Bette Nesmith Graham for USD $47.5 million in 1979. At the time, her company employed 200 people and made 25 million bottles of Liquid Paper per year. Bette Nesmith died on May 12, 1980, at the age of 56, in Richardson, Texas. From the start, Graham ran her company with a unique combination of spirituality, egalitarianism, and pragmatism. Raised a Methodist, Graham converted to Christian Science in 1942, and this faith inspired the development of her corporate "Statement of Policy". Part-code of ethics, part-business philosophy, it covered everything from her belief in a "Supreme Being" to a focus on decentralized decision making and
Bette Nesmith Graham an emphasis on product quality over profit motive. She also believed that women could bring a more nurturing and humanistic quality to the male world of business, and did so herself by including a greenbelt with a fish pond, an employee library, and a childcare center in her new company headquarters in 1975. Her only son, musician Michael Nesmith (best known as a member of The Monkees), inherited half of his mother's estate of over $50 million. A portion financed the Gihon Foundation which established the Council on Ideas, a think tank with a retreat center located north of Santa