a couple of those together. But you need the people to sit around the table or around the zoom or whatever it is, and actually think, not just high level about how do we define what those principles mean, but after that getting into each individual application to make sure that it is designed appropriately. So that's the design part, but it doesn't stop with design. Where it carries over into the execution is key because it isn't just a one and done is what I kind of like to say.

You need to think about how do we continually monitor this application if you're using it. So it's been developed by somebody else, you're a company and you've bought it, now you've deployed it, how do you internally continue to monitor it, the outcomes that come out of it. Whether or not we're using it in a fair way and asking for consent and thinking hard about accountability.

So if you are monitoring it and you are auditing it and you're looking at the outcomes and you start to see some oddities, which are going to happen because technology has to be tuned if you will, and adjusted from time to time, then who's accountable for those outcomes that start populating in a way that you don't expect? Was it the developer or is it the company that was supposed to be executing with the technology but wasn't doing effective monitoring and auditing? So you have to think about those things as almost handoff. It isn't just a one and done, it's off the shelf and it's good to use forever. There's an ongoing responsibility and obligation to make sure that technology is used and is executing in the way that it was designed to do.

Robert Wagner:

That's very good, very good stuff. And it brings to my mind that the fact that so many times people find alternate uses or outcomes from technology, like it was designed for this, but hey, that it works over here doing this. So anticipating those things and doing that,

Cindy Moehring:

And that gives into the safety and security, right? And making sure that when you're executing that you've thought about that and designed for it.

Robert Wagner:

So very strong risk analysis is what I'm hearing. So very good.

Cindy Moehring:

So I think, really just before we go on from that, if somebody wanted a case study in that situation think about the Facebook Cambridge Analytica example, what was really missing there. So that's the place where Cambridge Analytica had taken a fair amount of, well from 87 million Facebook users' and their friends' data without their consent and developed profiles that advertisers could then target them specifically. And it all played out in the 2016 election. But there was no consent from the end users. They just harvested the data on the backend. And so that's a really great example of technology that was used, to your point, in execution in a way that was not expected or anticipated on the front end.

Robert Wagner:

So another one of your principles is you must speak up when you see something that doesn't seem quite right. And I think we would all agree with that. It's just the implementation of it and then the context of when it happened. So I guess what I wanted to talk about here is just we want to create an environment where people can feel free to speak up. There's no retribution. All of those things have to be in place, both in policy and in practice.

But just thinking about when something really happens, and to me when this gets really hard is the differences in perspective where someone in maybe middle management or even lower in the company sees something they sense isn't right. But the executive suite has a very different perspective about this activity and sees it very differently. And I'm just wondering, you've worked in the largest US company how does this play out in the real world? We want to encourage people, say something, be very aware and there'll be no retribution. But then there's this completely different perspective if you're a leader and you see these activities kind of differently.

Cindy Moehring:

Yeah, that's a really great question. And I think what it comes down to is this concept that's known as organizational justice, which gets at making sure that concerns are heard, listened to, and evaluated appropriately, and that you kind of get back to the person that raised the issue. Because you're right, part of the issue is they may not have all the information, they may not have the full story, they may only have half the facts. And an organizational justice is a concept which points to the process and the procedure. And it's really based on a lot of research and data that's shown that for many people, for most people actually, it's more important that they be heard than that they necessarily be right. So it is acknowledging that. It's acknowledging that, but then taking the allegations seriously, doing a certain level of investigation so that you can figure out what's going on, and then making sure you get back to the person so that they can understand where maybe they were missing part of the information.

But even a step earlier than that, I will tell you is before it gets into an investigation point of view, there's two sides to this coin. It's helping people figure out how to raise their voice appropriately if they think they have some data and information. And there's a bunch of different strategies around that action-oriented approach, which isn't as many people think, just speaking truth to power. It's helping people figure out a way that's comfortable for them to find their voice. And it may be that they're more comfortable asking a question or two or talking to somebody else to gather more information and facts or asking in a group context with others that they've talked to in advance about what their concern is, raising it with supporters in a context that could get to the nut of the issue so that if there is missing information, that it kind of comes out in an earlier context and they don't just stew on it and chew on it for a long period of time. Or maybe they're more comfortable putting an email together. But there are lots of strategies. So that's one side of the coin.

But the other side of the coin is getting the executives and the upper management very dialed into the fact that active listening is super important because if there is an issue like this that's on somebody's mind and you're having a one-on-one with them just going through your basic business litany, and of course as the leader of that, you're going to be going, "Okay, where are we on this? And what's the status of that and what's going on here?" But if you don't train your leaders to leave the last five minutes of the conversation, you're going to miss what's really on your employee's mind. Usually if there's something like this that's bothering an employee and they want to raise the issue, they're not going to do it unless they feel like it's a safe space and that there's enough room and time in the conversation for them to raise it. And that usually happens the last five minutes. So you have to train your leaders to be active listeners that leave time in their schedules and are dialed in to listen to what really is on their employees' minds.

Robert Wagner:

Yeah. I love the concept of it's important that people just feel like they were heard, like we heard that we value that you brought that forward. And then I think just the coaching there at the end about, I've actually seen people talk about, just in a meeting, make sure you say, we have about five minutes left, and just letting people know there's a few minutes left now's the time if you're going to bring something up, that's really important. So that's good stuff.

Just one more question around this role of being an ethics officer in a company. And I'm just wondering, did you feel the stress of being the moral compass of an organization, and did you feel that as a weight on you? I can't relate to an organization as big as Walmart, but I know in smaller organizations, lots of times this kind of becomes the role as the CFO, they're that person who's kind of holding up the moral compass of the company. And I've actually had people say, "Well, if it's okay with Robert," or in this case, "if it's okay with Cindy, it must be okay." I mean, did you feel that kind of weight in an organization?

Cindy Moehring:

Yeah. I don't think you can answer that question in any other way than to say, yes, to a certain extent. You certainly do. And I'd say that sometimes a CFO may feel that oftentimes a GC, a general counsel may feel that too, especially if they don't break out ethics and compliance as kind of that moral compass, if you will. And in part it's because there really isn't anybody else within the company that is your peer that has that same responsibility as you do to be watching out for these things. And so you feel this weight and responsibility, I'd say, of saying what really needs to be said, even though it can be difficult to say it. And there's lots of studies about that, about just group think and shaking the head, but it only takes one person in the room to really say what they think about the elephant room and then undeniably others will say, yeah, we ought think about that, or I was thinking the same thing.

So there is that pressure to be the one to say that sometimes. And I can remember examples of situations where we had senior leaders who had done something unethical, and were sitting around with a group of business leaders and the most senior business leader in the room asking the group one by one after we'd discussed it, what they thought the outcomes should be. And there were times when you'd see as people were put on the spot, the business leaders trying to thread the needle, compromise, well, maybe this but not that. And then it comes around to the chief ethics officer who is supposed to be the moral kind of compass of the company. And you're faced with that decision of, am I really going to say what I think should happen here and what we would do with this person if they were any other employee of the company and not a senior executive?

And you have to be the one to say that. Now, fortunately, working at Walmart, I will tell you, the very senior leaders there were always very supportive. And so I actually never really felt like I didn't have the room and space to say what I needed to say ever. Because I think they realized it's a difficult, weighty position, and we did have ethical leaders at the top, and they were very open to creating that space so that what needed to be said could be said.

Robert Wagner:

That's good. That's awesome. All right, Cindy, let's just fast-forward to where you are right now in your career. So you're the Chair of the Walton College of Business Integrity Leadership Initiative. It's a long title.

Cindy Moehring:

Yes.

Robert Wagner:

Started in 2019. It's described as an initiative, which makes, is kind of curious to me. So tell us what that is, and if it's wildly successful, what will have been accomplished, I guess?

Cindy Moehring:

Oh, yeah. So it's considered an initiative because there are sort of three legs to that stool. There's the actual kind of classroom education, there's the outreach to the business community, which is the bringing together of the academics and the business community, and then also research in that space, kind of three legs to the stool. And success as we set out to define it, we've already had a lot of success in the three and a half years that we've been at this now, is to address this topic in an integrated, practical, and experiential way so that the students leave the Walton College business at the University of Arkansas better prepared for these challenges, ethical challenges that they're going to face in the business world, big and small.

Literally every day there's things that will happen. And so success, for example, one of the elements of success that we had in the very first year, was on the integration point, was making sure that we moved from about 15 to 20% of the students actually learning about this topic in their classes, to moving it down into some freshman courses and curriculum so that all students were hearing about it.

But then also developing new programs every semester with incredible speakers that we would bring in, like Sharon Watkins from Enron or Erika Chung from Theranos. And encouraging the professors to have their students attend those speaker sessions and then reflect on them where they would write reflections and talk about it in class for class credit or extra credit. And then we also developed digital credentials, like digital certifications that the students, if they reflected and recorded it in an app that we have, could earn a digital certification on it. So very practical and integrated all the way through the curriculum, but also experiential.

And we've had real great success with that, which is at the MBA level. We started a new program, gave groups of students a thousand dollars each and said basically, think of something good to do in this world and go do it. It can be amoral, not immoral, but it can be like a nonprofit or it can be a business venture and go make this world a better place, which is essentially, that's all we tell them to do with a thousand dollars. And they have a group project they have to do, they come back at the end of the semester and they're judged on it. And so in our first year out, we had a rear unicorn. It was a student led company that figured out how to import coffee from Haiti. They had a huge export business in Haiti a while ago. And then with all of the disasters they've had there, it just fell off a cliff.

So they figured out how to ethically import coffee from Haiti. So it generated a whole new industry there of people getting back to work and sold it in here to a number of different coffee shops. They won our challenge that first year out. Within eight months of starting the project, they got found out by a coffee supplier to Walmart, got picked up, and within less than a year, they were on the shelves of Walmart stores selling the product, which is ethically sourced coffee out of Haiti. Which all started with just a class project in the MBA leadership and ethics class where they were told to think of something good to do to make this world a better place and then go do it.

So forced to think about not just bottom line profits, but how do you do that in a way that's actually going to serve the world better? So we're on our third year now of that program. There's other stories, but probably not enough time to share those right now. But those are some real measures of success that I would say where you can actually see that you're having an impact.

Robert Wagner:

Yeah, that is great stuff. Great stuff. All right. Well, Cindy, I have just one more question before we get to our five questions that we ask everyone. And this is just a fun kind of personal question. So you're a lawyer by training, and I intentionally mentioned at the beginning that your husband is a judge there in Benton County, Arkansas. You're the ethics officer at America's largest corporation, but you got these three kids. And I'm just wondering, was there any grace for these three children growing up?

Cindy Moehring:

Oh, yes. Yes. There was definitely some grace. A lot of lessons that they, I think learned along the way that they may not have liked when they were growing up. But as adult children now, it has warmed our hearts when they come back and share with us that they actually understand why we did what we did at the time, and they're really glad that we did. But yes, I mean, I think you have to accept and understand, particularly in those formative years that they are just kids. So they're going to screw up and they're going to mess up. But there's also a pretty weighty responsibility, I think, for parents to take the time out to teach them the lesson behind the bad behavior. And over and over and over again, because it's going to go one ear and out the other for years. But your greatest hope is that when they do become adults, that maybe some of those lessons will stick. And then there's always the karma, wait till you have your own kids.

Robert Wagner:

There you go.

Cindy Moehring:

We'll see.

Robert Wagner:

Well, thank you for answering that. I just couldn't resist. I mean I just thought about that home with the ethics officer and the judge, and I thought, wow, that's quite a dynamic you got going on there. So, all right. Well, Cindy, thanks so much for being with us now. We do have five questions that we ask every guest, so hope you're ready.

Cindy Moehring:

Okay.

Robert Wagner:

All right. So what was the first way you made money?

Cindy Moehring:

Well, I actually think the first way I made money was by, in the fall, picking up black walnuts with my cousins from my grandmother's really large yard.

Robert Wagner:

Nice.

Cindy Moehring:

And just selling them, take them to be holed, and we would sell them. And you would think after a whole Sunday afternoon of picking up all these black walnuts, I always had visions in my mind of how much money it was going to make. And I tell you, they weren't worth a whole lot back in the day. You'd get a little bit. But yeah, that's one of the very early things I remember doing.

Robert Wagner:

That's awesome. We have not had that one, so that's very good. Very good. So if you were not a business ethics expert and leader, what do you think you would be doing?

Cindy Moehring:

Well, there's one thing that I actually picked up during Covid that I just loved and still do. I groom my own dogs now.

Robert Wagner:

Okay.

Cindy Moehring:

Everything from bathing them to clipping them, to trimming them and brushing them and grooming them. And it's just kind of strange. But I actually really enjoy it a lot. And so I'd probably have my own dog grooming business.

Robert Wagner:

That would be a big shift. That's awesome. That's good. So third question, what would you tell your 20-year-old self?

Cindy Moehring:

I think, 20-year-old self, it was about that time... I think I would say be more curious and explore the world, and to also think really hard about what a life worth living really means. I was in a big hurry when I was 20 to get to wherever I was I going to go and sitting where I am today I think being a little more curious, exploring the world and thinking hard about a life worth living and what that means is valuable advice for somebody who's 20.

Robert Wagner:

Very good, very profound. Thank you. So what will the title of your book be?

Cindy Moehring:

Oh my, the word that comes to my mind that kind of spans both personal and professional is Trade-Offs.

Robert Wagner:

Okay.

Cindy Moehring:

And what that can mean in various aspects. Obviously I'm a working mom, raising three kids and doing what I did for a living, you always have to think about the trade-offs and the implications of that. So I think probably that.

Robert Wagner:

Good. I hope you write that. That's very good. I think more needs to be said for that. Cindy, last question for you, what's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?

Cindy Moehring:

I think that kind of goes back to the question you asked about when I was 20, but it comes from, it was about that time, came from my grandmother. And as the story goes, I had come home one summer from college and she was there to visit, and I was very focused on getting done with college so I could get on with the rest of my life. But a professor had just said to me, "You should really think about going on to graduate school, maybe law school." And for the life of me, I just was thinking, no way. I've been in school my whole life, I want to get out.

And I remember telling this story to my dear grandmother, you're talking to somebody who's in their seventies and sharing this story when you're so young, I just remember her taking my hand and patting it and saying, "Honey, it's only three more years." A Coke bottle upside the head kind of moment or call it whatever you want. But what that said to me, and it has stuck with me my whole life, is take the long view. Take the long view, and have perspective and think about more than just what's right in front of you. And Grandma patting my hand and telling me it's only three more years really kind of stuck with me for the rest of my life.

Robert Wagner:

That is so good. So, SO good. It's so good that you even asked your grandmother or talked to your grandmother about that question. That is sweet in and of itself. And then she gave you great advice as well. So Cindy, we thank you so much for being with us. So if people would like to know more about the Business Integrity Leadership Initiative, or they want to reach out to you, how could they do that?

Cindy Moehring:

So we have a website. It's the Business Integrity Leadership Initiative. You type that in and it'll pull it up the U of A, but I'm on LinkedIn. You can connect with me on LinkedIn. They can find me probably that way. It's probably the best way to connect with me quickly, and then we can get into emails and phone numbers and everything else after that. But yeah, I love to connect with people and love being able to pay forward what I spent my career doing on the corporate side, now to the next generation of corporate leaders. It's really come in full circle, so it's great.

Robert Wagner:

Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you for being with us.

Cindy Moehring:

Well, thanks for hosting this great podcast. Appreciate being a guest.

Robert Wagner:

All right. Thanks. That's all for this episode of How That Happened. Thank you for listening. Be sure to visit howthathappened.com for show notes and additional episodes. You can also subscribe to our show on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcast, or Stitcher. Thanks again for listening. This content is for information purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. Copyright 2023 Hogan-Taylor, LLP. All rights reserved. To view the Hogan-Taylor general terms and conditions, visit www.hogantaylor.com.

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