Babb talks value-based leadership during 360 series

story and photos by Linda Kaufenberg

The October 360 Leadership Series featured Doug Babb, CEO of Cooper Clinic, who spoke of the importance of value-based leadership.

Babb has a long and successful history of leadership in business including executive vice president and chief administrative and legal officer at Beverly Enterprises and senior vice president at the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp.

The 360 Leadership Series was created by a group of John Brown University graduate alumni whose mission is to provide professional development, networking opportunities, and spiritual growth for Arkansas River Valley professionals.

Babb received his bachelor’s degree in pre-law from Minnesota State University and his juris doctorate from the University of South Carolina. Babb, his wife Kathy and their family have lived in Fort Smith since 2000. He is actively involved in many community organizations including the Donald W. Reynolds Cancer Support Foundation, the Fort Smith Regional Chamber of Commerce, United Way of Fort Smith Area, and the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith.

To begin his talk, Babb said he was a “recovering lawyer for about 20 years after having a varied professional background.” He noted his topics would be about value-based and situational-based leadership.

“There are some common threads I have taken with me no matter where I have worked. I have applied the same set of core values,” Babb said. “But in each instance I have had to learn about the corporation and adapt to the style of their culture.”

For value based leadership, Babb said it was important to have personal integrity, to be open minded and to know that change is inevitable. He made the following points about value-based leadership.
• Every leader has a chance to be an agent of positive change.
• Treat everyone with dignity and respect.
• Never compromise your core values.
• Do the right thing in the right way all the time.
• Be a servant leader.
• Never give up.
• Give 100% all the time.
• Be creative continuously.
• There is a solution to every problem.

“Your role is to lead and empower others, teaching, coaching and mentoring to develop leaders. It’s your responsibility,” Babb explained.

Continuing, Babb noted: “Don’t be afraid, take chances, assume responsibility and get out of your comfort zone.”

Describing situational leadership, Babb described the situation when he was involved with both Burlington Northern and Beverly Enterprises.

At Burlington Northern, profits were going down and they could not compete with the other railroads so they decided to merge with Santa Fe railroad. Santa Fe agreed to a friendly merger but Union Pacific had a different idea and tried a hostile takeover. The merger had been worked on for four years and suddenly Burlington Northern was in a proxy fight. BN won the fight but then realized that during that time, no planning had been done for a smooth transition. Babb was appointed to figure out how the merger was going to work.

With Beverly Enterprises, in 2004 Formation Capital and Appaloosa Management tried to take over the company with a plan to break the company into segments and selling off each segment. This would have resulted in there no longer being a need for a corporate office in Fort Smith.

Instead of yielding to Formation Capital’s demands, senior management decided to put Beverly up for bid. In a bidding war, San Francisco-based Pearl Senior Care (Fillmore Capital Partners) won. In the agreement, they agreed not to break up the company and not to move corporate headquarters out of Fort Smith.

“What did I learn from these experiences?” Babb asked. “The world of business can get nasty. But with perseverance, determination and hard work, you can change peoples’ lives. BN is still a viable company and BEI (Golden Living) is still in Fort Smith.”