“I Think of My Failures as a Gift”

Reprint: R1104F

Lafley, the former CEO of Procter & Gamble, is regarded as one of the most successful chief executives in recent history. But like everyone else, he’s had his share of mistakes. Politicians and winning sports teams draw their biggest lessons from their toughest losses, he says, and the same has been true for him.

P&G learned more from its failed new brands and products than from its successes. Among Lafley’s favorite examples is the color-safe, low-temperature bleach that the company test-launched in the 1980s under the brand name Vibrant. P&G chose Portland, Maine, as the test market, hoping to escape notice from Clorox, which was headquartered in Oakland, California. But Clorox got wind of the plan in time to distribute free gallons of Clorox bleach to every household in Portland, making all P&G’s advertising dollars, sampling, and couponing irrelevant. “Game, set, match to Clorox,” Lafley says. But the good technology behind Vibrant remained, and when Clorox tried to enter the laundry detergent business a few years later, P&G modified that technology to create Tide with Bleach, which grew into a business worth more than half a billion dollars.

Lafley also talks about systematically analyzing 30 years’ worth of failed acquisitions to uncover five root causes for their lack of success: no winning strategic reason for the acquisition; integrating poorly or too slowly; expecting synergies that didn’t materialize; incompatible cultures; and company leaders who “couldn’t play together in the same sandbox.” That analysis led to changes that informed P&G’s highly successful acquisition of Gillette in 2005.