Leading Innovation

Making P&G’s design for innovation work is the job of leadership.

Innovation is a human activity and leaders must unleash the creativity, initiative, leadership, and productivity of the innovators in their businesses. This requires a blend of intelligence and empathy. Empathy is incredibly important in a diverse, people-intensive business like ours. Most of our creativity and innovation happens in teams, and often the teammates are working in different parts of the world.

To lead in this kind of environment, we need a balance of intellectual skills and empathic skills. We have to develop the intuition to understand and appreciate people’s intentions, feelings and motivations — all of which have been shaped by experiences that may be sharply different from those we’ve grown up with ourselves.

At the same time, innovation leaders must be decision-makers. They must exercise the judgment and the courage to take innovation risks and to understand the role past failure plays in the innovation process, while also being willing to stop projects and reallocate resources to bigger innovation opportunities when necessary.

I’m a big believer that innovation leaders are made, not born. They learn to get comfortable with uncertainty. They learn to become more open-minded, to co-create with consumers, and to be receptive to ideas from different disciplines and industries. They learn to become both strategists and operational managers, to be agile and disciplined. As they learn and gain experience, they become more effective at leveraging P&G’s design for innovation to deliver consistent, sustainable growth.

The ability to lead effective innovation programs is required at P&G, particularly at the general manager and president levels. Good innovation leaders need to be cultivated and promoted — and I hold myself accountable for helping to select and develop the innovation leaders who run P&G businesses around the world. Ensuring P&G has the leaders and the pipeline to innovate for the next ten years is one of my most fundamental responsibilities as chief executive.