Kevin Roberts

And some of my friends were telling me that, but I knew I was called to do this school.

That little addendum,

changed my life because it made me realize this.

This is the thesis, to get to the heart of it.

Collins says, almost verbatim, a nonprofit CEO is not a for-profit CEO.

He or she is a legislative leader.

And I sat back and I thought about that.

And I said, I'm a guy who likes politics.

It's my first passion.

That resonated with me.

And so among the many things, for example, fast forward 20 years that Speaker Mike Johnson and I commiserate on,

is both being legislative leaders.

And I say, commiserate, because while he's grateful for the job that he has, he can't snap his fingers and even have 100% of his Republican conference join him.

I can't snap my fingers as a nonprofit leader anywhere, including at Heritage, and expect all of the board, all of the donors, all of my colleagues to salute and move on.

We have to build coalitions.

And so the second thing that we have honed over the years at Heritage, certainly before I got there,

and we have continued it, is working in coalitions.

And so sometimes that means when you have a political realignment, which we're in the middle of right now because of Trump and because of the rise of populist conservatism, something as a historian I believe is very congruous with our founding, there will be a handful of people who decide they don't want to be part of that.

And the way we manage that at Heritage is to continue to add and multiply, to continue to talk about

what our aspirational vision is for the future as a way of managing that coalition.