Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: Interview With Former Campbell Soup CEO Doug Conant

I recently interviewed Doug Conant on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview (note that the transcript is not 100% accurate, as it was captured through an automated transcription service and lightly edited. For the interview in its most accurate form, please listen directly at www.thirtyminutementors.com):

Adam: It's an honor to have a former Fortune 500 CEO and a man who spent a decade leading one of America's most beloved brands on the show today. Doug Conant is the former president and CEO of Campbell Soup company, where he led a turnaround of the company's financial performance and culture. Doug has also served as the president of Nabisco and the Chairman of Avon and is a leading voice on business and leadership. Doug, thank you for joining us.

Doug: Happy to be here. 

Adam: I'm excited to have you on because you're an expert on two topics that I'm especially passionate about leadership and soup. In your experience, what are the key elements to a great soup?

Doug: Well, first of all, let's not pigeonhole Campbell Soup as just a soup company. It is the largest part of the portfolio but Campbell Soup has many other brands. But after all, soup is our middle name, Campbell's Soup company so we'll start with soup. And the key for soup is, believe it or not, it's variety. Because people have favorite varieties of soup that are triggered by childhood memories and different than other food products variety plays a much bigger game. Now, in terms of the core varieties like chicken noodle soup, which is a selling soup, you have to have a very flavorful broth and good pieces of noodle and chicken there. And that was something that was interesting when I first got to Campbell in 2001. They had been through a series of cost savings and to get the cost down, they eventually started to take the chicken out of chicken noodle soup. And when you looked at our soups compared to some other competitors, you saw that all our brand was strong. Our performance profile in terms of appearance and tastes was not as strong as it used to be, because we cut back on some of the ingredients. So one of the first things we had to do when I got to Campbell Soup was start putting the chicken back in chicken noodle soup.

Adam: Wow. That's incredible. Doug, anyone my age associates Campbell's soup with great commercials. How did those commercials come together? Other and what are some of your best tips on the topic of advertising?

Doug: Well, you know, I can't take credit for the foundational part of Campbell's Soup advertising. That was done back in the 60s 70s 80s 90s, where they uncovered the good platform and made it part of the everyday vernacular in advertising for any product, especially consumer products. And the key was that we kept it simple and we were very focused on our advertising. And we found also that that advertising really resonated at particular times of year here in the northeast. Right now we have a cold snap. And historically we would have been advertising, chicken noodle soup and some of our other best selling varieties at the time of the cold snap. So interesting. Li you would actually take them good platform, and then advertise it at points in time during the year and the day when people were more more likely to buy and consume soup. You know, I think the best advertising that I've seen in a decade is what they're doing right now on air, which is 15 second spots with leveraging that good platform against core varieties. And the elegant simplicity of what they're doing right now, I think is world class and fits and goes up against any advertising I've seen in the last decade.

Adam: A lot of our interview is going to explore your accomplishments and lessons from your time as CEO of Campbell, soup and beyond. But let's talk a little bit about your journey to the top. What were some of the key things you did to become CEO of Campbell's soup? Can you start from your early days?

Doug: We could take up the hour to give you a snapshot. I'm the oldest of four boys. So of course I'm always right at the oldest with a cert, and I was a very shy and kind of quiet young man and uncertain of myself but I was also very industrious. I started doing paper routes and doing odd jobs, trying to make a little extra money. My mom was tied up taking care of the three younger brothers and I jobs taught me the importance of hard work and I learned that if I worked hard, I could get compensated for it. And that was pretty cool. And it also gave me a little bit of an identity. And then I discovered a sport, the game of tennis, and our home was a block away from a bank board, where a shy retiring reserved, introverted kid can go hit a ball against the wall for hours and not have to talk to anyone. Buddy, and I discovered I loved the game of tennis and perfect sport for an introvert. And I was pretty athletic and I became pretty good at it. And so I ultimately went on to be a competitive player in the junior ranks. I earned a scholarship to Northwestern University, played tennis throughout college, also coached at Northwestern and it helped pay for my MBA degree at Kellogg. And tennis was a very foundational part of my life where I had success with it, I developed confidence, I learned how to compete, I learned how to perform under pressure, I learned the importance of hard work and discipline and practice. And between the odd jobs and tennis, I developed an approach to life that was disciplined and that worked for me to move on. I took a job at General Mills right out of my getting my MBA. And, and I can remember my first performance review five months into it and, and my boss who went on to become chairman CEO of General Mills, where I started my job gave me an adequate review, but his boss's boss had her review it and then write a line and sign it and his boss wrote, you should be looking for another job. And that was my first performance review in the corporate world. And it is sort of one could wilt under that kind of feedback are one could rise to the challenge of doing better and having learned how to compete and thrive and work hard. That's what I did, but it was not. My my in the corporate world has been fraught with missteps and setbacks. And most people who have found a degree of success if you look underneath it all have had to deal with setbacks along the way, and I'm no exception.

Adam: Can you talk about a setback that really stands out and how you were able to fight through it and persevere?

Doug: Sure. It's really when I kicked my learn my life learning program and my study of leadership in high gear. I had been working for nine years for General Mills and I had moved out to the General Mills toy group at the time, General Mills was the world's largest toy manufacturer. They owned 13 toy companies, one of which was Parker Brothers toys and games outside of Boston. And I went up there. I was working there as Director of Marketing at the age of 32. And I've been there for about three years, General Mills spun their toy group off and there was a little chaos at that time. I went into work one day, the receptionist said Doug, Senior Vice President like to see you I went up to his office, he looked very nervous and he looked at me and said, Doug, your job’s been eliminated. You need to be over. If you're by No, nine years over in a snap, and I was devastated, and I found myself packing up my belongings and going home to tell my wife, we had two children at the time, we just had our second son, I had a big mortgage. We hadn't been in Boston that long. I didn't know a lot of people. And I was very devastated by that experience. And, and, and as I looked back on it, I hadn't done anything wrong, but I hadn't done enough, right. And, and I went through an outplacement process with wise counsel who went on to be one of my most had the most profound impact on me. One of my mentors, his name was Neil McKenna, and he sort of got me focused on lifting my leadership profile in a way that was highly authentic and also more effective and I've been working on it now for Gosh, since then, 35 years. And all you got to do is have a traumatic incident like that once. And it can be a catalyst to change and it wasn't my case,

Adam: Doug, something that you said really stood out to me. And that was you said I hadn't done anything wrong. But I hadn't done enough, right. Can you talk a little bit more about that? I would love for you to probe a little bit more.

Doug: It's sort of how I, it's how I feel about it. I think sort of naturally introverted and wanting to get along with people and being affable and just trying to be helpful. Organizations are looking for leaders to lead them to higher ground and to make tough decisions and move things forward in a way that honors the agenda of the company. And to do that you've got to be willing to you've got to demonstrate some courageous leadership and I was being too cautious and too timid to play. Light. Now there's nothing wrong with being cautious, timid and polite, but sometimes you got to fight through it. And I hadn't done a good enough job of that. So when I lost my job, I sort of, really I had to take ownership of that. It would have been easy to blame them. For, you know, what did I do, and I'm a victim. And as I got into it, and I worked through this with my outplacement counselor, Neil McKenna, it was pretty clear to me in the clear light of day after I slog through all of my feelings there, that I could have done a better job. And I've been determined ever since to do the best possible job with greater clarity with greater tenacity while still honoring people and inspiring the trust of the people I work with. But I ultimately landed on a line that I've become somewhat known for and it's about being tough minded on standard and standards and tender hearted People. And I grew up in a world where you either tough or tender, tough or nice. And what I found on my leadership journey is that you have to be both. You can be tough minded on standards of performance, but you damn well better be tender hearted with people because people are the vehicle that are going to get you to that higher performance. And if they don't think you care about them, it's highly unlikely that they're going to care about your agenda and a deep and powerful way. So I learned that the hard way losing my job, and I'm very vigilant about maintaining the high standards and loving people to death at the same time. And I must say, in the fullness of time, as I've developed through 1000 miles of experiences, I've developed a nuanced understanding of how I can do both and do it in a way that honors the people I serve.

Adam: There are few people who have had trouble distinction of leading fortune 500 companies let alone leading them with the level of success that you've had turning around Campbell's soup, not only financially but from a cultural perspective. Can you talk about how you did that? What were the key things from a leadership perspective that you put in place to really drive that turnaround?

Doug: Adam, I gotta tell you it wasn't just me. But I do have a philosophy around this from 30,000 feet, I think holds up to scrutiny. Talk about it with anybody. The fundamental belief I have is you can't win and then during in an enduring way in the marketplace, until you demonstrate that you have the capacity to win in an enduring way in the workplace. It's all about the people. When you're a CEO or a leader at any level. You quickly realize that Out of the hundred decisions made that day 98 of them were made when you weren't in the room. And you have to have complete confidence that the people in the room, have your back and are serving the enterprise in an appropriate way. So I believe you have to create a culture in the enterprise that inspires that kind of commitment to excellence. When I got to Campbell and on day one, I declared myself to the organization and said, You know, I can't expect you to commit to our agenda until you feel that we're committed to yours and we're stepping up to our commitment to each and every employee. We committed to listening to them and and and went on a in depth listening tour, and took their input. And we used it to sharpen our employee value proposition. We measured it every year for a decade, in terms of how engaged our employees felt. We were in there. agenda and how engaged they were in ours. And because I do believe it's hard to manage things, if you can't measure them somehow, it may not be perfect, but you should have a sense of direction. And we did. We focused on driving world class employee engagement, we use the Gallup q 12. survey tool. We went from being the worst in the fortune 500 being the best in the fortune 500 after a decade, and this is from a canned soup company headquartered in the poorest, most dangerous city in the United States. Camden, New Jersey, 75,000 people 70 murders a year. And we were an old economy, canned soup company, we were selling the same product we'd been selling for 100 years. With that with limited innovation. So as I've told, many audiences, look, if we could do it, you can do it. And we did. But we focused on the well being of our employees, while we also raised the standards in terms of expectations, and we worked with them to achieve those standards. And we had to make tough decisions. As a leader, you have three years to get it right. The first year is the other guy's fault. The second year, we're learning, it's our fault. But you know, we're still learning. The third year you own it. So as a leader, you sort of got to have your Get your act together fairly quickly knowing you've got a 36 month window. And so we told our leadership team, the top 350, out of our 20,000 employees, that we had to get going north in terms of employee engagement and performance over the first three years, and that we were committed to working with them to do that. But if they couldn't make it, we were going to have to make changes and put them in jobs in jobs where they could contribute or separate them from the organization. And while we were trying to meet needs and and supporting everyone, we also made tough decisions, we turned over 300 of our top 350 leaders which to mine Knowledge is the most profound change in a leadership team in a Fortune 500 company in three years. And we let go 300 out of 350, we promoted 150 from within, but we went out and hired 150 of the best and brightest from all over the landscape of consumer products and created a whole new culture. Interestingly, while we did that, employee engagement went up every year, which I did not anticipate. But in hindsight, I think the overall organization knew we needed to make changes and while we were concerned about the 350 leaders, we also had to be concerned about the 19,650 employees that work for them. And they were in a hunger for change also. So they saw us making changes and ultimately they supported those changes. And they saw that we were serious about Improving the workplace dynamics, serious about getting quality leadership in place, serious about raising the profile of our company in the marketplace. And they got on the wagon. And we then had a very good decade long run.

Adam: What did you look for in the people who you hire?

Doug: Well, there are three things I look for again from 30,000 feet, I look for people competence in their field. competence I break down into intellectual competence and ability to process information, emotional competence, in terms of their ability to operate in a human environment and, and functional competence in terms of their knowledge of the specific area that they're to be accountable for. I then look for character and character is fundamentally do they do what they say they're going to do? Have they are regarded as people of good character who follow through on their commitments, and that's all eminently checkable. So you have competence and character. And the third thing I look for is chemistry, are their values sort of naturally aligned with ours, so that they function in a team based environment which all large companies are, and there's plenty of evidence in their background and high levels of how they've been with the Teams they've been associated with. And if their teams have thrived, or if their teams have been better off for them having been there, then they're probably people we want to talk to. So I looked at the three C's competence, character and chemistry. And I enlarged that worked for us. I would also say one thing around this talent search piece, the best time to find talent is before you need it. So I have a practice that I did for over 20 years of meetings, to have the best and brightest in different fields. Every month, I had a search person who I worked with who just kept the roster with me, all across consumer products of people who I might someday want to know or work with. And if I was going to lay on business and I had time to get a cup of coffee, I'd try and arrange a coffee with someone or I was going to be in New York and I had a night free. I try and have dinner with someone. Inevitably I'd talked to 20 to 25 people a year, Who were some of the best and brightest in their fields. And so that by the time I got to Campbell and was looking for talent, I knew what talent looks like, beyond the four walls of my company. And so it made it much easier for me to ramp up the muscle building process in terms of our bench because I had been so focused on getting the right talent around me actually, at Nabisco. When we were owned by KKR, where I was president of bisco foods. We had to rebuild that organization. And by the time I got to Campbell, I was ready to take on the challenge at Campbell. I didn't know how dire it would be. But we persevered. It took a lot of blood, sweat and tears, but we persevered.

Adam: What was your daily routine as CEO?

Doug: As a CEO, I think it's important that as a CEO, you're incredibly well grounded in what matters most because there's just too much coming at you in a day. And I, I sort of run my life working off of five cylinders. One is my family, and another one is my faith. Another one is the community I serve. Another one is my personal well being. And the one that we're sort of talking about is my business, my stewardship in business, which I love. And so against that backdrop, I, I find as a CEO, there was so much coming at me. I needed to steady myself every morning so I actually started getting up an hour earlier, and having a cup of coffee out in my garden and reflecting on what was coming up that day. And what I really wanted to be focused on and then I would go in, I would go in and get ready for the day and I would be doing this before the kids were up And then I would go in and and get ready for my day and I put on my suit which was like putting on a suit of armor. I would I was going into battle, and then I would win my then I would drive the kids to school because the nights were too hard to predict. So I as often as I could, which was pretty frequently I was able to take one, two or all three of our kids to school. And then I would come and when I was CEO of Campbell, I then had a two to two and a half hour commute in a car from where I lived to the office. And I developed a routine as part of my day where at the end of a day when I was going home, I had my assistant pull all the information necessary for me to know what happened in the company that day off our portal. She would print it all out I would read it this is before we were as technology oriented as we are today. I would read it at all. And I would pick out 10 to 20 people that I wanted to reach out to, and I would write them thank you notes on the way into work that day, as thanking them for contributions of significance to our company like you, I see you over delivered your quarter by X percent Nice job. Or you beat the launch timetable by a month, congratulations, or whatever it was. And I would write 10 to 20 notes a day. And by the time I got to work, I found myself intoxicated with gratitude for all the good work that was going on at the company. Knowing that when I got into work, I had to deal with all the crap. And but I brought balance to the conversation. Those thank you notes. were important because as I've worked across sectors and worked with hundreds and hundreds of leaders at this point, we're all remarkably good about this. We're good, critical thinking people. And we're remarkably good at finding out what's not working in an organization and then fixing. That's what we do. And even in the most broken companies, I found that eight out of 10 things are being done right. But nobody's talking about it. And so, on my drive in every day, I was celebrating what was being done. Right. Done. Right. And they weren't gratuitous notes. It wasn't happy birthday. Have a nice day. It was man you delivered to your numbers this quarter. Great. Are you over? You outperformed last year in terms of your employee engagement score, nice work. So I started doing that. I wrote 10 to 20 a day, six days a week. And when I retired, they asked me, somebody asked me in an interview, how many notes so I said, I don't know. I wrote a lot of notes. And then we did the math. And it turned out I had sent out over 30,000 notes over a decade. to employ Campbell employees, we only had 20,000 employees. So odds are you got a note from me. And if you went anywhere in the world, we had operations in 38 countries. We were marketed on 125 countries. Odds are if I was walking through an office somewhere, there would be one of my handwritten notes stuck in someone's cubicle. And you could tell people knew I was paying attention. And I was celebrating performance. And it made a profound difference. All of my leaders notice that there are people were getting notes from me. So all the leaders said, well, are we supposed to write notes? I said, Well, you don't have to write notes. But I do think we want to celebrate what's going right. Because Lord knows we're going to have to deal with what's going wrong. You do better overall.

Adam: What can anyone do to become a better leader?

Doug: I wrote a book. It'll be published the first week of March. And that's the focus of the book, I think, the key to leadership in a world that's gotten increasingly dynamic, my friends at Harvard call it a vuca, world, volatile, volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, and it's spinning around. And so there's so much dynamism in this world right now. That I believe leaders need to have an incredibly strong foundation in order to weather the winds of change that are sweeping across the landscape every day. So what I think people need to do is get anchored in what we call their leadership foundation. And the work we do now really focuses on helping them become the best version of themselves they can be. Because I believe that your life story is your leadership story. And that You need to harvest your life lessons, learn from them, get anchored in them. Use them to develop your core beliefs about what will work with your leadership profile in a way that works uniquely well for you. And then you need to learn from the broader world around you. What can work and develop what we would articulate is your own personal leadership model. And I've been working with people now for 15 years, helping them design their own models, their own way of walking in the world as a leader. And what's fascinating is, everyone is different. Every single one is different, because we're different. We have different life experiences, we have different aspirations. And I think we have to honor that and find a way to harness it so we can be the best version of ourselves. When we get in the thick of thin things with leadership. This can be a fulfilling journey, if you're showing up as the best for have yourself if you're making a difference, you can actually enjoy the ride.

Adam: Most of our interview has touched on one of the five core aspects of your life that you talked about when you talked about your daily routine as CEO. For my final question, I would love for you to share with listeners any advice you have on the other 80% of what really matters? How can we live happier and more fulfilling lives? What really matters and how can we get there?

Doug: I think you've got to look inside and find out and sort through this question that Stephen Covey posed for me 20 years ago, when he challenged me to figure out what mattered most because I was just responding to all the stuff coming at me and reacting. And he challenged me to figure out What mattered most, I landed on my five things which I've shared with you. And, and I developed a process, a simple process where once a quarter I look at those five things and say, How am I doing? How am I doing with my own personal well being? How am I doing with my work? How am I doing with my family? How am I doing with my faith? How am I doing with my community commitments? It's, it's, it's not complicated, but I have, I have a checklist. And I've worked it over decades now. And it helps me keep my rudder in the water while the world is spinning out of control. So I encourage people to sort through what matters most to them. And then say no, to a lot of the other stuff that comes their way. Stephen Covey had another great line. He used he said, Doug, it's easy to say no, if there's a greater Yes. Burning within. We got to figure out what the greater yes is what matters most. What are those five things for you? And how are you saying yes to them. And then fill in around those things with the things you have to react to, for me 30,000 100,000 feet, feet. That's the most important thing, figure out what matters most and then put First things first. And make sure you're paying attention to it.

Adam: Doug, thank you for joining us. And thank you for all the great advice.

Doug: Okay, Adam, I wish you the best of luck with all of your work, you're doing important work and you just got to keep it coming. 

Adam: I really appreciate that. Thank you.