When Philip Navratil took over as CEO of Nestle, the situation was not pretty. The stock was down 26 percent over the previous five years. Analysts called the prior year the company's worst performance in two decades. There was a public product recall of baby formula. And somewhere between Italy and Poland, a truck carrying 400,000 Kit Kat bars was hijacked and never recovered. Into that mess walked a first-time CEO coming from the finance department, leading a company of 250,000 employees and over $100 billion in revenue.
What he did next is worth every leader's attention:
Narrow the Focus
The first move Philip made was to cut through the complexity. Nestle had over 400 products spanning dozens of categories. His answer was to identify four core areas where the company was genuinely winning: coffee, pet care, nutrition, and food and snacks. Everything else was put under review or on the chopping block. Ice cream, water brands, vitamins and supplements outside the core categories, gone or being phased out. The product lineup went from 400 to 150.
This is not a radical idea. It is a consistently ignored one. Most organizations accumulate priorities the way closets accumulate clutter gradually, without intention, until the sheer volume of it makes movement nearly impossible. Philip's move was simple and difficult in equal measure: decide what you are actually great at, and stop pretending everything else deserves equal energy. The math of organizational bandwidth is ruthless. A company that is trying to win in 400 product categories is not really trying to win in any of them.
The principle scales to any level of the org chart. Leaders who cannot name their top three priorities without looking them up do not have a communication problem. They have a clarity problem. And clarity problems are leadership problems.
Remove the Congestion
Once the focus was narrowed, Philip turned his attention to the organizational structure that was slowing Nestle down. Sixteen thousand positions are being eliminated over two years, with the majority coming from white-collar management and office roles. The logic is straightforward: an organization that has accumulated layers of management between the work and the decision is an organization that moves at the speed of its slowest approval process.
Congestion is the enemy of execution. It shows up in every organization above a handful of people, and it compounds as organizations scale. The solution is not to manage around the congestion. It is to remove it deliberately and humanely, and then protect the leaner structure that remains.
Build Real Accountability
With the focus narrowed and the structure leaned out, Philip moved to the individual level. He rewrote the performance system around a single metric he calls RIG: real internal growth. It strips out price increases, currency fluctuations, and acquisitions. It only measures one thing: are we actually selling more product?
What Philip discovered in the process was something that Lead in 30 has been built around for years. As he put it, employees appreciate clarity. They know what is expected, and they feel empowered to deliver. Accountability is not something people resist when it is built on a clear, honest metric tied directly to performance and compensation. It is something they respond to because most people do not want to maintain. They want to build.
The Bottom Line
Narrow the focus. Remove the congestion. Build accountability around what actually matters. Philip's playbook at Nestle is not complicated. It is just consistently, courageously executed. The leaders who study it and apply its principles at whatever level of the org chart they occupy will find that the same moves that are turning around a $100 billion company work just as well on a team of ten.