Own Up to Mistakes

You've got a good education and years of experience. You've learned from the best, tried all kinds of different styles and techniques, and got promoted to a leadership because you know what you're doing. You're an expert.

And someday, you're going to screw up.

It's OK to try something and not have it work. Frankly, if you never have a failure, it means you aren't taking enough chances. But having done something that doesn't work, you need to do two things. First, admit it (at least to yourself) and take corrective action, and second, learn from the mistake so you don't do it again. The first part is the hardest...if you can do that, the second part often follows. But admitting the mistake, THAT'S the tricky part, and honestly, it's a mark of a good leader, someone who's confident enough in his own abilities that he doesn't fear a setback and willing to put his ego on the shelf for the good of the firm.

A recent article in Business Week discusses recent moves by the leadership at Pepsi to overhaul multiple brands simultaneously in the middle of a corporate reorganization. Putting tasks such as marketing and strategic planning in a single pair of hands makes for an interesting challenge, but the scale of this operation takes it far beyond "interesting."

Not one to fiddle in the margins, d'Amore has taken drastic action. His audacious solution: tear down and then rebuild PepsiCo's biggest beverage brands, which, besides Pepsi, include Gatorade, Tropicana, and Mountain Dew. And he is doing this all at once. D'Amore's ambitious agenda brings to mind the Obama Administration's theory that it would be a shame to waste a crisis. His calculation is that a more powerful and enduring Pepsi will emerge from this creative destruction. D'Amore is willing to try new things even if it upsets traditionalists. And rather than cherry-pick a few priorities, he has taken on seven brands.

D'Amore informally called his undertaking The Big Bang. It was an apt metaphor. He was proposing not just devising new ads and slogans for seven separate brands but redesigning 1,121 different bottles, cans, and other packages. And he wanted to have the reconceived products on store shelves in seven months to coincide with the 2009 Super Bowl, when PepsiCo was planning to unveil several new commercials.

Never had the company attempted to overhaul so many products so quickly. The danger was clear: In January consumers would walk into supermarkets and find that nearly all of their favorite PepsiCo beverages looked dramatically different—and they might hate the changes. What's more, d'Amore's team wouldn't have time for the exhaustive market research that usually helps mitigate such risks.

Risky, but perhaps the bold move the company needed. Not everything worked out, though.

It's a risky strategy, and d'Amore, 53, has already stumbled, most glaringly when a consumer backlash forced him to scrap new Tropicana packaging...

Consumers hated Arnell's redesigned Tropicana carton, which included a cap that looked like an orange. After receiving mounds of irate letters, Nooyi decided to cancel the repackaging.

If you've seen the redesigned Tropicana carton, you know what the author's talking about. The new design came out while I was living overseas so I didn't see it at first, and only noticed it for the first time the other day. A friend suggested why perhaps I hadn't noticed it after I returned: the redesigned carton used a font that made it look like a generic, supermarket-brand of juice. My eyes had passed right over it because I didn't recognize it as Tropicana.

But even with that mistake, you have to respect Mr d'Amore at Pepsi for acknowledging it and reversing his earlier decision. Having done that, it's more likely that next time he'll find a way to do the marketing research before turning his Creatives loose on a new design. Maybe he still won't do it the old-fashioned way, but odds are he won't do it this way again, either. One sign of a good leader is the willingness to accept responsibility for something that doesn't turn out right and find a way to move beyond that failure toward success.