Reverse Mentorship

When you were at P&G, you were involved in the Glad products joint venture with Clorox. What competitive advantage did that provide and how important are these types of strategic relationships in business?

Yes, because our invention has now been in existence for almost 18 years. It's amazing.

That's a long time.

Yeah, very much so. And we're two competitors, you know, which makes it even more remarkable but we work together on this. It's pretty basic, first of all, there's a strong cultural fit between those two companies, and what each party brought to this was complimentary. So at Clorox, we had a brand name and a business and manufacturing assets and customer relationships, but we were in need of innovation and that's what P&G had. P&G had some technology that could be applied to, in this case, our Glad business, trash bags, food wraps, so it became a logical combination to bring the two together.

You know, today, innovation is everything in our business. And what this gives our business is more innovation for consumers and customers, delivered faster. I think that in today's world, it's fast companies beating small companies, and not big companies -- or fast companies beating slow companies, not big companies beating small companies. And the way to be faster is to create a network of partnerships. At, Clorox, about 9 out of 10 innovations that we bring to market every year have an external partnership component, gives us access to more ideas and we're able to bring more innovation to market, better ideas, bigger ideas to market than our competitors. That's really what it is about, and in many ways, the old way of working where everything happens in an ivory tower is long gone. It's about networks. It's about open innovation. It's about coming together with companies big and small.