Ms. Kotchka, 29-year P&G veteran and wonder woman of the Consumer Packaged Goods world, discussed how her primary task at Procter & Gamble is to “build design into P&G’s DNA,” and how that has involved changing the mindset at the venerable company from one that focused on the quality of the products to packaging aesthetics as well.
“You need to fuse meaning and pleasure with function,” she stated. The article adds, “Kotchka said she is gradually succeeding across the company by transforming the culture inside P&G to understand and embrace the value of design.”
As we all know, it isn’t easy to change a culture that has long been ingrained with doing business differently. It’s interesting to note how Ms. Kotchka has been orienting the company to achieve these goals. “At P&G, we want to build design into the front end of innovation,” she told her Fuse audience. The question is, how has she gone about accomplishing this?
* Reorienting work spaces to better inspire and create a collaborative environment.
* Encouraging management executives to interface with designers while researching consumers at retail or within their home environments. Better still: by teaching senior executives to think in design terms.
Remember we discussed the need for business to integrate its left-brain analytical thinking with more right brain creative problem solving capabilities of the designer–P&G presents us with a major CPG company that is clearly investing in this new business model!
* Developing an external design board, and directing internal P&G teams to interface with the customers directly three times per year to discuss marketplace products.
* Educating designers in basic business tenets so they can talk the talk with their executive counterparts and establish credibility with them.
* Teaching design principals to cross-functional department heads–the latter are now beginning to understand the core value design brings to their products.
Ms. Kotchka ended her address by telling her audience that while P&G hasn’t gotten where it wants to go, “We are much more inclusive in how we incorporate design into business strategy, and we are bringing our multi-disciplinary functions together.”
If the goal is to be more responsive to the consumer’s needs by offering better, more desirable products, isn’t that what every business should strive to do?

We spend a considerable amount of time on branding, positioning, messaging architecture, and the outbound side of our desired self-image. Problems occur when our people can’t answer the third or fourth question about “why” we feel the way we feel about our brand and company. We might be able to parrot the outer wrappings but don’t really know the deeper context of our culture. Let’s pull on this thread a little more, because this is an important topic.
Whenever we find ourselves working with a new company — either as an agency, a consultant or even as a new employee …. we need this cultural transfer to happen as thoroughly and quickly as possible. This isn’t a casual undertaking. One doesn’t absorb the deeper context of a company …. its real mission, values, key messages, and rationales behind important decisions …. by sitting through a Power Point presentation. Or three Power Point presentations.
Just as you didn’t get your Masters Degree by reading a book, you absorb these lessons the way people learn: by listening, reading, questioning, applying, and eventually by teaching. At each of these steps, you’re likely to find yourself being corrected and moving backwards to an earlier stage to re-absorb these new lessons.
Sounds hard, doesn’t it? It is. And this is why it’s important to take this seriously and to put measures in place to facilitate this cultural transfer as a discipline in and of itself. Don’t short-change yourself or your company at this important step, because it will only mean your new cultural acolytes will take longer to get up to speed than they otherwise would.
Here are a few examples to animate this point.
* Articulate why your core product was designed, why it is different from alternatives and competitors, and why your company made the choices they did when they took the first steps down its current product roadmap …. what is the deeper context behind the “zag” when your industry is content with a “zig” strategy?
* List out the key objections that your channel partners would raise during a routine sales call in the last thirty days.
* How do you see your current market standing in the context of overall industry and societal trends, both here and globally?
How many of your people can handle three, four, or a dozen pointed questions along these lines? How many of those who could are new to your organization? Not many? I’m not surprised.
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Key Takeaways:
. Treat culture like product training. We wouldn’t dream of taking product training lightly, would we? Why do we think strategy and culture are less important? In the absence of cultural and strategic knowledge, you’re a commodity.
. Question, probe, and improvise on your culture and strategy. See what works and what doesn’t. Get feedback. Keep working on it. Strategy and culture might be set in stone, but stone can be shaped to the needs of the day. Just make sure everyone agrees before you start swinging away.
. Teaching “why” has a more immediate and long lasting effect than just telling the “what.”
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One of the most important organizational growth strategies we can all instill in our companies is getting our “elders” to transfer their learnings. This practice is as old as time and probably started around campfires as storytelling and the beginnings of organized religion, and should be appropriately sized to the needs of the modern organization. Transferring culture is a lot like storytelling. Get your people to write down the important pillars of your culture and strategy in a place and manner that promotes the dissemination and deep understanding of this core knowledge. Wiki it. Re-write it and see if it holds together; get your management to critique it and fix it if it’s wrong, and re-work it until it’s right.
Does this sound like a lot of extra work? It is. And it’s important.
Regards.