I loved working here at Morningstar to me it's unlike the government you know we have a lot of freedom here I love this job I plan on working here until I retire because it's so different self-management is at a very very high level exactly the way you live when you go home from work we just actually keep that hat on when you come to work at Morningstar [Music] the Morningstar was founded in 1970 by Chris roofer he was at the time a college student UCLA and he leased his first truck a big rig and started
hauling Tomatoes into and out of factories and over a few years of doing that he kind of had some thoughts about how factories could be run and in 1990 he started what was the morning start packing companies very first facility in Los Banos California we've grown since 1990 to three very large facilities those facilities process about 40 percent of California's process tomato crop we are the largest process of tomatoes in the world so who's the boss I think in a traditional organization there's kind of a very rigid interpretation of who the boss is we have
no bosses here at Morningstar I have no boss so well everybody is up basically above when you come in on board at Morningstar you and the colleagues around you are expected to kind of take a timeout to sit down examine yourself your your competencies your your what you have to bring to the table the things you're trying to achieve in your career and in your life and organize your work accordingly and as long as you are achieving your mission and the enterprise is achieving their mission there really aren't a whole lot of boundaries around how
that works and you really what you're doing is you're working with other business units you know I may want to get something done the operations side so what I have to do is not because I'm the so-called head of quality or whatever your job title would supposedly be you need to go and you need to negotiate with another business unit maybe it's the evaporation guys and we need to negotiate but at the end of the day it's what's best for the company but we don't have a structured structured hiring process here at Morningstar as a
group as a family were involved and we make those decisions together you hire the right people you get the right person in the job you don't need to micro there is no micromanaging here and and it's it's really a breath of fresh air to be honest with you politics as a kind of concept is probably the are the absence thereof with the morning stars probably the most interesting thing that most people notice almost immediately you know there's no kind of trying to climb the ladder or vying for resources that are kind of scarce and being
doled out by somebody all of us are free to you know buy what we need to buy to do our job right it's not that there is unlimited funds it's simply that you have the ability to expend the resources you need as long as you get the appropriate you know get people involved who have expertise and are gonna be affected by it you have the ability to spend money and if I need to spend $80,000 on a lab instrument i buy the lab instrument in my other company that doesn't fly not only would I not
get it the the process to get to that point is it's very difficult the things that quash people are overwhelming bureaucracy and red tape and ability to do the things that you know beyond a shadow of a doubt are the things that need to be done I think the people on the floor are probably the best ones to make the decisions you know we see it run we've done the maintenance on it we know more about it than anybody our fundamental to our way of doing things is that the person with the most insight the
most knowledge should be the person making the decision period end of story knowledge is what gets you respect here not a job title we've pushed the fundamentals management out to everyone in the enterprise we've also pushed the fundamentals of creativity and innovation out to everyone the enterprise very explicit about the fact that that the most important thing with an organization is improvement the best thing for me working here at Morningstar is I'm constantly learning constantly growing constantly being exposed to things I wouldn't be exposed to I think I've improved our dice area a lot the
last three years I started with other colleagues helped with full document control program we added a a product hopper to one of our our lines so we increase the speed line speed from 80 cans a minute to about 150 cans of minutes I think most human beings have some internal drive that they want to do good things that create some sort of benefit for people it's very good to feel like you're bringing in to accompany historically the most prosperous happiest human societies on a very macro scale are those societies that are built on the same
fundamental principles and so our thought is that if that works with a whole lot of people can it work with not quite as many people within the confines of you know a company everybody takes a lot of pride in what they do here I think the self-management kind of breeds that it it breeds accountability I feel like Morningstar's mine ate the I believe all of us here take ownership and that's one of things that makes it great when work follows you home but in a good way when it helps you feel good about what you're
doing he'd that kind of growth rubs off in a personal life the what Morningstar has kind of become as a place where people learn what it means to have true individual freedom and personally be responsible for their actions and that's actually very invigorating thing for most people and so over time they start to kind of embed this into their personality into their fundamental character and they kind of carry that away when they leave Morningstar which is a very kind of interesting phenomenon I've grown much more here at Morningstar than I think I could ever have
grown and my other jobs I'm very proud to work here very proud [Music]
