TRIGGERING EVENT AT UNILEVER

Unilever, the worlds secondlargest consumer goods company, received a jolt in 2004 when its stock price
fell sharply after management had warned investors that profits would be lower than anticipated. Even
though the company had been the first consumer goods company to enter the worlds emerging economies
in Africa, China, India, and Latin America with a formidable range of products and local knowledge, its sales
faltered when rivals began to attack its entrenched position in these markets.
Procter & Gambles (P&G) acquisition of Gillette had greatly bolstered P&Gs growing portfolio of global
brands and allowed it to undermine Unilevers global market share. For example, when P&G targeted India
for a sales initiative in 200304, profit margins fell at Unilevers Indian subsidiary from 20% to 13%. An indepth review of Unilevers brands revealed that its brands were doing as well as were those of its rivals.
Something else was wrong.
According to Richard Rivers, Unilevers head of corporate strategy, We were just not executing as well as
we should have. Unilevers management realized that it had no choice but to make-over the company from
top to bottom. Over decades of operating in almost every country in the world, the company had become fat
with unnecessary bureaucracy and complexity. Unilevers traditional emphasis on the autonomy of its
country managers had led to a lack of synergy and a duplication of corporate structures.
Country managers had been making strategic decisions without regard for their effect on other regions or
on the corporation as a whole. Starting at the top, two joint chairmen were replaced by one sole chief
executive. In China, three companies with three chief executives were replaced by one company with one
person in charge. Overall staff was cut from 223,000 in 2004 to 179,000 in 2008. By 2010, management
planned close to 50 of its 300 factories and to eliminate 75 of 100 regional centers. Twenty thousand more
jobs were selected to be eliminated over a four-year period. Ralph Kugler, manager of Unilevers home and
personal care division, exhibited confidence that after these changes, the company was better prepared to
face competition. We are much better organized now to defend ourselves, he stated.

SOURCE: Summarized from The Legacy that Got Left on the Shelf, The Economist
(February 2, 2008), pp. 7779.

Resources for casestudy:

Initiation of Strategy: Triggering Events:
After much research, Henry Mintzberg discovered that strategy formulation is typically not a
regular, continuous process: It is most often an irregular, discontinuous process,
proceeding in fits and starts. There are periods of stability in strategy development, but also
there are periods of flux, of groping, of piecemeal change, and of global change.
This view of strategy formulation as an irregular process can be explained by the very
human tendency to continue on a particular course of action until something goes wrong or
a person is forced to question his or her actions. This period of strategic drift may result
from inertia on the part of the organization, or it may reflect managements belief that the
current strategy is still appropriate and needs only some fine-tuning.
Most large organizations tend to follow a particular strategic orientation for about 15 to 20
years before making a significant change in direction. This phenomenon, called punctuated
equilibrium, describes corporations as evolving through relatively long periods of stability
(equilibrium periods) punctuated by relatively short bursts of fundamental change
(revolutionary periods). After this rather long period of fine-tuning an existing strategy, some
sort of shock to the system is needed to motivate management to seriously reassess the
corporations situation.
A triggering event is something that acts as a stimulus for a change in strategy. Some
possible triggering events are: New CEO: By asking a series of embarrassing questions, a
new CEO cuts through the veil of complacency and forces people to question the very
reason for the corporations existence. External intervention: A firms bank suddenly refuses
to approve a new loan or suddenly demands payment in full on an old one.
A key customer complains about a serious product defect. Threat of a change in ownership:
Another firm may initiate a takeover by buying a companys common stock. Performance
gap: A performance gap exists when performance does not meet expectations. Sales and
profits either are no longer increasing or may even be falling.
Strategic inflection point: Coined by Andy Grove, past-CEO of Intel Corporation, a strategic
inflection point is what happens to a business when a major change takes place due to the
introduction of new technologies, a different regulatory environment, a change in customers

values, or a change in what customers prefer. Unilever is an example of one company in

which a triggering event forced management to radically rethink what it was doing.
See Strategy Highlight to learn how a slumping stock price stimulated a change in strategy
at Unilever.