“Perfection is a Disease.”
Ann Mukherjee is a seasoned C-Suite executive specializing in transforming global companies by leveraging demand driven growth to drive competitive advantage. Most recently, Ann served as Chairman and CEO, Pernod Ricard NA, the second largest spirits company in the world. Prior to Pernod Ricard, Ann was Global Chief Commercial and Marketing Officer of the largest privately held CPG company, SC Johnson, overseeing businesses in over 90 countries. Ann has also served as President, PepsiCo Global Snacks and served as CMO for Frito-Lay NA.
Ann has also served on the boards of Mondelēz, Hertz and Sabra. In 2020, President Trump appointed her to the Economic Recovery Committee during COVID and she has also worked with President Clinton as part of the Clinton Climate Change Initiative. Ann currently is program director for the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago developing a new executive curriculum for next generation CEOs.
Ann is also a friend and a big supporter of The Athena Project on Modern Leadership that Drew Ianni and I co-founded and was our guest on Unbossing. Unbossing is a podcast with leaders on how to lead and not to boss, how to manage through a zone of influence and not just a zone of control and why the future is a fusion of learning and unlearning.
The 40 minute episode with Ann is a masterclass on four different subjects:
1) On Growing Ourselves : Why perfection is a disease and the way forward is to embrace our weaknesses. Strengths and weaknesses are flip sides of the same coin. The key is to understand one’s strengths and weaknesses. Then build on areas of strength and learn how to compensate for the weaknesses.
Failure comes from not paying attention to our threats. In understanding our threats we can forge our opportunities and Ann teaches us how to do this with a SWOT analysis.
We are moving from an era of the “all-knowing” leader to the “all-learning” leader. Today it is key to “AI the shit out of ourselves” since we now have a confidant and mentor who can spar and train us.
2) On Growing Business: The secret to the companies that deliver total shareholder growth is one simple thing. Organic Growth. Not financial re-engineering. Not Mergers and Acquisitions. A ten year study by the University of Chicago builds the case for marketing and growth with data no Board can refute.
Businesses are about getting humans to work together with other humans to make and sell things to humans. It is as simple and complex as that. Forgetting the human part is losing the plot on how to run a business.
Great leaders recognize that each company and era has its own system. While Kraft and Frito-Lay were both food companies their systems of manufacturing and distribution were so different that it was only through unlearning and starting with a fresh sheet of paper did Ann thrive.
On the other hand, the differences between private and public companies may not be as great as one thinks. Operators still have to report to the owners whose name, focus and entire financial worth may be in the company the operator is running.
Beware those who run the same playbook when the rules of the game have changed.
3) On the importance of Creativity: Creativity is the oxygen to growth. Creativity unleashes potential. Creativity is understanding core human truths.
Ann aligned organization and drove SC Johnson growth with one line that united all the teams and the brands around the globe:
“SC Johnson helps women get off their knees”
This clarion call recognized that SC Johnson made cleaning products and around the world it was mostly women who cleaned.
Similarly Ann team won a Cannes Lion and scored the highest rated ad in the Super Bowl by understanding the core truth at the heart of Doritos which was:
“Break the Rules”
In 2006 decades ago just when User Generation Content was being born the Frito-Lay team outsourced creative to users. This not only broke the rules but also enabled Frito-Lay to have hundreds of creators to offset the hundreds of millions of dollars that Anheuser-Busch had to make and test ads for the Super Bowl.
4) On Life: It is a harsh world and it is tough. One can have work and family but often it is hard to have everything at the same time. Ann left her CEO job to focus on helping her husband recover his health knowing she could not focus and do a great job on each highly important and urgent task of running a company and helping her husband in his hour of need.
A key is to understand what gives you joy. Ann on a flight made a list of what gave her joy and then used AI to suggest how to rethink her life to ensure more joy.
Sometimes to pursue what you want you need to “break the rules” of ones own.
Ann decided after her husband recovered not to return to corporate life but to become a teacher and film maker focusing on a CEO program at Booth and launching her own film company.
Her film company and the U of C role allowed her to reconfigure her love of creativity from growing brands to growing people by give “voice to the voiceless” in her film company and guidance and advice to the next generation of CEO’s.
Ann reminds us that we should embrace our entire selves. The good and the bad.
Listen to podcast. It will rock you. You will learn. You will be inspired. You will be moved. All in 40 minutes.
On YouTube:
On Spotify (also available on every podcast platform):
One Single Thing.
The Daily Spark
Torsten Slock is the Chief Economist of Apollo and his daily spark newsletter contains a single chart and an analysis. One can access every chart and subscribe here (free): https://www.apollo.com/insights-news/insights/daily-spark#page-1
Here is his latest:
The Messiness Is Your Moat.
Luis Gariçano’s insight that AI autonomy declines with job messiness reveals an important truth about which work faces displacement. It’s routine, transactional roles that are vulnerable, not the complex relationship-driven work we assume is most at risk.
As tasks grow messier, AI capability stalls while human judgment becomes indispensable, drawing an autonomy threshold that protects messy work from replacement, see chart below and video here.
