8. Employees can articulate the following key components of the company’s strategy accurately.

• Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) – Progress is tracked and visible. Core Customer(s) – their profile in 25 words or less.

• 3 Brand Promises – And the corresponding Brand Promise KPIs reported on weekly.

• Elevator Pitch – A compelling response to the question “What does your company do?

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The Life Cycle of a CEO— Claudius A. Hildebrand & Robert J. Stark

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Introduction

In fact, Dave hadn’t been the first choice for the CEO position, or even the second or third choice. Word was five others had been offered the job before him. What’s more, a couple of years earlier he’d been unceremoniously fired from his position as divisional president at a leading competitor. No one would have suggested from his educational background, either, that he was CEO material. Not only did he not have a degree from an elite school, but it also took him six years to graduate. He hated college and he’d dropped out for a time.

As Dave’s first year in the CEO seat progressed, the sneering assessments of that Florida night prevailed on the Street; the company’s stock slid 40 percent.

The study analyzed the fortunes of nearly four hundred CEOs appointed to the helm of S&P 500 companies within the decade of 2004 to 2014. A set of the fifteen most effective early moves was identified. And out of those, the highest performers relied most on these five: operational improvements, launching new products, improving customer relationships, increasing employee engagement, and culture change.

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.

Improving the performance of companies that are performing fairly well is now the predominant objective, and PE firms have learned that a CEO’s people leadership abilities are the vital complement to strength in finance and operations for this new frontier of performance improvement.