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Think Ahead of the Curve
by Robert B. Tucker
The other day in Cincinnati I met with Filippo Passerini,
Procter & Gamble’s hard-charging chief information officer.
Fascinating guy. Ph.D. in statistics from the University of
Rome. Father of three. Technical mountain climber. And
the toast of his organization right now for what he and his
troops have been able to accomplish.
Passerini was the driving force behind Procter’s radical
revamping of its entire back office operations. The move
obliterated $1.2 billion in costs from P&G. It enabled the
consumer products giant to respond quickly to the Global
Economic Crisis, and bring new products to market faster
than ever.
So how does Filippo unwind after routinely putting in 60 hour weeks? He plays
chess. “Thinking what your opponent will do three moves out is good discipline for
business,” he told me in a thick Italian accent.
Filippo is the perfect illustration of a vital innovation skill that I call thinking ahead of
the curve.
“It was our reading of trends that led us to make this move,” he explained. In
frequent open-ended brainstorming sessions, he and his core team of five saw that
the world was shifting. It was moving from “big is good” to “flexible is good” to “network is good.”
“Fifteen years ago, if you were a big company, that was a competitive advantage.
Then flexibility was the way to achieve it. But we saw that over the next five years
the network would become more and more important.” What to do?
Passerini’s vision was that the entire company should operate from one
consolidated, integrated global network. He and his team assaulted the assumption
that the way P&G handled back office functions like finance and accounting, HR,
facilities management, and IT was good enough. They knew it was riddled with
duplication and waste. So they set forth to build a new unit -- Global Business
Services – to take over and consolidate all such operations.
Today, “shared-services centers” in Costa Rica, Manila and Newcastle, England
provide networked support around the clock to P&G operations everywhere. All nonstrategic
activities have been outsourced to outside vendors. And Passerini and his
group have “decommoditized ourselves” from being an internal service provider to
become a strategic partner to the organization.
In researching a forthcoming book, I’ve been interviewing dozens of high output
managers like Filippo Passerini. They don’t try to predict the future, which is
impossible. But they do make it a priority to spend time thinking ahead of the curve.
“One of our pillars is thinking out in the future and anticipating what is coming and
then making your move. It’s so much better than reacting.”
Innovation-adept leaders like Filippo Passerini don’t just gather better intelligence.
They creatively crunch this data, argue about it, debate its implications, and try to
connect the dots in some meaningful fashion. They seek to arrive at a point of view, both individually and collectively, about how to turn today’s rapid changes into
tomorrow’s opportunities. And then they take action.
How are you “sussing out” (as the British say) the trends in your market and in the
wider world? What’s new in your information diet that’s stimulating your thinking?
What trends, emerging technologies and developments are you doing deep dives on
to gain a knowledge edge?
“I manage my life like a chess game,” Passerini told me as I was leaving. “I still
continue to study every day.” Not bad advice for all of us.
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