Top Businessmen Deliver Symposium on Common Sense

It was billed as the “Northwest Arkansas Business Giants Forum.” It could have simply been called a symposium on common sense.

Three of the state’s most successful businessmen — Don Tyson, J.B. Hunt and Donald Soderquist — shed their neckties last week to rub elbows with 300 students from the University of Arkansas’ Sam M. Walton College of Business Administration. Wearing sport jackets and sitting in winged-back chairs, the triumvirate casually traded answers for questions for about an hour.

Each one repeated a unified message, “Find what you like to do and do it well,” throughout the forum. But the answer that got the biggest laugh, and probably made the biggest impact, was Tyson’s two-word response to a student requesting his formula for success.

“Work hard,” Tyson said.

The homespun humor contrasted with a packed auditorium that looked more like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise than the new Donald W. Reynolds Center for Enterprise Development. The new center’s video conferencing capabilities allowed the event to be broadcast live via satellite to the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Henderson State University and Ouachita Baptist University at Arkadelphia and John Brown University at Siloam Springs.

TV cameras pivoted as questions were phoned in from off-campus and attending students passed around cordless microphones. Despite all the bells and whistles, Dean Doyle Z. Williams says the forum was more than just a chance for the university to show off its latest toys.

“Some of the wisdom that was shared here today will benefit these students for a lifetime,” Williams says. “We think exposing our students to the business giants of Arkansas will serve as a real inspiration to them as they pursue their studies and think about their careers.”

It was also a chance for students to go to the source for some of the most talked about questions in the business community. One senior majoring in accounting had a question for Soderquist, senior vice-chairman of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. in Bentonville.

“Is your stock going to split at $100?,” the student says.

“Let’s just move on to the next question,” Soderquist says. “No really, that was a big question three years ago and it’s a board of directors’ decision. We think we split a little early last time, and so we’re just going to watch it.

“We think there is a value in having a lower-priced stock. That’s been our posture, so that the everyday person who shops at Wal-Mart can buy our stock.”

Hunt, founder of J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc. of Lowell, and Tyson, senior chairman of Tyson Foods Inc. in Springdale, say their companies went public for the same reasons that Wal-Mart did. They all needed additional capital to help their businesses grow. Being undercapitalized, along with not understanding the pitfalls of individual businesses, were the panel’s two suggestions for things to avoid when entering the business world.

“We have an 11th commandment at Tyson’s,” Tyson says. “It’s: Thou shalt have a profit. Profit will make your stock perform higher. We basically went public because I borrowed all the short-term money I could.

“Then I borrowed all the long-term money I could. Then I went to the public and said, ‘How much will you give me?’ It came along at the right time and really helped us along.”

Another thing the panel agreed on must have made some of the attending faculty cringe. In each of their careers, the panelists say, practical business world experience proved more valuable than what they learned in the classroom.

“A degree opens the door,” Soderquist says. “It’s something to build on. What really counts is what you do afterward with a job. There are people in this room with equal talent, but yet some will be more successful than others.

“Good grades don’t ensure success. They just give you an opportunity.”