The John Cook School of Business gave students an opportunity this past Monday, March 28, to finally put a face to a name they know so well: John Cook. The famous Saint Louis University donor and member of the board of trustees gave a speech to an audience of about 130 students, faculty and staff, telling stories of his business and philanthropic work and giving some sage advice.
“It’s good to have skills, but it’s also good to have luck,” Cook said.
Cook is a SLU graduate and one of the first in his family to go to a university. He told the story of his first taste of accounting, which occurred during a job he had to pay for college.
“I happened to get interested one day in this parking garage,” Cook said. “No one monitored it, so I took a day, and I audited.”
Cook discovered that the profits from the parking garage that day were close to $150 dollars short. He began to monitor the garage more closely and continued to notice there was missing money.
“And then, every now and then, we wouldn’t be short,” Cook said. “That was because there were days when one cashier didn’t work. At any rate, I ended up discovering what was the largest fraud in the company’s history. This woman had been basically ripping off the company for 30 years.”
When Cook graduated, he was offered a job with that company. He moved up through the ranks very quickly, attributing his success more to his administrative skills than his accounting abilities.
“In life, make sure you always know what you’re not good at, and compliment yourself with those skills you have,” Cook said.
His career really took off when he got involved with a then-fledgling company known as Wal-Mart and was able to work with it as it grew
to operate in 43 countries around the world. It was this global expansion that really spoke to Cook.
“Not only did I get to enjoy all the challenges of starting and running a company in a lot of different countries, but I got to travel a lot,” Cook said. “It gave me the opportunity to appreciate the rich cultures and diversities that exist around the world and started me early to try and engage in some work in philanthropy.”
His first experience in philanthropy took place 17 years ago in Bangkok, Thailand, when he met an American Catholic priest, whom he called Father Joe. Fr. Joe invited Cook to see a project he was working on in the slums of Bangkok.
“I thought I knew what poor was,” Cook said, “but when you go into the slums of Bangkok, you wind up with a new appreciation of the word slum.”
Fr. Joe had been working to educate the young children in the slums in the hope of integrating them into Thailand’s public school system. Cook, impressed with the work being done, signed on to help. Fifteen months later, he opened up a 14-classroom school. Since then, Cook has helped to open nearly 30 more schools and educate about 45,000 children.
Cook has also helped build schools in Nepal and the Sudan. He attributes his philanthropic activity as one of his key motivators throughout his career.
“The difference in your success levels is going to be tied to your leadership skills and your ability to mange and motivate people,” Cook said.
“One of the things I have found in my long business career is people like to work for and follow leaders who they believe care about them.”
Cook said one of the biggest dangers in being successful is the risk of becoming too self-centered. He cited working with the poor and downtrodden as one of the best ways to stay grounded in the business world.
Dean of the John Cook School of Business, Ellen Harshman, stated that she thought Cook’s strong focus on the relationship of business and philanthropy was an important message for the students.
“I hope they saw John Cook as a real person, a successful person who got his education at SLU and uses his resources to do good in the world. It’s not something you always hear about in your classes,” Harshman said.
