Changing the Game
Interviewed by Olivia Wolak

Interview with Stuart Haugen, Interim CEO		 Date Interview: 07/22/2009
Date of Credentialing:
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How did you start doing interim work?

I evolved into it by doing projects for friends who asked for help. I found that I was good at it. I work very effectively in, I guess you can say crisis or “special situation mode”. I enjoyed the intensity, the laser-like focus on results, and the broader range of experience you got in changing assignments.

Your website says “I am a proven game changer”. When did you change the game?

Well, as an early career example, I was given the crown jewels of the Nestle Purina Company. I took over management of Purina Dog Chow, a brand that had been in decline for seven years. It was being beaten up by every new product on the market. Many in the company thought it was just a cash cow to be milked until it died. Fortunately, a wise man, who believed in my vision and creativity, gave me the brand and asked me to do something with it.

What did you do?

Within six months we had completely revamped the product positioning. Rather than trying to compete head to head with all the trendy new products on the market, we went back to the core basics of what dog food is all about – optimal care for the pet you love, nothing more and nothing less. We created a new tagline and some incredibly powerful, highly emotional advertising copy – I confess, as a dog lover, it brought tears to my eyes -- under the campaign theme “Because you Care”. Effectively, we repositioned the competition as a personal self-indulgence by the owner, buying “silly” products that were not fundamental to your dog’s health.

What were the results?

That reversed the seven year decline of Purina Dog Chow and reestablished it as an engine for volume, share, and profit growth for the division.

What’s your best decision ever?

Other than marrying my wife of thirty years? On the career level – my decision to go international to get involved in a much broader, cross-functional, multi-functional decision making role. When you talk about a specific business situation, the best decision that I made was to not accept the conventional wisdom and beliefs regarding brand 7UP.

“If you have a team around you that holds back and doesn’t want to take any chances at all because they are afraid they are going to be the scapegoat for it, it’s a formula for low productivity.”

What about 7UP?

I took over as chief marketing officer worldwide for brand 7UP, where I was asked by the president of PepsiCo International to fix a brand that he had acquired three years earlier. It was still in a state of decline because it wasn’t getting any focus in the Pepsi system. We had the good fortune to find a great strategy and to turn that strategy into magic when we identified an incredibly powerful campaign approach with Fido Dido, a spiky haired line drawing guy that we came up with.

Fido Dido was brilliant. I can draw him and I’m not an artist. What was the role of game changer in this case?

It was really the ability to find and identify the strategy, find and drive the creative development behind it, but more importantly the ability to work it through the Pepsi system to get it on air and into market. It was an incredibly risky campaign.

Changing the Game.-- Stuart Haugen, Interim CEO

Stuart Haugen has 30 years of sales, marketing, and general management experience that spans the consumer goods and technology industries. He has worked with major corporations, such as Nestle Purina, PepsiCo, and Campbell Soup Company, as well as a broad range of start-up and early stage technology companies.

How so?

We developed parallel campaigns: one which was considered very nice and very masculine (7-Up had become, over time, a very feminine product, not a good way to sell volume in carbonated soft drinks), a strong campaign, but not very unique or edgy and another, Fido Dido, which was this very, very scary concept, in the sense of potential business risk, using a character that you either loved or hated. Think of a bunch of 30/40/50 somethings trying to assess this very teen oriented concept. We had some very strange meetings and memos on the topic.

How did you get that through such a corporate culture?

When things got bogged down, I took advantage of a power vacuum in headquarters management over a period of a couple months, produced the commercial executions on my own authority, which I didn’t really have, and got it into the market. It turned out to be probably the single best business decision that I’ve ever made and probably the highest risk as well in terms of personal career implications.

And did that risk pay off?

After five years of decline, 7UP grew 70% in volume in 18 months. That’s $2.1 billion in incremental sales. It was an explosive change.

That’s a home run.

It was. The Fido Dido advertising campaign ran in 120 markets for five years and is now back, globally, after a ten year hiatus, because they still haven’t found anything more powerful to drive the brand.

Maybe they should invite you back.

Maybe!

How do you know if something is a good idea?

There are a lot of really good ideas in life and in business, many of which should be implemented without delay, but if the idea doesn’t scare you when you first look at it, it almost by definition can’t be a great idea. If you can look at an idea and say “let’s do it” without taking a big, deep breath and saying “I ought to think about that for a little while”, it could be a really good idea, but it won’t be a great one. If it doesn’t scare you to death, it cannot be a real “game changer”.

 

What makes you a dynamic leader?

When the pressure is on and the crisis is real and near term, situations become very clear for me and time frames seem to slow down. I am very good under pressure.

“There are a lot of really good ideas in life and in business, many of which should be implemented without delay, but if the idea doesn’t scare you when you first look at it, it almost by definition can’t be a great idea. If it doesn’t scare you to death, it cannot be a real “game changer”.

That seems to be a necessary trait among the most highly successful interims.

I am also a very good judge of people and a great developer of leaders and teams. I have hired and trained or -- and this is very important -- recuperated and revitalized the careers of at least five current Fortune 500 or Global 1,000 CEOs over the years.

What makes someone a good developer of leaders?

The ability to delegate; the ability to empower them to act and lead, while at the same time protecting them from errors that they may make in stepping forward to test their vision and skills. I take errors on my shoulders and I pass credit through to my team. It has been a very effective formula over the years.

How do you get best performance out of people?

You need to get them risk-taking with you. People are quite logically scared when there is trouble in the company. If you have a team around you that holds back and doesn’t want to take any chances at all because they are afraid they are going to be the scapegoat for it, it’s a formula for non-responsiveness and it’s a formula for low productivity.

How do you solve that?

If you can free those “hostages”, those people who have been sitting there for the last 5 to 10 years knowing that the business was heading for trouble because it wasn’t doing what it needed to do…if you can liberate them to tell you what needs to be done, it can make you that much faster, that much better, and that much more successful. But the key is making sure they understand that you’re protecting them when they take risks and that they will share in the credit for success.

Any advice for your fellow members Stuart? And by the way, we thank you for helping out with our own interim practice over the years.

There is one rule I live by. There is no such thing as a bad idea, but you can make horrendously bad decisions. Ideas should be nurtured and treated for what they are; valuable and rare things that we can’t have enough of. But, when it comes to decision making you need to disabuse yourself of any wishful thinking and get down to reality.