The Provocateurs:

Des Dearlove:

Okay. Hello, I’m Des Dearlove, the co-founder of Thinkers50. Welcome to our podcast series Provocateurs, in which we explore the experiences, insights, and perspectives of inspiring leaders. Our aim is to provoke you to think and act differently, through conversations with insightful leaders who offer new perspectives on traditional business thinking. This is a collaboration between Thinkers50 and Deloitte. My co-host today is Stacy Janiak, managing partner and Chief Growth Officer of Deloitte US. Stacy’s also a member of Deloitte’s US Executive Committee and Global Board of Directors. Stacy, welcome.

Stacy Janiak:

Thank you Des, and I am thrilled to introduce our guest for today. In 2008, Jim Stengel shocked the marketing world by leaving his prestigious role as Global Marketing Officer at Procter & Gamble, one of the most admired brand building companies in the world. This bold move was the first step on a mission to share his passion for growing business through a focus on higher ideals and purpose. Today he’s president and CEO of The Jim Stengel Company and host of The CMO Podcast.

Des Dearlove:

Jim’s book, Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World’s Greatest Companies was based on a 10 year study demonstrating the correlation between brand purpose and financial performance. His second book, Unleashing the Innovators: How Mature Companies Find New Life with Startups, serves as a playbook for big companies to change their culture to drive innovation and growth. Jim, welcome.

Jim Stengel:

Thank you Des. Thank you Stacy. So nice to be with you this morning.

Des Dearlove:

Listen, before we get on to talking about your work, can you start by explaining this journey we’ve just been describing? What on earth provoked you to this quest really for purpose and ideals driven businesses? What was the ignition point?

Jim Stengel:

Well, I think obviously the idea germinated during my long career at P&G where I worked all around the world in brand management and then general management and then was appointed the Global Marketing Officer at P&G. Way back in the mid-1990s, I was responsible for Pampers Europe, Baby Care Europe — that’s P&G’s biggest brand. It was then, it is now, and the brand was not doing well on all measures. I was appointed to lead it. There was a courageous small team there that said, “We’re in the business of babies and parents and birth and life and we’re not doing anything with that. We should be aiming way higher as a brand to make a positive difference in the lives of families.” So that began a business model shift, frankly, on P&G’s largest brand, which was wildly successful. It took several years of course, but it was all based on finding a higher ideal or higher purpose for that brand.

Frankly, I think it was one big reason I was appointed to the Global Marketing Officer job in the early two 2000s, because our CEO at the time A.G. Lafley wanted that philosophy on more of our brands, all of our brands. P&G was an enormous laboratory for many things, but it was one for purpose. And I decided after seven years as Global Marketing Officer, with actually the tremendous support of the company, to follow this passion of mine full-time and teach, consult, write, do research, and really devote my life to being one of the change agents, I hope, and one of the thought leaders in this shift in business, which I think is better for customers, better for employees, and better for the world at large.

Stacy Janiak:

I’d like to pick up on that employee comment because we’ve had, with all of the provocateurs that we’ve talked to, this notion of purpose being front and center and we’ve had discussions around what does that mean for employees and how you engage your employees around purpose. Interested to hear how that manifested itself within P&G for you and what you saw as a result of that.

Jim Stengel:

Well, Stacy, it’s a fundamental lesson that I think we’ve all learned now, but any journey on business transformation, purpose included, begins inside. And it has to start with the motivations and interests and passions and care and concern of the people who are working on — no one cares more for a brand or business than the people who work on it. And so it always has to start there. You need their ideas, you need their commitment, you need their engagement at all levels. And in my experience, when purpose clicks and it works and it moves a business, it is because the team, inside the company leading it, engaged everyone broadly and it became theirs, not the CMO’s, or not the CEO’s, or not the CFO’s, it became their purpose, their mission. It always has to start inside. It’s crazy. It’s a fundamental lesson, but I still see it too many times violated.

Des Dearlove:

I think people are sometimes to be convinced about the link with performance as well. But you mentioned your research and the first book, actually, you did look at this and see that the two things are related. They are directly correlated. What did that research show and were you surprised?

Jim Stengel:

I was. I went in open minded and I wanted to go where the data went. I hired a research firm to work on the project with me. I enlisted a lot of graduate students to also help with it. I think what I was surprised at in the research on the book was the, just the incredible power, purpose when engaged by people working on the brand has in moving a business ahead with big numbers, big changes. I felt it was effective. I certainly saw the P&G teams who had embraced purpose and activated it and built it into their work systems, their KPIs. I saw what happened within P&G. Now seeing this happen across the world in multiple countries, multiple categories, hearing the stories, looking at the data, it was very inspiring to me and I’m very proud of that book to this day. I think it’s filled with great stories. Many of the businesses in there have continued to flourish. Not all of them. It’s not a perfect world. Some things trip people up. A big issue, I think, with purpose is when there’s a leadership change. And that’s why I think we as an industry have a very large opportunity on metrics that are more, I mean, I did the best I could 10 years ago when I wrote the book with the data I had available. But analytics has come so much farther along, and we are now able to look at causality of activating purpose, behaviors, and business results and financial results. So I’m very interested in that space right now. I’ve talked with lots and lots of different companies about it, lots of teams about it. I’ve invested some money in a startup that is doing very, very interesting work in this space.

But until boards are reporting KPIs on purpose activation and showing the causality with purpose activation and financial results, purpose will not be baked into how we do business across the world. When we have great firms like Deloitte helping companies understand their business better, and they’re looking at the purpose metrics and they’re talking about that at the highest levels, then we will have crossed another threshold.

Stacy Janiak:

Okay. We’re working on that, Jim. We’re there with you.

Jim Stengel:

I know that.

Stacy Janiak:

Yes. How do you think about that in the context of culture? Because I think they’re intertwined, but how do you think about that in the context of evaluating where a company’s culture is at and in particular, as you said, in times of leadership change, and is there a particular style of leadership, if you’ve worked in consulting with companies, that you think is necessary to have a purpose driven organization?

Jim Stengel:

I would use two words there, Stacy, curiosity and humanity. I know your firm, Deloitte, has done a lot of work on a human centered approach to business and design in business models. But the leaders that I find are most inspiring to me, and I think most effective, are those that ask a lot of questions, they listen more than they talk, they’re very engaged with new people who join their organization, they welcome provocateurs and challengers within their culture. They’re just simply curious. And they have a learning mindset, which we often call a growth mindset as well. In fact, if I had to take one lesson from the three years of weekly podcasts I have done with C-level people, mostly CMOs, and Deloitte, you have been a part of that. When I ask people the top leadership characteristic of effective leaders, I often get the word curiosity. In fact, I interviewed Ted Sarandos, CEO of Netflix at Cannes this year, and that’s the first thing he said to me, curiosity is the most important leadership characteristic. That’s certainly one of them. And then I just think of a deep sense of humanity about their people, about their customers, about they simplify things, they make it relevant. They’re just I think the greatest leaders in the world have a personal touch. They take their business personally and they think about the difference they’re making in the lives of their employees and their customers. I think purpose is a great means to do that. But humanity and curiosity, to me, those are the fundamentals of a very, very strong and lasting culture.

Des Dearlove:

I think that intellectual curiosity, that sense of always wanting to understand what’s in front of you and understand what’s going on in the room, I think I’ve seen that as a characteristic of CEOs. Funnily enough, I spent a couple of days with Reed Hastings, of Netflix, and he’s the same. Obviously that kind of culture, they’ve been together a long time, they’ve worked together a long time. But that’s undiminished, even though obviously they’ve done the things they have. But I think I totally agree with you on that.

Jim Stengel:

Just to prove that, I interviewed also in Cannes this year, Keith Weed, who was the CMO at Unilever, Head of Sustainability. He’s doing remarkable things in his post-Unilever-life on many, many different fronts. I also said to him, this is in the same week, “Keith, what was the most important characteristic of your long successful career at Unilever?” He said curiosity. And as Keith does, went on and on about how that manifests itself in his daily work, including being highly curious about these categories he was in and asking people a lot of, being a real zealot for knowledge and an advocate for the brands they sell. But again, Keith came up with curiosity in the first five seconds of my interview with him. It’s just, again, another proof point of this, and I think what we have to learn as leaders is it is a skill. Some are born with more curiosity than others, but it is something we can develop and hone and work on. In fact, I’m speaking to a bunch of graduate students at Miami University outside Cincinnati next Monday night, and that’s all we’re talking about, how to be a curious person.

Des Dearlove:

That’s interesting. Do you think that that’s something that’s increasingly recognized? Because for a long time we seem to want leaders who had all the answers. One of the few good things that came out of the pandemic, I think, is a sense of, we now want leaders who don’t pretend. I know it’s been coming, hopefully it’s been coming, but it feels like we’re in a new era now, and it’s okay for the CEO to not have all the answers. In fact, you start to worry if somebody, if you’ve got a leader who is pretending they’ve got all the answers, that would now be a worrying trait, I think. Do you think that’s a change?

Jim Stengel:

Yeah, I do think that is a change. I do think though, that asking, I think a great leader asks really, really penetrating questions. And if there’s two things I learned in my long career at P&G, it was that the consumer is everything and you better be the best company to understanding and delighting people. Consumer centricity of P&G has always been core value and continues to be. And the second one is asking really, really good questions. P&G just drills that into you from day one. You don’t have to have the answers, but you have to have the questions. And the better your questions are, the more you will get at the issues, the more you will develop your people.

Because when you’re asking your people great questions, when you get a team and you get increasing responsibility, it’s a fabulous way to train and develop. I do feel like we can all be, again, work on that. It’s related to curiosity of course, but asking great questions. Again, it’s one of the reasons I think P&G is as old as Deloitte, right? 180 years old and still thriving. It’s about the consumer and it’s about great leadership and asking great questions.

Stacy Janiak:

Jim, maybe taking us to the current environment that we’re all operating in, just the level of economic uncertainty and geopolitical uncertainty. How do you think about purpose driven organizations in a time of these types of challenging circumstances and how they can maintain it?

Jim Stengel:

It’s more critical and more important than ever, especially in these times of all this volatility, uncertainty, pending recession, all the things we’re talking about. Our employees expect us to be visible and to be present and vocal on issues that are relevant for your company, your category, and your consumers. And how do you decide when you step up, when you have a voice, when you take action? It has to be guided by something. And I think having a purpose, which is not just a statement, it’s a philosophy; it embeds your beliefs, your values, what you invest in, your tone of voice as a company, it guides all of that.

I think we live in a very complicated world and our people expect us not to have our heads in the sand, but you can’t come forward and try to make a positive difference on every issue that’s challenging us as businesses, as societies, as cultures. But you do have, I think, a responsibility to step in in the areas that are important, again, for your category, your company, your company’s beliefs, and your employees’ beliefs.

Des Dearlove:

You mentioned, you talked about your experience with Pampers. And in a way, if you don’t mind, that’s kind of an easy one, because babies, of course, babies and parents, what’s not to see a purpose in? But what if you’re a concrete, a company that makes cement, or a company that makes some sort of commodity item, how do you turn that into what Hubert Joly would call a noble purpose or a reason?

Jim Stengel:

We could spend the rest of this podcast on examples of companies that make concrete that, when they attempt to differentiate themselves on their purpose, it leads to really good things. I’m not being patronizing here. We have Deloitte on this show, and I have a long relationship with Deloitte, including sponsorship of my podcast. They live their purpose. They talk about their purpose, they talk about activating their purpose. They do it in normal conversations. I could bounce it to Stacy to talk about how purpose impacts a large global professional services firm. There’s a company that I have worked with in Canada that is in commercial real estate. And their CEO said, “If we let this go, especially in these dynamic times, this is all going to be commoditized and based on pricing.” So they decided to differentiate themselves on their purpose, that they discovered through talking to their people and looking at the origin of the company and so on, and they came up with an extremely inspiring – now this is commercial real estate, very financially driven, very operationally driven – and that company is thriving with their customers, their employees, their prospective customers, the society in which they work, because this was a company that was in a category which didn’t take the purpose naturally, that no one else was really thinking and talking about the things they started thinking and talking about. And it’s been very transformational for them. But I could go on and on about insurance companies, construction companies, ones that I’ve met, talked to, researched, and also worked with. There is no category where I’ve felt that this concept is not appropriate for. That’s a big statement.

Stacy Janiak:

I think your point, Jim, about that company going back to its origins, every company has origins, founders that were trying to solve a problem or create an experience or do something on behalf of their customers or their communities. And so being able to anchor back to that, whether you are in existence for five years or 50 or 100, I think really helps focus in on that purpose.

Jim Stengel:

Absolutely, Stacy, that’s the first thing I ask. If anyone asks me where do I start? I said, go back to your founders. Every time I changed brands at P&G, I took a day or two with my new team and I said, let’s go back to the beginning together. I just want to learn about it and we’ll talk about different things. I’ll ask questions. I just want to be immersed in the origin story and everything that’s happened since. It sounds so simple, but a lot of people blow right through that. You want to look forward. You want to get in there and talk to clients, talk to your team, get your strategy together, decide what legacy you want to leave. That’s all good, but take some reflection time and look back before you look forward. There’s always insights there, always.

Des Dearlove:

Does every individual brand, organization like P&G, does every brand, individual brand have its own purpose?

Jim Stengel:

Sure. I think the best companies, the best multi-brand companies have, I think at the corporate level, a strong set of beliefs and values, most have a statement of the difference they’re trying to make in the world. They have a personality, a tone of voice, they have a history. And I think every brand has to be part of that, has to have their own purpose that is in sync with that, inspired by the corporate purpose. But take P&G for an example, I just had the US CMO of Pernod Ricard on my podcast, and she talked an awful lot about the corporate purpose and individual brand purposes and how they’re linked. It’s a beautiful discussion we had. But at P&G of course they operate in, I don’t know, something like 40 different categories. Each brand has its own voice, its own history, its own purpose. But if it didn’t fit the company’s purpose, it would not be in the company. And they’ve made choices over time, as Unilever has, to get out of categories that they didn’t feel like the company purpose and the individual brand purposes were in harmony.

Stacy Janiak:

Jim, I’m going to switch this direction a bit to you as a provocateur. I know we had Julie Carrier on one of our earlier sessions, and she talked about the fact that most people believe that leaders are developed as adults, but all of the research would say that leaders really derive their skills in childhood. And so I’d love to hear your origin story about how you got to where you’re at today as an amazing leader and provocateur.

Jim Stengel:

Well, I was a middle child of six children in a lower middle class family, living in a small city. I think I had to be somewhat of a provocateur just to stand out. [Laughter]

No, but I think you’re right, Stacy. I think things do start in childhood. I grew up Catholic in a large family, in a neighborhood where we all walked to school and we all played with the people in our neighborhood, in our school, and we were on the streets all the time. I was sort of a disruptive and provocateur student in elementary school. I started a lot of businesses, including at the school. In fact, I was suspended from my elementary school, my parochial school, by the monsignor because I had started a business of renting wild and outlandish neck ties. We had to wear a neck tie to school, and then we all wore the straight simple ones back then. Well, I had a whole portfolio of ties from my grandfather’s era, the really fat 40s ties, and I rented them for a quarter a day. So everyone competed with each other to get the craziest tie to wear to school that day. I set up my little kiosk on the block down from the school and I got busted. He told me I was exhibiting mafioso behavior. [Laughter]

It’s one example of the kind of stuff that I did. I had fun doing it, it was a little business, right? I did all the stuff kids do. I had a paper route, I mowed lawns, I shoveled snow, I rented ties, I did all that. But in all those cases I tried to figure out a way to, I didn’t know it at the time deliberately, but stand out in some way. As I delivered papers, there were a lot of old folks who didn’t get out of their home much. I didn’t drop the paper. I knocked on the door, I gave them the paper, I asked how they were doing. They would invite me in for a quick milk and cookies, we’d have a quick chat, then I would move on to the next house. I just think things like that start in your childhood. And for me it was very influenced of course by my family, but also the kids I hung out with 18-19 hours a day. We were always up to something, always up to making some waves and creating something. It wasn’t mean, but it was mischievous.

Des Dearlove:

It’s interesting, isn’t it? You were punished back then for being entrepreneurial. Now business schools and schools try so hard to get kids to do that stuff. So sticking with you, while we are shining the torch in your eyes. Leadership, your leadership, we had Hubert Joly, former CEO of Best Buy, and he was telling us, telling Stacy and I, that he reached the top really, he got a kind of senior management position, and then it felt so flat, it didn’t have any meaning. It really wasn’t what he was expecting. And so he had this sort of almost, well, he describes it as a midlife crisis where that’s when he reached for purpose and connection and some of those other things and went on to, as we know, to turn around Best Buy as he did. But your journey sounds different in the sense that you didn’t seem to have that crisis, but has your leadership style evolved? Has it changed over the years?

Jim Stengel:

Well, yeah, I hope it has. I think obviously some things are fundamental, integrity and trust and honesty and those good things.

Des Dearlove:

And was purpose always part of that?

Jim Stengel:

It was. I think it was very implicit, but then it became more explicit. I was thinking about, I was talking earlier this morning with a senior person at Whirlpool. We were talking about purpose and how it all starts. I was reflecting with that person that my first brand manager job was a peanut butter brand, which you wouldn’t know much about in the UK, but Stacy would understand peanut butter, a big category. And P&G had the leading brand. I was put on that leading brand as a young brand manager. We had been locked in a market share stalemate with our two major competitors. I remember pulling my team together. And by the way, this is the 19, the mid-to-late-80’s. So we’re going way back. My team had a Korean American woman, an African American woman, an engineer we had brought out of the factory, someone we had brought in from business school. So really interesting team.

We stopped and we said, we’ve been in a shared stalemate for years, what would it take for us to massively break out of the stalemate and become market leaders by a lot more? And you know what we came down to was, let’s figure out what moms with young children really cared about and associate ourselves with what they care about. So we did that. We developed some alliances, some partnerships, which took our shares to record levels because we got involved with things that moms cared about that were natural for our category, which, basically, it was nutrition. The origins of purpose, I suppose, at least in the professional sense, go back to me, to my first assignment as brand manager decades ago. We weren’t calling it purpose back then, but I think it became more explicit. We ended up at P&G developing a way to do this and a process and a framework. And I tried to evolve that and expand that as I left the company and moved on to new frontiers.

But I think in terms of a leader, I think I’ve just become more comfortable with not having the answers, with being myself, with walking into the room and being comfortable with how I felt, what was going on in the room. I wasn’t trying to become, I think earlier in our career we go in and we try to make a mark, make an impression, make it quickly. I’ve become more of, I think, self-aware and self-confident in my intuition. And not that I don’t look for data, but I think when you’re earlier in your career you don’t trust your intuition or you’re afraid to trust it. I just feel like I’m much more comfortable with that, much more confident and much more relaxed, which I wouldn’t say I would have said that about myself 15 years ago.

Stacy Janiak:

One of the topics we’ve talked with our provocateurs about is, they typically have a superpower and overcoming biases along the way. It’d be interesting to just hear about how you’ve overcome biases along the course of your leadership journey. I’m sure our listeners would love to have a lens into that.

Jim Stengel:

I think, on superpower, we think about that a lot in the industry. I think it is a good concept. And I think it’s all about self-awareness, right? What are you really strong in and where are you not so strong? I think I’ve been pretty good at engaging a team, exciting a team, building a team, providing an atmosphere, we call it now psychological safety, elevating our standards together, expecting more of each other, in a way that it was not threatening. I think my teams have, in fact, a lot of, I think a provocateur that I was when I became, an area provocateur that is a legacy of mine at P&G is, I challenged that P&G could not be one of the most creative companies in the world. In the old days P&G was not seen as creative.

I came into the role as global marketing officer and I said, there’s no reason that the kind of people we have here and the agencies we work with and the brands we work on, that we should not be one of the most creative companies in the world in design, in communication, in innovation. I think that all changed at P&G, but I don’t think we implicitly felt we could achieve that. I think I made that explicit that we could, and I helped providing an environment where people could do that. On to your questions on biases, Stacy, I just feel like part of being a provocateur is to understand what might be the biases in the room that are explicit and implicit and surfacing them. I think I’ve been pretty good at that because I do try to create an environment of psychological safety where people are not afraid of saying something, admitting something that’s going on with the team. I’ve had a lot of role models in that growing up at P&G, of course, and even beyond that.

I think it is walking in and acknowledging what might be going on in the room, putting it on the table in a way that is all about the greater good, and ensuring that we’re taking advantage of the tremendous voices in the room and diversity in the room that is part of whatever team I’m working on. I think it gets back to curiosity too. If you go in seeking to understand and listening first, good things happen. No matter who you’re working with and what culture, on what team, what category, people want to feel heard, they want to feel respected, they want to feel like they’re working to their potential. And that’s what leaders do. That’s what good leaders do.

Des Dearlove:

I think it’s interesting. I was making the same kind of mental links that you were making, I think, as you were talking that through, because I think psychological safety, creativity, curiosity, they are all part of the same and you can’t have one without the other. And then the byproduct of that is innovation, and the byproduct of that, somewhere further down the track, is, hopefully is, creating value for shareholders too.

Jim Stengel:

It does.

Des Dearlove:

Would you agree?

Jim Stengel:

Yeah. Yes. I think you just outlined a very good leadership framework. I couldn’t say it better. We should end the podcast right there, but I know we won’t. [Laughter]

Des Dearlove:

No we won’t. No we won’t. To go back to the purpose stuff, what is the linkage? I was asking you earlier about the correlation, but how does it link? Why does an organization with purpose, a brand with purpose, a team with purpose, why does that often, typically outperform a team that isn’t motivated or incentivized with purpose?

Jim Stengel:

Well, I think it expands your lens. You think outside your category in a healthy way, not in a weird way. I think it excites people’s imagination. It is a broader field of innovation and creativity. I think you ask different questions, you spend your time in a different way. Your questions become much more about what can we do to better impact the people who are our customers and potential customers? That question is so endless in its inspiration. And so the discussions become much more about, okay, we may sell these products or services today, and we may have a sense of purpose, but gosh, what could we possibly do to elevate this and make a much, much higher impact? That just is a much more fertile discussion and a much more fertile field of innovation.

And you think about all the provocateur companies that make a difference in our lives, they almost all start with a bold thought that seems outrageous at the time. And they take that and they never get complacent about it. Netflix just announced, we talked about them earlier in the show, they just announced a great quarter at the time we are recording this. That’s a culture that, think about its origin story! It started with mailing discs to our home that we didn’t have to return overnight or in two days and paid these crazy penalties. Then it was the first one into streaming, and now it just sets the bar for content and provoking our thoughts and entertaining us to just a new level. And they’re just never complacent about that. And it’s a culture that’s pretty famous for performance expectations and psychological safety. It’s hard to get that balance right.

But we could go on and on about the companies that play a very important role in our life. And I think most of them started with a purpose that elevated people’s expectations of themselves and their performance. And that’s why these companies do perform better over time.

Des Dearlove:

It’s sort of Simon Sinek‘s point about “Start with the why.” If you start with the why, it’s a different set up-

Jim Stengel:

It’s endless!

Des Dearlove:

… from the beginning.

Jim Stengel:

The innovation, the discussions, and it obviously can take you into new categories, new spaces, which is all wonderful. But that creates interesting discussions about your portfolio, where you play, how to win, all those good consulting frameworks. They’re populated by bigger things when it starts with purpose.

Stacy Janiak:

Well, Jim, you’ve talked about your journey and some of the work early on that maybe you didn’t call purpose, but was very purpose related, and you’ve referred to some role models along the way. I think there’s always others in your orbit that help you along the journey. It’d be really interesting to know about a few of those people that helped shape you and get you to where you are today.

Jim Stengel:

Well, gosh, the beautiful thing about working at a company like P&G or Deloitte or many of the companies we’re talking about is it’s full of leadership role models. I think one reason that I still feel like young people will benefit a lot from joining companies like, Stacy, yours and P&G and others, is that you just enter into this incredible environment of leadership, role modeling, mentors. At P&G I had so many, it’s even hard for me to say there’s one or two. John Pepper, who is a retired chairman of P&G, retired chairman of Disney, he was an up-and-comer when I joined the company, when I was a really junior person, I’m talking about an assistant brand manager or early brand manager of the company, asked me who I’d like as a mentor. And I said, I would love John Pepper, who at that time was president of the company. And they said, well, no one’s ever asked that. HR phoned him up and said, there’s a young guy down here in the food division who would love to have you as his mentor. And he said, yes. And that began a friendship that has lasted to this day. He is just wildly loved by people across the industry. He’s so magic because he so deeply cared, and cares, about the company, its employees, its history, its customers, its retailers, and the guy is so-so real, authentic, and caring, and at the same time smart and connected and human and vulnerable. He certainly stands out as a really important figure in my development and a reason, by the way, I stayed at the company. Even though he was many levels above me, I wanted to be part of an organization that had leaders like that at the top.

Beth Kaplan was an early boss of mine when I was a brand manager and a marketing director. She left the company eventually and did many, many amazing things. But again, her standards, her questions, her support, her insights — fabulous. You learn in every meeting from a leader like Beth. And then there’s a controversial leader, talk about a provocateur; The CEO of P&G when I became a general manager was a guy named Durk Jager, and he was a Dutchman, and he just always looked at issues from the other angle. He’s the one that pulled me out of the US and said, you should go to Eastern Europe, you should run a couple countries there. It will be good for you and you’ll be good for them. I have him to thank for sending me into Eastern Europe in the early days to be a general manager and to just learn how crazy life is every day in an emerging market like that.

But he’s the one who basically said, “Our organizational structure is too slow. We’ve got to upend that.” You talk about why do we have so many deals on our brands? Why don’t we just roll it into one low price? Won’t that be more efficient? Won’t that be better? Won’t that build more trust? He had a lot of counterintuitive thinking. I think in many ways he was too much of a provocateur, and I think that may have been why he didn’t serve a long time as CEO, but smart. I learned a lot from him, learned from discussions, learned from meetings, learned from phone calls I had with him when I was in Eastern Europe. So again, I just rattled off three, I could go on and on. That’s the beauty of growing up in a really, really great organization.

Stacy Janiak:

Well, and fabulous lessons for our listeners.

Jim Stengel:

Since I left there have been many, many more outside. Scott Galloway, who’s become a real media star. I knew him before he was going on, and he was very helpful as I started my business. I admired his lifestyle. He was an entrepreneur, he was a professor, he created content, and he was curious, and I learned a lot from him as I was starting up my business and he to this day remains, and I’m a big fan of his, and he’s a friend of mine. It goes on and on and on.

Stacy Janiak:

Des, I think we have a couple names to bring into our provocateur list from that conversation.

Des Dearlove:

No, I think so, definitely.

Jim Stengel:

You sure do.

Des Dearlove:

We’ve looked back. Now let’s quickly look forward. Just take us, what’s next for Jim Stengel? What’s coming up? There’s a rumor that you might be writing another book, for instance.

Jim Stengel:

That’s a rumor. [Laughter]

Des Dearlove:

Okay. What are you up to? What’s the next few months?

Jim Stengel:

I’ll tell you what, no, I’m glad you asked the question. I have been thinking about what the next book would be that would add something to the world. This podcast that we started, one of Gary Bayer’s companies produces at Gallery Media. Deloitte sponsors it. The insight was that there wasn’t really anything where a CMO was talking to other CMOs about their life, their work, their history, their story, their impact, their company. We started this about three years ago, and it has become a thing. It’s kind of scratched my curiosity-itch. The reason I wrote those two books is I was interested in those two topics and I thought I would learn a lot and that my learning maybe would help others. And the podcast is doing that, and it’s doing it, frankly, at a scale that a book would not achieve. The numbers on the podcasts are many, many, many times larger than the audience for even a best selling business book. We do special series, we average about one release a week, so that’s a steady amount of content. I do love that. And by the way we are thinking about how we take that platform and make that even bigger. And so there’s a lot of interesting ideas we have to take what is really, really a powerful format that people do learn a lot from, and love the stories we get every week from professors using the podcast in classes to leading CMOs using it for their team discussions. That makes us all feel wonderful because I think we’re scaling inspiration and we’re scaling best practices. There’s a lot of thought about how we make this, even though it’s big and great, 10X the impact. That’s exciting for me right now. And then in terms of the space, we’re all still on the purpose journey. And as I said earlier in this podcast, I think we have a lot of work to do on predictive analytics for purpose activation and financial results. So I’m trying to learn whatever’s going on in the industry, as I said, I have invested in a small company that’s going in  this space. Deloitte’s doing interesting work here. If we can crack this one, that is a big, big, big gift to the world, because I think it will bring even more people into a better way of doing business. So I would say predictive analytics and the purpose space is an area I’m passionate about. The podcast and what it means and what it’s doing and its further potential I’m passionate about. And then, at the end of the day, my purpose in life right now, and it has been since I left P&G, is to help leaders be happier, successful, more content, more delighted, just more fulfilled in their life, and by believing in the purpose of their company and its relevance to them as an individual.  That’s evergreen. I’m still loving that. Whether it’s helping someone in a 30 minute phone call, to working with an organization like Deloitte on training and development for next generation CMOs. I love leadership development. I find tremendous satisfaction out of it. I think, we talk about curiosity a lot, you learn in every engagement with every individual, hopefully help them, they’re helping you as well. Leadership development I think is a space I’ll be doing as long as I’m on this planet.

Des Dearlove:

As well as the podcast in the book, where else can people look for, if they want to find out a bit more what you are up to, is there a good website address?

Jim Stengel:

You can visit my Twitter feed or webcast, the podcast itself. Those are all areas that they can reach out. LinkedIn, of course, all of those are great. 

Des Dearlove:
Huge thanks to you, Jim, and to you folks out there for listening. This is the Provocateurs podcast and we’ve been Des Dearlove and Stacy Janiak. Please join us again soon for another episode of Provocateurs. Thanks, Jim.

Jim Stengel:

Thank you, Des. Thank you, Stacy.

Stacy Janiak:

Thank you.