Paul Bulcke, CEO, Nestlé - Building Gender Balanced Business

“I may be wrong but I believe that a woman is driven by a different dynamic. I would say she is more balanced and less aggressive. A woman’s style is more inclusive and less ‘winner-loser’ oriented when compared to men, whose nature is often more competitive.”

One of the issues hampering gender balance has been career mobility. Says Bulcke: “We are a multinational company and multinational means quite a lot of people travelling around and having their careers in one country and then moving from one country to another. Maybe we didn’t condition the practicality of how we organize this and that our approach was based on a ‘man’s’ world”.

Moving ahead, Nestlé aims to better utilise talent by evolving its corporate culture from a traditional male one into a more gender diverse hybrid. “I definitely think that it has everything to do with business, in the sense that gender balance is going to lead us to unlocking the resources that we have, the talent that we have, that we haven’t unlocked until today.”

Bulcke passionately dismisses the idea that women should try to be the same as men. “Definitely not, because then we would lose what we are looking for…the other angle, the other way of seeing things. It would be going 180 degrees in the wrong direction. It’s all about complementarity.”

So what is that difference? “I would say that a man is someone who wants to be in the forefront….I may be wrong but I believe that a woman is driven by a different dynamic. I would say she is more balanced and less aggressive. A woman’s style is more inclusive and less ‘winner-loser’ oriented when compared to men, whose nature is often more competitive.”

“Success is linked to women being women and flourishing as themselves. It’s only then that you have the complementary elements and that richness coming to the surface.”

As with other male leaders such as Carlos Ghosn, Head of Renault and Nissan, who has three daughters, personal experience and family life has led Bulcke to arrive at a very different vision for women in business in the future. “Success is linked to women being women and flourishing as themselves. It’s only then that you have the complementary elements and that richness coming to the surface.”

For a company of 276,000 employees worldwide with annual sales of $95 billion in 2007, Nestlé’s gender initiative is a large undertaking. If successful, the impact could inspire many other companies to follow suit. But Bulcke recognises, shrewdly perhaps, that “you cannot change a mindset such as this overnight.” The first step, he believes, is to make the leaders at the company aware of the lost business opportunities that gender imbalance creates and of the need for change through “inducing and convincing, rather than legislating.”

“It is about understanding our consumers…who can understand female consumers better than women?”

At this delicate moment, Bulcke does not want to be too prescriptive about more gender balance at the top. “Let’s do it…we have to balance this. But I am not saying this has to be a 50-50 balance or a 90-10 one. But perhaps somewhere in between. I don’t want to put a figure on this. Otherwise, we could fall into the trap of fixing it into a time when we might have our ‘photo-finish’ moment for an annual report, for example, but then everything stops. That’s not how we work as a company.”

The focus will be on making the current leaders understand how much talent and resources are being squandered by the current gender imbalance. At the same time, Bulcke wants to make sure the process does not become too threatening to men in the company. “It should happen naturally….it should not be threatening, otherwise the men will become defensive and when people are defensive they are not successful.”

At the core of his message to his top leaders will be the hard business case that company such as theirs must understand women, who make up the bulk of their consumers. “It is about understanding our consumers…who can understand female consumers better than women? I am not saying men cannot understand them. But again it is about having a complementary perspective. Above all, it’s the business opportunity that will drive the gender balance initiative at Nestlé.”