EYE ON TRUCKING: ATA leader not afraid to shoot straight: times are tough for trucking
ATA President and CEO Bill Graves delivers his state of the industry address at New Orleans. (The Trucker/Kevin Jones)
By LYNDON FINNEY
The Trucker Staff
10/15/2008
NEW ORLEANS — William Preston Graves knows whereof he speaks.
He is the son and grandson of men who lost their farms during the Great Depression, started a trucking company and grew it into one of the largest regional motor carriers in the nation.
As such, he learned the trucking industry from the ground up from loading and unloading to front office management.
He served eight years as the 43rd governor of Kansas.
And today, Graves, who goes by Bill and is still respectfully called “governor” by many of his colleagues, is in his sixth year as president and CEO of the American Trucking Associations.
So it was as he stood here Oct. 6 to deliver the annual state of the industry address at ATA’s annual Management Conference and Exhibition, he harkened back to days gone by.
“As I sat down to work on my remarks for this year’s speech, I couldn’t help but think of the eight years I spent as governor and the eight times I delivered the annual state of the state address — not altogether unlike this address,” he began after the usual opening formalities. “If you’ve ever listened to a state of the state speech, whether it be by a governor or even the state of the union given by the president, you’ll find they all have one thing in common: they all start by declaring that the state of things at hand is somewhere from good to great. You’ll rarely hear a governor or president start on a negative note — obviously not wanting to acknowledge that things are going badly under their watch — even if in fact they are.”
Early in his tenure as governor, he reported right off the bat that the state of the state in Kansas was “sound” or “outstanding,” but by 1999, the state’s oil and agricultural industries had fallen on some rough times.
That year he reported that Kansas was entering its 139th year under very favorable conditions, but that “in spite of our strength [there] are some troubled areas, and all of Kansas should be concerned with the plight of the men and women in agriculture and oil sectors of the economy.”
In his final three years, a glance at his speeches indicates he was guarded in how he described the state of the state of Kansas, but of course the events of Sept. 11, 2001, left everyone in the U.S. in a state of shock for months to come.
We write all this to say that Bill Graves, as a politician and now as head of the country’s largest trucking organization, is not afraid to shoot straight.
And so he did in front of several hundred the morning of Oct. 6.
He did some soul searching as he prepared his remarks, he said.
“I considered highlighting some of the legislative victories we’ve had, some of the legal battles we’ve won and even some of the new and exciting programs we’ve started to further benefit our industry,” he told the delegates. “But I knew, regardless of how many of those I was able to rattle off, the facts would still be the facts: things are not going well for our industry and we face some awfully tough times in the near future.”
He cited several factors for his concern, not the least of which was the soaring price of fuel, which has surpassed driver compensation at the No. 1 expense for trucking companies nationwide.
But just as he did in his state of the state speeches, Graves quickly turned from any problems of the past to the solutions of the future, beginning with the people who make trucking what it is, including the nation’s 3.5 million truck drivers [the only standing ovation was during a luncheon three hours after Graves made his remarks and followed the introduction of David May, the national Truck Driver of the Year].
“There are two types of people,” Graves said. “There are those who are willing to accept the world as it is, and there are those who work to make it a better place. The very nature of our industry makes us the latter. We work every day to ensure that people in the smallest cities and farthest corners of the country have food to put on their tables, the medications they need to be well, clothes to put on their backs and all the other consumer goods that contribute to the quality of life we enjoy in the U.S. — a quality of life that makes us the envy of others around the globe.”
Graves called on trucking executives to work as a team to make sure the industry weathers the current economic and operational storms that he said threaten the industry.
We applaud an industry leader for standing up and not being afraid to tell it like it is.
Just as we applaud those 3.5 million truckers who haul that food, that medication and those clothes.
May we all work as one for the betterment of our industry.