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MANAGING FOR THE LONG TERM | Building a Leadership Brand
hbr.org | July–August 2007 | Harvard Business Review 93
UICK: WHAT DO THE FOLLOWING FIRMS HAVE IN COMMON?
General Electric, whose motto is “imagination at
work,” is a diversifi ed company with $163 billion in
annual revenue. It is famous for developing leaders who are
dedicated to turning imaginative ideas into leading products
and services. A GE manager can be trusted to be a strong conceptualist
as well as a decisive thinker; an inclusive, competent
team leader; and a confi dent expert in his fi eld.
Johnson & Johnson, whose credo begins, “We believe our
fi rst responsibility is to the doctors, nurses and patients, to
mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and
services,” earned $53 billion in revenue last year. It is celebrated
for developing leaders who provide scientifi cally sound, highquality
products and services that help heal and cure disease
and improve the quality of life. A J&J manager is known for
being socially responsible and a stickler for product development
and differentiation. She takes a product to market in
LEADERSHIP
You want your leaders to be the
kind of people who embody the
promises your company makes to its
customers. To build this capability,
follow these fi ve principles.
by Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood
Q
BRAND
BUILDING A
David Plunkert
MANAGING FOR THE LONG TERM | Building a Leadership Brand
a disciplined way; she is committed to building consumer
trust, to product quality, and to safety.
“Good help to those in need” is the mission of Bon Secours
Health System, a nonprofi t health care fi rm based in Marriottsville,
Maryland, that operates a variety of hospitals and
nursing care facilities. Consistent with its purpose as a Catholic
health care ministry, the 19,000-person organization develops
leaders who put a premium on “refl ective integration.”
That means Bon Secours expects its managers to do more
than just run health care units. They must also balance the
business of health care with compassion and caring.
Give up? One obvious connection among these fi rms – and
others such as PepsiCo, Goldman Sachs, Disney, Boeing, and
Herman Miller – is that they turn out strong leaders, in some
cases becoming “leader feeder” fi rms, whose managers are
well equipped to run other organizations. But there’s a less
obvious answer as well: These companies go beyond standard-
issue leader training, doing something they themselves
aren’t even necessarily aware of. Instead of merely strengthening
the abilities of individual leaders, these companies
focus on building a more general leadership capability. Specifi
cally, they build what we call leadership brand.
Leadership brand is a reputation for developing exceptional
managers with a distinct set of talents that are
uniquely geared to fulfi ll customers’ and investors’ expectations.
A company with a leadership brand inspires faith that
employees and managers will consistently make good on
the fi rm’s promises. A Nordstrom customer knows that the
retailer’s employees and managers will give her white glove
service. Parents who take their kids to a Disney theme park
assume that ride operators and restaurant personnel will be
upbeat, friendly, and gracious. McKinsey clients understand
that smart, well-educated consultants will bring the latest
management knowledge to bear on their problems. A leadership
brand is also embedded in the organization’s culture,
through its policies and its requirements for employees. For
example, the tagline of Lexus is “the pursuit of perfection.”
Internally, the Lexus division translates that promise into
the expectation that managers will excel at managing quality
processes, including lean manufacturing and Six Sigma.
In observing 150 successful leader feeder fi rms of various
sizes over the past decade, we have found that most of them
have developed a similar outside-in approach, which helps
them produce an excellent pipeline of leaders generation
after generation. They also tend to enjoy remarkably steady
profi ts year after year, because they have secured the ongoing
confi dence of external constituents whose expec tations are
comfortably fi lled by leaders throughout the organization.
Building a strong leadership brand requires that companies
follow fi ve principles. First, they have to do the basics of
leadership – like setting strategy and grooming talent – well.
Second, they must ensure that managers internalize external
constituents’ high expectations of the fi rm. Third, they
need to evaluate their leaders according to those external
This organization is known for… Leaders at this organization are known for…
Wal-Mart Always low prices Managing costs effi ciently, getting things done on time
FedEx
Absolutely, positively, doing whatever
it takes
Managing logistics, meeting deadlines, solving problems
quickly
Lexus Pursuit of perfection
Managing quality processes (lean manufacturing and
design, Six Sigma) for continuous improvement
Procter & Gamble Brands you know and trust
Developing consumer insights, precisely targeted
marketing, product innovation
McKinsey Being a CEO’s trusted adviser
Leading teams that deconstruct business problems,
synthesize data, and develop solutions
Boeing
People working together as a global
enterprise for aerospace leadership
Solving global problems, working as teams, possessing
technical excellence in aerospace
Apple Innovation and design
Creating new products and services that break the
industry norms
PepsiCo Appealing to the younger generation Building the next generation of talent
Embodying the Brand Organizations can strengthen their leadership brands by working hard to translate
what they stand for in the marketplace into a set of managerial behaviors.
94 Harvard Business Review | July–August 2007 | hbr.org
hbr.org | July–August 2007 | Harvard Business Review 95
perspectives. Fourth, they must invest in
broad-based leadership development that
helps managers hone the skills needed to
meet customer and investor expectations.
And fi nally, they should track their success
at building a leadership brand over
the long term. Before considering these
principles in more detail, however, let us
consider why relatively few companies are
able to establish leadership brands in the
fi rst place.
The Misguided Focus on Individuals
In recent years, thousands of companies
have spent millions on their own corporate
universities; yet most have failed to
develop true leadership bench strength.
That’s because, in too many cases, the approach
to leadership training is detached
from what the fi rm stands for in the eyes
of customers and investors. Rather, training
is the same from company to company,
regardless of whether the company is a
fast-food chain or an aerospace contractor:
A senior executive extols the importance
of leadership; outside experts talk
about business strategy, elicit 360-degree
feedback, or take personality inventories;
everyone spends time socializing and playing
golf. Leadership practices are piecemeal
and are seldom integrated with the
fi rm’s brand, let alone with the daily operations
of the organization.
At the root of this unfortunate problem is a persistent focus
on developing the individual leader. HR and successionplanning
teams tend to concentrate on fi nding and developing
the ideal candidate, who they hope will raise corporate
fortunes. In our experience, many fi rms rely on a competency
model that identifi es a set of generic traits – vision,
direction, energy, and so on – and then try to fi nd and build
next-generation leaders that fi t the model. Consider what
happened when we held a workshop for nine companies
that were all household names. We asked the representatives
from each organization to send us their leadership competency
models, which listed the “unique” characteristics that
they sought in their leaders (“has a strong vision,” “fosters
teamwork,” “demonstrates emotional intelligence,” and the
like). We then deleted the names of the corporations from
each model. During the workshop, we asked the representatives
to pick out their own. Few were able to do so; there
was little difference among the models of a telecommunications
company, a consumer products company, a fi nancial
services company, and an aerospace company. The conclusion
was obvious: By focusing on the desirable traits of individual
leaders, the fi rms ended up creating generic models.
And vanilla competency models generate vanilla leadership.
Once it selects a candidate, a company will try to train
her to be more emotionally and socially adept, to set direction,
to build relationships of trust, and so on. Eventually,
she may develop a personal reputation that distinguishes
her from other executives; she may even become a “celebrity
leader” of the kind featured in popular business magazines.
With this leader in place, her fi rm feels that its longterm
success is assured. This can be a trap, however, for a
Dave Ulrich ([email protected]) and Norm Smallwood ([email protected]) are partners and cofounders of the RBL Group, a leadership
development and human resource education consultancy, in Provo, Utah. Ulrich is also a professor of business administration at the University
of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, in Ann Arbor. They are the coauthors of Leadership Brand: Developing Customer-Focused Leaders to
Drive Performance and Build Lasting Value, forthcoming from Harvard Business School Press in September 2007.
96 Harvard Business Review | July–August 2007 | hbr.org
MANAGING FOR THE LONG TERM | Building a Leadership Brand
powerful and charismatic leader can develop a personal
brand that overpowers the organization’s own brand. When
employees become more dedicated to the individual who
is in charge than focused on what customers want, the company
can wind up in trouble. Moreover, an institution that
becomes too beholden to an individual leader runs a risk
if the leader turns out to be less than perfect. When Sandy
Weill, a celebrity leader and a master of acquisitions, left Citi –
group after a long string of mergers, the fi rm continued to
struggle with a series of ethical problems; it’s been left to his
successor, Chuck Prince, to fi gure out what holds the place
together.
Certainly, a strong, energetic, and intelligent leader can
help an organization; but given the short tenure of most
CEOs and the changing fortunes of the corporation in a
dynamic marketplace, we think that too intense a spotlight
on the individual leader is both naive and incomplete. Expanding
the competency model to include an external focus
allows companies to offset that risk, by enabling them to
tailor their leadership model to their own requirements.
We believe that long-term success – the kind that lasts
generation after generation – depends on making the critical
distinction between leaders and leadership. A focus on
leaders emphasizes the personal qualities of the individual;
a focus on leadership emphasizes the methods that secure
the ongoing good of the fi rm and, in the process, also builds
future leaders.
How to Build a Leadership Brand
A product’s brand connects a company’s output and reputation
with customers’ needs and investors’ hopes. A leadership
brand, by extension, is based on marketplace expectations
for the behavior of a company’s representatives. The following
principles explain how to develop a leadership brand.
Nail the prerequisites of leadership. Any brand takes
a long time to build and includes two major elements: the
fundamentals and the differentiators. A quality product like
a Lexus automobile, for example, has the fundamentals of
any car: the chassis, the drivetrain, the wheels. It also has
brand differentiators – the quietness of its engine and the
high level of its maintenance service among them – that bespeak
high quality. Both the fundamentals and the differentiators
must be carefully crafted, but the fundamentals must
be in place fi rst.
As a prerequisite to building a leadership brand, fi rms must
master what we call the Leadership Code. Roughly speaking,
the code consists of these requirements: First, leaders must
master strategy; they need to have a point of view about the
future and be able to position the fi rm for continued success
with customers. Next, they must be able to execute, which
means they must be able to build organizational systems
that work, to deliver results, and to make change happen.
Additionally, they must manage today’s talent, knowing how
Leadership Brand Assessment
How does your organization rate on the following
statements, on a scale from 1 (low) to 5 (high)?
We know how we want to be viewed by our
target customers, and we have articulated a
clear company identity based on this.
We have articulated a clear statement of leadership
brand that is connected to our fi rm’s identity.
We have translated our statement of leadership
brand into a set of desired leadership actions.
We have a process to identify development gaps
in our next generation of leaders.
Our individual leadership development plans
include acquiring skills, knowledge, and perspective
that matter to our target customers.
We invest in training experiences that include
customer perspectives.
We create job experiences that develop
customer perspectives within our leaders.
We encourage our leaders to invest in life
experiences that help them build relevant
customer knowledge and skills.
We gauge the effectiveness of leadership
investments by our business results.
We rigorously communicate to all stakeholders
the degree to which we invest in building
a leadership brand.
Total:
What’s Your Leadership
Branding Capability?
The following chart will help you discover the level of branded
leadership within your organization. If you score 24 or less, then
you should start by working on the fundamentals of lead ership.
A score from 25 to 34 means that you should pick one or more
dimensions where you are not yet strong and focus on improving
them. A score from 35 to 44 means that you are well on your
way to becoming a leadership brand company. If you score 45 or
higher, pat yourself on the back – and buy your company’s stock.
hbr.org | July–August 2007 | Harvard Business Review 97
to motivate, engage, and communicate with employees. They
must also fi nd ways to develop tomorrow’s talent and groom
employees for future leadership. Finally, they must show
personal profi ciency – demonstrating an ability to learn, act
with integrity, exercise social and emotional intelligence,
make bold decisions, and engender trust.
Companies often put too much emphasis on one kind
of fundamental at the expense of the others. One company
we worked with identifi ed 12 requirements for a successful
leader (characteristics like personal integrity, willingness
to learn, and consistency), but nine of them fell into the
personal profi ciency domain of the code. Another company
listed ten requirements (such as the ability to make decisions
quickly, manage change, deliver results, and work well
in teams), but eight of them fell into the execution domain.
A successful leadership development model should incorporate
all elements of the Leadership Code. An individual
leader may have a predisposition in some areas and should
be strong in at least one but must demonstrate a high level
of competence in all of them.
Canadian Tire works to develop executives who demonstrate
all the prerequisites of leadership. The Toronto-based
conglomerate, which had Can$8.3 billion in revenue last
year, regularly assesses the abilities of up-and-coming managers
in each dimension. Those with the highest potential
often have towering strengths but need to be challenged
in a completely new way in order to grow in other dimensions
– or to demonstrate their readiness for the next level.
The company encourages such growth by pushing executives
out of their comfort zone and moving them into new
territory. For example, Canadian Tire recently took the CFO
of its fi nancial services division and put him in charge of
a retail banking pilot. The fi rm also moved its retail VP of
home products into a position as president of the petroleum
division. Managing unfamiliar territory forces executives to
learn new skills and not always rely on their core strengths.
The results-focused CFO, for instance, demonstrated an ability
to inspire and direct a large team during the pilot project.
The retail VP had an opportunity to build the strategy for
an entire stand-alone small business unit and learn how to
engage frontline employees. Over time, the most promising
leaders at Canadian Tire will move into assignments that
develop all the core skills of leadership.
Without excellence in all the fundamentals, leaders can
be good, but they will not be outstanding. Once these basics
are established, companies can move on to shaping their
organization’s leadership brand.
Connect your executives’ abilities to the reputation
you’re trying to establish. Building a leadership brand begins
with a clear statement, somewhat similar to a mission
statement, that connects what the fi rm wants to be known
for by its best customers – the 20% of customers who represent
80% of value – with specifi c leadership skills and behavior.
Apple, for example, wants to be known for its outstanding
ability to innovate and design user-friendly technology;
to that end, it hires the best technologists and designers and
encourages them to break new ground. Wal-Mart wants to
be known for its everyday low prices, so it hires managers
who are frugal and unassuming themselves, and who can
drive a hard bargain.
When Israel-based Teva, the world’s largest generic pharmaceutical
company, set about developing such a statement,
its top leaders decided they wanted their company to be
known for fi ve qualities: leadership of the market, global
reach, partnership, integrity, and product affordability. Teva’s
management then worked to turn this desired identity into a
set of attributes that would help leaders meet customer expectations.
For example, under the category of global reach,
Teva wanted leaders who could combine sensitivity to local
culture with global vision to help meet customer demands
anywhere in the world. In the category of integrity, Teva
wanted leaders who could make sure that employees delivered
products and services on time, every time; fulfi lled
promises; and met targets. To build partnerships, the fi rm
needed leaders who knew how to recruit and develop talent,
so that physicians, health care organizations, and consumers
would view Teva’s employees as experts who could
help them solve problems. To bring products to market costeffi
ciently, Teva’s leaders had to be profi cient at sourcing
and at wringing the highest possible productivity from the
company’s assets. Finally, when it came to market leadership,
Teva would look to its leaders to foster innovation by
Long-term success depends on making a critical distinction: A focus on
leaders emphasizes the personal qualities of the individual; leadership
emphasizes the methods that secure the ongoing good of the fi rm.
98 Harvard Business Review | July–August 2007 | hbr.org
MANAGING FOR THE LONG TERM | Building a Leadership Brand
help ing the organization collaborate with leading scientists
around the globe and import the best ideas and research
into the company.
The Teva executive team felt that these traits and abilities,
if developed by leaders throughout the company and woven
into everyday practices, would both communicate their desired
brand to their external constituents and create the kind
of internal culture they were after. After extensive deliberations
Teva developed a statement of leadership brand that
clearly established the company’s priorities:
Teva leaders set ambitious goals based on excellence
in execution, have a global mind-set, master complexity,
and embody team leadership so that Teva retains
the most talented employees, doubles sales every
fi ve years, and provides a broad basket of qualitative
products that customers trust.
Notice that this statement of leadership brand is unique
in content – other companies do not necessarily need these
abilities to deliver these specifi c results. Critically, it integrates
business and customer goals (retain employees, double
sales every fi ve years, provide a broad basket of trusted
products) with a small, targeted set of leadership skills (excellence
at execution, mastery of complexity, and team leadership).
The statement also gives Teva’s different business and
geographic units room to develop individual brand identities
but is specifi c enough to guarantee that leaders across
the organization all share a common approach and goals.
The development of this statement allowed the company to
enact the next principle.
Assess leaders against the statement of leadership
brand. Once a company has crafted a statement of leadership
brand, it needs to continually evaluate individuals to
make sure that they are living up to it. This requires fi rms
to assess leaders more from the customer’s point of view and
measure results less by what the individual manager – or
the company – produces. Instead of worrying about goods
shipped on time, customers care about whether they received
their goods on time. Instead of concerning themselves about
the fi rm’s product error rates, customers notice when products
they receive aren’t fully operational on arrival. Rather
than just tracking employee commitment to the fi rm, a company
should also try to calculate the impact of employee
commitment on customers. By grounding a leader’s results
in customer expectations in this way, a fi rm begins to build
its leadership brand.
One way to assess leaders’ behavior through a customer
lens is to open up feedback sessions to customers. A board
of directors charged with evaluating the CEO recently went
a couple of steps further, by asking not only customers but
also investors and community leaders to comment on the
actions and accomplishments of the CEO. Through this review,
the CEO learned that he was not spending adequate
time connecting with community leaders and with some
segments of customers.
In another instance, a division of a large technology company
asked a group of targeted customers – ones who were
especially able to anticipate market trends – to evaluate its
mission and values statement. (The statement focused on
serving customers, fostering innovation, developing dedicated
people, encouraging social responsibility, and ensuring
fi nancial stability.) The division asked the group two
questions: (1) Is this the mission you want us to be known
for? (2) What do we have to do to demonstrate that we live
up to this mission better than our competitors do? This
exercise allowed customers to articulate both the actions
and the outcomes that they expected from the leaders in the
organization.
The company also invited customers to participate in periodic
assessments of the company’s leaders through surveys,
interviews, and focus groups. Those customers were asked
whether they would buy more from the fi rm if its leaders
behaved according to their expectations. The answer, not
surprisingly, was yes. As the fi rm began implementing the
customers’ suggestions and its leaders started to alter their
behavior, its sales rose 20% annually among those surveyed.
As this fi rm discovered, the more satisfi ed customers were
with the way the corporation was run, the more products
and services they purchased. That translated into a higher
price/earnings ratio in the long term.
Let the customers and investors do the teaching. If
your best customers or investors could observe the training
you offer your company leaders, how would they respond?
Would they see the development of leaders who have the
knowledge and skills to meet their requirements? Or would
To build a leadership brand, fi rms should assess leaders from
the customer’s point of view. One way to do that is to open up
feedback sessions to customers.
hbr.org | July–August 2007 | Harvard Business Review 99
they see training that is perfunctory and has little to do with
their needs and desires?
Companies can do several things to ensure that leadership
development incorporates external expectations. Customers
might participate in training sessions as “live” cases by coming
into the classroom in person or on video. Companies may
give customers a voice in the design of training programs, or
the training team can make sure that customer expectations
inform every aspect of the course. Customers and investors
can also help deliver a program as expert faculty. Alternatively,
they might simply attend the training and offer feedback
about the relevancy of the material taught.
Steve Kerr, formerly the chief learning offi cer at GE, recalled
to us how investor relations professionals at the company
studied infl uential analysts “the way the Ritz-Carlton
people study the names, photos, and habits of their best
customers.” During a leadership training session, a senior
investor relations professional showed slides of the most important
analysts who covered the company’s stock. Each picture
was taken at the analyst’s home. “You see that car? I’ve
washed that car!” the investor relations person exclaimed.
“You see that dog? I’ve walked that dog!” The investor relations
manager may not have had the suds or animal hairs
to prove it, but it is common practice at the fi rm for senior
executives to interact often with analysts and top customers.
During leadership training sessions at GE’s Crotonville facility,
panels of customers, analysts, and even reporters hold
honest discussions with executives.
The most powerful way to develop leaders who have a
customer lens is to give them job assignments that demand
it. Procter & Gamble ensures that its leaders acquire both
a consumer and a P&L perspective early by assigning new
management hires not to a staff position in fi nance or HR
but rather to a brand team. Getting a new MBA to work
directly on the Puffs facial tissue or the Pur water fi lter system
brands helps orient her to consumer expectations. Combine
that consumer-centric perspective with the fact that
P&G people tend to stay at the company for their entire
career, and you see how the fi rm has developed a powerful
leadership capability.
Teva, likewise, offers a variety of work experiences that
help leaders expand their knowledge of customers. Executives
frequently spend time in a line job where they have direct
customer contact, and then later move to a staff job (in,
say, fi nance, IT, or HR) where they can apply the customer
understanding they’ve acquired. Executives may be assigned
to a project that explores ways to add value for customers.
That might involve spending time observing physicians
who are prescribing a Teva product such as the multiple
sclerosis drug Copaxone, and then bringing back ideas for
improvements. Managers may also take part in an executive
exchange, where they work in a health care organization for
a period of time.
Working in environments outside headquarters, or even
outside one’s country, can also go a long way toward deepening
a manager’s sense of leadership brand. An executive
of a petrochemical fi rm might, for example, be given the
opportunity to work in many places – in Asia, Europe, Latin
America, and the Middle East. Experience with many cultures
can give that person a strong feel for what the company
represents in each of those regions, and reinforce some of
the underlying and shared assumptions about how the organization
relates to its customers.
Track the long-term success of your leadership brand
efforts. The result of a leadership brand focus is good management
that is unmoored from individualism, yet lasts over
time. As companies begin to develop and “graduate” excellent
leaders, they engender a reputation for very high quality
management – the essence of a leadership brand. Such
leadership bench strength can easily be seen in the degree
to which leaders that leave the fi rm go on to top positions in
other corporations. (See the exhibit “Industry Leader Feeder
Firms.”)
Companies with strong leadership brands tend not to
be as affected by changes in management as companies
with weaker leadership brands. Moreover, such fi rms are
Industry Leader Feeder Firms
Whereas some feeder fi rms produce managers who can do well
in virtually any industry, “leader source” fi rms develop managers
who go on to positions in the top echelons of one industry.
Automotive industry
Leader source: Johnson Controls
Graduates: Michael F. Johnston (Visteon), Charles G.
McClure (ArvinMeritor)
Consumer products industry
Leader source: Kraft Foods
Graduates: Robert Eckert (Mattel), James Kilts (formerly
of Gillette), Doug Conant (Campbell Soup), Richard Lenny
(Hershey)
Financial services industry
Leader source: Merrill Lynch
Graduates: Jeffrey Peek (CIT Group), Herbert M. Allison,
Jr. (TIAA-CREF)
Medical industry
Leader source: Pharmacia
Graduates: Stephen MacMillan (Stryker), Fred Hassan
(Schering-Plough)
100 Harvard Business Review | July–August 2007 | hbr.org
MANAGING FOR THE LONG TERM | Building a Leadership Brand
so confi dent about their bench strength that they turn
what most organizations view as a negative – the loss of a
leader – into a positive. The consulting fi rm McKinsey, for
example, continues to build its leadership brand reputation
by tracking and publishing the feats of its successful alumni.
General Electric – perhaps the ultimate leader feeder
fi rm – is the embodiment of this phenomenon. Everyone
thought Reg Jones, the fi rm’s CEO from 1972 to 1981, was
irreplaceable. Then came Jack Welch, and everyone thought
he was irreplaceable. Now Jeff Immelt has shown himself
to be more than steady at the helm. GE’s stock price has
remained stable even when its top managers leave. The fi rm
has an organizational capability that transcends any one
individual.
At the end of the day, a leadership brand shows up not
only in stable stock prices but in a higher market value. Increasingly,
the market value of a company is determined
by its intangibles – its ability to keep promises, design and
deliver on a compelling strategy, ensure technical excellence,
hire and retain smart people, build strong organizational
capabilities, and, especially, develop strong leadership. Intangible
value grows as customers and investors gain greater
confi dence about the future fortunes of one fi rm over others
in the same industry. One way companies can evaluate the
success of leadership brand efforts is by looking at how much
confi dence investors have in their future earnings. A publicly
traded corporation’s price/earnings ratio is a simple – though
not a perfect – indicator of that confi dence. Companies with
strong leadership brands, we have found, tend to have aboveaverage
P/E ratios. (See the exhibit “Leadership Brand and
P/E Ratio.”)
• • •
By adapting the fi ve principles outlined here, a fi rm can create
a leadership brand that differentiates the organization
to employees inside and to customers and investors outside.
The effort requires commitment from individuals throughout
an organization: Boards of directors need to encourage
the building of leadership brands; senior executives need
to sponsor leadership brand initiatives; HR professionals
need to design and facilitate programs that foster leadership
brands. The CEO of a company must function as its “brand
manager” and be the driving force behind building it as an
organizational capability.
As leaders at all levels of the company learn how to master
both the core skills of leadership and the essence of the
leadership brand, they will increase the value of their organizations.
By focusing on leadership, not just leaders, and by
evaluating everything from a customer perspective, fi rms
create the institutional systems and processes that will sustain
them year after year.
Reprint R0707G
To order, see page 195.
GE
Conglomerates
Johnson & Johnson
Drug manufacturers
(major)
Teva Pharmaceutical
Pharmaceuticals
PepsiCo
Food and beverage
Boeing
Aerospace/defense
(major diversified)
Disney
Entertainment
(diversified)
Procter & Gamble
Consumer products
Toyota
Automotive
Nordstrom
Apparel stores
Herman Miller
Business equipment
P/E ratio of company for the past ten years
P/E ratio of industry (not counting the firm) for the past ten years
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35
Leadership Brand and P/E Ratio
Leaders who organize resources to serve customers, who motivate
employees to be customer focused, and who track their
business’s success with customers can turn their company’s
leadership brand into market share. Firms with a strong leadership
brand also benefi t, over time, from a rising price/earnings
ratio. When we compared the P/E ratios of a sample of public
companies that had strong leadership brands with the ratios of
their industry over the past decade, we found that the leadership
brand companies had consistently higher ratios.

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