Impact Speaker - Tom Falk

Good afternoon. I'm told it's a bad idea to wear red here, so even though I'm a Wisconsin Badger, which shows a big red school, and Stanford Cardinal is another red school, I tried to represent you. This is about as close to gold as I could get. Anyway, you gave my whole speech? No, I'm actually just going to talk for about 30 minutes about me and what I do. I find that when I give a lot of these speeches, the big question for the students is, 'Hey buddy, how do I get your job?' So I'll tell you a little bit about what I do, who my customers are, what a typical day is like, and give you a little bit of free advice. Then we'll do Q&A, which hopefully will be fun and interesting. So let me talk a little bit about me. I was born in Waterloo, Iowa. I'm the oldest of nine children. That's me, the good-looking one over there. My dad still lives in Cedar Falls, Iowa. I started caddying when I was 12 years old. I earned a caddy scholarship, so I had somebody else pay for my college tuition, which is great. I went to work for Kimberly-Clark 33 years ago. After a while, they sent me to Stanford to do their Sloan program. They paid for that college tuition. So I'm thinking, this is good, I don't have any student loans. This is awesome. Anybody got student loans here today? Not too many. That's pretty good. You guys are well-said. So that's good. I've been married for 36 years to the same person. How about that? And that's our son. He just got married a year ago, so I have a brand new daughter-in-law. I'm learning about what that's all about, how to be a good in-law. I'm really an awesome in-law. I think I try to pick up dinner and do all kinds of other good things, taking them on vacations, paying their bills. So it's great. I like to exercise. That is not me doing the full Superman on the racquetball court, but I do play racquetball a couple times a week, try to strength train a couple times a week, do some other cardio. I like to row in the summer. I have a house kind of like that I get to go out and do that. So as you go through your career, try to find ways to stay active because it is a marathon. We're all working pretty hard during the day, but you need the energy that exercise and good sleep gives you to keep performing at a high level. So try to have balance in your life. We're going to talk about work-life balance in a minute.

Kimberly-Clark was founded in 1872. That's 144 years ago. Let's put that in perspective. In 1872 there were no iPhones, no telephones, no electric light bulbs, no automobiles. So that was a very different company than it is today. Wouldn't you say? Our first product was newsprint. How many of you read a daily newspaper? Whew, let's have the free Wall Street Journal subscription here somewhere. That gets you started. But not many people do. So the companies had to evolve and change over the last 144 years to be in the businesses that we're in. That's another story for you. You start out your career, and over the course of your career things change. You have to adapt, learn new things, develop new skills and capabilities. So even though you're going to get a very fine degree here from Georgia Tech, you have to exit with the attitude of 'I am never going to stop learning.' I've got to continue to learn new things to be relevant, develop new capabilities so that I can compete wherever our business is moving to, because it's moving somewhere you can't always predict how that's going to turn out. Today we have 43,000 employees. I do not know all of their names, but I know a lot of them. I've been around for a long time. That for me is the very best part of the job. I get to spend time with great people that are trying to win in the marketplace. They inspire me every time I get a chance to spend time with them. We have a bunch of our employees here in the front row. They had to sit in front because they're with me. But just being with them and finding out what they're working on and what they care about is the best part of what I do every day. So 43,000 employees, we're almost $19 billion in sales. We've got the number one or two position in about 80 countries. I get to travel to different countries. I did a speaking engagement to a group somewhat like this in Kazakhstan earlier this year. It was my first trip to Kazakhstan. There's a small university there that we recruit at. I went and talked to them about Kimberly-Clark and what we're doing, and how to think about business and their careers. About a quarter of the world's population uses our products every day. That's great news, right? Because three-quarters of the population don't use them yet. So we have a huge opportunity to grow. You have to constantly be thinking about how do you turn your business into something that can continue to grow. So our business: consumer tissue, personal care, KC Professionals. Let me just do a show of hands. How many of you have ever worn a diaper? Okay, you understand our business. You're in the category, right? So yes, we make Huggies diapers. We won't ask about Depend or Ploy. Some of your faculty members might be sensitive about that. They're older. It's a joke, folks. It's okay. And of course our Kotex feminine care, then Kleenex, Cottonelle, Scott. We use many of those brands in our professional environment as well. Terrific businesses. The great thing is people need our products every single day, no matter who's in charge in the country or what's happening economically. People need diapers and bathroom tissue every single day. That doesn't mean there aren't bumps in an international market sometimes that cause short-term business challenges, but fundamentally we keep coming back to people need our products every day. We deliver on the essentials for a better life for people all over the world. That's our goal: lead the world in essentials for a better life.

We do that with four key strategies built on four values. First strategy: Unleash the power of our people. We start with that. 43,000 people. That's the difference. That's what makes businesses work better than anything else. Lots of people have great products, great brands, great processes, great capability. But the power of a group of people working together to deliver on a business result is something that is really hard to replicate. My wish for all of you is that you find yourselves in companies that think this way and feel this way, and allow you to have the impact that has you perform at your best. You all want to go to work for a place that can let you do your best work and where your dreams can come true. If you have a place like that, that's a pretty powerful place to start a career. That's been what I've found at Kimberly-Clark, and it's my job to keep that going. So starts with unleashing the power of your people, making sure the best people want to come to work at KC, making sure we've got the right development experiences, the right training, the right opportunities for them to grow and flourish and take their career in whatever direction it wants to go. Second thing is have a strong healthy core. If you don't have a strong core business, then you're going to struggle to grow. You've got to have a strong core, winning products in the market, the right capabilities. We continue to invest in our core to make sure we've got the best performing diapers everywhere, the softest facial tissue, and winning versus our competition in all the markets we're in around the world. If you've got great people and a strong healthy core, then you got to think about growth. What can I do to create a better future? Where can I invest in new product areas that didn't exist? Just like the people that did the iPhone, the telephone, the automobile, and all those other things that have been invented over the last 140 years. I believe that if you have a strong team of people that's really powerful and empowered to drive your business, if you've got a strong healthy core business, if you're investing at the right level for the future, then you're going to deliver consistent business results. That fourth bucket, but it's not that you start out to deliver consistent business results. You start out by doing those other things. You build a strong team, have a strong core business, invest at the right level for the future, and the results flow from that. Now I'm an accountant by training, so it took me a while to figure that out. I used to think that business was all about math, that you start with the P&L. But what you really need is the P&L is the scorecard of all the other stuff that you're doing in the business. I urge you to think about that as you get into businesses. It's easy to get focused on whatever part of it you're working on, but try to think about that construct: Are we winning in our core markets? Are we investing for the future? Are we investing in our people? If you're doing those things consistently over the long term, you're going to be at a great place and have a winning company. And those four strategies are built on a bedrock of values. For us, authentic means you show up every day and try to do the right thing and be who you really are, and not have to pretend to be somebody else. So you want to work at a company that is authentic, where you can be different or be who you are, and not have to act differently when you come to work than you do at home with your family. Authentic is a key part of it. Accountable means we act like owners of the business, so we take decisions in the long-term best interests of the people that own the company, not short-termism. Innovative means we show up every day wanting to make the company better, and we believe that fresh thinking that adds value is something we should welcome and incorporate wherever we can. And finally, caring. Sometimes people would see caring on this list and say, 'Yeah, big companies don't really care.' But man, the people at big companies really do care. The best part of my job is seeing and hearing all the stories of our people all over the world that care for each other, give back to their community, and do the right thing when no one was looking. Those are the things that make you really proud of the organization that you create, and you create an environment where they can do that and it gets recognized and rewarded.

So what have I done since I came to Kimberly-Clark? I worked as a CPA for three years in public accounting. After a while, I didn't really want to be a partner at a CPA firm just because I looked at what it took to be good at that and that wasn't necessarily what I thought I was good at or what I thought I wanted to do. So I joined internal audit at KC. I really didn't like it all that much, but I thought it's a good company and I don't have to audit all that long. I'll learn about the business and maybe I can move into other financial areas. I went from there to the corporate finance team and worked on some special finance projects. Got exposure to senior management very early. Part of that is luck of the draw. I was in the right place at the right time with the right project where I had the right skills and I did a good job. So I got exposed to the CFO and the CEO in my first three or four years at the company, which is unusual. It was a great opportunity for me. Darwyn Smith, who was CEO, sent me to Stanford to go get my advanced degree, which I think mostly he wanted to be able to move me quicker through the organization. So often you find executives sponsor people. A lot of people come into organizations wanting mentors, which are good, but you also really want sponsors, people that will grab you and say, 'Alright, you're going there and we're gonna move you forward quicker.' That certainly happened for me to jumpstart my career in ways that I wouldn't have thought possible. I went out from Stanford to one of our production facilities at Beech Island in South Carolina. On paper, it was a three-step demotion. My Stanford classmates were like, 'Geez, Tom, you were a director of corporate strategy in Dallas and you want to be an operations consultant at Beech Island? Maybe they're sending you a signal. Maybe you just got kicked in the head.' I figured I can always go be an accountant. I don't know if I can be a general manager. I don't know if I can be good at plant operations. It was great because the company made an investment in me. I can tell you I did not enlarge the world's understanding of how to make diapers while I was at Beech Island, but I learned a ton. It still helps me to this day as I think about the people that work in our plants, what they care about, how they work every day, how we communicate with them. It was a great experience for me. You're going to get times during your career where you get offered the chance to jump off the ladder and go do something different. Think about that. It's not always risk-free, but it can be a really exciting opportunity for you to develop and learn new things. I never learned more about how to be a manager than when I was managing outside my home discipline. The first morning, I went into my morning meeting and I barely knew which diaper machines were mine. They said, 'Hey Tom, you think we should change the slip plates on the sharp modules today?' I said, 'I don't know. What happens if we don't? Do we have the spare parts? Is it a safety problem? Is it a quality problem? How much downtime is involved? Whose machine is this anyway? And by the way, if the answer to the question isn't obvious, come and see me and I'll make the decision.' It causes people to take ownership for the process. My job was to make sure I had the right team, to make sure we were setting objectives at the right level, and then to remove the obstacles that were getting in the way of their success, and then holding them accountable to go do their jobs every day and not have me be the boss that told them what to do. You'll find that great companies people will be challenging you to work up to your level of ability and even stretching you beyond your comfort zone at times. Great leaders will do that, and great people will rise to the occasion and rise to the expectations that you set for them. Then Darwyn came to see me in Beech Island and asked if I wanted to get back into finance. I said, 'Well, no, there's no jobs in finance you'd offer me that I want.' He offered me the chance to be vice president of business analysis, which wasn't on the list. So I said, 'Yeah, sure, I'll get back into finance for a while.' I did that, and then from there started running the diaper business starting in 1993. The merger with Scott Paper in 1995, I became chief operating officer in 2000 and CEO in 2002. Let's see. So what a CEO does every day. That's me actually working on a project with our Viva team. CEOs do some executive type work. That was a photo op staged to make it look like I was working hard. You guys are laughing at that. It really was. We were doing a Viva promotion. We were doing an Extreme Makeover for Boys & Girls Club. We actually took some Boys and Girls Club kids and we wound up making over someone's backyard to promote our Viva brand. It was a fun thing I got to do with the team. The key things that I focus on metrics: sales growth, profit growth, margin, market share, stock price. Those are the key things I pay attention to. Some of my deliverables: having a strong team is key, making sure we get the right innovation in the pipeline, making sure we're building the right capability in the right places as we grow in China or Latin America, that I've got the right people and resources and capability on the ground. And who are my customers? My customers are the Board of Directors. Sometimes people think CEOs don't have bosses. Well, you go, most people only have one boss. CEOs have 12 bosses. The whole Board of Directors are your boss in many ways, and their number one job is to hire the CEO. Shareholders are our key customers. I was on the phone with a shareholder this morning. Usually, I used to do three full days a quarter of meetings with shareholders after our earnings call and before we get too deep into the next quarter. We talk to people that either own the stock or that I think should own the stock and make sure they understand what we're trying to do at Kimberly-Clark, how we're running the place, what's important, where we're investing, what kind of growth we expect, what we're gonna do with the cash that we generate, and what's in it for them as a potential shareholder. We do spend a fair amount of time with those groups. I also spend time with customers. I'll be at Walmart next week teaching in their leadership program and then doing a series of top-to-tops with their executive team to make sure I know how we're performing. I find that I don't learn very much in my office. If I get out of my office and go see customers where they live in their offices, you get unfiltered feedback. You don't have the PowerPoint presentation that tells you everything is fine. You actually go and talk to the customer and find out what's not fine because they're not shy about telling you. It is important to get out and spend time in the market with your team, with your customers, to get unfiltered feedback. Don't let yourselves get trapped by your meeting schedule.

So I'll talk about three areas: ways to approach work as you graduate, so you get to kind of define your approach to leadership. We'll talk a little bit about work-life balance, and then I'll give you a challenge to be the CEO of your own career. Approach to business: my very first day on the job in public accounting, the part senior partner in the firm came in and he talked about business. He said, 'You know, business is simple. You just got to do three things. You got to take good care of customers, develop your people, and find a way to grow.' You do those three things, you're gonna be good at any business you're in. If you're doing great stuff with customers and they're wanting to do more business with you, engaging in long-range planning with you, that's going to keep moving in the right direction. If you're developing people, if you're hiring people that are better than you are, they will push you up the ladder. You will create opportunities for yourself by the strengths of your team. Sometimes it takes leaders to be confident enough to really trust in that, but it absolutely does happen. It's an awesome thing to see when you see people pushing their bosses up the ladder. Then find a way to grow. Be thinking about what else can I do, what needs aren't being met, what other services can I offer, how can I make this business bigger. As we think about growing geographically, that's part of it. We look at what markets do we want to go into next. We're poised and ready to go into Iran when the sanctions drop. We're also poised and ready to go into Cuba when the sanctions drop. We're ready for those next new market opportunities. We want to be ready to know what the plan is. We don't want to wait until we find out and then start to do the plan. We'll check and adjust as we go, but we're absolutely thinking about what are those next new markets and what are the next unmet consumer needs we can innovate for and develop new products for. We've got a lot of work being done in both of those avenues and vectors of growth. Work-family balance: how many believe there is such a thing as work-family balance? Show hands. I have crushingly disappointing news for you. There is no such thing as work-family balance. Your entire life you will be slightly out of balance. My belief is there are three forces in all of our lives that are always competing for our attention: your career, family however you define family, and self, the things that you do for your own self-development. You're going to be constantly trading off: what are my job responsibilities, what else do I have to do to progress my career, what are the issues with family, whether that's time with spouse, kids growing up, aging ill parents. Every one of us has issues in all those areas that we have to be a part of and want to be a part of throughout our lives. And self: what are the other things that are important to you to develop, whether that's continuing education, exercise, Bible study, or whatever other things you do that make you an interesting person, that are fun and bring more color to your life. You will be constantly trading those things off. If you're ever too far out of balance for too long, you're not going to be very happy. So you're going to need to rebalance a bit and think about, 'Alright, I've been on the road for a week, I need to make sure I've got time to do stuff with my family this weekend. I'm gonna try to stay in town next week to catch up and get back in balance on that front. Or I skipped workouts two days this week, I'm gonna take a long run in the next couple of days to get back on track with my program.' As long as you're constantly checking and rebalancing periodically, you have an interesting, long, full, happy life. You will find that the things that don't fit those buckets tend to get pushed out if you're smart. I don't watch a ton of television anymore because I'm doing other stuff that's in one of those three buckets. I do watch football. I watched the Cowboys beat the Redskins yesterday and wrote three blog posts while I was doing that. We got Cowboy fans here? Yeah, that's right, go Cowboys. Then I watched my Green Bay Packers get beat by the Vikings last night, so that wasn't quite as exciting. Anyway, work-family balance: just recognize you're gonna get competing tensions, that's normal, it doesn't go away. At different points in your life, you'll have different pulls on each of those levers. Just recognize you're gonna have to eventually rebalance to be happy long term.

Alright, so last: be CEO of your own career. You can all email mom and dad and tell them or text them and say, 'Hey, I'm a CEO.' CEOs have to do three things: deliver results, have a plan for the future, and build capability in their organization. So if you're CEO of your own career, deliver results in the job that you're in. Everybody has to start out their career being good at something. Be good at that, deliver more than what's expected, figure out what your boss's job is and do part of that if you can. Start out by delivering results. That's a key part of whatever your job is when starting a new career. Build capability: what things do you need to work to get better at your chosen profession, either to go deep in a particular area or to go abroad and learn some other functions. You don't have to get it right. I think a lot of times people would say, 'Gosh, Tom, did you know you're gonna be CEO when you started?' Heck no. None of us really know what we're gonna be doing 30 years out. If you can figure out over the next three to five years what might I want to do next, that's about as far as any CEO's business plan is any good anyway. So think about that for your career. What are the capabilities you want to build in the next three to five years? Then work toward that vision. Always know what you might want to do next if anybody asks. Then be open to a more interesting idea if someone comes up with one and think about how that might take you in a different path to your ultimate objective. If you deliver results, you're building capability, and you've got a near-term plan for where you want to go, you will be a great CEO of your career. So that wraps up my prepared remarks and I would be happy, and this would be more fun, if we start taking your questions. There's a couple of roving microphones around here somewhere. You guys are all pretty happy. There one away in the back right now.

Yeah, no, that's really a good question. And part of it was well, I read Dilbert every day, so my primary goal is to never be the pointy-headed boss or the bald goofy looking CEO guy. So I won't ask any of our Kimberly-Clark team that are here if I've fully met that objective or not, but that's my goal. And I think it's a very interesting question. I mean part of it is forcing myself to get out of my...

Comfort zone and go managing an area that I didn't know all the answers so the guy I was following was a diaper machine engineer so he installed diaper machines for a living and so he knew what to do and told everyone what to do and at first when I started to push that back on the team and asked them to accept accountability for their part of the process they were some of them were initially surprised but I also had some I had some maintenance mechanics who were actually quite tired of being told what to do and were just waiting for someone to ask them for their ideas and so if you are strong enough and confident enough to invite others in and share your power even though you had the power to make the decision you don't have to make all the decisions you can include others in your process and you find that you make better decisions and you'll have a more engaged team if you do it that way and then be open to learning it was I've added new executives to my team I added a CMO eight or nine years ago and I've learned a ton about marketing by having the CMO on my team I had a new chief supply chain officer last year at Schneider McQuillan and I've learned I thought I knew something about supply chain I've learned by having someone who's really good in that area on my team and so bringing in new people on your team and getting fresh ideas and being open to it throughout your whole career will make you a better leader going forward.

That's a great question. The whole issue of sustainability is relatively new, it's happened kind of in my career, and yet at Kimberly Clark we've been practicing sustainability for more than a hundred years. We started as a paper company, so we cut down trees and made paper, and in those days no one was around to tell you that you needed to practice sustainable forestry to be in that business, and yet whoever was running the company 140 years ago said, 'Well, if we cut down one tree, we're gonna plant two more so that we will always have an endless supply of forestry resources.' So in fact, we managed forests in Canada where it takes almost a hundred years to grow trees to cutting height, and four or five years ago we won some award for sustainable forestry, and that was because seeds were planted a hundred years ago that are now... it's still a beautiful evergreen forest. Probably about in 1995 I picked up the responsibility for our environmental group, and so we started setting five-year stretch goals on our impact on the environment, and this is before really anybody cared that much about it. So we wanted to reduce our energy consumption per unit of output, we wanted to reduce our impact on fresh water usage, we wanted to make sure all of our fiber is coming from certified sustainable forests. We've continued to every five years renew our goals with a new set of stretch goals, and I'd say more recently you find more people that actually care about that and ask questions about it. When we started 20 years ago, no one really knew or cared, but we knew it was the right thing to do, and so we published a sustainability report online and I urge you to take a look at it and you can see the progress that we're making. We track what our goals are, we also track what our performance is, and we just finished up our five-year goals in 2015 and we hit virtually all of our goals that we set in 2010, and we recommitted to a new set of goals. This time we went out seven years, we stretched out to 2022, which is when the company will be 150 years old.

It is interesting if there's an HR question: how do you build the right team and right culture in markets like that? And it's always a mix of some expats to get started to plant the culture, but then you've also got to have a local team on the ground that understands the local market nuance, but they've got to operate with the right culture and the right values, particularly internationally. And so where corruption is an issue, you've really got to emphasize ethics as you go about that. I'd say we've been on a journey in that front. As we look at our markets that have performed the best over time, they've been the markets that had the strong local teams that had the right values. So we've got a fantastic business in South Korea, it's about a nearly a billion dollar business, leading market shares in every category, and it's nearly all Korean team, language is a challenge there, so you've really got to be embedded in the local culture. China today for us is nearly all Chinese team, and we started 25, 30 years ago, I mean all the leaders were expats, we struggled, we eventually built the right culture and then built the right local leadership team. And then what you can have happen is, today like the guy who runs Europe Middle East and Africa for us is Argentinian, the guy who runs Italy for us is Colombian, we just moved an Israeli in to run Australia. So you can then pick your leaders up and transplant them where language and culture allow. There are some places in the world where it's tougher to do, but increasingly it's easier for your best people to get multi-geographic experiences.

It's an interesting question because I think you find in Europe they've tended to split the roles, but then they don't have a strong lead director per se, and the non-executive chair is sort of not a totally independent director there at the company two or three days a week, it's kind of a part-time job. So most American companies haven't adopted that, but they have a strong lead director. So I review our board work plan and board agendas with my lead director, and he approves those before the meeting. And then if we're doing any kind of other long-range planning, we'll work with a subset of the board on that pretty actively. So it's, I'd say most American companies have not split, and if you look at the governance results or the level of failure of governance between the two geographies, you don't really find a clear compelling case for one or the other. And it's probably just a little bit more efficient for me to take my chairman hat off and put my CEO hat on and go back and forth, but I probably talk or email my lead director, I'd say once a week about something.

That's a fair point. I guess I would say I didn't worry too much about my peers, I worried about my team and my results. And I say every company has politics. At Kimberly-Clark, more of the politics is about what's right for the business, not what's right for my individual career. So people that are very politically motivated about jockeying for position in advancing my own career usually don't do very well because they eventually get found out. So I wasn't trying to get ahead of anybody, I was being moved forward quickly by the executive team. And when I got my first big P&L role, I took over our diaper business in 1993, which at that time was our largest P&L, it was a two and a half billion dollar business making several hundred million a year. There were two or three guys that thought they were gonna get the job that were kind of competing with each other, and when I got the job initially I was worried they might feel bad about that, but they almost did, they almost said I didn't count because if one of the other guys had gotten it they would have felt bad because they were competing with them, but because they didn't see themselves as really competing with me, it didn't bother them that much. It's like, 'I'm okay as long as that guy didn't get it,' because then I'm behind, but I was never competing with you anyway. So I don't know if that answered your question.

In terms of that was the point about mentors and sponsorship. A lot of times people want mentors, and mentors can be very helpful to you to understand if you got assigned to this project or your performance review said this, what does that really mean here and what do I need to think about in that context. Sponsors, you might not even be aware you're being sponsored. Early on I wasn't aware I was being sponsored, I knew I was being offered opportunities, and if I had been dumb and said no and was unwilling to relocate, I physically moved seven times in the first ten years I was with the company. So I had a very understanding wife who was willing to rearrange her career priorities to help my career advance, and I to this day I'm very appreciative of the sacrifice that she made and wound up being a stay-at-home mom and created a great life for our son and for me. Now that's not the only way that it works. You're seeing these days just as many stay-at-home dads, and you're also seeing two-career couples where they make it work and they get more outside help. So there's more than one model. Moving to career couples is trickier, but we do it all the time. We have people moving all over the place, and we find ways to make it work for everybody. And in terms of how you manage your boss, I would say we can be honest about what your expectations are and ask, 'What do I need to do to get to the job that I'm looking for?' and get their honest assessment. Sometimes you might not want to hear the answer, but ask what's it going to take or what experience do I need to go get, and if you don't think you need it, then that's a good honest conversation to have at some point.

The challenge is that there's places like India where there's a lot of people and they don't have very much money, and our categories are really small. Even if you go into the center of China, the categories are very small and not well developed. In Africa today, there are more babies born in Nigeria every year than in all of Western Europe combined, and yet the diaper category is very small because they don't have very much income. So as people move up the GDP per capita curve, they have more money to spend in categories like ours. You first start to see bathroom tissue, then low-end feminine care, then value diapers. There may be some very wealthy consumers at the upper end that will buy those products in smaller boutique shops, but to get to those really being a mass market, we look at it in the U.S. and say on average consumers in the U.S. that are in the diaper category use 5 or 6 diapers a day. In some emerging markets, they might use one diaper a day, it might just be for overnight, so they might be in the category but it's not fully penetrated.

That's a great question, it's becoming more and more important. So we're a big Disney licensee, so we put if we put Mickey or Minnie or Winnie the Pooh on our Huggies products, you would think babies don't care but they really do. In fact, I was talking to one of our key customers and he said, 'You know who the decision maker for pull ups is, don't you?' and I said, 'Absolutely.' You know the three-year-old in the cart is deciding which designs he's gonna wear or she's gonna wear, they want the cars or the princesses. So understanding how do you manage that? So we do a ton of auditing, we do supplier certifications where they've got to go through and attest to what they're doing, and if we've discovered that they're in violation, that can mean loss of their business to us. So we take it very seriously.

Well, you should probably talk to my wife about that because she might say that I still haven't got it figured out quite right. But I would say, what I have found is that when you're with your family, be with your family. So if I pull my phone out at a family dinner, I get the skunk eye, and I deserve it. So I'm engaged in conversation with my family, I am not doing work, or I'll get up and go into another room if I really have to take a call or do work. So it is being present in the moment with whoever you're with. That's true when you're at work, that's true when you're with your family. And then it's pushing the things out of your life that don't add value. So I like to exercise, so I exercise early in the morning usually because my wife's sleeping and I'm not taking time away from anybody else but me at that point in time. So if we're on a family vacation, my son and wife can sleep later than I can, so if I've got work to do, I'll do it early in the morning, and then when they're up and about, it gets put away and we go do the family vacation. So you just get better at it, but it's really trying to compartmentalize it because you think you're faking it and they can't tell, but they can tell every time. So I just think being present. And we will have times where it's super busy and maybe there are times where you get out of balance. I was on a family vacation one time and I was on an outside board that was in the middle of a kind of a crisis, and we were on a sunset cruise and literally the Sun is about to go below the horizon, and my wife is there, my son is there, his girlfriend was there, it's kind of a nice family moment, and I get a call from the CEO of this company who needed to talk about the crisis, and that wasn't good. But on the other hand, it didn't happen every trip. So you will occasionally have issues where you're out of balance, you just got to recognize it and try to get back in balance.

That's a great question. The FORCE program is a great example of the stories to tell you how this really works in real life. Sometimes when you see programs that CEOs talk about, you might think that the CEO thought of all of that stuff themselves, so they're just super smart and they have all the best ideas. That's not actually how it works. The FORCE program was started by our KCP team, which is our KC Professional business based just up the road in Atlanta, where we have a number of fine Georgia Tech graduates. In fact, across Kimberly-Clark, I think we have over a hundred Georgia Tech alums, and I think we've got twenty or thirty co-op students around. So it originated there and it was a really good idea. As I observed what they were doing, it helped me think about what was possible in a different way. So I took that idea and then socialized it with the rest of the leadership team, with a small group to help get it going, and launched it. So a lot of times as a leader, it's swiping an idea, finding something that works, and then helping scale it.

And oftentimes you need to socialize it. So like when I brought in a new chief supply chain officer, the first thing I did was I did a little org project with a team to kind of benchmark how are other organizations structured in that way, what would report into this role. We did a little decision rights matrix, so what decisions would this new position make. Then I did a half-day workshop with my leadership team to talk about the role and what concerns would they have, what would excite them about the role, and we went through the decision rights matrix. This is before I even had the first interview with any candidates, because I wanted to make sure that if I had resistance in the organization that I knew about it early, so that I could either overcome it or in some cases adapt the plan and take some of their feedback. And you will find both of those examples. You will occasionally have, I've had situations during my career where someone had a really good point to make and an objection, and I had some good thoughts on how to do it in a different way that would be more effective, and being smart enough to take that feedback and course-correct and not have to win every argument even though you can. Then I've also had other times where I had people that, in any change initiative, I tend to look at my team and think about who is already fully in the boat that's rowing hard with me no matter what, who's kind of on the fence, if they sense the momentum is building they'll jump on, and then who is wanting to go in the opposite direction. And I've had several occasions in my career where we go for a quiet dinner or a drink and say, 'Okay, this is really important to me, I am going here, I need you to be with me on this, and if you can't then we need to talk about how you go do something else.' And you do it in a professional way. But that is your job as a leader. If you decide this is a course of action that is important for your team to go do, you have to get your team aligned behind you. They aren't ever gonna all be a hundred percent, but if you've got a critical leader on your team that is not wanting to go where you want to go, that's a problem for you, and then your odds of successfully implementing it are not very good. So you're better off addressing it in the front end as much as you can than waiting until it crashes. All these Kimberly-Clark guys are here, and they probably can tell stories about me here, so yep, check.

It's a great question, especially in sales. Sometimes in sales you find people that are really way better at sales than people management, and oftentimes we make the mistake of promoting the top sales guy into a people management role, and it's not what they're really good at or what they like to do. So it's also thinking about what is your ultimate career objective. We talked about that, the CEO of your own career. So if you're delivering results and you're killing it against your sales targets, that's fantastic. What capability are you going to build? Do you want to be a bigger sales rep, or do you really want to move into general management? And then what else do you need? Do you need marketing, do you need some other functional capability to get into a general manager role, not just a sales manager role? I think often that can be a trap, that we would get into a leadership role without a clear path of what it's going to lead us to. So I challenge that. I'd say not everybody needs to be a GM or a team leader. On the other hand, most of us at some point in time pivot from being a doer to being a leader. So we go from being the expert at something into having a team of people that work for us. So your career will go through different pivot points. You start out as a really good doer at something, you pivot to being a team leader, you may pivot to being a functional leader or a general manager, and maybe a leader of leaders. Depending on how high and how far your career goes, you have those turning points in your career where you've got to learn a new set of skills. You've got to, hopefully you're being developed along the way so you're ready for it. But it starts with where do you want to go and what do you want to do. If you really want to be the very best salesperson and that's really what your dream is, then maybe you don't need to be a people manager. On the other hand, the leader of our Walmart team has almost a hundred people on his team and he's got a three billion dollar account, so he is a hell of a sales leader and he's also got a big people management experience.

I think getting people to work together is the most frustrating and most rewarding part of most of these jobs. And even more, something called the star model, have you ever heard of that? The guy named Jay Galbraith invented the star model, and I did a consulting project with him on our design. The star model starts with your strategy, whatever it is you want to do at the top, and then the other points of the star are org design, process, people, and rewards. Execution of any successful strategy is a combination of all those things. So you've got to think about it: you have the right organization structure, do you have the right processes in place or the right decision rights, the right tools and systems, you have the right people, you need different capability to do what you want to go do, you don't have that in your organization, and then you have the right incentives aligned. So when I created the new marketing role, it was we wanted to get better at marketing everywhere, we needed to build our capability. So we had a strategy that we wanted to get better at marketing, so the org structure was to create a CMO, a central marketing capability. We also had to build a lot of marketing processes and tools and begin to train more of our team on what does it mean to be a good marketer and recalibrate where the bar was. I had to go recruit some great marketing talent from outside so that our team could see, 'All right, if you thought the bar was here, I think the bar is really here, I need to bring in some marketers at that level so that you can raise your game.' Then some people said, 'You know what, I can't get there, so I'm gonna go work somewhere else.' But a lot of people said, 'You know what, I can get there, I didn't know that was where I had to go, but I can definitely get there,' and they raised their game. Then you align your incentives with that. So I think that is the most important part of leadership, is getting people to collaborate and work better together. We all operate in these matrix organizations where we have the P&L owned in a geography and the functions all have global purview to look across companies in finance or HR or supply chain or marketing, and try to add value to the local businesses. It's a very tricky, challenging operating environment, but it's also very rewarding, and it can be a huge competitive advantage when it works well. Good leaders figure that out and create an environment where people make the right decisions. But no, it's the most exciting part of the job in many ways.