Performance Counts!

One of the things that attracted me to Campbell Soup Company in 2003 was its history, people and culture. But by the time I became President and CEO in 2011, our company was struggling to adapt to a rapidly changing global marketplace. We were slow to respond to shifts in the consumer and economic environment and we weren’t aggressively pursuing new growth opportunities or new consumer segments.

I could see that our employees were highly engaged, but that engagement wasn’t translating into higher levels of performance. It became clear to me that we needed to reshape Campbell and create a new high-performance culture to drive stronger business results and unleash the creativity, contributions and growth of our people.

In the past two years, we’ve made significant progress in these critical areas so I’d like to share our approach to driving performance.

It all starts with Setting Your Strategy. We did this in 2011 by creating a new Strategic Framework and have evolved our three growth strategies to achieve our goal of driving sustainable profitable net sales growth. These three strategies are:

1) Profitably grow our North America Soup and Simple Meals business

2) Expand our International Presence

3) Continue to drive growth in Snacks and Healthy Beverages.

To fulfill these goals, we established a dual mandate to: Strengthen our Core Business, especially our flagship U.S. Soup business; and Expand into Higher-Growth Spaces, including new categories, segments, channels and geographies.

Importantly, this strategy is now our roadmap for driving the company’s future performance in a changing world. It outlines our focus going forward and it makes a clear declaration to our employees and external stakeholders of what they can expect from us.

Since unveiling our plan, we’ve revitalized growth in our U.S. Soup business; expanded into new categories like packaged fresh foods and organic baby food by acquiring Bolthouse Farms and Plum Organics; and established a presence in baked snacks in China by purchasing Kelsen Group. We’ve also accelerated innovation to attract new consumers like Millennials and pursue new opportunities, like our recent agreement with Green Mountain Green Mountain Coffee Roasters to bring Campbell’s soup to Keurig? brewers.

In short, this strategy has the potential to change our growth trajectory by diversifying our portfolio beyond soup and accelerating innovation.

The second step is all about Developing the Right Structure with Strong Leaders across our organization. We have strengthened our leadership team by recruiting dynamic leaders from outside the company and/or promoting them from within. More than half of the executives on the Campbell Leadership Team are new in their role or new to the company. Our leadership team is executing our growth strategies and driving our culture and we have created a more dynamic organizational structure to better deliver against our strategic choices.

The third step is about changing our Symbols and Rituals – every company has theirs, from special events to credos. As an example, our core company values of character, competence and teamwork serve as an important symbol and are anchors to our employees in a sea of change. However, based on feedback from our global leaders, we added the value of courage to emphasize the need for bolder decision-making, challenging the status quo, and taking calculated business risks, all with the highest degree of integrity. We’ve enhanced our Leadership Model to foster the development of dynamic leaders that deliver results and drive the execution of our strategy. Last but not least, we’ve instilled a renewed focus on putting consumers first in everything we do.

The fourth step is People Processes, which began with surveying our employees to identify our cultural strengths and weaknesses and then developing a new performance management system focused on accountability, delivering outcomes and driving contributions to the growth and success of the company.

Under this new system, our employees will be measured not only on their day-to-day work and their leadership behaviors, but also on the efforts they make to advance and impact Campbell’s strategic agenda and the company’s performance. This is a change that has to come from the top. I believe this new system will enhance our ability as an organization to adapt and evolve, think big and act bold.

One of the most important things that we learned from our employee survey was that for too long, we had focused on driving organizational alignment. We spent so much time on consensus building that it often slowed our ability to take action and respond to trends and shifts that are impacting our industry, particularly changing consumer behavior and demographics. To respond, we developed and implemented an agile and decision-making model throughout our organization.

Just as important, we’ve made personal accountability a cultural mandate at Campbell. It sounds simple, but it means everyone is held accountable for their actions and we all own the results, from the C-suite to the plant floor. I’ve found in my career that people with a high degree of personal accountability usually make the greatest impact.

As we are discovering at Campbell, to accelerate your growth trajectory, you need people that make a positive impact and a culture that makes it possible to make the right things happen!

To be sure, we have more work ahead of us, but we’ve come far since 2011 as we continue to reshape Campbell, elevate the performance of our company and create a dynamic culture that empowers our people to aim high, act bold and achieve great things.