Here is a brief excerpt from an interview of Douglas Conant by Art Kleiner, editor-in-chief of strategy+business magazine, published by Booz & Company. Art is also the author of The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management (Second Edition, 2008).

To read the complete interview, click here.

Photograph by Peter Gregoire

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The co-author of TouchPoints and former CEO of Campbell Soup Company explains how executives build their company’s capabilities by connecting with people more effectively.Campbell Soup Company has long been an iconic enterprise. Founded in 1869 in Camden, N.J., its basic logo and can design have not changed since 1898. Andy Warhol’s paintings of those cans, which began as an irreverent comment on their emblematic nature, are themselves half a century old. The company’s recent business history is also iconic, at least in the way it evokes the overall drama of the consumer products industry.

Like many other food companies, Campbell diversified its product lines to gain scale during the 1980s and early 1990s. Then, in the mid-1990s, its financial performance began to decline. It adopted a more coherent strategy in the 2000s, seeking global growth with a sharply reduced portfolio focused on three brand families: Campbell’s soup, V8 beverages, and Pepperidge Farm baked goods. Finally, in recent years, as is becoming common in the food business, it has had to meet two seemingly contradictory imperatives in its product line — the promotion of health and wellness, and a high level of appeal to customers craving comfort food.

Making these shifts takes a fair amount of sophistication — in technology and process, and in leadership and human management. Instead of trying to gain those capabilities through acquisition, Douglas Conant, CEO of Campbell from 2001 to 2011, sought to build them from within. Conant was hired as a turnaround artist after senior executive stints at General Mills, Kraft, and Nabisco, but his approach focused on investing in people, including paying deliberate attention to his own leadership style.

Jon Katzenbach, who writes regularly on organizational culture in this magazine, regards Conant as one of the few leaders who understand not just the importance of personal impact, but how to deploy it in practice. That’s the subject of Conant’s book TouchPoints: Creating Powerful Leadership Connections in the Smallest of Moments (Jossey-Bass, 2011), coauthored with executive coach Mette Norgaard. The book describes how to reframe interactions with people — even annoying interactions, like interruptions — as opportunities to raise the quality of a leader’s connection with people, and thus to further the purpose of the enterprise. (Conant’s successor as CEO, Denise Morrison, was formerly the executive champion of the company’s signature wellness initiative.)

We sought Doug Conant out because the Campbell story and the anecdotes inTouchPoints have particular relevance for one of our own ongoing inquiries: How can companies build the capabilities they need to distinguish themselves? The interview was conducted at the offices of Conant’s Philadelphia-based not-for-profit group DRC LLC, which is dedicated to raising the quality and impact of leadership among senior executives.

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To read the complete interview, please click here.

To check out other resources and learn more about Booz & Company, please click here.