Greg Duerksen

Augustana College

BA

1979

Mr. Duerksen attended Augustana on a tuba and voice scholarship and added a business degree when he realized he was going to starve on the basis of his musical talents. The joke at the music school was, "If you can't make it in music, you can always go to Harvard Business School."

Harvard Business School

MBA

1983

Graduated with honors. Stayed on an additional year as an Associates Fellow writing course materials for Harvard Business School's globally-acclaimed Agribusiness Program.

Soyatech Global Soy & Grain Trade Summit

Soyatech Global Soy & Grain Trade Summit  Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

2011-10-31

Global AgInvesting Conference

Global AgInvesting Conference  New York, New York

2011-10-31

Animal Health Institute

Animal Health Institute  Boca Raton, Florida

2011-10-31

Finding the Right Answer is the Easy Part

In turnarounds, you have a few short weeks to solve the business problem. That's the easy part. Implementing the solution through hundreds and thousands of other people is the hard part. It requires extraordinary clarity of strategy and tactics and the communication of both, and then months of follow-up. This discussion outlines a powerful framework for thinking about and communicating turnaround strategies and tactics.

What Farmers Can Teach Harvard Business School...and vice versa

Growing up on a farm prepared me extremely well for Harvard Business School. I see four fundamental lessons that farmers can teach HBS:
• Long-term perspective
• Personal responsibility and honor
• Deal with uncertainty
• Wise financial management

There are also a few things farmers can learn from Harvard Business School:
• Work through others
• Robust risk management
• Operations management thought process
• Think big and think globally

Sustainability is the Perfect Word

SAMPLE OPENING TO A PANEL DISCUSSION:

The reactions to the word "sustainability" range from visions of heaven to ridicule and disdain, in large part because it means very different things to very different people. Therein lays the problem. For example, to some it means conservation, doing more with less – what business people commonly call efficiency or productivity -- and taking advantage of all the technological tools available, while for others it means organic and GMO-free. I’m with the former group, so I am confounded when I read a restaurant menu that says “We serve only sustainable, organic, GMO-free food,” because my immediate reaction is, “Hey, those are mutually exclusive!” But just so you know where my heart is, as an old farmer and fertilizer industry executive, when I reaad recently the latest US Geological Survey report that shows elevated dead-zone-creating concentrations of nitrogen and phosphorus in many streams, rivers, and aquifers, and at levels just as elevated as in the 1990s, it made me mad. It wasteful, it is uneconomic, it is poor stewardship, it is not sustainable, and it is wrong.

Notwithstanding my starting point, in the course of my career I’ve come 180 degrees in my view of the word sustainability, and now see it as perhaps the perfect word, because it can mean whatever you want it to mean. And therein lays the opportunity. Precisely because so many people are confused about what sustainability means, we have a terrific opportunity to define it and communicate what we are doing about it and what’s in it for everyone in the food chain -- from the consumer back to the farm and the input supplier.