Spring 2008 issue of Terry Magazine - (Page 20)

Presto! Aflac had a new senior vice president-director of human boat. Now the city of some 200,000 people 90 miles south of Atlanta runs on white-collar enterprises like Aflac and Synovus, and resources. Amos (BBA ’73), the 56-year-old head of Georgia’s fourth- also on the fortunes of Fort Benning. All the city’s commerce and energy goes on under the watchful largest public company — and a perennial Fortune magazines choice as one of the best places to work in America — has made a eye of a huge duck head, grinning down on Columbus from its tallest building. career of his powers of persuasion. In fact, it’s ducks unlimited at Aflac HQ. There’s a life-size brass As a kid in his family’s variety store near Pensacola, he talked duck on Dan Amos’ desk, ducks on neckties, stuffed duck toys customers into swapping hard-earned nickels for snow cones. hatching from bulky cardboard Amos was able to persuade his senior class at the University boxes. There’s an autographed of Georgia to elect him president in 1972. picture of Yogi Berra coddling The While still in his twenties, Amos persuaded so many Duck. There’s a framed letter from customers to buy Aflac policies in thinly the first President Bush populated Alabama and north Florida requesting plush ducks that he carved out the top sales territory s 6, 0 or ry 20 irect for Millie, the family dog, in the company. brua of d is h In Fe oard d in t his b who happily chews them. Named CEO at a tender 39, Amos ocee s aded o pr t u wa pers has persuaded his field sales EOs t way igh ted C ine the r ensa force through example, Aflaaaaaaac! term that comp o de how st erinspiration, and sharp Yes, Millie loved the duck, lder d on f ub e kho era o , bas stoc decision-making to outperand so does the whole wide The ation s rms. mpen for ave erfo l co form themselves year after year. world. In 1999 B.D. (Before ion h any p nnua is a omp decis h Aflac has seen 18 consecutive Duck), one in 10 Americans recogec d his th of roun well ms a sions years of 15 percent (or betnized Aflac’s oddly fricative company droo rcus oar repe ter) earnings-per-share name. Eight short years A.D., nine of t in b . fel orld been growth. 10 Americans know Aflac. The Duck has the w Further proof of his a higher recognition rating than Ronald business genius can be found half a McDonald or the Energizer Bunny. world away from Columbus — in Return on the original duck commerJapan, of all places, where Aflac has cial, which cost just $1 million to make, has been astronomical. now supplanted 100-year-old Nippon Life as the The first week The Duck ran, Aflac got more hits on its web site country’s top-ranking insurance company. than the entire previous year. In The Duck’s first year, Aflac sales Amos is so successful — and so confident in the rightness of his leaped nearly 30 percent . . . and the same thing happened the next corporate mission — that he has done a radical about face when it year. The spokesfowl appears on the “Tonight Show with Jay Leno” comes to his own pay check. In February 2007, he persuaded his and in commercials with Chevy Chase, Wayne Newton, and Melania board of directors that the right way to proceed in Knauss, aka Mrs. Donald Trump. this era of uber-compensated CEOs was for the The phenomenon isn’t just American. A duck jingle is the Aflac stockholders to determine his annual comnumber-one cell phone ring tone in Japan. pensation, based on how the company performs “The duck was a gamble,” Amos admits. “It was impossible to in the marketplace. explain the appeal of the ad to people, that we had this duck and he Perhaps most remarkable of all, Amos perwaddled around and said our name — Aflac. So I never even told suaded his board to take a flying leap with him the board of directors what would be on the air. I just asked them back in year 2000. That was the year Amos dared to trust me. to air an offbeat new ad on nationwide television. In “For me, the decision went back to the principles of risk manageit, a pushy, accident-prone duck made fun of the most ment that I learned at the University of Georgia. What was the risk, essential element of the company brand — the name really? Nobody knew our name anyway. No guts, no glory.” on its headquarters building. Amos reflects for a moment. Admit it now. You’ve quoted The Duck “Of course, nobody really expected all this to happen yourself: . . . at least not to this degree.” Aflaaaaaaaaaaaaaaac! Amos could say the same thing about his own career. Even though his father was one Why a duck? of the three Aflac founders, Dan Amos Aflac headquarters stands on the highest was a long shot to reach the company’s hill in Columbus. It’s taller by one prideful top office. story than the city government building downtown. The fine homes of mill owners and cotton merchants once topped this same A tale of three brothers promontory. Dan Amos’s life story begins with Aflac’s Today, Columbus’ red-brick textile factories and and it reads like a folk tale. Three brothcotton warehouses have mostly gone the way of the steamers lived in the Florida Panhandle in 1955. Amos Aflac 20 • Spring 2008 Terry College of BuSineSS

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Terry School of Business - Spring 2008 Contents Quick Bites Research & Innovation Gatherings Best CEO in America An Unlikely Rock Star Fire & Flavor Beyond the Bench Terry Memo Economic Scorekeeper Class Notes

Terry School of Business - Spring 2008

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