This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is our American stories, and now it's time for our series,

Do the Right Thing, which revolves around ethical dilemmas,

and always sponsored by the great folks at the Daniels Fund.

Robbie brings us the story of a man who gave up the chance to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company

because of one man's character.

At the age of only 23, Tim Luliet got the opportunity to work at Ford Motors, with

industry icons like Lee Iacocca and Henry Ford II.

There, he quickly rose to management level.

Later, when he was offered what most would see as a life-changing opportunity, he turned

it down to work with one man,

racing and auto manufacturing legend Roger Penske, the current owner of the Indianapolis

Motor Speedway, whose company is worth over $1.5 billion.

I was going to go become chairman of federal mogul and I needed a, I needed references.

You know, it's a normal process.

So I asked my neighbor, a guy named Roger Penske, if he would be one of the references

for me.

And he said, yeah, but only if you have dinner with me tonight.

I said, okay.

And he said, look, for his a lot of reasons. He says, I need somebody to come in and help me run this business. I'll be happy to be a reference, but if you want to come in and help me operate some of the myriad of businesses that Penske had grown and clean him up, he said, I'd be happy to, you know, find you a spot here to do that.

So I said back at my wife, I said, I here can be the chairman, CEO of a Fortune 500 company,

...