Bountiful Positivity

Speaking of failure then, is there a single big failure that you had that stands out in your mind and what did you learn from it?

My God, I've had many failures.

We all have.

I'll express the things that, oh my God, I wish I did this better and this is what I learned from it, but maybe thinking back a number of years ago, I was running a business when I was at P&G, the Bounty paper towel business and I was brought in to do a turnaround, it was a $1.4 billion kind of market leader in that paper towel category but was struggling, and I was in the middle of the turnaround of that business and P&G had gotten through a tough time when they changed CEOs, and during that CEO transition, BusinessWeek came in to do a story and I think the headline was somewhere along the lines or the sub-headline was, "If you want to know what's wrong with P&G, you have to not look any further than the Bounty business."

Oh, ouch, that's what you are running.

That was the business I was running, and I think the normal human instinct, I wanted to crawl under a rock when I saw that article, then the next instinct was, I wanted to write the editor and talk about all the inaccuracies in that story, but then if I stepped back, what I realized if I was feeling that bad, we probably had about 2000 team members on Bounty, they probably are also feeling equally bad, so instead, what I did is I wrote the entire team kind of a note on the BusinessWeek article and the topic, I expressed what I was really feeling, I was saying there were a number of things that I thought were inaccurate, they had a number of things right, and it helped reinforce kind of the strategy and the path that we're on in terms of really making sure people understood the difference between Bounty and paper towels, what our innovation focus was, what we had to do for value, the core tenets of our turnaround plan and reinforcing this as the path you're on, and I was very happy, obviously pleased that we were able to grow sales, I think, over $300 million after-tax profit, over 100 million, we had clear market leadership with that category. But I always go back to that moment where somebody kind of almost punched you in the gut and you had to really step back and say, okay, what it is it we are about and how do I make sure the rest of the team stays focused on the plan that we need? And so, that was a very public failure but one that I'm also proud of because of what we were able to do together.

And I would imagine it also taught you a lesson about, because your first instinct was to be defensive and say, "Well, you're wrong, you got that wrong, you got that wrong, you got that wrong," but you really took the time to step back, focus, and analyze.

Yeah, and that's so important. I think anytime we have adversity, being able to kind of stay calm, collected, and really take a look at other perspectives and put yourself in someone else's shoes from a different angle I think just invariably makes a plan much stronger, it gives you much greater both focus as well as resolve in terms of the things you need to do.