3 innovation strategies from Kraft Heinz CEO Bernardo Hees — and how they apply beyond food

How do you rev up a huge, international company? How do you stay innovative in a traditional industry? How do you make brands relevant and exciting?

Bernardo Hees, CEO of Kraft Heinz, may have highlighted these three challenges in his talk at the Executives’ Club of Chicago, but they’re hardly unique to him. Many CEOs struggle to shake off staid processes and stimulate growth. It’s just that Bernardo Hess happens to be doing it at a company with $26.5 billion in annual revenue.

Hess kept his lecture wide-ranging and focused on high-level strategies, but three of his concepts captured my interest as relevant well beyond food:

Hire the skills needed for digital transformation

When you think about the grocery business — if you think about the grocery business — you probably think about the “planogram,” how products are placed on shelves to maximize sales. Marketers have spent full careers studying, testing, and improving what positions best push shoppers to buy. It’s a hard-earned skill-set and, unfortunately for some people, it’s one of the many old-line skills that are less and less relevant.

As online sales have increased in all industries, even groceries have had to change how they target shoppers. (Amazon’s recent acquisition of Whole Foods, anyone?). Food companies must now focus on search engines in order to place products where customers will see them. It’s a whole new world that requires a whole new skillset, and companies have to be make sure staffing keeps pace with their changing reality.

Nurture your employees’ sense of ownership

In both of my conversations with other audience members before Hees’ presentation, the idea of “ownership” came up as a critical advantage. So I suppose it should have been no surprise to hear Hees bring it up in his talk as well.

Fast growth depends on employees’ demonstrating a sense of ownership, of personal investment and responsibility for the success of the company. While the concept is sound, I would have liked to hear more specifics about how Hees and his team fostered ownership among the employees of Kraft Heinz. In my experience, giving employees tasks and letting them figure out how to get them done, emphasizing the connections between their work and company metrics, and providing channels and incentives for innovative ideas are all great ways to get employees to buy-in on a company, so they’ll stay focused on its success.

Always accept new mistakes

The cult of failure is often preached by startups – you know, “Fail early, fail often.”  But even at a company the size of Kraft Heinz, Hees acknowledges that the only way to keep up with change is to take risks. He works to foster a climate where people are willing to make mistakes, and more importantly, a climate where they’re willing to learn from them. Failure isn’t the goal, education is. As Hees put it, “New mistakes are always welcome.” It’s repeating them that’s banned.

Most business leaders aren’t dealing with the same scale as Kraft Heinz, but, like Hees, we all must keep our companies agile, innovative, and up-to-date. His talk generated provocative ideas that can work at any size, and in any industry. If you want to talk through how you might implement them, email me.