The Gatorade Insights team partnered with PepsiCo’s Global Insights team to understand how they can leverage foresights to drive a brand strategy, as well as how centers of excellence and local teams can partner to drive goals. The session at TMRE also focused in part on cross-functional communication and cross-collaborative projects.
“It’s a huge passion point for us. PepsiCo is a global organization. We have a lot of centers of excellence. But it’s not just working with centers of excellence,” says Healy. “It’s any cross functional partnership that you have. And even beyond that, this also goes to relationships with partners, relationships with suppliers, brands. There are ways to do it right. There are ways to do it wrong. These ways of working are the most important thing as we get to who we want to be on our team, the great work that we put out. We talked about those relationships that you have, and the way we often think it should be is like a modern, big, happy family. Sometimes there’s tussles, but in the end, it’s a friendly thing. But that’s not really how it goes. Sometimes it can feel like ‘Succession.’ It’s kind of cutthroat. You don’t trust each other. But I’m going with it. And you can get some decent work out of that. But in the end, it’s not a healthy long-term relationship. What we aim for is the Addams family. Everyone’s got their own personality. We respect each other’s quirks. But in the end, we all come together, but recognize though that it’s not perfect. It’s key to have self-awareness.”
So what makes an ideal partnership?
“A good example is pure transparency,” observes Healy. “One of the big problems is telling people what you think they need to know. So you go to kick off a project. Hey, I’m going to work with this global team. We need to put trends together that are specific to our business, but I don’t give you the full context. I just tell you exactly what I think I need. The problem with that, if you contextualize it, in full, the other person might surprise you. You couldn’t possibly be thinking of everything. But also how is the other side supposed to deliver something that’s useful to your business, if they don’t understand the full context of everything you’re working on? That’s why I’m very big on full transparency. Because I’d rather be in a place where you fully understand the context of my business, and now you can bring the story to me. That’s really action oriented in a way that maybe you can surprise me.”
Time, of course, is one key aspect to having a healthy partnership as well.
Healy adds, “While we all have less time, the more time that that takes is well worth the outcome. For example, I had the opportunity to present to Ramon Laguarta, global CEO of PepsiCo. He came to Gatorade. He wanted to talk about our business for a full day. I had the opportunity to talk to him for 20 minutes to set up the rest of the day and talk about how it’s consumer based. And you’re telling me, I shouldn’t take that extra time to be surprised? Because some people would do the opposite. They’d panic and say, this is exactly what I want to show. But the value that we got out of working with our global teams in that was so much more. And we were able to put such a positive foot forward to this global CEO of PepsiCo, and that meeting went so well in a small part because of the way we set it up. I’m not going to take credit for the success of that whole meeting. But in the end, we did it. I understand it can be frustrating, and our lives are busy. But we really must put weight on the most important things.”
See the full video interview from TMRE, as Adler and Healy discuss the advantages of “Slow Power” and more.
