Assignment task:
Durk Jager was a man on a mission. As the newly appointed CEO of Procter & Gamble in January, 1999, he was determined to make P&G a more conflict-friendly organization. Jager had some ambitious goals for P&G. At the top of the list was the goal of significantly boosting sales volume. In 2000, he said he wanted the company, best known for products such as Tide, Crest, and Crisco, to double sales to $70 billion by the year 2005. But the company's strong cult-like culture tended to "Procter-ize" people, said Jager. P&G people were too insular, risk-averse, and slow to make decisions.
According to Jager, the problem had a lot to do with keeping people isolated inside P&G's twin-towers' headquarters in Cincinnati. The company recruited job candidates from a variety of backgrounds, put them through a relatively standardized training program, and then insulated them at company headquarters. After a while, they began to sound alike, think alike-even look alike, he said.
Jager's career path was unusual for P&G. While he had been with the company for nearly 30 years in 1999, he had spent most of his time outside Cincinnati. A Dutchman by birth, he joined P&G as an assistant brand manager in Holland. After 12 years, he was transferred to Japan as an advertising manager and was later promoted to general manager. He grew up totally removed from Cincinnati's central bureaucracy. So in spite of all his years with the company, he had an outsider's perspective. Asked to describe Jager, those who know him described him as a "loner," "hard-driving," and a person who "doesn't mince words." He had a reputation for shaking things up. As such, he might have been just the right man for his new job.
At the time, P&G was a company in which managers had a passion for memo-writing and dissent was rarely tolerated. Employees were wasting up to half their time on "non-value-added work," such as memo writing, he said. During a talk with employees in Japan, for instance, one worker complained to Jager that he had to continually create new management review charts, often with the same information in several different forms. The employee thought he was wasting a lot of his time.
Jager was determined to change P&G's culture. He wanted to make the company faster on its feet, more innovative, and more conflict-friendly. "Great ideas generally come from conflict-from a dissatisfaction with the status quo. I'd like to have an organization where there are rebels."
Questions:
Q1. How was the P&G culture shaped?
Q2. Using the four-culture typology (double-S cube) described in the powerpoint presentation linked in the resources, what type of culture do you think P&G was when Jager took over? What type was Jager trying to change it to?
Q3. If you were Jager, what would you do to change this culture? Outline specific steps.
Q4. As it happens, Jager's changes cut into profits, and the company began to distance itself from his projects. He resigned in 2000. What might explain his failure to institute change?