Though Hay planned from the beginning to transition the company into largely renewable production, he shared with us at the time, “The vast majority of the players in our industry thought it was a fool’s errand. There was still skepticism as to whether renewables were just a fad and government incentives would go away.” In his first few years, he focused on bringing in a team of innovative thinkers with entrepreneurial experience. “We had some of the best utility people around,” he shared, “but they were very risk averse.

He started building renewables capacity right away, but with small steps. “In the very early days,” he recalled, “I had to downplay what we were doing and say, ‘Hey, it’s kind of a nice little niche for us, and we’re making some money, but it isn’t a core element of our strategy.

We found this initiation of a big new strategy push at this year three to four juncture again and again in the journeys of the most transformative CEOs. Mary Barra took charge at GM in 2014, and in her first two years largely focused on urgent shot-term issues. She had to steer the company through the tumult of a scandal that broke just three weeks after she steeped into the job: GM had failed to disclose that ignition switches in some models were causing cars to suddenly shut off, resulting in the deaths of more than 120 people.

For acquisition, he shared, “We would look at almost anything that came up within the industry for sale, and we had four factors that drove our decisions. One, we would only buy number one or two share brands in their category. We did not believe we could take a dying brand and turn it around. Two, we wanted to buy businesses that had higher gross margin than out company average, so would help our gross margin. Three, we looked for asset-light companies. We didn’t want to buy a company with lots of factories or ones for which we’d have to build new factories. We preferred to bring operations into our own facilities. And four, we went for products that had some sort of advantage versus the competition that we could leverage with our marketing, sales, and operations muscle to make better.” That formula guided the well-measured acquisition of numerous leading brands during his tenure, including Spinbrush, OxiClean, Orajel, Batiste, and Vitafusion. These were businesses that his own business leaders had the expertise to run, and he folded them into Church & Dwight’s existing operations. Focusing on employees with R&D expertise, they kept, on average, only 10 percent of employees, many of whom joined the team at headquarters. “We doubled the size of the company,” he reported, without adding substantially to the number of employees.

That was the result of Cote’s marathoner “go slow to go fast” moves coming to fruition. Rather than flashy, highly risky, and dramatic moves, he’d made rigorously calibrated incremental improvements in business operations. These were combined with a steady stream of divestments and moderate acquisitions. Indeed, he is a standout example of someone who has mastered programmatic M&A, the systematic, highly strategic, and well-paced acquisition of relatively small companies compared the the size of the acquiring firm.