Kimberly-Clark Sidebar: Keeping It Simple
Erin Patrice O’Brien
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Thomas Falk, chairman and CEO of Kimberly-Clark, says he learned all he needed to know about running a business on the first day at his first job out of college. “I was working at an accounting firm, and the senior partner walked into my office and told me that business is simple,” he remembers. “Take care of your customers, find a way to grow your business and develop your people.”
Nearly 30 years later, that early mentor still calls Falk every summer to play golf and to remind him that those three rules are just as important today as they were then. Not that Falk needs reminding. “When I get out of bed in the morning, I think about two groups of people; all the investors who have more than $20 billion of their money invested in Kimberly-Clark, and the 53,000 employees and their families who are counting on me to get it right.”
As the CEO of one of the largest consumer products companies in the world, staying in touch with customers and workers is a little more challenging, but Falk still manages to find a way. He uses technology to connect with employees, posting a blog every week on the corporate Intranet. In July he wrote about “complexification,” or making things a lot more complicated than they need to be. He challenged readers to identify hurdles that make their jobs more complicated and to suggest alternatives. “That blog is our single biggest communication now,” he says. “We get around 7,000 hits a month. It has also made me more approachable. If I’m wandering around the company, an employee is much more willing to come up and talk to me about something they read in a blog post.”
To stay in touch with his customers, Falk often meets one-on-one with customers in their homes. Whenever he travels to one of Kimberly-Clark’s international outposts, he tries to schedule an in-home visit with a consumer. In China last year, he visited a new mother and asked her to pull out everything she uses to care for her baby, allowing him to see what products she uses and to find out where she gets her information about childcare.
In these visits he heard that in many developing countries young families can’t afford to use disposable diapers all the time, but they like to use them at night so everyone can sleep better or for special occasions. Today, diapers are sold in single packages in most developing countries to meet that very specific need. “These visits are always a terrific learning experience,” Falk says. “Of course we do larger consumer testing, but when you are in a home you can really see how our products can make families’ lives better.”
