Few brands enjoy disruption, but for former Newell Rubbermaid and Newell Brands president and CEO Michael Polk, it’s the only way to achieve positive results. The experienced executive previously led transformations at Kraft Foods and Unilever before joining Newell Rubbermaid’s board in 2009 and taking the helm as president and CEO in 2011.
It wasn’t an easy task. When Michael Polk entered the role at Newell Rubbermaid, the global market was characterized by what he called “a chaotic retail landscape and unprecedented macro-economic volatility after the 2008 global financial crisis.” Despite the company’s success at the time, the goal was to accelerate growth while simultaneously improving the margins in the business. The experienced Michael Polk was ready for the challenge. He detailed his vision and strategy in his innovative Growth Game Plan. Execution of that plan over an 8 year tenure as CEO, contributed to delivering compound annual growth rate of 7.2% for the brand and a near tripling of the enterprise value of the company from 2011 to 2019.
Implementing Michael Polk’s Ambitious Growth Game Plan
When Michael Polk joined Newell Rubbermaid, it had 40 brands under its corporate umbrella, including household names such as Sharpie markers and Calphalon kitchenware. There was market demand for these products, but it was Polk’s job to help Newell Rubbermaid operate more efficiently and competitively. After meeting with the board, he outlined a multipronged approach that, while challenging to implement, helped reestablish Newell Rubbermaid as an industry titan.
Restructuring for Growth, the Harder Right Decision
Polk’s first order of business was to restructure Newell Rubbermaid from a holding company to an operating company. This organization redesign de-layered the company creating focused and accountable operating divisions. As part of this change, Polk and the leadership team made the difficult decision to lay off half of the company’s vice presidents and nearly one-fifth of its staff. “We made this choice deliberately, but we didn’t do it lightly. The people impacted had their lives disrupted and the change we executed fundamentally changed the way the organization worked. We did it because we knew we needed to increase the marketing affordability in our P&L and release the growth potential in the business. It was the harder but right decision,” he explained. Ultimately, the decision to flatten the company hierarchy paid off in a significant increase in marketing investment and when coupled with bigger and better innovations accelerated the growth of the company.
Investing in New Capabilities and Talent
Next, the Newell Rubbermaid leadership team invested in employees’ skills to improve the business’s overall capabilities. “The progress we made would not have happened without the strengthening of the leadership team and the investment in talent deeper in the organization. As the company moved forward, the commitment to internal development of talent was essential to Newell Brand’s sustained success,” Michael Polk explained. Newell Rubbermaid also complemented their strengthened brand and commercial organization with a talented team of supply chain experts, which helped it improve the efficiency of manufacturing and logistics.
Reshaping the Portfolio
The final step of the Growth Game Plan was to strengthen Newell Rubbermaid’s brand portfolio. First, Michael Polk led a series of changes that resulted in 35 transactions over eight years — half of which were divestitures. The goal was to create a consumer focused portfolio of businesses from the eclectic collection of diverse businesses that comprised the original Newell Rubbermaid. In the process of all these changes, Polk’s team rebranded Newell Rubbermaid as Newell Brands, a nearly $10 billion consumer goods company with a focus on:
Writing instruments
Baby gear
Food storage
Camping and recreation
Fragranced candles
Smoke and carbon monoxide detectors
Small kitchen appliances and cookware
The strategic portfolio transformation enabled Newell Brands to embrace new capabilities across the entire enterprise like the progress the company made scaling digital commerce capabilities. Michael Polk took e-commerce sales from 9% of Newell Brands’ business in 2011 to over 20% of all sales at the point of his retirement in 2019.
A Vision Realized: Michael Polk’s Transformative Influence
Michael Polk retired in 2019 after serving eight years as the president and CEO of Newell Brands and 10 years on the Board of Directors. His Growth Game Plan initiative was difficult to pull off, but it generated impressive results for the global consumer packaged goods brand. In the first quarter of his tenure as CEO, in 2011, net sales were $5.4 billion. By his last quarter in 2019, net sales had nearly doubled to $9.4 billion. Polk’s far-reaching vision created long-term benefits. Restructuring, skills development, and portfolio transformation nearly tripled the company’s value and resulted in the scaling of the company. Polk believes transformative leadership across the organization is the key to any successful transformation. Polk said, “The transformation of Newell Rubbermaid into Newell Brands was driven by a determined and highly capable group of leaders that stretched deep into our organization. To achieve what we achieved could only have occurred by playing as a team which we strived to do every single day.”