What Defines The Success of Any Company is it's Corporate Culture

"Corporate culture is hard to define but easy to see because it is literally how people work together to achieve their goals."

AND WHAT Garcia saw and impelled him in January 2020 to join the U.S.-based division of Unilever was their commitment to use the power of its many iconic brands, such as Dove, Hellmann’s, Vaseline, and Lipton Tea, to pursue a sustainable impact on the environment, to make society fairer and to bring prosperity to more people.

"Sometimes our point of view causes controversy but it is what differentiates us in the marketplace.” A major point of pride for Venezuela-born Garcia is Unilever's new Nos Inspiras Tú (you are our inspiration) campaign which will utilize three of the company's most distinctive brands – Dove, Hellman's and Knorr – to address body self-esteem stress and improve nutrition in the Hispanic community.

The decision to join Unilever came at a time when Garcia, during a two-year break from the corporate world after he left Revlon in 2018, was considering retirement. His career had included top management posts at Colgate-Palmolive, Chanel, Timberland and other well- known companies. "I had the good fortune to work for the most part with companies that have strong corporate cultures and long lasting values," he said.

Garcia also was fortunate as a young child of middle class parents, both educators, to live in England and to travel each summer to Europe, thanks to Venezuela's over-valued currency and the oil boom. He studied chemical engineering at Simon Bolivar University in Venezuela but was guided and tutored into marketing by an uncle who worked for an ad agency. "I thought I will join this company and save some money for my MBA, he said. However, this return to school did not occur, Garcia said, because every few years he was given a new challenge, including a transfer to the United States for a "training and broadening assignment."

When Garcia returned to South America he worked in Colombia and then in east Asia. This was a wonderful time for him think about long-term planning, which he couldn't do in turbulent Venezuela. "In Asia," he said, "I learned strategic thinking about growth for the future, about choices and tradeoffs one has to make. This is the foundation, philosophy of my leadership style, which is listen, learn and have a positive impact on the things that I represent and I am accountable for."

During his travels, Garcia also learned to deal with different cultures, to listen and to appreciate that not everyone has the same leadership style, but there can be others equally effective and efficient,"

What Garcia learned in the highly competitive U.S. market is that, to win you need to have a combination of strategic ability, thoroughness, discipline and execution.

He added that when companies are very competitive the way they get differentiated, one from the other is how they make decisions." Garcia said, "Companies with a tradition like the one I am in now have had long lasting values and long lasting culture that define their success."

In the public domain, he said, Unilever sponsors and pioneers "things like positive climate impact with plastic recyclability and the committment for the eradication of emissions by 2030." In addition, Unilever is an advocate for human rights and supports a living wage for both its people and for those with whom it does business.

The inspiration to help drive changes for Hispanics, he said, came from that population and its dichotomy of cultural diversity and commonality. "We speak the same language but it is not always true that we understand each other because the same word in one country means something else in another." However, there are important similarities within the Hispanic culture. "These are the basic values and ethics that we bring to work," Garcia said.

Another point of commonality, he said, is that "somewhere in the family tree somebody came to this country for a reason to give a better future to our families" - which drives Hispanics strong work ethic. "We are 100 percent Hispanic, and a 100 percent American and we always give 200 percent of our effort, our dedication, our passion to make things better in whatever we undertake," he said.

Nos Inspiras Tú is inspired by these values, Garcia said, and represents a commitment to utilize Unilever's brand power to help address issues that are particular to Hispanics in this country.

"We want to help and I think we can benefit by growing our brands with this community," he said. Dove's role in the Nos Inspiras Tú campaign, he said, is based on recognition that the pressure to fit the ideals of body imagine that are prevalent in U.S. culture are causing stress for Hispanic girls at a very young age. Unilever has commissioned a study by Marisol Perez, a psychology professor at Arizona State University, to understand the power of self esteem and to try to develop a tool to address this concern.

Garcia says this curriculum is expected to be unveiled in 2022 and will utilize the expertise of organizations like the Boys and Girls Clubs of America.

Knorr will partner with UnidosUS, the nation's largest Latino civil rights and ad- vocacy organization. "We are trying to understand by working with them what are the needs of Hispanics in rural areas and to support solutions for better nutrition," he said.

Hellmann's is assigned to inspire people around the world to minimize food waste, Garcia said. This involves bringing simple solutions to creating more tasteful and nutritious meals from leftovers by using the mayonnaise as a condiment.

Another program that Garcia said reflects the company's values is United for America. This effort was started last year to aid communities such as Hispanics that were most affected by COVID, He said. Working with more than 100 partners, Unilever helped people to obtain food and personal care goods as well as access to WiFi and computers so they could continue their education.

For Unilever, he said, "I would like us to bring other companies that compete with us into this mission of making a sensible living commonplace. We alone can not fix the issues that the world faces today, but by creating that conscientious choice of responsible capitalism will allow us to create that society that we are aspiring to create." In addition, he said, "I would like to demonstrate to the world that there is no trade off between growth and shareholder concern and creating a better society and sustainable living." A commitment to environmental and societal improvements, Garcia said, "is not only a magnet but a condition for consideration for the best and the brightest in the world to come join us."

"I WOULD LIKE TO DEMONSTRATE TO THE WORLD THAT THERE
IS NO TRADE OFF BETWEEN GROWTH AND SHAREHOLDER CONCERN AND CREATING A BETTER SOCIETY AND SUSTAINABLE LIVING."