KEY POINTS:
AG Lafley is a man of routines, of goals, targets and lists, and an early-morning work-out or a dip in the pool has been a habit for years. Frankly, it is the only way to pep oneself up for a typical business day that will take him to
two cities, hundreds of miles apart, and all before lunch.
The early start is part and parcel of running the most powerful consumer brands business on the planet. Lafley is the man behind Ariel detergent, behind Crest toothpaste, Fairy washing up liquid, Duracell batteries and Gillette razors, behind Pringles, Pampers, Tampax and Tide, the best-selling detergent in the United States.
It is a giant list, with an ambitious goal in a decade of strong growth, free of profit warnings, and Lafley, who has been at the helm of Procter & Gamble since 2000, is close to reaching that target. Just the small matter of a consumer-led recession to worry about.
"There's no doubt that the US economy is slowing and the consumer is under pressure. You don't buy an iPod when you can't put food on the table for your family.
"Virtually every product that P&G sells is not losing frequency of usage. So I'm much more comfortable being in the consumer staples business than I would be in the consumer discretionary business."
10.30am: Lafley has a more relaxed demeanour than your average American corporate boss, all open-necked shirts, spiked white hair and a charming smile. While his father had been a rising star inside General Electric, and the family had moved around with each new posting, AG had rather planned to be a basketball coach or a teacher. It was only in the US Navy that he found his vocation, when he was posted to oversee the retail and services businesses inside a US air base in Japan. Harvard Business School followed, and he joined P&G's laundry detergents business in 1977.
Thrust into the top job after a nasty profit warning felled his predecessor in 2000, until recently he has kept a lower profile than one might imagine for a company of P&G's power. However, he has long been the chief executive's chief executive, cited by the likes of Sir Terry Leahy at Tesco as one of the business leaders he admires for his quiet intelligence and his lack of flash.
And with each passing year of solid results, and with the audacious $54bn takeover of Gillette in 2005 having been deemed a success, Lafley is increasingly sought for his "vision", his prescriptions for business success.
Now, having flown from his home in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Washington DC, he is charming the attendees at the Newspaper Association of America's conference in a panel discussion on innovation. Innovation, you see, is at the core of that "vision", as it has been ever since Lafley began clawing his way up through the detergents business.
12.30pm: Lafley dashes away from his conference session. Before lunch, he has to be at Gillette's historic headquarters in Boston, hundreds of miles up the east coast.
Over a light lunch, he is reviewing the progress of some of the Gillette brands, and he is making the usual disciplined use of time, keeping meetings short, strict limits of 20 minutes for one-to-ones, an hour for a group session.
4pm: Lafley is using some of his new-found profile to trumpet P&G's credentials in a book that he has co-written with the management guru Ram Charan. The latest in a round of media interviews promoting the book, The Game Changer is with Harvard Management, meaning he can make a welcome return to his alma mater.
6pm: Finally, it is to a recruitment event at Harvard, where Lafley is pitching P&G to future graduates.
- INDEPENDENT
