Our 2004 report proudly captured a real sense of accomplishment as we completed our three year Transformation Plan. “Simply better” crisply and concisely put forward our overall assessment. On the inside cover of our report, we highlighted fourteen key areas that we believed had been materially improved over the prior three years.
In my message to shareholders, I was able to confidently state that “it is now clear that we have renewed, revitalized, and reinvigorated our company and put it back on a growth track. We’ve rebuilt our organization, recharged our brands and reinforced our market positions around the world.” At the end of this same message, I acknowledged that we had made good progress but had not achieved perfection . . . that it was time to move to the next phase of our revitalization effort: to drive quality growth. With that statement, we launched our Quality Growth Plan which would be our focus for the next three years.
