Like any other large corporation, Cargill is a useful device for bringing bread to the table. It is also, of course, a device for bringing skin to the feet, well-being to where it is useful, fuel to an increasing array of fuel consumers, etc. With 124,000 employees in 59 countries, the company is a truly gargantuan undertaking, committed to success and evolution and power.
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What drives us, what makes us work, what keeps us going strong—and what we intend to do about it. At the basis of our success are some very special people: you, your family, your friends... and everyone else in the world. What does success mean to us? Our financial record says it all. You want to work. You want to work at Cargill. Well, here's a way to begin. Growth can mean one thing in one context, another in another. In one context, growth means joy and expansion and value. In another, growth means cancer. Which growth would you rather have? It's not all about people, in this world. It's also about our four-footed friends. For that matter, it's also about those without feet: plants. Decide for yourself how you want to be served. |
Some Friends and Colleagues In this world of ever-increasing but ever-shifting opportunity, it is impossible for any one company to successfully master the extraordinarily wide range of needs of an entire planetary population. So while Cargill does successfully master the food needs of that population, other companies must be called upon to provide for drink, defensive capacity, propulsion, etc. The Coca-Cola Company, for example, provides a massive flux of diverse drinks to the world's thirstiest. The Dow Chemical Corporation provides some of the components for those drinks, and a great deal more besides. Halliburton, Inc., meanwhile, helps rebuild more than just erstwhile dictatorships in resource-rich regions, so that other companies can focus on what they're best at. As for the American Petroleum Institute, it focusses on helping corporations meet, through conventional means, the propulsion needs of an ever more motile population. And what about international institutions? In an era when government has less and less to say about the proper way to do business, the World Trade Organization fulfills an essential role. The Word, "Cargill" The word "Cargill" comes from the phrase "If cars had gills," part of the original Cargill vision statement written by Lance Outwright, one of the six "Founding Fathers of Cargill." The vision is self explanatory. Nevertheless, a twenty-seven page document, "The Elucidation Of Outwright's Big-Thinking Foresight," lies under glass in the foyer of Cargill's executive offices. In essence, it is an exploration of Outwright's often-imitated "progressive anachronomysticisms," which can best be summed up as an inversion of Outwright's more famous thought experiment, "if fish had wheels." Outwright—who slept as little as forty-five minutes a day—could often be seen in his office speaking into an old dictaphone various extemporizations and other mentalisms that would more often than not find concretization as Cargill business units. "If cars had gills, if fish had wheels, if pheasants could self-baste." Outwright described these insights—his core competency, and by extension and wilful envisioningTM a cornerstone of Cargill's business-modellling processes—as "land mines going off in my brain," often coming to him as he "soldiered across the battlefield of business, the level mindscape of my win-pocked mind." | ||