These excerpts are adapted from the recently published “The Maverick Way,” by local author and former Orange County Register managing editor Richard Cheverton. The book (available at www.maverickway.com) focuses on executive William G. “Bill” Wilson’s 42-year career at giant paper-maker Kimberly-Clark Corp. In the first segment, Bill and an old ally, marketing guru Leo J. Shapiro, discuss how Wilson kept Kimberly-Clark in the diaper game. The second segment deals with Cheverton’s departure from the Register.
“The first reality,” said Leo Shapiro, “was that nobody wanted a disposable diaper. They wanted a diaper that works.”
“So, if cloth diapers are no damned good, what do you do?” Leo asked. “You try to invent a better diaper and you don’t worry about marketing and that’s what Bill did. He didn’t say build me a diaper that costs this and does that. He said ‘What would a good diaper look like, what would it be like?’ Now let’s keep going. You now have a diaper and it costs a dollar-seventy-five a copy. Bill accepts that. No despair.”
Bill Wilson jumped into the dialogue: “We started making test diapers. It was during this period that Dick Loescher (one of Bill’s key aides) and I went over to a show-and-tell at the executive committee,Jack Kimberly, chairman of the board; the president; the vice presidents of the major areas. I talked about the work we were doing with the diaper.
“Jack Kimberly said, ‘For 30 years we’ve tried to make a disposable diaper. Working on that is like sitting on a bridge tearing up hundred-dollar bills and throwing them in the water and watching them float downstream. I want all work on disposable diapers discontinued as of now.’
“So I quit talking about that. After the meeting, when we were walking back to our building, I said to Loescher, ‘Dick, you know what we ought to do on diapers now …’
“Loescher stopped me and said, ‘Bill, you got a direct order from the chairman of the board.’
“I said, ‘From now on that project is called bandages.'”
Leo and Lanny chuckled at the recollection.
“You must understand that there is a thing called bureaucratic reality,which is those things that people agree to accept as true,and there’s an external reality,” said Leo. “Unless you understand the bureaucratic reality and live within it you’ll never accomplish anything. But unless you understand that it’s a set of truths by agreement, you’ll never be worth a damn in terms of changing anything.”
Bill took up the story: “Leo recruited 35 women in Chicago by looking in the paper for people who’d just had a baby. We supplied the diapers and asked them to keep a diary of everything they did, because one of the things that really concerned us was this wasn’t really a disposable diaper. It would last all night long, but it wasn’t disposable. We had spent literally hundreds of hours at K-C trying to figure out how the hell we’d flush this thing down a toilet. We even had a glass toilet sitting up on a platform with pipes leading from it and we could see through it, see where it plugged.”
Yeccchhhhh.
“But as it turned out,” said Bill, “these women didn’t have a problem disposing of the diaper. They threw it out with the garbage. They solved our problem.”
“You mean you guys had never thought of throwing it in the garbage?” I asked, incredulously.
“We were fixated on it being flushable, because that’s what the marketing people wanted,a flushable diaper,” said Bill. “When we had sufficient data that this was a viable product, we presented this diaper to the marketing people. These guys were all very polite, sat there and listened. And finally, the executive VP said, ‘You’ve done a very nice job but it’s way too expensive and we couldn’t sell anything like that.’
“Leo was so mad after that meeting he said, ‘Wilson, I’ll work for you but I won’t work for Kimberly-Clark.’ I took the project, put it on the shelf, left it there.”
“Bill was able to accept that reality,the idiocy of management,” Leo chuckled mordantly.
“About a week or so later,” said Bill, “Leo went to these 35 women and said, ‘We’ve got all the data we need so we aren’t going to supply you with diapers.’ And the women demanded more diapers. ‘We don’t care. Tell us how much it is, we’ll pay for it, it’s all right.’ But we cut them off.
“Later I got a call from a lawyer in our legal department. He said, ‘Bill, I’ve got the most peculiar letter here. It’s from a lawyer in Chicago and I’ve looked him up and he’s one of the top class-action guys in the country. Some women are bringing a case against us because we won’t supply them with diapers. We don’t make diapers, do we, Bill?’
“I said, ‘I think I’d better come down and see you.’
“We decided that it would be cheaper to supply them with diapers than to fight a suit. So we went back and said, ‘All right, we’ll supply you with diapers. But if you have another kid I’m sorry,just one.’
“What better market research could you have? I took this up to marketing, but they still didn’t think they could sell it.
“I found out later that the husband of one of the women on our test panel worked for Procter and Gamble. So, the diary, the samples, the product got to P & G.; Five years later, Pampers hit the street.
“When Pampers hit the street, there was a guy over in the consumer division who had worked for me and he said to his boss, ‘Wilson’s got a diaper. He had it years ago. He’s got a whole research program going on it. He’s selling it in hospitals. And he’s got a machine down in Memphis.’ So the consumer division came and took it all.
“You get pissed off a little bit,” Bill shrugged. “But I put it on the shelf in a nice package so that it could be taken off easily. I knew that some day we were gonna pull it off. How did I feel? I felt good. P & G; was showing us how to sell it. We had a chance of being a good number-two.”
* * *
Finishing the book was cast against the backdrop of what was happening in my own little drama at the Register.
To set the scene: Back in 1991, N. Christian Anderson, the paper’s topmost editor, had turned the newsroom upside down and created something called “the newsroom without walls.” He had given me a new job,managing editor for strategy and administration, which was basically a one-man operation that would well, here it gets a little vague. Run strategic planning, serve as a foil for the newsroom’s notoriously short attention span, do research,it was a moving target of a job.
It had not been a good fit. Gradually, the “strategy” stuff withered and, finally, I was given responsibility for the Sunday paper, although I retained some vestiges of the old job.
I recalled a conversation with the new editor’s right-hand man. I told him that I was working on an interesting book, about folks we were calling “mavericks.” I asked him if he thought there were any mavericks around the newsroom. He looked me in the eye and, in a funereal tone, said one word: “No.” His voice betrayed not the slightest note of regret.
He was right. In the decade since the “newsroom without walls,” I had watched the people I now would call mavericks leave, one by one, many of them people I had hired in the early, manic-desperation days of the paper’s turnaround. That was then: we had to take risks or leave desks empty. This was now: we were getting resumes from people at the Washington Post, for heaven’s sake. We now had what every other big-time newspaper in the country possessed: a restless, nomadic staff of hired guns, each properly certified by an institution of higher learning and suitable two-year stints at increasingly larger, more prestigious papers.
The Register, we reminded ourselves more often than necessary, was “better” in every way. We even had the Pulitzers and other assorted icons of industry self-congratulation to prove it. We saw other papers copying our stuff,most of all the behemoth up the road in LA.
But could you sneak around behind the machinery and occasionally slip a spanner into the well-oiled gears? Could you pinch the beast without getting body-slammed in response? Don’t ask.
My work with Bill had left me with a vague sense, not of failure, but of missed opportunities.
As the research phase of the book wound down, I was also finishing up work on a proposal that had been prompted by the current editor’s vision (if that’s the right word) of the newspaper as a “platform” for launching scads of other informational enterprises,magazines, pamphlets, Internet sites, you name it.
Books? A no-brainer. I started researching the economics of the book industry, looking at Register material that might fit between boards. If you cut a few corners, kept the press runs low, you could produce books for amounts of capital that were chump change to a big organization like the Register.
In fact, I had some chump change, money sitting in the bank from profits on a yearly writer’s conference the paper sponsored and that I managed. It was tucked away, not quite off the books, considered seed money for the next year’s conference, but the money never came close to being spent. What had Bill called it? “Creaming” profits from one area and, without so much as a heads-up, using it to launch something new.
I had a formal, written proposal sitting in my desk drawer, ready to be launched at the newsroom’s top management, to be discussed and debated and evaluated and analyzed and re-submitted and, probably, lost in the shuffle of some immediate crisis in the news. It was a pattern I had seen repeated many times before.
I also had a form letter I had received from the company’s Human Resources department. It told me that, after 16 years of company service, I could now retire. My wife, bless her, thought I was nuts to keep hauling my frustrations home from the paper.
So, I did two things: I pulled out the Register book proposal and submitted it to the editor. Her response, after a week or so, was completely predictable: “Not now. Maybe later. We’ll let you know.”
Then I quit.
And I wrote “The Maverick Way.”
