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Pepsi Bottling CEO Champions Diversity Despite Hard Times

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  Pepsi Bottling CEO Champions Diversity Despite Hard Times

  Eric Foss extols "different perspectives, unique experiences and broad-based wisdom"

  • Among boards of US Fortune 500 companies, one of the most diverse is that of Pepsi Bottling Group, which is separate from PepsiCo.

  • While the latter has a female CEO, Pepsi Bottling has four women among its 10 members, including a Hispanic woman. (Among the six men are an African-American and a Mexican.)

  • Eric J. Foss, chairman and chief executive of Pepsi Bottling, considers a diverse board necessary because “It’s difficult, if not impossible, for homogenous boards to challenge and offer different perspectives, unique experiences and the broad-based wisdom that makes the board, and therefore the company, as effective as they can be.”

  • “Part of the strategic rationale for this is that our employee base needs to be reflective of our customer base,” Foss told The New York Times. “As our customers continue to become more diverse, it’s important that organizationally we look like them. … It’s not a fad.”

  • “Our approach to diversity is a fully integrated program. … It runs boardroom to backroom, as we like to say. It plays across all levels of the organization.”

  • Pepsi Bottling works on recruiting candidates for its board and then integrating new members through a process it calls “onboarding” that includes exposing the person intimately to both the operations and people of the company. “To have an effective board member to come into a company with a fresh set of eyes, the quicker you can onboard them, the quicker you’re going to have a productive board member.”

  • Foss, himself a white male, says that “having somebody like Sue Kronick, the vice chairman of Macy’s, who has insights into the consumer, adds tremendous value as we sort through how we’re trying to grow or maybe do something unique on the packaging front given her experience in cosmetics.”

  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/14/business/14interview.html?_r=2

   

  Posted by Mosaic Blueprint 11 months ago