THESE VITAL SPEECHES

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52 CICERO SPEECHWRITING AWARDS train wheels. He smiles at the dancing straphangers. He closes his eyes by the refrain, “Sail on Silver Girl.” Ratta-tat-tat. “Sail on By.” In the tunnel under the Harlem River, the baby imagines the violins. Da Da Da Da! He falls asleep. Ridiculous! What parents sing lullabies on the subway? Poor ones with big dreams. Dad gets haircuts once a year. His only shoes are the combat boots that took him through Vietnam. Mom sews her own coats, with buttons all over the place, and saves for a month to buy the Dad four White Castle burgers. With no money for babysitters, they take the baby everywhere. And they sing to him. The boy gets frightened by heroin addicts in the neighborhood, always swaying, never falling. DaDa Da DaDa. He cries when he hears the pop-pop of firecrackers down the street. The parents know they aren’t firecrackers. {Act out gun.] Sail on By They sing to him through at least five jobs and three community colleges. The boy draws space ships on chalkboards as Pappa takes organic chemistry tests. DaDa Da DaDa. He spins on office chairs as Mom punches little holes in program cards for giant office computers. He watches Mom run a supermarket cash register and Dad translate Spanish for doctors. Da Da Da Da! No one approves. Friends, neighbors, professors, bosses, even strangers on the street walking little dogs. [Act out shaking finger.] ”Ridiculous. Ridiculous.” Here’s where ridiculous can be brave. With a silly song, you can laugh off the scary days. Like when the landlord once cut the heat and flooded the apartment. DaDa Da DaDa. Or when Dad had to sell textbooks for food. Sail on By! With a silly song, the ridiculous can beat the impossible. When a community college tries to close night school for Mom, Dad and hundreds of other students, they protest and put the boy on stage during a demonstration. The toddler screams [Raise fist] “Sail on Silver Girl!” That college maintains night courses to this day. Ridiculous. Ridiculous. Silly things can be brave. Ivan and Milagros Fernandez sing Simon & Garfunkel to that boy for over five years on the subway. And that train ride leads to others. [Act out door] Madison Square Garden, they graduate. [Act out door] Union Street and 4th Avenue, they buy a house.. [Act out door]. Cranbury, New Jersey, they buy a farm. “See how they shine!” Your dreams may not belong on other people’s subway maps. They may seem ridiculous. But which is more ridiculous, dreaming or doing nothing? Here is the sound of doing nothing. [Hold hand to one ear, and then the other] And here is the sound of something ridiculous. Please sing with me. “Sail on Silver Girl. Sail on By!” Anything you do, anything you dream, will always be more beautiful than the silence of doing nothing. This is your life. This is your train ride. What will you sing on it? I hope it’s ridiculous. {Act out closing door] Thank you ladies and gentlemen. WINNER: STATE OF THE INSTITUTION SPEECH “Purpose and Northwestern Mutual” By Mark Lucius for John Schlifske, Chairman & CEO, Northwestern Mutual Delivered at Annual Meeting of Network Representatives, Milwaukee, Wis., July 20, 2015 Good morning, everyone. Thanks for being here. Wow! Welcome to Milwaukee, and welcome to the 2015 Annual Meeting. It is so great to see all of you here. For my wife, Kim, and me, this is one of the highlights of our summer. We look forward to the chance to reconnect with so many of you at this meeting. I think that’s one of the best parts about this meeting—the way we connect with one another. And there are so many ways to connect. The race yesterday morning. The garden party last night. The company show on Tuesday. And all the meetings in between. And for me, I also get in a little golf as a way to reconnect with some of you. This year was no different. In fact, I was playing golf with your FRA president, Ted Sangalis. I am a competitive person, and we were playing for a little money on the side. Our match was tied going into the last hole. I had the first shot, so I hit my drive. For me, pretty good, about 240, 250 yards down the middle of the fairway. Not bad. Ted gets up, and he hooks his ball across the fairway way into the left trees and tall grass. So at this point I’m thinking I’m in pretty good shape, but being the sportsman I am, I follow Ted into the woods to help him look for the ball. Well, we were there for about two or three minutes and weren’t having any success, so Ted said, “John, I don’t know if we’re going to find it. Go back, hit your ball. When you’re done, if I haven’t found it, I’ll declare my ball lost and concede the match.” So I go back out to the fairway and hit my shot. It’s a workmanlike shot. Lands short of the green, kind of dribbles on. I’m 40 or 50 feet away and just as I’m getting ready to move down the course, I hear Ted yell from the woods, “I found it.” A couple seconds later, I VSOTD.COM
see this incredible shot fly through a gap in the woods, land on the green, bounce once or twice, and roll up an inch or two away from the cup. So now I have a moral dilemma. Do I pull Ted’s ball out of my pocket, and tell him he hit the wrong one? Or do I give him the point and concede the match? What would you do in that situation? I’m kidding. It wasn’t in my pocket. I kicked it in the water when no one was looking. No. I tell that story simply to point to something, and that’s the competitiveness of our field force. It’s something I admire about you. You are so competitive. You compete with each other for awards, honors and ribbons. You compete with yourselves for your personal goals every year. And you certainly compete with the home office in the Roots and Wings Run, in golf, in whatever. But underlying that competitiveness is our sense of reliance on each other. It’s a friendly competition. There’s a huge amount of respect in it. And this underlying respect, loyalty and integrity we have with each other has been part of our company for years. If you consider the very first annual meeting of your association, in 1877, and you look at the meeting notes from that meeting, you’ll see they talked about the “inseparable community of interest” that exists between the home office and field. That got me thinking that there must be something about the home office and field together that creates this “inseparable community of interest.” And I believe it springs from our common purpose. This year, as I’ve been going around meeting with you, I’ve asked many of you, why do you come to the Annual Meeting each year? What is it about this meeting that brings you and your family to Milwaukee year after year, decade after decade? The most frequent answer you share with me is that it helps you reconnect to why you’re in the business—and why you work with Northwestern Mutual. It creates and defines the purpose in your working lives. That’s what I want to talk about today, this nobility of purpose that that helps us do great things together. I believe we can sum up our purpose in three concepts. One is our identity, who we are. The second is where we’re going as a company, our vision for our future. Lastly, it’s our culture; what separates us from every other company in our industry. When we talk about our identity, we have to start with mutuality. For us, mutuality isn’t simply a form of ownership. It defines who we are. It permeates every decision we make. It’s impossible to attend a meeting in the Home Office without hearing somebody ask the question, what’s in the best interest of our policyowners? Now, mutuality takes different forms in how we run our business. But one we don’t we get enough credit for is the way we treat policyowners. It’s the fact that we give equitable treatment to all policyowners—whether they bought policies 30, 40, or 50 years ago. Or whether they’re part of an unborn generation that will someday become policyowners. Plain and simple, we treat all policyowners the same. Now, that’s not true for a lot of companies. They “wall off” old business. They create closed blocks of business to move aside old policyowners so they can treat new policyowners better. I was reminded of that recently in a letter I got from a major policyowner. This person has been a policyowner of Northwestern Mutual going on 50 years, with cash value well into the six figures. He saw an article in a financial publication. The article quoted someone many of you know, a man named Peter Katt. Now, Peter is perhaps the leading fee-based insurance adviser in the industry. He can’t sell our products, of course, but he has a high regard for Northwestern Mutual. In this particular article, Peter was talking about how Northwestern Mutual treats all policyowners equitably. So this policyowner wrote me a letter, and I want to read it for you right now. He writes, “Dear Mr. Schlifske: Equitable treatment is important to me. Many years ago, I surrendered a 53 whole life policy from another major mutual.” (Anyone want to guess where that company is headquartered?) “I discovered that that company was providing a higher dividend to new policies than older policies. I concluded that that company was serving its best interests, not mine. I thank you and Northwestern Mutual for your longterm commitment to treating everyone the same.” This is what I mean about mutuality. For us, it’s like the golden rule. We treat our policyowners the way we would like to be treated ourselves. Another aspect of our identity is our financial strength. We are the strongest company in the industry. Now, I know I talk about this all the time, and some of you are probably saying “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it all before.” But we cannot forget what that means. Standing here on this stage, in July 2015, I can assure you that Northwestern Mutual has never been stronger. You can look at our assets, our investment portfolio, our reserves, our capital ratios, our business model—everything comes together to make Northwestern Mutual the strongest company in the industry. And I made that point recently to Moody’s Investors Services, one of the major credit rating agencies we deal with. Every few years, we to go to New York to meet with the entire Moody’s rating committee, and this was one of those years. We were in the midst of our annual review, and in that meeting I made the point that our goal as a company is to be the strongest company in the industry, bar none. At a break, one of the senior leaders at Moody’s took me aside and said, “That’s quite a bold statement, John. I’ve never heard another CEO say something like that.” Of course, I pointed out that is because we are the strongest company, and no other CEO can say something like that. But I also pointed out that we are not strong simply for the sake of being strong; we’re strong because our financial strength helps us make an unwavering commitment to our promises. CICERO 2016
Page 1 and 2: VITAL SPEECHES of the day 2016 EDIT
Page 3 and 4: 3 GRAND AWARD WINNER “The Downsid
Page 5 and 6: *** In retrospect, I should have le
Page 7 and 8: Think about being in a movie surrou
Page 9 and 10: Austin Texas with my wife Jean, my
Page 11 and 12: motivations and expectations when i
Page 13 and 14: That commitment we make every day c
Page 15 and 16: We all assume that Oscar said it.
Page 17 and 18: From old man Aristotle. Though he b
Page 19 and 20: with soaring authority when things
Page 21 and 22: indicate how and where to steer the
Page 23 and 24: That passion reminds me of another
Page 25 and 26: spoke to our workforce and asked us
Page 27 and 28: the Democratic People’s Republic
Page 29 and 30: who spoke flawless English but with
Page 31 and 32: “Patient Ruth.” She appeared at
Page 33 and 34: to improving health, we don’t mak
Page 35 and 36: ington Green in Massachusetts, wher
Page 37 and 38: First, leaders must be confident en
Page 39 and 40: evade detection. Technology compani
Page 41 and 42: secret meetings in Oman, far from t
Page 43 and 44: didn’t continue his career as a s
Page 45 and 46: The next day, the prospectors plowe
Page 47 and 48: of his offices, whoever can command
Page 49 and 50: competencies to meet the needs of a
Page 51: You may leave a legacy in a musical
Page 55 and 56: ecently bought LearnVest, and I was

THESE VITAL SPEECHES

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