Navigating a Crisis: Why Company Culture Is Key

When Milind Pant in January 2019 assumed the role of CEO at Ada, Mich.-based Amway, the world’s largest direct seller of consumer products, he brought along his personal credo of “leading from the heart.” He had picked that up during a stint in Thailand, where “it’s all jai,” the Thai word for heart. That defines his leadership approach at Amway, whose 16,000 employees and its million-strong network of “Amway Business Owners” or independent entrepreneurs made $8.4 billion in sales in 2019. When Pant learned about the coronavirus pandemic early this year through Amway colleagues in China, he prioritized the safety of employees. Another challenge has been to manage the pressures on the company’s supply chain as demand rose for its nutrition, health and hygiene products. According to Pant, the present times call for leadership with “love and humility” and “a growth mindset” – values he traces to the family-owned company’s founders. “I’ve personally been on a journey to lead with love and humility instead of pride and fear,” Pant said in an interview with Wharton management professor Michael Useem as part of a virtual event series titled, “Leadership in the Wake of COVID-19: What Enterprise Leaders Will Need to Survive and Prosper in the Years Ahead.” The series is hosted by Knowledge@Wharton in partnership with the 2020 Wharton Leadership Conference, the Wharton Center for Human Resources, and the McNulty Leadership Program.

An edited transcript of the conversation appears below.

Michael Useem:

You grew up in the foothills of the Himalayas in India. You worked for Unilever, and then as president of Pizza Hut at Yum Brands. What brought you to having an interest in managing a private-sector company like Amway?

Milind Pant:

Frankly, this was not part of any plan. As you said, I grew up in the foothills of the Himalayas. We didn’t feel it at that time, but in hindsight, we had modest material means. We didn’t have air conditioning at home. I remember we got a television when I was in my early teens.

But our parents had all of the love for us. They encouraged us to do the right thing – study hard, work hard, and life figured itself out. I went through my schooling and [higher] education in India, and I was fortunate to be able to join Unilever in India, which was almost like my second MBA.

When I joined Unilever, I went through its training program … across functions and categories, including spending eight weeks living in a village in India as part of the training program without running water or electricity, just to understand the heart and soul of India.

After doing all that, I thought I’d get a role in perhaps strategy or marketing in one of the brands like Dove or Sunsilk or Axe. But I moved to a business unit that made leather shoes for export. So, I spent the first two years of my career in tanneries. That was 30 years back, but that foul smell is still in my nostrils. But I had a great career in Unilever, and then I was fortunate to have a chance to join Yum.

In the last 10 to 12 years, my family and I have lived in three continents and five countries. We were living in German South Africa in 2007-2008. We moved to Delhi, [and then on] to Bangkok, Shanghai and Dallas, and now we live in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Useem:

You began [your career] living in a village. It’s a famous feature of being part of Unilever, where you spend time with your ultimate customers. What was the most formative experience along the way that gave you the capacity to serve as a general manager, where you really have to think about everything?

I don’t think there was one particular moment. I would point out a couple of learnings. Just the training

Pant:

at Unilever India was broad. It was across functions, and there were opportunities to work both in customer management and general management – sales general management on one side and brand marketing on the other.

There were other instances where one learned on the job. My first role as managing director of a country was with Yum in Thailand. When I moved there, it was a reasonable-sized business [with] 10,000 employees. The business had been struggling. I went there with the determination to turn around the business, to put all the strategies in place, and to build something that would last beyond me.

But my biggest learning from my time in Thailand and as the managing director in my first role was not so much on strategy or on intellect, but on leading with heart. In Thailand, everything is about the heart. The Thais have a word for it called jai, and it’s all jai. And since then I’ve personally been on a journey to lead with love and humility instead of pride and fear.

“Listen and Learn” Useem:

We’ve got to lead with the head of course, but we don’t forget the heart. I have a question about your transition from serving as president of Pizza Hut over to Amway. Both are private enterprises, but in some respects the two could not be more different in how they operated. What was your biggest learning as you came into Amway? [Was there] something that you didn’t know about that you had to master as you became chief executive of Amway?

As I came into Amway, I was very clear that my first 100 days were all about “listen and learn.” Ninety percent of our revenues are outside of U.S. — in Japan, Korea, China, which is our largest market, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, India, Europe, Russia, Latin America, and the U.S.

I spent an immense amount of time out on the road and meeting our entrepreneurs who are the heart and soul of our business. I learned from everyone, and I even came to your program that you and [Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli] had organized just before I formally took over as [Amway’s] CEO, as a part of my “listen and learn” [effort].

My biggest and most valuable lessons were from the entrepreneurs, or the Amway Business Owners. This was within my first 100 days in March last year, and I was in Tokyo. One of our entrepreneurs talked about how she is building a business around a healthy cooking community on Instagram. I looked at her and I said, “Oh my god, this is the future.” The entrepreneurial spirit, which is at the core of Amway, along with us being a social idea around relationships, now put together in the online world is the future, and this is social commerce.

That’s where we put together our 10-year plan

Pant:

— which we can do in a privately-held, family-owned company — to unleash entrepreneurship with social commerce. That idea came in listening to an entrepreneur in Tokyo.

The last three months have been extraordinary in everybody’s lives, whether it’s Thailand or China or the U.S., with the coronavirus, the Black Lives Matter movement, and [the] MeToo movement in the background as well. As you have managed through the last couple of months, what has been different from the way you would have led the company prior to about March 15th?

In some ways, everything has been different. But here’s what we realized early on — January 23rd to be exact, because that’s when we learned from our China team that there was a pandemic, and the lockdowns were coming. We prioritized safety for colleagues over anything else. We have 16,000 colleagues across the world, 6,000 acres of organic farms in three countries, and manufacturing locations [including] in Guangzhou (China), Buena Park, near Los Angeles, and in Ada, Michigan.

We said the most important thing is we’re going to do everything to keep each other safe. Once we had that in place, every other challenge that came our way, be it [about our] supply chain or figuring out how to work from home, and all the other stuff, it sorted itself out. My biggest learning through these last almost five months, [including] three months working from home, has been that during this

Useem: Pant:

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