Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Don Knauss, chief executive of the Clorox Company. “If you’re going to engage the best and the brightest and retain them,” he says, “they’d better think that you care more about them than you care about yourself.”
To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.
Photo credit: Earl Wilson/The New York Times
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Were you in leadership roles when you were younger?
I learned a lot of leadership lessons playing football and baseball in high school. But I started to think a lot more in college about what I was going to do. I was working on my master’s in history when I decided to join the Marine Corps. There was a service mentality in our family. My dad was Army Air Corps. My brother was Air Force. I was going to be a Marine. That changed everything.
What did you learn in the Marines about leadership?
I’ll tell you a story. I was stationed on Oahu. The first day I was actually in a line unit — after 15 months of school and training — was on Hawaii, the Big Island. There’s a big Army base there where artillery units train and shoot live rounds. They helicoptered me over and I took a jeep to join 120 Marines in this artillery battery. They’d been out in the field for several weeks, and the commanding officer had ordered hot food from the base camp because they’d been eating C rations [canned food] for several days.
I had been up since 5 in the morning, and I was pretty hungry. I started walking over to get in front of the line, and this gunnery sergeant grabbed my shoulder and turned me around. He said: “Lieutenant, in the field the men always eat first. You can have some if there’s any left.” I said, “O.K., I get it.”
That was the whole Marine Corps approach — it’s all about your people; it’s not about you. And if you’re going to lead these people, you’d better demonstrate that you care more about them than you care about yourself. I’ve never forgotten that, and that shaped my whole approach to leadership from then on.
When you got out of the Marines, did you know what you wanted to do?
I learned in the Marine Corps that I really liked strategy. Every operation in the military is based on a five-paragraph order, and the acronym is Smeac — situation, mission, execution, administration and communication. It’s a very logical flow.
I decided to get into brand management, and Procter & Gamble was a great training ground, and they hired a lot of junior military officers. Procter was more of a written than verbal culture, and business initiatives were structured through short memos. It was almost an exact parallel of the five-paragraph order. I said, “I could fit into that culture.”
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Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times’ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.comthat he started in March 2009. In his book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews with more than 70 leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here.
His more recent book, Quick and Nimble: Lessons from Leading CEOs on How to Create a Culture of Innovation, was also also published by Times Books (January 2014). To contact him, please click here.