After his time at the Charmin Paper Products plant in Germany, John Sipple’s leadership team at Proctor & Gamble offered him a less glamorous task: turning around a run-down pulp mill in the Florida swamplands. Here’s an excerpt:
They went on to describe the “opportunity” — I took the word opportunity to mean big problem. They said the business at Foley was struggling and needed someone to lead a transition from its outdated, stuck in the mud, traditional ways to something more in keeping with the current pace of business. At that point I had spent my entire career managing “high performance” systems, employing modern approaches to get everyone in an organization involved and contributing to their full potential. I had no experience with anything like this turnaround effort.
I wasn’t about to be won over by their “opportunity”, and my response was pretty negative: “Thanks for your interest in me and the offer of this opportunity but I don’t think I’d be interested, what else do you have?” Thanks, but no thanks!
To their credit they didn’t take my negative attitude at face value. They just said, “Well, why don’t you talk it over with your wife tonight, and we can talk more tomorrow.”
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