• September 15, 2011

What was Campbell Soup Company like when Douglas Conant arrived there in 2001?

The culture was "incredibly low-trust," rusty barbed wire surrounding headquarters' perimeter made it feel like a "high-security prison" (in one employee's words), and the company was in general in a "circle of doom," Conant tells Inc. magazine in an interview in its new "Inc. 500" issue.

Solutions? Conant started by turning over 300 of the company's top 350 executives within his first three years (150 promoted, the rest hired). A new organization-wide balanced scorecard, linked to performance evaluations and bonuses, served to ensure consistent, lasting focus on the desired goals and activities, he said.

Other breakthroughs included introducing microwaveable soups for millennials and Gen X-ers not into stove-top cooking ("It's amazing to think that the microwave was invented in 1947, and it took us over 50 years to figure out that we can have microwavable soups"), and introducing V8 V-Fusion, after realizing that "half the population didn't like the taste of V8."

And of course the new ad campaigns that reminded people that soup isn't just a cold-weather option, plus the new "gravity-feed shelving" in-store fixtures that let shoppers find their desired selections more easily.

"I loved the whole time I was there," Conant stresses, "but it's somebody else's turn now. I'll move on to new adventures."