• Cincinnati.com, Friday, March 16, 2007 11:45 AM

Robert J. Herbold, former senior vice president at Procter & Gamble who left in 1994 to become COO of Microsoft, is returning to Cincinnati this weekend to participate in a company reunion. Now retired, Herbold has written a book--"Seduced by Success: How the Best Companies Survive the 9 Traps of Winning"--that details his risk-taking career. He started at P&G in 1968 with a Ph.D. in computer science and an aptitude for running digitally simulated chemical reactions. He was soon put in charge of the company's R&D data centers, before being transferred to marketing.

A one-year assignment there lasted about a decade before he was transferred to market research, then assigned to a venture to link Wal-Mart computers to P&G computers to keep the supply chain fluid. Finally, in 1994, he left for Microsoft.

The key takeaway from his P&G career: "get a small group of people who are clearly held accountable, make it clear what you want them to do, and they will perform."

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