I suspect that many successful companies that have fallen on hard times in the past—including IBM, Sears, General Motors, Kodak, Xerox, and many others—saw perhaps quite clearly the changes in their environment. They were probably able to conceptualize and articulate the need for change and perhaps even develop strategies for it. What I think hurt the most was their inability to change highly structured, sophisticated cultures that had been born in a different world.

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.

7. The Private Equity Sprint

PE ownership also means, however, that the CEO has a good deal less autonomy than the public company CEO in setting the direction for the firm. The investment thesis includes a series of benchmarks for achieving results by a given time. It also includes an ambitious target for return investors, which will be in excess of the anticipated return of public markets. Achieving those results in the time planned is an intense challenge, one that involves considerable risk for portfolio company CEOs. The intense pressure to quickly produce results overwhelms many.

Crocs negotiated with Blackstone to sell it a 13 percent stake for $200 million, rather than an outright buyout, and awarded two board seats as part of the deal. Blackstone was deeply engaged in assisting with the turnaround, digging into data and helping drive change. The firm’s involvement also provided “tremendous air cover,” Rees said, meaning protection from the market’s punishment of the stock. For five years of “what was a very challenging, deep-seated turnaround,” he described, Crocs “didn’t worry about quarter-to-quarter decision-making; rather we set our focus on long-term, multiyear decision-making, which was initially difficult, as our stock was moving dramatically” due to those moves.