Kathy Fish at Procter & Gamble: Navigating Industry Disruption by Disrupting from Within

When Kathy Fish, Procter & Gamble’s Chief Research, Development & Innovation Officer, and a 40-year company veteran, stepped into her role in 2014, she was concerned that the world’s leading consumer packaged goods company had lost its capability to produce a steady stream of disruptive innovations. This, coupled with intensifying competition from more agile, digitally-savvy direct-to-consumer companies, convinced Fish that P&G needed to renew its value proposition. She believed it was essential that all 100,000 employees see innovation as their job, and that all aspects of the consumer experience—not only the product itself—be “irresistibly superior.” But making this change would require wholesale transformation, which was challenging because P&G’s business units had decision-making rights for their businesses. Thus, when she launched GrowthWorks, an initiative to bring lean innovation to scale at P&G, Fish designed it to be business unit-led and corporately-supported.
Fish and her team tackled challenges as they emerged along the way, such as the need to adapt career systems. Fish took a “pull” versus “push” approach and it caught on like “wildfire,” eventually producing a portfolio of over 130 projects, and momentum that led P&G to headline the Consumer Electronics Show for the first time. While progress indicators were strong, the business units still struggled to incubate innovations, and Fish feared that unless P&G’s overall innovation performance management and reward systems changed, the new approach to innovation would not take hold in a sustainable way. Fish grapples with whether to take a more “push” approach and add innovation metrics to the business unit presidents’ annual scorecards, which typically focused on short term deliverables.