Out of the Box: Nina Leigh Krueger

09/07/21 • 32 min

For most of her career with Nestlé Purina PetCare, Nina Leigh Krueger had worked on the pet nutrition side of the business. When the WashU Olin alumna joined the company’s cat litter group to lead its marketing, she found she was a fish out of water—and facing a challenge with a high sales goal in a stagnating business. Leadership, questioning whether or not to exit the business, challenged her to make or break the line.

Our story sets the stage for that pivotal moment and goes on to share the work she did in building and creating a team dynamic that was creative in its thinking. Then, once Krueger understood how the team worked, how could she blow that up and identify new paths to pursue in the business—for example, renovating an existing product or finding something totally new to build from the ground up. Then she did something marketers rarely do and offered up her marketing budget to R&D to help spur growth through product development. And she gave the scientists a seat at the table to listen to consumers.

The kernel of the idea for lightweight litter came from one of those scientists. They began to toy with potential solutions. A prototype was created using corn husks. A year later, Krueger was promoted to president of the litter business, and it was time to accelerate the work toward lightweight litter.

The end of the story? Success and a challenge from Krueger to make the company’s litter division—near extinction a couple of years earlier—into a billion-dollar business. That milestone came when the brand reached $1 billion in sales in 2020.

OTHER RELATED LINKS

One of the television spots for Tidy Cats Lightweight litter
Nestlé Purina’s Nine Square Ventures website
Anne Marie Knott’s book, “How Innovation Really Works”

CREDITS

This podcast is a production of Washington University in St. Louis’s Olin Business School. Contributors include:

Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick and Judy Milanovits, creative assistance

Jill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistance
Hayden Molinarolo, original music, sound design and editing
Nate Sprehe, creative direction, production and editing
Angie Winschel, production assistance and project management
Lexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website support
Mark P. Taylor, strategic support
Paula Crews, creative vision and strategic support

Special thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin’s Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

OTHER RELATED LINKS

One of the television spots for Tidy Cats Lightweight litter
Nestlé Purina’s Nine Square Ventures website
Anne Marie Knott’s book, “How Innovation Really Works”

CREDITS

This podcast is a production of Washington University in St. Louis’s Olin Business School. Contributors include:

Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick and Judy Milanovits, creative assistance

Jill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistance
Hayden Molinarolo, original music, sound design and editing
Nate Sprehe, creative direction, production and editing
Angie Winschel, production assistance and project management
Lexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website support
Mark P. Taylor, strategic support
Paula Crews, creative vision and strategic support

Special thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin’s Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

Previous Episode

The Higher Purpose: Dave Ciesinski

As the factory manager gave David A. Ciesinski, CEO of Lancaster Colony food brands, a tour of the facility, he led the company’s top executive into a locker room with collapsing ceiling tiles and rusted fixtures. “Is this befitting of a ‘better food company’?” the manager politely asked, reflecting the company’s slogan.

That was one of many moments that drove home for Ciesinski that his company could do more to walk the walk of a better food company. He strove to lead an organization that treated employees well and, by soliciting their involvement, produced better products. His prior experience in other packaged goods companies led him to an epiphany: That employees demanded and expected more from the companies where they worked. Leaders needed to be dialed into what’s important to their people.

“We were leaving effort on the table,” he said. “I could just tell we were 25% of the way penetrating through. I had an intuitive sense we weren't getting everything we could out of people. And we could go a click deeper.”

He felt the company was getting traction behind its mission statement, but at an abstract level. They’d articulated the “what”—what was Lancaster Colony—“but it didn't answer a fundamental question for us: Why does this company exist? What do we owe each other?” he said.

Those conversations found their resolution after Ciesinski was exposed to an article in Harvard Business Review. Subsequent conversations with its authors—Olin’s Anjan Thakor and the University of Michigan’s Robert Quinn—exposed him to their research-based philosophy of “the economics of higher purpose.” Ciesinski tells the story of this turning point, what it took to get there, how he made it happen and what it has meant to the future of Lancaster Colony.

RELATED LINKS

More about Anjan Thakor and Robert Quinn’s book, The Economics of Higher Purpose
The Lancaster Colony website
The original Harvard Business Review article by Thakor and Quinn
A summary of the Higher Purpose book from the Olin Blog

CREDITS

This podcast is a production of Washington University in St. Louis’s Olin Business School. Contributors include:

Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick and Judy Milanovits, creative assistance
Jill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistance
Hayden Molinarolo, original music, sound design and editing
Nate Sprehe, creative direction, production and editing
Angie Winschel, production assistance and project management
Lexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website support
Mark P. Taylor, strategic support
Paula Crews, creative vision and strategic support

Special thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin’s Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

Next Episode

Taking a Punch: David Karandish

David Karandish is, by any standard, a massively successful entrepreneur. His most noteworthy transaction is the sale of Answers.com for $960 million—a “rounded unicorn,” he says, using startup shorthand for a billion-dollar deal.

But that success was hard-fought and made possible by a litany of failures and one unexpected disaster. Meanwhile, those failures—and that one big success—paved the way for what already promises to be another massive hit for Karandish, BSCS ’05. Capacity, his AI-driven customer support platform has been on a tear.

Our story hinges on a two-hour period in 2011, 90 days after David—at age 26—and his partners had engineered the merger of their company with Answers.com, taking the once-public Answers private. That day, David’s team watched the traffic drain from their site in the wake of a change in Google’s search algorithms. “Our $127 million acquisition went unprofitable in about two hours,” he said.

This is the story of what led to that moment, how David and his team responded, what in his history informed that response and how he’s carried those lessons into his next chapter with Capacity.

Along the way, we learn something about the difficulty of thinking in terms of failure—though failure was the fate of his first six startups. We learn about the danger of taking customer acquisition for granted. We learn how a successful entrepreneur can roll up the lessons into one more big win.

And we begin to understand why it’s so important to learn how to take a punch.

OTHER RELATED LINKS