Quotes from Douglas Conant

When I arrived at Campbell on January 8, 2001, the company had lost half its market value in the prior year. They had to cut costs to the point where they were literally taking the chicken out of chicken noodle soup and the product was no longer competitive.

Ultimately as a leader, you're evaluated on how you interact with people. If you do it well, you develop a reputation as effective leader. If you don't, you develop a reputation for being a highly ineffective leader.

You have to talk about mistakes and then talk about what you have learned and how to move forward. You acknowledge missteps right away, you deal with them, and you move ahead.

Most people that derail as leaders in the corporate world, it's not because they couldn't do the math and calculate return on investment properly. The issues are communication and understanding. All of what typically would've been called the 'soft stuff.' You have to be authentic. You have to be dialed into the soft stuff.

I've met so many leaders who realize that telling your colleagues something that is on your mind is so much easier than keeping it in. Sometimes the things we make up in our heads are not nearly as big a deal as we think.

People lead complicated lives and aren't hanging on your every word or the company mission statement. You have to become a broken record of your expectations of the organization and show people why it is relevant and how it works in specific ways.

The corporate world has the resources to improve the world. It's where people live and work.

I would assert that highly effective leaders are made more than they're born. Every leader I know who's been highly effective has worked hard at it, and they've been students of it. The more you're a student of leadership, the more you figure out what works for you and the more effective you're going to be.

Integrity means having the courage to do what is right, and what is aligned with your values, no matter the situation.

Courage means feeling all those hard human emotions - all that uncertainty and anxiety - and getting the job done anyway.

Most people think of leaders as being these outgoing, very visible, and charismatic people, which I find to be a very narrow perception. The key challenge for managers today is to get beyond the surface of your colleagues. You might just find that you have introverts embedded within your organization who are natural-born leaders.

There's no evidence that large, diversified food companies win over time.