Strong, But Not Wrong

Doug Conant has spent the last fifty years being tough on standards and tender-hearted with people. One step still remains.

For a decade, Doug Conant ended his workday with a two-and-a-half-hour drive home from Camden, New Jersey, reading printouts of everything going right inside the Campbell Soup Company. On the drive in the next morning, he chose ten or twenty people and handwrote each of them a note. Not birthday cards, but personalized notes of appreciation. Thank you for over-delivering the quarter. Thank you for getting the production line running in Sydney. When he retired, an interviewer asked about the notes, and Doug did the math on the calculator in his desk drawer: thirty thousand letters over the course of a decade, in a company of twenty-five thousand people. Wherever you went in the world at Campbell, someone had a handwritten letter from the CEO pinned to their cubicle wall or displayed proudly in a frame on their desk. And the company those letters helped rebuild watched its engagement climb, by Gallup’s measure, from among the worst the polling firm had ever recorded to the best in the Fortune 500.

I sat with Doug recently on my podcast, One of One. He is seventy-five now, fifty years into the work, long since retired from Campbell but still building. Near the end of our conversation I named the principle I lead by — love and performance. I asked the man whose way of leading had become synonymous with leading with care what the word love, in particular, evokes. He answered honestly and thoughtfully. “I don’t use the word that often, but I feel the emotion.” Then he added: “I use love carefully with my family.” And finally, with the generosity of a man leaving a door open: “Love is a strong word, but not wrong.”

Strong, but not wrong. That sentence has stayed with me.

It would be easy to explain his reticence as generational. A postwar leader keeping what most consider a soft word at a professional distance. But dig deeper and a much more nuanced explanation emerges. Doug Conant did not shy away from leading with care. He may have expressed more of it, more concretely, than any chief executive of his era. For forty years he has greeted people the way his mentor Neil McKenna answered every phone call, in a time before caller ID: How can I help? He turned around a broken company by listening before acting, walked the halls of a business that had stopped trusting anyone in a corner office, and built — note by note, question by question — an entire system of care. He is not the byproduct of an era that cannot say the word love in a professional setting. He is its antithesis. Which is why his reluctance to claim it in our conversation left me so curious.

Midway through our conversation, Doug asked me the question he has posed to audiences for years. “Think of the person who most shaped your life,” he asked. “Did they have high standards for you?” “Enormously high,” I said. “Did they have your back?” I didn’t hesitate: “One hundred percent.” He continued, “Were they kind to you?” And I heard myself answer: “deeply loving.” He asked about kindness. I answered with love. Neither of us paused over the difference. I have been thinking about it since.

The phrase Doug built his leadership on — tough-minded on standards, tender-hearted with people — has a lineage far older than the boardroom. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus sends his disciples out among wolves with the original instruction: wise as serpents, harmless as doves. Two thousand years later, Martin Luther King Jr. took that verse as the text for a sermon he called “A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart,” and in 1963 he published it in a collection whose title names a new polarity: Strength to Love. For King, the tender heart was not kindness. It was agape — love as a force rather than a feeling, chosen daily, aimed at people who had given him every reason to choose otherwise, held steady against dogs and fire hoses and a jail cell in Birmingham. The hardhearted person, he wrote, “never truly loves.” On its way from the sermon to the executive office, the word love was replaced with something more acceptable: tenderness, care, kindness. And the softening hasn’t stopped. In our conversation, Doug said kind-hearted, nearly every time. Love became tender. Tender became kind. Each translation becomes a weaker imitation of the original.

You can see the cost of this softening by noticing where the word is permitted in the workplace. The retirement toast. The memorial service. We have licensed love in exactly two tenses, the valedictory and the posthumous — both instances of a person already on their way out of the room. I know this tax from my own experience. I neglected to tell my mother I loved her, fully and without reservation, until after she was gone. The cost is borne by specific human beings — the ones who worked beside us for decades and heard our appreciation, our engagement scores, our kindness, and never felt the thing underneath them. And it also costs even the most tender-hearted withholder.

Your life story is your leadership story, Doug teaches, and each of us carries a parking lot — the pieces of our story we set aside while the day-to-day got handled. No one can go into your parking lot but you. Doug was thirty-two when he was fired — told at nine in the morning to be out of the building by noon. That was more than forty years ago. He was paired with Neil McKenna, the outplacement counselor who became that mentor. McKenna’s first assignment: handwrite your life story, all of it. Doug turned in a hundred pages, then went back to rehearsing for job interviews. McKenna read the pages, watched the rehearsals, and delivered his diagnosis: the man on those pages and the man showing up for interviews were two different people. The decades since have been the closing of that gap, and it is nearly complete. Nearly. “I use love carefully with my family” means the word is spoken freely at home and translated at work. The word may be the last item in Doug Conant’s parking lot.

There is a story Doug tells about himself. Years ago, the executive coach Debra Benton noticed that he, a lifelong introvert, stood about two feet farther back from every group than anyone else in it. She gave him an instruction he found ridiculous: take one step closer. He initially refused. On the way home, he decided to try it. “It changed everything,” he told me. “It changed everything.” He said it twice. The step was small, physical, almost embarrassing. And it rearranged his relationships, because the inside work that made the step possible had already been done.

The word love is one step closer. For Doug. For me. For every leader running the strongest force available to them through safer and safer nouns. The inside work is what makes the step possible, and he has done the inside work, fifty years of it. Strong, but not wrong, he called the word. Right on both counts.

Take the step.

Postscript

I sent this essay to Doug before publishing it. He read the essay and asked that we speak. A few days later, we got on a call. I was his last meeting of a long day. We talked at length. He had been thinking about the essay in a way that he had rarely done. In his words: “You’ve struck a nerve unlike anyone I’ve ever talked to about this.”

He began with the most central aspect of his leadership: the tender half of his phrase was always accompanied by his insistence on being tough on standards. “It’s not Woodstock,” he said. It was the same polarity I have led with — love and performance — just expressed with different language. Then he reminded me where the order came from. He built his system of care inside RJR Nabisco in the 1990s, in the years after the most famous leveraged buyout in American history, the one they wrote Barbarians at the Gate about. His critics there had a name for what he was doing: “lovey-dovey-covey,” a reference to the leadership guru Stephen Covey, whose work deeply influenced Doug. Meanwhile, Doug’s businesses outperformed everybody. He always led with tough-minded on standards, he told me. In that world at that time, the order was survival. It was probably the hardest era and environment American business has ever offered a builder of a system of care. And he built one.

As we continued, he pressed himself on the word love and kept coming back to kindness. To him, kindness meant three words: empathy, generosity, and action. Those are, I offered, almost exactly the qualities of agape. The Greeks had seven words for love, I explained. English gives us one, and one definition makes us prisoner to the most conventional perception of what the word means. Doug and I may be pointing at the same thing.

May be. The gap narrowed on that call; it did not close, and I no longer think it needs to. The word itself did what the safer words cannot. It kept a seventy-five-year-old master of this territory up at night, fifty years into the work, stirring the pot — his phrase. Love has linguistic power. It opens the door to the conversation everybody, in their soul, really wants to have. We would not have had ours without it.

At the end of the call, he gave me the one thing he said he could say about the essay for certain, the same thing he had offered about the word itself in our first conversation: “It’s strong and it’s not wrong.”

This essay grew out of my conversation with Doug Conant on One of One. The full episode is worth your hour.