Procter & Gamble

In 2014 P&G announced it would shed about 100 brands to keep around 65. It sounds like a brutal amputation. It wasn't - the brands it cut accounted for less than 10% of sales and under 5% of profits. The discipline wasn't the cutting. It was knowing what was already dead weight.

P&G has cannibalized itself for a century, from Tide over Ivory to Pods over liquid. But when Dollar Shave Club owned the channel instead of P&G, its razor share fell from 71% to 59% and the company reached for lawyers, not labs.

In 2019 P&G split ten categories into six sector business units with their own P&Ls - hailed as the biggest reorg in 20 years. By September 2021 the sixth was gone, and even at its peak the sector CEOs owned profit only for the ~80% of sales in 'Focus Markets.'

P&G won the certified vote in the largest proxy fight in history — and still seated Peltz in December 2017 by growing its board from 11 to 13. The famous $100 million was Peltz's own on-air number, not P&G's spend. The real win was who controlled the table.

In FY2023, price added 9 points to P&G's growth and the world called it premiumization. By FY2025 price added just 1 point — and Baby Care, Fabric Care, and Feminine Care were all losing share. That's not a moat. It's a cost pass-through wearing a tuxedo.

Everyone treats P&G's pricing as doctrine. It isn't - it swings between coupons and stable list prices every time a shock hits. The 2020s price surge that pumped four points of growth into FY2024 isn't a new era; it's the pendulum mid-arc, already slowing.

In May 2013, P&G's board brought back A.G. Lafley as CEO, replacing the man he'd hand-picked to succeed him in 2009. Bob McDonald lasted roughly three years and eleven months. The move looked like a boardroom coup. It was really a company losing faith in the succession machine it was famous for.