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Two CEOs, one customer-responsive strategy
Innovation is becoming the lens through which leaders are directing a laser-like focus on business transformation. It's easy to see why. Margins and product life cycles are shrinking, competitive pressure is growing, and the need for customer responsiveness has never been more important. Every company needs an edge. Enterprise innovation is not the sole domain of the entrepreneur. It can be practised by CEOs of large firms, too.
Two CEOs in very different industries have applied the same basic innovation template with dramatic results. Doug Conant, 56, president and CEO of Campbell's Soup, and Fred Hassan, 62, chairman and CEO of Schering-Plough, changed the culture of their firms by engaging their management teams in a focused concentration on customer-sensitive innovations. Their similar leadership styles and focused emphasis on driving their business unit managers to come up with new solutions for customers' problems not only improved returns to shareholders, but also won recognition for each CEO (Hassan in 2006 and Conant in 2007) by Fairleigh Dickinson's Rothman Institute as "Leaders in Innovation."
Before Conant and Hassan assumed control in 2001 and 2003 respectively, both companies had allowed their brands to lose lustre and were in a downward spiral in their respective markets. Campbell's declined to the point where the Torrance Family, owners of the majority of the 140-year-old company, decided on a complete reorganisation. Schering-Plough was losing patent protection for its leading product, Claritin, as well as experiencing a sharp decline in its US$1 billion hepatitis C business. Both CEOs approached their similar situations with determination and a belief that the right team and the right focus on innovative customer solutions could reverse those trends.
