Military academies train what P&G wants
Decisiveness, discipline among qualities sought in managers
By Keith T. Reed • kreed@enquirer.com • Cincinnati Enquirer, September 28, 2008
Over four days in 2006, Ryan Hollin left Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., got married in California, and moved to Cincinnati to start a new job as a logistics manager at a Procter & Gamble chemical plant. A year prior, Hollin lost a leg in a suicide car bombing after only four months of deployment as an Army captain in Iraq. He spent the next year recovering and contemplating his future. Then another soldier, who also graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, told Hollin that P&G was recruiting service academy graduates for managerial jobs.
"I was ready to go, man," he said of how quickly he rearranged his life. Hollin's story is one example of a small but effective slice of P&G's worldwide recruiting efforts. The company is almost always looking for new talent capable of managing its varied operations and adapting to its corporate culture, which is famous for being regimented and feverishly innovative. P&G believes that in recent service academy graduates, it has found a deep well of that talent. The company has hired 140 new managers since the program's inception in 1994 but P&G says that pace has accelerated in recent years.
P&G's Current CEO Served for 5 years in the Navy
Last year, it hired 19 graduates of the five service academies, making the recruiting program fourth among all such efforts in the company. Only alumni networks representing Ohio State University, the University of Cincinnati, and Purdue University brought in more new managers in 2007. Leading the effort is Steve Wittman, 53, a former Air Force pilot who graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1977. Wittman's day job is managing a "shopper-based design" program, helping retailers figure out how to sell P&G products. He spends about 10 percent of his time leading a team of 25 P&G employees, who also graduated from service academies, to four
annual conferences, where they troll for new prospects. The meetings are competitive - at one in Seattle in August, 50 companies showed up to woo 230 candidates - so P&G sponsors seminars on how to prepare for a career outside the military. "Certainly we're competing with a lot of companies," Wittman said. By sponsoring special sessions, "We get a chance to put our best foot forward."
Veterans have track record
P&G's lure to former military officers stretches back beyond the 14-year-old program. A.G. Lafley, the company's
chief executive officer, left the Navy in 1975 after five years and joined the company two years later after graduating Harvard Business School. Bob McDonald, P&G's chief operating officer, is a West Point graduate and was an Army captain from 1975 to 1980. He joined the company that year as a brand assistant for Solo, a laundry detergent brand that no longer exists. John Pepper, who was chairman and chief executive officer from 1995 until 1999, also served in the Navy. A P&G spokesman stressed that military service is not necessary to climbing its corporate ladder. But recruiting experts say many companies value military experience in employees because of an assumption that veterans bring valuable experience to their jobs. "There's a sense of loyalty, commitment associated with military service and some companies find that favorable," said Scott Boyar, an assistant professor of human resources at Xavier University's Williams College of Business. "Some of those are transferable to the private sector. They could effectively argue that they (veterans) have...experience in these leadership roles."
Easing transition
Brooke Waller spent six years as an intelligence officer in the Navy after graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy in 2002. The job included debriefing helicopter pilots after dozens of daily training missions. It's not an obvious parallel, but she believes it helped her in her current role as a marketing researcher for P&G's Iams pet food brand. "It's really difficult to relate intelligence to cat food, but there are similarities. You really have to dig for accuracy and for details," said Waller, 29, who started with the company in March. Her husband, whom she met at the Naval Academy, also works for P&G. Hollin said his short deployment in Iraq has informed his role at P&G by teaching him to adapt to new challenges on the fly. Before going to Iraq, he was trained for a job in air defense artillery - shooting down planes. But "there were no planes in Iraq, so when I go there I had to train immediately for a new job," running mechanized artillery, he said. Then 24 years old, Hollin wound up training his 17-man unit, plus about 20 men in the new Iraqi army. It was good training for when he arrived at P&G and was told his job was to improve the work processes at his plant. "I'd never heard of anything like that," he said. "It wasn't stressful to me because I'd been doing that a lot, learning while I taught other people."
