AG Lafley: Competing by Reinventing the Core

FranklinCovey On Leadership

FranklinCovey

Business, Management

4.9 • 851 Ratings

🗓️ 9 December 2025

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Former Procter & Gamble CEO AG Lafley explains why enduring performance depends on treating even the most established business as an “eternal restart”—constantly innovating, pruning distractions, and staying grounded in real customer behavior rather than stated preference. Drawing on decades leading one of the world’s largest consumer companies, he outlines how organizations can sharpen strategic choices, build ambidextrous cultures, and simplify management systems to execute with consistency. Lafley also details P&G’s shift toward open innovation, its rigorous process for exiting underperforming categories, and the leadership behaviors required to create competitive advantage at scale. Listen now to explore how leaders can refocus resources, empower teams closest to the customer, and cultivate innovation that actually reaches the market. Everyone agrees that leadership matters. But in the rush of competing priorities—in the whirlwind of data, deadlines, and deliverables—it’s easy to lose sight of just how much it matters. Download our new guide, Where are all the Great Leaders, to learn more: https://resources.franklincovey.com/c/tlg-where-are-all-the-great-leaders?x=j4G37p&lb-mode=overlay FranklinCovey’s world-class learning solutions—delivered Live-Online, On Demand, or Live In-Person—are designed to build exceptional leadership skills and enrich your culture at every level of your organization. To learn more, email us at [email protected], visit franklincovey.com, or call us at: 1-888-868-1776

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Another fundamental thing I believe is that customers, consumers really cannot tell you what they need or want.
0:09.0	They can tell you what they're dissatisfied with.
0:11.4	They can tell you what they don't want.
0:13.7	But it's very difficult for them to tell you what they need and want.
0:17.5	We would have never gotten to a product like Fabriz, waiting for the
0:22.7	consumer to say they wanted Fabriz. We would have never gotten to Swiffer. We would have never
0:27.8	gotten to almost all of the new products that I ever worked on if we waited for the consumer
0:32.2	to tell us that she or he needed them. And then the second thing, I believe, is it's kind of like anthropology. You
0:40.5	learn a lot by, you know, sitting in the woods and observing, right? You know, watching what people do.
0:51.2	Hello and welcome to Franklin Covey on leadership. I'm your host, Will Hodling.
0:55.4	In these conversations, we'll speak with many of the world's leading experts on the mistakes,
1:00.7	methods, and mindsets that help them become the people they are today. We hope that their
1:04.8	hard-earned insights help accelerate you on your journey. Today's conversation is with
1:10.0	A.G. Laffley is the former
1:12.9	CEO of Procter & Gamble, one of America's greatest and largest companies. And he's also
1:17.6	the author of two bestselling books, Playing to Win, How Strategy Really Works, and Game Changer.
1:23.9	In today's conversation, we'll talk about how AG's experience at P&G guided his perception and ideas on strategy, on how to create innovative cultures, and how to encourage high performance across an organization.
1:37.3	A.G. Lee Laffley, welcome to Franklin Covey on leadership. Great to be here. Wonderful. I'm very excited for today's conversation so you you have had an incredibly
1:46.1	impressive career spanning multiple decades now and i want to start actually all the way back at the
1:51.0	beginning and ask you about your time in the military so you were a navy supply officer for five
1:56.4	years before you went to harvard business school and then ultimately joined proctor and gamble
2:00.2	how did that foundational professional experience shape the person and the leader that you became?
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 22 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from FranklinCovey, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of FranklinCovey and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.