We wanted to foster a team-like approach that would allow the CEO to collaborate with the presidents and to help advance their thinking in real time. We wanted to create useful dialogue in place of a one-way, bulletproof presentation. Instead of burying the issues, we wanted to talk about them openly. We wanted a new management system for the creation and review of the five strategic choices.

It was important to reframe the task or, as Daley puts it, “to create a framework of what a strategy discussion is and isn’t. A strategy discussion is not an idea review. A strategy discussion is not a budget or a forecast review. A strategy discussion is how we are going to accomplish our growth objectives in the next three to five years. We really wanted to engage in a discussion.

These reviews focused on very basic, very fundamental questions with the intent of helping the team make better strategic choices. The group would spend three or four hours chewing on the few critical issues together. We had three reasons for the shift in process.

First, we wanted to shift the culture of the organization to one that was more dialogue oriented. Second, we wanted to create a structure in which the business teams could truly benefit from the experience and cross-enterprise perspective of senior leaders. And finally, we wanted to build the strategic-thinking capabilities of P&G’s executives, asking them to practice thinking through strategic issues with others in real time. P&G executives are great operators in the businesses and the functions. The company needed its leaders to become better strategists because better, more choiceful strategies would enable yet better operations. P&G needed multidimensional leaders who could both make tough strategic calls and lead effective operating teams.

The change created a good deal of angst at first. Slowly but surely, though, the review meeting became what we hoped it would be: an inquiry into the competitiveness, effectiveness, and robustness of a strategy. In due course, the presidents came to understand that they wouldn’t be judged on whether they had every aspect of their strategy buttoned up but rather on whether they could engage in a productive conversation about the real strategic issues in their business. As a result, P&G leaders began to do more strategic thinking, to have more strategic conversations—not just at strategy reviews, but in the normal course of business—and the quality of strategic discourse improved. More importantly, the company saw better choice making, more willingness to make hard calls, and eventually better business results.

That’s what turned the strategic agenda into the strategic plan that got presented to the board about a hundred fifty days after he started. I use the term plan a little loosely,” Tamke editorializes, “because that strategic plan was kind of heavy on tactical things that we were going to get done in the next year and a bit lighter on the strategic direction, with more of the blanks yet to be filled in. But they did get filled in during the course of the next year, through updates that Gary did with the organization.