John E. Pepper (Walt Disney Company): "Bring the Vision Alive by What You Do, Always with the Aspiration to Figure out How to Do Better, Never with the Attitude that We’ve Solved the Issue, Aren’t We Great"
John Pepper, Chairman of the Board of The Walt Disney Company and retired CEO ofProcter & Gamble, is telling us about the most necessary competencies a good leader should have. According to John there are few of them: ability to form a vision, ability to make right choices, ability to bring a team together along with others.
1. What are the most necessary competencies that a leader should have?
I've always thought of five qualities that to greater or lesser degrees the best leaders that I've ever seen have. The first of them is an ability, personally and working with other people, to form a vision of what's possible for an organization that they believe in and that others believe is worthy of the very best effort. There are a lot of different jobs. You are in a job to make money for your family, you have to do that. There are others where hopefully it becomes a career; you want to look for a continuing progress. And then if you are very fortunate, you are working at something that you view as a real mission. That will only happen if there is a vision of something to be accomplished that really gets you excited, that you think is very important. It starts there.
2. Tell us about the second one.
The second, the best leaders that I've ever seen have been able to make very difficult and genuinely correct choices strategically. What are we going to do to achieve that vision? In Procter & Gamble's case here in Russia we knew to achieve a vision of being the best company we'd have to have very good relationships with universities like St. Petersburg, be able to hire the finest young men and women. We knew we'd have to have distributors all the way from St Petersburg to Vladivostok, the best distributors. We knew that we would have to be really good at understanding what consumers wanted. Examples of strategies. We knew we would have to have very low cost production and we need to pick the right plan sights here in St Petersburg and Novomoskovsk. That's the second. Strategic choices. Hard thing to do correctly.
The third is having done all that visioning and strategic choices, they know they got to execute well. With achievement just like filming this program requires really good execution on a part where men and women involved in doing that. And you got to keep learning how to execute better.
3. You've mentioned 5 traits, what are the last two?
The fourth characteristic is an ability to bring a team of people together. This is not just one person but to bring a team together, to select the right people, to have the environment where they really building on each others ideas, and to have an influence to that people who work for you grow, they get better, they learn from you.
The final characteristic of the best leaders that I've ever known, I don't mean just CEOs, I mean leaders at every level, is they are tremendous learners. They're focused on new ideas, on learning more than they are today by reading, by knowing other people. They never lose their zest for learning, for how you can improve.
So those are the five characteristic that I've seen. No one has them at the same level. No one is anywhere near perfect in all of them. But they keep striving to improve in those areas. The words you choose might be different but they come down to the same concept of envisioning something very important, knowing you got to make choices to get there, you going to have to work hard and improve to be really good at what you do everyday, you going to have to be able to rally a team and help people to grow. And you are going to have to be just ever-curious on finding new ideas to how your business model will change because of the changing environment or what new consumer need is there that we can meet in the company or what new better way to work with government officials is there. That would be my answer.
4. How do you have a vision come alive not just for small group of people?
There are two thoughts that come to mind, maybe three. Something that we did in Procter & Gamble twenty two years ago for the same reason you just suggested. We were just acquiring a new company, we were doing business at many parts of the world, and we thought we needed to embed our purpose which is very simple - It's to provide products, services that better serve the world's consumers. And in doing that we would be able to provide a great place for the employment, help communities and provide good financial results. We concluded we needed to put that in writing and really make it foundation everywhere we do business and every time we talk about it. But it's not just enough to talk words. Everybody has a grand vision statement. You got to bring it to live. That's the second point I make. In order to do it you have to tell stories. People learn through stories: of decisions that were made, of successes that were achieved and defeats that happened. It's to become storytellers in the organization of different events, decisions that bring the values and bring the vision to live.
5. What else can bring the vision to live?
The other thing that makes the vision come to live is results. You can't just have a vision; you got to be able to have results and then tell stories around those results. We have a vision in P&G of providing products that improve people's lives. You can hear that and say: "Well, that sounds dandy. That sounds nice but do you really do it and how do you do it?" What we do with our employees to help them understand is that we show videos of providing pure water in villages in Africa that don't have any, show babies being immunized for tetanus as a result of the program with Pampers that we are running around the world, of a new product that we brought out to provide better dental care. So you bring the vision alive by what you do, always with the aspiration to figure out how to do better, never with the attitude that "we've solved the issue, aren't we great" but rather as an inspiration of what a business can do.
6. What is important about execution?
What's important is what you just touched at, and that's removing regulatory complexity that makes it hard to be able to get a business started. There are certain things that government can do and certain that can't. One thing that they can do I believe and I can't speak as an authority in Russia but I can in the United States, is that they can make the regulatory environment, the role of law, the role of contracts, the role of property, transparent and they can make them ones where person gets an idea, has the ability to put together a business, to be able to implement it simply and quickly, and then be able to have a very good legal structure where the value of that idea whether it'll be patent or product is protected. This is really important. I think the three keys things for entrepreneurship is: you have to have ideas, there is no question, young people and older people in this country got ideas; you got to have capital. You got to have a capital market, venture capital market or private capital market or a government stimulated market. A lot of states in United States today are providing significant money in order to be able to fund new projects from the environment to technology.
7. Why are they doing that and what's the third key point?
Because it creates jobs, and they want jobs in their state. Federal government can do the same thing. Russian government can do it.
Then you have to have a regulatory environment which makes it relatively easy and there is no barrier in order to start a business. I can't comment on regulatory environment in Russia today, you would know that and I don't, but if it's too complex, if it's written with things that takes you four years or three years or longer time to be able to start something, it's a problem. Because in other places it won't be that way, and entrepreneurs will go where they can make their ideas. A lot of people want to stay here in Russia because it's a great market and it's their home but there has to be an environment that makes it really attractive to be an entrepreneur here.
