Guest blogger Kate Vitasek is back with part two of her post discussing The Real-Life Win-Win with the Vested Approach. In part one, Kate provided an overview of her Vested approach and also examined the need for better collaboration, real innovation, communication and shared-value principles to reach the long-term win-win in business relationships. Kate’s presentation, Vested: How P&G, McDonald’s and Microsoft are Redefining Winning in Business Relationships, will kick off the first day of NextLevel on Monday, February 11 at the JW Marriott Hill Country in San Antonio.
In addition to the Water for People story discussed in part one, two other cases in the book stand out.
McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc built long-term transparent relationships as the basis for long-term success through a “secret sauce” based on the belief that everyone in the McDonald’s System comprises a three-legged stool—employees, owner/operators and suppliers. With a mindset that “none of us is as good as all of us” they all can and should win together.
Kroc embedded a precedent of trust, loyalty and collaboration throughout the company more than 50 years ago. Today, McDonald’s still follows the Kroc philosophy.
Then there’s P&G: the company’s groundbreaking contract with Jones Lang LaSalle in 2003 flipped the conventional approach to outsourcing on its head: by creating a business model based on contracting for transformation instead of contracting for day-to-day transactions. When A.G. Lafley became P&G’s CEO in 2000, innovation became a priority. He bet that looking beyond P&G’s walls could produce more highly profitable innovations to drive value for both P&G and the parties bringing innovation to P&G.
This required movement from a “not invented here” mindset to enthusiasm for ideas “proudly found elsewhere.” P&G deployed a Vested approach when it entered a pioneering outsource contract with JLL spanning 60 countries that included facility management, project management and strategic occupancy services. They created a commercial agreement that was highly Vested in nature, collaborative in approach and transformational in thinking.
The P&G and McDonald’s stories embody the collaborative, innovative and Vested mindset that visionary leaders can bring to business relationships. I will be talking about these stories and more during my presentation at NextLevel. Hope to see you there!
