In sum, there were three critical where-to-play choices for P&G at the corporate level:

• Grow in and from the core businesses, focusing on core consumer segments, channels, customers, geographies, brands, and product technologies.

• Extend leadership in laundry and home care, and build to market leadership in the more demographically advantaged and structurally attractive beauty and personal- care categories.

• Expand to leadership in demographically advantaged emerging markets, prioritizing markets by their strategic importance to P&G.

Ultimately, there is no perfect place to start and the process isn’t linear—you need to go back and forth between the levels, just as you need to loop back and forth between the five questions in the strategic choice cascade. However, you can use three principles to help the company put together integrated activity systems at multiple organizational levels.”

(Lafley and Martin, “Playing to Win”, p.122) “1. Start at the Indivisible Level...

Build activity systems starting at the ground level—the point of indivisible activity systems

—and work your way up from there. Why? The capabilities at the indivisible level drive the

ones above.” (Lafley and Martin, “Playing to Win”, p.122-123) “2. Add Competitive Advantage to the Level Below...

Activities that don’t add value to activity systems below should be minimized, because they destroy value. For example, only if the hair-care category can demonstrate value (from sharing of activities and transfer of skills) that is greater than the financial and

administrative costs that it imposes on Head & Shoulders, Nice ’n Easy, Pantene, Herbal

Essences, and so forth, should it exist as a level of aggregation in the corporation. Otherwise, the level should be eliminated.

Up until this point, you likely have benefitted from stretch roles, along with periodic leadership development training to address capabilities needed below the CEO level. In fact, we find that leaders who make it to the C-suite get less development support than they did before reaching this level.

Pat Kampling of Alliant Energy cautioned, “An organization has a pace. The CEO can’t be outrunning that.” Shantanu Narayen highlighted, “You have a cadence of execution in a company.” If you’ve been with the company for some time, you may have a good understanding of that cadence. If you’ve joined from the outside, developing that knowledge is vital. And those with long experience in the organization won't have this awareness about some teams or whole divisions and must develop it.

When it comes to investing in leadership development, PE firms have thus far focused on providing executives of portfolio companies a richness of opportunity for networking and peer-to-peer exchanges with other leaders in their portfolio companies and their vast network of advisers. They’ve worked to create rich ecosystems to facilitate these kinds of opportunities. “We spend a lot of time nurturing our talent network,” Courtney della Cava shared. These networks provide entrée to hundreds of other C-suite leaders, board directors, and company stakeholders who can provide input, from customers to suppliers and regulators. “We actively cultivate communities among our various executive cohorts,” she explained. This may be done, for example, by hosting regular gatherings where leaders can confer about issues and build relationships. The firm may also take the lead in making introductions across the ecosystem. A CEO of a mid-cap health-care company might, for example, be introduced to her counterpart at a fast-growth tech company who has invaluable expertise in cybersecurity or AI implementation.