Phronesis: Practical Wisdom for Leaders with Scott J. Allen

Carey Jaros - Providing Safe Sustainable Solutions

• Scott J. Allen • Season 1 • Episode 259

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Carey Jaros brings passion for our Purpose — Saving Lives and Making Life Better Through Well-Being Solutions — to her daily work at GOJO (the makers of Purell). Her focus is on continuously extending GOJO leadership as a market-making, growth-oriented Company that cares about the health and well-being of people worldwide and within its walls. Carey joined GOJO in 2014 as a board member, then held executive roles as Chief Strategy Officer – where she oversaw Marketing, Product Management, and Innovation – and as Chief Operating Officer before becoming President and CEO in January 2020.

As an operator, investor, and board member, Carey has worked on and in more than 50 organizations— from established public and private companies, to startups and non-profits. Prior to GOJO, Carey was the President of Walnut Ridge Strategic Management Company, and was a Vice President at Dealer Tire, a large privately held tire distributor. She spent the first 12 years as a management consultant at Bain & Company.

Carey is a Board Director of Grocery Outlet (NASDAQ: GO) and an Advisory Board Member of venture-backed menstrual products startup Aunt Flow. She also serves on the Boards of The Cleveland Foundation, University Hospitals, and Laurel School.

Carey received her A.B. in Public Policy from Brown University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She and her husband live in Northeast Ohio with their three children.

A Quote 

  • "We have a whole-systems approach to social, environmental, and economic sustainability, including certification as a WBE, product certifications, and a vertically integrated supply chain. With our strong foundation in place, we're advancing our Sustainable Value strategy and action plan."


Resources Mentioned in This Episode

 

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

  • The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. Plan for Prague - October 15-18, 2025!


About  Scott J. Allen


My Approach to Hosting

  • The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic.

Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate, and conversations-to-text do not always translate perfectly. I include it to provide you with the spirit of the conversation.

Scott Allen  0:00 

Good afternoon, good evening, good morning wherever you are in the world. This is Scott Allen. Thank you so much for checking in; Practical Wisdom for Leaders. Today, I have Carey Jaros, and she is passionate about saving lives and making life better through well-being solutions in her daily work at GOJO, the makers of Purell. Her focus is on continuously extending GOJO leadership as a market-making, growth-oriented company that cares about the health and well-being of people worldwide and within its walls. Carey joined GOJO in 2014 as a board member, then held executive roles as Chief Strategy Officer– where she oversaw Marketing, Product Management and Innovation – and as Chief Operating Officer, before becoming President and CEO in January 2020. As an operator, investor, and board member, Carey has worked on and in more than 50 organizations— from established public and private companies to startups and nonprofits. Prior to GOJO, Carey was the President of Walnut Ridge Strategic Management Company, and was a Vice President at Dealer Tire, a large privately held tire distributor. She spent the first 12 years of her career as a management consultant at Bain & Company. Carey is a Board Director of Grocery Outlet (NASDAQ: GO) and Advisory Board Member of venture-backed menstrual products startup Aunt Flow. She also serves on the Boards of The Cleveland Foundation, University Hospitals, and Laurel School. Carey received her A.B. in Public Policy from Brown University, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She and her husband live in Northeast Ohio with their three children. Carey, thank you so much for joining me today. I truly appreciate this opportunity. Now, really quick. Before we jump in, what's not on your bio that listeners should know about you? 

 

Carey Jaros  1:49 

Well, Scott, first of all, I'm so excited to be here, and I think we're gonna have a great time. What is not on my bio? So, I'll give you two things. The first thing that's not on my bio is that I am a 500-hour certified yoga instructor and a practicing (? Ashanti?). So, I've been practicing yoga for about 20 years, and I practice Ashtanga, which is a particular style. And also that I not only have three children who I adore, but also two Labradoodles named Banjo And Hawthorne. 

 

Scott Allen  2:20 

Ah, very cool. I had a wonderful conversation with this woman. Her name is Amy Elizabeth Fox, she runs Mobius Executive Leadership. And she used this beautiful phrasing. I said, “So what are you seeing lately?” And she said, “Gosh, people are coming in exhausted. These senior-level leaders, they are just getting beaten down.” And she said, “And our goal is to help them become more performance-ready.” And again, a piece of that, as you know better than anyone, is taking care of self. And so, I imagine that practice of yoga is just essential. Would you agree? 

 

Carey Jaros  2:56 

Yeah. So, yoga is a huge part of my life and has been for a couple of decades. But I will tell you that during COVID, the pandemic started when I was two weeks into being CEO, and Purell was really very much in the center of our national response in many ways, given the importance of hand hygiene and service hygiene. And so, that's a time when I really doubled down on my yoga practice. And one of the silver linings of lockdown was not traveling for the first time in my full career, really, every week, and so I was able to get into a consistent practice. And I found, since going back on the road, like all of us road warriors, I've been able to really maintain that practice in a way that I hadn't before the pandemic. So, it's a gift that keeps on giving, not just for me but certainly for the people I interact with since I'm much nicer, and more patient, and more mindful.

 

Scott Allen  3:47 

Those are good things as a parent or a CEO. (Laughs) Well, okay. So, two weeks in, you start the role as CEO, we start to shut down as a country and as a globe. And as you reflect on the last couple years, what… It's been four years now, what have been the greatest opportunities and challenges that you've faced as a team in recent times? I imagine there were just some Herculean challenges ahead as you started.

 

Carey Jaros  4:17 

Yeah. So, fortunately, I had been in the business even though I hadn't been in the CEO seat. I think it would have been really, really challenging to sort of enter the business and enter that moment at the same time, but it was still an incredible challenge for our team to figure out how to respond in January 2020 and February 2020. Just to dimensionalize the challenge a little bit for you, we saw consumer orders increase 10x in one night. We then, very quickly, within three weeks, had three years of backorders. The active ingredient in most of our products is ethyl alcohol or ethanol, and we usually contract ethanol annually. In 2020, we had used up our entire annual contract for ethanol by the end of April, so really only a month and a half into the surge. So, challenges like that are hard. It's hard to even remember them. It's somewhat like giving birth, it's like you forget what it was really like in the moment and you focus on all the good things that happened after. But those early days of 2020 were really stressful. That said, I think the challenges that we faced really required us to find a gear that we didn't know we had as an organization. And not only am I tremendously proud of the way we just responded, but I'm proud of, actually, the opportunities that came out of the pandemic that we seized, and I'm happy to talk more about those if you're interested.

 

Scott Allen  5:45 

Well, I am. I am. You were in one of my classes probably about a year and a half ago now, and you had a statement that has always just stuck with me in a really nice way. But I think it was something to the effect of, “When it comes to a lot of these obstacles and these challenges, are you falling in love with the problem? Are you getting curious, and are you really, really starting to kind of pay attention and view these as opportunities in some cases?” And so, maybe talk a little bit about that. What were some of those challenges that you overcame, and that mindset of falling in love with the problem? I just absolutely love it. It's beautiful. It really is. 

 

Carey Jaros  6:24 

Yeah. So, first I have to give credit where credit is due. So, Uri Levine who's the founder of Waze is the first person who I heard directly talk about that concept. He talked about how important, as an entrepreneur, it is to fall in love with the problem rather than your solution. And I do think that applies very directly to our COVID response. So, it would have been easy to fall in love with our solutions to the problem, like any manufacturer who suddenly, overnight has demand they can't fulfill, your solution is to actually get people to take what you have, rather than getting them to take what they want that you don't have. And I think we did some of that, but mostly what we did is figure out how to get people what they needed and what they wanted from us as the number one hand sanitizer manufacturer in the world. And so, the problems came up in order, sort of as we hit constraints. So, the first problem was we just weren't geared up to manufacture 24/7. We were running two shifts five days a week, that's what we needed for our base business before COVID hit. And so, the first question was do we want to move to 24/7 even though it was nearly early days and we had no idea what would happen? And so, there was a really important, decisive meeting that we had where we made a decision as a leadership team to turn on 24/7 manufacturing. We had to do that at a time when we weren't sure that the demand would actually sustain, and so we had a hard conversation about what it would look like if we turned on manufacturing and there was no surge, and what it would look like if we didn't turn on manufacturing and there was a surge. And both for sort of moral reasons and just for practical reasons, we made the call to lean in and turn on 24/7 manufacturing even though we would have been buried in product if we didn't need it. We knew we could sell through it. If we didn't turn on manufacturing and the search materialized, there's no solution. And so we did that. So, that was sort of step one. The next set of constraints were really around running out of raw materials and components for our products, and that was a very real concern. It wasn't just about not having it or not being able to get it quickly, but at the same time as we were gearing up to respond, everybody else on the planet was also gearing up to respond with surface cleaning and skincare products, and many of those responders didn't have the kinds of science-based safe, efficacious, high-quality solutions we did. And so, it was a race against the clock to secure components and raw materials to produce product that we knew worked and was safe for people, and frankly, to capture an unfair share of those components and raw materials so they didn't go to product that was substandard. Unfortunately, we weren't 100% effective, and so I'm sure, Scott, you, like many others, had the terrible experience of putting hand sanitizer on your hands and then realizing that it smelled like tequila, or it was sticky, or there were other things that were just clearly wrong with it. 

 

Scott Allen  9:27

Yes.

 

Carey Jaros  9:28

But we did our best. We did our very best, and I could talk for hours about all the tactics we used to do that. 

 

Scott Allen  9:32 

That's awesome. What else? What else comes to mind when you think about some of those challenges in recent years that you're just proud of the team to have overcome?

 

Carey Jaros  9:43 

So, I think that whole period of 2020 was about constraint busting, and the third frontier of constraints was really around just human capacity and labor. Our team showed up in ways that I couldn't have asked them to. It wouldn't have been right as a leader to even ask them to, and they did it because they believed in what we were doing. So, I'll give you an example. There was a production leader who… I was serving lunch to the team on a Saturday for all the folks who were working during the pandemic, and we were masked, and socially distanced, and the plant manager pulled me aside and said, “Hey, one of our PLs has worked for 21 days straight, and we told her that she needs to take a break but she just keeps volunteering for shifts. And so, I just wanted to let you know I thought you'd want to talk to her.” And I said, “Of course, I want to talk to her.” So, we found this incredible team member out on the floor with her team, and I pulled her aside, and we had a nice conversation. And in addition to encouraging her to take a day off, I said, “Tell me, how are you doing this? You have kids at home who are homeschooling. I know everybody else in the world is locked down and you're getting up every day, 21 days in a row to come in here. How are you doing it?” And she didn't miss a beat, she looked me in the eyes and she said, “We're saving lives and making life better. Who's gonna turn that down?” [Inaudible 10:55] And so, there are many examples like that, but that one always sticks out for me. The other thing I'll say is it wasn't just the pandemic that was hard, I think we had to ramp up, but there was a lot of adrenaline. We knew the work we were doing was really important. In some ways, it was easier to be heroic in 2020 and in early 2021. And then, what followed, which was a lot of dislocation and disruption in the marketplace. People didn't go back to public life in all the ways that we expected them to, and frankly, needed them to for a business that was two-thirds soap before the pandemic. So, we really need people in public places using our soap. And so, the time after the pandemic was in some ways just as challenging for us as an organization.

 

Scott Allen  11:42 

Really? See, I never would have thought that. 

 

Carey Jaros  11:46 

Yeah. There were many memes floating around the internet about how, companies like ours, how it was all good news all day long, and it's really not true. We had to endure a very significant amount of dislocation and disruption in 21, 22, and 23. There was a lot of bad products that was made all over the world that went out into the market. And it sat on shelves, it sat on tabletops, and it took people a long time to throw that stuff away, and no one was using it. In some ways, it was sort of a blocker for good product making it out into the market, and that was very disruptive for us. And then the other thing, which I alluded to a little bit, is just the traffic in public spaces. We are really a business that is about keeping people healthy and well when they're out interacting in the world, and the amount of interaction in the world just was much lower in a sustained way for a couple of years. We are seeing that reverse, and we've really seen our soap businesses back basically where it was before the pandemic. People are back out in public doing things. Our airport business is through the roof. So we've really seen an incredible recovery, but it took some time. 

 

Scott Allen  12:53 

I’m in a fair amount of airports, and I notice every time it is Purell and you are busy in the airports. 

 

Carey Jaros  13:00 

Hope you've hit those dispensers and that you feel what we want you to feel, which is taken care of. Like the facilities are really worried about your health and well-being, and that you use those products and feel refreshed and ready to interact with your environment.

 

Scott Allen  13:14 

(Laughs) I definitely feel more refreshed, especially when traveling. That's for sure. Well, the leadership challenges that you have navigated in the last four years are monumental. And every time you take on a new role, you learn something about yourself. And so, what are a couple of those reflections that you have about you as a leader being in the seat? You said, “I hadn't been in the seat,” so to speak. “I'd been in the organization, but not in the seat.” You're in the seat now, it's about four and a half-plus years in, what reflections do you have on that?

 

Carey Jaros  13:46 

It's a great question. I have learned so much. I think all of us who have really not even just been leaders, but who have been society members over the last five years, we have developed,  like, in dog years. I think it's been a pretty incredible time to be a human, and I mean incredible, like, awe-inspiring, not necessarily all good. A couple of the sort of my takeaways from this period, I think the first and foremost, purpose really matters. So, we have had a purpose of saving lives and making life better through well-being solutions for decades, and everybody in the business knew that was our purpose every day long before COVID. We had handled things like H1N1, and SARS, and Ebola. And in each of those moments, that purpose compelled us to do things that were extraordinary, and that was certainly true in COVID too. So, I think having purpose matters, and it makes life easier as a leader because you're all showing up with that shared desire to have impact in a consistent way. So, I think that's first. Second is we have a set of values and guiding principles at GOJO that, again, were in place before the pandemic, and we invoked those on a daily basis to help us make decisions. So, I think values and guiding principles are really just you're basically writing down how you make decisions and what it feels like to exist in an environment. And so, we were able to look at those values and guiding principles and to literally use them to help us navigate very, very, very difficult and complex situations. So, I'll give you an example. During the early days of the pandemic, we did not have sufficient capacity to meet demand, and so we had to make choices about who got products that are life-saving products and life-protecting products. And that's a really tough position to be in if you don't have a framework to help you navigate it. And so, we were able to use our values, and those values allowed us to make choices like prioritizing frontline healthcare workers, prioritizing emergency responders, but also prioritizing grocery workers who were coming in and interacting with the public at a time when other people weren't. And so, that was a really critical piece of being able to lead through that time and I'm really grateful for having values and guiding principles. And then the last thing I'll say is never more than in a crisis is it more obvious that the best leaders don't have to know everything. They have to be able to facilitate groups of people to do things that none of us alone could do. And so, that was really the job. No one on the planet had lived through a pandemic of that level that sustained duration and magnitude. Maybe there are people who are no longer on the planet who had seen those things, but nobody in our generation of leaders had been through that. There's no way I could have known what I needed to do every single day or what we needed to do, my job was to facilitate a diverse group of people with a diverse set of experiences, and expertise, and ideas, and to get that group together to come up with the very best possible ideas and solutions to help us make decisions. When we learn new things that suggested that decisions we made weren't the right ones, to adjust on the fly and have the confidence to keep moving forward. That's what leadership was about, it wasn't about knowing.

 

Scott Allen  17:14 

 I very much appreciate that perspective because I think, at times, some people construct leadership as, “Well, I'm the person who has the answers, arrives with the solutions, figures out the problems.” And I think great leadership, especially when it's a complex adaptive challenge where there aren't answers, so to speak. It's about elevating the right questions, creating that psychological safety so we can have the really difficult conversations and get all the perspectives on the table. And then, to your point, it's a little bit of an experiment. And, “We're going to try this. This is what we think the path is, but this is uncharted territory. We will adjust quickly if this doesn't feel like it's moving in the right direction.” Framing leadership in that way is critical when we're dealing with those types of problems. 

 

Carey Jaros  17:58 

I think that's right. And, in a moment like that, you have to have self-esteem because you have to feel confident making decisions based on the best information you have. You can't stay stuck. And if you have a big ego, that's actually really dangerous for the organization and for the people you serve because, if you are not humble, then it's really hard to say, “The decision we made yesterday with the best information we had then, actually, today doesn't look like the right decision, and let's revisit it. Let's figure out how to pivot. Let's just tweak it a little bit if that's all it needs.” But you have to be able to wake up every day and say, “I believe we did the best we could do yesterday with the information we had, and let's look at what we know today, and we're gonna make the best decision we can make today also.” And I'm so glad I had that experience early in my tenure as a CEO because, over the last five years, I've had dozens and dozens and dozens of opportunities to take that lesson and practice it again, and it's always better than being stubborn and sticking with some decision you made that obviously is no longer the right one. And everybody else in the room knows, it's not like they don't know. 

 

Scott Allen  19:04 

Yeah. Exactly. Well, I know that you are a huge fan of innovation and creative thinking, and so are there any things that you can share with us, maybe, that have happened in recent times or that you're excited about when it comes to that topic? I'm always amazed because you think hand sanitizer, hand soap, well, what are we going to do with that? Well, your mind is always thinking about how to make that product more sustainable, how to innovate, and I'm excited to hear. You're smiling, maybe there's a couple of things in mind. What can you share? 

 

Carey Jaros  19:35 

Yeah. I absolutely love solving real human problems. And that's what innovation is all about for us at GOJO and I think out in the world. Innovation is really in our DNA. So if you refer back to those values and guiding principles I talked about, they include things like the value of bold leadership, a guiding principle of ‘we innovate for a better world.’ We courageously take on challenges no one else will and inspire others. So, those are the ways that we talk about ourselves as members of Team GOJO, and it's an identity that then manifests every single day in real work around developing new solutions to these real human problems. So, a couple of my favorites that are sort of more recent. This year, we launched our newest dispensing system. When I talk about dispensers, and you think about skincare, soap and sanitizer, they're really those little boxes on the wall all over the world. We have more than 20 million of them, just from GOJO and Purell that are out there in the world dispensing our products everywhere. And launching dispensing platforms for us is a major way that we continue to introduce real innovation that does these important jobs out in the world every sort of five to seven years. So, this year, we launched our new 10 series platform. It's about as cool as soap and sanitizer dispensing could be. This new platform has a couple of things going for it. First of all, it's the second generation of a technology that we invented, and that today we're the only one who practices, which is called Energy-on-the-Refill. So, if you think about a traditional soap dispenser that's touch-free, that's automatic, that dispenser has probably four big D-batteries in it. Those big D-batteries are a lot of solid waste. They are eventually going to run out, and someone's gonna have to replace them. And while they're out and they haven't been replaced, the dispenser is rendered useless. So, that's a real problem. Our 10 series and the eight series before it, which was sort of the pioneering system, has Energy-on-the-Refill. So every time you change the refill to get more soap or more sanitizer into the dispenser, that refill brings its own battery now, just a single double A, that is enough power to discharge the entire refill. And so,if you're if your job, Scott, every day, were to make sure that all of the dispensers in a building, and if you're in a health system, that could be 60 or 70,000 dispensers, to make sure that every one of those dispensers is working, you would employ full-time people just to change batteries. You don't have to do that anymore with this new system. You literally, as long as they're servicing the dispensers when they run out of product, the energy is going to ride along for free, and you're going to end up with dispensers that work in the moment that you need them when you're treating a sick patient or when you're trying to keep yourself healthy and well.

 

Scott Allen  22:21

Oh, that's so cool. Okay.

 

Carey Jaros  22:24

So, 10 series has energy on the refill. It also is the platform that is gonna enable the next generation of smart technology in this space. So, when I say IoT or smart technology, you probably don't first think of soap and sanitizer dispensers, but, in fact, we have had IoT-capable soap and sanitizer dispensers now for, really, a decade plus. What has been the obstacle to really broad, broad use of these dispensers to do things like give you service alerts when they run out, or to help you monitor compliance to hand hygiene in a hospital environment is the cost of having each of those dispensers communicate with the cloud and produce data that's actionable. We have been in this business now for almost 15 years trying to figure out how to make a cost-effective solution, and this new platform has the first really exciting cost-effective IoT capability. And so, if you were to install a 10 series dispenser today, that dispenser could both tell you when it needs more product, and it could also do things like tell you if the refill that's in it has expired. It could do things like tell you how many actuations it's seeing a day and when you're most likely going to need to replace the refill. And, most importantly, in a health system, it could tell you if you, Scott, had actually used hand hiking when you were supposed to.

 

Scott Allen  23:48 

Well, that's a big problem that not many people know about is physicians washing their hands, or caregivers, I should say. We don't want to talk about that, but I used to work in a hospital. And, at the time, the numbers were low. Now, I imagine they've improved, but, oof, because they're the largest spreaders of bad stuff, right? The caregivers. Is that still accurate? 

 

Carey Jaros  24:10 

Yeah. So, what I'll say is, in most health systems, when they actually move to electronic compliance monitoring, they will see compliance rates that are under 50% even though when they've been doing observation-based compliance monitoring, someone with a clipboard, they've seen rates that are maybe 90% or better. You and I both know about things like the Hawthorne effect. When we're observed, we tend to behave better. And so, electronic compliance monitoring is going to be the standard. There's no question. And the systems that have leaned in, like University of Chicago is a great example, that have really leaned into electronic compliance monitoring, have been able to both get a baseline that's accurate, as hard as that is for them, and then to really manage that up. But because there haven't been really good, cost-effective solutions, that hasn't been adopted in the way that it needs to be. And so we're really excited to have a cost-effective solution that can enable this electronic compliance monitoring and all of the better safety measures that will come with it for patients to really take root.

 

Scott Allen  25:12 

Well, Carey, I'm so thankful for your time today. A couple of things stand out for me. We were together probably a few months ago and you were talking about how your product had just gotten into the world's… Was it the world's highest convenience store somewhere in Tibet?

 

Carey Jaros  25:28 

Yes. We are on Mount Everest. So, our product is now available in the highest retail location on Earth, which is pretty exciting. 

 

Scott Allen  25:39 

(Laughs) Now we need to get it, I don't know, maybe in a submarine in the Mariana Trench, and then we'll have you in the lowest. I don't know, that would be kind of cool.

 

Carey Jaros  25:46 

The cool thing about Purell, Scott, is it is actually everywhere. It's pretty ubiquitous. So, I bet if we went out and looked, we could find some Purell that's pretty close to the sea floor. I'm gonna take that on as a piece of homework coming out of our time together.

 

Scott Allen  25:59 

In a submarine somewhere. (Laughs) Well, it is. It literally is. I've sent you photos from Denmark, I've sent you photos from Alexis, I've sent you photos from all over as I'm traveling. And so, I imagine you are in every country and all over the world. And, most importantly, back to the mission: Saving lives in making life better through well-being solutions. And I think such an incredibly important mission and making the world a healthier place. But also I love the fact that we're focused on that sustainability, we're focused on the technology and the innovation piece of all of that as well so that the product can get wider reach and have more of it make more of a difference and improve. Again, back to why you all exist; saving lives and making life better. So, it's just so very, very impressive.

 

Carey Jaros  26:49 

So, I'll tell you about one of my other favorite innovations that I think really gets at this idea of both innovating to help humans, but also innovating for a better planet. A couple of years ago, we were looking at the world of soap. And hand soap has been around since the beginning of time, and it's a category that really has seen very, very little innovation. And, as we looked at this category, we felt like a lot of the technologies that are being used, especially in higher-risk environments, like health systems, communal living, food service, those technologies are quite old. So, antibacterial ingredients, for example, have been around for a very long period of time, and frankly, have some drawbacks. Many of those ingredients are harsh on skin, some of them have come under attack from environmental groups because of the footprint that they leave in our water systems. And we said to ourselves, there has to be a better way here. There has to be a way to make soaps that are as effective or more effective than the ones we have, but that are also just safer for humans and for the environment. And so, we started playing around with a technology that was rooted really in some of the work we had done in ethanol and in hand sanitizer. We invented a brand new soap, but not just a new soap itself, a new kind of soap. So, Purell Healthy Soap with clean release technology is sort of the long name, but what this Purell Healthy Soap does is it actually removes more germs than normal soap, so it leaves four times fewer germs on your skin than normal soap, but it does that without any harsh antibacterial ingredients. So, there's no active ingredient. It's a bland cosmetic soap. And so, I'll tell you how it works. So, soap is about 90% water, and water has very high surface tension. So, if you put a drop of water on the table, you can see that bead of water sit there. It doesn't spread out. Now, when you wash your hands with soap that's 90% water, and you use water to do it, all of that product that's on your skin also has high surface tension. And your skin has tons of little micro-cracks and crevices and depressions, and the soap and the water sit on top, they don't go down inside because of that high surface tension. And so, one of the things we figured out is that if we added ethanol, alcohol, same alcohol that's in your maybe Friday night cocktail, if we add that ethanol to our soap, it actually changes the surface tension of the soap and allows the soap and the water to go down into all those little cracks and crevices and clean out the dirt and germs. And it does that without any kind of chemical reaction. It's mechanically removing more dirt and germs. So, that was the first step, and we were really excited when we proved that it worked. As we were doing wash studies with this soap, however, we also noticed that people were washing their hands for a slightly shorter period of time on average. And because we're nerdy and curious, we wanted to figure out why that was happening. And so we did more and more studies and we noticed that the watch times were slightly shorter. In fact, they were enough shorter that, over the life of a refill of soap, you would actually use 20 gallons less water if you used this product versus if you were washing your hand with a liquid soap, and about six gallons less water than if you were washing your hands with another foam soap. And it turns out that when we formulated this soap to do the work it does down            to clean out those dirt and germs, we actually formulated a soap that also rinses cleaner and faster. And so, this soap is safer, doesn't have these harsh antibacterial ingredients so it's safer for humans in the environment. It's more effective, it removes more dirt and germs. And it also is saving water and reducing the chemicals of concern that are out in the world. So, really cool example of innovation that really gets at the heart of how we innovate at GOJO.

 

Scott Allen  30:37 

I love it. It's so awesome. And I love how you light up when you're talking about this because it's so cool. Again, we wouldn't think of it necessarily. Obviously, you're thinking about this every day, but even the notion that we could save water by improving the technology, it's just so cool how you all are thinking about this space. And I'm thankful for you, I'm thankful for the work that you do, and I'm thankful that you spent some time with me today. Very, very much so. I always close out the conversation by asking what you've been listening to, what you've been reading, what you've been streaming, what's caught your attention in recent times. It could have to do with what we've discussed; innovation, technology, IoT or Internet of Things, or it could have nothing to do with that. What's caught your attention that listeners might be interested in?

 

Carey Jaros  31:24 

So, I'll give you one sort of more professional resource, and I'll give you one more personal resource. So, on the professional side, I am a student of leadership. I read lots and lots and lots of thought leadership work around being a good leader. And I am particularly smitten right now with the work that Frances Frie and Annie Morris are doing on leadership. So, I have read a number of not only the books that Frances, and now, Annie have written together, but also I listen to their podcasts and read a lot of their blog content. And I'm really into the trust triangle and thinking about how to show up as logical, as authentic, and as empathetic every day to build trust with the people around me. So, that's sort of my professional answer. On the personal side, I mostly read a lot about yogic philosophy, Scott. That's what I read. So I just finished a book called ‘My Journey Home.’ It's an incredible book about a spiritual quest through India, and I found it really illuminating.

 

Scott Allen  32:26 

Well, I just reached out to Frances Frie about being on the podcast. So, if you have any strings you can pull with Frances, you let me know. (Laughs)

 

Carey Jaros  32:34 

I'll do my best to do that. I'm certainly a huge fan.

 

Scott Allen  32:38 

And she and Amy Edmondson are my Harvard folks that I'm actively in pursuit of. (Laughs)

 

Carey Jaros  32:44

Okay. I’ll see what I can do. We're definitely friends online, so I’ll see if I can pull any strings.

 

Scott Allen  32:48 

Maybe some Adam Grant. If you could just take care of those three, that'd be great. Laughs)

 

Carey Jaros  32:53

No problem. What a productive hour we've had.

 

Scott Allen  32:57 

Well, Carey, thank you so much. I very, very much appreciate your time. I know that it's valuable, and I know that listeners, I'm gonna put some links in the show notes for all of you who are listening. And you know what? Carey, thank you so much for the work you do. 

 

Carey Jaros  33:10 

Thanks so much for having me, and thanks to all your listeners for tuning in. 

 

Scott Allen  33:14 

I was saying to a friend the other day that I just feel so thankful that I tapped into this topic that I just have jet fuel for, which is leadership and that mission of how do we better prepare people to serve in these very complex roles? And the practical wisdom for me here is that you have an individual, Carey, who is tapped into a mission as well, and we heard her say that. And I think it's so important. And what I love about her mission is that global reach, the innovation, the creativity. And how do we take what could be perceived as a fairly standard product and continually improve, innovate, and take it to new levels in really creative and cool ways, and ultimately, help the world in a wonderful way. So, as you think about 2025, how are you helping the world? How are you innovating? How are you creating? How are you tapping in? And I think, for each one of us, that's an important reflection as we close out 2024. As always, thank you so much for checking in. Take care. Be well. 

 

 

[End Of Recording]