In 1980, as he was approaching a new role running P&G’s entire European operation, John sat down and wrote out the principles that he had learned from his mentors and observed from numerous Procter & Gamble executives.
That 40+ year old document is too good to not share, and so John readily agreed that we share it recently in this blog. And sharing the original, brilliant advice is just a start! John and I spent time discussing his Characteristics of Successful P&G Managers and that discussion follows.
Steve: Thank you for spending time discussing Some Characteristics of Successful P&G Managers, a document you wrote in 1980. I was thinking about this document in the context of the history of Procter & Gamble, a great company that has always been known for people development. Yet, for some reason or another, you sat down and captured this important document on paper yourself in 1980. What was going on that prompted you to capture these thoughts at the time?
John Pepper: At the time I was being given a significant increase in responsibility moving from the United States to run all of our European business, nine subsidiaries, and I thought this would be a very good time for me to be very intentional in putting down everything I’d learned in the 17 years I’d been at P&G, and even before that in the Navy. I think that’s what prompted it at that time. I’d thought about these subjects before, but I thought, “I’ll put it down on paper.”
Steve: All of a sudden you were in charge of leading the business in nine countries, all with different cultures and different levels of history with Procter and Gamble. What role did culture play in your ability to help shape the business and teams in those regions?
John Pepper: Let me answer that in two ways. One, I had been greatly helped by the fact that I had previously worked in several of those countries. I had the great benefit and joy of experiencing different cultures. I’d developed a deep appreciation of two things. One, that the cultures were different, and two, despite the differences, there was a unity about the principles and values and commitments within Procter and Gamble that overshadowed and permeated all of them.
I knew at that moment we had a particularly big challenge, and that was organizing our countries on a European basis rather than have them each be their own individual fiefdoms, which was the way it was when I first went to Europe. Each country had operated its own way, very deliberately. Each had its own plant. Each had its own buying department. Each had its own product formulations.
We came to realize that to grow, we really needed to work better together. There were potential benefits in technologies, raw materials buying, manufacturing and many other areas.
My task, my opportunity, was to develop a single culture in a situation where many people didn’t want to change. They wanted to keep things totally within their control.
And that was probably the biggest challenge that I always faced during those next four years, in the first half of the ’80s.
Steve: When I was rereading the successful characteristics of P&G managers document, I noticed that in addition to the eight characteristics you identified, you also called attention to a series of specific traits like wisdom and courage and confidence. The fourth one was joyful, and I just lit up when I saw that because it’s not the kind of thing you see in a lot of Fortune 100 company documents. I’d love to get your perspective on what you were thinking when you wrote it and how you think about it today.
John Pepper: Well, I think about it the same way I did when I wrote it, which is it is so important. The work we commit ourselves to can be hard and exhausting. It’s important to take joy in it, to be able to express that joy, not detached from realism, not detached, of course, from dealing with tough issues, but you’ve got to take joy in what you’re doing, joy in the service you provide, joy in the victories, joy in having the opportunity to deal with other people who you really respect and have come to like.
I found an enormous amount of joy in my work at Procter & Gamble. There was joy when I went to a Procter and Gamble plant and I could observe what people were doing or when participating with a customer team in an important partner meeting.
I’ll always remember that day during a particularly difficult stretch of business when I received a crystal clear piece of advice. It was in the midst of a very challenging time in our US business. Several new brands that had been launched weren’t doing well. We were having to take our profit forecast down because of that. And one day a person I respected said to me, “John, I have a piece of advice for you.”
I said, “What is it, Norm?”
He said, “You ought to smile more. You ought to smile more.”
Wow, that really caught me up short because inside I felt good, but it was clear I was letting the weight of this profit situation get me down and looked sullen. I think people were discouraged by that.
Steve: I think our emotions radiate out from us in any situation. And they impact whoever’s around us.
John Pepper: They absolutely have impact. Eisenhower once told a story about when he was Supreme Allied Commander in WW2. One of his generals was moping around and it was having a negative impact on morale. Eisenhower was blunt. He said, “Get over it. Your job isn’t to share misery about how you’re feeling. Your job is to encourage the troops on how we’re going to win, how we’re going to achieve our objective.”
I think it’s important to never avoid facing up to reality, yet at the same time to also express positivity. Everybody loves somebody who’s positive. If there’s a problem, they’re right on it. We’re going to figure together how to make it work, figure it out. What have we learned? What are we going to do to make it better?
One time when we were talking, you asked if I looked back today at things I wrote about 42 years ago, whether there’s anything I’d change. There’s nothing I’d take away and say, “That’s not important.” I’d include them all, but there are two real points of emphasis I’d make.
Steve: I’m all ears!
John Pepper: Of course, I would continue to put “integrity” in capital letters and flashing lights, doing the right thing, absolutely fundamental.
But behind that, I would talk about two other important leadership characteristics. One is courage. The courage to go against the grain, to go for a big win that’s not certain, to pursue an idea, either your own or somebody else’s, even one that some would think is a cockamamie idea.
The other is persistence. Persistence in being prepared, persistence in not giving up.
The downside, the risk of persistence, is sometimes you’ll persist against ideas that just, in the end, just aren’t the right ideas. They won’t work, and there is that risk and you have to keep alert to that, but more often, much more often, I’ve found this idea of persistence in what you want to get done to be absolutely essential to success at every level. We would not have major innovations in Procter and Gamble like Bounty, Charmin and Pantene, if it were not for the courage and the persistence, not initially of the CEO, but of somebody in R&D who, despite initial failures and doubts, kept saying and persisting and having the courage to say, “Trust me. Trust me. Don’t give up on this. I can make it work.”
Steve: Courage seems to be incredibly important at every level of an organization. If you’re a more junior executive and you see something that isn’t quite right, it takes courage to speak up.
John Pepper: It does. It takes a great deal of character to speak up not just once, but perhaps two and three times. Some people who do this probably wouldn’t even call it courage. I think it is both courage and persistence.
It comes back to having a burning conviction in something that you think is extremely important. If you have that, you still need a lot of courage and persistence to keep advancing it, to keep learning.
Steve: In your document, you talked about the importance of people doing their job the best they can do, and not thinking a lot about what’s next, about being promoted, about the next job. I’ve thought a lot about this challenge over the years because it’s so easy for folks earlier in their careers to become fixated on their progression and sometimes lose sight a little bit of that notion of just do a great job and the world will find you. The world will find a way to make sure that you have other opportunities to contribute. Do you have any advice to younger executives about how they can stay in the moment and not spend too much time thinking about getting promoted?
John Pepper: That’s a great question because I hear young people today, including at Procter and Gamble, talk about how I can get more political visibility, how I can be politically visible. Embedded in that comment is a certain assumption that maybe if I just do a good job, people won’t notice and I won’t move ahead the way I’d like to. And most people will want to move ahead. They don’t want to settle and spend the rest of their career doing just what they are doing now. They want to grow.
I definitely have some thoughts on this. One, it depends, indeed, on where you work. If you’re in a company where really the driving force is to find young talent to move ahead, it’s a different situation. At Procter and Gamble, it’s self evident. The company depends on people coming in and growing with the company.
In my case, I’d say 90% of my effort was to do the job as well as I could. I was also thinking two other things that probably helped. One is I have to be clear about what can I do to help my boss do better in his or her job. What is it that she needs? Is there anything else that I could be doing to make her job easier or better?
The other thing I thought about is looking at the next step up, what skillset would I benefit from developing more than I am capable of right now? I would think about what would that next role require. I’d be thinking about that and what that might be, like being better at public speaking or working well with other disciplines, other functions. I’d think about that. How can that be applied to what I’m doing now? How can I excel at my current role and prep for the next thing? I’d be intentional thinking about how do I need to develop for the next assignment.
I wasn’t going into people and saying, “Why wasn’t I promoted now?” I was often promoted faster than I thought I would be, but not always. There were a couple of times when somebody moved ahead. I’d look at it and think, “Wait a minute. What’s going on?” But, with consideration I’d return to the point of view that said, “You just keep doing what you’re doing and do it better.” It’s faith in the system. It’s faith in people. It’s another element of trust.
I would also have frank conversations with my boss like I would with a teacher in school. What can I be doing better? What can I be doing better than I am today from your perspective, with the simple idea of I want to do better, not that I’m looking for a tip to jump ahead.
Steve: When you think about your characteristics of successful P&G managers, how applicable would those principles be to any of the other really enormously successful organizations you’ve contributed to, like Disney or Yale? Can you just pick them up and pluck them down and they ought to work? Or would you need some fine tuning for the cultures of those organizations?
John Pepper: Well, you certainly need to fine tune how you apply them, make them operational, respecting the culture. But they all apply. The culture at Yale would vary by which part of the University you looked at, from professors and administrators to front line workers and union members. There are aspects of the cultures in each that are the same, but when I came into Yale, I once had a faculty member write me. “Mr. Pepper, I’m really glad you’re on campus. I think you’re going to teach us a lot, but I have a piece of advice to you. Don’t be using those terms that are coming from Procter and Gamble. If you do, I’m telling you you’re going to turn off every faculty member.”
I took the point, and I wasn’t going to abandon the principles, but I would think about them in a way that I felt they would have the effect that I wanted to make a difference.
I wasn’t an employee at Disney, I was on the board. But I think one thing in the Disney experience that goes back to what we’ve been talking about is the importance of being extremely decisive, crystal clear in your strategic choices.
Bob Iger didn’t write much about strategy, but his strategy was crystal clear in his head when he communicated and when he operated. There were really three choices. Choice number one, get more creative content. We get more creative content, we can build on that. That led to Pixar and the Marvel acquisition. The second choice was making Disney a major force in China. The third was to be first using new technology like having ESPN available on cellphones. He had a clear mission for the company, taking advantage of new technology. That’s a really good strategy.
Steve: It’d be interesting to see, with Mr. Iger having resumed leadership at Disney, what transpires. I think we can already see him reinvigorating some of those principles that you mentioned that he had years ago like the content principle. They went from having great content a few years ago to simply having a real lot of content, and there’s a big difference. It sounds like, by seeing what he is saying and doing that there’s a new content quality sheriff in town again.
John Pepper: I think you’ve sized it up just right, Steve. He faces some huge decisions; Disney has always been quality over quantity. The other position that’s self evident will be pricing. It’s not just going to be a number of subscribers game. It’s going to be about profitability for this thing. Don’t chase the number of subscribers, even though that will remain important, right out the window. The product must be excellent.
John Pepper spent much of his career at Procter & Gamble, becoming CEO of the company in 1995. Following his time at P&G, he went on to serve as Board Chair at Walt Disney as well as Board roles at other fine companies and served as Board Chair at Yale. During his tenure as CEO, John led Procter & Gamble through a period of significant growth and expansion, introducing new products and expanding the company’s global footprint. He also spearheaded efforts to improve employee diversity and inclusivity, earning recognition for his commitment to corporate social responsibility.
Notably, John also co-founded the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, a museum and educational center dedicated to telling the story of the Underground Railroad and the struggle for freedom and civil rights in America.
