Word: jager
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...blamed the shortfall on a one-time confluence of factors, from a jump in the price of raw materials like pulp and oil to a delay in savings from a sweeping reorganization. "I see this as an aberration, and it will never happen again," CEO Durk Jager vowed. The Street's response, he said, was "not rational behavior...
...Jager knows that in the new economy, P&G has to move faster. The hard-charging Dutchman, who started the job a year ago, has unleashed a plan to get ideas from lab to market in two years instead of the typical five to 10. He's also trying to jazz up the staid P&G ads of the past, which scientifically compared the benefits of Pampers or Bounty with those of Brand X. Jager wants what he calls a softer, more "right-brain selling approach...
...wouldn't know it by last week's market massacre, but Jager is doing a pretty good job so far. He's pushed out a wide array of new products, including an electrostatic mop called the Swiffer and a fabric deodorizer dubbed Febreze that are each on track to rack up some $400 million in sales in their first year. He hasn't been shy about growing through acquisitions either: he's already shelled out $2 billion for high-end pet-food maker Iams, and he recently tried to snatch the pharmaceutical firm Warner-Lambert from Pfizer...
...that, at least for the next 13 years, was the attitude De Jager adopted. "We used to joke about this at conferences," he says. "Irresponsible talk, like 'We won't be around then.'" But by 1991, De Jager, a self-described "nobody" in the industry, had decided he would be around. Four years later, he was giving more than 85 lectures a year on the topic and posting regular updates to his site, the Web's first for Y2K warnings, www.year2000.com...
...then, and not two decades earlier? Why De Jager, and not Bemer? Proximity to the millennium may have had something to do with it as well as the increasingly ominous tone of the warnings. This was Bemer's dry 1979 prophecy of doom: "Don't drop the first two digits. The program may well fail from ambiguity." Twenty years later, here's De Jager's jeremiad: "The economy worldwide would stop...you would not have water. You would not have power...