Former Procter & Gamble CEO John Pepper on predecessor's impact

It’s been more than three decades since John Smale retired as chairman-CEO of Procter & Gamble Co. and nearly 12 years since he died, but his legacy lives across the marketing world.

Smale oversaw P&G’s global expansion of the 1980s, launched the category management system and forged the company’s legendary collaboration with Walmart. He was an early advocate of corporate social responsibility and greenlighted P&G’s diversity policies. And after P&G, when he joined and later chaired the General Motors board, Smale ushered in a new era of more assertive corporate boards.

But no one had written a book about his contributions until recently, when former P&G Chairman-CEO John Pepper joined Smale’s daughter to convince Rob Garver to write “Here Forever.” In the latest Marketer's Brief podcast, Pepper talks about the book, Smale’s legacy in marketing and some of the milestones in his own career.

That includes how Pepper and Smale once bonded over how awful they thought a presentation by a Young & Rubicam agency executive was. The two were sharing a car returning from the presentation by the head of creative at Y&R, a P&G agency at the time, Pepper recalled, when Smale asked him what he thought.

“I paused for maybe five seconds and told him my answer was I thought it was a load of crap, gobbledygook, and I couldn’t understand what he was trying to say,” Pepper said. Smale responded, “That’s exactly how I felt,” Pepper said.

Questions of that sort were something for which Smale was famous—or notorious—according to Garver’s book. It was a practice known as “pulling on the string” to get a sense of how people thought or how much they knew about difficult topics.

Pepper was on the receiving end again years later when Smale questioned him pointedly about a diversity policy Pepper had proposed for P&G. Ultimately, he said Smale told him he was “using too much gobbledygook” in his language around diversity and not focusing on the long-term business reasons behind it. Pepper, after initially pushing back on that, ultimately conceded “there was truth in what he was saying and we reshaped it and made it stronger. And he became the strongest advocate that anyone pushing for something could ever have.”

Pepper also reflects on Smale’s move to promote Ed Artzt to CEO before Pepper in 1989, at a time when Pepper was widely expected to get the job.

“I wasn’t surprised,” Pepper said. “I knew a lot of people were, and some were disappointed. But I thought this was exactly the right decision.”

Pepper added that he worked for Artzt for half of his total career at P&G. “He and I were very different personalities,” Pepper said. “I learned an enormous amount from it.”

Pepper also talks about his own return to becoming executive chairman of P&G in 2000 after the resignation of his successor, Durk Jager. “It was very disappointing,” Pepper said. “I was extremely sorry to see this turn of events. … The challenges the company had faced, he had faced, a lot of them undoubtedly were there when I left.”

But he said he was heartened by the subsequent turnaround under the next CEO, A.G. Lafley. “I felt, in a way privileged to be able to play this role,” Pepper said, “a role that frankly, I never would have wanted to happen. But it did. And we came out of it with renewed spirit.”

Pepper noted that it’s a tradition for P&G execs to provide advice to their successors, even when don’t get pulled back in to help run things. He said he has offered occasional advice to successors including David Taylor and current Chairman-CEO Jon Moeller. And he recalled one bit of unsolicited advice he once got from Smale after P&G’s stock tanked.

“Forget about it,” Pepper said he recalls Smale saying. “Just keep executing the plan you have. It’s a good plan. The stock price will take care of itself.

“It didn’t stop me from looking at the stock price,” Pepper said. “But it lifted a heavy load off me, and it provided a heck of a good piece of perspective, which I’ve tried to pass on.”