From House Painter to Harvard: This Unilever CEO’s Road to Success.
Today’s interview is with John LeBoutillier, President & CEO of Unilever Canada. Like me, John grew up in an apartment in the middle of a major city (for him in Manhattan, for me in Toronto). What impressed me most about John was his ability to just outwork everyone else, which really resonates with my own thinking which I recently captured in this story on Chad Grills’ The Mission, “There is No Secret to Success, there is Just Hard Work”.
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Here are the three things I learned from this interview:
- John’s early career at Ogilvy taught him some valuable lessons on leadership, particularly the ability to lead without direct authority, as well as the importance of supporting your team when one of them falls down.
- He’s consistently focused on self-improvement, which has gotten him access to new opportunities. For example, while at Ogilvy, he decided to get an MBA to learn about his client’s business, so he could be a better Account Executive. He pushed this further, becoming an intern at Kraft and eventually working there full-time, with the goal of eventually returning to Ogilvy to deliver more value back to clients. His switch from Agency-side to Client-side was done initially for learning and self-improvement.
- His story reminded me a lot of my personal readings on Stoicism, particularly Ryan Holiday’s books, Ego is the Enemy, Obstacle is the Way and The Daily Stoic. John’s advice to his 25 year old self was to expend less energy on the “30 percent” of activities which worried him, but really were out of his control. While John didn’t excplicitly talk about Stoic Philosophy, his ability to thrive in his live despite growing up not talking till the age of 4, not reading till the 3rd grade, and today being most excited about fixing broken businesses like he did with Tang and Knorr. These traits and stories all match the patterns of the great stoic thinkers.
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Daniel
Daniel Rodic is the Co-Founder of Exact Media, which is transforming the world of direct mail by enabling brands owned by companies like P&G, PepsiCo, Unilever and L’Oréal to distribute samples and coupons using the excess space in eCommerce parcels that have already been shipped to consumer.
Daniel was named Top 30 Under 30 by Marketing Magazine, and represented Canada at the G20 Entrepreneurs Summit in Moscow and Beijing. Daniel served on the Leadership Council for the United Nations Media for Social Impact Summit and he is a 2016 finalist for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award.
