“Tony, how can Peter Arnett of CNN have a satellite dish in his briefcase to broadcast to the world about the invasion of Iraq and our warehouses can’t communicate with our distribution system in the Philippines?” I asked. I became the general manager of our Procter & Gamble operations in the Philippines in mid-1991 after the Gulf War had already begun. The Procter & Gamble Company entered the Philippines through acquisition in 1935. But when I became general manager, we were not delivering on our potential. We had warehouses scattered throughout the seven thousand–plus islands of the Philippines and were unable to ship all orders. Our warehouses couldn’t communicate with each other or our factories. In those days it took years to get the Philippine phone company to install a landline, and cell phones were not yet reliable. This is why I challenged our new information technology leader, the author, Tony Saldanha, to use technology to leapfrog the problem.
I have always believed in the competitive advantage benefits of digital technology. I wrote binary-coded decimal (BCD) programs for an IBM 360 computer in high school. At West Point I took every computer software and hardware course available and wrote portions of an assembly program for our Honeywell mainframe computer to translate Fortran IV into BCD. Later, as chief executive officer of the Procter & Gamble Company, I set a path for P&G, according to Global Intelligence for the CIO magazine (April–June 2012), to be the first Fortune 50 company to “digitize the company from end to end.” McKinsey & Company summed it up as “creating the world’s most technologically enabled company.” This meant that every individual in the company would have a customized dashboard on their computer that would allow them to view their metrics in real time and drill down as needed, by brand and by country, to understand what was happening and react to create competitive advantage. We called this initiative Project Symphony, and it was led by Tony Saldanha.
You see, the Procter & Gamble Company was rapidly globalizing in the 1980s and 1990s, and I was fortunate enough to be a part of it. Assignments on our biggest brands like Tide; in multiple international locations like Canada, the Philippines, Japan, and Belgium; and across geographies-leading categories or operations all convinced me that technology could provide the competitive advantage to gleaning insights first and expanding them more broadly. Taking advantage of this potential means digitizing before your competition. Today, this seems rather anachronistic. The question is no longer “whether to transform” but more “how to transform.” This book by Tony, based on his years of experience and multiple attempts all over the world, provides an important step-by-step guide to improving transformation success rates.
When I became the eighth secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, the second largest department in the federal government after the Department of Defense, I faced the same challenge to transform the organization using digital technology. In fact, I became secretary when employees lied to my predecessor and “cooked the books,” causing veterans to not get timely health care in Phoenix. My first trip after Senate confirmation was to Phoenix, and I discovered the PC-based system we asked our schedulers to use dated to 1985 and was like operating green-screen MS-DOS. Beyond this, we were managing our more than $185 billion budget using COBOL, a mainframe computer language I coded at West Point in 1972. I hired an individual who had been CIO at Johnson & Johnson and Dell to help me transform the VA via digitization. For example, using human-centered design principles, we created one website for veterans to replace over a thousand disparate sites, most of which required unique usernames and passwords.
Tony’s experience has made him an expert on digital transformation. In the Philippines and in Asia he created a new model for digitizing our distributors—dedicated companies that represented our sales and logistics capabilities in situations where the retailers were too small and disparate for P&G employees to serve them directly. As previously noted, he led Project Symphony across the global enterprise as we worked to turn our myriad of data into real-time decision making for time compression competitive advantage. In P&G’s Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa Division, Tony further perfected the linkages between the corporation and its distributors with a real-time distributor connect initiative. It provided more real-time visibility to store sales and inventory in small stores, for example in Nigeria, than at Walmart stores in the United States. As Tony moved up the ladder at P&G, he applied his considerable digital transformation skills more broadly across the company.
I wholeheartedly recommend this book to every reader. Tony’s three decades worth of deep experience and the use of the airline industry–inspired checklist system is unique. It will prevent you from making the mistakes Tony and I already made, help you beat the odds of the 70 percent failure rate in digital transformations, and enable you to deliver competitive advantage to your enterprise.
Robert A. McDonald
Retired Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer, The Procter & Gamble Company;