The Talent Masters by Bill Conaty

Author:Bill Conaty [Conaty, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-46027-1
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2010-11-08T16:00:00+00:00

THE BIG PAYOFF

P&G’s strengthened leadership bench left the company well prepared when A. G. Lafley announced his retirement as the aftermath of the financial meltdown was ravaging many companies’ strategies and leadership. Every CEO in the company’s 172-year history has been promoted within. It’s a great tradition, but one that can be dangerous if tradition is the only point.

Lafley and the board approached the succession decision with one overarching goal: to choose the best person for P&G at that point in time. The search started early, as Lafley made talent planning, including CEO succession, part of his ongoing agenda with the board. Directors started tracking candidates soon after Lafley took office, and they got to know them better by visiting them periodically on their own turf. “We put a lot of horses in the race and let them run until we were ready to make a decision,” Lafley says. The list shortened as the planned retirement date neared, but a handful of viable candidates remained.

When the decision point was a couple of years away, Lafley and the board worked with their own HR experts Antoine and Nagrath and with Bill Conaty to refine the criteria for the CEO job. Integrity, character, and values were absolute essentials, and all of the candidates met that test. The remaining criteria were based on scenarios looking forward five to seven years that helped to pinpoint the issues the new CEO would have to contend with and therefore the skills and traits a leader would need to take the company forward. Consumers’ needs were changing and widely varied, and so were opportunities for growth. In developed countries, the economic downturn was pushing consumers toward lower-priced products. Meanwhile, economic growth in emerging markets meant that hundreds of millions of people were gaining the wherewithal to improve the quality of their lives. P&G needed a leader who understood the complexity of meeting diverse consumer needs through both innovation and cost.

McDonald stood out as a candidate well equipped to build on the company’s momentum and consumer focus and take P&G to a new level. In June 2009, he was named chief executive officer, and on January 1, 2010, he became chairman as well, completing the handoff. A West Point graduate who joined P&G in 1980, McDonald expected to spend his whole career in Cincinnati. Instead he developed his leadership skills in a series of assignments in Canada, Japan, Belgium, and the Philippines—where he saw firsthand how P&G products affected people’s lives, sometimes providing affordable health and hygiene benefits that were truly transformational. P&G’s restated purpose—“to touch and improve more people’s lives, in more parts of the world, more completely”—follows directly from McDonald’s global experiential learning, and he has already started down that road. After bringing the cost structure in line with the economic downturn, he announced a new initiative to have one billion additional consumers using P&G products within five years—in China, India, Brazil, Africa. With people such as Melanie Healey and Deb Henretta in the pipeline, P&G is poised to make his vision a reality.

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