The Wisest Company in the World

In most companies, institutional wisdom walks out the front door daily, through retirement, layoffs, or ? most often ? when experienced, older workers start to feel irrelevant. A balance sheet can’t measure the loss of these culture-bearers who have more than just the know-how, but also the know-who that often helped the company get to where it is today. In a business world increasingly infatuated with the young, new, and digital, I was curious to discover the world’s leading company when it comes to cultivating and harvesting wisdom.

I met the greying, pony-tailed, positive-spirited, mid-fifties F.D. Wilder after giving a speech to brand marketers in New York in May. He didn’t look anything like what I would expect from a senior leader at Procter & Gamble (P&G). We immediately became soul brothers and he invited me to Cincinnati to attend P&G’s Signal event on learning and leading through mass disruption. To be honest, I was a little skeptical. P&G feels pretty old school and this venerable American institution has had some challenges with its global market share the past decade. Let's just say that my jaded San Francisco POV shifted upon the first stop on my headquarters agenda, visiting the P&G Archives with the company's historian and storyteller, Shane Meeker, and senior archivist Greg McCoy.

The Archives weren’t full of dust and ancient history from nearly 200 years ago when the company sold exclusively candles and soap. Instead, it was replete with insightful installations like the “Wall of Failures” that’s regularly updated with products or brand launches that became noble experiments and teachable moments. There were hero stories of young scientists like Dave "Dick" Byerly who, breaking all kinds of company rules over sixteen years, created and championed Tide even when his superiors told him to give up. What was particularly prescient about the Tide product invention is that it disrupted P&G’s core soap product so, just like Netflix disrupted their DVD by mail business with their streaming option a few years ago, P&G created its own toughest competition with new products. And, I had no idea that P&G still produced the soap opera “As The World Turns” until just eight years ago, having pioneered consumer products marketing with the growth of radio and TV in the mid-20th century. P&G uses its Archives as a means of connecting new employees and teams looking for inspiration with the successes and failures of the past to assure the company doesn’t forget its own legacy of knowledge and wisdom.

But, the best was yet to come. In my new book Wisdom@Work, I suggest we can learn something from Google, with its “20% time” for engineers, where qualified innovators can use 20% of their time toward experimental projects they think might be good for Google product development. I’ve suggested that we apply that idea to “Modern Elders,” those more experienced employees with deep institutional wisdom who could cut back their scope of work and act as in-house coaches, company cultural curators for new hires, and internal catalysts for teams that need a spark or some collaborative emotional intelligence. Many who’ve heard my idea have liked it, but I had no idea P&G had created something similar 50 years ago.

P&G has an internal group of Brand Strategy, Communication and Production expertise and knowledge. The team is full of experienced marketing employees and industry experts who serve as knowledge centers within the individual businesses. This group (about 50 people train for a year in this role before being unleashed into a team as a wise elder) assures that core company foundational principles aren’t lost, that training is improved over time, and that the Modern Elders create new knowledge based upon the dynamic nature of the marketing discipline.

Those who succeed in these roles tend to know how to influence (since they rarely report to the General Manager) through high emotional intelligence, holistic thinking, a curiosity and comfort with ambiguity and change, and an adaptive and flexible perspective. These last two qualities aren’t necessarily expected from older employees, but listening to Kimberly Doebereiner tell her story it was clear to me this 50-year-old was a true “Modern Elder.”

In addition to this expert group, P&G has a Brand Mastery Society, a Sales Mastery Society, a group of R&D Masters, an HR Mastery Society, and Product Supply Masters and there’s also a robust P&G Alumni Network, which assures that the company’s institutional wisdom isn’t forgotten.

Core to P&G’s business model is building leaders from within. Managers are expected to both build brands and develop people. In fact, it’s been said that there are only three institutions which exclusively hire from within for their top ranks: the Catholic church, the U.S. military, and Procter & Gamble. You don’t recruit the Pope, a general, or a P&G CEO from another religion, country, or company. And, because of that, I didn’t expect to find a company that both honored and appreciated their “wisdom workers” (an updated way to describe Peter Drucker’s “knowledge workers” from a half-century ago) while also having a healthy dissatisfaction with the status quo.

P&G’s seventh annual Signal conference, the crescendo of my trip, was curated and emceed by long-time Silicon Valley vet John Battelle. The theme was “Leading Through Mass Disruption” and the stage was full of start-up companies that are collaborating with this global behemoth that’s constantly intent on disrupting itself.

When I joined Airbnb, a thoughtful friend of mine mused that the world is rich in genius but poor in wisdom, and maybe the Airbnb young ones wouldn’t mind a little bit of that scarce resource. But, others privately positioned this as an EQ versus IQ face-off: me in a death-match of wisdom vs. genius with the brainiacs of the Valley.

It doesn’t have to be versus; it can be wisdom and genius. These aren’t sibling rivals. They’re kissing cousins. And, the roles can be symbiotic as Robert Pogue Harrison suggests in his book, Juvenescence, “Wisdom could hardly meet this challenge if it were not in some sense ingenious, nor could genius build upon its past achievements if it were not in some sense wise. In sum, there is a wisdom at the heart of genius that enables genius to reap the rewards of its history without having continually to reinvent the wheel, just as there is a genius at the heart of wisdom that allows wisdom to creatively transform and rejuvenate the past, while giving a measure of continuity to the otherwise discrete history of genius.”

I believe there are a few old-line Silicon Valley companies ? Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Cisco ? that ought to invest in a few plane tickets to Cincinnati (yes, there are direct flights) to see how this 181-year-old company stands Head & Shoulders (excuse the product plug!) above their Fortune 500 brethren when it comes to combining wisdom and genius.

?Chip Conley is a New York Times best-selling author and veteran hospitality executive who renewed himself in midlife by collaborating with the Millennial co-founders of Airbnb to create the world’s largest global hospitality brand. His new book, Wisdom@Work: The Making of a Modern Elder, is now available.