Testing and learning from mistakes: Maquivar of Mars Wrigley

I think that, as you rightly said, we had COVID. Now we are facing into the Russia-Ukraine situation that is providing an impact globally on inflation, commodity pressure, labor. And then I'm sure that after this Russia-Ukraine crisis, we will see something new in three to five years that is going to be the norm: this volatility, this VUCA environment. And then of course the question is, the answer is how we are able to build the muscle, the capabilities with our associates — we call associates what other companies call employees, but we do not call ourselves employees, we call ourselves associates because we truly believe we are more than an employee, we are part of the company, we are small owners of Mars. So we call our associates that. And so the tricky piece, the solution, is to build the right talent and capabilities with our associates, to my previous comment: to be agile, to take risks, to be decisive, to be innovative and do not wait for perfection but rather to progress, to test and learn, do it better, test and learn again and do it better, then learn from that and do it better, versus waiting 10 years to do something, waiting for that perfection, because perfection will never come. So this idea of progress, progress, test and learn: any idea, any business model, any new product, any new route to market, and anything, and not waiting for perfection but rather let's action, test and learn, learn from our mistakes to do it then better, and then learn again and do it better. That approach is allowing us to experiment, to be faster, to be creative, to be more agile. And by doing that, and building that muscle, that capability with our associates, we are going to be able to face — and we are facing — the Ukraine-Russia situation in a successful way, and we are going to be able to then face anything that will come our way in the future from this VUCA world. If we do not build that muscle of creativity, risk-taking, decisiveness, agility, then we are all always going to be three steps behind the situation, always late answering the consumer, always late answering the customer, or always late answering to the situation. And when you are always late, then you are behind and you are losing competitiveness, and then through the years that will not mean success. So I'm very proud to say that we are building that muscle that is allowing us to come out successful out of COVID, and that is allowing us to face the current situation of Ukraine-Russia also in a successful way. So it's about building those talents, those capabilities. Five years ago, maybe five years ago we did a reflection and said we are not decisive enough, we are not agile enough, and we were taking too many decisions at a regional or at a global level. So the country India or Mexico or Russia needed to ask approval from the region or the globe for too many things, and that escalation, that process slowed us down. So we did a reflection, and we catalogued all the different decisions that were made in the unit, in the region, in the globe, and we reflected and said this is an obstacle for us being agile. And we then decided to move the majority of the decisions to the unit. And today, because we did the exercise now, 98% of the decisions are done at the unit level and only 2% are done at the regional or global level. And that has allowed the units — in this case India behind Kalpesh, our GM — to be agile, to be able to decide himself or the India team the things that are right for India, and not us slowing them down by requesting them to come to us for a decision. So it's just an example on how we are pushing decisions where the consumer and the customer are. And that is super important. Another aspect, for example, is that we have moved away from hierarchical organization of a superior, line manager and then one below, and rather moving towards an agile network organization where we have centers of excellence at the global level that are experts on their field — on sales or on marketing — and then the units, in this case again India, are able to tap into these centers of excellence in a very clear way, and they have established these connections so that they can very quickly bring know-how and knowledge that maybe doesn't exist at the country level and bring that knowledge into the unit in a very agile way to be able to make a better decision. So I think the combination of pushing down the majority of the decisions to the unit, and then creating this network enterprise where the knowledge, the centers of excellence connect in a very clear way with the units, that combination has allowed us to be quicker and faster on making decisions, but also that those decisions are better.