INTERVIEW WITH DOUG CONANT
Forbes/Leadership
Doug Conant:To me it’s a grow or die world. It’s very Darwinian, and there is no in between—you either grow or you die. At Campbell Soup Company, we had become the world’s largest and best canned soup manufacturer and our organization was extremely proud of how many cans we could run per minute. In the meantime, packages were changing and consumers were changing. The microwave had been invented in 1946 yet we did not have microwavable packaging until 2003, two years after I became CEO. We were very focused on being a great canner, and to a degree, had lost track of what our consumers were looking for. They were looking for quick convenient meals. All of a sudden, we unlocked the potential to take soup to work or to school, and that convenience platform created a multi-hundred million dollar business that helped us grow sales ten of the eleven years that I was CEO. So, a simple “close-to-home” innovation connected to meeting a consumer need – in this case, convenience – helped change the profile of our company. Similarly, we brought scaled innovation to the category in terms of health and wellness, variety, taste, and value. In addition, we innovated at the point-of-purchase with gravity-fed shelving that greatly improved shop ability for the consumer. Collectively, these innovations revitalized the category during my tenure as CEO.
Reiss:Talk about the connection between culture and innovation?
Conant: The key is to stimulate superior employee engagement.To drive engagement, we first must acknowledge the reality that every employee faces: they’re overwhelmed by life. Most large organization employees have over 200 emails per day and 20 to 30 text messages, not to mention they actually have to talk to real people on the phone and meet with real people in meetings. Employees in smaller organizations have similar challenges. For the most part, they are all diligently trying to meet the needs of the various constituencies within their organization and beyond, every day. They also have complex personal lives where they’re trying to meet the needs of their family, their children, their parents, their extended families, and the community-at-large. To me, the first role of a leader is to acknowledge the challenges every employee faces as they try to juggle all of these competing interests. Also, they are juggling these interests in three time zones – they are trying to deliver in the “Present,” while honoring the “Past” and simultaneously trying to set the table for an even more prosperous “Future.” Once the leader acknowledges these challenges, they need to earnestly and visibly help create an environment that better helps employees deal with them. In my experience, as the leader earnestly works to improve the environment for the employees, over time the employees more earnestly work to advance the agenda of the enterprise. This process creates a platform for superior employee engagement where employees get both their heads and their hearts fully “in the game,” attacking their work in a more spirited and collaborative way. I have found, the more engaged they become, the more creative and innovative they can be and the more value we can create together.
Reiss:What advice do you have for leaders about innovation?
Conant: I learned a valuable lesson from studying an amazing woman, Margaret Rudkin, the founder of Pepperidge Farm. At the end of every meeting she held, she was known to say, ‘That’s good. What’s next?’ She became famous for saying, “What’s next?” I advise all leaders to bring this ‘What’s next?’ thinking to the table every day. It drives forward thinking, innovation, and ultimately success. Summing up the future of CEOs and innovation, Anthony Marshall, Global CEO Study Program Director, IBM said, “Business has never moved faster than it does today. With all of this constant change, innovation is absolutely critical to create and sustain new business value. Customers with rapidly changing attitudes need to be brought into innovation activities. To successfully innovate, business needs that right organization and the right processes, but mostly it’s about people—having the right incentives and the right organizational culture. It’s critical for organizations to open up to be both systematic and systemic in the way they approach innovation.”