Life after Gillette
When you sell your house, you have to move out. Take, for instance, the example of Gillette Co., the Boston icon founded by King Gillette and sold by King Kilts.
Giant Procter & Gamble Co. paid $53 billion to acquire Gillette, one of the world's best brands. While we locals kicked up a fuss about another Boston institution being auctioned off, the corporate line was all about how these two companies could learn from each other. P&G, maker of things like Pampers, Tide, and Charmin, knew about marketing to women, and Gillette, the king of razor blades, knew men.
Here is what P&G learned in the two years since the deal went down: Gillette is, in fact, a fabulous brand. And P&Gers can run it without all those Gillette lifers.
Gillette's senior management has poured out of the firm since the sale. Some were pushed, others jumped to take advantage of lucrative change of control provisions that are always included in these deals. Look for more to jump before September, when the window closes on the packages.
The list of top Gillette managers who have left is long. It starts, of course, with chief executive Jim Kilts (now a director of The New York Times Co., owner of this newspaper), who stayed a year, just long enough to guarantee his $165 million mega-payday for engineering the sale. Last week P&G said the Gillette veteran who stepped into Kilts's job, Mark Leckie, 53, will be leaving in September. Another key departure: Mary Anne Pesce, 55, a 26-year veteran who most recently was president of deodorants and male personal care.
Among the many other names: vice chairman Edward DeGraan; Robert DeMartini, who ran North American blades and razors and was recently named chief executive for Boston sneaker maker New Balance; former chief financial officer Charles Cramb went to Avon Products; Joseph Scalzo, a former group president, is now chief executive at WhiteWave Foods; and Peter Hoffman, architect of the "Best a Man Can Get" campaign. And on and on it goes.
A P&G spokesman says 95 percent of all Gillette managers who were offered jobs stayed. But of all Gillette's top executives only three remain: Ed Shirley, who heads P&G's North American market development; Braun boss Bracken Darrell; and Joseph Dooley, who heads Duracell. Boston-area employment is down about 500 to 3,000.
Former Gillette executives, none of whom will speak on the record, say it has played out this way because P&G was so much larger than Gillette, and the cultures have distinct differences. Among them: P&G is a consensus-driven place while decisions at Gillette, once made, were driven from the top. P&G's focus tends to be broader, and shallower, than at Gillette, where blades and razors are what matter.
"At the end of the day, all roads led to Cincinnati, or through there," said one former senior executive.
The mass exodus is similar to what happened after Toronto's Manulife Financial Corp. bought John Hancock Financial Services in 2003. The motivation is similar, too: The best jobs go to the executives from the acquiring company, and the handsome golden parachutes give the highly mobile losing executives every reason to leave.
So while both companies lost substantial institutional knowledge, both companies have continued to perform well. Gillette's blade business, for instance, is on track for an estimated 7 percent sales increase this year, slightly better than P&G's overall growth, P&G says.
Two weeks ago more than 50 former Gillette executives packed Clerys Bar & Restaurant on Dartmouth Street, not far from the Prudential Center, the company's long time headquarters, for a reunion after work. It was an upbeat crowd that night, said one executive who was there. Gillette was well in the rear view mirror, and no one was looking back. The road ahead looked too good.
Steve Bailey is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at bailey@globe.com or at 617-929-2902. 
