Ensuring a healthy value chain: former P & G Vice Chairman Kerry Clark runs the largest company no one's heard of

Chief Executive, The, March, 2007 by J.P. Donlon

What will it take to do this?

Two things. We need to continue to build our suite of technology systems and services. For us, this means working across divisions. For example, when our team initially came to talk to us about the Care Fusion product--the hardware is not that unique, but the software is proprietary with unique abilities--I said, "Great. So have you talked to the pharmaceutical division about getting the right type of bar-coded products into the hospital system to enable that?" There was sort of a look. "Well, no." We said, "Well why don't you get the two groups together, sit down and figure out exactly what medications we will need to have bar-coded so when the customer buys the solution, we provide them with a complete solution?"

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Second, we need to develop the tools and the portfolio of products, whether they are specific solutions like Care Fusion and MedMined, in ways that offer better solutions for customers.

Will we see a P & G-type branding overhaul at Cardinal?

We will approach this slowly. Early on, some Cardinal folks were showing me disposable gowns that they put on patients. I said, "Wow, they do every-thing but display advertising on that. Did you ever think about 'Have you tried our latest gloves?'" People were completely horrified at that idea, and we haven't gotten quite that far yet.

The reality is we have a lot of work to do in integrating all the various brands and products that we provide, particularly in our medical/surgical business. Some of those brands come from companies we bought. We're starting to work in the med/surg area in particular. We like to say it's the biggest company that nobody ever heard of.

You have placed a high priority on leadership development. How is that working out?

We're trying to do a couple of things concurrently. We are taking a deep look at our talent process, division by division. [Clark gets up and motions to a cabinet behind his desk.] Come over and look into these drawers. You probably can't see them all, but these are some of the organizational reviews we have done just in the last two months. Every single organization, IT, services, HR. We've gone through every unit organization and every succession plan of our top leaders. Through this process, we've taken an in-depth look at our top team, the top 30 managers. In fact, we're going to take that to the board.

In our review of the top 100 global leadership team, we identified strengths and weaknesses and focused on the keepers and the developers, their ultimate career destination, their potential, how long we think that person would need to get there, and what are the key next steps that we need to take to get them ready.

We're focused on the group that is four or five levels down, what at P & G we called our business unit general manager. We're going through all of those. One of the things we're finding is that some people have been moved into those jobs as a reward for having done well elsewhere. We need to move the age down in that group, because they tend to be older. But we need to get people in their 20s and their 30s in these entry-level general manager positions. For the first time now, we are having very clear discussions on the candidates, their destination job, and what exactly is the plan over the next three to five years to move that person closer to their destination job.