Good morning. Welcome to the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Shareholders of Oshkosh Corporation. I am Craig Omtvedt, Director and Chairman of the Board. We will begin with the official business of the meeting as outlined in our proxy materials. After we adjourn the formal meeting, we'll receive a brief update from Wilson Jones, our President and Chief Executive Officer. Before we get into things, I must say I am honored to serve as the Chairman of this great corporation. I mean, we've got a great strategy, we've got great people, and I think you'll hear more of that from Wilson. In fact, I know you will. So with that, this meeting is now called to order. Joining me today are the other directors of Oshkosh Corporation as well as our company executives.
So I'd like to recognize our directors at this time and thank each of them for their service, both personally and on behalf of the shareholders. So would each of you please stand as I introduce you? First, Keith Allman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Masco Corporation. Needs no introduction, but Wilson Jones, our President and Chief Executive Officer. Leslie Kenne, retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General. Kimberly Metcalf-Kupres, who is the retired Chief Marketing Officer of Johnson Controls. Stephen Newlin, Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors of Univar Inc. Raymond Odierno, Retired General of the U.S. Army. Duncan Palmer, Global Chief Financial Officer of Cushman & Wakefield. Sandra Rowland, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Harman International Industries. And John Shiely, Retired Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Briggs & Stratton Corporation.
Retiring and not here today, Peter Hamilton, Retired Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Brunswick Corporation, who has served on our board since July 2011. Scott Wallace, a Retired Commanding General of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, who has served on our board since February 2011. Lastly is Steven Mizell, Chief Human Resource Officer of Merck, who has served on our board since July of 2015. He is not standing for reelection due to demands of a new position and scheduling conflicts, and he also is not here today. So we'd very much like to thank Mr. Hamilton, Mr. Wallace, and Mr. Mizell for their many years of service and truly tremendous contributions to the board. Sitting next to me, Ignacio Cortina, Executive Vice President, General Counsel, and Corporate Secretary of the company.
Also here today are Sandy Heft and Bruce Arensmeier of Deloitte & Touche, our company's independent public accountants. We are holding this meeting for the purposes stated in the notice of the annual meeting. Ignacio, please introduce the formal portion of the meeting.
Thank you, Craig. This 2019 Annual Meeting of Shareholders is convened in accordance with the notice and proxy statement first distributed on December 21st, 2018, to shareholders of record as of December 13th. We have appointed Gary Farrar as our Independent Inspector of Election for today's meeting, and he is present today. Mr. Farrar has informed me that at least 89% of the stock of Oshkosh of record as of December 13th is represented at this meeting either in person or by proxy. This means that a quorum is present and the legal requirements to proceed with this meeting have been met. The polls are now open and will remain open until we officially close them later in the meeting.
If you are a shareholder of record and wish to vote your shares in person, you may obtain a ballot now from the Inspector of Elections table in the back of the room. If anyone is voting on the authority of a legal proxy, please note that fact on the ballot. You should give both the proxy and the ballot to the Inspector of Elections. Shareholders who have already voted by proxy, including over the internet or by phone, do not need to complete a ballot.
All right, thank you, Ignacio. The first item of business to come before this meeting is the election of directors for terms to expire at the 2020 Annual Meeting. The proxy materials identified the Board of Directors nominees and described their backgrounds, skills, qualifications. Ignacio, will you please read the names of the Board of Directors nominees to be voted on by the shareholders?
The names of the Board of Directors nominees are Keith Allman, Wilson Jones, Leslie Kenne, Kimberly Metcalf-Kupres, Stephen Newlin, Raymond Odierno, Craig Omtvedt, Duncan Palmer, Sandra Rowland, and John Shiely.
Thank you, Ignacio. The nominations are closed. The second item of business to come before this meeting is the ratification of the appointment of Deloitte and Touche as the company's independent auditors for the fiscal year ending September 30th, 2019. The third item of business to come before this meeting is the consideration of a resolution to approve on an advisory basis the compensation of our executive officers named on page 39 of the proxy statement. The fourth item of business to come before this meeting is to consider a shareholder proposal included in the proxy statement for this meeting regarding shareholder action by written consent. I will recognize Lee Splitt, the proxy holder of the sponsor of the proposal, who may introduce this proposal and make a brief statement. So please, Lee.
Thank you very much. Proposal four, Shareholders' Right to Act by Written Consent, sponsored by John Chevedden of Redondo Beach, California. Shareholders request that our Board of Directors undertake such steps as may be necessary to permit written consent by shareholders entitled to cast the minimum number of votes that would be necessary to authorize the action at a meeting at which all shareholders entitled to vote thereon were present and voting. This written consent is to be consistent with applicable law and consistent with giving shareholders the fullest power to act by written consent. This includes shareholder ability to initiate any appropriate topic for written consent. Taking action by written consent in place of a special meeting is a means shareholders can use to raise important matters outside the normal annual meeting cycle and avoid the cost of a special meeting.
This proposal topic won majority shareholder support at 13 major companies in a single year. This included 67% support at both Allstate and Sprint. A shareholder proposal on the same topic won 49% support from Oshkosh shareholders a few years ago. With Oshkosh shareholders' impressive 49% support a few years ago, management mentioned the right of shareholders to call a special meeting. However, shareholders were not made aware that to exercise this right can mean that it may be necessary to contact 20% or 30% of shareholders in a short period of time. Many shareholders who are convinced that a special meeting should be called can make a small paperwork error due to the dense legalese in our bylaws. This would disqualify them from counting toward the ownership threshold that is needed for a special meeting.
This is why taking action by written consent is an important related item so that shareholder input can be effectively expressed to the Board of Directors. The intention of this proposal is that shareholders will not need to make use of it because its mere existence will be an important additional incentive that will help ensure that the company is well overseen by the Board of Directors. This is especially important because our stock fell from $95 to $62 in 2018, and one of our directors received 100 times as many negative votes as certain other directors in 2018. So please do vote yes, shareholder right to act by written consent, proposal four. Thank you very much.
Thank you for your comments. Appreciate it. This completes the items to be voted on at today's meeting. The polls for voting are now closed. Ignacio, please proceed with the vote and provide a report on the results.
Thank you. Craig and I received proxies authorizing us to vote shares on the items of business of today's meeting, and we have voted these shares accordingly. Based on a preliminary tabulation from the Inspector of Elections, I can report as follows as to the items of business at today's meeting. Shareholders have elected all 10 director nominees. Shareholders have ratified the appointment of Deloitte & Touche as the company's independent auditors for fiscal 2019. Shareholders have approved our named executive officer compensation. And finally, shareholders have voted against the shareholder proposal regarding shareholder action by written consent. The final tally of votes certified by the Inspector of Elections will be included with the minutes of this meeting and made publicly available with the SEC in the next few days.
Thank you, Ignacio. As there is no further business to come before this meeting, I declare the meeting adjourned. I must admit this has been a pretty efficient session. So now Ignacio has a brief important announcement.
Thank you, Craig. Wilson Jones will now report on the company's activities and provide other information regarding the company's operations. Today's presentation is being webcast. The audio replay will be available on our website for approximately 12 months. The remarks that follow, including the videos shown at this meeting, include statements that we believe to be forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks that could cause actual results to be materially different. Those risks include, among others, matters that we have described in our annual report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC on November 20th, 2018, our Q1 report on Form 10-Q of fiscal year 2019 filed on January 30th, 2019, and other filings we may make with the SEC.
We disclaim any obligation to update these forward-looking statements, which may not be updated until our next quarterly earnings press release, if at all. References in his remarks to a quarter or a year are to our fiscal quarter or fiscal year unless stated otherwise.
All right, thank you again, Ignacio. I'd like to thank all of you, our shareholders, for your continued confidence and support. As I said at the beginning, this really, truly is a great company. We have a tremendous board, a strong and capable management team, and we believe we have a strategy that's going to drive value. Okay, so with that, would you now welcome Wilson Jones, and we will turn this over to him.
Thank you.
Well, good morning and welcome to our annual meeting. I also want to welcome our webcast guests that have joined us today. We appreciate you being here with us today, even though you're a little remote for us. I want to echo what Craig said about our board. We're very fortunate to have a board of directors like we have. They work very close with us and guiding us, directing us, and really looking out for the shareholders. So I want to share my appreciation for this board and the great work that you do and how you work well with our leadership team. I'm very proud of our leaders today, and I think what you'll see at the end of my presentation is how these two groups are working really well to operate this company in an efficient manner and a very performing manner.
We'll share some of those results with you toward the end. One thing I want to do today that's a little different than we do at the annual meeting is share with you an update of what we're doing around People First. I'm sure you've heard a little bit that we're focused today more on people. To kick this off, we prepared a short video for you.
At Oshkosh Corporation, we're not just talking about a people-first culture. We're living it in some of the most innovative and effective ways, starting with our team members' well-being. Health screenings, wellness seminars, and financial tools are just a few of the ways that we're promoting wholesale well-being.
I know that cancer survival rates are three times higher when caught early, and it means a lot to me that my company is willing to engage in my family's health and well-being. We offer a variety of learning tools for our team members, foundationally with the Continuous Improvement Management System, fundamentally with your Oshkosh University or the U, and a wide variety of focused learning opportunities to strengthen anyone's contribution to their role.
As a people leader within Oshkosh Corporation, it really helps me to be able to know what's available to develop my team, to help them feel engaged and excited about working here at Oshkosh. Because of the tools in the U, I feel much more equipped to have those conversations and really provide that development for my team.
Being part of our customers' lives and the communities in which we live can give our team members a grounded sense of purpose that can't often be found on the job alone. Oshkosh team members through our company are involved with charities, causes, and movements all over the world.
The connection that Oshkosh has between its people and the communities where they work and live is so strong and so beneficial to charities like ours.
Through MOVE, the continuous improvement management system and comprehensive strategy deployment, we maintain focus on the customer throughout the entire product lifecycle. We invest in emerging capability to manage the complexity in our business and maintain disciplined capital allocation.
A company this large, you can probably imagine it has many moving parts, so it's easy to get lost in the shuffle. So it's inspiring to see new processes being implemented. We're always reaching higher.
We're taking a proactive problem-solving approach to our supply base. Our Supplier Academy is designed to partner with suppliers to help them continuously improve while Oshkosh continues to improve and grow.
I feel that the Academy approach was effective for Amerequip. It has allowed us to learn and implement a plan for every part, as well as gather more information about TPMs and preventive maintenance.
We lead our industries not simply through market share, but by innovating safety and productivity for our customers who are also making a difference. A perfect example is in Pierce's CARE Initiative. This is a partnership with the Firefighter Cancer Support Network, providing firefighters and their families the awareness and immediate resources to protect them from carcinogen exposure.
One of our department goals is to improve firefighter health and safety. As we evaluate equipment and apparatus for our department, we want to ensure that the manufacturers that we purchase from are dedicated to improving the health and safety of our firefighters.
As you can see, our people are involved in a variety of activities in our company. I think it's fair to say that there's a lot more than what you saw there today, but that's a sampling of some really good things going on within the company. If we could dial back a little over 3 years ago, our leadership team, as we do on a regular basis, was evaluating some critical success factors going forward. If you think about 3.5 years ago, we saw unemployment rates lowering. We saw markets getting better. Talent acquisition became much more of a challenge than previous years. When we talked about it, it was obvious to us, and this will be a Captain Obvious statement for you, but the single most important asset in a company or business is people.
We wanted to look at, okay, what are we doing around people? What is our current state? If you followed us for all these years, you know we were performing culture back then. In my opinion, we weren't a bad culture, but in the spirit of continuous improvement, we thought we could make the culture better. When we evaluated really what was making companies vault ahead of other companies, it's where they had added that healthy ingredient. They were both a healthy and performing culture. So we set out a quest with a future state in mind of having that healthy, performing culture at the same time developing businesses in our local areas that are destination workplaces, where we're the preferred employer. You all know us.
We're not in metropolitan cities, so we have to be one of the best employer propositions in the areas where we work. We looked at a lot of data. Some of it was hard to look at, but important for us to understand where we were, more importantly where we didn't want to be, and where we wanted to go. This is some macro data that we looked at. Again, I don't think this was real prevalent in our company. We probably had some pockets of this, but if you think about a company that has three-fourths of their team not engaged, I'm guessing that company is not performing very well. If you look at the upper right, seven out of eight team members go home at night feeling that no one listens to them or cares about them.
They're coming in every day with their hands and their head, but they're leaving their heart in the car. So how productive is that going to be? What's that experience like that they take home for their families and their children, their spouses? You look to 60% of people reported that work is a significant source of stress. And then here's an eye-opening one. On Monday morning, heart attack rates increased by over 20%. So what we learned in looking at what we didn't want to be is that a lack of people-first practices not only makes the workplace very hectic, very stressful, but it also can affect the team members' lives, their health. There's a Mayo Clinic quote. They did some research on this subject, and it says your supervisor actually has more influence over your health than your doctor.
But it was a journey that we went through some of this data, and we studied a lot more than what you're seeing here, but it was very revealing for our team to say, "We don't want to do that to our people. We want our people to have a good experience at work so it carries over into their own personal life." Let's look at some more positive things. People who are happier at work are 12% more productive. Now, this is a study that I disagree with a little bit because I think if you have a place where you enjoy coming into work every day, you feel like you're part of the mission, you're part of the engagement strategy, you're going to be more than 12% productive than an unhappy team member. But we'll go with this for today. What it does, though, it drives loyalty.
It drives that good retention of your top talent, and it also allows you to recruit more talent. It allows people to be creative, innovative, which helps us reach those stretch goals that are so important to you, our shareholders. So then the question is, what makes people happy? Gallup did a survey, kind of a wide survey, 155 countries that they looked at. Number one determinant of happiness came back loud and clear, a good job, meaningful work with people who care. Now, if you think about our company, we've got the meaningful work. We protect the warfighter, the firefighter. We keep people working safe at heights. We help build cities and keep those cities clean. So we have that part of the equation. But we wanted to add with that caring, healthy component that we felt like we could improve. So what did we do?
Well, I can tell you what we didn't do. We didn't get the leaders around the table and say, "We're going to do these 10 initiatives, and it's going to transform our culture." What we did is we went to our customer, our team members, and we asked them, "What do we need to do to transform this culture to a healthier, more enjoyable culture that still performs like Oshkosh always does?" We did it through engagement surveys. We did it through global town halls, different types of listening sessions where we were listening for understanding. And what our team came back with was really three simple focus areas. They said, "Engage us, develop us, and connect us." They wanted to be engaged in developing processes. They wanted to be engaged with a seat at the table to be heard.
They wanted to be engaged in developing or transforming this culture. They wanted to be provided opportunities for both personal and professional growth. And they wanted to better connect with each other, with our customers, and with our community. So that's what we've been focused on the last three years, is working on the engage, develop, and connect. On the engagement side, I'll hit a highlight of each one of these areas here. When we talked to our team, they said, "This is a big team. We have 15,000 people around the world, and we get that we need to be a one-team concept, but we need some community within the community." And so we started employee resource groups. In 2014, we started the Oshkosh Women's Network.
This has been a really nice program for women in our company to network, to gather mentoring opportunities, and they've developed a leadership insight series that meets monthly with bringing speakers in from outside the company and from inside the company. I think we're starting to add some chapters now, some other segments. Again, it's not just for women. They invite everyone in the company. It's an inclusive network, and we all certainly enjoy the leadership insight series. Young Professionals Network. Our young professionals are special, right? We love our young professionals, but we want to help them participate in a variety of professional, personal, and social development opportunities. A really important ERG for us is the Oshkosh Corporation Military Network, and we're committed to the development of over 900 team members that serve or are serving in our armed services.
Their objective is to support the full range of diversity associated with our armed services. Now, I'll tell you too, they're also helping us in a big way in recruiting. We've got a lot of military personnel exiting out of the service, coming into the public sector, and this group is doing a nice job of helping us recruit. Moving on to develop. I said it earlier, but we want our team members to be successful in life, so we look at development holistically. One of the highlights of our U, U Oshkosh University, is a program called Lens of Leadership. We've now focused on the top 340 leaders in our company, basically the director level and above. We're working with them to articulate the purpose and benefits of leading with a people-first mindset.
It helps them understand the personal accountability in taking leadership action for the benefit of the organization as a whole. I like the feedback that we receive from the graduates of this class. The common theme is, "Wow, this is an awesome responsibility we have of leading in a people-first way, but now we're gathering the tools to be more effective at it and understanding our self-awareness so we can plug in and do people-first the right way." Our well-being program focuses on physical, emotional, and financial well-being. It encourages a healthy lifestyle by offering incentives for health screening, tips on nutrition, as well as offering programs for our team to stay physically active. Fidelity provides team members with individualized financial strategies. The last program I'll mention here is called the Oshkosh Excellence Awards. This has been a real successful program. We're through 5 years of this.
It's where team members get together, learn the tools of continuous improvement, deliver continuous improvement events for the company, working across segment, across function, which is one thing they've asked for in those experiences. And then as they turn in these programs, it goes into this judging of awards, and we have a big awards night, but it's first judged on the local level, then it's judged on a regional level, and then it goes to a global level. And each time they win in one of the five categories, our foundation gives them money to donate back to the charity of their choice in their community. So it's really been a win-win-win. If you think about it, the team member wins by learning and having new experiences around continuous improvement. The company benefits from good continuous improvement. That's so important for us to remain competitive.
Then the community wins with the donations going back. So through five years, we've donated over $500,000 to this program. Two years ago, we were recognized by the state of Wisconsin as a workplace of excellence. I'll move on to connect. A lot of things we're doing to connect to our customers and to our community. I'll highlight Feed the Body, Feed the Soul. If you think about Northeast Wisconsin, this is a nice place. But even here in this nice place, we've got over 30% of this population living below the poverty line. So as one of the biggest employers, wherever we're located, we need to make sure we're helping take care of those basic needs in the communities where we live and work. So in this case, we do a concert. We just did a Tom Petty Tribute. It was the last concert we did.
We take the ticket revenue we received from the concert, and we go to Feeding America, and we buy bulk foods. We don't stop there. Then we organize a packing event. We like to have production lines and show people how efficient we are in production. And we set up lines, and we had volunteers from the community come in, trying to build the volunteer base. In this case, we had roughly 1,000 volunteers over about a 14-hour period, and we packaged over 200,000 pounds of bulk food. In one case, we packed that much rice. It went into the 18 counties, the food pantries in Northeast Wisconsin, enough rice for one year of basic needs. So really making a difference in the lives of others extends into what our people are doing and volunteering in the community.
So that's a few of the many things we've got going on to improve our culture. I think the next big step for our culture is work environment. I think most of you know we're building a global headquarters. This is another good step in order for us to remain that preferred employer or that destination workplace. We need a work environment to match all the things that we're doing in our culture. If you look around Oshkosh, you probably know this, but 40 locations, 19 leased, so not very efficient, not very safe, especially with the wonderful weather that we've been having of late. And then the lease and maintenance fees are very high. So this really consolidates us down and gets us really into helps us fit into our People First culture as we look to really providing a work environment that supports our team.
This will create an inviting, engaging setting for not just our team, but also the community. It'll include amenities that foster learning and development. I mentioned earlier the U, Oshkosh University. The second floor building you'll see as we come around is devoted to a training academy, extending the development of our people. Our goal over the first 18 months to 24 months of this program is to get every team member, all 15,000. I've got some HR team looking at me like, "Are you crazy?" But get everyone through our building for one learning or development opportunity. I believe we can do that. We want this to be a headquarters for all, not just a corporate headquarters. How have the People First efforts paid off for our company?
And you saw some of these awards earlier in the video, but I can't help myself but brag a little bit on our team and how we've performed. We were talking last night with our board, and we've had 10 significant awards over the last 12 months. And as you roll back to three years ago when I told you we were just starting our People First journey, we're way ahead of where I thought we'd be at this time from expectations and what we're being recognized for. World's most ethical company, though. That's a special one. Only 135 companies around the world. That's pretty neat, three years in a row. In the next four to six weeks, they'll be announcing their 2019 awards. And not to be overconfident, but I think we've got a good chance of staying on that list and being there for the fourth consecutive year.
So stay tuned for that press release. Fortune's World's Most Admired Companies for the second consecutive year. We recently received the Military Friendly Employer Award, which is very special to us. And then Glassdoor named Oshkosh Corporation as one of the best places to work in 2019, again, for the second consecutive year. And what's special about Glassdoor is it's our people. It's direct feedback from our team. It's not a consultant, an analyst, or a publication. It's coming direct from our team members. So when you add all these up, what's it doing for us? Well, I think it helps our morale. It helps our retention of our talent, and it also helps us recruit more talent. And I'm sure you're saying, "Well, those awards are great, but what does that do for the company? Or is it helping in the financial performance?" And I think it does.
I believe our people-first has delivered results for the shareholders, and it's showing that we can win with more focus on our people. We're still remaining that performing culture, but we've added that healthy component to it. Our financial performance over the past three years has been very good. Revenue has grown at a compounded annual growth rate of 8%. Operating income has grown at a compounded annual growth rate of 18%. And earnings per share has grown at a compounded annual growth rate of almost 30%. In terms of strong free cash flow, we have a strong balance sheet, which provides optionality. Our capital allocation opportunities continue. We'll continue to invest in our core business. We'll look at share repurchases and growing the dividend. Some good news. In 2018, Standard & Poor's upgraded us to an investment-grade rating. It doesn't stop in 2018.
We're off to a good start in 2019. Most of you know we released results last week for our Q1, and adjusted earnings per share exceeded prior year and analyst expectations. All four segments improved operating income margins by 200 basis points or more. The quarter was strong and led by access equipment and fire and emergency. In the quarter, we had revenue growth of 14%, adjusted operating income growth of 72%, and adjusted earnings per share growth of 92%. Our defense team continues to ramp up JLTV production. Our commercial team continues building on the success of its simplification efforts. We repurchased a significant amount of shares in the quarter, $170 million, and we continue to invest in the strength of our growing our people culture. Our plan going forward is to deliver another solid year in 2019.
We're targeting revenue growth of 6%, operating income growth of 9%, and earnings per share growth of 14%. We'll generate $450 million of free cash, which our goal is to return close to 100% of that to you, our shareholders. We plan on achieving JLTV full-rate production in our defense segment, allowing us to receive international orders for JLTV. Our plan in non-defense segments is to continue to leverage the strength in markets and profitably grow where we can. As I close, I want to remind you that Oshkosh Corporation is a different integrated global industrial. Why do I say different? Well, most global industrials don't have a defense business with programs of record out into 2026. We have some diverse in markets around municipal businesses with fire and emergency and refuse collection vehicles. We'll continue to leverage our integrated operations in technology, procurement, simplification, and manufacturing.
We'll stay focused with responsible capital allocation using the strong balance sheet, growing dividend, and share repurchase. Our People First culture will continue to mature and drive performance. Our next step in our culture is to drive that owner's mindset, kind of a founder's mentality. Our people are starting to realize this is their company. So we want that owner's mindset with the insurgency to fight through those issues that we know we're going to have to work through on a day-to-day basis. So that deep connection to the front line, whether that's their customer, their supplier, or maybe their internal customer. All this leads us to say we are well-positioned for success and have a positive long-term outlook. We appreciate you coming today to hear our update. And more importantly, we appreciate your support of the Oshkosh Corporation.
Our investor relations team, Pat Davidson and Jeff Watt, will be in the back of the room if you have any questions as you depart. This will conclude our meeting for the day. Thank you again for being here. Please drive safely. Thank you.