Warner Baxter, CEO of Ameren, did not have to reach far to grasp the mission of the American Cancer Society.
He lost his father, Ray Baxter, to prostate cancer, and then very recently his eldest brother David to kidney cancer. The baby of the Baxter family, Warner also has two twin older brothers. Gary is a cancer survivor, and Gary’s twin Terry lost his wife to cancer as well.
The fact that his brother Gary survived cancer taught Warner Baxter an important lesson that would guide his future activism with the American Cancer Society.
“It isn’t hopeless,” Baxter said.
You can get well.
That is one of four planks of the American Cancer Society’s mission, which is to save lives by helping people to “stay well, get well, find cures and fight back.” Baxter has studied all four planks of the mission carefully, because he helped to write a business plan to execute that mission in Missouri.
A business plan to fight cancer? What else is to be expected from CEOs Against Cancer, which Baxter leads in Missouri.
When he committed fully to the project in 2011, one thing he told the American Cancer Society was, “If I am going to bring together a bunch of CEOs, I don’t want happy talk. I want it to be thoughtful, and I want to have a goal and a strategy to achieve that goal.”
So they wrote a business plan.
“When we come together, we bring speakers, but we seek to act against this plan,” Baxter said – “otherwise, we can’t measure our progress.”
One important objective CEOs Against Cancer has helped to achieve on Baxter’s watch is to engage full participation in the American Cancer Society’s third national cancer prevention study. (The first full-fledged Cancer Prevention Study, known as CPS-1, conducted 1959-1972, is the best-known. “It was the first study that linked smoking to cancer,” Baxter said, as well as the first study to show a relationship between obesity and a shortened life span.)
In the third study, CPS-3, launched in 2006, the American Cancer Society is collecting blood samples from people with no personal history of cancer. The goal was to enroll at least 300,000 adults from various racial and ethnic backgrounds from across the United States and Puerto Rico, and with the help of Baxter, his fellow Missouri CEOs and over 30,000 other volunteers nationwide, that recruitment goal was met and exceeded, with over 304,000 participants enrolled by December 2013.
“Many of our companies opened our doors and asked our employees to sign up,” Baxter said, which involved donating a blood sample and providing “input on their lifestyles.” Baxter himself, having no personal history of cancer (unlike his late father and eldest brother), gave the researchers his blood and his lifestyle input.
The other progress Baxter and his fellow CEOs can measure against their business plan is heightened awareness. At their companies, he said, they are seeing “more screenings, more smoking cessation signups, more people interested in learning how to eat better and follow a physical fitness program. I see how people are more engaged and sharing best practices.”
Baxter also moved outside of the walls of Ameren and the companies run by his colleagues in CEOs Against Cancer to bring awareness to the broader community. He did this by forging a partnership with Coaches vs. Cancer, another volunteer initiative of the American Cancer Society that engages NCAA coaches in the work.
Together, the coaches and the CEOs transformed the annual Meramec Holiday Tournament at St. Louis Community College – Meramec into the Coaches vs. Cancer Tournament. For the cancer activist CEO, that means 16 teams of athletes and an arena (capacity 2,000) full of fans gathered together to have their cancer awareness heightened.
“With each of the kids, we talk about the importance of cancer prevention and awareness,” Baxter said, “and they take that message back to their families and schools. Thousands of people, over the course of the Christmas holidays, hear messages of cancer prevention and awareness.”
Baxter forged this partnership with Norm Stewart, Mizzou basketball legend who survived colon cancer and founded Coaches vs. Cancer. Stewart’s Mizzou teams won more games in his 32 seasons as head coach (1967-1999) than the team had won in the 60 previous years of the basketball program’s history.
Stewart’s story is another reminder that people diagnosed with cancer can get well. He underwent invasive surgery and chemotherapy following the 1989-90 season, when he was diagnosed, and returned to coaching Mizzou the following season. It was as a colon cancer survivor that Stewart coached a Tigers team that went a perfect 14-0 in conference play in 1994, earning him College Coach Of The Year honors.
Baxter credits the College Basketball Hall of Fame coach with providing one of the “ah ha!” moments that guided his activism on the issue.
“I asked Norm if he had any advice, and he said, ‘You need to do what you can do.’” The advice seems obvious enough on the face of it, but Baxter – an enormous fan of NCAA basketball – milked this simple advice like one of the Confucian analects.
“Not try, but do,” the CEO interpreted the coach. “And don’t tell somebody to do it. You do it.”
Stewart drafted Baxter onto the national board of Coaches vs. Cancer, so now the CEO is reaping personal rewards as a basketball fan, in addition to the humanitarian high he clearly gets from his cancer activism. Prominently displayed in Baxter’s corner office at Ameren is a basketball autographed by some of the greatest college basketball coaches of our time, which tends to get a new autograph added at every national board meeting.
“Every year, I get to sit down with all of these NCAA coaches, and I am in heaven,” Baxter said. “I have the opportunity to see existing and retired coaches, and listen to them tell basketball stories. I am like a kid in a candy store.”
Currently, Baxter is raising awareness and selling tables for the Illumination Gala on April 11, a benefit for the Siteman Cancer Center at the Ritz-Carlton, which he and his wife Cindy Baxter are co-chairing with Suzie and Dave Spence. For information, visit http://illuminationgala.org/index.html.
For more information on CEOs Against Cancer, visit http://www.acsworkplacesolutions.com/ceosagainstcancer.asp.
Follow this reporter on Twitter @chriskingstl.
