Business leader McDonald addresses UMaine students
The chief executive officer and president of Proctor & Gamble spoke affably with a hundreds of University of Maine business students Wednesday about successful leadership traits and his company’s commitment to corporate social responsibility.
Bob McDonald, who also chairs the board for the $83 billion-a-year consumer products corporation, stressed to a packed Minsky Recital Hall in the Class of 1944 Hall that a sense of purpose to paramount for leaders, businesses and individuals.
“Living a life driven by purpose is more meaningful that meandering through life without direction,” was the first of 10 principles McDonald discussed at the event arranged by the Maine Business School.
Good leadership, McDonald said, is the single-most scarce resource in the world. He encouraged members of his audience of mostly business students and faculty members to consider how life experiences and lessons have affected their outlook and beliefs. Good leaders are introspective, he said.
“The larger an organization you lead, the more deliberate you need to be about your leadership,” he said. “The larger the company you work for, the more people want to know what you believe in.”
The West Point graduate and former U.S. Army infantry captain and Airborne Ranger — who was an underclass student while UMaine finance professor Bob Strong was an upper class student there in the mid-1970s — said Proctor & Gamble’s “purpose” attracted him to the company in 1980. Through its products and philanthropy, the 174-year-old corporation is committed to doing things that help others and make people’s lives better, he said.
“We believe that the more we make this purpose pervasive, the more successful we’ll become,” he said.
The second principle McDonald stressed was “companies must do well to do good and must do good to do well.” It is a “positive and virtuous cycle,” evidenced, he suggested, by Proctor & Gamble’s sales growth from $10 billion a year in 1980 to $83 billion today, and employee growth from 61,200 in 1980 to 129,000 today, and huge increases in the value of company stocks.
Some of the benefits of working for Proctor & Gamble, the Cincinnati-based executive said, include a profit-sharing plan for employees, an assumption of trust and respect for all employees and seeing that every employee is “in the right job.”
“We expect everybody in the company to be a leader. It doesn’t matter what your hierarchy is,” said McDonald, who started with the company “at the bottom, just like everyone else.”
Among the philanthropic projects Proctor & Gamble is engaged include a water-purification kit for people in underdeveloped countries. Some 4,000 children die every day of dysentery diarrhea because of contaminated drinking water in regions where water is scarce and often contaminated by animals, he said. Proctor & Gamble’s water-purification project and pledge to try to help prevent one death an hour earned the company high praise from former President Bill Clinton.
McDonald concluded with the thought that “the single difference between those who succeed in the Proctor & Gamble family and those who don’t is the ability to learn… So please don’t think your education is over when you leave the University of Maine.”
He challenged the students to consider when they become frustrated with teachers, parents or others who seem slow at learning their way with evolving new technological inventions to consider “in 20 years, what technology are you going to be slow at?”
Strong’s long time friendship with McDonald helped make the presentation possible, according to business school faculty members. Information about Proctor & Gamble’s value-based leadership strategies, along with books on the topic that McDonald recommends, is available on a company website.
A high-resolution photo of Bob McDonald is available online.
September 7, 2011
Contact: George Manlove, (207) 581-3756