A.G. Lafley walked back into Procter & Gamble headquarters in May 2013 and faced an impossible situation.
He’d left three years earlier after a decade as CEO—during which he’d tripled P&G’s sales and made it one of the most admired companies in the world. His successor, Bob McDonald, had expanded aggressively into new categories and markets but lost focus on P&G’s core brands. Stock price stagnated. Activist investors were circling. The board was under siege.
Lafley knew P&G intimately—he’d spent 33 years there. But the company had changed. New processes. Different priorities. A culture that had drifted from what made P&G successful.
Here’s the choice every returning leader faces: restore the old culture completely, or accept all the changes and work within them. Most leaders pick one extreme or the other. Lafley did neither.
He understood something most leaders miss: organizational culture isn’t monolithic. Some elements drive success. Others create drag. The skill isn’t reading culture—it’s knowing which parts to honor and which to disrupt.
When Lafley first became CEO in 2000, P&G was in free fall. His predecessor, Durk Jager, had tried to transform the company overnight—slashing brands, forcing innovation, breaking tradition. The conservative P&G culture rejected the changes violently. The company lost $75 billion in market value in four months.
Lafley took the opposite approach. He identified what P&G’s culture did brilliantly—methodical process, consumer focus, operational discipline, long-term thinking. He preserved those completely. But he challenged the parts holding P&G back—insularity, risk aversion, resistance to external ideas.
The result: P&G opened its innovation process to outside partners (“Connect + Develop”) while maintaining rigorous internal standards. Lafley hired 150 mid-career designers—shocking for a company that only promoted from within—but integrated them into P&G’s existing brand teams. He literally tore down the oak-paneled executive walls and moved leaders into cubicles, but kept P&G’s foundational “Purpose, Values, and Principles” as the management guide.
I keep seeing leaders fail at this selective navigation. They either respect culture too much and nothing changes, or ignore it completely and get rejected. Maria from the email struggled because she pushed for change without first understanding which cultural norms enabled P&G’s success and which ones blocked it.
Three patterns I notice in leaders who navigate culture effectively:
They study which norms drive results vs. which protect comfort. Lafley spent his first weeks back in 2013 observing what had changed at P&G. Some shifts improved performance—faster decision-making in emerging markets. Others drifted from what worked—diluting focus on billion-dollar brands. He kept the performance drivers, challenged the drift. Most managers see culture as monolithic: “this is how we do things.” Strategic leaders see it as a portfolio of norms to selectively preserve or disrupt.
They challenge norms by first honoring the system. When Lafley brought design thinking to P&G in 2003, he didn’t force it on skeptical divisions. He took the entire global leadership team to IDEO’s offices to experience it firsthand. He started in divisions already interested in design. He worked within P&G’s consensus-driven culture to introduce ideas that challenged P&G’s insularity. The cultural system accepted the change because he respected how that system makes decisions.
They know transformation requires both preservation and disruption. Lafley’s “Connect + Develop” opened P&G to external innovation—heresy in a company built on internal R&D. But he positioned it as amplifying P&G’s core strength: understanding consumers better than anyone. Same with hiring mid-career designers: framed as enhancing P&G’s product excellence, not replacing it. The innovations succeeded because they preserved what made P&G great while disrupting what held it back.
Lafley left P&G again in 2015, having restored focus on core brands, rebuilt innovation momentum, and strengthened the culture that makes P&G endure. Harvard Business School still teaches his leadership as a case study in cultural navigation.
The executives promoting people like Maria aren’t looking for cultural conformity. They’re recognizing leaders who understand which organizational norms enable success and which ones prevent it—then have the judgment to preserve one while challenging the other.
Cultural intelligence isn’t about fitting in. It’s about knowing when to fit in and when to stand out.