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Before a strategy becomes a success story, it's a judgement call.
Now in its second season, Founder's Mentality: The CEO Sessions gets inside the decisions that defined some of the world's greatest leaders - a bet the market couldn't yet see, a crisis that put the organisation's purpose to the test, and the courage to keep showing up even when you don't have the answer.
How do you stay close to the frontline as the organisation scales?
What does AI mean for the thing you have spent years building?
How do you transform the company without breaking what makes it great?
Hosted by Jimmy Allen, Advisory Partner at Bain & Company, bestselling author and leader of Bain's Global CEO Forum, each episode is a candid, in-depth conversation with leaders from Mars, The Economist Group, Khan Academy, and more.
Each episode is built around one real story, one defining moment, and the lessons that come from living through it. Dense with insight and designed for leaders who listen with a pen in hand, the series explores the outer game of markets, technology and growth, and the inner game of energy, humility and courage, and what it takes to master both.
The question this season isn't just what the CEO should do.
It's who does the CEO need to become?
Join the Conversation:
https://www.bain.com/founders-mentality/
https://www.bain.com/insights/topics/ceo-agenda
Links:
Bain & Company LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/bain-and-company/)
Bain & Company X (https://x.com/BainandCompany)
Jimmy Allen LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-allen-3442b/)
About the Host:
Jimmy Allen is an Advisory Partner at Bain & Company with over 35 years’ experience advising leading organizations. He’s the author of multiple best-selling books on growth and leadership and the host and founder of Bain’s Global CEO Community Forum. Jimmy is a regular speaker at global business events, including the World Economic Forum, and serves on the Botswana Economic Advisory Council. Outside of consulting, Jimmy started his own record label (Abubilla Music) in 2008 and supports Singing Wells, a project dedicated to preserving Kenyan village music.
Bain & Company:
Founder’s Mentality: The CEO Sessions is brought to you by Bain & Company, a global consultancy trusted by the world’s most influential business leaders. With decades of experience guiding organizations through growth, transformation, and leadership development, Bain’s executive insights offer what it takes to lead at scale.
- We started a strategy
that we need to move our
purpose from sitting on a
wall to decision making at
the table. So a better
world for pets had to be
actively used in deciding
what business we are in.
- A purpose-driven company.
Almost every great firm claims to be one.
It's there in the annual
report, in the CEO letter,
on the website, often supported by posters
decorating meeting rooms.
And most teams nod along,
never quite sure what
leaders would do if
they were really tested.
But until tested, they
store the slogans in the
things we say file. I'm
Jimmy Allen, and this is
Founder's Mentality: The CEO Sessions.
Poul Weihrauch is CEO and
Office of the President at
Mars. And you know Mars,
but mostly from the
checkout aisle. Snickers,
the world's best-selling
candy bar, M&M's, Twix,
Orbit gum, you name it.
It's a global snacking powerhouse.
But the part of Mars you
may not know is the one
Poul helped build: Mars Petcare.
Before taking on the
group role, Poul helped
transform Mars Petcare. He
turned a legacy pet food
business into a leader in
pet health and pet care.
During his time as president,
the company doubled in
size and tripled its organic growth rate.
But that's the what. How
he did it is extraordinary,
and it begins in a graveyard.
Well, that needs a little context.
One of the reasons I was
so excited to speak to Poul
about the transformation
is because of an amazing
article by Professor
Thomas Malnight at IMD.
You'll find it in the
show notes, but the short
version is this. After
touring the business in two
thousand fourteen, Poul
was convinced that Mars
Petcare could be something
much bigger than the sum
of its parts. So over
steak, fries, and Belgian
beer, he and Malnight hatched a plan.
Poul would take a group of
next-generation leaders,
who he called the Pathfinders,
and he'd tell them,
"Act as if you've been fired.
Go out and study some
of the fastest-growing
companies in the world,
and then come back and tell
us what you found." Six months later, the
Pathfinders came back with
a brand-new vision for
Mars Petcare. And Poul,
well, he didn't just ask for
a report. He asked the
Pathfinders to help design
part of an upcoming
summit for senior leaders,
and he said to them,
"You show us what needs to
change."
- We were all summoned
to go to a graveyard.
And in this graveyard,
they had made a complete dark
room with tombstones
everywhere, somber music,
and a bit of skeletons
hanging, and it said
Blockbuster A kind friend
of yours born this year,
dead that year. Eastman
Kodak, inventor of digital
photography, died a year.
And it basically said to
us, "If we don't open up
and don't change, somebody could beat us."
So we all walked out of
the service thinking,
"Oh, we have to take this
serious and change the way
we operate." We didn't
know that they had made the
graveyard. And then we
walked into how is our
strategy going to change?
How are we going to collaborate?
And out of that we started
a strategy that we need
to move our purpose from
sitting on a wall to
decision-making at the table.
So a better world for pets
had to be actively used
in deciding what business we are in.
- I love this idea of the
graveyard, the imagery,
all of it. Here you've
got these young people,
they've traveled the world,
they have their new
ideas. So the purpose had
to move from the walls to
decisions.
- Yeah. So one example
of using the purpose as a
decision-making criteria
is to define the business
we are in, Jimmy. When I go to the doctor,
the doctor, she says to
me, "Poul, you need good
nutrition. You need access
to good healthcare."
So I dutifully do my annual
health check, and I'm
being told to exercise.
It's fundamentally the same
for cats and particularly
dogs as well with the
exercise. And we thought,
hang on, that is a better
world for pets, so we
will only be in a business
that led us up to the purpose.
So we decided we have to
get big in healthcare.
Then we started analyzing
the spend in healthcare
and realized that the
spend on healthcare would
exceed food. So if we
didn't make a substantial
strategic switch here,
we would actually lose our
global leadership. Okay?
And then we realized, oh,
but a lot of data sits in
diagnostics that can help
inform us to make the best
and most precise nutrition
for our clients in the
hospital. And coming out
of the summit, we were
lucky timing-wise that
we then acquired VCA very
quickly in the United
States that had 1,000
hospitals and diagnostic labs.
We bought a company
called Linnaeus in the UK,
AniCura in continental Europe, et cetera.
So we got a lot of momentum of the energy.
And the second thing they
had designed was what
unites the businesses
other than the purpose.
And what unites it is science.
Food is the most important
thing we can control for
cats and dogs, and our job
is then to offer the best
available nutrition at
all price points And
likewise, the access to
healthcare and the science
and data became very important.
Purpose, data, and science
became the uniting factor
which this group came back with.
- The way you describe
purpose is very similar to
within Founder's Mentality
we talk about it,
which is every great
company has an insurgent
mission. They're almost
at war against their
industry on behalf of
underserved customers.
But we're talking there about founders.
You had a business. You
had a group of leaders that
were not involved in the
extraordinary exploration
of companies, but are
then being presented this
incredible vision. For
most CEOs, this is then the
classic problem. I know
where I wanna go, but I have
a whole set of people that
are involved in legacy
businesses, all of which
are profitable, all of
which are helping me fund
this beautiful future.
How did you keep them on
side knowing the reality
that not everybody would
be the perfect leader for
the perfect new businesses
you were creating?
- This was very tough, and
I would not say we got it
perfect. In the beginning,
the leadership team I ran
had as a base the legacy
business, so the first
thing we did was to change
our leadership team.
The top team became heads
of what was in essence
four divisions, our legacy
pet nutrition business,
our Royal Canin business,
and our veterinary
business, and then we had
a data business called
Kinship, and later our
diagnostics business.
We did not have manufacturing
because obviously you
don't have manufacturing
in a hospital, in a
diagnostic business or a data business.
So we moved manufacturing
to where manufacturing was
relevant, i.e., in the
food producing businesses.
And that was a big thing
to do because we are a
proud manufacturing company as well.
Then we worked really
hard on communicating the
importance of each division.
So as an example, we measure
how many pets we touch
in each division, and our
legacy businesses at the
time touched about 375
million pets out of the
world's 800 million.
Our hospital business,
around 40 million pets.
So our legacy business
remained hugely important
in terms of communicating
to the pet parents. And
in order to live up to our
purpose, we have to touch
the pet's parents and
remove their pain points
and make it easier for them
to be a good pet parent.
So the communication around
the importance to the
purpose, the investment
level, they had to feel we
didn't starve them to invest.
Quote, one of the guys said,
"Yeah, I just fund all
your fun bit in the new businesses."
Yeah. And so constant
communication about how much
capital allocation we made,
how much we invested in
marketing, and always put
what was still today the
biggest division at the forefront of our
communication. Did we get it right?
No. Will you still find a
little bit of cynicism in
a corner or two of those
that have spent most of
their career? I'm sure
you will, because this
tension of creating the new
and retaining the old is
a very, very difficult tension
- Poul's navigating one
of the hardest acts in
business. Shift investment
to new engines of growth
while making sure the
legacy business doesn't fall
off a cliff. We call this
the engine one, engine two
problem. Engine one's the core.
Huge business, but slower growth.
Engine two's the new business, small but
fast-growing. So how the hell do you shift
investments towards engine two?
Well, let's celebrate what Poul didn't do.
First, he didn't underestimate
the change challenge
he was facing. All of his
leaders needed to create
the vision of what Mars
Petcare could become,
and all of his leaders need
to experience the danger
of not acting. So he inspired.
He mobilized the pathfinders.
They walked around a
graveyard of companies that
failed to embrace the future.
They were future-oriented,
outside in, head and
heart. Second, he didn't
dismiss engine one.
Yes, the new service-oriented
businesses of engine
two were faster growth,
and yes, they demanded
investments, but engine
one was critical to the
future. And here, Poul
did something remarkable.
He talked about hidden assets.
Yes, engine two had faster
growth, but engine one
had 10 times the customers of any of those
businesses. Engine one
served 400 million pets,
and the sheer scale of this
is key to communicating
the future of Mars to pet parents.
Of course, future growth
matters, but current scale
and reach matter, too,
and Poul didn't forget that.
He gave every leader
a stake in the future.
He gave every leader a role.
You at some point in this
journey faced what I call
the dark period. And what
I mean by that is you have
seen the bold inspiration
and then very quickly
after you had to make a
set of investments and
you're beginning to pull
the parts together that
eventually will become
this grand ecosystem My
hypothesis is at that point,
you then almost had to
wait to see if all of
the promise came true,
meaning that a lot of these
acquisitions need to be
integrated. There was then complexity.
Tell me how you as a
leader handled that muddled
period.
- It was lots of problem.
This was a time where we
were fast into veterinary,
but private equity was
also fast, and our job was
to get hold of the most
priced assets, and you
want to keep the founder of
that business. And when
you get hold of founders,
it's maybe not always the
case that you come and
say, "Here's how we do
certain things, and in order
to get the bigger good,
we need you to change a lot
of things." And some of
those founders really worked
well, and others did
not and were resistant,
and that's very, very
hard to manage in a big
business. The other very
difficult point is on data
and data systems because when you acquire,
you get different legacy businesses.
So unless the data is on
similar platforms that can
speak to one another, we
can't use a lot of the data
activities, and that's a
very hard piece of work
that takes years. The
reality is, for all the
wonderful stories and
podcasts you have about
digital and AI, it still
takes years to get some of
this work done, in my experience at least.
- The issue of ecosystem
control and customer
transparency turn out
to be opposite missions,
which is ecosystem control
has you acquire a lot of
companies, new data systems,
many, many different
views of who the customer
is, and the need to give
them a seamless experience
requires one view of the
customer. Have you cracked it yet?
- No, no, I would actually
concur with the view.
Part of it is linked to organization.
Our legacy business,
Royal Canin, sells to pet
specialty stores. We bought
a super premium natural
business called Champion Petfoods, Origin,
Acana are their brands.
They have a separate route
to market. And then we
have some small data-heavy
businesses, and they have
a direct go-to-market.
What we have done in the
short term is that we share
all P&Ls, all activity
levels and what have you with
the customer. But if the
customer gives us a call
and say, "Can I see Mars?"
The sad reality is we're
probably sending four or
five people. And here comes
the question: Should you
send one or should you
have one that is a lead,
or should you retain
four or five to have the
dedication of your business?
We have a belief in Mars
that focus wins over
synergy. That can be
challenged, and it may not be
the same in all industries.
But for all our work
done over the years, at a
corporate level, we believe
our snack business is
distinct, our pet business
is distinct, our food
business is distinct. We
believe that the knowledge
of the category has bigger
value for the customer
than the synergies that
we could take behind the
scenes. And at the end of
the day, we want to grow
the category, grow the
business for the customer,
and believe that that will
create the best results.
But the tension still
sits there today, Jimmy.
- I love that statement,
but that's very clear to me
when we're talking about
the snacks business versus
the pet care business.
Within pet care now,
I think some could argue
that a better world for
pets would be when I call,
I don't get five and I
don't get one, I get
exactly the right person.
You've lived it, and I'm
sure there's a hat you wear
which is totalitarian control,
just get on with it,
break what you need to
do to create a single
integrated view of the
customer, and part of you
that says, "Wait, I've
got to take daily focus
versus synergy decisions."
You've clearly come
down on I'm not gonna be
totalitarian and break things.
Why?
- I think it comes to philosophy.
So I'll give an example.
Royal Canin is all about
cats first, dogs first.
It's precise nutrition,
and therefore the model is
often about a prescription.
I go to the vet, let's
say my dog is obese.
The veterinarian will say,
"You should really do
something about that.
We have a diet called
Satiety." And that
precision requires a strong
respect for science and
targets a particular price
point because scientific
products are expensive.
A Pedigree family would
typically be a family dog
with love for the dog,
and we just have a dog like
any other member in our family.
And the way you sell
this is quite different.
So we speak to quite different segments.
And so what we do when
we go to a customer,
we retain that food philosophy
because the way they
drive their business is by
bringing that philosophy
to life in their stores.
And if you are in a
veterinary hospital, they only
want to talk to the scientific guys.
We call it sort of white coat.
So they want a serious conversation.
It's very different
conversation you have than when
I meet with a Walmart or a Tesco or
- A Carrefour. So I think
the lens you took is,
at the end of the day, am
I forcing synergy because
it's good for Mars? Or am
I forcing synergy because
it's good for each customer segment?
And the reality that you
keep facing is any one
segment enters in their
language with us through a
need that is dominant,
and just making it a single
view of the customer and
that there's a Mars person
they call feels more like
cross-selling than serving
their need in a way. And
so I'd rather stick with
the philosophy of how they
came to us, even at the
expense of having five
Mars people potentially
having to talk to them,
but that's better than the
artificial synergy that
comes from taking away their
specific need and turning
it into a generic customer
of us.
- Absolutely, and if I could
make another lens for it
and take a finance lens on
it, if we deliver this to
the customer, we will grow
faster Because our job is
to get the customer to
grow the category faster.
If we take that as a premise
and take a shareholder
value return, 70% of
shareholder value return over
time comes from growth.
So I would argue that yes,
it's a food philosophy,
it's a category view of how
we grow, but it's also a
financial strategy that
will pay off over time.
It may not pay off in the
short term, but over time,
if our customers grow
faster with us, they will
benefit, we will benefit.
Financially, the equation works well.
- And then the second
challenge you raise is the
founder dilemma, which
is it's amazing and often
renewing to acquire a bunch
of founders because they
bring entrepreneurial energy
back into the company,
and then you always face
the issue of how much
complexity do I absorb
by learning from them and
adopting their ways of
working, and how much do I
try to have them become
the Mars way of working?
Did that pressure ever come up?
- Yes, it did. In our vets
business, we had three big
businesses in the US.
We ran them distinct,
and we got to a moment
where we would have it under
one leadership, and we
actually appointed the head
of our global veterinary
business from one of the
founder-led businesses
to run it because this
person's expertise was
infinitely higher than ours.
And I said to this gentleman,
"One of your jobs is
to protect the veterinary
business against Mars,
because we will all come
and say, 'This is how we do
it around here.'" And that
around here was defined
as the consumer goods
business, and that might not
be applicable to a veterinary
healthcare business
where we have 18,000
veterinarians employed that are
motivated in a very
different way from the 18,000
sales reps we have in
our food business as an
example. So yes, we have seen both.
- I'd love to return for a moment.
You gave a group of 30
people the best job in the
world, which is spend
the next six months doing
nothing but learning how
great businesses grow and
come back and tell us what we should do.
I know the main intent
was to create a breakout
strategy for Mars Pet Food,
but there must have been
a secondary one, which
is you just started the
greatest leadership development
program I think I've
ever seen. What happened to their careers?
- Lots of them are still
here and have grown in their
jobs, and they became advocates.
We got 20 of the biggest
advocates for the strategy
in the business. The
second thing that happened,
we thought, how can we
make a leadership program
that takes some of the best of this?
So what we actually did
afterwards was every six
months, we picked another
20 people and put them in
a group with three
regions, three functions,
and worked on a pain point.
In the ecosystem, we
identified six, seven pain
points every six months
that we needed to work on.
Example, how do I improve
the lifespan of a pet?
And that has a food
component, it has a data
component, and it has
a veterinary component.
So we took a condensed
version of it, and 10 years
later, this program still runs.
- We had a very interesting
conversation with the
founder of Mercado Libre, Marcos Galperin.
He talks a lot about the
organization of the future
as one of constant
mobilization and demobilization
of teams. It feels like
your Pathfinders program is
that, in the sense that
you are mobilizing small
groups of people to deal
with real pain points in
the ecosystem. Has that
influenced how you might
wanna do that even more structurally?
- I think, Jimmy, at its core,
one of the struggles we
have as corporations
is we are organized in
functions, but the value
is created across all.
And what you try and do
with this is to break the
functions, but also to
enlighten how that value is
created through cross-functional
collaboration that
takes an identified
pain point in our case,
or opportunity or whatever
you want to call it,
and say, "This is what
we develop against,"
and then all functions
have to ladder up and you
accelerate.
- This is remarkable. Poul
embraced complexity in the
name of the customer.
Chapter one of the Mars
Petcare story. Agree on
a bold new vision of a
company that provides
integrated solutions for its
customers and execute on
that vision through a set
of acquisitions. And
chapter two could have been
this. Fast integration.
Create one company,
one view of the customer, one data system,
one dataset. Keep things simple.
Give each customer a single
integrated entry point
to Mars. And I've worked
on dozens of chapter ones
with CEOs and mostly
neatly to chapter two.
String of pearls
acquisitions followed by fast
integration. But Poul didn't pursue fast
integration. He avoided the siren songs of
simplicity and control. He
recognized that Mars had
acquired pet businesses
that sell to very different
worlds. There's not
one integrated customer
experience because there's
not one entry point to
the company, and we build from there.
Fast and full integration
is only worth doing when
it serves the customer,
not when it serves the
corporation. And one of
the hardest things for any
leader is restraint. Don't
pursue a strategy that
makes your job bigger or
makes it more interesting.
Don't integrate because
it makes the headquarters'
job simpler. Start with the customer.
Where does integration add value to them?
And where does separation
matter most to them?
But what happens when that
customer lens costs you?
And I mean really,
really hurts the business.
Few of us have had to face such a test.
But Poul and his people
were tested in the cruelest
of ways I wanna turn to something.
I love the vision, but
often a company is best
judged about whether
they're purpose-driven,
and yours is to make a
better life for pets,
when things are at their bleakest.
And I'd love you just to
talk for a moment about the
cyberattack, because I
think it's a really good
example of what happens
when things get bad.
So can you just describe that for us?
- Yes. The cyberattack
you're referring to is the
ransomware attack called
NotPetya back in 2017.
FedEx was hit, Merck, the
American pharma company,
Saint-Gobain in France,
the construction company.
So it was all industries.
And at the time, I was on
the board of Beiersdorf.
And Beiersdorf, the CEO calls me, Stefan
Heidenreich, and says,
"Something is happening to
our system. Are you guys okay?"
And I said, "Yeah,
I haven't heard anything."
I put the phone down, and
five minutes later I hear
from Royal Canin that
we have a massive issue.
We have no idea what's going on.
All 18 factories went down.
After two days, we tried
to produce the recipes that
we could still remember
because we have access to
zero data. All 3,000
computers in Royal Canin were
down. We even called retirees
and asked them if they
remembered recipes, and
they came in and helped us
with the mixing. It was
beautiful that they came in
and helped us, but we
were in a massive crisis.
This is a big business,
and because Royal Canin
produces life-supporting
recipes for dogs that are
hospitalized, it has severe consequences.
And therefore, we were
scrambling with a solution
for this, and I'll never
forget, I was at home on a
Sunday, probably about
a month into the crisis.
We could see the stocks
were just going down,
and we were heading to
a critical juncture.
And Loic Moutault, our
head of Royal Canin at the
time, he calls me a Sunday,
and he says to me,
"Poul, you need to listen
to me for five minutes and
not say anything." He knows me well.
"And then I have a mad proposal."
And basically, what Loic said was, Hill's,
our competitor, was not hit by the attack,
and in order to live up
to our purpose, a better
world for pet, we have to
go to our customers and
recommend a Hill's diet
where we can't supply
anymore, and we have to
do it now so that the pets
remain alive. So we
literally prepared a note for
all the recipes to the
veterinary hospitals.
For this specific diet,
we recommend that you buy
Hill's colon. Loic, of
course, said, "Are you in?"
And we agreed that it was
the only responsible way
to be a purpose-driven company.
It was the ultimate test
of it, and if we put cats
and dogs first, this
is what you have to do.
You don't need to question it.
The fun story, Jimmy,
at the end of the year,
we got the factories back
up, and what was amazing
was normally when you don't
supply to big customers,
they give their penalty.
They all waived their penalties.
Our logistics firms
offered to work without any
supplement all weekends to
be able to supply in the
crisis. So somehow, this
crisis just amplified the
togetherness. That story
for our veterinarians,
for our associates, was
such a strong manifestation
about what it means to be purpose-driven
- I've sat across from a
lot of CEOs, and I cannot
think of one who told their
customers to go and buy
a competitor's product.
But Poul did in the middle
of the crisis because the
alternative was letting
pets die. Guys, the
customer lens isn't free,
especially in the short term.
Over the long run, the
theory goes, leaders will be
rewarded with customer loyalty.
But on a daily basis, that
customer lens can demand
a high price, like
sending your customers to
competitors, knowing
many might not come back.
This is what it means
to be a purpose-driven
company. A real test comes, you pass.
And that proves not only
the strengths of the
mission, but the qualities
of its leaders Poul,
you are talking about a lot of quite
counterintuitive decisions.
As you look back, what in
your background prepared
you for that approach?
Where the hell did that come
from?
- The answer is, I probably don't know.
I can give a few guesses.
I think the job as a leader is to put the
organization first, and
then you put your team
second, you put all your associates third,
and you put yourself last.
- But where did that come from?
That's a very wise leader
looking back at his
career, but tell me where
that, for you, came from.
- I think it came sort of late, late 30s.
I think important for
me was to get children,
because I think as a human
being you get more into a
more reflective mode. I did at least.
I should speak for myself, not for others.
And you start thinking
about what shaped you,
and how do you want to
shape your children,
how do you want to grow?
And I think it has a lot
of analogies to business.
That self-reflection and
immersion into, where did I
come from? Who have I become?
Where do I want to go to?
In a way, that works for
an organization as well.
And I've just found the
deeper I go into my own
beliefs, the more I work
on my self-awareness,
the more I understand my
trigger points, the more I
explore the dark side of
me, the bright side of me,
the more I get a clarity
of my own compass.
And if the organization I
lead can be driven forward
from a place of authenticity,
from a place that this
actually matters, it's
not just at the end of the
year we have grown 8.7%,
it is, how have we grown?
How have we grown our people?
And that deeply motivates
me as a person, because
I've seen my own growth
throughout my career working
for a fantastic company
that had offered me growth
opportunities that certainly
as a 25-year-old I'd no
idea I could get. So I
think if you can get this
symbiosis to work between
your own self, your own
growth, leading from a
place of authenticity in a
compass that drives you
somewhere, I think you get
the best out of it and you get the highest
satisfaction out of it.
That would be my guess.
- Amazing. Amazing. So
I'll now ask the corollary.
We've investigated a lot
that you've learned from
the pet food side. You
then became group CEO.
Which of those lessons
did you bring forward,
and were there ones you had to shed?
- Well, the one I had to
shed was to be called Pet
Poul. It went very, very
quickly because I was known
for that. The thing I really
learned in Petcare was
to manage a set of assets.
That were very distinct
because in a way we were in
three industries, at least.
So I really learned
that I go in a meeting,
I need not to ask that
question, but ask this
question. I really need to
think about each meeting
I go into, which business
am I in to add value to
that business? And the
way you run a snacking
business is very different.
Even the way you sell
chewing gum is different to
the way you sell chocolate.
The questions you ask in
a business review have to
be very distinct. So I
think that's a big part of
understanding how I avoid
a conglomerate discount on
Mars Incorporated and
actually make it a real
strength.
- There is a humility that
comes with what you're
saying, which is I've got
to do what's right for
that business, not
what's great for my ego,
because it's not that I'm
looking for value added
that isn't there, for
synergy that isn't there.
I've got to constrain
myself to what that business
and its customers need.
- Yes, absolutely. I mean,
we might think as CEO,
we are incredibly
important at what have you,
but trust me, the day
we are out of the door,
we are forgotten and it's the next person.
So we just need to eat a
little bit of humble pie
and step back and think,
Mars Incorporated is from
1911. It is going to survive without Poul,
thankfully, and probably thrive.
So having that sort of
service mentality to the
organization while I'm here
is part of the important
thing of being a CEO. My
most important stakeholders
is the people that work for me.
There are 170,000 of them.
And my job is to engage them.
And they're my, even
when I talk in the press,
I will sit and prepare and,
all the questions will
come left, right and center.
The ones that really read
it are the ones that,
that work for me. And
they're probably the most
important audience I have permanently.
- That is one of the most
powerful messages a company
could hear from its CEO.
With that message in mind,
let's remind ourselves of
what Poul didn't do. First,
he didn't underestimate
the challenge of moving
from Engine 1 to Engine 2.
Second, he didn't ignore
slower growth Engine 1.
Instead, he celebrated
their hidden assets,
those 400 million pet parents.
This is a story of bold
moves, and it's one of the
great Engine 2 stories in
business, but it's also a
story of CEO restraint.
And here's the third thing
Poul didn't do. He didn't
pursue fast integration.
He embraced complexity in
the name of the customer.
While each business of
course shared a single
vision, Poul didn't rush
to bring all the decisions,
all the systems, all the
views of the customer to
the center to himself.
And there are a lot of
objective reasons to centralize fast.
Simplicity, one view of the customer.
And there are a lot of subjective reasons.
Make the CEO role easier,
bigger, more powerful.
And many, many CEOs
move fast to centralize.
I mean, isn't that what great leaders do?
Well, the answer is no.
Great leaders put the
customer before themselves.
In fact, if we strip it
all back, the lesson sounds
almost old-fashioned.
Leadership is service.
Customer first, self last.
Poul sends his customers
to buy competitors'
products because it was
the right thing to do.
In many companies, such
phrases are filed away in
the things they say drawer.
Mars Petcare puts them in
a very different drawer.
The things our leaders actually do.
Everything from today's
episode and every episode is
at bain.com/founders-mentality.
And we'll be back in two weeks.
Stay curious. Next time on
Founder's Mentality: The
CEO Sessions.
- When we got to, like,
350 people, we started to
attract talent from Silicon
Valley talent who had
worked at other founder-led businesses.
And I remember a couple
people saying many times in
our San Francisco office,
"Wow, it's so refreshing
that you and Matthew
still show up for work."
I didn't really understand
what they meant,
and finally I was like,
"What are you talking
about?" And they're like,
"Well, my last founder
stopped showing up for work