Helen Hayes once advised, “Focus on achievement.  Forget about success.”
Good advice for anyone, particularly brand managers.  If you can take your own personal drive and ambition and translate it entirely into drive and ambition for the brand entrusted to you, you don’t have to worry about your own success.  Make your brand achieve.  Your rewards [...]

Heard good advice on TV, CANE episode tonight.
The patriarch of the family gave this advice to Jimmy Smits who he has put in charge of the business. “Learn to listen. People will say, ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this. But they tell you anyway. It’s one of the most commonly used [...]

We all need a little emotional boost from time to time.  I heard this on the radio yesterday.
“Falling down is not failure.  STAYING DOWN is failure.”
If you are down at the moment, GET UP.

Why does this post memorialize the passing of a novelist, Kurt Vonnegut?
I began my career (before P&G) in one of General Electric’s famed training programs. In Schenectady I was assigned to a desk that once belonged to Kurt Vonnegut before he became a novelist. I was 23 years old and had heard of [...]

The late Bear Bryant, the legendary football coach at Alabama was so confident in his coaching abilities he was quoted as saying, “I’ll take mine and beat your’n, or I’ll take your’n and beat mine.” He did not mean to imply that his players were not great, just that he would stack his coaching [...]

There is no such thing as the Sales Department. Everyone who succeeds is a salesman.
If you start your own company, you are its principal sales representative until you reach such critical mass that key customers no longer care who you are. With certain products and services this happens only after millions in sales. [...]

I saw a diagram the other day that showed that RESULTS exist in the space between what you DEMAND and what you TOLERATE.  I think that there is some truth in this statement, but it is in conflict with our definition of leadership.
We believe that a LEADER is someone whom others CHOOSE to FOLLOW.  So [...]

I realized the other day that I spend a lot of time in my career dancing on the head of a pin to find the sharpest point. What does this mean?
In looking for the difference between 211 degrees when water is hot and 212 degrees when water boils and produces steam (referenced in the [...]

A CEO friend gave me a book worth your owning, 212°

The premise of this book is simple:
At 211 degrees water is hot. At 212 degrees water boils. This one degree difference produces steam and energy powerful enough to move a locomotive, in fact to pull a train.
This is worth remembering every day. [...]

Meaning “Not Invented Here,” a term you have probably heard and/or had to deal with before.
This insular way of thinking within companies never made sense to me when I was working on brands within major companies such as General Electric, Procter & Gamble, SCJohnson Wax and Neutrogena. For instance, my R&D teams were good, [...]