Leaders of Change: Amrit Patil

AMRIT PATIL leads the eCommerce business for Kimberly-Clark’s consumer products in US, with responsibilities that include P&L results as well as capability development.

Amrit started his career in India with A.T. Kearney, before moving to CPG industry to start practicing what he was preaching as a consultant. In his 9 years at Hindustan Unilever Ltd. in India, he has done a variety of sales and marketing leadership roles, in home and personal care categories. He joined Kimberly-Clark as the APAC Regional Sector Leader in 2013, before relocating to Wisconsin in 2015 as GM for Depend, Kimberly-Clark’s adult care brand. 

Why did you choose to pursue eCommerce in your career? Short answer - to grow as a professional.

eCommerce was the proverbial ‘red pill’... It made me uncomfortable, it represented a puzzle and I wanted to take a crack at solving it. It also meant an opportunity to do something that I had never done before…. And I did not want to miss out on that because most of the learning happens outside one’s comfort zone…

What is your biggest strength, and how have you used it for your success in eCommerce? I got lucky with my experiences (strategy consulting, CPG sales, country/regional/global marketing roles, P&L responsibilities, exposure to multiple developing and developed markets, great mentors and brilliant peers/team members) as they helped me get comfortable with steep learning curves while solving different business challenges. It was more serendipity than plan.

This comfort with learning new things helps me connect some dots in seemingly complex and chaotic eCommerce world. 

What is the weirdest skill or talent to come in handy in your eCommerce experience? I am very comfortable asking questions, even at the risk of sounding stupid. I am not sure I would call this a skill or talent though :)

How have you most successfully influenced change within your organization? Personally, the most important thing about influencing change is realizing that you are never really completely done with it. Any change is hard, culture change is harder, culture change that will last even when you are gone is the hardest.

For me, it boils down to three specific things –

1. Build and share a case for change that is personally relevant for audience.
2. Don’t get tired of repeating the case, even when you feel the audience has already heard it multiple times.
3. You can’t do it all by yourself. So, actively recruit change agents / endorsers / sponsors – people who will drive the change even when you are not in the room. 

What was your most “valuable” career failure, and why? I am going to talk about the most ‘valuable’ failure in my life, even though it is not a career failure technically. This is not to say that I have not failed in my career - I have had my share of career failures and I am better off today because of all of them.

In my student life, I went through what felt like a catastrophic failure in one of my exams. To be candid, if you had judged it by the norms, you would not call it a failure. But, it left me emotionally devastated at that time.

It affected me for two reasons – First, I was not expecting it at all, based on the work that I had put in. I was stunned by the shocking gap between what I thought my efforts would deliver and what was actually delivered. Second, I let my parents down in a big way and that too, in a very public setting.

That incident has taught me a very valuable lesson – don’t ever get complacent. If you want to stay relevant, you have to keep getting better all the time. 

In the last five years, what new belief, behavior or habit has most improved your life? This one is simple – communicate / clarify my intent explicitly. It helps me build trust quickly, across functions, operating companies and partners.

Since I joined Kimberly-Clark in 2013, my roles have put me in situations where I was working with consumers, customers and colleagues from cultures that were very different from the culture that I grew up in. So, I could no longer rely on the contextual, implicit understanding of cultural nuances that I took for granted when I was working in India.

I knew that I could not do these roles effectively without building trust and building it quickly. I realized that communicating my intent explicitly before sharing my asks/recommendations/questions/feedback went a long way in these situations.

Of course, I did not figure this one out by myself. Aditi, my wife who is an ICF certified executive coach, helped. 

What are you learning right now? Too many things to name here! 

What are the 1-3 songs that would make up your career soundtrack today? It’s said that the songs that you listen to in your teens, stay with you for the rest your life. Not sure if it’s a fact, but seems to be true in my case. I grew up in India listening to songs in Marathi (my mother tongue) and Hindi. I am not into English songs. Also, I am an introvert and I probably do better when there are no words involved :) So, I am also going to add themes/background scores/instrumentals too to this list. 

• Mage Ubha Mangesh – Nakshatrache Dene – Asha Bhosle: I am grateful to have had a chance to do a lot of things over my career and it has been possible because I got lucky with my bosses / mentors who took a chance on me. This song probably does justice to that feeling.
• Bank Robbery Prologue – The Dark Knight – by Hans Zimmer/James Newton Howard: I find this one unpredictable, exciting and it keeps one eagerly anticipating for what’s coming next. Seems to be a good analogy for my career!
• Yeh Jo Des Hai Tera – Shehnai – Swades – by A R Rehman: For me, this is a good reminder that there are things that are far more important than my career.

What are the 1-3 books you’ve gifted the most or that have greatly influenced your life, and why?

• The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand: I don’t agree with everything that the book conveys, but it has left an impression. When I was growing up in India, most of my textbooks hinted at socialism as an absolute positive force and capitalism as an absolute negative one. When I read Fountainhead, I realized that most books are likely to be just opinions of authors and it was important to make a deliberate effort to read different (even contradictory!) views on a subject, before coming to my own conclusions.
• The Prophet by Khalil Gibran: For its timeless wisdom about the most meaningful things in life; for creating impact with so few words, for its lyrical quality. Every time I read it, I learn something new.
• Vaporized by Robert Tercek: This last one has to be the one that I am currently reading – One of my mentors gave it to me and it has forced me to relook at a lot of things that I do in my current role. It has now taken over The Prophet as the book that I have gifted the most. In fact, I have extra copies in my car as I write this :) 

If you could have a gigantic billboard for the world to see with anything on it, what would it say, and why? I thought about this for a second! I thought you were setting me up… A gigantic billboard that everyone in the world can see is a nice metaphor for how CPG industry has worked so far – it represents reach and mass appeal.

I would rather send a very personalized note to each one of the people who really mean a lot to me.  

What are the worst recommendations or advice you have heard related to eCommerce? ‘Worst’ is a very strong word :) … it also does not do justice to the intent behind the advice/recommendations.

Here is what I would say - When I hear someone say things about eCommerce that I may not agree with, I look at that as an opportunity for both of us to learn something new. 

What advice would you give to a future leader of change about to enter business, or specifically the eCommerce field?

1. Often stated but still the most critical – start with the consumer.
2. The question that you will be asked the most is different from the question that you really need to solve for. You need to answer both. Question that you will be asked the most – What is your eCommerce strategy? Question that you need solve for – How are you going build the culture to be successful in eCommerce?
3. Get comfortable with the idea that you are going to make mistakes and have failures.
4. Find partners – peers, experts, mentors – within or outside your own organization, right from day one. 

What specific, industry-related change do you believe will happen that few others seem to see? It is too vain to think that I can see stuff that others don’t seem to see. So, I will ignore that part.

Here is what I believe - Predicting ‘the’ future is impossible. Predicting different versions of future is a fun exercise, but its present utility may be limited if you don’t act appropriately now.

So, let’s stay focused on the one certain change that we as industry professionals have to drive – massive shift in dominant CPG industry culture.

Here is how the destination looks like from my perspective -

1. Organizations would have moved away from the false choice between agility and scale. The winners would have figured out how to enable agility@scale through advantaged capabilities.
2. CPG organizations would have built the culture AND the capacity to ‘Fail Fast/Cheap/Forward’. The culture would have shifted from ‘Doing after Knowing’ to ‘Knowing by Doing’.
3. Organizational boundaries (intra-organizational as well as inter-organizational) would largely lose their relevance or serve a very different purpose.

As leaders, our current challenge is to manage the transition toward this destination.  

What is the last thing you bought online, and why? Last thing I bought online was a movie… because it was convenient – it was available when I wanted to watch it and I did not have to move from my couch :)

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Leaders of Change is a weekly interview series featuring select industry pioneers who are driving the evolution of commerce, the consumer and everything in between. If you would like to recommend a Leader of Change for consideration, please reach out to me on LinkedIn.