Our 2001 annual report was my first as a CEO. The title of the report, “It’s not enough to be a legend,” was intended to communicate that our legendary company needed to be renewed. In this report we reviewed our situation and we announced our plan for renewal. We called it our Transformation Plan. This was a bold three-year plan that acknowledged that you can’t talk your way out of something you behaved your way into – you have to behave your way out of it. We had behaved our way into a difficult situation over a period of years and it was clear to us that it would take several years to behave our way to a high quality sustainably good performance level.
Also, in this first report, we expressed our belief that to win in the marketplace we first needed to win in the workplace by creating an environment that fostered innovation and rewarded success. To establish our winning in the workplace platform, we articulated what later became known as the Campbell Promise: Campbell Valuing People, People Valuing Campbell. This expression was intended to convey our recognition that if we wanted employees to value the corporate agenda, we needed to tangibly demonstrate that we valued each employee’s personal agenda.
Overall, this was a critical first step in the renaissance of Campbell Soup Company.
