David Taylor, former Procter & Gamble chairman, president and CEO joined the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business for its first Lessons from Leaders conversation of the academic year.
After rising through the manufacturing side of Procter & Gamble and being tapped after just nine years with the company to lead its largest manufacturing facility at the time, David Taylor made an unusual career move.
He started over.
Taylor was leading about 1,200 employees when he told company leaders he eventually wanted to run a business. Their response: He needed to learn how to build brands. So the engineer and plant manager moved into marketing, working alongside colleagues who were much earlier in their careers.
“It was a wonderful lesson in humility,” Taylor said. “It was a great chance to learn and to be in the learning mode, not the knowing mode.”
That willingness to keep learning became a recurring theme on Sept. 10 in LaRose Digital Theatre at the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business.
The conversation was moderated by Jack Ryan P’17, founder and principal of Jack Ryan Advisory and chair of the Love School of Business Board of Advisors.
Taylor spent more than 40 years with P&G, with assignments across the United States, Asia and Europe before eventually becoming chairman, president and CEO. Today, he serves as senior operating adviser to Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, chairman of the supervisory board of Opella Healthcare Group and non-executive chair of Delta Air Lines’ board of directors.
When Ryan asked what advice he would give students preparing to enter the workforce, Taylor pushed back on the idea that there is one ideal first assignment.
“Many people ask me, ‘What’s the right first assignment? Do I need to start in marketing or sales?’” Taylor said. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is what you do with the first assignment. Do you come into whatever you’re asked to do and do it with excellence?”
He said that strong work creates the credibility to take on larger challenges and eventually influence the organization itself.
“If you really want to change the system, be successful at wherever you are,” Taylor said. “That gives you a platform to be able to change the system. You build credibility that you can accomplish outcomes, and once you do that, the willingness for others to listen to you grows.”
Taylor said one of the strongest differentiators he has seen among successful leaders is their ability to bring out the best in the people around them.
“The greatest differentiator I’ve seen in my time with P&G, my time at Delta and now working with a private equity company is often their ability to unleash those around them,” Taylor said. “Those that have relatively little ego, but a high level of achievement, a high level of personal accountability and a high level of empathy for others.”
That combination, he said, creates something leaders cannot achieve on their own.
“What happens is they generate followership,” Taylor said. “That creates wonderful outcomes, especially when you get to mid- and higher levels, because the group amplifies the results.”
Students later turned the conversation toward artificial intelligence, asking Taylor what skills they should focus on as AI changes marketing and business.
Taylor said AI is already helping companies create and analyze content more quickly, but technology does not replace the need to understand the people a business serves.
“When we go to markets, the first meeting is in homes,” Taylor said. “We’d get to know the person. We’d learn about their life, their kids. ‘Tell us what you do each day.’”
He said those visits allowed teams to observe what consumers actually did, not just what they said they needed.
“You find there’s a lot of compensating behaviors consumers have,” Taylor said. “They’ll say, ‘This is not an issue,’ but you see they do an extra step because something doesn’t work the way they think it should.”
Taylor shared examples from P&G’s work in markets around the world, including observing how consumers washed their hair in rural China and how a consumer in Japan used Febreze on furniture she wished she could wash.
“You don’t see that looking at a sheet of paper,” Taylor said.
For Taylor, AI can accelerate the work once a company understands the problem it is trying to solve.
“AI will let you have faster, better answers once you know what to work on,” Taylor said. “What mountain do you want to climb? And that often comes from a better consumer insight and empathy.”
For the final student question, Taylor was asked whether there was one piece of advice he had used as a filter when making major decisions throughout his career.
His answer brought the conversation back to learning.
“Probably the simplest one is: Can I make a difference, and can I learn?” Taylor said.
He encouraged students to consider those questions as they evaluate their own opportunities, rather than getting caught up in salary, job titles or whether an assignment appears prestigious.
“Pick a place that you’re happy to walk in the door every day, you can hold your head up, you can learn and you can make a difference,” Taylor said. “You have talents and the ability to do a ton of things. You get to choose how you use those.”
About Lessons from Leaders
Launched in 2017 by Dean Emeritus Raghu Tadepalli, Lessons from Leaders brings senior executives to campus for open talks, small group discussions and purposeful one-on-one networking that connects students with mentors. The program helps bridge classroom learning to real-world decision-making and strategy, and aims for every student to leave with a new contact and meaningful career insights.