UC Marketing Professor Turns Road Trip Research into Series of Articles for Fortune

They spent a year traversing the globe interviewing senior executives at 10 diverse companies to shed light on successful business practices. Now their insights on business leaders who achieve top-line growth will be published in a six-part, online series for Fortune magazine. The series began March 21 and will run through April 25.

Chris Allen, Arthur Beerman Professor of Marketing at UC’s Carl H. Lindner College of Business, teamed up with Jim Stengel, former global marketing officer at Procter & Gamble, to examine leadership at companies experiencing exceptional growth.

Allen and Stengel researched leadership from established giants such as Unilever and IBM to upstarts and technology and category leaders such as Innocent, Intuit and Louisville Slugger. In the process, they traveled some 40,000 miles to assess robust business cultures that rely on ideals or purpose. 

“The series of articles is about ideals in action,” Allen says of the 750 pages of transcripts gathered from the interviews. He hopes the work will serve as a road map for businesses and a learning tool for students. “It’s all about how brand ideals involve specific leadership principles and practices that can be adopted and implemented to improve financial performance at any organization.”

Allen and Stengel’s road trip learning will be

posted in six installments

each Friday from March 21 through April 25. Their research project was launched as a follow-up to Jim Stengel’s book “

Grow:

How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World’s Greatest Companies” (Crown Business, December 2011).

In the book, Stengel examines numerous category leaders to show how financial success is associated with leaders’ abilities to connect with the fundamental emotions and values of their various stakeholders. The new research by Allen and Stengel will give leaders a more granular appreciation of the rituals and behaviors that are needed to realize the potential of acting on a brand ideal.

The Carl H. Lindner College of Business at the University of Cincinnati has been repeatedly named a Best Business School by Bloomberg Businessweek, U.S. News & World Report and The Princeton Review. In 2014, the Lindner MBA program made the biggest leap of any program in the nation in the U.S. News & World Report rankings. In 2012, Bloomberg Businessweek ranked eight Lindner undergraduate specialties among the country’s Top 15 public programs. In addition to its MBA and undergraduate degrees, the Lindner College of Business offers students seven specialized graduate degrees as well as a plethora of standalone Graduate Certificates.